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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age,
+by T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Social Transformations of the Victorian Age
+       A Survey of Court and Country
+
+
+Author: T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 27, 2012  [eBook #39001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE
+VICTORIAN AGE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
+Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031472768
+
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE
+
+A Survey of Court and Country
+
+by
+
+T. H. S. ESCOTT
+
+_Author of 'England, its People, Polity
+and Pursuits,' &c., &c._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+153-157 Fifth Avenue
+1897
+
+
+
+
+_PREFACE_
+
+
+It may be well very briefly to explain the relation in which the present
+work stands to a survey, not a history, of modern England undertaken by
+the same author some years ago. That earlier work was originally published
+by Messrs Cassell and Co. in two volumes. It was reprinted, first by them,
+secondly by Messrs Chapman and Hall, in a single volume. Into that
+re-issue of his _England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits_ (the labour of
+revision being much lightened by the obliging help of Mr Francis
+Drummond), the author introduced certain references to social or
+legislative changes effected since the original edition of the work
+appeared. Without organic disturbance of its plan, and risk of consequent
+confusion to the reader, it would have been impossible to bring down that
+book to the year 1897. The writer does not in the following pages
+pre-suppose any knowledge of his former book on the part of the readers of
+his present one. He has, however, held himself absolved from the duty of
+repeating in this book minute accounts of institutions fully described in
+its predecessor. Such repetition seemed the more undesirable because the
+earlier book is still in wide circulation here; while it has been
+translated into several European languages, and has been adopted as a text
+book in the higher grade State schools of Germany,[1] and of other
+countries. The method of workmanship adopted in _Social Transformations of
+the Victorian Age_ is identical with that pursued in the case of _England,
+Etc._
+
+This new book being, like its predecessor, not a history, but a series of
+different views from a common standpoint, the sketches of national life
+and character as well as of national institutions at work, have in all
+cases been made from personal observation; supplemented by the assistance
+of the highest experts in their different departments to whom the writer
+had access. Often, he is glad to say, the same private friends who helped
+him in the seventies have been able to renew that help in the nineties.
+Thus, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Robert Herbert, Mr Mundella, Mr Archibald
+Milman of the House of Commons, and Mr Albert Pell have generally and
+specifically repeated the assistance lent to him twenty years earlier. In
+most cases it is hoped the assistance given has been acknowledged in its
+proper place. In many cases the advantages of this service extend beyond
+any particular passage. In all which relates to the new schemes of local
+government the writer is particularly indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin or
+members of his staff; to Sir Henry Fowler; to Sir Charles Dilke; to the
+Rev. J. Charles Cox, LL.D., of Holdenby, as in ecclesiastical matters to
+the Rev. A. L. Foulkes of Steventon, and to the Rev. H. W. Tucker, D.D.,
+of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In references to
+certain phases of social history, especially about the early railway
+period, he has learned much from Lord Carlingford, Mr Markham Spofforth,
+Mr J. C. Parkinson, and from Sir W. H. Russell. And finally he would
+specially thank several gentlemen of the Education Department, as well as
+the Vice-President himself, Sir John Gorst. It is hoped that, as in the
+case of the writer's _England_, so in that of his new book, the
+collaboration of those who are, in their different provinces, experts, has
+ensured a more uniform accuracy than in a volume dealing with such a
+variety of subjects would otherwise have been attainable.
+
+T. H. S. E.
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+  CHAPTER I
+
+    TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED,                      1
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+    THE NEW WEALTH,                                                 13
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+    TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM,                                        27
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+    THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS,               39
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+    THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST,                                     53
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+    SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND,      67
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+    THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES,                                77
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+    THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES,                                92
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+    COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION,                              103
+
+  CHAPTER X
+
+    THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS
+    OF 'SIBYL,'                                                    115
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+
+    FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS,                   132
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+
+    THE LADDER OF EDUCATION,                                       151
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+
+    THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE,                168
+
+  CHAPTER XIV
+
+    THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE,                                  179
+
+  CHAPTER XV
+
+    FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW,                          193
+
+  CHAPTER XVI
+
+    'THE PLAY'S THE THING,'                                        206
+
+  CHAPTER XVII
+
+    THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING
+    MILLIONS,                                                      220
+
+  CHAPTER XVIII
+
+    THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL
+    PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA,                                 238
+
+  CHAPTER XIX
+
+    CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS,                                    259
+
+  CHAPTER XX
+
+    ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE,                                     274
+
+  CHAPTER XXI
+
+    CROWN AND SWORD,                                               290
+
+  CHAPTER XXII
+
+    FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES,                         311
+
+  CHAPTER XXIII
+
+    TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE,                          320
+
+  CHAPTER XXIV
+
+    CECILIA'S TRIUMPHS,                                            337
+
+  CHAPTER XXV
+
+    TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART,                              349
+
+  CHAPTER XXVI
+
+    POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE,                               362
+
+  CHAPTER XXVII
+
+    NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES,                         380
+
+  CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+    TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE,                               388
+
+  CHAPTER XXIX
+
+    TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT,                          398
+
+  CHAPTER XXX
+
+    THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY,             408
+
+  CHAPTER XXXI
+
+    THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND
+    COLONIAL,                                                      422
+
+  INDEX                                                            439
+
+
+
+
+Social Transformations
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED
+
+    Difference between English society in the earlier and later years of
+    the Queen's reign illustrated from the composition of Hyde Park
+    crowds, first, when the Park was a playground for the Royal children,
+    and a parade ground for social celebrities, secondly, as it has become
+    since. Different generations of Victorian Royalty. Great noblemen,
+    Lord Lansdowne, Lord Eglinton, Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Shaftesbury, The
+    Duke of Wellington. Statesmen, Earl Grey, Sir Robert Peel. Other
+    celebrities, social, or intellectual, or literary. The dandies, some
+    of them sketched by Thackeray, Morgan O'Connell, the original of 'The
+    O'Mulligan,' Alfred Montgomery, Alexis Soyer, Lord Adolphus
+    Fitzclarence, 1848-51. Tall forms of Thackeray and Jacob Omnium
+    overtopping the crowd. The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, on
+    horseback. The absence in later days of eminent individuals like
+    these; the old editor and the new. A. W. Kinglake among the last
+    riders in Hyde Park of veterans who write. Commerce in the Park and in
+    society represented by 'King' Hudson before and after his fall. Lord
+    Tollemache, of Peckforton, the last of great nobles familiar to
+    English crowds.
+
+
+As it is to-day, so, during the earlier years of the present reign, both
+before and after the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park was the social
+parade ground, not only of the capital, but of the Kingdom. Then, as now,
+its human panorama was the representative reflection of the social
+conditions not less than of the typical personages of the era.
+
+Throughout the later forties or the fifties, the loungers from the
+provinces were certainly not less numerous in Hyde Park than to-day.
+Foreign visitors were beginning to be a feature in the Metropolitan
+summer. But the scale on which the London season half a century ago was
+observed was so small as to resemble but faintly its successors known to
+the present generation. Society scarcely exceeded the dimensions of a
+family party. Hyde Park itself seemed a Royal pleasure ground first, a
+popular resort afterwards, to which strangers were, as to the Park at
+Windsor, admitted by favour of the first Constitutional Sovereign, to
+behold the pastimes of the rising generations of Royalty. The little boy
+and girl, steering their ponies through the maze of carriages, horses, or
+pedestrians, were the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. Observers
+noted with appreciative criticism the progress made from day to day by the
+young riders. Other of the Queen's descendants of age still more tender,
+followed with their parents in an open carriage, the exact build of which
+had been introduced by the Prince Consort, and were manifestly being
+instructed by their father or mother in the art of acknowledging
+gracefully the respectful salutations of spectators.
+
+The company crowding the Park, and most familiar to London onlookers
+differed from the crowds of succeeding decades, first, in the monotony of
+its composition, secondly, in the commanding ascendancy of some among the
+individuals whom it numbered. This was a kind of feudal age in our social
+development. The monarch was surrounded by subjects, the splendour of
+whose station, or the lustre of whose endowments caused them to shine
+forth in their exalted firmament, with a light of their own not reflected
+by, though comparable with, that of Royalty itself. Two noblemen, during
+the first quarter of a century of the Queen's reign, one Scotch, the other
+English, seemed to eclipse the rest of the peerage. The Earl of Eglinton,
+of the period now referred to, was famous, even among Englishmen, from the
+tournament held some years earlier in 1839 at Eglinton Castle, and
+described by Mr Disraeli in his last novel, _Endymion_. The lady who had
+been the Queen of Beauty upon the occasion, the Duchess of Somerset, was
+then a synonym for all which women envy or men admire. When she appeared
+in Hyde Park, the crowd gazed at her carriage with the awed admiration
+that they bestowed on those born to thrones. North of the Tweed, Lord
+Eglinton summed up to his adoring countrymen, in his own person, all the
+influence, the dignity, the splendour, the power, and all the other
+attributes of greatness with which the principle of birth could be
+endowed. What Lord Eglinton was in Scotland, or to the natives of Scotland
+in London, Lord Lansdowne[2] had long been to all classes of Englishmen,
+not more in his native county than in London. Here, during the earlier
+Victorian seasons, he was conspicuous in Hyde Park, generally by his
+perfect demeanour of high breeding, specially by this blue coat and
+voluminous white neck investment. After him, slowly riding on a horse
+whose familiarity can best be expressed to readers of to-day by comparing
+it with that sometime attained by the white cob of Mr Lowe, Lord
+Sherbrooke, there appeared, in the blue coat and white trousers of the old
+régime, the figure before whom all heads instinctively uncovered, the
+great Duke of Wellington. On horseback, also, were two other men, second
+only in eminence to the Duke himself, Lord Palmerston, and Sir Robert
+Peel. The first still wore his years lightly and was as much at home in
+the saddle as in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel, still a remarkably
+handsome man, had the enthusiasm of the equestrian. Those who can recall
+the loose connection between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the steed which
+he bestrode, can form an idea of the 'seat' of the great Sir Robert.
+
+Next to the representatives of the reigning family and to the statesmen
+who were the props of the young Queen's throne, the attention of the Hyde
+Park crowd was fixed upon a little group of gentlemen, remarkable for the
+perfection of their toilettes, and for the special attention manifestly
+bestowed upon their hair, not as to-day cut down to the scalp, but falling
+gracefully over the white collar. These were the dandies. The last of the
+tribe has not long passed away. But as a race they have left no
+successors. The late Mr Alfred Montgomery had for his associates Count
+Alfred D'Orsay, whose Christian name was perpetuated by a dandies' club.
+'The Alfred' flourished in Albemarle Street till a decade or two since.
+Its founder survived till the nineties, Alexis Soyer, high priest of the
+mysteries of the fine art of cookery as well as the original of
+Thackeray's 'Mirobolant' in _Pendennis_. Others who sat for their
+portraits to the novelist were well known in the fashionable section of
+the Hyde Park crowd. Morgan John O'Connell, a leader of dandies, was of
+course there. There, too, was that other O'Connell, known by his friends
+as Lord Kilmarlcock, from whom Thackeray never denied that he had taken
+the traits of The O'Mulligan. Possibly, too, there might have been seen
+here Mr Arcedeckne, whom the same novelist has immortalised in 'Harry
+Foker,' and who thus early in the Victorian era prefigured the social
+friendship since grown more common between the gentlemen who live to
+labour, and their comrades who live to enjoy. Still more noticeable among
+the Hyde Park loungers on foot, standing not far from D'Orsay and
+Montgomery were the two inseparables, the then Sir George Wombwell and
+Lord Adolphus, better known as 'Dolly,' Fitzclarence, the latter curiously
+like Lawrence's picture of George IV.
+
+The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, scarcely less powerful in the
+social and political system than in his own office, would have been
+mistaken, by those who did not know him personally, for the plain country
+gentleman whose life he liked to lead. His square, neatly compacted
+figure, with cleanly shaven upper lip, and penetrating, but pleasant,
+expression of eyes, was among the last to enter and to leave the Park. Not
+less well known to most Londoners and to many provincials were two of Mr
+Delane's literary friends, though not both of them wrote for his paper.
+One of these was Thackeray, towering above all the smaller men. The other
+was tall Thackeray's taller friend known to his contemporaries as 'Big'
+Higgins, still better known to the public at large as Jacob Omnium. The
+two were generally to be found together. The eyes of all passengers were
+strained, and their tongues silenced as these two tall lumbering figures
+manoeuvred slowly up or down the Row; not so much ridden in then as it was
+afterwards.
+
+But neither the intellectual workers, nor the social butterflies attracted
+more attention than a middle-aged, rather over-dressed lady in a very
+gorgeous carriage, which might have become a Lord Mayor, and a big, heavy
+man, with drab-coloured, wiry hair, who sometimes sat beside her. The
+chariot and its occupants seemed to interest the country visitors in the
+Park more than did the distinguished persons already mentioned. The
+gentleman was George Hudson, the 'railway King,' who had not only made a
+fortune himself, but had been the cause of many others rolling in wealth
+scarcely less than his own. Within a few years he was still visible in the
+same enclosure, not, however, in the gaudy equipage, but as a pedestrian.
+The crash, in fact, had come. King Hudson had fallen on evil days. But
+having dragged none down in his descent, nor disclosed any secrets of the
+prison house, he kept friends who helped him in his adversity. The house
+at Knightsbridge, which is now the French Embassy, knew of course Hudson
+no more. Its fashionable assemblages since it became a diplomatic
+residence cannot have been more brilliant than those which met there when
+Hudson was its master. Nor, indeed, has its social splendour since been
+eclipsed by any of those more recent hosts whom commercial success has
+incorporated among the sons and daughters of fashion. Hudson's dinner
+table, or Mrs Hudson's reception room, were graced, habitually by the
+great Duke of Wellington, by the Duke of Cambridge, and occasionally by
+other Princes of the blood Royal. Nor, during his decline, did Hudson fail
+to carry himself with good humour, and even dignity. His simple, harmless,
+almost pathetic vanity had perhaps combined with his shrewd Yorkshire
+common sense to support him under his adversities. A sum which realised
+£600 a year had been subscribed for him, the trustees of his annuity being
+Sir George Elliot, and Mr Hugh Taylor. His wife and his sons were alive.
+But he preferred living in a solitary lodging in London. His freedom from
+all anxiety made this season of eclipse, he protested, the happiest time
+of his life. A courteous recognition from the great Lord Grey in the Park,
+or the kindly concession to him of the chair which he had occupied, in
+other years, in the smoking room of the Carlton, shed something more than
+a transitory gleam of comfort upon his darkened fortunes, and were recited
+by the old man with his north country burr to the friends with whom, to
+the last, he used to dine. Like another fallen star of a different system,
+in an earlier age, Beau Brummell, Hudson passed several years of his
+eclipse at a hotel in Calais, where he was visited by more friends than
+had ever looked in upon the great dandy of the Georgian epoch during the
+twilight hours of his life.
+
+Such, then, were the chief among the more representative figures to be met
+with on the brightest and most varied of the social parade grounds of the
+capital during the earlier years of the Victorian epoch.
+
+No single element conspicuous in the Hyde Park of the later years of the
+Victorian era was absent from that earlier crowd at whose composition we
+have glanced. The social prominence of English plutocracy whether
+represented by the great money brokers, whom, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic,
+Piccadilly has always known, or by Yorkshire Hudson, whom it knew fitfully
+during the short spell of his splendour, has been, from Elizabethan or
+still earlier times, a feature and a force in the social economy of the
+town. That which, seen between the Magazine and Apsley House, would have
+most surprised Hyde Park loungers in the early Victorian days, had they
+been able to lift the curtain of the future, is not the fact of the best
+coaches of the Four in Hand Club being owned by men whose names have no
+English sound, and whose taste for horseflesh is not hereditary; but
+rather the vogue now attained by prevailing bicycles. Even here, perhaps,
+one ought rather to recognize the reintroduction of a fashion whose idea
+is as old as the hobby horse itself than a mode as indisputably modern as
+the safety wheel or the pneumatic tyre.
+
+The Princes and Princesses who once rode their ponies between Albert and
+Stanhope Gates are now bearing a part in the government of Empires, but
+are seldom for long unrepresented in the moving and glittering throng.
+The 'city' in the Row is not a novelty. The Church began with Archbishop
+Tait to be more prominently represented than was ever known before. The
+most emancipated of bygone occupants of Lambeth would scarcely have looked
+forward to the time when a cavalcade composed of archiepiscopal children,
+led by a Primate himself in the van, with his Chaplain bringing up the
+rear, would canter to and fro along the Row. Hyde Park is not to-day
+visited by early water drinkers who believe in the virtues of the probably
+forgotten spring in Kensington Gardens hard by. But not many hours after
+dawn, the novelty, as to early Victorian observers it would have seemed,
+may be witnessed of ladies and gentlemen issuing in bands from their
+Tyburnian or Kensingtonian homes to gain an appetite for breakfast, and a
+store of fresh air for the day's confinement, by making at least once the
+circuit of the Park while the roads are at their emptiest, and the
+dewdrops still glisten on the flowers.
+
+Something else than the extended popularity of London's most serviceable
+'lung' is suggested by the contrast between Hyde Park as it is now, and as
+it was three or four decades since. The dandies are not the only feature
+in the social landscape one looks for in vain. The commanding
+personalities of individuals of either sex which seemed common on every
+social plane thirty or forty years since have largely disappeared now. The
+levelling influences of a democratic epoch have reduced to a uniformity of
+unheroic proportions those who represent in our public places the
+interests, the occupations, the achievements, or the society of their day.
+It is called a prosaic age. It is certainly, as compared with its
+predecessors, a lilliputian one. At the very zenith of his power, Mr
+Gladstone in the streets or parks of London, never fixed the attention of
+the crowd to the same degree as his political master, the great Sir Robert
+Peel. The adroit, accomplished, and singularly successful soldier, who,
+since the Duke of Cambridge's retirement, has been Commander-in-Chief,
+resembles the Duke of Wellington in stature. Neither Lord Wolseley, nor
+any of his contemporaries, compels as yet from street crowds the mute
+veneration and awe which the simple fact of his unrivalled pre-eminence as
+a subject secured for the Duke of Wellington whenever he set foot in
+Piccadilly, or turned his horse's head in the direction of the Horse
+Guards down Constitution Hill.
+
+Outside the Royal Family there is no great lady who like an earlier Lady
+Jersey is greeted as a queen by crowds to which she can only be a name. In
+the same way, the average of efficiency in journalism was never so high as
+at present, nor the editing as well as the writing and compiling of
+newspapers ever more competently performed. The editor, however, of the
+stamp of John Thaddeus Delane does not, nor by the circumstances of the
+time could, any longer exist. The responsible head of a great newspaper
+office has necessarily become less a creator of public opinion, less even
+of an interpreter, which Delane signally was, of middle class English
+thought, than the custodian of a commercial interest, the vicegerent of a
+proprietor who regards the journal, first, as a great organ of public
+opinion; secondly, as the instrument for achieving his own patriotic
+purposes in his own way. While Delane was yet living, the able conductor
+of another great daily journal was ambitious to fill a place like Delane's
+in the social and political system. It was a sad mistake. In journalism,
+more than anywhere else, as this gentleman ought to have known, given the
+requisite capacity which he undoubtedly had, a man may exercise almost any
+power he likes on condition that he himself remains in the background, and
+neither in jest nor earnest magnifies his apostleship too much. The
+consequence was, in the particular case now spoken of, that after some
+years of patient forbearance on the owner's part, his solicitor waited on
+the editor one fine morning at his country house, and curtly handed the
+gentleman, who thought himself indispensable, a formal note of dismissal.
+Stories were told of occasional collision even between Mr Delane and the
+proprietary of the great newspaper. These were for the most part doubtless
+apocryphal. The one thing which observers knew for certain was that when
+the commercial master of the newspaper appeared during the evening in the
+same room as its literary controller, Mr Delane generally found that he
+had an engagement at his office. Some years after the date at which Hyde
+Park retrospectively has been presented, the best, if not the only, well
+known man of letters to be observed on horseback was A. W. Kinglake, the
+historian of the Crimean war. When he passed away there was left
+stout-hearted, short-tempered Anthony Trollope, who, up to the time of
+his fatal seizure, pounded his sturdy cob so many times round the
+enclosure between Cumberland and Albert Gates, just as a few hours earlier
+in his study, whether in or out of the vein, he had completed a fixed
+number of words of his new novel. These knights of the pen are followed
+(1897) by Frederic Harrison, Leslie Stephen and W. S. Lilly. The last
+quarter of a century in London finds us with many adequate representatives
+of national industry and achievement. The hero who in any department sums
+up the exploits and the tendencies of his age will with difficulty be
+found. The fact that it is the day of great successes does not prevent its
+being comparatively the age of small men. So long as the veteran Lord
+Tollemache, of Peckforton, survived to drive his team in its harness of
+untanned leather from Marlborough Gate to Portman Square, the peerage in
+its social aspect did not lack one whom Carlyle would have admitted to be
+in his way a hero. Since 1890, when Lord Tollemache died, Burke and
+Debrett contain no name whose owner is the cynosure of the holiday crowd
+in at all the same degree as that last survivor of those noblemen whose
+figures at an earlier period of this reign were as well known to the
+popular eye as their position or eccentricity was celebrated in popular
+talk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE NEW WEALTH
+
+    Commercial plutocracy not seen in England for the first time under
+    Queen Victoria, but dates from Queen Elizabeth or earlier. Wealth,
+    birth, intellect, often united in England. City traders being Lord
+    Mayors who from 1452 onwards have founded noble houses. The chief
+    elements in the new nineteenth century wealth considered. Gold
+    discoveries in California 1848, in Australia 1850. Their transforming
+    influences at home and abroad. Expert opinions of the period on the
+    consequences and the durability of the new gold. Different views and
+    calculations of Sir Archibald Alison, Sir Roderick Murchison,
+    Chevalier and Cobden. A new civilization resting on gold. Australian
+    millionaire farmers preceded millionaire gold diggers. Effects of new
+    gold upon circulating and fixed wealth of England tested by property
+    assessments.
+
+
+'I respect the aristocracy of birth and of intellect. I do not respect the
+aristocracy of wealth.' The remark is attributed to the great, or second,
+Sir Robert Peel. It proceeds upon a confused view of the social principles
+indicated by the words. It comes, somewhat inappropriately, from the
+political successor of the William Pitt who bestowed more peerages upon
+the possessors of mere wealth than any Minister before his time had done.
+The distinction drawn by Sir Robert Peel between the different
+aristocracies of England involves some misconceptions of social history.
+In Austria there existed during the last century, there perhaps survives
+faintly to this day, an antagonism between the principles of birth and of
+wealth such as England has never known. With more than conventional
+fitness is the Premier of the day, whether peer or commoner, the guest on
+each 9th of November of the First Magistrate of London City. Within five
+centuries, at least fourteen noble houses have been founded by ten Lord
+Mayors.
+
+In 1452 Sir Godfrey Feilding, mercer, was the Lord Mayor from whom the
+Earls of Denbigh descend. Five years later another trader, Sir Godfrey
+Boleine sat in the chair of Whittington. One of his lineage, a generation
+or two later, as Earl of Wiltshire, gave Henry VIII. his second wife, and
+England her first Protestant Queen. Some ninety years thereafter, Lord
+Mayor Sir John Gresham, grocer, supplied from his numerous family a Duke
+of Buckingham, and a Lord Braybrooke. In 1557 Sir Thomas Cooke, draper,
+was installed in the Mansion House. To his descendants at least two
+patents of nobility were granted, the peerages of Salisbury and of
+Fitzwilliam. In 1570 a clothworker, Sir Rowland Heyward, became chief of
+the City Corporation. He was the ancestor of the Marquises of Bath.
+Fifteen years subsequently to this date, Sir Wolston Dixie, of the
+Skinners Company, was at once the Sovereign of the City and the forerunner
+of the peers bearing the titles of Compton or of Northampton. During the
+earliest years of the seventeenth century there reigned to the East of
+Temple Bar Sir John Houblon, a grocer. His descendants were to number
+amongst them the Irish Viscounts who in the fulness of time gave to Queen
+Victoria in Lord Palmerston the most popular and powerful Premier during
+the first half of her reign. Within another hundred years Lord Mayor Sir
+Samuel Dashwood, vintner, became a progenitor of future nobles only less
+prolific than his sixteenth century predecessor, Sir Thomas Cooke. Those
+who sprang from him obtained in due course the peerages of Warwick and
+Brooke. When in 1711, as Tory Ministers, Harley and Bolingbroke dined at
+the Guildhall, they were entertained by Sir Gilbert Heathcote whose
+posterity was ennobled by the styles of Aveland and Donne. One of Lord
+Salisbury's Christian names, and his second title, that of Viscount
+Cranborne, perpetuate the memory of the Sir Christopher Gascoigne who was
+Lord Mayor of London during the first Ministry of Henry Pelham, in 1753.
+
+These instances serve circumstantially to remind us that the titled, like
+the untitled aristocracy of the country has always represented, as it
+represents to-day, in nearly equal proportions industry and intelligence
+in enterprise, perhaps even more than antiquity of descent. The dramatic
+circumstances of his rise and of his fall; the extent to which the latest
+developments of science, adventure and speculation were embodied in the
+person and in the career of the York linendraper's son, make George
+Hudson, the 'railway King' specially conspicuous amongst those on whom
+shrewdness and opportunity conferred material success. But the type is not
+merely as old as the present century. It has existed as long as English
+civilization itself.
+
+When Queen Victoria came to the throne, there was little in the signs of
+the times to betoken as near at hand the national prosperity which was
+firmly established before she had been seated on her throne five and
+twenty years. National depression followed the exhaustion of English
+energy and finance which had been caused by the struggle with France. Long
+after the heavy war taxation had ended with Waterloo, and the conqueror of
+Waterloo had as ruler of the State reduced army expenses to an
+unexpectedly low figure, the national fortunes were at an alarmingly low
+ebb. Sinecures had been nearly abolished. A further saving of expense had
+been expected by the partial or practical disbandment of the Yeomanry. But
+between 1815 and 1845 the series of bad years was broken only in 1822-5.
+Even then, English enthusiasm at the liberation of South America from
+Spanish rule was followed by reaction consequent upon the sinking of
+British millions in loans to the Spanish Republics of the New World.
+During the first decade of the Victorian epoch, better harvests coincided
+with the importation of gold in small quantities from the Ural mines. The
+railway enthusiasm provided fresh employment for the working classes. More
+even than by gold and railways was done by the fiscal reforms due to
+Cobden, Bright, Peel, Villiers and Gladstone to give impetus to trade, and
+commerce, and to make England the market of the world. Hence the origin
+and multiplication of English millionaires. The country was thus
+gladdened by fitful gleams of a long unknown prosperity. But budgets
+continued to be bad, and Whig finance was in chronic disrepute. During no
+small part of a century, English exports had remained almost stationary at
+£51,000,000 a year. The distress was aggravated by the cotton spinning
+failures of 1842-3. On the eve of these the Burnley guardians told the
+Home Secretary of the inadequacy of their funds for the relief of local
+necessities. So gloomy indeed seemed the national fortune, that the
+Government of the day sold the Crown rights over Epping Forest. Nor as a
+fact was it till the forty-fifth year of the Queen's reign that in 1882,
+this historic pleasure ground presented those scenes with which it is
+chiefly identified to-day.[3]
+
+The first of the most striking transformations of the Victorian era took
+place in the eleventh year of the Queen's reign and continued during two
+or three years thereafter. The gold discoveries in California began in
+1848. They differed from those which had preceded them elsewhere on
+American soil in the circumstance that the new treasures were distributed
+among the entire population, and were not confined to a small band of
+despotic aliens, as had happened under the sway of the Spanish chiefs and
+the Incas of Peru. In 1850-1 the same precious metal as three years
+earlier had been yielded to diggers on the Californian slopes and on the
+banks of the Sacramento River was found to exist in the alluvial plains of
+Ballarat in our own Australian colonies. The practical value of these new
+sources of wealth was variously regarded by political critics and
+scientific economists. The French Chevalier, and our own Cobden predicted
+as a result of the new gold supplies a fall in the value of money, a
+revolution in property, the doubling of wages and prices and the
+impoverishment of capitalists. Others foretold the speedy exhaustion of
+the new gold mines. That view was sanctioned by the expert authority of
+the famous geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, who spoke of the limits of
+the recently discovered gold as 'Nature's Currency Restriction Act.' Sir
+Archibald Alison, not an incautious person, and certainly no friend to
+innovation, elaborately supported a contrary opinion. He engaged in a
+series of minute calculations for the purpose of showing that the gold
+supply now available could not be used up within four centuries. When the
+alluvial soil was drained of its precious deposits, there would, as Alison
+argued, remain the parent rocks, the cost of working which seemed likely
+to diminish and not to increase with time. Nor was this authority less
+sanguine as to the beneficent effects upon all classes and interests of
+the new gold. Commerce, he argued, would be promoted at every turn. With
+increasing production there would be fresh employment, a practical
+decrease in taxation, and generally in the payments made by the poorer
+classes to the rich. Before the Australian discoveries of 1850, scarcity
+of gold had, as Alison contended, raised the value of money, and
+emphasized the difference between the rich and the poor. The Currency
+Restriction Act had been passed in 1844. 'Nature's Grand Currency
+Extension Act' was the name given by the historian to the fresh sources of
+wealth revealed in Bendigo and Ballarat. The facts and figures were
+something to the following effect. The discoveries of 1850-1 had added
+sixteen or eighteen millions to the world's money in comparison with the
+eight or ten millions which in the fifteenth century and onwards had been
+provided by Mexico and Peru. On the other hand the economist Chevalier
+anticipated that, as a consequence of the new gold, money in ten years
+would fall by one half. 'In 1800,' so ran the argument of this economist,
+'the annual addition to the gold of Christendom was barely two and a half
+millions. In 1848 it amounted to thirty-eight millions. In 1858 the total
+was a hundred and ninety millions. Hence,' he insisted, 'between 1858 and
+1868 the additions to the world's available stock of the precious metal
+would be at least as much as the aggregate of additions during the three
+preceding centuries, that is four hundred millions sterling.' The stages
+in this induction may be thus briefly epitomized. During the three and a
+half centuries since the voyages of Columbus and of Cabot opened the New
+World to the Old, two thousand millions sterling had been added to the
+gold and silver of our planet. The hectolitre of wheat before A.D. 1492
+cost in Paris from 2s. 6d. to 2s. 9d. Between 1848-58 it cost 16s. 8d. In
+other words if the usual grain test be applied, money had fallen during
+three and a half centuries to nearly one-sixth of its original value. It
+was upon calculations like these as well as upon certain other
+considerations that Chevalier based his argument that the fresh influx of
+gold would make money fall again by three-fourths of its value. This was
+in effect to say that to procure the same amount of subsistence as
+hitherto four times as much gold would be required. Cobden's anticipations
+were to the same effect. So general was the belief of an impeding
+depreciation of gold and appreciation of silver that Holland actually
+demonetized gold and adopted silver as its standard money. All these fears
+were doomed to disappointment. The hopes were more than realized. The
+third quarter of our present century has proved the most prosperous which
+modern Europe or the world has ever known. A careful and voluminous writer
+on this subject, the late R. H. Patterson[4] attributes this
+miscalculation to the 'famous currency principle' which grew up after the
+great war.
+
+The agencies that have changed the material basis underlying the structure
+of English society were thus fairly now in operation. They were
+supplemented by other circumstances all tending to produce the same
+result. Chief among these was the fact of the English coal supply
+surpassing that of other countries in its abundance and its universal
+distribution by land and sea. The character and the progress of the
+Victorian era are due in no small degree to the sagacity and shrewdness of
+the Prince Consort. He was now the first to recognize that the time had
+come when the cultivation of the artistic sense was alone needed to make
+the English workman the best in that world of which from the days of
+Chatham onwards, his country had been pre-eminently the workshop. French
+industry had not even yet recovered from the blow dealt to it by the
+revolution of the last century. That effacement of an earlier régime had
+differed in important particulars from all analogous movements in earlier
+ages. The havoc, the massacres, the proscriptions and confiscations of
+ancient Rome during her passage from a Republic to an Empire, had
+seriously affected the highest classes alone. The substitution for the
+French monarchy of a Robespierre first, of a Napoleon afterwards, had
+involved all orders in a common ruin. The Queen's husband made it the
+business of his life to insure the maintenance of the advantage which
+history itself had thus given to English industry and manufacture, and
+which the fresh supply of the precious metal directly favoured.
+
+The universal attraction to Englishmen of the Australian gold fields may
+be summarized in a very few facts and figures. In 1852 the English
+emigrants to the treasure stores of the Antipodes were 369,000; a larger
+number, that is, than was represented by the increase of the Queen's
+subjects at home through the excess of births over deaths. Our population
+in fact stood still in order that Australia, like California, might be
+peopled. During the four or five years of the gold fever under the
+Southern Cross, we sent out 1,356,000; more, in other words, than the
+whole population of Scotland at the time of the Union. The annual average
+of English emigrants was thus a trifle over a quarter of a million.
+Somewhat later, the collapse of the railway mania in England and the
+potato famine in Ireland, swelled the average total of this annual exodus
+to nearly half a million.
+
+Other results of the influx of gold during the second Victorian decade
+remain to be epitomized. The precious metal in the Bank of England, from
+less than eight millions in 1847, increased to twenty-two millions in
+1853. The Bank rate during the whole decade was two per cent. The growth
+of trade was suddenly but steadily promoted. During 1853, twenty millions
+more of gold money than within any preceding twelvemonth changed hands
+among the public. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that a belief in
+the permanence of the low interest rate just mentioned caused Mr
+Gladstone, when Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1853, to bring
+forward a scheme for the conversion of a portion of the three per cent.
+Consols, into Consols bearing a lower rate of interest, and that the
+interest on Exchequer Bills was a penny a day or one and a half per cent,
+per annum. The harvests of 1853-4 in England had been bad. The fresh
+purchases by the gold mine countries of English goods fully compensated us
+for the loss from this cause. The value of that custom may be judged from
+the figures which show the cost of life at the gold mines. In the early
+fifties flour rose to four times, meat to five times their usual value. An
+egg or a pill cost a dollar each.[5] For a miner in tolerable luck £2 were
+not an exceptional day's earnings. Nor between the years 1849-55 and
+onwards were the effects of the gold discoveries on foreign and domestic
+trade less noticeable. Within a single period of twelve months, the value
+of our exports increased by one-fourth. Most of these were required by
+consumers in California or in Australia as the case might be. The rise of
+wages owing to the rush to the gold fields amounted in 1851-2 nowhere to
+less than twenty per cent.; in some trades it was twenty-five per cent. In
+London the price of bricks was increased by fifty per cent. Liverpool,
+Manchester, Birmingham shared the general prosperity. Agricultural labour
+was not paid at a rate proportionate to its scarcity. The extent of that
+scarcity may be judged from Sir Morton Peto's suggestion that the Militia
+should be called in to complete the operations of harvesting which were
+interrupted by the inducements offered by contractors to navvies at wages
+varying between four shillings and threepence, and four shillings and
+sixpence a day. Thus the competition of the gold fields industry was
+directly instrumental, not only in increasing trade, and therefore
+production and wealth in the mother country, but in improving the
+condition of the industrial classes at home.
+
+This rise in wages was not however a pure gain. Before the end of 1855
+prices had increased by nearly one-half. The Preston strike of 1853-4
+opened that campaign between industry and capital which has been paid for
+by the representatives of both with so serious a deduction from their
+profits. Before the Preston strike, the unions had been mainly political
+organizations; thereafter they became industrial. Meanwhile on the other
+side of separating oceans new Englands were being created with incredible
+rapidity by the new gold. Already indeed Her Majesty's subjects, without
+leaving their native land knew something of the Eldorado which Australia
+constituted even before the treasures of Ballarat and Bendigo had been
+unearthed. While as yet the nugget was a prize of the future, fortunes
+were realized by the shearing of flocks. Long before the 1851 Exhibition
+the Australian millionaire, returned to his native land, had become
+familiar to Victorian London. He did not yet often live in Grosvenor
+Square. He was to be found frequently in the best houses of the scarcely
+less palatial Westbourne Terrace or at a later date in Rutland Gate. The
+gold which enriched England created Australia, whose capitals can scarcely
+be said to have existed before the thirteenth or fourteenth year of the
+present reign. Gold gave to Victoria civilization and government. It
+built Melbourne. The same omnipotent agency changed New South Wales from a
+sparsely-inhabited tract to a populous and prosperous State. The extreme
+youth, as national life is computed, of Australia will perhaps best be
+realized when it is remembered that the founder of Melbourne, John Pascoe
+Falkner was yet alive, and welcomed to his capital the Duke of Edinburgh
+on the occasion of his visit to the Antipodes in 1860; and that Henty,
+Falkner's associate and senior, survived at least to 1882.
+
+In no department of industry were the immediate profits of Australian gold
+more appreciable than in our transoceanic mercantile marine. During the
+fifties European emigrants crowded every ship. Seamen's wages leapt up by
+a bound to £4 a month.[6] Between 1851 and 1859 the annual rate of
+emigrants was a hundred thousand. The gold raised during this period in
+Victoria fell little short of eighty nine millions. Imports rose to thirty
+pounds per head of the Victoria population, exports rose to fifty-six
+pounds per head. Previously to 1851 New South Wales could not be said to
+possess a foreign trade. In less than thirty years, by 1878, this commerce
+was reckoned annually by thirteen millions of exports, fifteen millions of
+imports. In New South Wales, too, the gold excitement was followed
+immediately by prosperity in coal fields which yielded not less than a
+million sterling. These are the circumstances that, rather than any
+domestic speculations or industries, explain the growth of the London
+plutocracy which has been so prominent a feature of the era now under
+consideration. Under Queen Elizabeth and the Cecils, fortunes made by
+lucky ventures in American and Indian trade were conspicuous. Under the
+Georges, after the victories of our great Admirals Howe, Jervis, Anson,
+foreign wealth was poured into England continuously long before large
+revenues were realized by the development of our mineral wealth. It has
+been already said that during some time after the Queen's accession there
+prevailed general distress chequered by the influx of gold from Russia and
+by the beginnings of railway enterprise. From the earliest fifties a
+change for the better set in, with what results the income tax returns
+will show. The impost was extended to Ireland in 1855. In that year the
+assessed incomes were three hundred and eight millions. Ten years later
+the amount was three hundred and ninety-six millions. After another decade
+it was five hundred and seventy-one millions. In the financial year 1882-3
+the figures were £612,836,058.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM
+
+    All projects of increased speed in locomotion denounced when first
+    proposed. Sir Henry Herbert, M.P., in seventeenth century, on journeys
+    between Edinburgh and London in a fortnight. Parliament on railways.
+    Lord Clanricarde, Colonel Sibthorp, etc. George Hudson, the railway
+    King. Charles Guernsey, the original of Thackeray's 'de la Pluche.'
+    Progress and sequel of the railway fever of 1846. The Queen's first
+    railway journey. Hudson and his fall. Comparison between mines and
+    railways as sources of national wealth. Mr W. H. Mallock's
+    demonstration that the working classes of the United Kingdom have
+    increased in wealth more noticeably even than the upper classes.
+
+
+The truth of Mr Disraeli's humorous description, in his Edinburgh speech
+of 1868, of boots at the Blue Boar agreeing with the chambermaid at the
+rival Red Lion about the folly and iniquity of railways, appears to be
+rooted in the constitution of human nature. All readers are familiar with
+the picture of the English traveller, drawn by Mr Apperley in his famous
+_Quarterly_ article, _The Road_. This imaginary passenger had gone to
+sleep in the days when public conveyances could not be counted on to
+perform more than some half dozen miles an hour. He awakes in the era of
+the lightning coaches and quicksilver mails timed to perform twice that
+distance within the sixty minutes. If, as archæologists say, a certain
+Ericthonius of Athens[7] invented some fifteen centuries B.C. the first
+chariot of which authentic record exists, he, too, was perhaps regarded as
+an enemy rather than as a benefactor by some among his amazed
+contemporaries. More than 3,000 years after the Attic revolutionary an
+English Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Herbert, said that a man who
+proposed to travel to and fro between Scotland and England within seven
+days each way would be voted fit for Bedlam.
+
+By 1843, thirteen years, that is, after the historic steam locomotive
+between Manchester and Liverpool which caused the death of Mr Huskisson,
+the great railway systems of England existed in a form more or less
+complete. Eighteen hundred miles in all were open for traffic. Parliament
+had authorized the expenditure on them of seventy million pounds. Sixty
+million pounds had been so spent already. An average of three hundred
+thousand passengers was carried weekly. Neither by the opinion of
+parliament nor of the public were railways regarded with unequivocal
+favour, or even at all times with toleration. Colonel Sibthorp could say
+in the House of Commons that he considered all railways as public frauds
+and private robberies. Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord Lansdowne, the Duke of
+Wellington, Lord Clanricarde, all spoke of George Stephenson's invention
+in the same contemptuous tones. The _Morning Post_ in February 1842 dwelt
+with satisfaction on the fact that 'the Queen never travels by railway;'
+while Prince Albert who did sometimes patronize the train between Windsor
+and London was obliged only too often to protest: 'Not quite so fast, Mr
+Conductor, if you please!' Within four months of the _Morning Post's_
+announcement, the _Railway Times_ was able to record that Her Majesty made
+her first trip on the Great Western. A few months later the Royal
+passenger accomplished the distance between Southampton and Vauxhall in
+less than two hours without a hitch. Five years subsequently the Queen and
+Prince Consort journeyed to Cambridge for the installation of His Royal
+Highness as Chancellor in a train driven, as Her Majesty records, by
+George Hudson, the railway King. Between 1836 and 1846 the English mind
+was fairly reconciled to the new method of transit. The day had finally
+gone by when, as they had done a little previously, a firm of London
+solicitors could refuse the business of the Brighton line on the plea that
+coaches would drive off the trains in a month. From 1836 and onward the
+Liverpool and Manchester, the London and Birmingham, and the North Midland
+lines were all paying ten per cent. During 1846, the year of the railway
+mania, 440 railway Bills passed authorizing the construction of 8,470
+miles and the raising of £180,138,901.
+
+This was the zenith of the shortlived splendour of George Hudson, the
+railway King. He has been seen already in these pages, amid the Hyde Park
+crowd in the early forties, resting his large heavy person in his wife's
+chariot. The man himself had first become known on the City Board of
+Health in York. Afterwards he was elected Mayor of his native town. In
+that capacity he made the acquaintance of George Stephenson. In 1845 the
+son of the York linendraper, now a power in the railway world was returned
+to the House of Commons as Member for Sunderland. His parliamentary career
+is alone, if at all, remembered to-day by the frequent encounters on the
+floor of the House between himself and Mr Bernal Osborne. Diverting
+memories of these were often recalled for the benefit of his friends by
+Hudson's antagonist, with the generous admission of the raconteur that he
+had, in the ex-King, usually found his match, if not in humorous retort
+and thrust, yet in substantial argument. Two years after the 'King' drove
+the engine which took the Queen and her Consort to Cambridge, suspicions
+of Hudson's motive and conduct took (April 19, 1849) a definite shape. The
+shareholders of the Midland demanded a Committee of Inquiry. The
+incriminated Chairman resigned his post, and quietly accepted his
+permanent eclipse. It was noticed to his credit at the time, and has not
+since been denied, that he made no efforts at self exculpation, disclosed
+no names or confidential transactions, and thus refused, as unquestionably
+it was in his power to do, to associate persons of the highest
+consideration with himself in his fall. Hudson was only the type of a
+class whose members were invested by the railway passion of the period
+with brief splendour and unsubstantial prosperity. In the Upper House,
+Lord Clanricarde mentioned how Charles Guernsey, a broker's clerk, had
+subscribed fifty-two thousand pounds for shares in the London and York
+line. This was the undoubted original of Thackeray's 'de la Pluche.' The
+total of his gains appears to have amounted to thirty thousand pounds.
+The essential facts of the sequel with very little of fictitious
+amplification are given by the novelist.
+
+A reaction, as has been seen, followed the morbid enterprise of 1846. Its
+results, however, have endured to the present hour. In 1845 the United
+Kingdom possessed only two thousand four hundred miles of iron way. The
+capital invested upon these was only eighty-eight millions. Before 1850,
+the capital had increased to two hundred and thirty millions. To-day the
+aggregate miles of the railways of the United Kingdom are little, if at
+all short, of twenty thousand. The expenditure has been six hundred and
+thirty millions. The gross annual income is sixty millions. In order to
+appreciate with approximate accuracy the part played by the steam
+locomotive in the creation of nineteenth century wealth in England, or to
+define with practical distinctness that familiar term 'the railway
+interest;' it is necessary to examine this matter more in detail. In 1855
+the total of capital represented by the United Kingdom railways was
+£297,584,709. In 1894, the latest date to which the Board of Trade returns
+are published, the total was £985,387,855. After forty years, therefore,
+the railway investments of these Islands had increased by £687,803,146.
+
+Another chief source of national wealth and industrial employment during
+this reign has been provided by mining enterprise. In respect of the money
+value of each, what are the relations which the yield of subterranean
+labour has borne to the enterprises of steam upon the surface of the
+earth? In 1855 the value of all the minerals brought to the light of day
+is expressed by the figures £29,579,001. The figures referring to railways
+for the same year were, it will be remembered, seen to be £21,507,599.
+This comparison between the two shows therefore that in 1855 the mines
+exceeded the railways in value in round numbers, by eight million pounds.
+The exact figures of the excess were £8,071,402. Forty years later this
+balance is more than redressed. In 1894 the total of mineral wealth was
+£80,900,453. The entire railway receipts were £84,310,831. In other words,
+the surface opulence of the United Kingdom had not only made good its
+inferiority to the subterranean wealth, but had advanced beyond that
+rival, in round numbers, by three and a half million pounds. The exact
+figures were £3,410,378.
+
+The interesting analysis of the resources of the different orders of the
+community contained in Mr W. H. Mallock's 'Classes and Masses' supplies
+tolerably conclusive evidence that the results of mining and railway
+enterprise have been distributed not very unequally between the rich and
+the poor, or, as Mr Mallock rather puts it, between income tax payers on
+£1,000 or upwards a year and those who, earning less than £150 a year, pay
+no income tax at all. His estimate is that the population of England
+contains seven hundred thousand families, equal to a total of three
+million souls, 'with means of subsistence, insufficient, barely
+sufficient, or precarious.' Although these figures represent the entire
+population at the Norman conquest, Mr Mallock is able to show that
+relatively to all inhabiting this realm the necessitous class has
+decreased, not increased. In the seventeenth century, one-third of the
+dwellers in Sheffield, then (1615) as to-day a great manufacturing centre,
+were dependent on charity. Thirteen years after the Queen's accession
+(_i.e._ 1850), out of every two hundred of our population nine were
+paupers. In 1882 the proportion of pauperism was only five. Between 1850
+and 1897 the population has increased from twenty-eight millions to
+thirty-eight millions. The income-tax payers have increased from one
+million and a half to nearly eight millions.[8] Incomes between £150 and
+£1,000 have increased from three hundred thousand to nine hundred and
+ninety thousand. Incomes above £1,000 have increased from twenty-four
+thousand to sixty thousand; or, as this authority finds it more convenient
+to put it, the middle class has grown by six hundred and ninety thousand.
+The rich have been re-inforced by only thirty-six thousand. On the other
+hand Mr Mallock is able to dispose of the fallacy that during the present
+reign the very richest class have grown richer still. In 1850 the incomes
+of fifty thousand pounds and upwards were seventy-two thousand; in 1897
+they are nearer a hundred thousand; thus while the fairly well-to-do
+middle classes have increased by hundreds of thousands, the professional
+plutocrats measure their increase only by a few simple thousands. Briefly
+summarized, the arithmetical argument of Mr Mallock is as follows. In
+1800 the whole wealth of the country was two hundred and forty million
+pounds. Of that amount the workers took one hundred and eleven million
+pounds, leaving for the middle classes and the rich one hundred and thirty
+million pounds. Three quarters of a century later, or more exactly in
+1881, Mr Mallock's latest date, making his argument still more applicable
+to 1897, the total of national wealth was one thousand three hundred
+millions. Of this the workers had six hundred and sixty millions. The
+working classes had thus, from being twenty millions behind the rich at
+the opening of the century, advanced twenty millions beyond the rich
+towards its close. From these figures, the inference is fair, and indeed
+irresistible, that railways like other inventions have contributed to the
+material prosperity of all classes equally, and have not enriched the
+capitalists alone.
+
+Notwithstanding George Hudson, who has become merely a memory, or Charles
+Guernsey, the stockbroker's clerk who was his lowly imitator, the railway
+plutocracy would seem to be a phrase more full of sound than of practical
+meaning. If to this remark the name of Vanderbilt be objected, the true
+facts of the case rather confirm than disprove the present remark.
+'Commodore' Vanderbilt was a rich man before he ever owned a railway
+share. He sold a fleet of steamers to purchase control of the New York
+Central Railway. Had he invested the capital realized by this preliminary
+transaction in any of the industries of his nation, such as the tinning of
+beef from a cattle ranche in California, or the curing of bacon at
+Chicago, he might have made the same or an even larger fortune. Railway
+diplomacy was only the accidental employment of Mr Vanderbilt's
+extraordinary genius for creative finance. The same talents exercised upon
+any other material, or expended in any other career could scarcely fail to
+have commanded same results. In another department of the industry
+afforded to intellect by the steam locomotive, Charles Austin made two
+fortunes out of railway Bills. His abilities as an advocate were probably
+unequalled among the generation to which he belonged. Since Austin's day
+lawyers of the same, or something like the same capacity have amassed
+wealth not inferior to Austin's out of electric patents practice, or in
+other branches of law which have been specially in request at the moment.
+While the railway fever of the forties was at its height, a little man
+with an intellectual head covered by a proverbially shabby hat might often
+of an afternoon have been seen walking down Parliament Street. He never
+failed to bestow a copper upon the crossing sweeper at the point where the
+Home Office stands to-day. Formerly the contractor usually lavished on the
+man a four-penny bit. But times were bad. The vail was reduced to a
+quarter of that amount. The donor humorously anticipated the day when he
+might be glad of a reversionary interest to the broom and shovel employed
+outside the Horse Guards. That calamity, which of course never seriously
+threatened, was averted. The little gentleman with the ostentatiously
+neglected head-gear, Thomas Brassey, was a millionaire long before he
+built his last railway. But his contemporary, Thomas Cubitt, made the same
+fortune out of building Belgravia. Railways have also often enriched the
+landowners through whose estates the lines have run. So high an authority
+as Mr Samuel Laing holds that the owners of the soil have been over
+compensated by the companies generally for the acquisition of their land.
+To this, however, the country gentlemen would reply that in countless
+instances they have received no more than the agricultural value for their
+acres.[9] Certainly the profits of this class from railways have not
+exceeded the gains which have accrued from the selling or leasing of other
+property for building purposes. The railway interest, then, as a phrase
+scarcely points to the existence of railway shareholders as a caste or
+even a separate class. Railway shares, as the statistics above quoted
+show, are distributed in fairly equal proportions through all classes of
+the community. The learned professions, especially the Church, are
+represented as well as the State or capital in these proprietorial bodies.
+In the great majority of instances, the separate sums held are small.
+Thus, ten years ago, the London and North Western Railway with its ninety
+millions of capital had about thirty thousand debenture and stock holders.
+Three thousand pounds scarcely represent what could be regarded as a
+plutocratic investment. As for the men who were the early captains of
+railway industry, they none of them secured more than modest competences.
+Vignoles, Stephenson, Brunel, Hackworth, Allport, Cawkwell, Grierson; none
+of these founded, none of their descendants are likely to found,
+territorial families. Sir Daniel Gooch, so long the chairman of the Great
+Western, left six hundred thousand pounds to his posterity. The greater
+portion of this sum was made, not in railways, but in coal and in
+telegraphs. Sir Edward Watkin, who is still with us, and to whose
+enterprise neither the mountain precipice nor the realm of air is
+inaccessible, has perhaps been not less prospered. It would not however be
+easy to multiply instances of railway opulence like these.
+
+On the other hand Arkwright of the spinning jenny has founded two rich
+county families. His rival, Hargreaves, established another. The true
+conclusion on this subject seems to be that the wealth invested in our
+railways is only one, if the most conspicuous manifestation of the wealth
+of the community. No better summary of the facts could be found than the
+shrewd phrase into which George Stephenson condensed the whole subject.
+'The country made the railways, and in return the railways made the
+country.' The prosperity of the manufacturing classes which has coincided
+with the Victorian era provided the money that built the railways. In
+return the early development of our railway system enabled us to get so
+far in advance of Continental nations as merchants and manufacturers that
+our rivals have not yet caught us up, and perhaps never will.
+
+The future development of the English railway system may be a tempting and
+instructive topic for speculative experts, but is not for a general
+survey, such as the present. The issues between traders and framers of
+railway rates for the carriage of merchandise are periodically expressed
+in the demand for the acquisition of the iron roads, like the telegraphic
+wires, by the State. The mighty sections of the Anglo-Saxon race on either
+side of the Atlantic present the two great exceptions to the State
+proprietorship or State control of the public locomotives. Seeing that
+half the railway mileage and capital of the world belongs to the United
+Kingdom and to the United States, these exceptions are themselves of
+considerable importance. The incorporation of the railway systems of the
+United Kingdom into the national service would, it has been calculated,
+involve the doubling of the annual Budget, and an addition to the
+permanent Civil Service of five per cent, of our male population. If this
+estimate be correct, it seems likely that a Minister of the Crown will
+think even more than thrice before he seriously proposes the assumption of
+such a responsibility by himself and his colleagues.
+
+    Apart from his general obligations to the work on Railways (2 vols.
+    Cassell & Company, 1894, by Mr John Pendleton), the writer expresses
+    his grateful acknowledgment for valuable help in this portion of his
+    work privately received from Mr Acworth, the great authority on modern
+    railways throughout the world, and from Mr A. J. Wilson, the eminent
+    writer on financial and commercial topics.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
+
+    Contrast between the London of the forties and the London of to-day.
+    Gas and steam chiefly mark the century. City traders still living at
+    Islington. The theatre not yet an institution. The parks still uncared
+    for. Thames pollutions still recall Dickens' description of Quilp's
+    home. The future South Kensington cabbage beds or waste ground.
+    Absence of enormous fortunes outside commercial millionaires. Evidence
+    of increasing national prosperity afforded by statistics of picture
+    sales. The growth of these sales from Charles I. till to-day. The
+    Beckford, the Horace Walpole and other sales. Gradual rise in value of
+    great masters. Memorable sales and personages at Christie's.
+    Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire episode.
+
+
+The chief resemblance between the London which Queen Victoria first knew,
+and the capital as it was seen by her subjects on her jubilee anniversary
+in 1887, is the appearance of the steam locomotive at the railway termini
+and upon the waters of the Thames. Passing to more permanent
+characteristics, only the great national buildings would enable those
+present at Her Majesty's coronation to identify the pre-Exhibition
+Metropolis with the capital of to-day. Even Hyde Park, that, as has been
+seen, was then, as now, the recreation ground of polite London, presented
+an aspect very different from its appearance on the approach of the
+sixtieth commemoration of the commencement of the reign. Like all the
+other Royal enclosures, the Hyde Park of the forties or fifties was
+decorated by no flower beds and was in other respects habitually ill-kept.
+General sanitation had yet to reach its infancy. The Thames remained
+almost as unwholesome and repulsive a stream as at an earlier epoch the
+Fleet Ditch had been. Dickens' description in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ of
+'Quilp's' haunts was a sketch from life equally graphic and accurate of
+the condition of the river's shore between London Bridge and the Strand.
+The site of the river embankments of to-day swarmed at low water with
+mudlarks gathering fragments of coal and other refuse which had dropped
+from the wharves that lined the banks on both sides of the river. If the
+ladies who to-day take tea on the Terrace of the House of Commons had
+exposed themselves so persistently on the spot where that structure now
+stands, instead of catching a catarrh, they might have feared a
+pestilence. Even in the course of the short suburban drives made by the
+coaches of the Four-in-Hand Club after their meet at the Magazine, the
+ladies who to-day occupy the box seat would have run the risk of being
+shocked by the sight of corpses hanging on the gallows. Lord Grey's Reform
+Act had been added to the Statute Book before this relic of barbarism
+disappeared. The midlands were busy with preparations for the first appeal
+to genuine constituencies when certain electoral canvassers, merrily
+pursuing their work outside Leicester were horror-stricken amidst their
+fun by the sight of a lifeless form fashionably dressed in blue coat and
+gilt buttons swinging to and fro on a gallows tree by the roadway. The
+body was that of a young master printer, who had been hung for a
+particularly abominable murder. More decent times happily were near. This,
+which many men now living can remember, was the last gibbet that ever
+disgraced the Queen's highway. The city workers when they did not dwell
+above their offices, lived for the most part at Islington, still a country
+suburb, or took the bus or coach to and fro between the more rural
+Tottenham or Highgate and their counting room or shop. The ground which is
+to-day covered by the mansions, the hotels, and the flower beds of South
+Kensington was then either used as cabbage gardens, nursery grounds, and
+riding schools, or was given up to the loafers and ruffians of the
+streets, who chose the forenoon of Sunday as the time for settling their
+differences with their fists.
+
+As a popular institution the theatre was practically unknown to the early
+Victorian era. The old patent houses were supported precariously. Their
+rivals of more recent date were on the chronic verge of bankruptcy. Night
+after night popular actors and actresses performed to empty benches.
+Pleasure seekers from the West were more likely to make up a party to see
+a man hanged than to make up a party for the play.
+
+The new millionaires came in with the new gold. At this earlier date, the
+men who had realized great fortunes in business, who did not belong on the
+one hand to the wealthy territorial noblesse, or to the financial
+plutocracy on the other might be counted on the fingers of a single hand.
+The Rothschilds had been settled among us for a century. Their opulence
+had passed into a proverb. Other names belonging to the millionaire
+category were Arkwright, Strutt, Jones Lloyd, better known to the present
+generation as Lord Overstone, and Hope. The forerunners of that
+aristocracy of wealth which sways society to-day, of the Guests, the
+Crawshays in the iron trade, had not yet appeared. Half a century had
+passed since the second Pitt had declared that 'every man with forty
+thousand a year had a right to a peerage.' The Listers, the Holdens, and
+others were already prosperous manufacturers in the Bradford district. The
+brewing interest already knew its Basses and its Guinnesses. The peerages
+and the baronetcies with which these families have since been decorated
+were reserved for a much later stage of the reign. Even the uncrowned
+kings of the Australian or Californian gold mines had no subjects in
+London till the World's Show of 1851 had passed into history. The gradual
+advancement of the great retail traders typified by the name Peter
+Robinson, or Maple, to a corresponding dignity on a different level did
+not take place till our own decade. The social polish and refinement which
+are the attributes of the new wealth to-day, had not half a century since
+become dreams of fancy. Rude plenty and coarse splendour characterized the
+entertainments and the dwellings of the early Victorian plutocracy, as
+they had marked the hospitality of our Saxon or Norman ancestors. It is a
+commonplace of conversation to say that none can foretell where the
+movement which during the last half century has set in with all classes is
+to stop. Not only the wages of the working classes, but the payments of
+professional and every kind of skilled industry have increased at a rate
+predicted to be impossible; but every shilling buys from thirty to fifty
+per cent. more than formerly of the necessaries and comforts of life. The
+Prince Consort, as has been already said, did more than any other
+individual of his day to quicken English workmanship with the artistic
+sense. The task that waits for accomplishment now is seemingly to develop
+intelligence and thrift in the masses. If this work be carried to the
+point which may be expected from the progress made during the last half
+century, the conditions of the national life in England cannot fail to
+improve more rapidly than anywhere else in the world.
+
+The new municipal buildings which have risen in all the great towns of the
+kingdom during the last four or five decades; the warehouses, offices, and
+shops that, if seen in Venice, would be admired for the artistic splendour
+of their exteriors, but which pass unnoticed on the Thames, the Mersey,
+and the Irwell; these are some among the outward and visible signs of the
+progressive prosperity of all classes of the community, since the
+treasures of Australia and California first were poured into England, and
+since the Serbonian bog of Chat Moss was turned into a safe and solid
+track for the steam engine. Other indications, not less conclusive and
+perhaps more picturesque, of the same truth are the decoration of the
+outskirts of every town with private villas set in landscape gardens which
+half a century ago would have seemed worthy of Chatsworth, and with public
+parks not less cared for than Royal pleasure grounds, the acquisitions of
+corporate enterprise, or the gifts of individual munificence. The hard
+facts and figures which have accumulated since in 1846 the British ports
+were opened to the merchandise of all nations explain in detail the
+transformation that has been witnessed. During the quarter of a century
+before the repeal of the Corn Laws, the total value of English exports, of
+products, of manufactures was one thousand and eighty-five millions.
+During the twenty-five years that followed the repeal, the value was three
+thousand and thirty-one millions; in other words, an increase of nearly
+two hundred per cent. The second quarter of a century since Free Trade,
+that is from 1871-1896 has raised the total value of our exports to six
+thousand two hundred and ninety-nine millions; and this in the face of the
+great and continuous fall of prices during recent years. Our import trade
+has expanded even in greater proportion. The total value of imports of
+merchandise during the years between 1871-1895 was nine thousand seven
+hundred and sixty-three millions. These figures do not exhaust the
+national profits of Free Trade. Our increased business with the great
+markets of the world abroad has meant a vast extension of employment among
+the masses at home. There is not only more work to be done. It is paid for
+at a higher rate than was ever known. Articles of necessity, not more than
+of luxury never before known in industrial households, are to-day common
+beneath the workman's roof. With comfort, sobriety, and thrift, which are
+indeed the parents of comfort, have increased too. The Chancellor of the
+Exchequer in his last Budget stated that within ten years the deposits of
+the savings banks have more than doubled. The evidence furnished by
+statistics of pauperism is not less significant. In the spring of 1896
+poor relief was given to 739,021 as compared with 897,370 in 1857. And
+this although the population had grown in forty years from nineteen
+millions to over thirty millions. In 1857 the ratio of paupers to
+inhabitants was more than 47 in 1,000. In 1896 the ratio is 24 in 1,000.
+
+The proof of national prosperity afforded by the income-tax returns was
+given at length in the preceding chapter. Entirely to exhaust the
+statistical evidence available for the propositions now advanced there may
+be cited the figures connected with the National Debt. This is being paid
+off out of the successive surpluses of annual revenue over expenditure. In
+1856 after the Crimean War, the Debt stood at eight hundred and
+twenty-nine millions, or about £29, 12s. per head of the population. In
+1895 it had been reduced to six hundred and sixty millions, or about £17,
+6s. per head of the population. The amount of the Debt in March 1896 was
+six hundred and fifty-two millions. Thus, in the last thirteen years, the
+money responsibilities of the nation have been reduced by one hundred
+millions. Enthusiasts for Richard Cobden's memory have therefore some
+reason for declaring that since the measure which the genius of himself
+and John Bright conceived, and the statesmanlike energy of Mr Villiers
+promoted, was written on the Statute Book, a new England has been created.
+Nor has anyone seriously denied the connection during the régime of
+Protection between wheat at from 53s. to 112s. a quarter and the
+intolerable distress of the working classes in town and country expressed
+in ricks blazing and Riot Acts read. With the first relaxation in the
+Protective Tariff, some improvement began. It continued very gradually but
+certainly till at last the new prosperity as shown by the figures and
+facts already cited was fairly established.
+
+The prices commanded by famous pictures at the great art sales of the
+present and preceding periods have not uniformly attested the correctness
+of the popular criticism. They have, however, at all times afforded a
+practical criterion of the growing wealth of the country, and above all of
+the standard of expenditure current among the educated classes; seen in
+this light, the figures are not irrelevant to the present purpose. Picture
+sales have been a feature in the social and artistic life of England
+during more than two centuries. In 1649, by order of the Parliament, the
+collection of Charles I., the most discriminating and perhaps the greatest
+of Royal patrons of art, was offered to public competition. It realized a
+trifle less than fifty thousand pounds, probably not half of what it cost
+its original owner, who is said to have paid for the 'Mantua' pictures
+alone eighty thousand pounds. At a later sale, however, many of these
+paintings found purchasers at from £500 to £800 apiece. Thus, even in
+these early days, was the coming rise in artistic values faintly
+foreshadowed. But no continuous increase was yet noticeable. Not quite a
+century after this, Harley, Lord Oxford's celebrated collection was
+dispersed. The polite education of the well-to-do classes had then made
+considerable advances. The first of the Indian Nabobs had returned home
+with the spoils of the Pagoda Tree in his pocket to end his days in the
+coffee houses of St James's. The commercial classes were generally
+prosperous. Many Sir Vistos, complying with the whisper of the familiar
+demon 'had a taste.' The conditions of the time were therefore not
+unfavourable for prices conspicuously higher than had been given for the
+Stuart collection. Nevertheless, the interest aroused by the Oxford sale
+was so languid, art fanciers were so little enterprising, that the highest
+price recorded on this occasion was eighty-nine pounds, five shillings for
+the 'Jacob and Laban' of Sebastian Bourdon. The Italian masters commanded
+on an average only five guineas apiece. A superb specimen of Claude
+Lorraine encouraged no bidder beyond twenty-seven pounds, six shillings.
+Holbein's since famous portrait of the Duchess of Suffolk went for fifteen
+pounds, four shillings and sixpence. Rembrandts scarcely found purchasers
+at twelve guineas or even six. Pictures then supposed to be by Michael
+Angelo could be had for a few pounds. The highest price paid at the Oxford
+sale, the only one running into three figures was one hundred and
+seventy-five pounds, five shillings, for Van Dyck's 'Sir Kenelm Digby and
+family.' On the other hand, a second Van Dyck of unrecorded title went for
+five pounds, fifteen shillings. This was the period in which Hogarth's
+masterpieces were bought for prices ranging between a maximum of
+eighty-eight pounds and a minimum of twenty-seven pounds. This
+depreciation did not continue long. Soon after the Oxford sale of 1741,
+the paintings by which Hogarth is best known were readily purchased at a
+thousand pounds apiece. Even, however, after the nineteenth century had
+opened, no sudden rise in art values took place. In 1823, at Beckford's
+Fonthill sale, the principal treasures only realized an average of
+thirty-one pounds each, the whole collection of pictures, four hundred and
+twenty-four in number, produced thirteen thousand two hundred and
+forty-nine pounds, fifteen shillings. In the year before the great
+Exhibition at the King of Holland's sale, a 'Holy Family' attributed to
+Raphael found no bidder beyond two hundred and fifty pounds.[10] A
+European sensation was created by the agent of the Russian Emperor giving
+on this occasion, three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three pounds
+for a chef d'oeuvre of Leonardo da Vinci. But the 'Trinity' by Rubens was
+not considered specially cheap at six hundred and fifty-eight pounds.
+Famous portraits by Dutch masters at three hundred and thirty pounds each
+were looked upon as extravagant. The characteristic profusion of the
+famous Marquis of Hertford in paying fourteen thousand pounds for some ten
+or twenty pictures furnished during some weeks the talk to the town. In
+another quarter of a century, in 1876, at the Bredel sale, the 'Enamoured
+Cavalier' by an artist not of the highest distinction, realized a price
+almost unprecedented then, but often repeated and increased since, of four
+thousand, three hundred pounds. That the upward movement of prices, to
+culminate some time later as will presently be seen in a memorable
+transaction of the saleroom, had fairly started twenty years ago, is
+evident from the details of the present retrospect. That the new
+development was at that date in its infancy may be inferred from the fact
+that at the Albert Levy sale in 1876 a landscape by Gainsborough which has
+since changed hands for thousands secured only a few shillings over three
+hundred and sixty-seven pounds. Eight years later at the Quilter sale of
+1884, the enhanced value of foreign masters formed a much more conspicuous
+testimony to the growing affluence of the classes which supply the
+virtuosi of these later days. On that occasion the 'Heidelberg' of Turner
+was after a keen competition knocked down for not much less than two
+thousand pounds. The same artist's 'Zurich' in the same year went for
+twelve hundred and sixty pounds, nearly twice as much as it had secured
+only a decade earlier. Incidentally for those to whom such facts and
+figures are interesting on artistic, and not social, grounds, the
+conclusion from such an analysis as has now been attempted seems to be
+that since the Strawberry Hill sale and later the Bernal sale, the best
+works have continuously and conspicuously increased in value, but that,
+especially in the case of later Italian painters, Guido, etc., pictures of
+moderate merit have become a drug in the market. If Sir Robert Walpole was
+the first of modern parliamentarians, his son was equally the eighteenth
+century founder of the existing race of art connoisseurs. During the April
+and May of 1842, the collection of the toy villa whose Gothic pinnacles
+overlook the Thames yielded in round numbers thirty thousand pounds. After
+an interval of fourteen years the treasures of Ralph Bernal, whose death
+deprived the House of Commons of a Chairman of Committees as that of his
+son was afterwards to eclipse its gaiety, formed the event of the season
+of 1856. In the course of a thirty-one days' sale the total realized was
+twice that of the Walpole sale, in other words more than sixty thousand
+pounds.
+
+These figures seem insignificant when contrasted with the heroic prices of
+our own epoch. Of these only a few and not the highest have yet been
+glanced at. Compare with the modest totals just mentioned the competition
+and the sums of money, both without precedent, expended in Christie's
+salerooms during the seventies and eighties of the century. The rostrum
+mounted by the auctioneer may be, as is said, identical with that used in
+the earliest days of the house a century ago. It is the only visible link
+with the past still remaining. The quality of the crowd of buyers is not
+more changed than the prices which they are prepared to give; or the
+national opulence which these prices indicate. In those earlier days the
+salerooms were in Pall Mall instead of King Street, St James's. These
+premises were only vacated, as many now living can remember to clear the
+way for the still youthful Royal Academy before it had, on its journey to
+Burlington House, reached the stage of Trafalgar Square. The keen Celtic
+face of Doyle, director of the Irish National Gallery; the strikingly
+handsome and Venetian profile of Sir Frederick Leighton; the delicately
+chiselled and thoughtful features of Woolner, more than creditable as a
+sculptor, far more than merely graceful as a poet; these among the company
+of possible buyers represented the professionally expert element. The
+late Sir William Gregory with his fine brow and leonine head, whose
+many-sided culture suggests the complete man of the Herbert of Cherbury
+type whom our ancestors worshipped; another Irishman on whom a picture
+acts as a magnet on steel, Lord Powerscourt; among Scots Lord Rosebery;
+the Duke of St Albans whose physiognomy in those days recalled his Stuart
+ancestry; the interested and intelligent presence of a representative of
+that exotic wealth which has encouraged English industry and art so much,
+Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild; these are among the best known members of
+the general circle. Nor should there be omitted the form of a tradesman
+whose position next to the auctioneer, and whose telegram and account book
+in hand proclaim his occupation. This is Mr Agnew, pre-eminently a
+creation of the new wealth of the Victorian epoch, as well as the promoter
+of not a few artists' prosperity. To-day the enterprising trader is to
+prove himself the idol of the saleroom by paying the largest sum ever
+known to have been given for a single painting. And that in opposition to
+the peer of the longest purse of the day, the late Lord Dudley. That noble
+connoisseur by his bid of ten thousand guineas seems at first to have
+secured for Park Lane Gainsborough's portrait of the Duchess of
+Devonshire, who won by her kiss the Westminster election for Charles Fox.
+Just as the hammer of fate is about to descend, the dealer intimates an
+advance. Amid applause, such as salutes the Derby winner on Epsom Downs,
+Mr Agnew[11] is declared the possessor of the incomparable canvas for the
+price, as yet unheard in any saleroom, of ten thousand one hundred
+guineas. Three years before this, in 1873, 'The Sisters,' also by
+Gainsborough, had brought six thousand, six hundred and fifteen pounds.
+Fourteen years after its first sale, in 1887, the same painting realized
+nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five pounds. Recent changes in the
+law of entail have undoubtedly tended to promote these unprecedented
+prices. The chief cause, however, is the general augmentation of wealth
+and the more lavish scale and ideas of expenditure that have penetrated
+all classes of the community.[12]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST
+
+    Specific instances of the fusion with native elements of the owners of
+    foreign wealth, especially in the case of the Jews. Growth in England
+    from early days of Hebrew plutocracy. Different views as to number of
+    Jew families, the names of these as preserved by Jewish writers.
+    Westminster Abbey under Richard III. and Henry VII. completed with Jew
+    money. Later settlements of Jews in England date from Charles II.
+    Under George III. the prosperity of the Goldsmids foreshadows the
+    future power of the Rothschilds. Early beginnings of the Rothschilds,
+    on the Continent and in England. Rothschild and Waterloo; Rothschild
+    and the Bank of England. Services of the family to the English State.
+    Their method of using their wealth under Baron Lionel and his
+    successors. Their example to others of their race and their work
+    amongst their own people.
+
+
+The close assimilation of the newer elements of English life to the older;
+the gradual but unchecked identification in pursuits, habits, culture and
+tastes of the aristocracy of wealth with that of birth have been already
+mentioned. More detailed illustration of these distinctive movements of
+the Victorian era are necessary to enable us to form an adequate idea of
+the personal and enduring influence exercised upon the society of England
+by those who since their national dispersion, have in all countries
+illustrated in themselves the chief developments and agencies of wealth.
+From the popular expressions sometimes employed about the Jews in England
+to-day, one might suppose they had become considerable among us only
+during the Victorian epoch. Few people, as they look at Westminster Abbey,
+remember that this monument of the national Christianity which the piety
+of Edward the Confessor began was completed under Richard III. and Henry
+VII. with money levied from the Jews.[13] Under Henry III. the sufferings
+of the chosen race in England had been severe. Thereafter, a gradual but
+progressive improvement in their position took place. But so late as 1633,
+according to a Hebrew authority named Haham, quoted in the _Anglia
+Judaica_, astounding though the statement sounds, there were only twelve
+Jewish families in this country. The distinction of re-establishing the
+race on British soil has been claimed for the protectorate of Cromwell. It
+really belongs to Charles II., and actually occurred during the first few
+years after the Restoration. One of the comparatively few Anglo-Jewish
+conversions to Christianity took place about this time. Close to the
+Abbey, which his ancestors' wealth had completed, in the church of St
+Margaret's, Westminster, an Israelite physician, Speranza Collins, abjured
+the faith of his fathers, and was formally received into the Anglican
+Communion by Dr Warmester, Dean of Westminster. By the time that the house
+of Brunswick was established on the throne, the fabric of Anglo-Jewish
+plutocracy had well nigh built itself up. The great natural philosopher
+Emmanuel Da Costa, whom the Italian Jews of the eighteenth century
+furnished to England, compiled a list by name of all his countrymen living
+under the sovereignty of George III. In this list there are no
+Rothschilds. The patronymics of most frequent occurrence are Rodrigues,
+and Goldsmid. This latter seems to have been the Semitic family which,
+under the third George, occupied the position most closely analogous to
+that filled by the house of Rothschild under Queen Victoria. The country
+houses in the Sheen and Richmond district with their deer parks and
+vineries owned by Abraham and Jacob Goldsmid, foreshadowed distinctly the
+later beauties in the same region of Gunnersbury, if not of the more
+distant Mentmore.
+
+At the close of the eighteenth century, the Frankfort Rothschilds, the
+friends and bankers of the Prince of Hesse-Cassell, were a power in
+Germany only second to that of the Empire. The capital on the Main had
+from the days of Charlemagne been a trading centre. During the sixteenth
+century, its fairs caused the place to be the market of the world, and
+three hundred years later may have given to the Prince Consort[14] the
+first idea of the great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Long before Mayer Amschel
+Rothschild, the founder of the firm died, the prices of Frankfort were
+being studied as closely as those of Antwerp or Rotterdam. The third
+brother of Anselm Mayer, who controlled till 1855 the Frankfort branch,
+was evidently the first great financial genius of his family. His
+enterprise and judgment made him the Croesus of Europe. They also at a
+critical point in his career prompted him to save from ruin more than one
+Paris bank reeling under the effects of North American insolvencies. At
+the close of the last century, the English business of the Rothschilds was
+transacted by the firm of Van Notten. A dispute with a Lancashire
+manufacturer on whom Germany and Austria depended for their cotton goods,
+sent Nathan Mayer Rothschild from Frankfort to England. In this way the
+English house came into existence, and the necessity for foreign agents
+outside the family ceased. The Napoleonic wars, as is well known, largely
+contributed in their successive incidents to the earlier fortunes of the
+family. Already the first Rothschild had speculated largely in the bills
+on the English Government given by the Duke of Wellington for the support
+of the British troops. Settled in London he provided the channels for the
+regular transmission of funds to the forces in the Peninsula. Early in
+1800, he was the first man on the London Stock Exchange. His agents
+followed in the train of every regiment. His couriers in their specially
+chartered ships were on every sea. Rothschild himself, unseen by others,
+watched the Battle of Waterloo. He crossed the Channel in a fishing boat,
+and arrived in London, to find it full of rumours of the English defeat.
+Casually appearing on the Stock Exchange, he received the condolences of
+the City on his ruin. Only he himself knew what his investments were.
+Instead of being ruined, he had added a million to the family wealth. Such
+at least is the conventional account. The foregoing details are in
+substance taken from an entertaining volume by John Reeves on _The
+Rothschilds_, published by Messrs Sampson Low.
+
+The present writer has, however, some reason to question the accuracy of
+the tradition of a Rothschild secretly watching the great battle. The
+account that Baron Lionel's friends generally gave is as follows. During
+the great Corsican's usurpation of the First Magistrateship in the French
+State, the lawful possessor of the Throne, Louis XVIII. was living in
+retirement in Belgium.[15] The Rothschilds, on the early morrow of the
+decisive battle, sent a courier to the King's villa near Ghent, to gather
+from the reception of the news by His Majesty how the fortune of the day
+had gone. The King's sitting room was on the ground floor with windows
+looking on the garden. In that enclosure the Rothschild emissary took up
+his station, so that, himself unseen, he could observe what passed on the
+other side of the windows. Presently a rider, fresh from his horse, still
+booted, spurred, and mud splashed, entered the chamber, made a low
+obeisance to its dethroned occupant, who, on his part, graciously extended
+his fingers which the messenger gently touched with his lips. Hence the
+outside spectator inferred Napoleon's defeat, and proceeded at once to his
+principals in London. As an English financier this is the Rothschild who
+popularized foreign stocks and loans in this country by causing the
+interest and dividends to be paid in London, instead of, as heretofore,
+abroad. Four years after Waterloo, he first identified himself closely
+with the English Government by undertaking a loan of twelve millions. His
+profit on the transaction was one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. With
+this sum he bought Gunnersbury, formerly the home of Amelia, aunt of
+George III., which had since passed into the hands of a private citizen
+named Copland. The Rothschilds naturally and honourably took their place
+among the lords of the soil in their adopted country. He who is now spoken
+of encountered, perhaps provoked, much opposition from rival financiers,
+and more than once measured swords with the Bank of England which had
+hesitated about technicalities of discount. Shortly after this the New
+Court potentate called at the Bank bringing with him a sum of twenty-one
+thousand pounds in £5 notes,[16] each deposited in a separate bag. Seven
+hours were occupied in changing this paper into gold. For the time the
+general business of the establishment was arrested. The strategy succeeded
+completely. The next day it was announced that in future the Rothschild
+bills would be taken as the Banks'.
+
+In the July of 1836 a pigeon fluttered in through the open window of the
+New Court counting house. The bird had travelled from Frankfort; it
+brought the news of the death in his native town of the great head of the
+firm. Many religious ceremonies of the Hebrew race have, during these
+last few years, been converted into great functions of modish society. The
+ceremonial series began when the body of the first great Rothschild known
+to England, in the presence of the whole Corps Diplomatique attached to
+the Court of St James's, was committed to the earth in the East End
+cemetery of his race. With that event the latter day history of the
+Rothschilds begins. Henceforward the business was to be conducted by
+Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild's four sons in England, together with their
+uncles abroad. Of these sons Nathaniel settled in France, Lionel, Nathan
+Mayer and Anthony managed the English firm. Under the régime of Baron
+Lionel Rothschild whom many now living remember well, the first great act
+of association with the English Government was in 1847 the Irish Famine
+Loan, supplemented as it was by munificent subscriptions for the relief of
+the distress which the failure of the potato crop had caused. Seven years
+later Baron Lionel carried out the sixteen millions loan for the English
+Government. The transaction for which the Lionel administration is best
+remembered by the present generation is the advance for the purchase of
+the Suez Canal shares in 1876. The announcement of that negotiation by the
+Prime Minister of the day in conjunction with his compatriots in the City,
+came as a surprise to the English people at large. It has, however, on the
+highest authority since transpired that when in 1874 Mr Disraeli took
+office, he had already decided upon acquiring for England a preponderating
+interest in the international waterway. Nor is it impertinent to assume
+that during the Sunday visits which the statesman, as Mr Disraeli and as
+Lord Beaconsfield, paid to the suburban home of Baron Lionel, this scheme
+may sometimes have been discussed. Four millions was the sum advanced by
+New Court, one hundred thousand pounds represented the total of the
+Rothschild 2-1/2 per cent. profit.
+
+By this time Baron Lionel had been in possession of a seat in the House of
+Commons some ten years, won though that seat had been only after a
+prolonged struggle. At the beginning of the century no Jew magistrate or
+sheriff existed. In 1837, Sir David Salomons became sheriff of London and
+Middlesex, but the true faith of a Christian test prevented him from
+serving. Eventually, to oblige the City, Lord Chancellor Campbell
+introduced a Bill removing this disability. Parliament, however, was still
+closed against the Jew. Ten years later Lionel Rothschild, with Lord John
+Russell, was elected M.P. for London. The Jewish Parliamentary Relief
+Bill, supported by Mr Disraeli as well as Mr Gladstone, passed the House
+of Commons, to be thrown out in the Lords. In 1850 another measure shared
+the same fate. The sixth decade of this century had come before the first
+Rothschild took his place on the green leather benches. Mr Disraeli's last
+novel, _Endymion_, as rich as any of its predecessors in personal
+portraits, contains in the character of Mr Neuchatel, the banker, the most
+graphic pen and ink sketch of the financier now mentioned. In the grounds
+of Gunnersbury, statesmen of both parties, diplomatists from every Court,
+foreigners of every grade of distinction met each other. Here Mr Disraeli
+chatted amicably with Lord Palmerston, the turbulence of whose foreign
+policy he was fresh from denouncing in the House of Commons. Hither Louis
+Napoleon, when an exile in London, drove in his friend Count Alfred
+D'Orsay's cabriolet. Here the veteran Lord Lyndhurst instructed in habits
+of English thought his aptest pupil, then a showy but still obscure
+politician soon to become the pillar of the Tory party. It was by Baron
+Lionel that the Rothschild hospitalities were begun on the scale on which
+they have since continued. First came the marriage of Baron Lionel's
+eldest daughter, Leonora, to her relative, Alphonse Rothschild. Persigny,
+then French Ambassador in London, made a speech which the Paris Academy
+recognized as classical in its perfection. Mr Disraeli, always
+pre-eminently happy on these occasions, delighted host, hostess, and
+guests by a coruscation of glittering antitheses, and flashing epigrams in
+affectionate honour of the bride and bridegroom. The ex-Lord Chancellor,
+Lord Lyndhurst himself, in whose honour the Baroness Mayer had given a
+fête a few days earlier at Mentmore, said a few words so happy in their
+arrangement, so dignified in their cadence that they were subsequently set
+to candidates for the Newcastle medal at Eton to translate into Attic
+prose.
+
+Not twenty years have passed since, on Baron Lionel's death in 1879, the
+fortunes of the house have been controlled by the Lord Rothschild of
+to-day with his brothers Alfred and Leopold as his partners. The loans for
+the Hungarian, Brazilian, and Chilian Governments are only a portion of
+the New Court enterprises since 1879. In the eyes of England and of
+Europe, their most important undertaking has been in relation with Egypt.
+In 1885, at the moment that the Western powers were at diplomatic feud
+with each other about the land of the Pharoahs, Egypt itself drew more and
+more near to complete bankruptcy. The calamity was only averted by monthly
+advances from the Messrs Rothschild upon no legal security, but on the
+strength of a private note from the late Foreign Secretary, Lord
+Granville. This is the testimony of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach speaking as
+Chancellor of the Exchequer after he had succeeded Mr Gladstone in 1885.
+The nine millions loan issued in that year was, of course, highly
+successful for its negotiators. But this good fortune had been preceded by
+an anxious season of protracted risk encountered with unfailing public
+spirit.
+
+The Semitic capitalists of the century have been compared to a foreign
+garrison quartered in every European country, never completely fused with
+the native population, always separated from the national life, and
+potentially hostile to the domestic interests of the land which it
+occupies. In the case of the financial family whose connection with
+Victorian England has now been summarized this description is not borne
+out by the facts. Their activity as financiers and generosity as citizens
+during calamitous seasons like the Irish famine, are only specimens of the
+services rendered by the Rothschilds to their adopted country. No
+exceptional distress comes upon any portion of the United Kingdom without
+eliciting a letter of womanly sympathy from the Queen, and the opening of
+a subscription list in the City. At the head of this list the name of the
+New Court firm is tolerably sure to be seen. Members of a race whose
+history is like that of the Jews one of razzias, confiscations,
+disqualifications, patiently borne and slowly overcome, can scarcely be
+expected to betray no consciousness of these antecedents in their habit
+and speech. The bearing of the Jew, whatever pinnacle of greatness he may
+have climbed, is traditionally the bearing of a man on the defensive,
+prepared, if he sees an opening, to anticipate the necessity of resentment
+by showing his ability to repel offence. Those who, whether by individual
+experience or by ethnic tradition, have been schooled in experiences like
+these, are not likely to show morbid delicacy in their deportment towards
+others. The mart and the bourse to which the Jews have been driven are
+defective schools of social culture. Asiatic plutocrats are sure,
+therefore, wherever they may be settled, to provoke enemies in the very
+act of creating clients and dependents. The English Rothschilds of every
+generation have found opportunities of performing private not less than
+public kindnesses. In spite of, or rather perhaps because of this, they
+have wounded many susceptibilities, for there may be an insolence of
+neediness not less than of wealth. Fairness, however, requires the
+admission that the successive representatives of the great Semitic house
+in respect of the performance of the duties of citizenship as well as in
+the wise, not less than the beneficent use of wealth, have set an example
+to the fellow countrymen of their adoption in general, and to their
+financial rivals in particular. The employment of great wealth in
+accordance with the principles of magnificence and of taste was esteemed
+so highly by the cultivated Greeks of old as to receive from Aristotle a
+concrete illustration in his category of virtuous characters. The same
+tradition was preserved and exemplified in those republics of mediæval
+Italy that wore the closest resemblances to the older democracies of
+Hellas which history records. It was not unknown in England at that period
+when London was to the Englishman what Florence had been to the Florentine
+under the Medici, or, at an earlier age, what the City of the Violet Crown
+had been to the contemporary of Pericles. A similar sense of the public
+usefulness and patriotic obligations of great wealth animated the citizens
+of London under our own Edwards, and had previously found many modes of
+effective expression under Elizabeth. Those were 'the gorgeous days' in
+which the trader of one of the great chartered companies in the Indies or
+across the Atlantic, having made some exceptionally successful venture, on
+returning safely to his native land, and to the township which had been
+his cradle, was wont to testify his gratitude to Providence by
+embellishing the place of his birth with buildings or gardens, with
+galleries or terraces, many of which, as in the case of the gifts of Sir
+Thomas Gresham, the first of the great loan negotiators, endure to this
+day, not only in the college which bears his name, but in the Royal
+Exchange. By no family, not of English birth; by few Englishmen
+themselves, either under Queen Victoria or her predecessors, have the
+public and national responsibilities imposed by financial success, or by
+hereditary millions, on their possessors been recognized so frankly, or
+been illustrated with so happy and impressive a blend of splendour and
+propriety, as by the descendents of the bankers of the Princes of
+Hesse-Cassel who in the first days of this century issuing from their
+natal judengasse at Frankfort established themselves in England, and at
+the same time, or shortly thereafter, fixed their emporia in the great
+Continental capitals as well.
+
+Whatever their natural pride in the creative power of their wealth, no one
+can lay it to the charge of the Rothschilds that in the use of this
+instrument they have lost sight of their duties to the land of their
+adoption. In any faithfully written chronicle of English art or sport
+since both were organized among us on their present plan, the name of this
+family must fill no small space. Their services to the breed of horses may
+be surmised from the popularity of Baron Lionel Rothschild's success in
+the race for the Derby with Favonius in 1871, as well as from the
+popularity which his son has since won in the same pastime. Their private
+houses are museums of art which have encouraged English not less than
+Continental talent, and which are open to every visitor who is interested
+in their contents. Since the Rothschilds were settled in Piccadilly and
+Mayfair, many others of their race have made a position in the polite life
+of the capital and of the country. That each of these, to mention only
+Murrietas, Oppenheims, Bischoffsheims, have fixed the ends and regulated
+the scale of their expenditure with a regard for refinement as well as
+pomp, and that the more prominent members of a no longer despised race
+have been incorporated thoroughly into the ranks of the native gentry, is
+due largely to the personal initiative and influence of the New Court
+dynasty. Nor is it merely their wealth and the influence which money has
+brought that have placed the Rothschilds at the head of Semitic settlers
+in England. Their loyalty to their nation has never been eclipsed by other
+interests. They have not only endowed hospitals and built synagogues. They
+have always exerted a pacific and unifying influence upon the various and
+sometimes mutually conflicting Hebraic factions; at one time they have
+reconciled to each other different schools of Teutonic Judaism. At another
+they have performed the same good office for Israelite communities outside
+their own Teutonic pale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND
+
+    Private and individual efforts which have quickened the sense of
+    citizenship in England and bridged the gulf between rich and poor.
+    Historic and abiding influences of the Young England movement of 1846.
+    How it facilitated the Factory Acts and prompted private owners to
+    open their parks to the public. Temple Gardens and Lincoln's Inn.
+    Effect produced by the brothers Mayhew with their _London Labour_ and
+    _London Poor_ during the fifties, and also by certain articles in the
+    _Times_ and _Quarterly Review_. Lord Shaftesbury, the Poor Man's Peer.
+    Origin of Public School and University settlements in great towns.
+    Edward Denison and his friends before Arnold Toynbee. Individual
+    example acting on public or corporate owners. Educate the public and
+    actuate legislation when the time is ripe for it. Sir Erasmus Wilson's
+    gift of Cleopatra's Needle preceded beautification of Thames
+    Embankment.
+
+
+The practical sense of citizenship by which, in the preceding chapter, the
+Jewish community in England has been seen to be animated is among native
+Englishmen themselves pre-eminently the development of the Victorian era.
+Its manifestation in the capital was preceded by its active display in the
+provinces. Few individuals of our epoch have more appreciably and
+definitely impressed the image of their genius on the social history of
+their age, than Benjamin Disraeli, first, and only, Earl of Beaconsfield.
+This is not the occasion on which to examine his position in, and
+services to, the public life of the period, as well as his place in the
+inner economy of the polite world. In the social movement of the
+industrial classes of the community, especially in their relations with
+their more highly placed neighbours, the work done by this remarkable man
+is not less conspicuous than it is seemingly enduring.[17] The political
+school which, at the outset of his career his genius created, that of
+Young England in the ninth year of the present reign, did not last long as
+a political organization. It was never intended to do so. Of the little
+coterie whose inspiring literature is contained in the trilogy of romance
+that is constituted by _Coningsby_, _Sibyl_, and _Tancred_, the sole
+survivor is the Duke of Rutland. Even he, perhaps, is better known to many
+readers as Lord John Manners. He was first introduced to the general
+public by the style of 'Lord Henry Sidney' in his friend's earliest novel.
+With pardonable pride in a letter incorporated by the editor of the
+_Quarterly Review_ in an article on _Sibyl_,[18] the Duke of Rutland
+points back to the undoubted service which the sentiment generated by the
+Young Englanders rendered to Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, and to Mr
+Oastler in their gradually successful efforts to pass the First Factory
+Act as well as generally to soften, perhaps even to sweeten the daily lot
+of the suffering, the defenceless, and the poor. At that time, the humane
+and religious fervour of Lord John Russell had not yet leavened, as it
+soon afterwards did, aristocratic Whiggism. Mr Gladstone's spiritualizing
+touch was still to be laid upon the party that he was yet to join. The
+scientific economists of the school of Peel, comprising as they did Cobden
+and Bright, were the enemies of the movement. Even the pioneer of that
+movement, who afterwards nobly vindicated his claim to the title of the
+Poor Man's Peer, was indignantly asked what he, Lord Shaftesbury, had been
+doing, when Lord Ashley was fighting for the Ten Hours Bill of 1844.[19]
+
+His virtuous indignation obscured this critic's view of the fact that the
+peer he praised was identical with the peer he denounced.
+
+If this were the context in which to illustrate the political permanence
+of the Young England agency, it would be enough to point to the
+perpetuation in the knights, dames, and chancellors of the Primrose
+League, of the sensibility to picturesque or semi-feudal effects which
+inspired Disraeli and his friends in their manipulation of Conservative
+sentiment. These qualities, at an interval of just half a century, were to
+reappear in Disraeli's aptest[20] pupil, Lord Randolph Churchill. As a
+social and unpolitical testimony to the quickening power of the new
+England propaganda, when its promulgation was an affair of yesterday, it
+may be mentioned that at the Queen's accession, as for many years
+thereafter, it was comparatively an unknown thing for the private parks
+surrounding gentlemen's houses in the provinces to be used as people's
+pleasure grounds. Show places on such a scale as Blenheim or Chatsworth
+existed then as they exist to-day. Even in the case of the former of
+these, in præ-_Coningsby_ or ante-Victorian days, it is not likely to have
+occurred to a Duke of Marlborough, as it did occur to the seventh
+successor of John Churchill, being the eighth Duke, to engage a special
+train to convey several thousands of East End children from their native
+courts and alleys to the undulating woodlands of his Oxfordshire park.
+Within a few years of the appearance of _Coningsby_, Eaton was only one of
+the great parks which, so long as certain reasonable restrictions were
+observed, became not less free to town or country labourers with their
+wives and children than Kensington Gardens, or, as what till our age was
+called Battersea Fields.[21] Royal patronage had not been withheld from
+the movement. The memories of the present generation stop short of a time
+when Windsor Park, together with the gardens and terraces of the Castle,
+was inaccessible to excursionists by the Great Western Railway to view the
+natural panorama bright with all the beauties of 'blossom week,' or to
+hear the band on the slopes play the favourite pieces of the Queen. The
+capital was not yet fully abreast with this piece of social progress. Long
+after the gardens and the general maintenance of the public parks endowed
+them with fresh attractions, the private pleasure grounds of corporate
+owners were closed. The new philanthropic reforms were introduced here by
+the noble structure of the Thames Embankment. The Temple Gardens had,
+indeed, long been open. The flower beds and their careful tending were
+still to come. The Benchers of Lincoln's Inn were more exclusive. The new
+buildings, as they are called, flanking this enclosure, date from 1845.
+The Lincoln's Inn Fields' theatre had disappeared in 1848. Nearly half a
+century was still to elapse before the leafy paradise in the heart of this
+austere kingdom of Chancery law was to ring with childish voices from the
+courts and alleys which abut on Chancery Lane.
+
+Within fifty years of the Queen's accession, the personal example of that
+Lord Shaftesbury whose name has been mentioned already was to bear rich
+fruit. In the _Times_ newspaper during the earlier sixties, there appeared
+a leading article on the subject of the homeless poor of London. It was
+equally noticeable for the humanity which inspired it, and for its
+vigorous and graphic expression. Not long before this, an interest, then
+entirely new, had been imparted to the grim subject by an essay in the
+_Quarterly Review_ based on the then comparatively recent volumes about
+London labour and the London poor by the brothers Mayhew. A host of
+writers have treated this subject subsequently. Many of them,
+conspicuously the late Thomas Archer, with a thoroughness and freshness of
+knowledge scarcely inferior to that with which it had been approached by
+the Mayhews. But in their hands the topic was absolutely new. Without
+hyperbole, in literal truth, the West End was then not only ignorant of
+how the East End lived, but with very rare individual exceptions, entirely
+indifferent to the mingled squalor and tragedy of that existence. Horace
+Mayhew survived to a vigorous and remarkably handsome old age, dying only
+a few years ago. His work on the deeper depths of London poverty was the
+one effort of his life. All his energies were thrown into it. The work
+when finished, if it did not exhaust him, left him so depressed by the
+misery which he had been investigating that he had no mind to return to
+the lighter departments of periodical letters wherein his career
+commenced, and his earlier reputation was made. A long period of social
+indifference and legislative lethargy as to the condition of the very poor
+in the capital and in other great towns now ensued. In 1865, the first
+editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, Frederick Greenwood, conceived the idea
+of commissioning his brother James, a well known writer on social
+subjects, to pass a night in the casual ward of a workhouse, rumours of
+abuses in the management of which were then attracting attention. About a
+year after this, a winter of exceptional severity afflicted the poorest
+portions of London, near the Docks and elsewhere, with the combined
+calamities of lack of labour, and as a consequence with famine,
+firelessness, and pestilence. Three friends, each of them then young men,
+all Conservatives by conviction and all under the influence of the
+philanthropic teaching of Disraeli's novels, were in the habit of
+frequently meeting with a view of maturing some scheme for the relief of
+that destitution at the East End, with which existing agencies of help had
+proved themselves impotent to deal. One of these belonged to a well known
+Shropshire family, Baldwyn Leighton.[22] Another, Sir Michael
+Hicks-Beach, has since become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The third was a
+son of a former Bishop of Salisbury. Edward Denison was equally quick to
+master the dominant facts in a social situation, and to take the action
+that seemed the best thereupon. Within a few days, he decided that the
+first step towards remedying the evils recorded morning after morning in
+the newspapers must be personal acquaintance with their magnitude, and
+their origin, as well as with the habits and homes of the distressed
+masses. Denison, therefore, established himself in a small house in
+Whitechapel, the very heart of the necessitous district.
+
+Since then, the example thus set has been followed frequently. Denison of
+course was sometimes visited in his East End lodging by his West End
+friends. These returned, bringing with them a more vivid sense of the
+industrial suffering just outside the doors of the polite world than
+literary descriptions, however graphic, could convey to the perfunctory
+reader of the morning paper. Other incidents were to prove unexpectedly
+instrumental in deepening the interest of well-to-do Londoners in their
+destitute neighbours. Within a year or two of Denison's mission, the
+Fenian outrage at Clerkenwell Prison not only robbed many poor families of
+their breadwinners, but left them literally homeless. Disraeli, at that
+time Prime Minister, sent down his private secretary to distribute alms
+among the victims of the explosion. Mr Montague Corry, since Lord
+Rowton,[23] saw sad and strange sights during this charitable errand. His
+recital of these experiences was followed by liberal subscriptions to the
+sufferers from Pall Mall and Mayfair. From that day to this, not only has
+the stream of charity flowed less sluggishly; there has been also awakened
+a new personal and intelligent interest in the condition of the most
+squalid of poverty's perennial children. That feeling has not evaporated
+in charitable doles. Substantial funds have been organized by private or
+corporate munificence for improving the dwellings of the poor and for
+practically testifying the neighbourly solicitude of more fortunate
+citizens.
+
+The demoralizing effects of public executions were exposed by Thackeray.
+His essay, 'Going to see a man hung' gave shape, and eventually success to
+the movement for the hanging of criminals within, and not outside, the
+prison walls. So, at an earlier day, Dickens, who of all our greatest
+writers was the first to interest the public in the waifs and strays in
+the London streets, had initiated in _Oliver Twist_ a social demand for
+workhouse reform. The best causes are liable to abuse and caricature.
+There have been moments when, since the Mayhews wrote, sympathy with the
+lot of the London poor has seemed in danger of becoming overdone, or being
+degraded into a fad, a craze, a fashionable hobby, and thus of ceasing to
+be an actuating conviction. The modish popularity of 'slumming' as it used
+a few years ago to be called had of course its absurd aspects, but was,
+nevertheless, not an unhealthy sign. It could be compared to the froth
+upon the surface which concealed, and did not necessarily weaken, the
+stimulating and strengthening qualities below. Whether this philanthropic
+curiosity was displayed in town or country, the social truth of which it
+constituted evidence was that the commercial spirit and its harsher
+influences, not unfortunately uncommon among the upper classes in the
+early days of the new poor law, were becoming obsolete, and that the class
+fusion born of class sympathy to which De Tocqueville has attributed our
+later freedom from organic revolutions was in steady process of evolution.
+Edward Denison came first of all, and could only see with the eye of faith
+the fruits which his example was to bear in the beneficent experiment of
+Arnold Toynbee and in the People's Palace. So it has continued, till
+to-day the University and public school settlements in the East End of
+London and in other great cities are institutions not less deeply rooted
+than the parochial system itself. The kindly work is not confined to a
+single sex. St Margaret's House, Bethnal Green, the ladies' branch of the
+Oxford agency, presided over by Mrs Burrows, is as firmly established as
+the homes founded by Trinity or Christ Church in the same neighbourhood.
+Throughout the English speaking world, the same beneficent inspiration
+seems to have been almost simultaneously operative. One hears of analogous
+enterprises in the great cities of Australia and in the United States. The
+American movement even claims seniority over the English. Andover House,
+Boston, was in full working order before the cognate agencies in our own
+capital were complete. The devotion of Trade Unionists to their Union has
+been employed as a figure to illustrate the mutual loyalty to a great and
+good idea of those brought up in the same College or University or public
+school. This reciprocal enthusiasm has now been active and productive long
+enough to entitle it to the praise of solidity and permanence. The public
+and legal provisions for quickening the sense of citizenship in town and
+country will presently be examined in detail. That which seems important
+to bear in mind is that the legislature did not interpose its machinery
+until the private agencies, social or moral, already recapitulated, had
+done their work. Even the improvement in the open spaces of the capital
+which is so marked a feature in metropolitan progress during the last few
+decades, has been helped or encouraged largely by private initiative. The
+late Mr Matthew Arnold recognized as a graceful and original act of public
+service, the transport of Cleopatra's Needle from Alexandria to London at
+the cost of Sir Erasmus Wilson. Before the obelisk was established on the
+Thames Embankment the municipal authorities had prepared a home for it and
+converted into daintily kept pleasure grounds the little enclosures by the
+side of the riverain promenade.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES
+
+    Reflection of the Estates of the Realm in the old divisions of rural
+    life in England. Modifications in the system introduced by recent
+    changes in local government. The English village as it now is. The
+    public house as a place of resort largely displaced by the parish
+    meeting room. The quickened sense of civic life shown in the speech
+    and bearing of the villagers. The exact functions of the Parish
+    Council, or Meeting. Relations between Parish and District Councils.
+    Retrospect of English Poor Law system. Greater popularity of the
+    District Councils. Other duties than of Poor Law Guardians discharged
+    by District Councils. Clergy and Squires. How affected. District
+    Board's composition. Its relations with magistrates, and popular
+    feeling.
+
+
+Before 1894, English parishes in rural districts possessed, as they still
+do, three centres of local life. The State was represented by the squire,
+or chief landowner, often, as may still be the case, an absentee. The
+Rectory, or Vicarage, with the neighbouring church was the geographical
+depository of spiritual power. The village inn, or public house, was the
+place of popular meeting, and with its adjoining skittle-alley was the
+source of popular amusement. Here the gossip of the neighbourhood was
+discussed, or the local newspaper read. London journals did not, and do
+not, often enter remote neighbourhoods in the provinces. The doings of the
+Imperial Parliament, or the Concert of the European Powers were, as they
+remain, of little interest to the rural tillers of the soil in comparison
+with the wages paid by the farmers in the district, the supervision, or
+the lack of it, exercised by lords of the land over the cottages of the
+poor. Nothing more struck the stranger who wished to acquire information
+as to the daily lot of the rural population, and as to opportunities for
+their improvement, than the prevailing ignorance or indifference about the
+facts of their daily life. It was not exactly Christian acquiescence in
+chronic want and squalor as a Divine dispensation. It was rather an
+unreasoning suspicion as to the motives of the enquirer, and as to the
+consequences to themselves of the answers given, which, if it did not seal
+the villagers' lips, restricted their replies to inarticulate grunts or
+evasive generalities.
+
+Within the fifth decade of the present reign, all this has either changed
+entirely or has been appreciably modified. The public house, or inn,
+stands indeed where it stood. The tap is no longer the parish club room.
+Even the skittle-alley has lost many of its attractions. The authority of
+the Manor House has been divested of the superstitious sanctions with
+which it was once clothed. The squire and the parson are regarded as
+well-meaning persons with a good deal of human nature, after all, about
+them. As for the geographical centre of village existence, it is no longer
+the roof tree of the publican, but the village meeting hall. This, in the
+majority of cases, would never have existed but for the initiative of the
+clergyman. He it is who with no parliamentary sessions to attend during
+half the year, with no town house always ready to receive him, passes most
+of his time among his own people; and thus combines in his own person,
+very often, the two separate principles of Church and State. This village
+assembly room is furnished with the chief county and market town
+newspapers. It is without carpets or draperies, and does not consequently
+retain tobacco smoke. If, therefore, the villager likes a dry pipe while
+he reads, or chats, it may at stated hours be allowed him. Gradually,
+therefore, he has grown to regard the place as his betters regard the
+House of Commons, as the best club of which he knows. The publican may
+suffer, but all other members of the little community have gained.
+
+At the present moment, the manner and the countenances of the rural
+company, apart from the subjects of their more than usually animated
+conversation, indicate a season of exceptional importance. The truth is,
+that an election for the village parliament is imminent. Whether the name
+be parish council or parish meeting, the reality is the same. That reality
+since Sir Henry Fowler's amendment in 1894 practically implies Home Rule
+for every parish in rural England. The franchise is in effect universal.
+Without regard to income or place of domicile every parishioner whose name
+occurs in the local government or parliamentary register has a vote, and
+is in addition entitled to attend the parish parliament. So systematic is
+the preservation of the separate individuality of every village, that
+where the number of inhabitants is below[24] 300, and the gathering is
+called a meeting, not a council; no association of that particular village
+with others is allowed to supersede the separate meeting. The executive
+body is thus always the parish meeting. The grouping order necessary for
+the amalgamation of parishes for council purposes is never given without
+the closest scrutiny by the County Council first, or confirmed by the
+Imperial authority in London afterwards. In no case is the parish meeting
+dispensed with. Amongst the groups we have seen discussing their affairs,
+one might have noticed women as well as men; for though by the decision of
+the Court of Appeal in the case of Drax _v._ Ffook, women can vote as
+occupiers and not as owners, they are, whether spinsters or wives,
+eligible to be parish councillors. Should the parish be without a village
+hall, the schoolroom is the usual place of assembly. The one spot
+peremptorily forbidden by the law is the public house; unless no other
+rendezvous be procurable for love or money. It is still too early to
+pronounce definitely as to the permanent effect of these institutions. The
+general tendency has perhaps been towards the falsification alike of the
+extreme hopes and fears which they first raised. Their jurisdiction
+includes all the functions of the old vestries and their officers,
+together with other novel and more drastic prerogatives. The discussions
+are often limited to dull details of mechanical routine, but are
+sometimes, as to-day, sufficiently animated. In the typical parish (a
+generalization from actual experience), the question of opening or closing
+footpaths across fields chances closely to divide parochial opinion. A
+little time ago, the vexed problem was the limits of a village green
+which had been so much diminished by encroachments as to cease almost to
+exist. Another issue that a little while hence will furnish material for
+debates not less vivacious is that of allotments for cottagers. Here as in
+the other cases, there is a strong faction on either side. A heavy
+parochial whip has been sent out by the two sets of leaders. If the matter
+is decided in the affirmative, and the allotment or village green
+extension, as the case may be, is carried, a measure of expropriation may
+follow, should the County Council, as superior body, sanction the scheme,
+and should the Local Government Board, after hearing the case of the
+dissidents, confirm the parochial proposals. As a check to parochial
+extravagance, the money to be advanced by the central authority is not to
+exceed one-half the value of the local rates. Inheriting the power of the
+vestries which they displaced, the bodies now mentioned have in their
+hands the appointment of overseers of the poor. 'One man, one vote'[25] is
+the universal principle. The employers of labour, that is the farmers, are
+consequently liable to be placed in the minority by their servants. Hence
+proceeded the assertion that the signal withdrawal of the farmers from the
+Liberal party, as being morally responsible for the measure, largely
+brought about the crushing defeat of the Gladstonians at the general
+election of 1895. If the farmers were animated by any such resentment
+towards the party which they identified with the real authorship of the
+Act, the feeling has already to a great extent passed away. What remains
+of it will no doubt evaporate as eventually sentimental grievances of this
+kind seldom fail in England to do. Impartial evidence, gathered at first
+hand, does indeed show that the increased mutual knowledge generated
+between farmers and their hands in the parish meeting room has resulted in
+an actual improvement of the relations between the two classes. All the
+national processes which legislative change sets in motion have worked
+slowly in England. It was not till the third or fourth appeal to the
+constituencies under Household Franchise was made that the permanent
+results of the peaceful revolution in 1868 could be computed with even
+approximate accuracy. The final consequences of the extension of the
+franchise to counties by the Liberals in 1884 have not yet declared
+themselves. It would, therefore, be premature as yet to make any definite
+deductions, social or political, as to the working of a system which has
+been operative only since 1894.
+
+One thing more about them may, however, be said. As in the case of the
+farmers where, with a fair measure of conciliation and tact, the occupiers
+of the soil find their official intercourse with its tillers unexpectedly
+harmonious, so as regards the relations between the villagers and the
+clergyman, in the position of the latter as the spiritual, and often
+inevitably to a great degree the temporal, head of the community. Briefly
+stated, the effect of the Parish Meeting, or Parish Council, is to restore
+to the villagers certain of the rights which, in the old Manor Courts,
+they had possessed. Where the clergyman combines with the practical sense
+of an educated man a freedom from a suspicious antipathy to the civic
+activities of his flock, there is not only no jealousy of the parson's
+intervention in the deliberations of the parish hall; but the experience
+which he is likely to bring to the work is welcomed by the councillors as
+a valuable aid to their discussions. If, when standing for a seat on the
+council, the rector issues an address savouring of dictatorial
+self-assertion; if from his pulpit he prescribes a plan for the conduct of
+these elections; the reverend gentleman may find himself at the bottom of
+the poll. When, however, he deals with his parishioners on the assumption
+of their equality in all non-religious matters with himself, he disarms or
+prevents jealousy. He has a fair chance of being chosen by acclamation to
+the president's chair at the little Board.[26] Parish Councils have for
+the first time in the rural history of England developed a sense of
+responsibility among those to whom a decade ago the idea of rural
+citizenship, with obligations as well as rights, was unintelligible. They
+have, therefore, impressed the minds of those concerned in them with some
+sense of power. Thus far, no tendency has been displayed to use that power
+in a revolutionary fashion. A body which, like the average parish
+parliament, numbers from five to eleven, is not likely to prove a
+tempestuously democratic, or violently revolutionary assemblage. Finally,
+though, on the requisition of three members to the chairman the council
+may be convened at any time, its actual convention is never brought about
+more than thrice, and seldom more than once in a twelvemonth. Not the
+least good which this institution carries with it in most neighbourhoods
+is its creation of wider, less mean, more liberal interests in daily life,
+and with these interests, subjects of conversation for the village
+community more generous than private affairs of individual
+households;--what Hodge, the ditcher, does so late at night in the
+neighbourhood of the squire's game preserves; how much money the
+carpenter's wife paid for her new bonnet; or how her daughters afford so
+gaudy a display of Sunday finery. That the new machinery has thus far
+worked with less friction than might have been expected may be inferred
+from the statistics courteously forwarded to the present writer from the
+Local Government Board under date August 7th 1896. As has been said
+already, the Imperial authority at Whitehall acts as arbitrator in all
+cases of difference between the popular Parish Councils and the more
+exclusive County Councils as to the acquisition of land for allotments. At
+the time now mentioned, it was the calculation of the President of the
+Local Government Board that four cases had occurred of appeals by Parish
+Councils against the refusal of the County Council to make the allotment
+order; and that in fourteen cases in which orders have been made by County
+Councils, eight protests against them have reached the Local Government
+Board from persons immediately interested.
+
+Ascending from the lowest deliberative unit in the new scheme of local
+self government one passes from the Parish Council to the District
+Council. If it can be questioned whether the average villager as yet fully
+appreciates the gift of power made to him by the legislature in 1894, no
+such doubt can exist as to those bodies that are a little higher in the
+deliberative scale, the District Councils. The local parliament in the
+parish hall may sometimes be unattended by a single cottager. The District
+Council, if it be not as yet popular, is at least never neglected. Seats
+on it were from the first objects of local ambition. This is only what
+might have been expected in an age, a marked feature of which is the
+quickened interest of all sections of the community in whatever affects
+the health or comfort of the labouring classes. The District Council, as
+its name implies, has a more than parochial dignity. Its jurisdiction is
+practically commensurate with the sphere of the old Rural Sanitary
+Authority. The relief of pauperism however, forms a first and special care
+of this body, the members of which are also the Guardians of the Poor. Its
+place of assembly is the chief small town of the neighbourhood; not indeed
+the County town, but generally a convenient town where there happens to be
+a railway station. The District Council has already contracted certain
+associations of local fashion. The ladies of the country side have entered
+warmly into its business, and often constitute a majority of its most
+active members. There is, of course, the complaint of impulsiveness
+brought against the District Councillors. Thus the domestic idea is
+regarded by them with more respect than it secured from their
+predecessors, the Boards of Guardians. Guardians were elected by the
+plural vote of the larger ratepayers. They had, moreover, to satisfy a
+property qualification in their own persons. District Councils in theory
+know nothing of, and in practice are affected little by, such conditions.
+The ex-officio magistrate, without which no Board of Guardians was
+complete, is systematically absent from the new District bodies. The
+_personnel_ of the new Councils, which occupy a place midway between the
+Parish and the County assemblies, presents a notable contrast to that of
+the superseded Boards of Guardians. County magistrates are not, in virtue
+of that office, ordinary members of these bodies, which are almost solely
+elective. The dignity of the body, however, is well maintained. The
+chairman of the District Council becomes, in consequence of that position,
+a County magistrate with powers as plenary as if he were the nominee of
+the Lord Lieutenant. Sometimes, of course, the chairmen of the District
+bodies are already magistrates. That is, however, the exception. There now
+exist in the United Kingdom about a thousand elective magistrates, being
+chairmen of District Councils. By far the greater part of these are new to
+their legal responsibilities. A few are working men. One District Council
+in Northamptonshire is presided over by the master of a small railway
+station on the Midland line. Another has for its chairman an agricultural
+labourer; a third is controlled by an ex-policeman; a fourth by one who
+supports himself on the cultivation of sixteen acres of land. The effect
+of popular election is not limited to the discharge of those duties
+connected with pauperism and sanitation that are the primary concern of
+the District bodies. Assessment committees, and school attendance
+committees are both drawn from the District Councils. The latter of these,
+it is generally admitted, have done their work better since they ceased to
+be composed exclusively of employers of labour, and since they have become
+representative of industry as well.[27]
+
+The Poor Law, which has been in force during the whole of the Victorian
+era, was, as scarcely needs to be said, among the earliest achievements of
+the Reformed Parliament. Bitter and prolonged as was the resistance to
+portioning out the country afresh for the relief of pauperism instead of
+congregating the poor of each parish in their own workhouse, the
+beneficent results of the change have long since been universally
+admitted. 'The new Bastilles' was the name first given to the unions which
+the Act of 1834 created, by the opponents of the Bill, with a view to
+excite popular feeling against it. Only the most hardened paupers, who
+objected on principle to industry of any kind, complained of the modicum
+of labour exacted from the occupants of the new workhouses. Even these
+shirkers have become reconciled to some sort of industry. The improvement
+in the habits of the whole working class was conspicuous and immediate.
+Thus, as in his History of the period, Mr Molesworth points out,[28] in
+four unions of the Midlands, there were in 1834, 954 able-bodied paupers.
+In June 1836 there were only 5. All the rest were in regular work. In the
+county of Sussex, the most inveterately pauperized in England, there were
+in 1834, 6,160 paupers. The Act had not been in operation two years before
+this total was reduced to 124. By 1836 the Act had become operative in
+twenty-two counties. The average of the reduction of the rates in these
+was 43-1/2 per cent. The Commissioners of Enquiry, on whose report the new
+legislation was based, predicted that the application of their principles
+would restore and improve industry, would create or confirm habits of
+thrift, would increase the demand for labour as well as the wages of the
+labourer, and generally would promote the welfare of those who lived by
+manual toil. The Queen had not ascended her throne when the erewhile
+opponents of the Measure confessed that these anticipations were already
+fulfilled. It was not to be expected that bodies so essentially different
+from the old Boards of Guardians as the District Councils are would
+administer the Poor Law in the same spirit or on the same principles as
+their predecessors. Few socio-economical questions of the day have
+provoked controversy so bitter, or divided skilled and conscientious
+partizans into such mutually envenomed factions as the conditions on which
+relief from the rates should be granted to the necessitous poor. The
+uncompromising advocates of the workhouse test system, compulsory
+residence, that is, within the workhouse walls, maintain that in this way
+only can systematic pauperization be avoided, and that so alone will the
+not uniformly industrious poor realize the stigma of coming upon the
+rates. On the other hand, it may be argued that in innumerable cases
+timely charity from the common fund will prevent the utter break up of a
+needy, but not necessarily indolent home. Paupers, it may be said, who
+will not work, and who are, therefore, not proper objects of compassion,
+are never kept by any sense of pride or shame from taking up their
+quarters in the local union. Thus, may it not be false economy to make
+absolute destitution and homelessness a preliminary condition of parochial
+help? On these points, those who differ will never agree. What it is now
+relevant to point out, is that the administrative methods of the new
+Councillors have very generally shown a reaction from the more stringent,
+and less sympathetic policy of the old Boards of Guardians. Thus, the
+workhouse test is far less often than formerly made the condition of poor
+relief.
+
+Organization in every department of activity or interest is the most
+conspicuous movement of the last quarter of this century. Some years must
+yet elapse before we know the exact point to which the legislation now
+reviewed has disciplined and stimulated the inhabitants of rural England.
+The object of the controllers of the vestries that the Parish Meetings
+have superseded was to keep village administration in the hands of a
+privileged and comparatively leisured minority. Hence it was not unusual
+to fix the hour for the vestry meeting at 9 a.m.; when of course the male
+population would be at work in the fields. Under the Act of 1894 the
+Parish Councillors are bound to hold their sittings in the evening after
+the day's work is done. From a historical point of view this legislation
+cannot be charged with being revolutionary. The powers which the new
+bodies have assumed in checking encroachments upon common land and other
+like offences are indeed considerable. That prerogative is not an
+innovation. It is rather a revival of the authority which in the old Manor
+Courts, presided over by the steward of the Manor lord, the freeholders
+could exercise. Beyond question, the most far-reaching and important
+change introduced into country life by the new machinery is the infusion
+of the elective element into the nominated magistracy. This has not yet
+received the attention it deserves. Under the earlier régime, as has been
+said, certain guardians had a seat at the Union Board because they were
+magistrates. Under the existing dispensation certain Justices of the Peace
+owe their place on the magisterial Bench to the fact of their performing
+the duties of District Councillors and Guardians of the Poor. The
+relations between the two positions are thus exactly inverted. That the
+tendency of this change is to soothe the suspicions once widely prevalent
+as to the principles on which Justices' justice was administered does not
+seem disputable. It has also positively increased the respect in the rural
+mind for the law itself as the expression of wisdom and equity. The
+cordiality with which the older magistrates, nominated to the Bench by the
+Lord Lieutenant, have generally welcomed their popularly chosen colleagues
+has undoubtedly strengthened this wholesome sentiment. Finally, the same
+career in the local polity as of old remains practically open to men
+serving on the Commission of Peace. Where the old J.P. Guardian was a man
+who did good work on the Union Board, he seldom now is debarred from doing
+it still. Even when he is locally unpopular, a well-earned reputation of
+ability or aptitude for affairs is pretty sure to bear down purely
+personal objections and secure his return to the District Board; a
+tolerably conclusive proof of the fitness of the parochial constituencies
+for the measure of autonomy which they have received.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES
+
+    General effect of the legislation of 1888 on the English County
+    system. Some analogy between the principles of corporation reform
+    (1835) and County administration reform (1888). But the earlier act
+    did not touch, as the later did, the power of magistrates in Quarter
+    Sessions. Social circumstances, _e.g._: the growth of an educated and
+    leisured class of residents in country towns which have made the time
+    ripe for the new legislation, and distributed throughout England a new
+    class of capable local administrators. Contrast between County town
+    life before and since the establishment of County Councils. Social
+    pictures of county supremacy on Sessions days in the old era at hotels
+    and shops. County self government has not destroyed the old County
+    traditions nor deprived the old administrators of their former career.
+    Exact functions of County Councils, and points of administrative
+    communion between them and the old magistrates. Local idiosyncrasies
+    of these Councils, North and South.
+
+
+The legislation of 1888 has influenced the entire scheme of life in
+provincial England. The social prestige of the County system, centred in
+the extra-judicial power of the magistrates at Quarter Sessions, had not
+been affected prejudicially by the Corporation Reform Act with which, two
+years before the Queen's accession, the Whig Ministers in the newly
+reformed Parliament supplemented the Poor Law changes. The principle
+underlying the County Council Act of 1888, and before that the Corporation
+Act of 1835 was the same. Both marked a return to a more ancient but a
+less exclusive system rather than a sudden introduction of a new. Like the
+monarchy itself, the borough corporations were in their beginnings
+genuinely popular. As in the case of the Throne, so in that of the
+provincial polities; it was the Tudor sovereigns who narrowed and
+enervated the privileges of their subjects. Under the Plantagenets and
+throughout the Middle Ages, the corporations were elected by popular
+constituencies, the freemen of the town. Contracted in their scope under
+Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, these charters of urban freedom were, under the
+Stuarts, so remodelled as to transfer from the burgesses to the Crown the
+appointment of municipal officers. Municipal liberty having passed away
+first, municipal purity gradually followed. The abuses in civic life had
+at last equalled the corruptions which reduced parliamentary elections to
+a farce. Within a year of Lord Grey's Reform Act, the urban scandals
+became too gross to be ignored longer by a comparatively purified House of
+Commons. As in the case of the procedure with reference to the Poor Law,
+so in the business of municipal reform a Commission was appointed to
+investigate the corporations of the United Kingdom. The national
+enthusiasm for the men who had carried electoral reform against the House
+of Lords, against the Duke of Wellington and against the King was soon
+followed by a Tory reaction. In the hope of regaining for his party some
+of the popularity which it had lost, Lord John Russell in the summer of
+1835 submitted the new measure to the House of Commons. Two millions of
+Englishmen were affected by the scheme. The then existing municipal
+bodies had been shown as little to represent the property, the
+intelligence, even the population of the towns as the unreformed
+Legislature had reflected the convictions and desires of the Kingdom.
+Charitable funds, bequeathed by former benefactors for the impartial
+relief of local want, had by the abuses of years, been diverted wholly
+from their original purpose. They were dispensed habitually to the
+political friends of the men who had for the time the upper hand in the
+affairs of the borough. These moneys seldom mitigated any honest distress;
+they were squandered in the periodical junketings of the authorities of
+the township, with the political partizans who were their fellow feasters.
+Two novelists of our time have drawn famous pictures of the same great
+nobleman. The original of Disraeli's 'Lord Monmouth' in _Coningsby_ was
+the Marquis of Hertford, whose henchman, the 'Mr Rigby' of the novel, was
+the John Wilson Croker of real life. Thackeray's 'Marquis of Steyne' in
+_Vanity Fair_ was the other literary likeness of the same titled original.
+In real life the Marquis of Hertford, as 'an honest burgess,' was a chief
+member of the Council of Oxford city. The Right Honourable John Wilson
+Croker, his lordship's steward, and his confidant in all things were the
+chief associates of this eminent noble in the control of the municipality
+of the University town. The Corporation Act of 1835 swept away these
+scandals, and made municipal government a fairly popular reality.
+Thenceforward in all corporate boroughs, the Town Council was chosen by
+resident inhabitants rated to the relief of the poor. Since 1835 the
+power of the magistrates in boroughs is exercised by the borough bench
+with an appeal to Quarter Sessions, that is, to the County. The measure
+did not a little towards re-establishing the popular privileges which had
+existed before the Tudor encroachments. London was not included in the
+Act. With that exception, all English towns on the Queen's accession had
+for two years been in the enjoyment of self-rule. Cobden is one of the
+many opponents of caste exclusiveness who have testified to the purity and
+efficiency of the unpaid magistracy in their functions of County
+administrators. These persons were of course never responsible to any
+constituent body. They satisfied the property qualification by the
+possession of £300 in land, or by the receipt of an income of £100 a year.
+Notwithstanding the thoroughness of the work done by them on the Quarter
+Sessions committees for regulating extra-judicial business, they
+represented no interest except that of the party enjoying political power,
+the supreme embodiment of which was the Lord Lieutenant of the County.
+
+Meanwhile, there had been great changes in the composition of the
+residents at, or in the neighbourhood of the chief provincial towns of
+England. The close of the Crimean War reinforced the class now mentioned
+by the addition of educated, but not generally wealthy, men, who desired
+peacefully to spend the residue of their days in districts with which
+family ties made them familiar or which conveniences of sport or education
+rendered attractive. The absorbing powers of the capital have
+progressively increased during recent decades. Opulence and fashion have
+swollen the great public schools of the country to unmanageable
+dimensions. Still, to a large percentage of English parents in the upper
+middle class, Eton and Harrow are not the only two possible schools of the
+realm; life may be lived as pleasantly, and more economically, in
+provincial centres like Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, or Cheltenham as within
+the metropolitan radius. Schools, not less than hotels, have become
+matters of joint stock enterprise, and of federal proprietorship. The
+excellent places of teaching which abound in such towns as those just
+mentioned are pre-eminently a product of the Victorian era. Thus it has
+come to pass that, at innumerable spots throughout provincial England,
+during recent years there have settled families, not pretending to
+historic antiquity or distinction, but still agreeably supplementing the
+social resources of the County district. Many, perhaps most of these
+newcomers have served the Queen in peace or war, abroad as well as at
+home, and are thus likely to have acquired administrative experience of
+different sorts. These are just the people qualified to relieve their
+older neighbours, the local squirarchy, in their administrative work. If
+the machinery for establishing County Councils had been created in the era
+of the Corporation Reform Act, or during the first half of the present
+reign, it would have been premature, would at least comparatively have
+failed, instead of proving, as it has done, a signal success. How this
+institution works will best be judged by contrasting certain phases of
+County town life to-day and in the pre-County Council epoch. To visit
+such a town on a day when the magistrates were sitting at Quarter Sessions
+was like making an excursion into feudalism. One used to alight at the
+stable yard of the chief hotel to find no room for one's horse. The
+County's steeds had possession of the best stalls. They could not of
+course be displaced by, or consort with, the quadrupeds of less
+considerable riders. Inside the building, the same tale was retold and on
+every storey illustrated afresh. The apartment normally the coffee room
+was consecrated to the exclusive use of a select party of County justices
+who were still at luncheon. The drawing room on the first floor was in the
+occupation of the women kind of their relatives who were just about to
+refresh themselves after shopping with a cup of tea. The member of the
+general public who entered the chief shops of the place on the day devoted
+to County customers found himself and his patronage at a discount. The
+tradesman, in civil terms, profoundly regretted his inability to attend to
+the chance comer until he had satisfied the needs of the County justices'
+ladies who were expecting every moment to be called for by their lords
+from the Sessions House.
+
+Socially, not less than geographically, the County continues to exist. The
+wives and daughters of the country gentlemen who are County J.Ps. set the
+fashion in their neighbourhood and are still regarded as moulded out of a
+clay slightly superior to that of which their neighbours consist. But as
+an object of fetish worship the County has in most districts disappeared.
+The chief linen draper in the town, as he watches the County ladies, in
+their dilatory fashion, toy with one fabric after another, can scarcely
+suppress a look of impatience on his well disciplined face. He happens to
+be, not less than the father and husband of these ladies, himself a member
+of the new County parliament. He is exercised by a fear lest the special
+committee of the body on which he is serving should have decided the
+question of certain alterations in the approach to the local capital in
+which he is interested, before he has had time to get to the place of
+meeting. Unconsciously, perhaps, his manner towards the lady relatives of
+his council-colleague, the squire and magistrate, has lost something of
+its old deference. Still, the foundations of the social system remain the
+same. The fusion between classes of which the County Council is the
+expression rather than the cause has not brought us appreciably nearer the
+revolution and the Red Republic than had been done by the earlier
+parliamentary reforms. Here, as in the case of the District bodies, the
+law of the survival of the fittest is unrepealed, amid the administrative
+changes of the hour. County magistrates who are specially qualified for
+County administration are elected to the new Councils in numbers
+sufficient to leaven these bodies. The service that they performed on the
+committees of the old Sessions is still discharged by them on the Boards
+that are of more recent growth. The venue of their exertions is changed.
+The opportunity of their labour remains the same. Probably the association
+of County gentry with country town traders widens the view of the
+squires, acts as an incentive to greater energy, and is actually
+productive of better work. Certainly, since this machinery has been in
+operation the intellectual resources of the chief centres of population
+within the jurisdiction of the County Council have been improved. New art
+and science museums have come into existence. The people's parks, which
+were already known in country towns, are better kept. New reading rooms
+and libraries have opened their doors.
+
+During the rather more than half a century that elapsed between the
+Corporations Act of 1835, and the Local Government Act of 1888, the chief
+reforms effected were in the province of sanitary administration, were
+mainly due to the efforts of individuals, such as Mr Stansfeld in 1872,
+and were generally incorporated in the Public Health Act of 1875. These
+sanitary measures contained the principle on which the area of the United
+Kingdom was finally redistributed. For the purposes of County Councils,
+England is mapped out into sixty-one administrative counties. Each of the
+electoral divisions of which the County consists has a Councillor of its
+own. The electors are practically almost identical with the parliamentary
+constituencies. In the case of municipalities inside the County area, the
+Local Government Board decides the share of representation to which it is
+entitled, and allots to it on the Council one or more members, as the case
+may be. In addition to the councillors created by purely popular election,
+a certain number of aldermen, not to exceed one-fourth of the whole body
+are chosen by co-optation among the Councillors themselves. The term of
+Council office is three years. The chairman, however, who is not forbidden
+to receive a salary, holds his place only for one year. Like the District
+chairman, the County president too, without satisfying any pecuniary
+qualification, becomes, by virtue of his office, a County magistrate.[29]
+Like the Council electors, the chairman and the six co-opted aldermen are
+subject only to the condition of having the County vote. As in
+parliamentary elections so in County elections, the polling is by ballot.
+The incidental expenses, however, which are strictly regulated by the
+number of the constituency, are defrayed, not by the candidate or his
+friends as in parliamentary competitions, but out of a County fund. The
+prerogatives of magistrates in whatever appertains to the licensing of
+public houses, and exercised in Quarter and Special Sessions, are
+untouched by the new bodies. With that exception, the functions of Quarter
+Sessions are superseded practically by the Councils. As a consequence, the
+sessional attendances of the magistrates have largely fallen off; though
+there still exist many opportunities for joint action between the new
+Councils and the old Sessions. For instance, the County police is
+controlled by a committee whose members are selected from the old
+magistrates and the new Councillors. Again, when the object is to acquire
+fresh land for popular use; to open or endow local museums or libraries,
+to establish emigration funds to the Colonies or elsewhere, united action
+between the two bodies is usual, but not compulsory.
+
+It has been seen already that the Local Government Board at Whitehall
+looks for the endorsement by the County Council of the Parish Council's
+proposal to acquire land for allotments and, with that purpose, to obtain
+loans from the State purse. Similarly, the borrowing powers for less local
+objects of the Councils are definitely limited. The consent of the
+Imperial authority is needed to enable the Council to borrow for permanent
+works or to issue County stock. The Council's annual Budget is closely
+criticized not only in debate by the Councillors themselves, but by the
+Local Government Board. The property rated to the County Rate which is the
+security for all loans is inspected periodically by Imperial officers. The
+accounts are examined by Imperial auditors. Meanwhile, it may be
+conjectured justly that the considerable remnant of country gentlemen of
+the old school, that is, the nominated magistrates, who have seats on the
+new Councils, secure a salutary continuity of administration and
+expenditure between the new régime and that which preceded it. There is,
+of course, far more of local variety and of adaptability to the needs of
+special neighbourhoods in the composition of the Councils than it was ever
+possible there should be in the _personnel_ of the Quarter Session
+administrators. This fact would alone make it unsafe, as may be seen by
+one or two instances, to generalize about these bodies. If in the
+Midlands, in the Metropolitan shires, and in the South Western counties,
+power remains to a great extent in the hands of the old order, and only
+the tenant farmers on a large scale have influence on the Councils, the
+experience of the northern mining districts and of Wales is very
+different. Throughout the Principality, as well as on the Gloucester and
+Monmouth frontier, the small farmers, who are Nonconformists to a man,
+find themselves, for the first time in their lives, a decisive power in
+their neighbourhood. The same is the case in Durham. Here the colliers,
+also for the most part Nonconformists, containing among them many of the
+finest, most upright, and manly specimens of the English race, practically
+dominate the Council of the Northern shire.[30]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION
+
+    Reasons why London was not included in the Corporation Reform Act of
+    1835. Popular character of its municipal government contrasts with
+    Royal encroachments of various periods. Various schemes and
+    commissions of City reform since the Queen's accession. 1853
+    Commission alone produced practical result in the establishment in
+    1855 of Metropolitan Board of Works. Relations between this Board and
+    the City. In 1888 Board of Works superseded by London County Council.
+    Exact relations between London County Council and the City
+    Corporation. National and Imperial uses of Lord Mayor illustrated.
+    Possible changes of the future. Class fusion illustrated by titled
+    Mayors and other provincial usages.
+
+
+The London County Council, which has little in common with the bodies
+already examined except the name, has been reserved to a chapter dealing
+chiefly, like the present, with the polity of the capital. For the
+exclusion of London from the Corporation Act of 1835, sufficient reasons,
+whether of principle or procedure, may be assigned. To the former category
+belongs the fact that the City Corporation, even during the encroachments
+of the Tudors and the Stuarts, had, unlike other towns, maintained its
+original liberties. It was, amid all its vicissitudes, not, as were the
+corporations described above, a self chosen, but a popularly elected,
+body. Secondly, the Corporation Commissioners did not think that a period
+within three years of Lord Grey's Reform Act, before the ground swell of
+the excitement, caused by that measure, had subsided, was suitable for
+deciding complex and far-reaching issues like those presented by the civic
+system grouped round Guildhall. At the same time the Commissioners
+expressly recorded their opinion that the magnitude of the problem ought
+not indefinitely to postpone an attempt at its solution and that the
+difference between the administrative problems of the provinces and the
+capital was one chiefly of degree. In their separate report of 1837 the
+Commissioners confined their observations on municipal London to cautious
+negatives. The suggestion of creating a congeries of Metropolitan
+municipalities had even then been made, as it has often been renewed
+since. This proposal was officially condemned on the ground that it would
+only remove an anomaly by provoking an abuse. At the same time, certain
+functions of local administration were specified which, within the
+Metropolitan area would be performed most efficiently and economically
+under the control of a single authority. In 1853 a special Commission
+enquiring into the affairs of the City Corporation, among various, but not
+very definite proposals, hinted that the seven parliamentary boroughs, of
+which London then consisted, might supply the machinery for a heptarchy of
+municipalities administratively associated in a central Board of Works.
+That body was to be composed of persons chosen by the different boroughs
+of the capital. No active steps were taken towards the heptarchical
+subdivision of the capital. But in 1855 the Metropolis Local Management
+Act was introduced by Sir Benjamin Hall. The result was the Metropolitan
+Board of Works, which remained an active power until it was superseded by
+or incorporated in the London County Council of 1888. All the then
+existing parishes and vestries of London sent members elected by the
+vestries to this central body. The Board of Works supplied the long
+desiderated unity of administration. If during its thirty-three years of
+rule it made many enemies, it also effected great improvements. In 1884
+the Administration of Mr Gladstone produced a fresh measure of London
+reform. The chief feature of this was the absorption by the City of the
+powers of the Metropolitan Board, and the redistribution of parochial
+functions concentrated upon the City Corporation but now to be divided
+among new local bodies. This proposal proved equally unacceptable to the
+City which was already overburdened, and to the parochial bodies which
+were soon to be superseded. It had, however, advanced the question a
+perceptible degree; had renewed popular interest in London reform, and
+helped to create the public opinion which, four years later, in 1888,
+enabled the Cabinet of the day to include London in the Bill for
+establishing County Councils throughout the kingdom.
+
+In the provinces, as has been seen, the County Councils practically have
+taken over the civil and administrative duties of magistrates formerly
+exercised at Quarter Sessions, but have in no way touched the judicial
+functions of these gentlemen as representatives of the Queen's justice.
+In the same way, the London County Council has left absolutely unimpaired
+the judicial power of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen organized in their
+various courts to execute and administer the civil and criminal law
+according to the historic traditions of the capital. The Common Council of
+London City has, therefore, to-day the powers which belong to an ordinary
+borough council. Outside the City limits, the London County Council with
+respect to drainage, sanitary arrangements generally, new streets and
+local improvements of all kinds, in courteous, rather than compulsory,
+concert with the City discharges the functions of the former Board of
+Works, or of a County Council in the provinces.
+
+That this friendly association between the two Metropolitan bodies, the
+old and the new, should be practicable is what a knowledge of the past
+would lead one to expect. In civic affairs London has always been an
+encouragement and example to provincial townships. The magnitude of its
+area, the preoccupation of its inhabitants with the complex interests and
+exhausting activities of their daily life render London, as Cobden and
+others have always discovered, an impracticable headquarters for political
+agitation. But long before our great provincial centres had been possessed
+with that intense feeling of corporate life which is now the boast of
+Manchester or Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, or Leeds, the traders who
+did their business under the shadow of Guildhall were united by a
+citizenship scarcely less stimulating and constraining than that of the
+little Republics of old Greece. One, and each of them, they took a
+patriotic pride in the material perfection to which the conveniences or
+comforts of their existence had been brought. Thus, as Lancashire has seen
+with exultation the reflection of its collective life in the great cities
+on the Irwell, or the Mersey, the entire Kingdom and Empire have always
+recognized the symbol of their unity as well as of their greatness in the
+prosperity or in the institutions of London City. Nor does anything more
+impress the mind of our foreign neighbours or our Colonial fellow-citizens
+than the response to appeals for help in the day of distress which issue
+from the Mansion House as from the heart of the English race. It is thus
+no exaggeration to say that the past records and contemporary services of
+London have proved of some moral use in promoting the success of the very
+latest municipal reforms. That a final stage in the evolution of London
+government has yet been reached no one believes, least of all the men who
+completed the preliminaries for the formation of the London County
+Council. The Commissioners of 1886-7 have themselves pointed out the
+anomaly of applying to London, even though it be called a County, that
+form of administration which is primarily intended for provincial shires
+necessarily identified not with commerce and trade, but with rural
+pursuits and interests. The City Corporation and the London County Council
+will both be relieved when the existing period of transition with its
+occasional friction and confusion is terminated. The relations between the
+two bodies must necessarily be mutually those of armed vigilance rather
+than of cordial alliance. What is known as the Unification Commission
+was, it must be remembered, appointed at the instance of the London County
+Council. The chief points of the proposal thus made was as earlier
+paragraphs have shown practically to merge the City in some new municipal
+body to the East of Temple Bar. As matters are, while the Lord Mayor and
+Aldermen are not County Councillors of London, the City of London has four
+representatives on the Council. These, however, are not the nominees of
+the Corporation, but are chosen by the ordinary civic constituency, the
+ratepayers. As a matter of fact, though by a coincidence, of the four
+present representatives on the Council of the City, one is an Alderman,
+and another a common Councilman. But they were not chosen in these
+capacities. As little therefore as the vestries or as the local boards is
+the Corporation directly represented in the London County Council, which
+was created by the Act of 1888. When, in addition to its hospitable and
+charitable functions, the services rendered by the City to the cause of
+national education are remembered; when it is considered that nearly all
+the great Guilds help by exhibitions to support poor students at the
+Universities, and that they also make regular and liberal contributions to
+the Science and Art department at South Kensington as well as to the
+Finsbury Institute for the technical training of mechanics and artizans,
+the extreme unwisdom of any scheme of London reform which shall, by
+wounding the pride, discourage the generosity of the historic interests
+now mentioned, becomes self-evident.
+
+However cordial at the different points where they are brought into
+contact the relations may be between the old Corporation and the new
+Council, it is seemingly agreed on all sides that the true method for
+administering that vast and not yet finally circumscribed area inhabited
+by what De Quincey once called 'the nation of London,' has still to be
+devised. The suggestions for future reform are innumerable in quantity and
+Protean in character. Whether the existing areas of separate control
+inside or outside the City gates should be maintained; whether they could
+be replaced conveniently by five or ten, by six or fourteen, separate
+municipalities; these are the problems that, as in the past, so in the
+future, seem likely long to divide the minds of Metropolitan reformers.
+The City Corporation has already divested itself, _e.g._ in its relations
+with the Commissioners of Sewers, of certain functions which normally
+belong to a town council. Hence, it has been suggested that this process
+might be continued till the Lord Mayor and Aldermen practically merged
+themselves in the existing County Council of the capital. In that event,
+the administrative jurisdiction of the County Council, instead of stopping
+abruptly at Temple Bar, as it now does, would stretch from the Strand to
+the Guildhall. From thence it would radiate throughout the region
+generally spoken of as the City. There does not seem much likelihood of
+the fulfilment of this contingency. Such a scheme could not work well
+unless it were embraced with practical unanimity by those whom it
+immediately concerned. The Lord Mayor of London, and the authorities
+gathered round him, naturally regard with jealousy even the apparent
+infringement of their historic prerogatives and immemorial dignities. Nor
+in the interests, not of the City alone, but of the nation at large is it
+desirable that anything should be done which might actually impair the
+prestige, or even sentimentally wound the vanity of the exceedingly
+useful, and uniformly patriotic and generous men who are installed by
+annual succession in the Mansion House. The lofty attributes with which
+the French press and stage have invested the Lord Mayor are not entirely
+caricature. They indicate corresponding realities. The Lord Mayor has
+always been and remains to-day far more than the local head of a great
+municipality. In all parts of the Three Kingdoms, he, with his colleagues,
+controls territorial estates equal in extent, and far more than equal in
+revenue to a Continental Duchy. The Guildhall, with its library and
+museum; the Mansion House; schools and institutions like the City of
+London School, Ward's City of London School for Girls, the Guildhall
+School of Music; these are only a few of the foundations that are
+naturally presided over by the Lord Mayor. They all exist, not so much for
+the glory of the City, as for the service of the community. Possibly it
+might be useful to classify the complicated functions of the Sovereign of
+the City. It would then be seen how far the principle of devolution could
+be applied to his various attributes in their daily exercise. There are
+those who have imagined that within the empire of the Lord Mayor of the
+future there might be created subordinate municipalities which would act
+as local committees under his central control.
+
+Few better proofs of the general intelligence and efficiency of the County
+Councils could be given than the wisdom with which they have discharged an
+educational duty of the first importance imposed upon them by a new
+parliamentary statute. The Customs and Excise Act of 1890 placed certain
+funds for the development of technical instruction at the disposal of the
+Councils. That duty in the opinion of the critics at Whitehall was
+performed so efficiently as to suggest the formation of committees from
+the Councils to ascertain local needs of technical training as well as
+practically to control, in the place of School Boards, the elementary
+education of the Kingdom. The Measure wherein that proposal was embodied,
+the Education Bill of 1896, has been withdrawn. The tribute to the
+capacity of the Councils remains. The educational functions with which it
+was suggested to charge these bodies, will without doubt, some day be
+performed by them.
+
+The wholesome fusion of classes promoted in the country villages and towns
+by recent local government reforms has been already noticed. The same
+tendency has been pleasantly illustrated at other points in the social
+scale. The legislation of 1888 neither diminished the prestige nor
+trenched upon the province of the Imperial Parliament. The only point at
+which it can be said to have touched that body was the process connected
+with the acquirement of land for public purposes by Parish Councils. Here,
+it will be remembered; if the order, decided on by a majority of the
+Parish Councillors, is ratified by the County Council; if, after that, it
+passes the ordeal of the Local Government Board; then the Whitehall
+department issues its sanction for the purchase of the land in question.
+That order has forthwith the validity of an Act of Parliament, without
+having gone through the different stages incidental to legislation at
+Westminster.
+
+Meanwhile, hereditary legislators have to a considerable extent
+practically interested themselves in, and placed their experience at the
+disposal of, the County Councils; just as, with regard to Parish Councils,
+the clergy and gentry have been seen assisting at the deliberations of
+their tenants or their flock. The first chairman of the County Council of
+London, Lord Rosebery, only abdicated that office to become Prime
+Minister. Among his successors were the former permanent head of the Board
+of Trade, Lord Farrer, the Vice-President, Sir J. Hutton and Sir Arthur
+Arnold. The same process of social amalgamation has been witnessed in the
+provinces not less signally than in the capital. The premier peer of
+England, the Duke of Norfolk, has been Mayor of Sheffield. Lord Derby has
+filled the same office at Liverpool. Lord Windsor, in succession to Lord
+Bute, has been Mayor of Cardiff. Lord Beauchamp has presided over the
+Corporation of Worcester. Lord Hothfield, one of the largest landowners in
+Westmorland, has been Mayor of Appleby. Lord Lonsdale has been Mayor of
+Whitehaven, Lord Zetland has held the same position at Richmond. Lords
+Dudley, Ripon, Warwick, and Crewe, have presided each of them over the
+Corporations of the towns from which respectively they derive their
+titles. If this be a reversion to an earlier usage of the aristocracy in
+England, the precedent had been almost forgotten before the practice was
+revived. The analogy that to most persons will more readily have suggested
+itself is rather that of the cities of mediæval Italy; when the commercial
+community of Genoa was presided over by a lineal descendant of the Doges;
+when a Doria was at the head of the municipality of Rome; when Milan and
+the Lombard capitals, which first instructed England in arts of luxury and
+in modes of splendour, were controlled by Magistrates whose pedigrees
+might have stretched back beyond the Empire to the classical Republic. If
+the civic association of the titular nobility with the new democracy of
+England were not popular it could not exist; and titled Mayors would cease
+to be returned by popular constituencies. If on the other hand the
+municipal compliments failed to bring with them to their recipients an
+opportunity of usefulness as well as a sense of honour, they would not be
+accepted. The plain historical truth is that the patrician landowners of
+England have recognized the opportunity of removing the remnant of
+traditional estrangement between themselves and the masses of their
+countrymen of which so much was heard during the years immediately
+following the new Poor Law of half a century since. Of that sentiment,
+little known except by hearsay to the present generation, the most vivid,
+and not the least trustworthy record is still to be found in a fiction
+already mentioned in these pages, Mr Disraeli's _Sibyl_. Nothing but
+reciprocal good can come of these relations between the classes and the
+masses, to apply to them the distinguishing terms used by Mr Gladstone.
+An apprenticeship to the routine work of municipal affairs in view of the
+changed subject matter of the questions of the day is more likely to prove
+practically serviceable for those born into the condition of hereditary
+statesmen than a course of diplomatic lounging in the Courts and
+Chanceries of the world, or even than the grand tour which now extends
+from Calcutta in one direction to Chicago in another. The class fusion
+that is so signally the social product of the present reign has culminated
+in the conditions which, in the fulness of time, legislation has rather
+recognized than produced. Long before provincial self government was
+established upon the lines indicated by the Acts of 1888 and 1894, the
+spirit which in 1867 prompted Edward Denison to take up his dwelling in
+Whitechapel had been exemplified by philanthropists of both sexes in
+London and elsewhere. The sister of Mr Chamberlain is one of several
+ladies at Birmingham who systematically co-operated for purposes of house
+to house visiting in the poorest quarters of the town that they might
+practically instruct the wives and daughters of working men in the arts of
+domestic management, and in the possibility of keeping the humblest homes
+happy, healthy, comfortable and clean. Similar organizations have done a
+like work in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and no doubt in all
+our great centres of population.[31]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS OF 'SIBYL'
+
+    Exterior of a University settlement in the East End. The scene in the
+    street. Various functions of the University settlers within. General
+    supervision of health arrangements; putting the law in motion to that
+    end. Conciliation between masters and men. The higher culture for East
+    End pupils. Coaching a Bethnal Green four. Earlier efforts in this
+    direction. S.W. slum boys in Belgravian drawing rooms. The young lady
+    and the ubiquitous jockey. The settlements and clubs of to-day at the
+    East End of London foreshadowed by earlier organizations in the
+    provinces by the agencies of the Christian socialists; the working
+    man's colleges, etc. The inside life of settlements and clubs to-day.
+    Schools of character to all concerned. General analogy between West
+    End and East End clubs. Some details of the good work done for, and
+    by, both sexes, young and old. A City missioner's testimony. Then and
+    now in the East End. A. Toynbee; T. H. Green and this movement. Rules
+    suggested by personal experience for the conduct of this intercourse
+    between different classes.
+
+
+In a street broad and clean, as many of those at the extreme East End of
+London are, but still in the heart of an unmistakably poor, often a
+squalid quarter, is a house which, resembling its fellows in architecture,
+presents even as to its exterior the appearance of being inhabited by
+persons of a better sort. On the pavement outside groups of men, women and
+boys are waiting for admission. The door is opened presently, not by a
+servant of either sex, but by a person, evidently a gentleman, in the
+prime of early and athletic manhood. The men and women are introduced into
+a room on the ground floor. Their host hears perhaps of a fever having
+broken out not a hundred yards off; of a home distrained upon for unpaid
+rent by an impatient landlord, or gutted of its furniture by the broker's
+man, of a local inspector's failure to order the demolition of dwellings
+unfit for human habitation, of a strike imminent near the Docks, and
+likely in its results to leave tens of households without clothing or
+food. If this be the tale poured into the ears of the young Oxford or
+Cambridge graduate, he at once hurries off to see whether his personal
+influence, strengthened as it is by some years of varied local experience,
+cannot move the landlord to give his tenants one more chance; or whether
+the tact, that is not likely to grow rusty from lack of practice, cannot
+promote a compromise between masters and men; or whether the knowledge of
+municipal law, acquired by many months of careful reading, with the help
+of local illustrations, cannot be so brought to bear upon the parochial
+officer as to induce him duly to execute the letter of the Sanitary
+Statute.
+
+If none of these things have to be done the lads may be called into the
+chamber which serves the resident for the purpose of study and pupil-room.
+It is, in fact, just such another den as very likely may have been
+occupied by our graduate a couple of years ago when he was an Eton master
+and saw his private pupils at his quarters in Keate's Lane. It by no means
+follows that the subject of his conversation with these East End lads is
+primarily scholastic or strictly educational. The University resident at
+the East End has brought with him the taste for athletics of all kinds
+which he acquired on the Isis or the Cam. He devotes as much time to
+teaching his East End pupils cricket or oarsmanship as to awakening and
+satisfying their interest in learning or letters. He and his party are
+therefore very likely to be seen taking the omnibus or rail if the
+afternoon be fine, to Putney or Hammersmith, where the spectators on the
+bank will soon be cheering a Bethnal Green four practising starts with a
+Leander or a University crew.
+
+The building of whose interior a glance has been given is probably the
+hired house in which two or three members of the Academic or Public School
+settlement live. It may be one of the many clubs for adults, for boys or
+girls, which to-day are scarcely less common in the purlieus of Poplar
+than are clubs of a different sort in St James's or Pall Mall. These
+institutions are among the chief instruments of civilization on which the
+new settlers rely. No one now doubts the service to the manners and the
+morals of the upper classes rendered by the joint-stock caravanserais of
+the West End. Three bottle men, as readers of Thackeray may see for
+themselves, lasted throughout the epoch of coffee houses. They very
+generally disappeared with the replacement of coffee houses by clubs, and
+with the early adjournment from the dinner table to the smoking room. A
+club-man in his cups was found to be a nuisance. A new public opinion was
+created against an old vice. Protracted potations rapidly became, as
+Hamlet desired, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, till a
+toper in St James's became as rare as a bishop in a billiard room. An
+analogous reform in the East End as in the West has been worked by a like
+agency. The fittings and the environments of the institution differ in the
+two regions. Their moral influence is identical in both. In this matter,
+too, as in so many other modes of social improvement, the Metropolis
+followed the lead of the provinces. East End clubs, in contradistinction
+to boozing-dens, existed indeed long before University settlements were
+known, or before Edward Denison's first visit to Whitechapel was paid; but
+not before at Lancaster in 1860, the Working Men's Mutual Improvement and
+Recreation Society had flourished for some little time. In like manner,
+the University settlements now spoken of, had been preceded by the
+organized efforts of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, and other
+representatives of what was then called Christian socialism, to establish
+by the college for working men in Great Ormond Street a living connection
+between University influence and industrial well being. Even working men's
+colleges had existed in the country before F. D. Maurice made his London
+experiment. Sheffield witnessed the first of these during the early
+fifties. Oxford and Cambridge towns were not long behind. Thus the
+promoters of academic settlements were not without the benefit of the
+experience of their earlier predecessors as well as of the public spirited
+association of their contemporaries. The Working Men's Club and Institute
+Union had been founded in 1862 by Lord Brougham and Lord Lyttelton. Much
+of the machinery, as well as a nucleus, for the endeavours of the
+settlers of a latter day was ready to their hands before they began their
+work. But the idea of the combination of gymnasium with club, and of the
+subordination of the roughest kind of physical exercise to the ends of
+social culture had not been illustrated on any extensive scale before
+institutions like the Repton or the Oxford House clubs were controlled by
+men who took this way of doing honour to the name of their University or
+their school.
+
+Before this, ladies living in Belgravia, revering the memory and example
+of Maurice, were in the habit of inviting to their drawing rooms from the
+alleys and by-ways in which the fashionable district abounds poor boys who
+could not be tempted, even with the bait of magic lanterns, to the night
+school. The work was found to be rather too exacting. The chivalry of
+street boyhood did not, as might have been foreseen, prevent the urchins
+from gratifying their sense of fun at her expense in the drawing room of
+the amateur teacher. The joke of giving, as their names, those of the
+famous jockeys of the hour, Fordham, Archer, Cannon, as the case may be,
+proved too good to be resisted. Gravity, once disturbed, could not be
+restored. The pupils could do nothing but laugh at each other's fun. Their
+would-be instructress had to acquiesce in their removal when the servant
+came to clear away the tea things. A public feeling in favour of order and
+even cleanliness has long since been generated in the boys' clubs
+controlled by the University settlers. First the prejudice against collars
+as an article of attire goes out; then a feeling in favour of washed hands
+sets in. In the recreation rooms upstairs boxing gloves are provided as a
+safety valve for the escape of the superfluous humours of Arab animalism.
+Then by slow degrees comes the hour when bagatelle boards may be
+introduced without danger of their being used for the breaking of heads,
+or of the bagatelle cues being employed for the perforation of the
+lath-and-plaster walls instead of for the propulsion of the ivory balls.
+
+The parents are provided with the same sort of accommodation as their
+children. The adult clubs are chiefly of two kinds. In some, the first
+purpose is political. In that case the society becomes an agency for the
+propagation of Radical ideas, and probably an outwork of Trades-Unionism.
+But from many of these foundations politics, which are generally
+synonymous with advanced Liberalism, are excluded. In the majority, if not
+in all, of the non-political clubs, intoxicating drinks, though under
+conditions they were sanctioned by the early founders, are by common
+agreement, prohibited also. The popularity of these clubs with the wives
+of their habitués is a sufficient proof of the sobering tendency of the
+new resorts. In all cases, the women gain scarcely less advantage from
+them than the men. Each club is an organization for social entertainments
+and hospitalities to which members are free to bring all their women-kind.
+
+The dominant idea of the University settlement to which these clubs are
+subsidiary, is to give the poorest and most densely populated working
+class districts the benefit of a resident gentry such as, in the clergyman
+or the squire, is generally commanded in rural parishes. The local
+separation between employer and employed; the fact that the workers do
+not, as they used to do, dwell to-day within sight of their masters, but
+are segregated into colonies of their own in another quarter of the
+capital, and have no access to persons better informed than themselves in
+the troubles and perplexities, big or small, of everyday existence, first
+prompted those who realized the perils of this situation, to make, as far
+as might be, common lot with their less fortunate fellow creatures. In New
+York, where these societies seem to have been known longer than in
+England, the phrase employed is Neighbourhood Guild. To obtain the local
+knowledge which can alone enable the most wise or charitable to give
+effective help, habitual residence under conditions and in neighbourhoods
+identical with the class to be benefited is absolutely necessary. The
+University settler becomes in fact a sort of Delphic Oracle, consulted on
+all embarrassing contingencies by the entire neighbourhood. To vary the
+simile, the enquiries made of him are not less various than the questions
+which the editor of a popular print undertakes to answer in his
+Correspondence column. The doubts and complications arising out of the law
+of landlord and tenant, especially out of that enigmatic being, the
+compound householder who so long obstructed the path of Household
+Franchise, require a practical knowledge of often abstruse legal points
+and sometimes compel resort to a professional solicitor. The precise steps
+necessary to put in motion the Statute for the removal of hopelessly
+insanitary dwellings are not likely to be within the knowledge of the
+dwellers by the Docks. These are only a few of the knots which for the
+instruction of those he has chosen for neighbours, the University settler
+must be prepared to untie. And this is only one of the duties which he
+actually performs. He not only takes part in the municipal government of
+his neighbourhood; he helps others to take part in it, too. Already he has
+himself sat on School Boards and trained grown-up pupils to fill his
+place.
+
+Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University
+settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of
+the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy
+the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that
+are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies'
+College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public
+schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in
+hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works
+of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor
+mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the
+conventional 'day in the country,' but a sojourn of weeks, or even months,
+in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant
+uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought
+to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham
+ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of
+the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few
+hours' journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little
+charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their
+homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were
+first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes
+may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic
+lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas
+tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general,
+though not uncontrolled, romp.
+
+Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers
+aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than
+indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated
+to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent
+part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said,
+decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be
+forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over
+all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any
+breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average
+standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving.
+Generally and individually the club members have realized that their
+material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and
+in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach
+of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship.
+Such a conviction indicates the progress made towards the creation of a
+healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would
+have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any
+sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even
+destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their
+brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin
+East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End
+has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced
+them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their
+dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled:
+_The Universities and the Social Problem_[32] do indeed include some
+rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy
+in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to
+Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of
+pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did
+not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might
+have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the
+baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of
+putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose
+of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or General Booth, who
+both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that
+poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original
+sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on
+fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into
+habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas
+of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of
+gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People's Palace, for
+some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact,
+were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young
+patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick
+slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much
+above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social
+deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the
+superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the
+Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable
+advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar
+and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less
+outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know
+unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service
+which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The
+work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather
+than æsthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the
+neighbourhoods they visit. Their opinion of the practical results of the
+agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a
+missioner to the present writer: 'It marks an epoch in East End
+civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have
+despaired.'
+
+The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men's
+Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is
+no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious
+it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist,
+should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie's subscribers, or
+should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the
+British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the
+union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by
+the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with
+wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers'
+Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to
+which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves
+have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more
+highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclopædias like Mr Augustus Hare
+or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to 'take walks' with them.
+Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct
+them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are
+the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the
+student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The
+biographies of the statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic
+vicissitudes of the Republics of mediæval Italy, even the philosophy as
+well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after
+a day's manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate
+returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to
+be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago,
+or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship,
+as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate
+benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold
+Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral
+philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the
+disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present
+to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it
+had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato,
+or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most
+valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of
+his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a
+prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local
+bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught
+more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford
+settlers at the East End have improved upon Green's example, with much of
+his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the
+East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present
+writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating
+to that part of unfashionable London.[33] Thanks mainly to the influence
+and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements
+in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households
+had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social
+results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the
+writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the
+later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of
+course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social
+disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the
+increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and
+drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those
+purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still
+incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been
+examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous.
+The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers
+is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district,
+whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the
+settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his
+joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training
+that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of
+which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a
+founder. The assistance of those in such a position as the University
+settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. 'We always
+need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford
+Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can
+keep things going pretty well for ourselves.' Such is the common remark of
+the settler's friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt.
+The University settler and his friends in his own station are not,
+however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society
+is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the
+atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If
+the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or
+profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the
+same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde
+Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a
+suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after
+edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own
+equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at
+the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require,
+not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people
+need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction,
+whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man,
+but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who
+are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the
+field against the heaviest odds, are perfectly manageable. The most
+aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of
+fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among
+their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their
+bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity
+they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the
+courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ
+from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these
+ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a
+single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who
+consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty
+begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No
+section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate
+order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class.
+The genuine working man in the working man's club causes none of those
+embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that
+of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of
+Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to
+be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden
+rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense
+on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position,
+let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any
+conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above
+all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the
+manual overture will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing
+that the maker 'has no false pride.' A greater mistake there could not be,
+as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith
+in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother's footman on
+receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him
+who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure
+and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison's and of
+Arnold Toynbee's influence for good with their inferiors was that they not
+only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own
+work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them
+and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the
+gulf separating 'the two nations' of the English people.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS
+
+    State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the
+    Queen's accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the
+    people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel
+    Whitbread's faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster's Education Act.
+    Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and
+    Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department
+    completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or
+    Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and
+    the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the
+    Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891.
+    Elementary education now organized. External change in the English
+    landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently
+    made towards this.
+
+
+Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national
+activity the special features of English life during the last half of this
+century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational
+arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly,
+with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady
+progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within
+measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English
+boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the
+highest teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which
+merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career
+open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than
+half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State
+practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching
+purposes a grant of £20,000. The sum with annual increments was
+thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in
+Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the
+Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a
+twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of
+organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and
+the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just
+named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George's Channel never
+neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on
+the eve of the Queen's accession, thousands of working men and women owed
+practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the
+close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In
+the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of
+the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English
+clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell
+Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a
+scheme of instruction for the whole English people.
+
+Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833, Parliament fitfully
+recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the
+son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E.
+Forster's reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal
+of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the
+earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in
+the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to
+enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself
+brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The
+project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry
+which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we
+have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the £7,000,000 now
+spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for
+that purpose of, £20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we
+have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an
+interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne's Administration excited
+much obloquy, and raised the 'No Popery' cry against them, by allowing a
+share in a grant, now increased to £30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The
+House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of
+religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a
+majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with
+certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto,
+the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first
+time an Education Department was organized under the Lord President of
+the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was
+appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston's long term of office, in 1857,
+the Education grant rose to £451,000. It became more expressly understood
+that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in
+the Vice-President.[34] With the steady increase of the annual grant, its
+province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle
+of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer
+limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had
+been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence.
+Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The
+quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in
+proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was
+more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the
+efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the
+Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education
+reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment
+by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in
+schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The
+teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase
+in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education Vote amounted to
+one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe's drastic, if
+indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that
+sum.
+
+No fundamental change took place till the Education Act of 1870, always
+associated as that will be with the name of W. E. Forster. Dealt with as
+to its provisions, its working and its results, in elaborate detail in the
+author's preceding work, _England_, the Measure now rather more than a
+quarter of a century old will here be summarized sufficiently by reminding
+the reader that this legislation empowered the election of School Boards
+throughout the Kingdom, but maintained the system of voluntary
+subscriptions, and only compelled the institution of School Boards where
+voluntary effort had failed, and in the Time Table Conscience Clause
+provided a security for individual liberty. Mr Mundella's Act of 1880 made
+education absolutely compulsory throughout England and Wales, whereas
+before then the power of compulsion was left to the local authorities. In
+all State-aided schools, religion was to be taught either at the beginning
+or end of school hours, so that, without disturbance to the general
+curriculum individual children could be withdrawn from the sacred lesson
+at their parents' will, without incurring any disability on that account.
+These provisions met with the usual fate of legislative compromises. They
+deeply offended many sections. They entirely pleased none. The battle
+between religious and irreligious training, between what have been called
+the National and the Denominational systems was not decided in 1870. It
+has been fought over again more than once since then. It remains unsettled
+to this day.
+
+During the whole of that decade, the Education Acts were supplemented with
+detailed legislation of a consolidating or modifying kind. No organic
+change took place till in 1891, the Government of Lord Salisbury adopted
+the first of the three Fs, long since propounded by Mr Chamberlain, and by
+abolishing the School pence which scarcely repaid the trouble of their
+collection, made elementary education as free to all children in the land,
+as by the law of 1870 it had practically become compulsory. The proposal
+to free the schools was not universally popular with the party to whose
+lot it fell to execute that policy. So, notwithstanding its exclusive
+traditions, that party had, under Mr Disraeli a quarter of a century
+earlier by its Household Suffrage Bill, recognized and established the
+English democracy. The plea on which those who had begun by resisting free
+schools finally accepted them was the expediency of accepting the
+inevitable first, and secondly the practical wisdom of obtaining credit
+for Conservatism by doing well and wisely that which at some future time
+the opposite party would have ingratiated themselves with the masses by
+doing badly. The results of free education were speedily visible in the
+increase of the children educated throughout the land. The increase of
+children in schools during the five years preceding the Free Education Act
+of 1891 had been 269,903. During the quinquennial period after the Act the
+increase was 421,860, or, in round numbers, just double. The first rung
+in the educational ladder for the benefit of all classes of the Kingdom
+had been fixed firmly by the Act of 1870. It was not, nor was ever,
+regarded by its authors as a complete Measure. It provided no regular
+system of higher grade schools intermediary between the most elementary
+teaching, and the more liberal culture of the grammar schools. The only
+supplement that it received from the Government under which it had become
+law was the Endowed Schools Act of 1874 for re-arranging the funds and
+remodelling the curricula in secondary endowed schools throughout the
+country. Private effort and local enterprise usefully came in where Mr
+Foster's Education Act had stopped short. In various parts of England, and
+especially in the great northern counties of Lancashire, Durham and York,
+School Boards, fortunate enough to possess controlling spirits of
+exceptional enlightenment, exercised their legal power to establish
+schools of a higher kind specially for the teaching of science or art, and
+generally for the tincture of the youthful mind with a more generous
+training. Such schools received additional grants from the Science and Art
+Department at South Kensington.
+
+In this way the 1870 Act at once partially enabled the child of the
+poorest parents to mount through the elementary schools, to the secondary
+schools of the Kingdom and thence to those seats of learning at which the
+picked youth of the country enjoy the choicest opportunities of mental
+culture, or are qualified for the highest posts in after life to which
+English ambition can aspire. The problem now to be solved, which is in
+actual process of solution and of which a few years more may probably
+dispose, is the completion of the national ladder of learning by a more
+thorough organization of the agencies for advanced knowledge throughout
+the country, and for the passage of the pupil from schools of the lowest,
+to schools of the higher grade. Just as, during recent years of the
+present reign, successive Reform Bills have increasingly nationalized the
+legislative Chambers at Westminster; so the tendency and the result of the
+transformations undergone by the great public schools and by the
+Universities, that they feed, is to draw more closely together the bonds
+uniting these institutions with the nation as a whole, to widen their
+curriculum, to infuse a popular element into their governing bodies, and
+to make them not merely the instructors, but the representatives of the
+intellectual interest of the land. By remodelling the governing bodies of
+Eton, Winchester and Harrow, the Public Schools Act of 1868 appreciably
+quickened and deepened the sense of public responsibility inherent in
+these corporations. Nearly thirty years' experience of the Endowed Schools
+Act justifies the statement that the work accomplished for the grammar
+schools of the country is analogous to the results which the earlier
+legislation has yielded in the case of the more famous seats of youthful
+study.[35] A wholesome spirit of competition now animates the governors of
+these old if often still obscure endowments,[36] and daily causes fresh
+usefulness to be extracted from money resources, long suffered to remain
+idle. Later legislation, whose general aspects have already received
+attention in these pages, has conspired to deepen the sense of obligation,
+and to stimulate to efforts, most salutary for the taught, alike the
+governors of and the teachers in the schools.
+
+Shortly after the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, important
+functions, educational and financial, were given to the new County
+Councils. The grammar schools were quick to perceive a new opportunity. In
+1889, thirteen representatives of the Councils, in some cases at the
+instance of their older colleagues, received seats on the governing bodies
+of the Secondary Schools. The corporations thus reformed have already
+begun vigorously to deal with an abuse inveterate in their smaller
+schools. Where the value of the endowment, from charges on the property of
+which it consists or from a fall in the value of land, has fluctuated the
+governors have been in the habit of farming out the school to the
+headmaster. They have, that is, assigned to him the income of the trust,
+and such fees as he can charge. In return, the pedagogue takes upon
+himself the charges of working the school, and of the teaching of a fixed
+number of free boys. The tendency of this arrangement is, of course, to
+repeat in the present day the experiences of Do-the-boys Hall under Mr
+Squeers in _Nicholas Nickleby_. The headmaster has upon him the burden
+not only of his educational work, but of the solvency of his daily
+business. His own stipend is too small to admit of his paying competent
+assistants. He becomes a pensioner on the caprice of well-to-do parents,
+and the instrument of their not generally very enterprising will, or of
+their too enlightened pleasure. The only chance for the small secondary
+schools thus circumstanced is their rescue by some of the more
+public-spirited and opulent of the governors. But this relief is
+forthcoming so rarely that the Commissioners generally recommend the
+closing of all schools existing under these conditions and the application
+of their endowments to purposes less obviously foredoomed to failure.
+Other instances of the waste of existing resources for secondary education
+are even more frequent and not less serious. Grammar schools of competent
+calibre are often geographically crowded so close together as to obstruct
+and paralyse their mutual efforts. Thus in South Devon there is at
+Chudleigh a grammar school of considerable repute. Within a radius of
+sixteen miles, _e.g._ at Ashburton, Totnes, and Bovey Tracey, there are
+similar schools capable of good work, but lacking a population of parents
+and children to fill their empty benches. A like experience has often
+occurred in the case of establishments which, not being endowed grammar
+schools have not come under the notice of the Commissioners. Bath, for
+instance, has long possessed more educational opportunities than most
+other cities in the West of England. The oldest of her proprietary
+colleges, that in the district known as 'Grosvenor,' to some extent became
+merged in the less ancient Sydney College. That in due time produced a
+successful offshoot, the Somerset College. These two latter institutions
+during some time were healthily stimulated by mutual competition. At last
+the rivalry became profitable only to the prestige and numbers of the
+secondary schools that, managed on the same principles, had come into
+existence first at Cheltenham, then afterwards on the Clifton downs, near
+Bristol. In 1885,[37] the Somerset and Sydney Colleges were amalgamated
+under a single headmastership by the title of the Bath College. This
+to-day is doing an excellent work. But it is the North and East of England
+where by the needless reduplication or ill-advised contiguity of schools
+of the same grade the most flagrant breaches are committed against the
+first laws of educational economy. Thus, in the West Riding, the grammar
+school of Ossett has a fair endowment but practically no scholars. Again,
+Walsingham in Norfolk, with less than 1,000 inhabitants, possesses a
+substantially endowed school, the boys attending which had decreased from
+32 in 1884 to 11 in 1894. Not far off at Ipswich, Norwich, and Bury St
+Edmunds, are establishments of historic fame, and of present competence.
+As an alternative to the continued waste of such opportunities, and to
+promote the local completion of the educational ladder indicated in the
+beginning of this chapter, the Commissioners suggest that the Walsingham
+school should be transferred bodily to Fakenham, a prosperous and not
+distant town, or that the Walsingham funds should be converted into
+scholarships and exhibitions to be held at other places of education
+within the County. There are other small grammar schools which, while just
+paying their way, have evidently no considerable career before them. Here
+the spirit of commercial impatience is apt to suggest the conversion of
+these places of teaching into elementary schools of the better sort. But
+the places now spoken of often have honourable traditions, and resemble
+families that, through no fault of their members, have, by misfortune,
+come down in the world. Local patriotism dwells fondly on the creditable
+past of such institutions, and would be wounded by their irrecoverable
+degradation. Surely, therefore, these schools might have the chance of
+retrieving their position. That, in effect, is what the Commissioners say.
+Assign to the decayed grammar schools their exact place in a reorganized
+system of secondary education. On condition of their adapting themselves
+to the place thus appointed to them, assist them out of the public funds
+to regain full effectiveness, and, together with that, to renew their past
+prosperity.
+
+Within the last few years an illustrious proof has been given that a great
+school is not necessarily so sensitive a plant as to depend for its
+life-blood and vigour on the essential qualities of the soil wherein its
+founders first fixed its roots. 'The Grey Friars' of Thackeray's novels,
+the Charter House school, which, in R. C. Jebb, now Professor of Greek in,
+as well as M.P. for, Cambridge University, has produced probably the first
+scholar of the latter half of this century, has been removed recently to
+the great advantage of the physical health and literary industry of its
+scholars from its ancient home in London city to the rural neighbourhood
+of Godalming town. A precedent for the same policy in less famous
+instances, exists. At Hewsworth, in the West Riding, Archbishop Holgate's
+grammar school has been closed from lack of pupils. Its endowment was
+merged in that of the grammar school at Barnsley, a town of some 36,000
+inhabitants, midway between Sheffield and Wakefield. Within half a dozen
+years, the Barnsley school, thus reinforced, had achieved prosperity, and
+had adopted the chief recommendations for effective teaching made by the
+Commissioners. One thing is at least clear. If liberal education, the
+process, that is, of the development of the whole intellectual nature,
+without immediate reference to the supply of material needs, is not to
+become a mere tradition; if, in other words, literary culture be worth
+preserving as an instrument for training the mind, the cry for merging the
+grammar schools in agencies of specialist and technical teaching must not
+be adopted without consideration. The highest experts in this matter agree
+that the scientific and technical instruction, which is visibly a paying
+investment, runs in these days no risk of neglect, but that there does
+exist a danger of the first aims and the true methods of intellectual
+training being ignored. Even thus, fairly equipped as England is with the
+machinery for secondary teaching of the scientific sort; still better
+furnished as she might be with a more economical administration of
+existing resources, fresh provision must be made on a liberal scale before
+the national appliances are complete. The Commissioners have estimated in
+those counties to which they have paid special attention the number of
+boys or girls educated at secondary schools at 21,878 or 2·5 per 1,000 of
+the population. As might be expected, the local inequalities revealed by
+this analysis are very great. Thus, in Bedford, because of the great
+Harpur endowments of that small county, the proportion per 1,000 is 13·5.
+In Lancashire the population has altogether out-grown the secondary
+endowments available: the proportion per 1,000 is only 11. In Yorkshire it
+is only 2·1. In Warwickshire, notwithstanding the splendid foundations of
+Edward VI. at Birmingham, and the wealthy and famous schools of Warwick
+and Coventry the proportion remains as low as 5·2.
+
+While these aspects of latter day education are being considered, the
+honourable connection of the new Local Government bodies with schools must
+not be ignored. Liverpool, like South Lancashire generally, is not ill
+supplied with agencies for secondary or technical instruction. The means
+of the capital and of the county would both be inadequate but for the very
+liberal contributions made by the County and City Councils to the schools
+owned by religious and secular proprietors for boys and girls. The
+companies thus spoken of are enabled by the Councils to carry on more than
+one particular school at a loss, even though the deficiency be not made
+good by the profit on other schools of the group. In view of the fact
+stated above that a great educational pioneer of this century, Joseph
+Lancaster, was a Quaker, it is interesting to know that the most recent
+Education Commission selects for special compliment the Ackworth Friends
+School, open to members of the Society from all parts of the world, in the
+West Riding of Yorkshire. The more searchingly the enquiry is made, the
+more distinctly there emerges the fact that private venture schools
+created by voluntary effort, conducted by individual enterprise, render
+the most effective service to secondary education. These institutions open
+their doors for public examination. They cannot, therefore, be unworthy of
+State help. Their headmasters and their chief assistants generally are
+University graduates, and were often trained at one of the older public
+schools. A fresh rung in the ladder of educational ascent will have been
+made when these schools, 30 per cent. of whose teachers are University
+graduates, receive official registration as well as whatever material
+assistance State recognition can confer. State organization of national
+teaching primary or secondary by means of official examination and by
+grants of money proportioned to the proficiency established by these
+ordeals, is, as we have seen, and as it must always be remembered, not
+more than half a century old, and in a national sense, scarcely therefore
+passed beyond its infancy. The progress indicated in the preceding remarks
+justifies the expectation that before very long the edifice will be
+crowned with a completeness worthy of the strength with which the
+foundations have been laid, and more than one storey of the fabric has
+been already reared.
+
+Other agencies now fairly at work in this enterprise remain to be
+mentioned. Before the Universities had sent their resident representatives
+to the East End of London, and to the slums of other great cities, they
+had actively identified themselves with the encouragement and the testing
+of secondary teaching throughout the land. The Oxford and Cambridge middle
+class examinations began to be held during the early sixties in the chief
+towns of provincial England. Very soon afterwards, there were organized
+successively the Higher Schools Examination Board, conducted by the two
+Universities, and the University Extension Lectures which presently will
+be examined here with some detail.
+
+But by this time the fresh appliances for elementary and secondary
+education, both directly or indirectly growing out of the legislation of
+1870, had changed the physical, not less than the intellectual, aspect of
+the whole country. In the city as in the suburbs, in the provinces not
+less than in the metropolis, the whole landscape was thickly dotted with
+new piles of buildings, in all cases constructed with marked regard to
+convenience and health, substantial always, in some cases really handsome.
+These were the new Board Schools, some for the most elementary instruction
+of the rising generation, some for higher grade teaching, or for imparting
+to older children the rudiments of scientific and technical knowledge. In
+the former case the buildings were surrounded with gravel playgrounds,
+furnished with swings, parallel bars, and other gymnastic appliances, all
+used under the direction of an expert teacher, who alternately with the
+drill sergeant came on duty during play hours. The structures annexed to
+the actual class-rooms of more advanced pupils were furnished within as
+laboratories and work rooms. Here the pupils were apprenticed to the
+initial duties of the chemist, the gasfitter, the electrician, or of any
+other vocation they were destined in after life to follow. One result of
+this new start in the State schools was the stimulus of a competition that
+produced a perceptible increase of efficiency in the private schools not
+necessarily identified with any religious denominations. These private
+schools still exist; and by the greater elasticity of their system, and
+special opportunity of encouraging individual originality in the learners
+they are the salutary and indispensable adjuncts of the State
+institutions. The generally superannuated and often inefficient dominie,
+alternating between slumber over the text book from which he was supposed
+to teach, and unprovoked aggressions with his cane upon the knuckles or
+any other available part of the persons of his nearest pupils, is now
+replaced by a master in the prime of life and energy, who, if not a
+graduate in a University, has the certificate from one of the many
+examining bodies which attest his fitness for the place. Almost
+imperceptibly to-day, the elementary school matures into the secondary
+school. Nor is the development always indicated by a change of name, for
+higher grade elementary schools, to employ their official title, in which,
+after all his Standards have been passed, the Board School boy, between 15
+and 17 years old is placed, are in effect not less of secondary schools in
+their way than Cheltenham or Westminster. Controlled indeed by the School
+Boards, they prepare their pupils for matriculation at the London or other
+Universities, or for entrance upon professional life. Thus, in 1894,
+exclusive of the capital, the English School Boards controlled no fewer
+than sixty establishments of this higher type. Of that number thirty-nine
+were organized science schools. The fabric of the buildings had been
+provided out of the rates. The cost of the superior teaching was defrayed
+by private munificence, or by the State grants conferred by the Science
+and Art Department which, in South Kensington began as, and still is, a
+portion of the Department in Whitehall. The number of boys and girls,
+according to the latest statistics, educated in these superior Board
+Schools is 4,606 boys, 2,023 girls. Outside London, the great majority of
+the institutions now spoken of are in the Northern, the Midland and the
+Eastern counties. Advantage to all concerned might be expected to accrue
+could these higher Board Schools be managed, if not in active concert, yet
+with the practical approval, and pecuniary encouragement, of the County
+Councils. When, therefore, by the withdrawn Bill of 1896, it was proposed
+to invest County Councils with educational powers, but not, save in rural
+districts, to displace School Boards, the new duties contemplated for
+those Councils were not those for which they entirely lacked preparation.
+In addition to all this, the great City Guilds, notably the Drapers,
+Grocers, and Goldsmiths provide for secondary teaching not only in London,
+but wherever their property lies, a machinery of proved effectiveness. The
+more recent Intermediate Education Act fills in Wales the interval between
+the schoolroom and the workroom; its precedent is sure to be followed
+elsewhere. The means, therefore, of technical training accessible to the
+very humblest classes of the community, cannot be described as inadequate.
+While the tendency thus is for places of secondary teaching to become
+training grounds for special, technical, or professional instruction, it
+is satisfactory that Oxford and Cambridge should hold before the eyes of
+the country the standard of the more general culture which is identical
+with real education, and should bring to the very doors of the humblest
+homes throughout the country the effective and inexpensive agencies for
+securing this teaching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE LADDER OF EDUCATION
+
+    Mr Lowe's advice thirty years ago now fairly fulfilled. Individual
+    influence co-operating with the State reforms the true secret of
+    recent educational advance. Animating effect felt throughout the
+    country of Benjamin Jowett's educational example at Oxford. The
+    practical and concrete test of the helpfulness of the educational
+    ladder to the entire community applied in detail. Instances of Board
+    School boys, and of sons of day labourers who have risen to
+    distinction with the help of the new educational agencies. Experiences
+    of the Clerk of the London School Board and others. Missing rungs
+    still to be supplied to the ladder by reorganization or slight
+    enlargement of existing resources. Need of reorganizing the teaching
+    profession by new local and central councils. Dangers besetting the
+    present movement illustrated.
+
+
+The theory, and, in outline, the practice, of the educational reforms
+reserved for the most recent years of the present reign have now been
+explained with as much fulness as the scheme of this work permits. It
+remains concretely, if of necessity briefly, to answer the question: What
+actually has been done? No Blue Books, or other educational statistics are
+necessary to convince one of the reality and magnitude of the enterprise
+already accomplished. 'Let us educate our masters,' was the advice of Mr
+Lowe when, in the House of Commons, he bewailed so brilliantly and
+bitterly the era of the new democracy begun by the legislation of 1867-8.
+The advice has been followed. A new generation has sprung up, which is
+demonstrably better educated and more humanized than any of its
+predecessors. The diminution of pauperism and crime; the gradual
+disappearance from London and from other great towns of the uncontrollably
+rough element among the street observers of public holidays; the growing
+competition among the industrial classes of museums or picture galleries
+with drinking bars on Sundays and on popular feasts; these are the more
+superficial signs of the progress already made and still going forward.
+Intelligent foreigners,[38] the very men who are said to anticipate the
+judgments of posterity, declare that within the last twenty years the
+physiognomical type of the London street loungers and loafers has visibly
+improved; that the look of the vulture which was habitual on faces pinched
+by hunger, and puffy or pallid with debauchery, is no longer the
+dominating expression of feature; that the rapacious arabs of the pavement
+who were formerly ready to devour the new comer outside Charing Cross or
+Victoria railway stations, where they have not disappeared, have become
+orderly, intelligent, and not altogether the reverse of polite. It
+requires perhaps an Englishman to appreciate at their true worth, the more
+delicate gradations of this improvement as it is illustrated elsewhere. Go
+into the pit or gallery of a London theatre, on the Surrey side or in
+Hoxton. In look, in manner, and in the kind of conversation between the
+acts, the play-goers have changed. If there were ever any danger of an
+orange or ginger-beer bottle descending from the gallery to the pit, the
+peril is now obsolete. Should the situation be Shoreditch or the City
+Road, the strains of the orchestra intermittently may be accompanied by
+voices joining in the chorus with original variations. But the melodies,
+however irregular, only express an honest holiday enthusiasm. Schools
+elementary, whether of the first or second grade, secondary, technical or
+scientific, explain much of this new improvement in the facial
+characteristics and at all public places in the general deportment of the
+humblest of Her Majesty's subjects. But they do not account for the entire
+change. Something like twenty years ago, when a work named _England_ was
+in preparation its author by personal inspection of the localities
+mentioned, ascertained that the latest reports on the truck system as in
+some parts of Staffordshire it continued to exist, and of the agricultural
+gangs in more northern counties, faithfully depicted the social condition
+of great masses of the mining and rural population. The same local
+examination to-day presents a cheering contrast to the writer's earlier
+and depressing experiences. In every town and village of the United
+Kingdom it is now easier than was ever known before for the very poorest
+to live in a cleanly, a godly, sometimes even in a comfortable fashion.
+All the necessaries, most of the superfluities, of existence are to-day
+unprecedentedly cheap. Wages have risen all round, till a pound a week has
+become the normal pay of unskilled adult labour in the town, and about
+twelve shillings in the country. Some conspicuous evils in our industrial
+system have indeed yet to be removed. The fines and deductions[39] to
+which, often without just cause, the earnings of factory hands are
+subjected, have been denounced with just severity, though in moderate
+language, on platforms and in print, by Sir Charles Dilke. On this side of
+the Millennium finality in social legislation will prove, it is to be
+feared, not less difficult than in political matters Lord John Russell
+found, to his disappointment, was the case. The advance of civilization
+itself creates new social conditions which call in their turn for
+periodical legislation. Till the resources of all classes are equalized,
+there must be some who cannot protect themselves, on whose behalf the
+legislature must interpose.
+
+That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as
+well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades
+since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be
+impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class,
+would no longer be represented, even by _Punch_, as proposing to 'heave
+half a brick' at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As
+for setting the bull-pup at the parson's little boy, the suggestion is
+less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous
+undergraduate, the son of the collier's employer who is home for his
+College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of
+Devonshire is not a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the
+frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park
+round the Reformers' Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies' Mile as
+being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That
+implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the
+discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of
+the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord
+Mayor's Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the
+Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal.
+The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the
+world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken.
+As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in
+comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk
+hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a
+new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban
+railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their
+Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a
+welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults
+who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school
+days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries;
+the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share
+with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a
+new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but
+wholesomely controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as
+that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.
+
+Before considering the provisions necessary to complete the educational
+ladder, it will be well from specific instances to see what the facilities
+already established have done towards promoting the ascent from the Board
+School to the University. The following instances now published for the
+first time, are supplied by the courtesy of the Clerk of the London School
+Board. In 1879 a boy whose first learning was gained at a primary London
+Board School, obtained on entering a secondary school the Carpenters'
+Foundation Scholarship, together with the Conquest gold medal. Shortly
+afterwards he became captain of the City of London School. Proceeding
+thence to Cambridge, he won a Foundation Scholarship at Trinity;
+eventually was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, became
+next a Fellow of Trinity; and subsequently held a high position in the
+Board of Trade. Another lad of equally humble birth in 1880 got a
+mathematical scholarship at Queen's College, Cambridge, was among the
+Senior Optimes in the Tripos and in 1886 was appointed a mathematical
+master at one of the great public schools. In 1881, another Board School
+boy, having received the Greek and Latin certificate from the Universities
+Examining Board won a classical scholarship at St John's, Oxford, and
+afterwards a First Class in Classical Moderations. A little later he was
+placed fourth in the First Class of Civil Service candidates. He has since
+developed into a useful official of the Local Government Board. Another
+boy of like antecedents won a scholarship at St John's College,
+Cambridge; subsequently came out first class in one division, second
+class in another division, of the Theological Tripos; carried off the
+Jeremie Septuagint prize, open to the whole University, and afterwards
+became a successful parish clergyman. Other distinctions won by candidates
+of the same category are a scholarship at the City of London School; in
+1883 a first place in the competition for vacancies in the India Office;
+in another case, and with the other sex, in 1885, the fifth place in the
+London Matriculation test, the Gilchrist and Reid scholarships, and later
+First Class Academic Honours for English. This instance is the more
+memorable because it is the earliest distinction of the sort won by a
+Board School girl. Since then the same young woman has become an assistant
+teacher at the Ladies' College in Jersey. This example has often been
+repeated since. Three or four of the prize winners at Girton College
+during the later eighties were London Board School girls. The well-known
+senior curate of St Saviour's, Everton, Liverpool, a High Honours
+Cambridge graduate, had been a Board School boy. His colleague had been
+enabled by a Fishmongers' scholarship to enter at Sidney Sussex College at
+Cambridge. In the summer of 1880, F. J. Wild was the first London Board
+School boy who went to Balliol. Nine years afterwards, this lad entered
+the Indian Civil Service, and became Assistant Magistrate and Deputy
+Collector in the North-West Provinces. 'Bachelor of Science, Bedford
+College, first division, 1891;' 'Recommended by Wesleyan Conference for
+training in their theological institutes and for the Home ministry;'
+'Teacher at Diocesan Training College;' these are comparatively common
+entries in the catalogue of Board School honours for this decade. In or
+since 1893, there have been some half dozen cases of Board School boys
+taking College and University Honours at Oxford as well as good places in
+the Indian Civil Service competition. The experience of the London Board
+Schools is not unlike that of similar institutions in the provinces. A
+decennial calendar after the Oxford precedent of distinctions academic or
+professional won by Board School pupils is a volume which it would really
+be worth while to prepare, and materials for which are accumulating on all
+sides. Pending the completion of the ladder for ascent in the normal way
+from the Board School to the University, private encouragement supplies
+many of the missing rungs. Thus, the vicar of a Herefordshire village
+noticed the quickness of his gardener's son; helped him to enter the
+Hereford County School. From this the lad got a scholarship to Malvern
+College. Afterwards, one of the first Board School boys who won that
+honour, he carried off the entrance blue ribbon of a Balliol scholarship.
+In due course the gardener's boy took a first class in Classical
+Moderations, and a first class also in Classical Greats.
+
+Typical instances have now been cited sufficient in number and variety to
+show that, as seems to be the general opinion of the last Education
+Commission, notwithstanding incompletenesses and imperfections here and
+there, enough has already been done to enable every clever boy in whatever
+station he is born by his own industry and volition to secure the same
+opportunities of cultivating his gifts as the nobleman's son who wins the
+Newcastle medal at Eton. The personal effort and initiative of the late
+Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, did more perhaps than has been done by
+any other individual to promote this work. Under him the College of
+Wycliffe not only maintained the prestige which it had acquired in the
+days of Dr Jenkyns, and which was greatly increased by the successor of
+Jenkyns, Robert Scott, but became at once the patron and the pattern of
+minor places of education throughout the country. Provided they showed
+ability and industry, the day labourer's and the artizan's son were
+welcomed from the provincial grammar school as warmly at Balliol as the
+Sixth Form boy from Harrow or Eton. The connection between secondary
+schools of all grades in the provinces and the University on the Isis had
+already been promoted by the agency of local examinations; it was rendered
+more intimate by the Socratic interest which Jowett took in the
+intellectual welfare of the rawest lad from the country if only he showed
+the slightest sign of mental promise. Jowett's stimulating sense of
+citizenship was felt during his life in the remotest corners of the
+country. Its animating influences have survived his death; they still
+operate as an inspiring force wherever the domains of municipal and
+educational life converge. This good man and patriotic citizen did not
+live to witness the active assumption of educational responsibilities by
+the County and Borough Councils from which, not vainly, he hoped great
+things. An educational system in thorough touch with Oxford and Cambridge
+on the one hand and on the other hand with primary village schools; this
+was the ideal that Jowett, Lake and Stanley advocated to the earlier
+School Enquiry Commissions. Jowett lived long enough to see in the case of
+several great provincial grammar schools, notably that of Bradford, his
+ambition fulfilled.
+
+In many, if not in most districts, the new provincial Councils have now
+added as many rungs to the educational ladder as could fairly be expected.
+The wants which still await fulfilment are definite. They ought not to
+prove very difficult to supply. Local endowments supplemented by a
+moderate amount of State help, will, if wisely directed, provide the
+larger facilities still needed for the promotion of higher grade
+elementary school pupils to grammar schools. In order that there may be no
+further waste either of the money or of the machinery for national
+education, a drastic scheme of reorganization seems to be a cardinal
+necessity. Secondary education is a phrase too mechanically interpreted as
+a synonym for technical or scientific education. If the Statutes be
+interpreted literally, the County Councils are empowered only to levy a
+rate for a higher school grant when the teaching which that grant defrays
+is to enable a boy or girl to learn the elements of some remunerative
+handicraft, and is thus expressly sanctioned by the Technical Education
+Act of 1890. If the Councils have gone beyond this, and pecuniarily
+ministered to the needs of a more generous culture, they have acted, so to
+speak, at their own peril, or that action has been rendered possible by
+the private liberality of their more opulent members. In addition to this
+need of a new definition of the ambiguous epithet and substantive employed
+so often in the foregoing text, a new educational authority which can
+officially survey every department of the entire field of teaching has
+become indispensable. Centralized at Whitehall this authority will to some
+extent inevitably be. Its operation, however, must be highly elastic. The
+conditions of its control must be adaptable to the infinitely varying
+conditions, social, geographical, material, sentimental, of the United
+Kingdom. The most recent enquiries show that there is much less
+dissipation of educational energy by the mutual overlapping of schools
+than might be expected. The single instance of this sort to which
+attention has been directed by the last Commission is that of Bolton,
+where there exists an unprofitable competition between the grammar school
+and the Church Institute Boys' School. Elsewhere, however, as at Leeds and
+other great towns of the North, Mechanics' Institute Schools, Higher Grade
+Board Schools, trench respectively on each other's province, though each
+of them, by slightly varying its curriculum, does good work and is in
+great local demand. The explanation of the latter fact is the universality
+of the appetite for higher teaching created in the large centres of the
+English population. The most frequent, and with proper care the most
+easily remediable form of overlapping occurs when the higher divisions of
+a lower grade school retain pupils already ripe for a higher grade school.
+What are the exact limits to be placed respectively to the provinces of
+elementary schools of both grades? and what to the grammar schools on the
+one hand, or the University schools on the other with which the
+rudimentary institutions ought closely and cordially to co-operate? these
+are problems with which, in the fifty-ninth year of Her Majesty's reign,
+there does not exist any single authority competent to deal. The confusion
+between the jurisdiction of the educational bodies now in being is
+comparable with that which existed in the relations of the various
+administrative authorities and areas in the case of local government
+before these functions were comparatively simplified by the legislation of
+1874 and of 1888. The Education Department in London has no concern with
+secondary schools save so far as some of these are inextricably
+intermingled in their operations with the finance or the teaching of
+primary schools. The Charity Commission wherein the Endowed Schools
+Commission is now merged, can only take cognizance of the agencies for
+higher teaching for a special purpose and from a single point of view.
+This loose and very partially effective machinery of control has since
+1890 received a new element of complexity from the educational power
+vested with such happy results as it has been in the County Councils. The
+educational branch of the Privy Council office in London has long
+attracted to it young men of industry and talents from the Universities as
+well as of considerable administrative ability developed at a later date
+by official experience.
+
+Meanwhile the profession of the teacher becomes more highly organized each
+year. The value of its material interests is constantly increasing. It
+still remains without any direct representation in the official world
+comparable with that which is secured to the civil and military services
+by the Council of the Secretary of State for India. The headmasters'
+annual conference has during the last few years supplied a useful medium
+for the interchange of opinions and experiences between the recognized
+chiefs of their vocation. The College of Preceptors has its occasional
+meetings. Certificated assistant teachers have formed themselves into a
+loosely coherent body of their own. None of these can, except in an
+indirect way, place their practical experience at the disposal of the
+central authority whose consent is necessary for any organic change in the
+teaching subjects of schools that receive a public endowment. In the case
+of schools whose speciality is a sound commercial education, proofs of
+late have multiplied that the object of this training may often be more
+faithfully accomplished, to say nothing of the intellectual gain to the
+learner if the boy who is going to stand behind a counter, and may
+sometimes be called upon to write a business letter for his employer, is
+instructed in something beyond the arts of summing and penmanship. Many
+boys of the humblest birth show a remarkable aptitude for applied logic
+and political economy when the elements of physical science fail entirely
+to attract their minds. The educational council which might be auxiliary
+to the Vice-President of the Council will perhaps number amongst its
+members men who, from their own practical knowledge, can give sound advice
+in cases where the teacher ought to be entrusted with the power of
+adapting the education, not merely in a general way to the vocation that
+is hereafter to engage the learner, but to the idiosyncrasies of the
+pupil as well. The stipends of assistants in secondary schools are often
+unwisely and wastefully low. Men and women who work so hard as these
+persons do are entitled to the assurance that their emoluments will be
+regulated by the consideration that comes of knowledge as well as the
+severer equities of commerce.
+
+The first thing, therefore, as all who on this matter speak from
+experience agree, is to establish local councils for educational purposes
+which by the prevention of confusion and overlapping between schools of
+different grades, will directly promote the economy of educational force
+not less than of expenditure. As for the central authority which the
+interests alike of teachers, of taught, of children and parents, of the
+State, and of its subjects demand, substantial unanimity as to the
+composition of that body exists among those who are most qualified to give
+an opinion. Generally it is suggested that the new Council might be shaped
+after the model of the Indian Council. To come to particulars, there would
+be, in the first instance, a certain number of Crown nominees; secondly,
+the Universities, perhaps the great public schools or other public
+educational bodies, would be asked to select representatives of their own.
+Another element in the new central authority would be experienced members
+of the teaching professions. These might be chosen partly by the
+headmasters in conference, but to some extent by the assistant teachers
+employed in every variety of public schools from the highest to the
+lowest. It would seem on the whole advisable to select the teachers'
+members by the direct vote of the class immediately concerned. The
+machinery for doing so would not be difficult. Voting papers, as in the
+case of London University in the choice of appointments to the Senate, or
+of professional representatives on the Medical Council, would be employed.
+In this way, every registered teacher would have a voice in regulating the
+details and rewards of his profession to the great increase, as cannot be
+doubted, of its _esprit de corps_. In the case of elections to the local
+authority for preventing waste and confusion between local schools an
+analogous method might be employed. The registered teachers, that is,
+would in each neighbourhood choose their proportion of the members of the
+local educational body.
+
+Signs are sometimes visible of a reaction from the enthusiasm for
+educational progress that has engaged the national energies during the
+last half century. There is a danger, one is told, of educating boys or
+girls beyond their capacities, and above their station. The increased
+competition for the positions of governess and clerk, means misery and
+ruin to many of the candidates who would be more suitably, comfortably,
+and far more remuneratively employed in domestic service, or in manual
+labour according to their sex. The virtues of humility and respect for
+superiors are said to be crushed out in the scramble for knowledge that
+may enable its possessors to better themselves. Servant maids, one is
+told, no longer confine their demands to permission to wear a fringe, but
+stipulate for a pianoforte in the basement, or a bicycle with which to
+take their airing on their Sundays out. That upon the humbler levels of
+the community the progress from ignorance to education should be
+accompanied by real or apparent disturbances of the personal relations
+between classes was to have been expected. Seasons of transition such as
+the present always generate a certain amount of personal friction or of
+social displacement. Those just being emancipated from the illiteracy or
+semi-barbarism which have been the traditions of centuries have not yet
+overcome the agitating strangeness of their new and improved condition.
+Those above them in the social scale have not yet been able to decide
+whether to conciliate their educated inferiors as possible friends, or to
+stand on their guard against them as actual enemies. As the situation
+becomes more familiar, it will prove less strained. Common sense as a
+supplement to their zeal, seems the chief want of the educational
+reformers, official or private, of the day. The tendency is to postpone
+the development of intelligence to the acquisition of knowledge. The
+masters whom we are now educating are not in the habit of using their
+minds for the mere pleasure of intellectual exertion. Hence they often
+give an impression of being far less intelligent than they really are. The
+correct use of common words in the mother tongue ought orally, not out of
+any lesson book, to be taught all boys and girls. The difficulty
+experienced by the persons now spoken of in clearly answering a simple
+question is often insurmountable. The tendency is, not to digest the query
+as a whole, but to catch some word used in it and then to make a remark
+suggested by the association of the sound of the syllables, and so
+practically to evade the question put. The cheap diffusion of newspapers
+and magazines confirms rather than corrects these failures to concentrate
+the mind in the casual talk of everyday life. It is not beneath the
+dignity of the State educator to deal with the defect.[40]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE
+
+    Social importance of Eton, Harrow, and other great schools, as
+    representing the social evolution of the epoch. The conventional
+    mistake that the new wealth has been injurious to the social tone or
+    scholarly studies of public schools. In the case of Eton the historic
+    details and educational statistics prove the falseness of the
+    statement. Progress of the school shown by success in the new as well
+    as old examinations during the incriminated period of the last forty
+    years. New social elements have increased the value but not the
+    expense of Eton. The fourteenth Earl of Derby as a typical Eton
+    product.
+
+
+The whole region of public elementary and secondary education, whose
+improvement is so conspicuous an incident in the recent domestic or social
+annals of the time, has now been indicated at sufficient length and
+minutely enough to convey an accurate notion of the facts. One may,
+therefore, pass to those educational levels which stand a little higher,
+and up to which recent reforms of popular education are, as has been seen,
+gradually assisting the progress of Board School children. The
+sociological feature of the present reign has already been described in
+these pages as a process less of revolution, than of evolution; of the
+natural incorporation of new elements into an old fabric, of the
+harmonious assimilation on the part of a polity that is the growth of
+centuries, of the ideas and types that are the products of to-day. These
+processes can nowhere be witnessed more crucially in operation than at
+those little worlds, the great public schools such as Eton and Harrow,
+which, as they have ever been, are the faithful microcosms of the great
+worlds that lie beyond them. Many of the accounts of Eton which
+periodically find their way into print seem inspirations from Baron
+Munchausen. The school that during centuries has been the special training
+ground for the country gentlemen of England, which was once to such an
+extent the nursery of future lords spiritual and temporal as to enable Dr
+Keate to include among his titles to respect the fact of his having
+flogged in their youth the whole Bench of Bishops,[41] is conventionally
+represented as corrupted at its heart by the predominating influence of
+the sons of the 'new rich' on its classic soil. The parent who wishes his
+son to be at the school where his sire, and his sires before him, had
+been, is disgusted by reading romantic accounts of the bank balances in
+Windsor town kept for their boys by the plutocrats, Saxon or Semitic, of
+the City. It may, therefore, be said authoritatively that thus far
+research has failed to bring to light a single instance of the new rich
+Etonian who possesses during his school days a banking account of his own.
+Now, not less than formerly, the lad who returns to his tutor's or his
+dame's with a £5 note in his pocket is looked upon by his comrades as in
+luck.
+
+Forty years ago, when a Public School Commission was making its enquiry,
+the cry of the commercial Croesus swamping the country squire was first
+raised. The most practical proof of its hollowness is that the expenses of
+Eton, if still prohibitive to many parents, have not increased of recent
+years. What has rather happened is that the school outlay has been
+remodelled. The charges are to-day inclusive. If comparatively fresh items
+figure in the school accounts, the incidental outlay on casual
+subscriptions and a long catalogue of extras is now superseded. The real
+cost of Eton and of other schools like it is what the individual boy
+chooses, or what his friends allow. The expensive habits of the Etonian
+are more a domestic, than a scholastic, growth. No advocate of the
+_nouveau riche_ theory has ever asserted that the scale of living in the
+clubs of Pall Mall has become insufferably profuse since gentlemen
+enriched by commerce, prone, like Mr Mantalini, to despise details of
+petty cash, have been made free of these establishments. There is not, nor
+has there ever been, the slightest danger of the Etonian or Harrovian of
+the old aristocratic order being corrupted by plutocratic schoolfellows.
+The son of Sir Gorgius Midas in real life proves to be a quiet, sensible
+lad, with a just and shrewd sense of the value of money, and perhaps less
+likely to waste his father's substance in the 'sock shops' under the
+shadow of Windsor Castle than his form comrade, the son of the squire whom
+Sir Gorgius could buy up half a dozen times over. At other places than
+the great public schools of England, a studious boy may find himself more
+in the way of amassing knowledge. Nowhere will he learn so many lessons
+useful for the daily conduct of life, which books do not impart. Nowhere
+will he have such opportunities for the acquisition, the development and
+the display of practical common sense. So far back as the later fifties of
+this century, an Eton master, the late Mr Durnford, the respected father
+of him who still represents the same family on the Eton staff, alluding to
+the decline in the manufacture of Longs and Shorts in pious Henry's
+shades, could say: 'Latin verses are with us things of the past.' There
+is, however, no reason, as the list of Eton honours at Oxford or Cambridge
+will show, for imputing to Eton any decline in the essentials of classical
+scholarship. Since the new wealth is supposed to have contaminated the
+standard of plain living and high thinking among the old gentry, in 1851,
+the famous son of a famous father, a name venerable in the Law Courts and
+on the Thames, J. W. Chitty, an old Etonian, won at Oxford a first class
+Vinerian Scholarship, followed by a Fellowship at Exeter. About the same
+time R. G. W. Herbert the late Permanent Head of the Colonial Office
+carried off, as a scholar of Balliol, the Hertford and the Ireland, and a
+Fellowship at All Souls. The late Lord Carnarvon was not so infected by
+the plutocratic idleness of Eton as to miss when at Christ Church the
+highest honours of the Classical Schools.
+
+Three years later when according to the conventional view the 'rich
+vulgarians,' as the Mrs Major Pompley of _My Novel_ calls them, must have
+entirely crowded out the sons of squires as well as the humanities
+themselves, another country gentleman's son, the late Edward Herbert who
+died at Marathon in 1870, had as his brother scholar at Balliol, also from
+Eton, another son of a Western squire, Edmond Warre, to-day Headmaster of
+his old school. In the same year the son of a 'squarson' to employ Sidney
+Smith's useful term, also an Etonian, Henry Barter of Merton, the evil
+associations of plutocracy notwithstanding, won the highest mathematical
+together with second class classical honours at Oxford, and was only just
+beaten by the present Bishop of Hereford, for the University Scholarship
+in mathematics. This list of instances belongs to the era (the fifties)
+when the corruptions of the new wealth were most rampant at Eton, seems to
+refute the mechanical charge; that list may be closed with the name of a
+country gentleman's son, since then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Michael
+Hicks-Beach, who, Eton and Christ Church notwithstanding, took a first
+class in the Modern History schools in 1858. About the same time the
+member of a Liverpool mercantile family, the son of a great statesman, W.
+H. Gladstone, had not at Eton so unlearned all he had been taught
+elsewhere as to be prevented from winning a studentship at Christ Church.
+His contemporary at Eton, A. C. Swinburne, the poet, won at Oxford the
+Taylor scholarship for modern languages about the same time. The catalogue
+might be extended indefinitely. The representative names likely to convey
+the fullest idea to the general reader have now been mentioned. A further
+selection of patronymics would confuse rather than instruct or interest.
+It will be enough to say that in or since the sixties down to 1896, of the
+highest honours in the Schools or in the Colleges at Oxford 400 were
+obtained by the sons of country gentlemen who, notwithstanding the new
+wealth had like their fathers before them been sent to Eton and who were
+not apparently quite demoralized by that ordeal. At Cambridge the total of
+Academic distinctions won by Etonians of the same grade as at Oxford, is
+as might have been expected higher, and amounts in round numbers to 550. A
+competent judge in these matters, speaking with no personal prejudice in
+favour of the school of Henry VI.[42] or of its Cambridge sister King's
+College, but with much experience of classical examinations, J. Y.
+Sargent, told the present writer not long ago, that Eton was the one
+school in England whose boys could write tolerable Greek prose.
+
+Any social change that may have come over the place since the introduction
+of the new wealth into the country would seem to be very different in fact
+from that described by fiction. The presence of a large number of boys
+whose parents derive their income from no hereditary acres and whose
+domestic associations are therefore different from those of the country
+gentleman's son has indeed produced an effect, but one which is the very
+opposite of its current misrepresentation. Before the Victorian era
+opened, well-to-do commercial fathers were, as readers of _Coningsby_ will
+remember, in the habit of sending their sons to the seat of education most
+in vogue with the titled and untitled patricians of the realm. Such
+influence as these have had has proved notoriously healthful to the whole
+school community. The newcomers have with scarcely an exception been
+trained from childhood to an adequate appreciation of the value of money
+and are the last boys in the world to be permitted to squander it for mere
+show. Before their advent to the place, Eton might have been charged with
+narrowness or partiality in the composition of its life; congenial enough
+as the training ground of peers, opulent commoners, diplomatists, and
+other destined dignitaries of State or Church, but less salutary for lads
+who had their own way to make in the world, and who while doing so, must
+expect to come into collision with the men of the City, the office, and
+the shop. The genius of every great English school is essentially
+democratic. Boys are valued by their fellows not for what they have, but
+for what in themselves they are; not for the antiquity of their family
+descent, nor for the depth of their father's purse. The boy who dazzled
+his mates with the glitter of sovereigns fresh from the Mint would be
+suppressed as promptly by the public opinion of the place as the toady or
+the parasite. To-day no English lad is so little likely idly to waste his
+parents' cash as the young Etonian.
+
+There is no school which so far as social discipline is concerned better
+enables its boys to dispense with the University and yet lose so little
+by not going there, or which turns out its boys such ready-made little men
+of the world as the foundation of Henry VI. That this is to-day the
+special attribute of Eton, possessed by it in common perhaps with Harrow,
+is due to the circumstance of its having become representative of the
+entire life, commercial, not less than squirearchical or patrician, urban
+not less than rural, of the whole country. The truth is that the _nouveau
+riche_, as he is represented by the popular imagination, is the product of
+romance, or the creation of the stage. The antagonism between the socially
+emancipated of yesterday and the descendants of houses which had become
+considerable before constitutional government in England was known is
+imaginary and in direct contradiction of the experiences of daily life.
+The son of the new man of one generation as to his tastes, his prejudices,
+his politics, his pursuits, the performance of his duties, the choice of
+his pleasures, becomes, in the next, socially indistinguishable from the
+scion of the oldest nobility. On all points he has unconsciously, as is
+the way with the imitative race of boys, modelled himself after the
+pattern of those country gentlemen, divines, civilians, soldiers, and
+sailors, who are for the most part the reverse of plutocratic, and whose
+sons have been brought up at home under conditions which would make them
+physically intolerant of the bad taste that may be defined as a missing of
+the due proportion of relative things. The Lancashire trader's son who at
+school finds himself next in form to the boy of ancient family is quick to
+imbibe the social traditions and intuitions with which the atmosphere is
+charged. He has been sent to school to make acquaintances perhaps as well
+as to learn; but certainly not to dazzle his schoolfellows by the glitter
+of his father's gold. If the Manchester lad possesses more pocket money
+than some of those in his 'house,' he is pretty certain also to set them a
+wise example in the careful spending of it. The truth is that with the
+whole system of public examinations and with literary competitions
+narrowing the entrance to all kinds of professional life, the genius of
+the place at the great public schools has undergone the same modifications
+as at the Universities. The schoolboy who has obtained his exeat for a few
+days as he bounds off to the station to catch his train, may be thought to
+have left all care behind him. Enjoyment, however, is very probably not
+the reason of his visit to his friends in London.
+
+Sandhurst or Woolwich examinations, competitions for the home or foreign
+service at Burlington House are quite as likely to be the object in view
+as the visit to the dentist by day or to the theatre by night. This early
+acquaintance with the responsibilities of life exerts a sobering influence
+on the most constitutionally volatile of Eton or Harrow striplings. The
+lad whose path of pleasure is darkened by the shadow of the ubiquitous
+examiner loses prematurely the juvenile appetite for veal and ham pies,
+jam tarts, ginger beer, even for cocoanut paste. When there are not
+examinations at a distance, the ingenuity of Oxford and Cambridge provides
+the machinery for them hard by the Playing Fields on the Thames or Byron's
+Tree at Harrow on the Hill. 'Posing' in some form goes on all the year
+round. It has become in effect obligatory on the public school boy to
+obtain before going up to the University the certificate which frees him
+from the Littlego examination, or which if he enters on other careers,
+secures him an analogous dispensation.
+
+The higher certificates in the University examinations are not easy to
+obtain. They uniformly indicate a high standard of proficiency. The
+success of Eton in these ordeals has been steadily progressive during the
+last twenty years. From 39 in 1875 the Eton candidates had risen to 88 in
+1896. The total of certificates and distinctions won by these, an
+aggregate of 1,413 candidates, was, during this period of twenty years,
+1,516. Meanwhile the number of Eton boys who, without passing through an
+intermediary stage at the professional crammers, take good places direct
+from their school in the Indian and Home Civil Service competitions has
+increased during the last few years by something like 10 per cent. The
+Eton 'Army' class is also doing well. The number of boys proceeding to
+Sandhurst and even to Woolwich straight from school as others proceed
+straight to the University increases annually. These statistics go some
+way towards disproving the conventional reproach made largely by ignorance
+against the most representative of English public schools of being
+socially and economically demoralized, or intellectually sunk in indolence
+by the malignant influences of the new wealth. If there were any truth in
+such an accusation, the maintenance of the traditional standard of
+scholarly excellence in exceptional cases would not be combined, as
+to-day it is, with the visibly demonstrated improvement in the work of the
+rank and file of the boys. The truth is, that at all our great schools,
+Eton like the rest, the new elements among the boys have tended to produce
+a wholesome change in the public opinion of the place distinctly
+favourable to a higher average of school industry. The ideal Etonian of
+history is, and seems likely long to continue, the fourteenth Earl of
+Derby, translator of the _Iliad_, and perhaps the most brilliant
+parliamentary debater of the century. 'He saps like Gladstone, and he
+fights like Spring.' So runs Lord Lytton's spirited and familiar line
+concerning this most typical of Eton worthies. No one would have welcomed
+more warmly than he the statistical evidence here given that under its
+latest Headmaster, the study of the new ologies, and the manual mechanics
+practised in the Eton workshops which Dr. Warre has established have not
+ousted the older humanities from their place, and that, the new wealth
+notwithstanding, it has ceased to be a reproach against any boy at the old
+school that he is a sap.[43]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE
+
+    Changes in the social life of Oxford and Cambridge visible on the
+    surface since 1860. Social differences between Oxford and Cambridge as
+    places of residence. General results of the unattached student system
+    established in 1868. The idea of the University as distinct from the
+    colleges, socially prominent in earlier days, has acquired new
+    prominence since. The admission of non-collegiate students.
+    Vicissitudes in the popularity of the Union as a social club and as a
+    debating society. Its earlier distinction repeated in later years. The
+    unattached students' scheme in its practical details and working.
+    Academic successes of students, especially in Theology. The Extension
+    Lectures scheme, personal details and general results.
+
+
+Under the new and quickening influences imported into the second half of
+the present century, the changes in the conditions of social life are more
+visible at the two great Universities than at the public schools. The
+public school boy has been seen hastening to the railway station that he
+may catch the train which is to convey him from the place of industry, not
+to the old holiday fields, but to a fresh seat of studious exertion. In
+like manner, a fair proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates now pass
+the greater portion of their lives in hurrying to catch trains from their
+academic termini to scenes of provincial activity. The commercial
+traveller of the old order as Dickens described him was not more
+incessantly on the road than the Oxford or Cambridge Extension lecturer.
+He, like the movement he represents, is the product of the age that has
+given us Bradshaw. Oxford and Cambridge have in fact been brought to the
+doors of those who cannot themselves go to Cambridge or Oxford. Nor is the
+new element, among those who have taken their degree, the only change that
+has been witnessed in the _personnel_ of the place. Enough has been
+written about the domestic revolution which has transformed what till the
+later sixties, had continued a cloister into a flourishing provincial
+centre of family life; about the nursemaids with perambulators in the
+parks, the children trundling their hoops along Addison's Walk, or playing
+ball under the statelier avenue which fringes the Christ Church meadows.
+In reality this feature in the social polity of Oxford, however
+interesting or striking, has never marked so visible a contrast to the
+preceding epoch as it may have done at Cambridge. The capital on the Isis
+has always been a considerable county town. From a time to the contrary of
+which memory does not run, Oxford has had extra-academical attractions of
+its own for persons without any interest in its studies. It has always
+been a hunting, steeplechasing, and generally a sporting centre. Its
+neighbourhood is probably more picturesque than that of its sister on the
+Cam. Like other midland counties, its environments have never been without
+more manor houses and country gentlemen's residences than is the case with
+the academic section of East Anglia. As far back, therefore, as the later
+fifties certainly, and it may be much further, social Oxford possessed an
+existence not less distinct from, or independent of, academic Oxford, than
+Windsor, Harrow on the Hill, Rugby, Cheltenham, or Marlborough possess a
+social machinery of their own apart from the schools which are a feature
+in their respective neighbourhoods.
+
+What will really strike the eye of one revisiting Oxford after a long
+interval is less the signs of the latest developments of domestic life
+than the appearance of greater youthfulness in the undergraduates. Where
+this juvenility is real, and not the illusion of the spectator's own
+advancing years, it is largely to be explained by the order of students
+new since 1868. Not without much opposition or till after long resistance,
+the Oxford statutes in that year relaxed the most exclusive condition
+written on their page by the disciplinarian severity of Archbishop Laud. A
+return to the mediæval usage was sanctioned. Once more it became possible,
+after a lapse of three centuries, for young men to go to the University
+without going to college. The Vice-Chancellor matriculated students
+furnished with credentials of respectability, and with enough of learning
+to satisfy the masters of the schools. Provided, in other words, they had
+a fair prospect of passing Responsions, which do not constitute one of the
+public examinations, but mark the survival of the old entrance ordeal
+prescribed in the days when the University was everything and the Colleges
+comparatively nothing. If he were not legally of age, the formal consent
+to his life in lodgings of his parents or guardians was further required
+from the non-ascript undergraduate, as well as a general testimonial to
+the probability of his deriving educational benefit from his new
+opportunities. Littlego might be excused by the delegates in the case of
+students not intending to proceed to their degree, but only to study
+systematically some special subject. In the place, however, of the
+'Smalls' testamur, or its equivalent, the special student was tested
+closely as to his aptitudes for the subject of study he professed.
+
+The total yearly cost, all entrance fees included, of the non-collegiate
+youth would average between £50 and £60, instead of thrice that sum, not
+perhaps an exaggerated estimate, for his collegiate brother. £10 covers
+handsomely all the initial outlay. The period of residence required for
+the degree is twelve terms. These must be kept in what is called 'full
+term' which is rather later than the almanac term, and also in a duly
+licensed lodging house. In exceptional cases these conditions may be
+dispensed with. In no case will the undergraduate who has no porter's
+lodge to pass before he 'knocks in' at night find more liberty than the
+intramural student. His landlord or landlady in the town may perhaps
+promise not to communicate some irregularity to the authorities. But so
+surely as the unattached commits the smallest breach of academic
+discipline, sooner or later it will reach the official ear; he will find
+himself a marked man.
+
+Men who are now middle aged, or even elderly, looking back to their
+college days will recollect that there prevailed an invisible system of
+surveillance, and even espionage, much more close and real than it was at
+all pleasant in the days of one's youth to admit. That supervision has
+now become more subtle, ubiquitous and unavoidable, till at last the
+unattached freshman realizes that wherever he may be, he lives and moves
+in a whispering gallery, as much as if he were a famous figure, in the
+heart of London society and of the London season.
+
+The practical success of this innovation was immediate. It has been
+tolerably complete. Within thirty years of its introduction, that is on
+the 1st of January 1896, the University books showed the existence of 480
+graduate or undergraduate non-collegiates. Of these 245 were at the date
+mentioned _in statu pupillari_. The authorities to which these students
+are immediately subject are the Vice-Chancellor, the two Proctors, a
+Censor who stands in the relation of College tutor to the whole body; two
+other tutors associated with him who give advice on all subjects, and
+seven delegates, being members of Convocation. The Censor is the head of
+the whole unattached system; to him intending students should apply for
+all practical information. The teaching available for the University
+alumni now mentioned is at least as effective and wide as any of the
+colleges can offer.
+
+At the instance of Mr Jowett, a great friend of the scheme, other colleges
+than Balliol soon opened their lecture rooms to non-collegiate guests. The
+Honour tutors especially allocated to the unattached, include
+distinguished Fellows of Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln, Magdalen,
+University College, Wadham and Worcester, as well as famous theologians
+from Keble, or a non-collegiate M.A. not less accomplished than the
+present Professor of Modern History, Mr York Powell of Christ Church. The
+extent to which the young men thus provided for have profited by their
+opportunities, may be judged from the following epitome of examinational
+statistics. Two first classes in Classical Moderations, 2 also in
+Mathematical; 13 seconds in Classical Moderations; 39 third classes in the
+same examination; 7 Mathematical thirds in Moderations; these represent
+the distinctions gained in the older Honour Schools by the students who as
+an institution have not yet completed their third decade. Although thus
+far they do not seem to have done very brilliantly in the Philosophy and
+History Schools, they have won a first class in Jurisprudence, 2 in Modern
+History, 12 in Theology, 3 in Natural Science, one in Oriental Studies, as
+well as some dozen places in these studies below the coveted level of
+_classis prima_. The Bachelor of Civil Law examination is known to be one
+of the hardest on the Isis. In this the unattached may be credited with
+one first class, one second, as well as one third and one fourth. During
+the period now spoken of, several University prizes have been carried off
+by the new comers. Thus a non-collegiate candidate has won the Denyer and
+Johnson scholarship in Theology four times, the Pusey and Ellerton
+scholarship (Hebrew) the same number, as also the Senior and Junior
+Kennicott (also Hebrew). The Davis scholarship in Chinese was for the
+fifth time won a few years ago by an unattached, and for the second time
+the Taylorian scholarship in Modern Languages. Among older and better
+known distinctions open to all comers, the Arnold Historical essay has
+been won by an unattached; the Chancellor's English essay, and the
+Ellerton essay have been won twice. While it will thus be seen that the
+new students have acquitted themselves specially well in Theology, they
+have in twenty-four cases gained open scholarships, and in three cases
+open Fellowships. The Bowden Sanskrit, the Burdett-Coutts scholarships
+also figure among their list of honours. In the Pass schools 310, a
+proportion of 72 per cent., have satisfied the examiners. As an instance
+of their being on their entrance up to the scholastic level of the average
+public school boy, 30 or 40 unattached have elected to pass Responsions
+before matriculation and have done so without any difficulty.
+
+The general conduct of the new undergraduates, who, some prophets had
+predicted, would demoralize the University by their rowdy example, has
+been with scarcely an exception, exemplary. Only one disciplinary case, to
+employ the euphemism of the last official report, seems to have occurred.
+With the enterprising alacrity which to their own credit, to the good of
+their colleges, to the benefit of the whole University, the
+representatives of the different societies on the Isis display in
+attracting special talent to the foundations in which they are
+respectively interested, some absorption of the unattached into the
+colleges was inevitable. It has, however, been less than one might have
+expected. The average of these migrations does not vary much, and seems to
+proceed at the rate of between 20 and 25 per year. Nor, apparently, does
+there exist any dissatisfaction among the non-collegiates with their own
+position in the City of Colleges. Thus when they migrate to a college, the
+attraction is generally found to be the exceptional facilities for
+instruction in a special study, _e.g._ Natural Science or History,
+afforded by the foundation in question. As, by implication, has been
+already stated, Mr J. A. Froude's successor in the Chair of Modern History
+was, throughout the greater portion of his career, a non-collegiate.
+Together with the present Recorder of Londonderry, Professor York Powell
+was one of the first batch of unattached students in 1868. Superior
+conveniences for the studies respectively to their taste, rather than
+economy, were the motives which sent the future Professor and the future
+Irish lawyer, Mr T. G. Overend, to the University and not to college. Mr
+Powell took his degree as a member of Christ Church; Judge Overend was
+unattached to the last. Both obtained high Honours in the Schools. The
+after success of each began directly they left the University. Having been
+called to the Irish Bar in 1874, Mr Overend was in 1885 the leader of his
+circuit as well as a Queen's Counsel. His health alone caused him to give
+up his practice and take a County Court judgeship.
+
+Thus far the unattached graduates in residence never at any given time
+seem to have exceeded 50. Their rivalry with the colleges is, therefore,
+in point of numbers not very formidable. Nor do they seem appreciably to
+have affected the social or intellectual life of the place. Like the great
+public schools the two Universities are to the present generation what
+they were to its predecessors. Athletic accomplishments have declined as
+little as general scholarship. The pastimes, however, are conducted far
+more economically than was once the case. Instances of young men being
+hampered during their professional struggles by the evil legacy of
+University debts have decreased so steadily as to justify the hope of
+their ultimate and entire disappearance. Thus the Oxford undergraduate as
+Leech used to depict him, or as Thackeray in _Pendennis_ drew the typical
+pupil of both Universities; throwing away his father's money at the end of
+the term in London in exaggerated tips to hotel waiters and cabmen, is
+to-day as much of an anachronism as the Etonian in his teens who has not
+learnt that if care is taken of the shillings, the pounds will take care
+of themselves. In one particular, though perhaps accidentally, the
+non-collegiate undergraduate as an institution has coincided an
+interesting modification of the social conditions of Oxford life. Early in
+the present century, the conception of an academic as distinct from and
+independent of a collegiate polity was more present to the undergraduate
+of that epoch than it was to his successors half a century or so later.
+This fact is one among the explanations of the popularity of the
+University Union Debating Club during the student days of Mr Gladstone as
+well as of the comparative disfavour into which it had fallen during the
+student days of, for example, Lord Randolph Churchill. There appear,
+however, periodically to take place reactions in favour of the nursery
+ground of future orators. Mr Asquith, already of Cabinet rank, to whom
+probabilities, as well as Lord Rosebery's words, point as a coming leader
+of the House of Commons, belonged to a slightly older generation than
+Churchill. Before he took his degree in 1863, he had established the same
+sort of reputation for himself in the Union as had been won two or three
+generations earlier by Mr Gladstone, and as seventeen years afterwards
+was to be won in the same arena by Mr G. N. Curzon, in 1897 Foreign Under
+Secretary.
+
+During the later sixties, there came into existence, as further
+developments of what was practically a collegiate example, social clubs
+for undergraduates. These, in effect, though not in theory, were generally
+recruited from a few colleges. Such societies have doubtless not lost
+their earlier popularity. They have witnessed a fresh access of favour to
+the University Union Club. They have perhaps helped themselves to
+contribute to it by causing the Union, in the supply of creature comforts,
+to compete with the collegiate lounges. A room for the reading of novels
+had been regarded as a dangerous innovation at the Union before 1865. It
+was not till after that year that a smoking room was sanctioned, or the
+refreshments of tea or coffee supplied. That in the future as in the past
+the chief work of the Universities will be done through the agency of the
+colleges is no doubt not less true than that at Eton, like Harrow, the
+tutorial system will co-exist with the most liberal and sweeping
+innovations which may be introduced. The colleges depend for their success
+on the same conditions as the non-collegiate delegacies. In prosperous
+seasons when trade is good and money plenty, there will be few vacant
+rooms either inside the college walls or outside in the licensed lodging
+houses. When times are bad, the list diminishes. Thus in the October term
+of 1896, 621 freshmen entered the colleges as compared with 734 in the
+preceding twelvemonths; Christ Church had only increased by 11; Worcester
+doubled its numbers; at the same time Magdalen, always a popular college
+with the public, had fallen from 53 to 40, Balliol from 49 to 36, Lincoln
+from 24 to 17. As for the non-collegiates, there was not only no increase
+but an actual diminution; the figures here were less by 11 than in the
+preceding twelvemonth.
+
+The great contrast which in comparing it with its normal condition two or
+three decades ago would be noticed by the Oxonian who revisits Oxford
+to-day is the change from an habitually stationary to a visibly locomotive
+population on the part of those who formerly seldom left their college
+rooms. Down the chief streets of the towns on the Isis and the Cam
+respectively, even at the very height of term time, there is a constant
+succession of cabs conveying young men in the prime of life to the railway
+termini. These are the fellows and tutors of the different colleges whose
+predecessors seldom or never used to leave their University during term,
+save when college business took them for a few hours to their lawyers in
+Lincoln's Inn, or to the college estate bailiffs and stewards in the
+country. Such are not the missions that explain this increase of railway
+bound traffic when as yet no vacation is in sight. Those now spoken of as
+hurrying off to some provincial spot are well known in their University
+and a few hours hence will be warmly welcomed at their provincial
+destinations as Extension Lecturers on subjects of popular interest. What
+has happened is this. Certain enlightened inhabitants of both sexes in
+some district of manufacturing Lancashire or in agricultural Devon have
+been struck with the state of ignorance in which their school course has
+left many young men and women. At the same time they have noticed
+indications of a wish with those of maturer years to make up for early
+neglect by later application to branches of study of all kinds. Books
+alone have failed to supply the want. Intelligent and profitable reading
+is a scientific habit properly to be acquired only by those who have been
+drilled into it and who have already some general acquaintance with the
+topics treated in the written page.
+
+The County Council, as we have repeatedly seen, discharges already some of
+the functions and dispenses some of the funds of an Educational
+Department. Very possibly private munificence accompanies if it does not
+prompt this corporate enterprise. The next step is to communicate with the
+University Extension Lecture agency at whichever University, Oxford,
+Cambridge, London, or Victoria, according to the preference displayed.
+After the expenses have been guaranteed, the lecturer appears. To enable
+his hearers intelligently to grasp his plan of discourse, the discourse
+itself is prefaced by the distributions of a synopsis, which is in its way
+a work of literary art, whose readers, without any other help than its
+perusal may gather something more than a mere foretaste of the ground to
+be covered, or of the instruction to be conveyed. Such a syllabus as that
+of the Oxford lectures by Mr Shaw or Mr Marriott on different periods of
+English or French history, like the Reformation of 1529, the Revolution of
+1689, or the age of Louis XIV. at once assists the working men for whom
+they were planned, and serves as a model for the taking of notes. Each
+lecture of every course of twelve is followed by a class during which the
+lecturer is in the Scotch term heckled by his audience. Essays are set,
+looked over, and returned to the writers with marginal corrections. At the
+end of each course an examination of both sexes is held, and certificates
+of merit are granted. The sons and daughters of the local gentry, day
+labourers in factory, field, office, or shop figure in nearly equal
+numbers among the students, the women being slightly the more numerous,
+and acquit themselves equally well in the examinations.
+
+The system has only attained to its present completeness within the last
+few years. The idea of it had occurred to Oxford reformers so far back as
+1850 when residents and non-residents alike were asking how the
+educational machinery on the Isis or the Cam could be made more available
+for all classes of their fellow subjects. The Oxford Hebdomadal Board was
+addressed on the subject, the names of Lord Ashley, Mr Gladstone, Lord
+Sandon being among the signatories.
+
+The great Dr Pusey, whose mind was as truly liberal as his Churchmanship
+was high, had been struck recently by the number of great Anglican divines
+who were the sons of small tradesmen. It was for Oxford to revive the
+example of the ancient monks of Durham, and to devise means for bringing
+the University within the reach of the poorest in the land. Another member
+of Christ Church whose pointed features, dark complexion, saturnine habit
+and rare scholarship will be recalled by many readers of these lines, Mr
+Osborne Gordon, joined with Professor Hussey in impressing by almost daily
+protests this popular duty on his too exclusive Alma Mater. At this time
+religious tests existed in all their historic severity. There was no
+matriculation without signing the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Common
+Prayer Book, and no degree till after a like process with reference to the
+Three Articles of the Thirty-Sixth Canon.
+
+These facts account for the then dominant Liberalism of educated opinion
+inside and outside the University. Had tests ceased to exist when they
+were abolished in Ireland, as both Canning and Sir Robert Peel at one time
+or another had suggested, it is scarcely speculation to say that the
+demand which in 1868 brought about the unattached system and, after
+another decade or so, the Extension Lecture system, might not have
+organized itself with such drastic results. The non-collegiates might have
+come into existence while as yet the Great Western Railway approached the
+Cherwell no nearer than Didcot. The Extension Lecture machinery was not
+less dependent upon the propulsive power of steam than the iron engine of
+Stephenson itself. To-day Bradshaw's Guide is as indispensable a part of
+the lecturer's equipment as his manuscript notes. Here, as at other points
+in our secondary education, more organization and more endowments are
+required. There should be more inducements to young and competent
+graduates who have the knack of imparting their own knowledge to large or
+small classes to take up this work as a career, not as an occasional
+auxiliary to other occupations. The Extension centres also need to be
+supplemented more largely with local colleges such as that for which
+Reading is indebted to Oxford and Exeter to Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW
+
+    The concrete personal result of the civic, social, and educational
+    processes already described is now to be examined. The personal
+    contrast between the new generation of young men and women of the
+    middle class, most likely to strike an Englishman returned to London
+    after long absence. Sex emancipation. The typical physique of both
+    sexes has been visibly modified, amongst other agencies by bicycle
+    practice. The stately maiden or matron of the period was unknown to
+    John Leech; has been drawn faithfully by Du Maurier. Some social
+    ideals are unchanged, but older middle class ideals have passed out of
+    date.
+
+
+In the foregoing chapters a general view has been given of the social
+conditions under which, modified it may be by the influences of his
+historic past, the character of the average middle class Englishman of the
+Victorian epoch is formed. What is the personal result, the concrete
+individual product of these forces? The epithet 'middle class' is employed
+in deference to traditional wont, but is in great measure misleading
+because the tendency of the age, the uniformity of the social and
+educational discipline through which most Englishmen pass tends
+increasingly to obliterate distinctions of conventional grade, and in
+tastes, pursuits, prejudices, to assimilate all to a single type. 'They
+look upon you as we do upon a December fall of snow; as a seasonable,
+unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, sent for some good purpose, to
+be revealed hereafter.' The restlessness which in the British visitor
+puzzled the Mussulman when _Eothen_ was written as a national quality has
+of late increased among us.[44]
+
+From those who represent Royalty to those who represent manual labour for
+daily bread, an impatient restlessness is socially a note of the period
+which has perfected steam locomotion by sea or land, and by the electric
+telegraph has almost annihilated time. The cheap press, with its
+ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and
+occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated
+Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation,
+into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the
+world, ever on the lookout for new excitements, habitually demanding
+social pleasure in fresh forms. The insularity of the national character
+has to some extent disappeared in the tide of new ideas, and novel modes
+of life that from Continental sources are perpetually overflowing into our
+land. The Universities, as shown in a preceding chapter, have been brought
+to the door of the labourer at his bench, to the shop assistant at his
+counter, to the clerk at his desk. If this does not always imply an
+universal access of real education, no one who knows the England of to-day
+can doubt that it never fails to mean the multiplication of all kinds of
+knowledge, or to generate the social aspirations, and the thirst for that
+kind of self-improvement, real or imaginary, which is accompanied by a
+growing demand for social existence of an animated kind, for a daily life
+less insular in its organization and less restricted to the domestic
+hearth. Some prejudices, as was natural among a conservative people, were
+on its first introduction excited against the new order of things.
+
+Late in the seventies of our century the social craze of what was called
+'rinkomania' set in. Any available buildings were laid down with floors
+more or less lubricated, on which the sons and daughters of the various
+sections of the great middle class, shod with a peculiar adaptation of
+wheels, slipped about, and called it skating. These resorts were no doubt
+admirably conducted. Acquaintances made at them were probably blameless.
+They often perhaps ended in blissful and desirable marriage. But not
+without a shock to her sense of maternal propriety did the English matron
+of old-fashioned ideas see, or hear of, her daughter being twirled round
+in the arms of some youth just introduced, or perhaps without even the
+preliminary of that easy form. The young woman could cite plausible
+precedent for the process. The most fond and nervous of mothers suffered
+her fears to be allayed. No evil, and it may be hoped some good, to mind
+and body, came perhaps from these experiences.
+
+It was, nevertheless, an innovation on the usage of generations to which
+bygone ancestors and ancestresses would not readily have reconciled
+themselves. In plain words it signified the revolt of the sons and
+daughters of the middle class against their exclusion from modes of social
+enjoyment that to their contemporaries slightly above them in the social
+scale had long been allowed. They had read of the subscription balls
+planned by the astute Scot, John Almack, at Willis's Rooms, in the last
+quarter of the eighteenth century. More recently they had seen accounts of
+subscription dances in what were then aristocratic watering places like
+Scarborough, or of the more cosmopolitan revels where chaperons were
+largely dispensed with by their well-born charges at Baden-Baden and
+Homburg. What claim did the accident of birth constitute to a monopoly of
+the more stirring and less exclusive forms of pleasure? Thus it came to
+pass that the pastime which followed the generally patrician Almacks at
+the interval of a century from being a romp of children became the mildly
+gymnastic function of youths and maidens of maturer years.
+
+The next stage in this progress is marked by the popularity of the
+lawn-tennis ground. The private gardens of urban or suburban villadom were
+soon too small for the wielders of the racquet. The common enclosure of
+the crescent, the square, or the 'Gardens,' was coveted one day by the
+players. It was possessed the next. After this, the transition to
+lawn-tennis subscription clubs, with public grounds, and championship
+matches open to all comers was easy and natural. The parlour of home soon
+dwindled into an insignificant spot to the overgrown boys and girls
+engaged in 'All England' tournaments of their own.
+
+Meanwhile, the gentlemen and ladies who called themselves society, and to
+whom a portion of the newspaper press was set apart, were indulging more
+enterprising tastes still, in a manner duly recorded by their daily and
+weekly journals. The rage for 'making up a party' for everything;
+researches into the London slums, or visits to the French play, came in;
+superstitious veneration for the ceremonial etiquette of a past day went
+out. The mere expedition to the theatre was scarcely stirring enough
+without the preliminary dinner or the subsequent supper at the modish
+restaurants which cause certain quarters of London metaphorically to abut
+on the Boulevard des Italiens or on the Palais Royal. They who now from
+afar imitated this glittering example had not, it is true, like their
+betters, any 'smart' sets of their own.
+
+That was no reason why the favourites of fortune should have all the fun
+to themselves. The daughters of the professional class and of those below
+them in the social scale were as well educated, as intelligent, as
+personally presentable, as those whom a partial chance had made
+conventionally their superiors. Why should the persons born with the
+proverbial gold spoon in their mouths alone be emancipated? Friskiness was
+an attribute not confined to the born inheritors of that which called
+itself society.
+
+Thus the laws of middle class orthodoxy were subjected to a process of
+general relaxation like to what, rightly or wrongly, was fancied to have
+taken place in more exalted circles. Clubs for private theatricals
+followed the subscription dances, in suburban town halls. Bayswater
+wanderers or South Kensington shooting stars reproduced some theatrical
+favourite from the repertory of the Prince of Wales's or the Gaiety on the
+amateur boards of Westbourne Grove, Brompton, or Chelsea. In all things
+the accredited exemplars of the latest and most cosmopolitan mode were
+followed by the younger generation of the classes that conventionally were
+still regarded as strongholds of the ethical severity which Puritan
+ancestors handed down. The development was of course inevitable. In the
+long run it will not be found to have done any harm. But incidentally it
+has involved a considerable modification of the old ideas and habits of
+many hundreds among Her Majesty's subjects whose special attribute was
+once supposed to be, in Froissart's phrase, 'to take their pleasures
+sadly.' Lord's Cricket Ground on an Eton and Harrow match day; the Hyde
+Park Magazine as the meeting point of the Four-in-Hand Club; any one of
+some half-dozen eating houses bordering on Bond Street, frequented under a
+Gallic title by the home-staying Briton; these have ceased to be the
+appanage of Belgravia or Mayfair alone; the crowd which resorts to them is
+quite as representative of the newest interests as of the oldest acres.
+
+In theory and in practice 'society' considers itself, and to some extent
+is still, a close corporation. It is bordered by a fringe not always
+easily to be distinguished from the holy fabric itself. Its doings are
+more and more moved by influences originating outside its own limits. If
+this were not so Lord Beaconsfield would not have been able truthfully to
+say in his last novel _Endymion_ that London which during the earlier days
+of the Queen's reign was a very dull place had now become a most amusing
+one. No one knew the capital better or during his later years had tasted
+of its lighter pleasures more discriminatingly than the critic who made
+this remark.
+
+As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of
+the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so
+English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power
+of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively
+recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those
+with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews
+its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old
+and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is
+unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.
+
+In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the
+present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen's
+Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house
+wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation
+of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and
+might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror.
+As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new régime has
+involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth
+is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower
+charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to
+leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer
+succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly
+without tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial
+magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres.
+Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical
+indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be
+unlet; his sons' bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in
+marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the
+old Hall at his 'rent dinner,' the squire, one of a long race of squires,
+has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton,
+Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of
+education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since
+Lord Cairns' Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the
+earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection
+with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed
+into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county
+town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill
+owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life
+lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new
+proprietors violates few of the old traditions.
+
+The squire of to-day, who was the banker, solicitor, or brewer of
+yesterday, reproduces very successfully the existence of the more ancient
+predecessors whom events have caused him to expropriate. His son is at the
+same school, at the same college, or in the same regiment as the son of
+his predecessor; his daughters are not less fond than the daughters of his
+predecessor of riding to the meet, or of driving in state to the county
+ball. He himself is more diligent in the business of quarter sessions,
+transferred to County Council, than the squire before him was; his wife is
+not likely to neglect the duties of the parish Lady Bountiful; her poultry
+yard may be decimated by Reynard; her husband refuses on that account to
+connive at the enormity of shooting a fox. Rather will he take a pride in
+being able to boast that when there is a meet on his property, the coverts
+are never drawn blank. In due time he may accede to the mastership of the
+subscription pack which more liberally than his predecessor he supports.
+The last squire was a judge of horses and cattle at the County Show; the
+new squire will doubtless in due course fill that position; meanwhile,
+though he may have been born in a warehouse and bred at a desk, his taste
+for shorthorn breeding is worthy of an exclusively territorial lineage; he
+himself plays as well as dresses the part to perfection, and might be
+matched for tramping across stubble or plough and bringing down partridges
+against the least commercial of the squirearchy.
+
+This is only typical of what during many years has been taking place among
+all classes. A discreetly generous administration of the Poor Law operates
+in the long run as an insurance payment against revolution. The fusion of
+classes not less than the organization of professions or enterprise is the
+keynote of our epoch. The process has, without an exception, been one of
+levelling up, not down. The classes called indifferently higher, or older,
+have proved to possess an unexpected aptitude for communicating the
+tastes, the pursuits, the habits, the very instincts, which have descended
+to them from their forefathers, to the newcomers that the distribution of
+wealth, the opportunities of industry, the innumerable vicissitudes of
+life, have incorporated gradually into themselves. Thus it has come to
+pass that society in England, in itself the most miscellaneous of all
+conceivable composites, is saturated throughout and cemented as to its
+different parts by a real homogeneity. The method of attainment has
+varied, will continue to vary infinitely; the ideal standard remains
+uniform. In most country districts, the notable exceptions being the
+mining regions of the North, or the aggressively Nonconformist portions of
+Wales, the old J.Ps. where their qualities entitle them to do so, have as
+a preceding chapter has shown held their own against their new colleagues
+on the County Councils. The achievement finds its exact counterpart in the
+broader and more purely social processes just described.
+
+That which has been called the restless, the aspiring, self-assertive,
+inquisitive spirit of the age is not confined in its manifestations to any
+section of the community, urban or rural, territorial or commercial, of
+gentle or ungentle birth. It has been accompanied by a distinct change in
+the figure and in the general appearance of the English youth of both
+sexes. Suppose an Englishman who had left his country at an early period
+of the present reign, and who, having made his fortune in the Colonies,
+had returned to pass the residue of his days in his native land. What are
+the changes that would most impress his mind? It cannot be doubted that
+foremost among these would be the visible obliteration of the conventional
+distinction between the aristocracies of birth and money, the oligarchies
+of manufacture and of land. As from the window of his club, from his seat
+in the hotel coffee-room, from his position at the theatre, the opera, or
+from his chair in Hyde Park, he watched the representatives of the new
+order which during a few decades had sprung up in the old country, he
+would be aware of an improved expression of countenance upon the faces of
+the quietly and well dressed young men, of figures taller, better set up,
+and better carried, among the young women as well.
+
+The ideal of English womanhood as represented in the sketches of George du
+Maurier is a faithful generalization from actual life, historically
+accurate in all its essential details. Even the lofty stature since the
+bicycle began to develop certain muscles and parts of the human frame, is
+now seen to be no figment of the artist's imagination. The feminine forms
+which, towering majestically above the thrones of wheelwork, look down
+upon the dwarfed passenger or equestrian, are to-day perceived to have
+been presented on no exaggerated scale in the pages of _Punch_. English
+women have always had a beauty and a durability of attractiveness unique
+throughout the world. It is only of late years that to these qualities,
+consequently on improvements on their physical regimen, the maids and
+matrons of Britain have added a certain Junonian majesty of proportion
+that John Leech could not depict simply because in his day it did not
+exist, but that is portrayed with the fidelity of historic truth by the
+pencil of John Leech's successor. This latter development has been an
+unmixed good. The transition from the eventless purely domesticated
+existence to the locomotive, semi-public, generally unsettling, and
+exciting life in the case of the future wives and mothers of middle class
+Englishmen, has had its transient disadvantages. It was not indeed to be
+expected, nor was it possible, that the change from samplers and school
+rooms to skating rinks, lawn tennis tournaments, bicycle grounds, and
+suppers after the play at restaurants, could be accomplished with perfect
+smoothness, or that the bread-and-butter miss described by Byron should
+without any jar to the nerves of her compatriots develop into the girl of
+the period, though on a less aggressive scale than she was once sketched
+by a popular novelist in a famous article. The most circumspect of
+chaperons, the most drastic of duennas cannot ensure her charges against
+sometimes making ineligible acquaintance on these public pleasure grounds.
+The records of the Law Courts show that the dancing youths of subscription
+ballrooms, in the suburbs, are not invariably conducive to the domestic
+happiness of middle class homes. The development was to be expected. The
+percentage of friction or scandal was inevitable. As Brummel's valet said
+of his master's crumpled neckcloths: 'These are our failures;' in other
+words, they are the social miscarriages incidental to the strangeness of
+the new order. As the class now spoken of becomes more habituated to the
+cosmopolitan modes which it has assumed, the rôle will doubtless be played
+without any misadventures.
+
+Nothing less than a progress from insularity to cosmopolitanism is the
+social enterprise in which the upper classes led the way, and in which
+those who are always ready to imitate their example have followed them.
+The fashion is not yet fully acclimatised. For that reason carping
+critics, unjustly perhaps, have suggested that English families who take
+their holiday at Boulogne-sur-Mer would do well not to carry with them on
+their return to their suburban homes in England the social usages which
+flourish in the Assembly Rooms of an Anglicized French watering-place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+'THE PLAY'S THE THING'
+
+    Summary of the agencies and incidents preparing the way for the
+    revival of the theatre as a popular institution, Macready and his
+    purifying influences inside the theatre. Charles Kean at the
+    Princess's. Usefulness of Rugby and Eton associations to each of these
+    respectively. Miss Faucit (Lady Martin); her last appearance at Drury
+    Lane; her enduring influence on the profession. Mrs Boucicault, Miss
+    Kate Terry, Mrs P. H. Lee, Miss Ellen Terry and others. Henry Irving;
+    his first London hit at the St James's, afterwards at the Lyceum under
+    Bateman. His success characterized. T. W. Robertson's plays. Other
+    circumstances of the time favourable to the new popularity of the
+    play.
+
+
+At the different seaside resorts fringing the greater part of southern
+England from Beachy Head to Penzance, by the new sort of life organized at
+Eastbourne, Hastings, and innumerable other places, one is reminded very
+practically that only twenty miles of intervening sea separate the French
+from the English coast. The British climate may be less favourable than
+that on the other side of the Straits for the open air existence of the
+French littoral. The more praiseworthy, therefore, and not the less
+persistent are the efforts of visitors and residents on the unsunny side
+of the Channel to acclimatize themselves to the _al fresco_ habits of
+Boulogne, Dieppe, Trouville, or Biarritz.
+
+Brighton has not yet very visibly changed its régime since the days when
+George IV. lived at the Pavilion. Its newer rival, Eastbourne, has taken
+advantage of a local conformation, and especially of a paved sea front to
+present the stranger with various little reproductions of what is most
+characteristic in the social exterior of French holiday life during the
+bathing season. It is not only one or two families, mutually intimate,
+which meet and pass together the greater portion of the day on the
+esplanade that lies in the shadow of Beachy Head. The whole place
+practically turns out, settles itself down for a day's occupation, if the
+weather be fine enough, on the causeway above the pebbled shore. The
+ladies produce knitting instruments or appliances for domestic needlework.
+The men have their newspapers or books. The circle exactly after the
+French fashion is formed, big enough in compass to admit all the polite
+population of the place. When the luncheon hour approaches, there is a
+move not from off the sea front, but to some of the covered shelters that
+stud at intervals the esplanade. Improvised tables are covered with white
+cloths. The company, that the French stranger at a glance recognizes as
+belonging to the order of _bourgeoisie_, proves itself long to have
+outgrown the dislike to public meals common to most English men and women
+at the period of the Queen's accession. At night the boarding houses,
+hotels, or private dwellings that in a long line rise just above the sea
+terrace seem practically to amalgamate themselves into a single dancing
+hall.
+
+Other instances, more picturesque, or at least more suggestive, of the
+naturalization of continental examples, at English holiday resorts may be
+given. Eastbourne is indebted for the full development of its natural
+attractions and for the addition of its beauties of art to the Duke of
+Devonshire. Amongst other buildings with which the place has been enriched
+is a town hall of graceful proportions and artistic aspect. This building
+is crowned by a clock tower so exquisitely shaped and standing out in such
+classic profile against the dark South Downs in the background as to
+justify the local vaunt that had it been in Florence sightseers from all
+parts of the world would have flocked to see it; and guide books would
+long since have commemorated the glories of, a new Campanile added to the
+historic list of fair structures. While the Eastbourne clock tower is
+awaiting the architectural canonization it deserves, the town itself has
+still more closely approached to southern exemplars by starting a carnival
+of its own.[45] The slovenly and bedraggled mummeries into which the
+Italian saturnalia have degenerated have not prevented the enterprising
+authorities of the Sussex watering place from mimicking the battles of
+flowers and confetti that are still supposed to relieve the approach of
+Lent in the City of the Popes, but which as a fact have during late years
+only formed another feature in Roman vulgarity. One advantage over its
+more Southern original the Sussex shore imitation possesses. Real confetti
+are not employed. Pellets of tissue paper are missiles at once less costly
+and less dangerous than sugar plums. In other respects the continental
+type has been reproduced rather too faithfully. Whether on the Corso, the
+King's Road, Brighton, the Esplanade or Terminus Road, Eastbourne, the
+whole pageant, as to the costume, the humours, and the hand artillery of
+the mummers, resembles equally the scenes on the return from the Derby by
+road to be witnessed between Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.
+
+It was, perhaps, the foreign imitations in the social scheme of English
+life increasingly visible during his later years to Matthew Arnold which
+inspired that close observer with the advice to his countrymen to organize
+the theatre. To some extent, indeed, the counsel had long been
+anticipated. The organization of the stage into a wholesome agency of
+popular amusement and teaching began with Macready, the earliest of that
+line of considerable actors who have served their generation during the
+Victorian epoch. But the prejudice against the play prevailing among other
+than the austerer classes long survived the work of this great reformer of
+the English stage. The company which fills a theatre to-day in respect of
+ethics and behaviour is not inferior to the fashionable occupants of an
+opera box on a subscription night.
+
+It was not always so. When between 1827, the year of his first, and 1851
+the year of his last, appearance at Drury Lane, Macready was the head of
+the theatrical world, he found some difficulty in eliminating certain
+objectionable elements from the auditorium of Drury Lane. He persisted
+with his work. At last the moral atmosphere of a London playhouse was
+admittedly as unexceptionable as that of Exeter Hall. Macready himself who
+was born in 1793, and lived till 1873, had been educated at Rugby, as
+Charles Kean who followed him, had reached the Sixth Form at Eton.
+Macready, too, was in his day almost as much a favourite with the clergy
+of the Established Church as, since his _The Sign of the Cross_, Mr Wilson
+Barrett has become in ours. If the Etonian Keate inspired respect by the
+consciousness of his having birched future generations of statesmen, the
+Etonian Macready reflected the prestige of respectability upon his
+profession from the fact that during his retirement at Sherborne in
+Dorsetshire, most of the Anglican clergy noticeable for their elocution
+had received lessons from him in the art of reading.
+
+Charles Kean's acting life covered the period between 1820 and 1868. Like
+Macready, he was a favourite in the provinces before he made his mark on
+the London boards. With him there began, or was fairly established, the
+improvement of stage, scenery, costume, and in all incidental accessories
+that has been brought to so high a point of perfection by the genius,
+industry, and well-judged lavishness of Henry Irving. Byron's enthusiasm
+still glows in the words of his famous eulogy on the acting of Charles
+Kean's father, Edmund Kean, who seems to have been perhaps the most
+powerful and moving artist that the English stage has known. The energy,
+passion and fire of the Keans marked a reaction from, and were to some
+extent a protest against the stately and frigid classicism of the school
+of Kemble. They thus appropriately coincided in point of time with that
+romantic movement in English poetry which in his satire Byron ridiculed,
+but which in his practice he did so much to promote. The epoch, during
+which these attributes were displayed by Kean and his followers, roughly
+may be said to have synchronized with the season of the influence on the
+thought and diction of English poetry exercised through the publication of
+the _Reliques_ of Thomas Percy, who, towards the end of the last, and
+early in the present, century, was successively Dean of Carlisle and
+Bishop of Dromore. This book probably did more than any other single
+volume ever issued from the press, to quicken and complete the revolt of
+English taste against the formal models of the age of Pope. From the
+personal life, character and wide social acceptance both of Macready first
+and of Charles Kean afterwards, the English drama directly, as well as
+indirectly, was a gainer. In those days the social fusion was not nearly
+so complete as it has since become; but Macready and the younger Kean had
+both been popular in their school days. In after life Rugby and Eton
+respectively rallied round them. The amalgamating agency of the Garrick
+Club, practically so familiar at rather a later day, was not then an
+operative force. But of the Athenæum and similar institutions Macready and
+in his turn Kean must have been free; their private acquaintances and
+visiting lists were as large and as representative as those of their
+successors during the present decade of the Queen's reign.
+
+It is not, however, under a dynasty of high tragedians that the full
+development, as a social and intellectual force, of the Victorian drama
+was to be attained. Long after the theatre became respectable, it remained
+dull. The audience seldom dwindled to the point of invisibility which a
+little time before was in some theatres habitual, and not infrequent in
+all. Before the period now spoken of, Lord Lytton, of whose place in
+letters more will be said elsewhere, had gone some way towards repeating
+the dual successes in Parliament and at the playhouse achieved by Sheridan
+in an earlier day. _Money_ was produced in 1840. Exactly a quarter of a
+century afterwards a dramatic hit not less palpable and destined to have
+results more considerable was made by an author till then little known on
+the London stage. The year in which _Society_ was played at the Prince of
+Wales's, till then the Queen's Theatre, in a street off the Tottenham
+Court Road, will be remembered by the theatre-goer as that in which Henry
+J. Byron's last burlesque was produced on the same boards and in which one
+of the actors in that extravaganza, _Don Giovanni_, Mr John Hare, took,
+for the first and only time in his life, a woman's part on the stage,
+wearing the petticoats of Zerlina, the simple peasant girl. The real
+significance of this occasion lay in its marking a new era in the fortunes
+of the nineteenth century drama. The germ of Anthony Trollope's novels of
+domestic life, may be seen in Bulwer-Lytton's fictions of _The Caxtons_
+school. The part performed by the author of _Society_ and its dramatic
+sequels for the English play resembled the performances of Anthony
+Trollope with regard to the English novel. Like Bulwer, Robertson
+fashioned his dialogue on the model of Sheridan. The writer of _Money_
+laboured to reproduce the antithetic polish of his original. The author of
+_Society_ and the series that followed it was attracted rather by the
+caustic repartee in which the author of _The School for Scandal_
+excelled. The change thus introduced at a theatre of which till then few
+had ever heard, was the substitution of the realities of contemporary life
+in drawing room, club, shooting field or camp for the threadbare
+traditions, stilted sentiment, and fustian talk of conventional melodrama.
+Whether the original were, or were not, too trivial for reproduction, it
+is at least human nature to which the mirror was now for the first time
+during recent years held up. The contrast between Robertson and most of
+his immediate predecessors who were nearly his contemporaries was not less
+marked than that between those masterpieces of the Laura Matilda school,
+which delighted Mrs Wititterly, and the works of Miss Edgeworth, or that
+between the _Great Cyrus_ and the author of _Waverley_. The _dramatis
+personæ_ of Robertson were the men and women, the youths and maidens, the
+old bucks and young officers, the pretty servant girls, their ogling
+followers, the dapper apprentices, the seasoned topers whom the English
+public had long known from Leech's drawings in the 'London Charivari,' but
+who had not often been met with recently on the London stage. Now, for the
+first time within the experience of many, the theatre became the fashion;
+the stalls at the Prince of Wales's first, and at other houses soon
+afterwards, were peopled by occupants as modish as the Italian Opera when
+Piccolomini sang in _Traviata_. Even then, however, the first night of a
+new drama, though at the most popular playhouse fell very short of
+reproducing the personal distinctions of a première at the Comédie
+Francaise or the Palais Royal. That was to follow in due time. Early in
+the sixties an impressario, with judgment sharpened by American
+experience, became the lessee of the same theatre, the Lyceum, which
+twenty years earlier had been managed by Charles Mathews and Madame
+Vestris. The first great feature in Mr Bateman's management was the
+powerful and picturesque acting of his accomplished daughter in _Leah_
+first and in some Shakespearian parts afterwards. About the same time an
+actor with whose name in coming years the Lyceum was to be more widely
+associated had given the public specimens of an art surprisingly vigorous
+and picturesque. Henry Irving first played before a London audience in
+1859. In 1866 he had the good fortune to be cast with Miss Herbert (Mrs
+Crabbe) in one of those character parts in which he has had few equals,
+the worthless, persecuting husband in _Hunted Down_. This was in the
+theatre that witnessed the first triumphs of the great singer Braham, that
+more recently had been filled from pit to gallery by the laughter loving
+admirers of Mr and Mrs Frank Mathews,[46] or by the appreciative few who
+realized the charm of the more subtle impersonations of Alfred Wigan. The
+place, therefore, was of good omen for the rising star. The most
+accomplished dramatic critic whom in England the century has produced,
+George Henry Lewes, and the lady who bore his name, but is best known to
+the public as George Eliot, author of _Adam Bede_, both witnessed the
+début. 'Ten or fifteen years hence,' said the gentleman, 'that young man
+will be where Kean once was, at the head of the English stage.' 'In my
+opinion,' faintly murmured the lady, 'he is there already.'
+
+Meanwhile, the popular taste of English playgoers had been educated by the
+impersonations of Miss Faucit as well as by her own literary expositions
+of Shakespeare's characters, and by the written discourses of her future
+husband, Sir Theodore Martin on cognate subjects. The daughter of an
+actress, Lady Martin received her first education for the stage from an
+actor, one of a race of actors, Percival Farren, of the Haymarket Theatre.
+This is the family which at the end of the eighteenth century gave a
+Countess, acknowledged on Mrs Abington's retirement to be the first
+actress of her day, to the Derby peerage. Its living representative, the
+gifted and exemplary William Farren, more than recalls to the present
+generation the genius of his predecessors. Soon after her arrival in
+London, Miss Faucit joined Macready's company, and her 'Juliet' became a
+classical performance. Probably the last occasion that this lady was seen
+on the London stage is her performance of 'Rosalind' in _As You Like It_
+at Drury Lane during the sixties. As a proof that Lady Martin has
+exercised an abiding influence on her profession for good it is enough to
+mention the names of Mrs P. H. Lee, as 'Juliet,' of Mrs Boucicault, the
+graceful and accomplished wife of a popular husband, Miss Kate Terry (Mrs
+Arthur Lewis), peerless in romantic melodrama, under the lesseeship of
+Benjamin Webster at the Adelphi. Some bright particular star from the
+days of Sir Walter Scott downwards has never failed any generation of the
+Terry family; Henry Irving's inexhaustible co-adjutress has only
+illustrated anew the ancestral tradition. Artists whether of the pen or
+pencil, practically experienced in all the publics of Europe, have been
+unanimous in testifying that there is none with whom conscientious toil
+and excellence are so sure ultimately to yield the reward of fame and
+profit as the public of England.
+
+The theatre with us was firmly established as an honourable and lucrative
+institution directly men of intellectual power and of competent education
+began to throw their energies into it as they might have done into the
+law, the legislature or any other of the liberal professions. Samuel
+Phelps was born some ten years later than Macready; he was trained in
+Macready's company; under him Sadler's Wells became once more the
+prosperous school of classical drama. Some years junior to Phelps, Walter
+Montgomery laboured in the same line. Both of those men unconsciously were
+preparing the way for Henry Irving; they were each endowed with high gifts
+of mind as well as with shrewd common sense. Their detractors of course
+were not wanting. Neither Montgomery nor Phelps, on the score of public
+appreciation, had more reason to complain than Henry Irving himself. If,
+therefore, the reason is asked for the revived popularity of the play in
+all grades of English life, the answer must be not so much the exceptional
+brilliance of individual successes as the qualifications of industry not
+less than aptitude which a succession of actors has brought to the
+vocation. Sir Henry Irving, as a stage artist may have his mannerisms or
+defects. Whatever career he might have embraced, he would have made his
+mark in it, because, besides being a great actor, he is a remarkably
+clever and far-seeing man. He is therefore in this way historically true
+to the best associations of his art.
+
+Public speakers at theatrical fund dinners are apt to cite as novel
+instances of the drama's popularity the proportion of young actors who
+have been educated at Eton or taken a degree at Oxford. So far from this
+being a novelty, it is rather, as the illustrations mentioned above show,
+the reversion to an older order. Henry Irving's knighthood only implied
+the just recognition of qualities that in another walk of life would have
+earlier elicited for their possessor a like distinction from the State.
+
+In accounting for the approximation as to popularity of a London to a
+Paris première which to-day so much impresses the foreign visitor, other
+circumstances must be remembered. During the last decade or two,
+especially since the collapse of the second French Empire, the English
+capital has been, to an entirely new extent, the pleasure ground of the
+world, and at all seasons of the year contains a large floating population
+of strangers, Anglo-American or European, as well as of British subjects
+visiting for a few days from other parts of the Kingdom, the capital on
+the Thames. These birds of passage seldom possess a large social
+acquaintance in the capital; the men among them do not always belong to
+clubs; the ladies are too busy shopping to invite, or to make, calls; the
+theatre is thus for a constantly increasing proportion of those who sleep
+within the bills of mortality the easiest and the most attractive form of
+pleasure. Hence as might be expected, the far more amusing repertory of
+the Victorian theatre at the end of this century than at any previous
+epoch. With a Pinero, or a Grundy, to mention only two typical names; with
+pieces so diverting as _Charley's Aunt_, or _Bootles' Baby_, to mention
+only one or two representative plays, the Englishman whose chief pastime
+the play has become finds laughter moving relaxation as effectually, more
+economically, and to himself a great deal more intelligibly within the
+roar of his own Strand, than by travelling to a Paris boulevard. The
+integral part now occupied by the play in the life of the most respectable
+portion of the middle class is shown by the spacious theatres that have
+lately risen in such decorous suburbs of the metropolis as Brixton.
+
+Its utility as an agency of mental improvement and moral teaching is
+suggested by the surprising success of the new religious drama that
+beginning perhaps with the _Judah_ of H. A. Jones, has reached its climax
+of well deserved success in _The Sign of the Cross_ of Wilson Barrett. The
+suburban theatres have not as yet provided a great field for original
+talent in the playwright; as might be expected, their patrons seem to
+prefer pieces that have already received the stamp of public approval.
+While musical comedies indicate an increasingly popular compromise between
+Drury Lane and the _Alhambra_, the romantic drama has once more proved to
+be not less attractive than when three decades since _The Corsican
+Brothers_ first filled the Princess's with enthusiastic audiences. This
+perhaps at the present moment is the latest of all the successful revivals
+on the English stage. The plays respectively founded on novels, _The
+Prisoner of Zenda_, and _Under the Red Robe_, are not only above the
+average as to merit, but show that the popularity of the cup-and-saucer
+drama of Albery and Robertson is consistent with a vigorous affection for
+the melodrama which in Bulwer's _Lady of Lyons_, and in Boucicault's
+_Colleen Bawn_ once absorbed the enthusiasm of the pit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING MILLIONS
+
+    Technical reasons rendering an exact comparison of foreigners settled
+    in England at different dates impracticable. Approximate results
+    yielded by the analysis of official figures, and their lessons. Danger
+    of German competition with English clerks exaggerated. Actual
+    occupations followed by foreigners. Allegations concerning alien
+    pauperism tested. Proportion of foreign to English pauperism in
+    London. Percentage and nationalities of foreigners in great towns of
+    England and their occupations. Theories about population, especially
+    Malthus. The Malthusian doctrine examined by the light of English
+    experience. Objections to it summarized. The truth and the details of
+    English population since 1793. Views of Dr Price and others as to
+    decrease refuted by Cobbett. Figures and facts of increase. How the
+    non-pressure on means of subsistence can be explained. New industries.
+
+
+In the preceding chapter it was mentioned that one of the elements in the
+increased popularity and prosperity of the theatre as an English
+institution is the growing addition of foreigners to our native
+population. This will be a convenient place at which not only to analyse
+the composition of the foreign influx to our shores, but generally to
+examine the rate and the results of the increase of our population.
+Official data for the numerical estimate of the strangers within our gates
+is not forthcoming with the certainty and completeness that might be
+desired. The reason given by the parliamentary report[47] is intelligible
+enough; and is to the following effect. The English census takes
+cognizance of birthplaces, not of nationalities. British subjects who have
+been born abroad are indeed asked to state the fact, but frequently fail
+to do so. When the return reaches the Registrar General, the confusion is
+frequently such as to render it doubtful whether the foreign birthplace
+implies a foreign nationality as well. This uncertainty was not removed,
+but was rather increased, when the Enumerating Officer exercised his
+ingenuity in deducing the national identity from the surname. For instance
+few patronymics are more distinctively German than Müller. None is more
+likely to be written by an English clerk as the indubitably British
+Miller. The result has been at different times an understatement of
+residents in England who are foreigners both by nationality and birth, and
+an overstatement of the foreign-born British subjects. The operation of
+the principle adopted in the last census is exactly opposite to this; it
+tends to overrate foreign subjects domiciled in England and to underrate
+English subjects who were born beyond seas. The general consequence is
+that as the Report already mentioned reminds one, the foreign residents
+returns for 1891 are not minutely comparable with those for previous
+censuses. It will be enough to restrict ourselves on this point to the
+returns of the last three censuses 1871, 1881, 1891, a period of twenty
+years. Of persons being foreigners both by birth and nationality residing
+at these epochs in England and Wales, there were in 1871, 100,638; in
+1881 there were 117,999; in 1891 there were 198,113. The process indicated
+by these figures seems to have been at varying rates going forward through
+a long series of years.
+
+For the two decades between 1871 and 1891, the growth of foreigners among
+us was 98 per cent. It will, therefore, probably not be a serious
+miscalculation to estimate the total of strangers within our gates as
+having doubled itself during the more recent years of the Queen's reign.
+This estimate derives fresh probability from the fact that between 1881
+and 1891 the increase of foreigners domiciled in England outstripped by
+nearly six-fold the augmentation during the previous decade. The greater
+part of foreigners in England and Wales are with us for business purposes,
+or are sailors on board ships trading with England. As, therefore, might
+be expected, most of them are to be found in the great industrial centres,
+or at the large seaports. Thus, of a total of 198,113, 95,053, or nearly
+one-half were enumerated in London; 15,536 in the suburban counties of
+Surrey, Kent, Middlesex, Essex. Lancashire contained 25,109 with an
+overflow of 2,254 into the suburban parts of Cheshire. In Yorkshire there
+were 15,755; in the mining counties of Durham, Glamorganshire,
+Northumberland, though not engaged in mining but in shipping coals, there
+were 14,908. The foreign miners, it may be said, actually at work in
+England are very few. The town in which the total proportion of foreigners
+to the population has always been highest is of course London (the
+strictly metropolitan area); the London foreign population is 23 to
+1,000. In the suburban districts of West Ham, Willesden and Tottenham the
+proportion is 10 to 1,000. In the provinces, next to London come Cardiff
+with 21 per 4,000, South Shields and Manchester each with 18 per 1,000,
+Leeds and Grimsby each with 16, Liverpool and Hull each with 14; Newport
+and Swansea each with 12; the other towns where a proportion of 10 per
+1,000 is reached are Sunderland, Hastings and Brighton. Of the 198,000 odd
+foreigners now under consideration, 1,804 are Asiatics coming from China,
+Persia, Arabia or elsewhere; 1,062 are from Egypt or some other part of
+Africa; 26,226 are Americans; out of these 19,740 belong to the United
+States, the subjects of the Stripes and Stars enumerated as domiciled
+among us in 1881 were 17,767, an increase of 11·1 per cent, during the
+decade. The number of English living abroad is of course immeasurably
+greater than that of foreigners living in England. Thus in the case of the
+United States alone, in 1891 there were settled 1,008,220 English people;
+this was an increase of 35·2 per cent. over those enumerated in 1881.
+
+The complaint that foreign competition in England itself is crowding
+native industry out of the market recurs periodically; it renders of
+special importance to Englishmen the estimate of the European foreigners
+who have, during the period now under review, immigrated to our shores.
+The total of those composing this category, men, women and children, has
+been 168,814; as for the reasons already explained one is cautioned to
+remember, this is an outside calculation owing to the inclusion in it of
+many who though British subjects, omitted to set this forth in their
+schedules. Of the 168,814 European foreigners, 101,255 were males. From
+this total may be deducted 7,421 as boys under 15, and 3,039 as men of
+upwards of 65; the sailors, in number 15,035 should not appear in the
+estimate. When all deductions under these headings of industrial
+ineffectives have been made there is left an aggregate of 75,760 effective
+competitors with native industry on English soil, whom during these
+decades their respective countries have equipped and sent forth against
+us.
+
+With our own population of 37 millions steadily increasing, the numerical
+rivalry seems less alarming than might have been imagined. As a matter of
+fact that rivalry strictly speaking may be larger than the provisional
+estimate now given would show. It sometimes happens within the experience
+of local registrars that to avoid English jealousy and so to have a better
+chance of obtaining work, industrial aliens Anglicize their own
+patronymics, change them for purely English names, or give English towns
+and counties as their places of birth; for the most part these deceptions
+are detected by the enumerator. In St George's in the East, however, in
+Spitalfields, in Mile End Old Town and elsewhere some registrars seem to
+think the fraud often passes undiscovered; but others, with equal
+experience, disavow any reason for the suspicion of such a practice within
+their areas.
+
+As in the case of our Scotch and Irish colonies, so, too, with our
+settlers from the European continent the men largely outnumber the women.
+Whereas in the general population there are 106 women to every 100 of men,
+and 35 per cent. of the people are under 15 years of age; among the
+European foreigners there are only 67 women to every 100 men; only 8·8 per
+cent. of the whole are under 15. In the case of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes,
+chiefly of course, sailors, there are four men to every woman, and
+sometimes as many as seven or eight. That in the case of Belgians, French
+and Swiss permanently settled in England, the men are outnumbered by the
+women is of course to be explained by the demands made for the former in
+the capacity of governesses, milliners, and serving maids. The figures
+relating to the sex of the strangers within our gates, as might be
+expected, fluctuate. Especially notable is the difference between the
+statistics for 1881 and for 1891; in the former year children under 15
+formed 6·4 per cent. of all foreigners; in 1891 the percentage had risen
+to more than 8.
+
+The inference to be drawn from this statistical contrast suggests a new
+kind of immigration and probably implies that with a view to permanent
+settlement in England the foreigner was transporting his household gods
+bodily to our shores. Much has of late been heard about the crowding of
+pauper aliens into England. Some of the figures just examined may have
+involved cases of outdoor relief. Of this there is no evidence. But that a
+very serious addition was in this way made to the pauperism within English
+workhouses does not appear to be true. The exact figures and facts on this
+point may perhaps as well be given; of the 36,871 foreign Europeans
+living at the time of the last census in the East End of London, only 105
+had seen the inside of an English union; out of the other (English)
+668,243 inhabitants of these parts of the town 13·5 per 1,000 were pauper
+inmates; in other words, the proportion of foreign to native pauperism in
+those districts where foreigners chiefly congregate was less than
+one-fourth of the proportion of paupers in the remaining population. Of
+these foreigners inside English unions 51 were Germans; 16 were French; 14
+were Russians or Poles; 5 were Swiss; of the remainder no more than 4 came
+from any single foreign State.
+
+'Made in Germany' is a phrase round which there has centred lately much
+controversy, political, economical, social and personal. This will have
+prepared the reader to hear that on an analysis of the nationality of our
+foreign residents, Germany heads the list with 50,599; Poles and Russians
+come next with 45,074; then the French with 20,797; afterwards follow in
+the order indicated with numbers fluctuating between 10,000 and 5,000
+Austrians or Hungarians, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss; no other nationality
+contributed more than 5,000; the Russian and Polish names, which, after
+the Germans, constitute the majority are so unmistakable as to render a
+comparison between their numbers in 1881 and in 1891 tolerably safe. This,
+for reasons already stated, is not so in the case of foreigners with less
+distinctive patronymics. In 1881 the Poles or Russians enumerated were
+14,468; in 1891 they were 54,074; the increase in ten years had thus been
+some 212 per cent. Germans, in number 50,599, constitute nearly one-third
+of our whole foreign population. Of that moiety, 1,981 are teachers; 1,198
+musicians; 5,358 domestic servants in private families or inns; 659 are
+professional cooks. To pass to a higher social category, 1,207 Germans are
+established in business as brokers and merchants; 1,966 as clerks; 393 are
+commercial travellers; 2,833 are sea-faring men; 282 are jewellers or
+goldsmiths; 889 are watchmakers; 794 cabinetmakers; 1,309 are butchers;
+2,340 are bakers; 276 are sugar refiners; only 592 are classed as general
+labourers; 5,042 are occupied in ministering to the needs, luxuries, or
+vanities of the person from the making of coats to the dressing of hair,
+or the preparation of feathers for Court head dresses.
+
+From these figures two facts of some interest emerge. The business clerks
+who are complained of as interfering so disastrously with the clerical
+labour market of Englishmen do not represent the largest contingent of
+Teutonic industry among us. Numerically the most serious competition of
+German with English industry is in the case of domestic servants. German
+tailors are second in order of importance; the clerks come after, not only
+these, but other occupations. Next to Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium and
+Spain seem to supply the most numerous competitors with the industry of
+the British middle classes.
+
+The growth of the purely English population, not complicated by any
+foreign elements accompanied, as it has been, with a steady increase of
+national prosperity is enough to supply instructive material to the
+philosophical enquirer into the facts and figures of English progress
+during the Victorian epoch. Before looking into these by the light of the
+once accepted theory of population it will be as well clearly to state
+what these doctrines are, as well as to summarize the criticisms to which,
+on the face of them, they are open. The doctrine of Malthus was first put
+forward by him at the end of the last century. During the first years of
+the present, while the reverend philosopher was professor of history and
+political economy at Haileybury, few subjects excited so much interest or
+controversy among writers on political philosophy or comparative
+statistics. The doctrine, as it was originally propounded by its author,
+is that population tends to increase in geometrical ratio, that
+subsistence only increases in numerical ratio. It followed, therefore,
+that unless the population be periodically thinned by the external
+influences of pestilence or war, the poorest classes chronically must be
+at starvation point, and that unless the multiplication of the race be
+checked by prudential restraints, within a given time the point will be
+reached at which the population on this planet is altogether in excess of
+the means for its support. On the threshold of the discussion which this
+proposition elicited, the obvious remark was that it asserted not an
+actuality but a possibility. Hence, unless, instead of a tendency, a
+proved experience could be asserted; unless, in other words, in the place
+of a tendency to increase existing, a historical increase could be
+established, the commentators on Malthus maintained that the danger which
+he foresaw was too remote to be reckoned with. The following is the line
+taken by the critics of the Malthusian theory. It was declared to rest
+upon a series of hypotheses which as a matter of fact were never
+fulfilled. Granted that if the progression foreseen by Malthus took place,
+the calamity apprehended must ensue; it was maintained, as a matter of
+fact, that the abundant safeguards existing in practice were ignored by
+the alarmist _doctrinaires_. Supposing each marriageable pair upon the
+earth to marry first, and to produce afterwards as many children as a
+normally healthy couple may expect, not only subsistence, but standing
+room in this world would fail them. Experience, however, shows the
+fulfilment of any such forecast to be a moral impossibility. In daily
+practice there are apart from difficulty of subsistence many checks which
+avail to keep increase of population within reasonable bounds.
+
+Thus, statistics show that more than half the human beings born die from
+accidents or ailments before reaching marriageable age. Of those who
+actually reach that age, an uncertain, but considerable proportion fail to
+find mates; the men perhaps because they are over fastidious or selfish;
+the women possibly because they lack attractions of dower or person. With
+many more the course of true love runs crooked; the desired partner not
+being attainable, a solitary life is led. In other cases, the fear of not
+being able to maintain a conventional position acts as a deterrent. Then
+there is the considerable percentage of cases where legitimate
+opportunities of marriage are denied. Thus Colonial frontier men in
+solitary wilds have few opportunities of courtship or matrimony. Soldiers
+constantly changing their station; or sailors with a brevet wife in every
+port, are not usually marrying men, or the founders of numerous families.
+Of those who marry, many have no children, some have only one; others have
+sickly children who die. On the assumption that everyone in the world
+married, each pair must have two children to keep up the population.
+
+Hence the critics of the Malthusian theory have calculated that, striking
+out of their count those who cannot or will not marry, and those who,
+marrying, are childless; merely to maintain the population without
+increasing it, every married couple ought to produce a family of six.
+Though according to the Malthusians themselves this sufficiently liberal
+allowance of progeny might be reached without any calamitous consequences,
+practical acquaintance with the contingencies of domestic life shows that
+this quantum will not often be reached. If in any part of the world there
+existed conditions favourable to marriage and to fecundity, it was in
+Australia, shortly after the earliest gold discoveries, but when many
+immense fortunes had been made in farming; here there was work for all,
+wages were high, living cheap, cultivable, but uncultivated land abounded;
+finally there were no catastrophic checks from earthquake, pestilence or
+famine to the multiplication of human beings; if, therefore, the
+Malthusian doctrine could anywhere be verified, surely it would be here.
+Notwithstanding all these inducements to marriage and the propagation of
+the species, the actual rate of population increase was 2 per cent. a
+year.
+
+Hence it may perhaps be inferred that this represents the normal rate.
+That falls far short of the geometrical rate which the Malthusians would
+have us expect. The physiological truth, as expounded by experts in these
+matters would seem to be that in proportion as subsistence is more
+abundant and of a better kind, life more regular and artificial, fertility
+decreases. Scientific physicists point as proof of this statement to the
+fact that wild animals when domesticated or in good condition are less
+prolific than in their normally savage and poor state. So it is with women
+in the western wilds of Ireland, or in the Scotch Highlands. As their food
+and clothing are scarce and coarse, their maternity increases. The
+inference from the facts now cited clearly is that whatever the terms of
+the Malthusian proposition may mean, their significance does not warrant
+the conclusions that ardent Malthusians have at all times drawn from them.
+
+But it has been asserted that famine and plague are the Divinely appointed
+checks to the growth of population; thus showing some external restraint
+upon the multiplication of the race to be necessary to prevent population
+outstripping subsistence. The most familiar proofs offered of such an
+assertion are the periodical famines in India, especially that in the
+province of Orissa, and the Irish famine from the potato failure in 1846.
+On these proofs the following remarks suggest themselves. In the case of
+Orissa, numbers had nothing to do with the famine or consequent mortality;
+the people died because the heat of the sun untempered by rain literally
+scorched the food supply out of existence; if there had been only as many
+hundreds as there were millions, the same calamitous result, though on a
+numerically smaller scale, would have ensued; a province of Central India
+was decimated because the food did not exist. The famine therefore was
+real.
+
+In the case of Ireland, no famine at the close of the first decade of the
+Queen's reign existed in the same sense that it had done in Orissa; the
+potato crop alone failed; corn, dairy produce, food products generally
+were plentiful; corn in fact was being exported from Ireland while the
+Irish themselves were perishing from starvation. The calamity therefore
+was less the stoppage of supplies by Providence as a check on population
+than a pecuniary failure. Nor was it a visitation as regards which man
+could plead exemption from responsibility. The potato rot did not come
+upon the Irish peasantry in a day or in a week. The disease had appeared
+in Eastern Europe so early as 1844 and 1843; it was scientifically certain
+that eventually it would reach Ireland. When, after due warning it
+attacked the plots of miserable soil reclaimed by peasant industry from
+hillside and bog, the destruction of the staple of native food wrought by
+it was gradual. Weeks and months were required to complete the process of
+rotting. Nothing was done. The people died not from the unkindness of
+nature, but from the neglect of man. Had the prudential restraints of the
+Malthusians limited the numbers to half the actual total, the agrarian
+policy which was responsible for the diet of potatoes instead of corn
+would have resulted in the same poverty and, therefore, in the same
+death.[48]
+
+One is not here concerned with the abstract truth of the theory of
+population enounced by Malthus, but with its applicability to, or its
+instructiveness in the case of, the England of Queen Victoria. What then
+are the facts of population here to be dealt with? The multiplication of
+the inhabitants of this country is known never to have been so rapid as
+during the century which opens with the French Revolution in 1793, and
+which witnesses at its close the sixtieth anniversary of Her Majesty's
+accession. Earlier periods of augmentation may therefore be omitted. A
+hundred years ago, Dr Price, maintaining population actually to have
+decreased, spoke of its decline as a great danger. Cobbett and other more
+accurate observers, or less incautious generalizers, in opposition to Dr
+Price, established circumstantially the fact of an increase; but the
+possibility of a contrary view being taken is as suggestive as it now
+seems remarkable.
+
+Mr Thorold Rogers has been guided by his study of prices to the conclusion
+that the standard of comfort in living began to rise among us from the
+Reformation of the sixteenth century progressively onwards; and that even
+during the eighteenth century the masses were enjoying a golden age.
+Between 1750 and 1800;--the period during which the factory system began
+to be known, and the problems of population and production were both
+closely discussed,--no fear of population getting ahead of subsistence
+suggested itself. Similarly during the Corn Law agitation 1840-6, the
+increase of production from English soil, notwithstanding the
+economico-agrarian law of diminishing return was proved to have outgrown
+the population. Later and more detailed statistics show that since 1831
+population with us has increased 30 per cent., capital 100 per cent.,
+purchasing power 600 per cent. During the last half century the average
+price of corn has been falling. Our demand for foreign corn has increased
+and is increasing. This evidence fortified by the income-tax returns,
+forbids the notion that during the last two centuries population in
+England has outstripped the means of its support. The conclusion is
+therefore irresistible that the natural tendencies to increase of
+inhabitants, whatever the occult possibilities may be, practically are
+counteracted by motives invisible and undefinable, perhaps, but not less
+potent. As a writer in _Macmillan's Magazine_[49] points out, population
+generally increases up to the relative limit set by the power of procuring
+subsistence at any given time and place. The absolute limit as is shrewdly
+remarked, could only be reached when the highest skill and organization
+have extracted the last possible morsel of food from the earth; that
+experience has not yet been reached. So far from population always getting
+ahead of subsistence, its increase is by no means invariably as rapid as
+the development of the food supply. Both between 1560 and 1760; again
+between 1830 and 1880, this seems to have been the case in England.
+
+During many years, as each decennial census has appeared, timid
+sociologists may well have felt misgivings whether England could continue
+to support her ever multiplying millions. The fears of science have not
+been verified by the facts of experience; thus exactly a quarter of a
+century since the census return of 1871 seemed to leave no escape from the
+conclusion, that population had already all but overtaken the means of
+subsistence, or that unless our numbers were at once arrested, it must in
+a very short time do so. Since 1871 we have added 7 millions to our
+population, the equivalent, that is, of 1,200,000 families and the same
+number of working men. Instead of the pressure on subsistence being
+greater, or the average condition of our people being worse, the exact
+opposite has occurred. In comparison with the state of things two decades
+since, the masses among us are to-day better housed, better clothed,
+better shod, better fed, better educated. There is, as in an earlier
+chapter was shown, a steady decrease of pauperism; the number of those who
+with their dependents of all kinds live on the result of their
+investments, is growing constantly. Whether it be due to the reduction in
+the cost of conveyance, to the opening up of fresh fields of supply, or to
+the appreciation of gold, the fall in prices of the chief articles of
+consumption, corn, sugar, tea, cotton, timber, is a visible and a great
+benefit to the country.
+
+The fact that the increase between 1881 and 1891 fell short by about a
+quarter of a million of that which signalized the preceding ten years has
+been demonstrated by statistical experts of scientific authority not to
+indicate pressure on means of subsistence, but to be explicable by the
+stationariness of the population in many rural districts as well perhaps
+as by the disinclination, reflected from French and American precedent, of
+Englishwomen indefinitely to fulfil the functions of maternity.
+
+During the period now spoken of, with the exception of mining, the great
+staple industries of the United Kingdom have none of them increased, while
+agriculture has decreased. It may, therefore, well seem problematical how
+the 1,200,000 fresh heads of families have found a livelihood for
+themselves and their belongings.
+
+The explanation can only be that several new, as they are often nameless
+industries have during this time come into existence. Birmingham, the home
+of small industrial enterprises and in a less degree Sheffield, would of
+themselves explain the mystery. And here specific mention of a personal
+experience seems necessary. When the present writer by local observation
+was first acquiring material for such writing as that of which this book
+consists, he visited among other places Sheffield, under the obliging
+personal conduct of its then, and happily its present, Member, Mr A. J.
+Mundella. Close to one of the largest factories in that capital of cutlery
+and furnaces is a small establishment owned by a single proprietor who
+from that source of income alone, has realized a considerable fortune.
+This gentleman contracts for the purchase of all the refuse, the waste
+paper, the gilt or tin foil and other unconsidered trifles included which
+accumulate in the rubbish heaps of other premises. On their reaching his
+place of business, they are placed in a furnace; all the impurities are
+burnt out of them. There remains a nondescript residuum of charred and
+apparently worthless substances. Some of these, however, contain particles
+of gold dust; these are placed into a crucible; eventually there is often
+left a deposit of the precious metal which the jewellers are ready to buy.
+The gold watch chain worn by the Sheffield industrialist now spoken of,
+was of several carats, and was manufactured entirely out of the yield of
+this refuse. The incident is worth mentioning as a concrete suggestion
+drawn from real life of the protean methods of industrial money-making
+that are constantly being discovered by the ingenious and unabashed
+industry which in Virgil's phrase, conquers all things.[50]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN
+VICTORIA
+
+    Comparative novelty of constitutional government as understood to-day,
+    and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the
+    Queen's reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey's
+    Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with
+    the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the
+    Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent
+    changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to
+    Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier
+    parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy
+    to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P.
+    Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction.
+    Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.
+
+
+Constitutional Government and a popular legislature, did on Her Majesty's
+accession, both exist in England. Neither of them was more than four or
+five years old. Each therefore had arrived only at the experimental stage.
+The Reform Bill of '32 had scarcely begun to be operative when its
+imperfections made themselves felt. For the first time indeed in English
+history popular constituencies had been organized by that Measure. But
+while all householders rated at £10 and upwards had a voice in the
+national Government, various old historic franchises had been abolished.
+At Preston, for example, the suffrage had previously been in practice
+universal; so that there, and at Windsor like Preston, the Reform Act had
+a disfranchising effect.[51] All sections of the middle class were
+enfranchised by the Measure of 1832.
+
+With some show of reason it was complained that, while numbers were now
+supreme, opinions and interests were, as in the case of pocket boroughs,
+better able to make themselves felt under the nominally exclusive régime
+which had been swept away. The new constitution was not the only
+parliamentary novelty that signalized the opening of the Victorian epoch.
+In addition to a new parliament returned by fresh constituencies there had
+recently risen at Westminster a new Palace containing of course a House of
+Commons comparatively fresh from the workmen's hands. The old structure
+had been burnt down in 1834. The pile of buildings designed by Barry as
+its architect which is now so familiar a feature in the London landscape
+did not assume its present proportions in all their completeness till the
+reign had entered upon its second decade. During the six years between
+1834-40 the Houses sat in a temporary building which had been run up with
+miraculous rapidity. As nearly as possible ten years after Her Majesty
+received the early visit of her Chancellor at Kensington Palace, more
+exactly on April 13, 1847, the Peers took possession of their new
+Chamber.
+
+Three years later, May 30, 1850, the Commons met for the first time
+beneath the roof that shelters them to-day. Since the People's
+Representatives and the Barons were constituted into separate Assemblies,
+the building which the famous Clock Tower surmounts is in fact the fourth
+meeting place that has been assigned to the Commons of England. It was not
+till 1547, the first year of Edward VI. that the chapel of St Stephen in
+Westminster Palace was prepared for the Commons. Before that date they had
+assembled in the Chapter House.
+
+The Speaker's Chair was then the former seat of the Abbot. Beneath this
+roof were passed the Statute of Provisors 1350, the Statute of Præmunire,
+the Act of Supremacy, and the Act of Submission. Until St Stephen's became
+the synonym for the Popular House, party government can hardly be said to
+have been, even rudimentarily, established. Government by groups, the rule
+in the French Chamber theoretically held to be so mischievous in England,
+but in whose direction we seem to be making further progress each year,
+was practically the rule in the pre-St Stephen's period. Nor would it be
+easy to exaggerate the influence favourable to a hard and fast dichotomy
+into parties exercised by the structural arrangements of the secularized
+shrine.
+
+What are the points of contrast in the economy of the Commons' House of
+Parliament and its precincts to-day which would most strike the shadowy
+observer revisiting the place by the glimpses of the moon after half a
+century's absence.
+
+The accommodations of comfort, study or pleasure that now make the House
+of Commons not perhaps the best but a really good club, are only the
+fulfilment of undertakings which our imaginary spectator would remember as
+having been begun when he was last there. Neither would he be much
+surprised by the increase in the occupants of the Strangers' Gallery; nor
+in the greater conveniences enjoyed by the reporters. Long before the
+necessity for Barry's new building had arisen these improvements in the
+internal fittings of any House of Commons were anticipated. When in 1847
+the Hereditary legislators were about to settle in their new home, they
+were much exercised by the conditions under which, and the exact places
+where, their wives and daughters should view the progress of their
+debates. The first suggestion of appropriating to the peeresses the
+gallery that runs above the Ministerial Bench elicited from the late Lord
+Redesdale the blunt remark: 'It will make the place like a casino.' To-day
+the bright toilettes lit up by the sun pouring through the multi-coloured
+glass, and blending with the bright tints of the decorated walls form
+nearly the most picturesque feature in the afternoon of a London season.
+
+Amazement, approbatory or the reverse, at this spectacle is the beginning
+of surprises which the spectral visitor would find in store. Descending
+into the hall which separates the two Houses, he would meet a commoner
+acting as a squire of dames, escorting detachments of ladies to points
+whence they could best see the House of Commons celebrities of the hour.
+Looking through the swing door of the Representative Chamber, the
+parliamentary Rip Van Winkle would for the first time in his experience
+note the flutter of muslins and silks through the grating that bars the
+compartment just above the reporters' benches, and that is known to-day by
+the name of the Ladies' Cage. In 1834 this was a novelty as yet undreamed
+of. The germs of it may perhaps first be detected during the opening year
+of the present century.
+
+In 1800 the admission of the Irish Members after the Act of Union involved
+structural alterations in the Chamber. Among other things a chandelier was
+fixed in the centre of the ceiling. At the same time a round hole was cut
+for the escape of the hot air. The top of the orifice was protected by a
+balustrade. From above this chandelier ladies were permitted
+surreptitiously to peep over. In that extremely uncomfortable and rather
+perilous position they saw what they could of the speakers and heard
+murmurs of the debate. The first subsequent novelty was the introduction
+of a few chairs. The temporary structure for the Commons after the 1834
+fire was in the old House of Lords formerly known as the Court of
+Requests, occupying as it did much, if not all, of the site of Edward the
+Confessor's palace. The Lords themselves at that time met in the present
+St Stephen's where the Commons meet to-day. Nor was it till after the
+first Reform Bill that the domiciles of the two Assemblies were exchanged.
+
+In the building which served the Commons between 1836-40, no provision was
+made for ladies. By the report of the select committee of 1836 this fresh
+accommodation was suggested. On the 3d of May in that, or in the following
+year, the House ordered[52] that a place should be provided where, with
+less discomfort, and more dignity than from the lamp balustrade, ladies
+could listen to the speeches, and catch an occasional glimpse of those who
+delivered them. In the temporary structure the exact spot thus allocated
+to them seems to have been behind the Speaker's chair, if not actually
+beneath the floor. Experts at least have discovered no alternative
+situation as possible. The Ladies' Gallery of to-day as it exists just
+above the Reporters' box is divided into three parts. The western third is
+reserved for Mrs Speaker. It is called by that lady's name. Here she
+receives as her guests personal friends or semi-official personages of her
+own sex. The two eastern thirds of the compartment now spoken of are at
+the disposal of Members for their wives and friends. There is a ballot for
+the Ladies' Gallery a week in advance. Certain representatives of the
+people have been favoured, as the result of consummate dexterity or rare
+luck, with singularly uniform success in this ordeal. During the earlier
+period to which reference has been made, there are believed to have been
+instances in which ladies clandestinely found a place not only in the
+balustrade above but in the ventilating chamber beneath the floor. Thus,
+when they did not flutter as angels above, they burrowed like moles below.
+Nor, as we have seen, was it till Barry's plan had become an architectural
+fact that the wives and daughters of the people's elect were delivered
+from these two predicaments.
+
+To-day a lady visiting the House of Commons during debate has her 5
+o'clock tea as comfortably as in her own drawing room. If the weather be
+sultry, or the debate tedious, she can refresh herself during the interval
+between tea and dinner with strawberries and ice as luxuriously as at
+Gunter's in Berkeley Square. During the more monastic period of the modern
+House of Commons, there occurred a short interval in which a very few
+ladies on the floor of the House itself on the same side as the Treasury
+Bench were stationed on chairs so placed that their occupants could hear
+without being seen. One day a sudden witticism of an orator upset the
+gravity of the listening stateswomen, and scandalized the Speaker. That
+laugh proved fatal. Henceforth Members were forbidden expressly by the
+House to secrete ladies in any part of the Chamber, either above or under
+the floor. To-day in the interior of the Chamber itself ladies are not
+more visible than formerly. The proposal to remove the grille that
+converts their gallery into a cage is still made periodically; but with as
+yet no great appearance of success.
+
+Outside but still beneath the parliamentary roof, or within the
+parliamentary precinct, the sex that is no longer 'suppressed,' pervades
+the place at all hours. The Members' dining room, where male strangers can
+be invited, is not yet open to guests of our new _ecclesiazusæ_. All other
+parts of the premises are already pervaded by them. In the basement a room
+has been discovered in which the fair guests of Members can be
+entertained when the debate is over by a supper which may well repair the
+omission of a dinner. The river frontage of the Westminster Palace during
+some years has been surrendered at discretion to the politicians of the
+petticoat. Lord Redesdale foresaw the coming resemblance of the interior
+of the Peers' Chamber to a music and dancing saloon. Even his alarmist
+imagination never pictured at the height of the London season an assembly
+of ladies upon the Terrace just outside the Chamber, enjoying as the
+guests of the elected of the democracy ices, strawberries and cream, all
+the other modish adjuncts of 5 o'clock tea. This they have done since
+1888. More recently there have been added waitresses attractively dressed
+in a black and white uniform. Some years ago Mr John Bright, a special
+habitué of the tea room, arranged a subscription for a wedding present to
+the young person who presided over the cups and saucers, when on her
+marriage she retired into private life. Even that statesman would not
+perhaps have undertaken his graceful and chivalrous task in the case of a
+whole regiment of tea room nymphs.
+
+The lady M.P. has still to come into existence. Her sex controls votes and
+vicariously receives them. In New Zealand and other Colonies the same sex
+records votes directly as well as influences votes indirectly. If, as
+other precedents might suggest, the mother country is advancing towards
+the Colonial usage, is there any abiding reason why to their parliamentary
+influence already established beyond doubt, the mothers and daughters of
+England should not add the responsibility to public opinion which a
+parliamentary seat would bring and which they now escape?
+
+The personal changes in the composition of the House of Commons are only
+less striking than the innovations in its social life. Years have passed
+since Mr Disraeli's oft reiterated remark that the future of English
+politics was to the English youth. In a sense different perhaps from that
+which the phrase was first intended to bear, this consummation seems in
+gradual process of fulfilment. In 1837 a chief amusement of visitors to
+the House of Commons was to count the number of bald heads in the
+Assembly. Those phenomena, as the legitimate results of age, are very
+nearly unknown to-day. During the first three decades of the Queen's reign
+the average age of a Member was between 50 and 60. Now it is probably not
+much more than 40. Often it happens that senators are so fresh from school
+as to be unable to forget their schoolboy phraseology, and to address the
+Speaker in the exact terms they used but the other day to the master of
+their Form. Thus, 'If you please, Sir, Mr Speaker, Sir!' is the opening
+often heard of late years from a boyish senator who rises to address the
+House in response to the eye of its President. In other respects, the
+typical M.P. has changed not less conspicuously. Men of the social and
+political quality who followed the lead of Sir Robert Peel first, and of
+Mr Disraeli afterwards, who could be taken for nothing else than the
+country gentlemen that they were, have been replaced by men whose
+antecedents and whose interests are not less manifestly commercial.
+
+Long after the abolition of the Corn Laws the description of the
+Conservative party given in the Life of Lord George Bentinck continued to
+be true. A glance sufficed to show that these 'men of metal and of acres'
+were the products of their native soil. Specimens of this class lingered
+at times pretty plentifully after Household Franchise was added to the
+Statute Book. The tall erect figure of Mr Newdegate, broadened, but not
+bent, by age, still retaining much of the elasticity of youth; the less
+rugged and angular, but physically not less well developed, presence of
+Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, Knightley; these were specimens of Members
+not uncommon within the memory of the present generation. To the same
+order, in spite of a very different appearance, belonged the parliamentary
+Cato of those days, Mr J. W. Henley, the veteran Member for Oxfordshire.
+If the wisdom of the House, its occasional intolerance, and its hereditary
+good sense, were ever incarnate in an individual, they resided surely
+beneath the compact sturdy figure with the countenance, seamed and gnarled
+as of an ancient oak, of that remarkable man. Before Quarter Sessions had
+given place to County Councils, Mr Henley and others of his class ceased
+to be known in their places.
+
+These were the men, contemporaries of Disraeli and Northcote, brought up
+in the same parliamentary, often in the same social, school as them.
+These, too, were they who for his mastery of parliamentary law, his
+excellence of parliamentary manner, and his maintenance of historic
+standards in parliamentary debate, could almost tolerate the Liberalism of
+Mr Gladstone. With a pang they anticipated the day when his withdrawal
+would rob the Assembly of the last surviving monument of the eloquence and
+bearing which used to be the familiar attributes in the first assembly of
+gentlemen in the world. Already debating of the old stately order had
+begun to go out of fashion. Thirty years after the Queen's accession, in
+the Reform discussions of 1867, Mr Lowe had made one of the latest and
+happiest hits ever secured by a familiar phrase from Virgil. In 1881,
+after the death of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone pointed a reference of
+the same kind with not less felicity when he applied to his rival on
+returning from Berlin the words by which the Latin poet indicated the
+commanding presence of Marcellus among the winners of the _spolia opima_.
+
+With these exceptions, there is no recent record of signally successful
+quotation in the House of Commons from classical authors. Not indeed for
+want of classical scholars. Professor Jebb, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir M. W.
+Ridley, are at least the equals in this respect of their seniors.[53] The
+simple reason is that Latin and Greek quotation which were once held to
+be, as Mr Disraeli said of invective, an ornament of debate, have passed
+into the heritage of outworn words and faces. To-day if honourable
+gentlemen illustrate their meaning by a metaphor or clench an argument by
+an epigram, they go for their _tropes_ and ideas, not to the library, but
+to the laboratory. Thus one of them not long since was heard to compare
+the mind of an opponent to a series of condensing chambers. The masters of
+the grand style in parliamentary oratory, as it may be called, cannot be
+said to have passed away while David Plunket, Lord Rathmore, lives. But
+the business of the House of Commons is done in Committee. A Committee of
+the House of Commons is like a committee of any other gentlemen
+professedly met together to transact the greatest amount of work in the
+shortest space of time. Telling arrangement of ideas, clearness of
+thought, conciseness of phrase, dexterous support of special views by
+figures and facts; these are the qualities bred in the parliamentary
+atmosphere to-day. In such categories are the ideals consciously aimed at
+to be found. No competent person seriously supposes the average of
+intellectual power in Parliament to have declined. Mr Gladstone and other
+experts have testified that it has increased, and that the 1893 Parliament
+contained more men of first rate capacity than any within modern memory.
+
+The interest taken by the nations in the doings of the House of Commons
+has not permanently abated, nor is likely to do so, seeing that its
+attraction resides less in the letter of its debates than in the
+circumstance of its being a continuous commentary on the social as well as
+political history of the day, a concentration, epitome, and amalgam of the
+human nature of the period. The vicissitudes of human affairs, the sudden
+growth, the not less sudden rupture, of human friendships; the involuntary
+perjuries of political allies surely as laughable in the sight of Jove as
+the perjuries of lovers; the sworn confidants and colleagues in one
+Administration transformed into the mortal antagonists of the next; these
+are the episodes of everyday life reflected upon the stage of the Theatre
+Royal St Stephen's. Can they then, fail to be more full of dramatic charm
+than the entertainments provided in any other playhouse of the realm? The
+parallel between the theatrical and parliamentary stage might be made
+still closer. As on the former, so on the latter there are certain stock
+parts always sure to be enacted, whatever the title of the play, or the
+nature of the discussion.
+
+The Mr Henley already named, pre-eminently representative as he was of the
+hard good sense and rugged honesty of the Tory squire, was not a novelty
+in the Chamber. He had his forerunner in the 'down-right' Shippon, as Pope
+calls him, of a Georgian House of Commons. He it was who, as a Jacobite
+opposed to Sir Robert Walpole yet said of himself and his adversary, 'He
+is for King George; I am for King James. We differ on most things; but
+Robin and I are the two most honest men in Parliament.' The theatrical and
+parliamentary analogy might be illustrated much further. One or two more
+instances will suffice. The stage character whose chief function is to
+keep the audience smiling and to enliven dulness by a laugh has his exact
+analogue in the parliamentary humorist, whose very rising is the signal
+for a burst of anticipatory merriment. In the nineteenth century the name
+of that humorist has been, during its first half, Sir Charles Wetherell.
+He relieved the severity of the 1831-2 Reform Bill discussions by
+convulsing his hearers with laughter at the farcical absurdity of his
+sallies, or by the ludicrous incongruity of the metaphors with which he
+pointed his invective.
+
+Half a century later the name of the performer is changed. The function
+discharged is identical. In the place of a Wetherell there sits now a
+Bernal Osborne, now a Patrick Boyle Smollett, now a William Gregory, and
+again a Wilfried Lawson, or a Labouchere. In any case the wag is
+indispensable to the proceedings of the House. In every new Parliament he
+makes his appearance, if not quite so early, yet with the same regularity
+as the Queen's Speech, or the Debate on the Address.
+
+Other rôles are equally familiar, and with the same undeviating regularity
+are forthcoming. High or Low Church, dry or Evangelical, the different
+champions of the Church, each in their own era and from their own point of
+view, come forward to defend the national Establishment. These are the
+gentlemen whom in once addressing a deputation of them Mr Disraeli
+characteristically styled 'the children of the Church.' Of this section,
+during the earlier decades of the reign, Sir Robert Inglis was a chief.
+Round him were grouped a little band in which Mr Spooner, and thereafter
+the intrepid Mr Newdegate, and poor Mr Whalley, with his jaded, hunted
+look, had a place. The burly presence of Sir John Mowbray, the less
+robust, but wiry figure of Mr Talbot, both Members for Oxford University,
+belong to a later date. When these may have disappeared, successors are
+already visible to take their place. The stalwart form and patriarchal
+beard of Sir John Kennaway, the less athletic and more sensitive figure of
+Mr Stanley Leighton are even to-day powers in that ecclesiastical faction.
+The two sons of Lord Salisbury, Lord Cranborne and Lord Hugh Cecil belong
+to another generation, but to the same category of ecclesiastical
+defenders.
+
+During the Queen's earlier years, Chartism, that is to-day only a name,
+was an active force. Most of the points of the Charter itself have quietly
+become law. The Septennial Act has not indeed been repealed; but
+practically the term of parliamentary life has been shortened. The ballot
+has quietly superseded the hustings. Payment of Members is seriously
+discussed. Election expenses have been much reduced. By the Redistribution
+Bill of 1884, an appreciable step towards equal electoral districts has
+been taken. The Georgian House of Commons, indeed the House till the full
+effects of the first Reform Bill were felt, was so small, its members so
+preponderantly came from the upper class of society as to give the
+Assembly the air rather of a family party than of a national forum.
+
+From 1707 to the beginning of this century, the English, Welsh and Scotch
+numbered 558. The Act of Union at the beginning of the century added 100
+to the House of Commons of 1801. The additions to the House made by the
+Reform Bill of 1832 in the case of Wales and Ireland 5 each, of Scotland
+8, were exactly compensated by the reduction of English Members. The
+Measure, therefore, which created popular constituencies and with them a
+popularly representative Chamber left St Stephen's numerically unaltered.
+As to quality, it socially modified rather than, as is sometimes said,
+revolutionized the Assembly. Nor, as to figures, did the Household
+Franchise Bill of 1868 enlarge the Chamber. The 7 fresh representatives to
+Scotland, and the 1 to Wales were balanced exactly by the disfranchisement
+of 8 English constituencies. The House of Commons remained therefore 658.
+An increase began with the Reform Bill of 1885. The emancipation of the
+agricultural labourer by the franchise on the same conditions as his urban
+brother involved the sole increase since the Irish union to the numbers of
+the House of Commons. Even that is only represented by 12. The whole of
+this increase was for the benefit of Scotland. Two new Members were indeed
+received by England under the latest franchise re-arrangement. Two were
+also lost by Ireland. Thus the Irish disfranchisement balances the English
+enfranchisement. The sole nett profit in the transaction accrued
+therefore, as has been said, to Great Britain beyond the Tweed.
+
+While the House of Commons as to arrangements, occupants and visitors has
+changed more than once during the period comprised in this survey, there
+has been in the opinion of experts like Mr Gladstone no diminution of
+ability in its general debates. The amount of varied and accurate
+knowledge displayed during discussions in Committee by the rank and file
+of its members has increased appreciably since the Derby-Disraeli Reform
+Act. But, it is said, as our constitution has become more democratic, our
+popular legislators have grown unmannerly. Those who know the volumes of
+parliamentary history summarizing debates in the House during the French
+Revolutionary epoch of 1793-5 may be disposed to doubt the justice of this
+censure. The violent personality of the recriminations between individual
+members of the two Whig sections at this period; the revolting grossness
+of the metaphors and the epithets by which the intellectual majesty of
+Burke stooped to express his loathing for the new Radicals on both sides
+of the Channel; the personal menaces exchanged by competitive debaters of
+smaller calibre; leave no room for doubt on the point. Two years after the
+first Reform Act, Church rates and other ecclesiastical topics gave rise
+in the debates upon them to scenes and noises, cockcrowing amongst them,
+that scandalised the parliamentary decorum of the period, as disgraceful
+beyond all precedent. These incidents were attended by a degree of
+parliamentary disorder which was habitually in excess of the ebullitions
+however scandalous, provoked during the session of 1893 by the Second
+Irish Government Bill of Mr Gladstone. The great change of recent years in
+parliamentary methods is of course the organized obstruction on frivolous
+and irrelevant pretexts raised during debate. Even this is not the novelty
+that some have seemed to suppose. During that distant era when no
+chandelier hung over the heads of Members, the only illuminants known in
+the Chamber were candles. A formal motion was made that these should be
+brought in. The early practitioners of obstruction seized upon this issue
+to delay the discussion. Motions for adjournment became effective
+instruments for delay during the Reform discussions of 1832. They were
+then employed with success generally, and with humour sometimes by the
+popular Sir Charles Wetherell, and in case of unpalatable amendments by Mr
+Sheridan. While motions for adjournment have thus always been used as
+methods of delay, they naturally have had different aspects at various
+times. Thus when employed for fighting a Bill to which conscientious
+objection was entertained, these motions differed entirely from those to
+the same ostensible end made by the feigned opponents of perfectly
+harmless Measures. Mr Pope Hennessy was practically the founder of this
+later and indiscriminate opposition to all attempts to legislate.
+
+The late Mr Parnell extended that system to routine business such as the
+nomination of Committees, also to unobjectionable votes in supply, and
+finally in 1877 to private Members' Bills as well as Government Bills,
+with the avowed aim of paralysing the whole machinery of Statute law. The
+late Sir Stafford Northcote, who more than any other statesman of our time
+resembled, in his conscientious caution and chivalrous devotion to
+principle, Mr Perceval, dealt perhaps too gently with this abuse of forms,
+nor saw fit to employ the new rule that was suggested to him by the
+consummate experience of the late Sir Thomas May. Mr Gladstone's
+management of this matter in 1881-2 was more drastic; it would have been
+successful but for the tactics of the late Lord Randolph Churchill and the
+present Sir John Gorst. After this came in 1888 the leadership of Mr W. H.
+Smith, resulting as it did in 15 new Rules. The practical result of the
+latest changes in House of Commons procedure may be summarized popularly
+and briefly as follows. The French principle of closure already adopted in
+all other Popular Assemblies is now part of the law of the English
+Parliament. This instrument can be moved for at any time. It depends
+wholly on the Speaker or, if the House be in Committee, on the Chairman,
+whether the motion for it be put to the House. If put it is generally
+opposed. Then follow debate and division. For its adoption there must be
+not only a majority but one composed of not less than 100 Members.
+
+With its larger numbers, the representative character of the House of
+Commons has been increased also. The steps by which it has acquired
+control of the executive as well as the legislative machinery of
+government need not be recapitulated here. Its moral, educational and
+social influence in the country is probably not proportionate to its
+actual power. The theory of delegacy so indignantly repudiated by
+Conservative speakers during the first Reform Bill debates is to-day
+accepted and actively illustrated by a majority of Members. More and more
+the tendency is for the constituencies to call into existence a
+Government to undertake a specific task of legislation whose scope is
+defined by the individual possessing for the moment the national
+confidence. To support in that special work that particular statesman, or,
+if he falls into disfavour, to thwart him, the householders send to St
+Stephen's men whose discretion is restricted within very narrow limits.
+
+This arrangement immensely increases the authority of the democratic
+favourite of the moment. It is less favourable to the prestige or
+usefulness of the Chamber as containing the collective wisdom of the
+nation. The aptitude for business talk that shall be to the point in
+Committee has not, when the House has a mind to it, declined. The great
+speeches, no sooner delivered than they constitute national text-books,
+are less frequent than the display of excellence in debate. Afraid of
+boring the Assembly, dreading the imputation of mere rhetoric, the Member
+who has something to say usually prefers delivering it to his constituents
+at his periodical reunion with them, or upon some other extra
+parliamentary occasion. The terse diction and urbane gravity of manner of
+Sir Charles Dilke made him, during his Foreign Under-Secretaryship, a
+parliamentary model. Such oratorical efforts as he sometimes made, were
+reserved for the meetings with his electors. The clever young politician,
+being on his promotion, speaks when he can that he may give his future
+chief a taste of his quality. Popular meetings therefore, and the
+periodical press have detracted from the House of Commons as a school of
+eloquence, or as a national educator. On the other hand the House of Lords
+has no constituencies in the background. Its time is less preoccupied. It
+is to-day far more representative of the English people than was the House
+of Commons a few years before the Queen's accession. It does indeed
+chiefly consist now of men whose station and whose antecedents are not
+very dissimilar from those of the House of Commons before that Chamber had
+been thrice Reformed. Hence some of those debates, especially on foreign
+policy, or grave points of constitutional procedure that used to mark
+epochs in the Elective Chamber are now almost confined to the Hereditary
+House.
+
+Outbursts of periodical petulance against the Peers will doubtless
+continue. Such Radicals as may be left in England to-day are at heart far
+more tolerant of a second Chamber, composed as that at Westminster is,
+than were the 'root and branch' men not merely of Cromwell's day, but of
+half a century ago. Something therefore may perhaps be said on behalf of
+the opinion that any movement which may be successful against the House of
+Lords is likely to affect the House of Commons as well.[54]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS
+
+    Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House
+    of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social
+    characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old
+    County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament.
+    Modifications in _personnel_ of the Liberal party since the great
+    fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of
+    the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone's opinion and experience on this
+    subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in
+    the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to
+    House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of
+    Lords and local debating societies.
+
+
+The average age of its members is not the only respect in which, during
+the Queen's reign, the House of Commons has been gradually transformed. If
+the country squire of the old school of Mr Henley has disappeared from it,
+that is because he is now as unknown in his own county as in Pall Mall.
+The social composition of the Whig, or Liberal, party was finally and
+entirely altered about the period of the first Reform Bill. The change had
+indeed been going forward from the earlier epoch when the middle class of
+commerce began to be, as from the days of the Edwards it was tending to
+become, the greatest power in the country. The replacement of the old
+Whig, with his territorial associations, by the new Liberal, like Mr
+Cobden, was only the last stage in the development of self-government in
+England. In truth, however, the kind of progress now spoken of was not
+limited to any single political connection. The Nestorian experience of Mr
+Gladstone testifies it to have been not less noticeable among Tories than
+among Whigs. There were not, he thinks, in 1835 five members of the
+Conservative party owing their seats to commercial or industrial
+influences. The change which has come about in the composition of the
+party since then is 'simply marvellous.'[55] The specific legislation that
+has surrounded the English Crown by a democracy, is the extension of the
+lodger franchise to boroughs in 1867, to counties in 1884, and the
+cheapening of elections by the Corrupt Practices Bill of Sir Henry James
+in 1883. Notwithstanding these advances, the blend between authority and
+freedom has never been more fortunately conspicuous nor more wisely active
+in this country than since the period of its self-government began. Before
+1870 it used to be said that the Pope, shorn of his temporal power, would
+exercise a prerogative not weaker, but stronger than when he was sole lord
+of Rome. Whether that prediction has, or has not been fulfilled, the
+influence that a constitutional Sovereign can exercise in the United
+Kingdom has increased rather than diminished since the days of absolute
+monarchy were over. Whatever in the way of political initiative the
+Sovereign has surrendered has in the department of social ascendancy and
+civic influence, been restored with interest to the Crown. The late Sir
+Henry Maine, differing in that respect from earlier political theorists,
+has in that very suppleness and elasticity which his predecessors praised
+discovered a source of weakness to the English constitution. So shrewd an
+observer as Mr Goldwin Smith bitterly complains of the fickleness of
+popularly elected Parliaments, and their quickness to reflect the external
+influences of the moment, as of the chief dangers to our political
+stability. Into that controversy it is needless to enter. It may seem
+strange to those who have had more than half a century's experience of her
+loyalty to constitutional principles; but in 1837 no one certainly knew
+whether the young Queen would not insist upon her technical right to
+nominate and dismiss her Ministers at will. Less than four years had
+passed since her uncle William IV. had practically exercised that
+prerogative. In 1834 Lord Althorp was called by his father, Lord
+Spencer's, death to the Upper House. Lord Grey had long wished to resign
+the Premiership. His unsatisfactory relations with the King made him seize
+this opportunity of doing so. The Sovereign accepted the resignation of
+the Cabinet with more than alacrity. Substantially therefore, and
+morally, there would seem something in the statement that William IV.
+dismissed the Whigs to please himself.[56] As Mr Gladstone in one of his
+essays has shown, the principle giving cohesion as well as joint and
+separate vitality to the members of a Cabinet independently of the
+personal pleasure of the Sovereign had been established before then. First
+actively applied if not discovered by Sunderland, the son-in-law of the
+great Duke of Marlborough, the Cabinet system, as Mr Gladstone has shown,
+can scarcely be said definitively to have triumphed till 1828, when George
+IV. reluctantly accepted Canning for Prime Minister. William IV., Mr
+Gladstone's first Royal master, is, it may be noticed in passing, admitted
+by his early servant to have used his prerogative unwisely; but is
+defended from the charge of having used it unconstitutionally. So great is
+the distance in political thought traversed since 1834 by the statesman as
+well as by others.
+
+No thought of reverting to this family precedent has ever probably
+occurred to her present Majesty. The comparison of the position
+voluntarily occupied by the Sovereign to-day to that of the permanent head
+of a great department of the State unchanged by Ministerial or electoral
+vicissitudes, roughly but not altogether inaccurately conveys some idea of
+the practical influence of the Crown upon the politics of the period.
+Continuous experience of public affairs is not however the sole source of
+the influence upon them which a constitutional monarch may be enabled or
+obliged to exercise. The familiar Bedchamber Plot, presently to be
+mentioned more in detail, and the momentary friction between the Sovereign
+and her responsible statesmen that followed it, is now known to have
+originated in a misapprehension. The Minister only desired that a few
+ladies should give up their places in the Household. The Sovereign
+resisted the dismissal of her entire suite. If, indeed, a solution of the
+difficulty had not been found; if, that is, the Queen had pressed her
+personal wishes to the point of the Premier's retirement, it is by no
+means certain that she would have lacked constitutional arguments
+justifying her course. A sort of plebiscite in 1841 had been given to Sir
+Robert Peel. On some national issues of broader import, the popular
+feeling at this time notoriously had not been expressed with convincing
+clearness. On all sides there seemed balance and consequently confusion of
+public opinion. From the altitude of her throne, and by the light of her
+ancestral knowledge, the Queen might have argued that she saw the
+situation more correctly than her Ministers in Parliament or her people
+outside, and so have vindicated the dissolution of the House had she
+chosen to adopt that course. This prerogative of sanctioning the recourse
+of a Minister to the constituencies is one of which the Crown can never
+finally divest itself. In the last resort, however much he may wish to
+abdicate his power, the first magistrate of a State must be prepared on
+that point for a definite individual responsibility. The latest
+indubitable illustration of this truth was given in 1868. In that year Mr
+Gladstone's Irish Church resolutions secured the defeat of the Disraeli
+Government. The Conservative Premier did not, as precedent for doing even
+then existed, resign immediately. He placed before the Queen the
+alternative of a dissolution then, or six months later, leaving absolutely
+to the Crown the responsibility of the choice. If that situation has not
+since exactly repeated itself, obviously from the very nature of things it
+is one which may at any moment recur. Thus it will be seen that under
+parliamentary government, the self effacement of the Sovereign is an
+impossibility. Years have passed since the sense of popular disappointment
+at the visible results of the Grey Reform Act found expression in
+_Coningsby_, and since the Sidonia of that romance ridiculed to his young
+disciple the imperfect vicariate of a House of Commons. However essential
+a part of our institutions it may be, its power and popularity are not
+to-day without competitors in popular favour. These rivals to the House of
+Commons are in their way as much as itself integral parts of the national
+life. If, notwithstanding all the gibes against it, the House of Lords,
+composed as it is to-day, be not a representative body, nothing which
+exists in England can deserve that epithet. Socially the peers of the
+later Victorian epoch are as a whole indistinguishable from the Commoners
+at St Stephen's of an earlier epoch. They reflect at least as faithfully
+the variety, the interests, the pursuits, and the convictions of the
+nation. The great difference between election to the Lower and promotion
+to the Upper House is that the former generally goes by local interest.
+The latter depends usually on political service, on personal merit, or
+individual achievement. That distinction was unknown before the present
+generation. Macaulay, a great writer and the best informed man of his day,
+received a peerage. His personal claims to the honour were admitted by
+reason of his place in the party which from 1832 he had continuously
+served in Parliament. His pretensions to a peerage were emphasized by his
+services as a State official. He had occupied Cabinet rank; he had been
+Secretary at War when that office was equivalent to a Secretaryship of
+State. No coronet was ever given to literary genius alone before that
+conferred upon Lord Tennyson.
+
+The younger Pitt is reported to have said that any man with £40,000 a year
+had a right to a seat in the House of Lords. Some of his creations notably
+that of Lord Carrington gave effect to that opinion. These peerages,
+however, did but foreshadow faintly the elevations of men actually engaged
+in commerce as in the case of Lord Armstrong, vicariously through his
+widow in that of Mr W. H. Smith, and many more. The press, too, is not
+less representative than the House of Commons. Nor in all probability is
+Lord Glenesk the last representative of journalism, as he has been the
+first to receive a seat in the Hereditary legislature. Under any
+circumstances, the well placed English newspaper is likely to be not less
+expository of public opinion than any body of gentlemen, by whatever mode
+elected, sitting at Westminster. Special tendencies of the time make the
+press an exceptionally lifelike measure of the thoughts and wishes in
+every department of life of every section of the English people. Newspaper
+proprietorship has in fact become not less a fashion of the day than
+theatrical lesseeship was a few years since. A number of men agreed on
+certain points such as the development or exploitation of particular
+enterprises, are seized with the conviction that 'an organ' is essential
+to their success. They combine, therefore, to buy or to press into their
+service by subsidies some printed sheet which may yet have the ear of the
+nation but which happens just now to have fallen upon evil times. If no
+such opportunity as this present itself, newspaper starting has become a
+recognized industry of commerce. After a time, therefore, a new literary
+champion of the Empire enters the lists. Its real object may be narrow and
+even personal. Its managers know that if their end is to be accomplished
+it must be veiled by a programme of more disinterested generalities, and
+that popular sentiment should form the first study of its conductors. In
+this way therefore, apart from the great newspaper oracles of the time
+which in all but name are national enterprises, the press has increasingly
+an inducement, that never fails, to hold up the mirror to the convictions,
+prejudices and sentiments into which public opinion can be analysed. The
+reptile press of Germany is, upon any considerable scale, not known in
+England. The connection between most journals whose support is envied, or
+whose opposition is dreaded, and some or more of the leading public men of
+the day, has been often very close[57] and is perhaps, still not quite
+unknown.
+
+The newspaper, however, is but a single agency for the literary influence
+exercised upon the public life of the day. Of late years periodicals,
+appearing at less frequent intervals, have among politicians themselves
+competed in attractiveness with the national assemblies at Westminster. In
+proportion as parliamentary reports have been in the daily press reduced
+to a few columns and in the case of all but speakers of the first rank to
+a few paragraphs or sentences; parliamentarians themselves have
+substituted the monthly Review for the stenographer or for Hansard as the
+depository of their views. Technically the presence of reporters in the
+gallery is even to-day connived at rather than constitutionally
+sanctioned. Yet the leader of the House of Commons, not very long since,
+reminded his hearers that those who were not present at his speech might
+master his points by referring to the parliamentary reports next day.
+Members with a taste for writing, having some carefully thought out
+message to deliver on an intricate topic of foreign or domestic policy are
+increasingly inclined entirely to pretermit the parliamentary stage of
+their exposition. By reserving their remarks for the monthly periodical,
+they can be sure of fixing popular attention more conspicuously. Their
+signatures are appended to their effusions. The editor incurs no
+responsibility either for the substance or the form of the opinions
+delivered. The reciprocity of the arrangement is, between him and his
+contributor, complete. On the one hand the literary impressario secures
+the advertisement of a familiar if not a famous name, good as he knows it
+to be for the sale of a certain number of copies, each one of which
+represents a clear if a small profit. On the other hand, assuming the
+senator to deserve an audience, he is more likely to secure one when his
+views are placed before the public for the first time with all the
+advantages of good type and paper, when they are read comfortably in
+library or club, not listened to with an effort, and even then but
+partially heard in the exhausted atmosphere of the House of Commons. Again
+if the Popular Chamber still be of the same intellectual calibre as of
+old, it has grown also more manifestly fastidious and more demonstratively
+intolerant of speakers who do not hit its taste. As Sir James Mackintosh
+and Lord Macaulay in different words both said, it was always a Chamber
+whose tastes and verdict were incalculable. Since, under a democratic
+franchise, it has become an Assembly primarily of business gentlemen, the
+chances of failure to satisfy it are so alarmingly numerous as to prevent
+all but the most self assured and impassive from making the effort. It
+prides itself above all things on its business-like tastes. Therefore, it
+abhors any approach to rhetoric. It fails not to remember its traditions
+of eloquence, or the ascendancy over itself which to a master of words and
+phrases, to a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lowe, a Canning, a Peel, it was
+proud to accord, like a horse that knows, and that takes a pleasure in,
+its rider. Therefore the House expects from those who address it something
+more than the bald, business talk of the Board room; an aptitude for
+clothing sound original reasons in diction which shall be without
+pretentiousness, but that shall not lack felicity and point always, and
+epigram sometimes. If these conditions be forthcoming; if the Chamber be
+in a good humour; if it be neither too long nor too soon since it lunched
+nor too near the hour when it dines; then the elective legislators will
+perhaps for a short time give their ear to one who rises at the right
+moment and in favour of whom they are predisposed. The conditions are
+obviously severe. It is therefore not to be wondered at that candidates
+for oratorical honours at St Stephen's tend steadily to diminish.
+
+There is another kind of rivalry to which of late years the House of
+Commons has been exposed, which may excite a smile, but which is in its
+way a reality to be reckoned with. This is not that of the provincial
+platform, of the public meeting room, or of the debating society in its
+older development. These latter have always, among the lower middle
+classes, fulfilled a function like that of the University Unions among the
+classes somewhat better to do. Coger's Hall was the school of discussion
+in which the late Charles Bradlaugh acquired great power of direct and
+incisive utterance as well as a perfect control over his temper. London
+and all the great provincial towns have as many of these places as ancient
+Rome possessed of gladiatorial schools. A really new growth of the last
+quarter of the nineteenth century is the local Houses of Commons. These
+sprung up in and for every quarter or suburb of London, and in many
+provincial districts as well. They are still known, and sometimes much in
+vogue. They are not of course recognized by the legislature. Nor, as in
+the case of the municipal bodies which we have already seen at work, is
+their machinery controlled by the Local Government Board. A seat in them
+has been known to be as much an object of rivalry among an increasing
+class, as a place on the green leather benches of Westminster. The member
+for Kennington or Lavender Hill in the south of London, for Westbourne
+Grove or Shepherd's Bush in the west, for Haverstock Hill in the north,
+may even be as considerable a personage with his immediate friends in the
+district as the member for Westminster in the Imperial Parliament. The
+leader in the Hampstead House of Commons, or the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer in that which meets on Richmond Hill is not certain that he
+would change his place with his titular equivalents at St Stephen's. These
+are considerations that may explain why the House of Commons, whose
+supremacy was unchallenged under a Peel, a Stanley, a Palmerston, a
+Disraeli, a Gladstone, is regarded no longer with awe, sometimes with the
+familiarity that breeds contempt.
+
+As yet this diminution of parliamentary prestige, if such there really be,
+is indicated only by a floating sentiment. It finds expression chiefly in
+social chatter or in newspaper flippancies. Nor in the present decade of
+the Victorian epoch are there many positive signs of our representative
+system being superseded by the controlling will of an individual autocrat
+for whom the late Mr Froude thought the time was steadily approaching. The
+same remark might with equal truth probably be made of every part in our
+national polity. It is certainly true of the House of Lords not less than
+of the monarchy. The position practically occupied by the Crown to-day, is
+that which the Prince Consort many years ago marked out for it. Some of
+these functions he was himself able to assist the Queen in discharging. To
+him there seemed to devolve upon the monarchy duties analogous to those
+discharged by the permanent officials in the great departments of State.
+Amid the vicissitudes of party, the rise and fall of Ministers, the
+changes of popular opinion, the Crown was in his judgment the one
+guarantee for continuity in policy, domestic not less than foreign. The
+occupant of the Throne took, as Ministers of State, those whom
+parliamentary majorities and public opinion indicated. The Sovereign
+however had other functions than merely to register and sanction the wish
+of subjects and the decisions of Commons. Chief among these, as every
+other page of Sir Theodore Martin's book during the Peelite and
+Palmerstonian periods clearly shows, was to judge of the quarters whence a
+stable Administration could be formed; whether, in fact, Lord John
+Russell, Lord Palmerston, or Lord Derby, in a balanced state of
+parliamentary feeling, had the best chance of carrying on the Queen's
+government to the welfare of the realm and the confidence of its
+representatives. The most familiar aspects of the political and
+parliamentary situation have ceased to be now what in the Prince
+Consort's day they habitually were. The doctrine that Ministers are the
+free choice of the Sovereign was never propounded absolutely by the
+husband of the Queen. The doctrine was rather assumed by him in the
+interests of the national convenience than expressed in any terms defining
+the Royal prerogative. The slow process of absorption of the Peelites into
+the Liberal ranks; the lifelong rivalry of Lord John Russell and Lord
+Palmerston produced, during much of the Prince Consort's time, a condition
+of unstable equilibrium in party organization, which in these later days
+of popular mandates, general elections which are plebiscites and of
+overwhelming majorities which amount to commissions of the democracy, it
+is not easy to realize.
+
+Some there were who thought that the Liberal disruption of 1886 might
+reproduce in English politics the precarious and fluctuating relations of
+parties and statesmen that seemed between 1852 and 1865 to have become
+permanent. Had that forecast been fulfilled, the Sovereign to-day might be
+confronted with personal responsibilities of Ministerial selection which
+would have recalled the duty devolved upon her during earlier portions of
+her reign. Nothing of the kind has happened. The event of ten years ago
+has resulted not in party instability, but in fresh fixity of tenure to
+the political conglomerate that the constituencies have as yet shown no
+wish to dismiss. Of course in time the same conditions as of old must
+recur. The national organization of which Liberals as well as
+Conservatives are constituent parts, will at some day or other upon
+issues perhaps now unsuspected resolve themselves into their elements.
+Ancient lines of demarcation will again declare themselves. A cycle of
+government by groups may yet be opened.[58] People and Parliament may
+still wait for the Royal choice to close an interval of confusion and of
+doubt. In whatever form this reversion to an older order may present
+itself, whatever the exact contingencies in store, the occupant of the
+Throne as has been shown above cannot divest himself of the right,
+therefore of the duty, of giving a casting vote when his officers of State
+hesitate, as Mr Disraeli did in 1868, as to the exact moment when the
+appeal to the constituences most advantageously can be made.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE
+
+    The general power and usefulness of the English Crown strengthened,
+    and not weakened, by the constitutional transfer of political power to
+    Parliament and Ministers. The national aims of Queen Victoria and
+    Queen Elizabeth contrasted. Possibility of the Sovereign more
+    correctly than Parliament or Ministers interpreting indications of
+    national will. What happened under Queen Anne may conceivably occur
+    under some of her successors. The facts concerning the monarchy as
+    they are to-day. Posthumous recognition of the soundness of the Prince
+    Consort's views on the sphere of Royal duties, and the legitimate
+    field of the Crown's activities. His influence still a living force.
+    Court offices, and reforms attributable to him. The present Prince of
+    Wales exactly follows his father's example.
+
+
+Whatever of power may have been resigned by the Crown in the way of
+political authority has since that resignation abundantly been recompensed
+to it in the direction of social authority. The latest predecessor of her
+own sex upon the English Throne correctly interpreted as against
+periodical parliamentary majorities the loyalty of the nation to the
+Anglican Establishment; then a synonym for High Church Toryism. The Legion
+Memorial,[59] probably drawn up by Daniel Defoe, marks the lowest point of
+unpopularity ever reached by the House of Commons. No one would venture
+to say that a repetition of such an experience, however unlikely, is more
+impossible under Queen Victoria, than at one time it might have seemed
+under Queen Anne. The chances of a revival, with the national consent, of
+the personal prerogative of the Sovereign in Church and State affairs,
+though far from being inconceivable towards this changeful close of the
+century are too problematical for serious calculation. Like Queen
+Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, from her accession to the Throne, proposed to
+herself as an ideal the affection of her people. The Tudor Sovereign,
+however, amid all her desire for the personal attachment of her subjects,
+bated no jot of her queenly dignity or hereditary pretensions. The
+Hanoverian Sovereign who blends the lines of Tudor and Stuart in her own
+person has always kept before her an object equally distinct, but far more
+congenial to the graciousness of her sex. An Elizabeth never willingly
+allowed the tenderness of the woman to eclipse the majesty of the Queen. A
+Victoria has never, consciously or unconsciously, veiled the motherhood of
+her people by the pomp of their ruler. The stages by which the conception
+of English sovereignty that is to-day a national possession has attained
+its present completeness, must now be examined. From her sex, and the
+circumstances of her life, it has long been inevitable that some of the
+social functions (in the sense in which that epithet is now used) of the
+Sovereign should be discharged vicariously by other members of the
+reigning House. Whether it be Prince and Heir Apparent, or Royal Duke
+makes no difference to the present argument. The idea of the monarchy
+actually operative among us to-day whether in its constitutional,
+ceremonial, or social attributes is at all points stamped with the impress
+of one systematizing and controlling mind.
+
+That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never
+was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more
+vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that
+has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply
+to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member
+of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so
+familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign
+or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth
+century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time
+when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or
+resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian
+England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned
+individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was
+who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, assistance in
+the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more
+conspicuously associated with the representatives of the kingly principle
+in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms.
+Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen from
+earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with
+an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the
+accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the Duchess
+of Kent, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert:
+'The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin' (the Princess
+Victoria).[60] Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte
+naturally supplied the first link of cousinly association between his
+nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course
+wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial
+diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be
+developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and
+the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that
+the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast
+by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more
+difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found
+impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of
+a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and
+institutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne's
+over sanguine anticipations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted
+countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that
+the proposed allowance of £50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp
+suggested, reduced to £21,000, was to be fixed at £30,000. All he
+regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of
+science would be necessarily more restricted than he had hoped.[61]
+
+Naturally the economy of the Court system was the first to feel the
+reforming influence of the man who afterwards helped profoundly to modify
+the whole system of English life at large. The first opposition was
+encountered at the hands not of an Englishman, but of a fellow
+countrywoman of his own, the Baroness de Lehzen, who, from being the young
+Queen's governess, had become the head of her household. The abuses and
+extravagance of the Royal establishment shocked, as they well might have
+done, the frugal Prince. Nor was it only that the money expended yielded
+no proportionate return of comfort and convenience. The very rudiments of
+domestic supervision were found to be wanting. Windsor Castle was only one
+degree better than Buckingham Palace. Those employed about the Royal
+dwelling not only had themselves free ingress into the living rooms of the
+family, a nondescript gathering of camp followers, loafers and errand boys
+also contrived to pass in and out unchallenged. On one occasion a boy was
+found, with no felonious intent, to have passed the night under a sofa in
+a parlour next to the Queen's bedroom. The lad had no wish to have done
+so. He was simply shut in, unperceived by those whose business it was to
+lock up.[62] In this work the Prince Consort was confronted by the
+opposition which the reformer of inveterate abuses never fails in any
+department of life to encounter. The administration of the Palace
+household below stairs in a less wantonly wasteful manner was held to
+threaten the dignity of those about the Throne. A check upon weekly bills
+in the basement was suspected of veiling a sinister design on the
+constitution of Church and State. Sir Robert Peel in 1841 had dwelt on the
+difficulty of domestic reforms in the Palace. In 1843 he acknowledged the
+economy and efficiency with which the Queen's Household was now conducted.
+The Minister was vilified in the cheap weekly papers as a joint
+conspirator with those foreigners who christened their treason by the fair
+names of retrenchment and order. He was even attacked in clubs and drawing
+rooms by fine and fashionable people for being ready to compromise the
+dignity and disturb the equilibrium of the British Crown. The chief point
+of the Prince Consort's Court improvements was concentration of
+responsible power upon a single individual in the place of its confused
+distribution among mutually conflicting understrappers. In this task he
+was aided by Baron Stockmar who had all the national aptitude of the
+German for the details small and great in the domestic routine of palaces
+and princes. The ultimate result of these operations was to invest a
+Master of the Household identical in all respects with that functionary as
+he exists to-day, with supreme jurisdiction over the domestic arrangements
+of the Sovereign, able directly to communicate with the departments for
+executing the different repairs. Other duties gradually gathered round
+this personage. To-day, as the Prince Consort had always purposed, it is
+upon him that there devolves the duty of issuing at the Royal command,
+invitations to guests to sleep and dine beneath the Queen's roof.
+
+The composition of the Queen's immediate entourage is now practically the
+same as that decided upon by Her Majesty in conjunction with the Prince
+Consort. The ladies of the Court, that is, consist of the Mistress of the
+Robes, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Women of the Bedchamber, and the
+Maids of Honour. The first named of these, the Mistress of the Robes, is
+in her way, a State official. She must not be below the rank of a Duchess.
+She changes with the Government of the day. Her attendance on the Queen is
+limited to State occasions. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, all of them
+peeresses, are in number eight. One of them is invariably waiting upon the
+Queen. These are the ladies who in 1839 Sir Robert Peel, when forming his
+Administration, thought should be changed. The Women of the Bedchamber are
+also eight. These generally are only in attendance when the Mistress of
+the Robes is present. One of them is always near the Sovereign. The Maids
+of Honour are also eight in number. These must be either the daughters or
+grand-daughters of peers. They have the courtesy title of 'Honourable.'
+Two of them are always in waiting for a month at a time. The Prince
+Consort also in selecting the officers of the Household, showed special
+care and judgment in his choice of the person who discharges the duties of
+Privy Purse. From the days of Colonel Phipps, or Colonel Anson, to Sir
+Fleetwood Edwards; these have been men of first rate financial and
+administrative capacity. Misled by a similarity of terms, some persons
+seem to fancy there exists a vital association between the gentleman who
+fills that position in the Queen's Household and the nobleman who, as Lord
+Privy Seal, has a seat in the Cabinet of the day, and who in 1896-7 was
+Viscount Cross. Hence the recurrent announcements in the newspapers that
+this statesman has been summoned to Windsor or Balmoral to assist Her
+Majesty with her business papers. The present opportunity therefore may
+usefully be taken to contradict the construction placed upon the character
+of the visit of that Minister to the Court. This the present writer has
+the very highest authority for doing. The connection between the Cabinet
+and Court offices whose names so closely resemble each other is in no
+sense organic. Lord Cross, now spoken of, is eminent for his knowledge of
+business of all kinds. He is a man of the widest and most varied
+experience in every department of civil and political affairs. He had a
+seat in Lord Beaconsfield's last Cabinet. Than him the Queen possesses
+to-day few older servants, or more trusty friends. In that capacity, not
+in virtue of his Ministerial position, it is that Lord Cross finds
+himself so frequently the guest of his Sovereign.
+
+The Prince Consort's reforms in the economy and administration of the
+Court itself, though not the least valuable or necessary of his labours,
+naturally appealed less directly to the popular interest than his other
+activities, by the results of which the land of his adoption is to-day the
+gainer. Not a moment had been lost by the Prince in beginning to realize
+his early idea of associating for the first time since the days of the
+Stuarts the Sovereign with the promotion of letters, science, and art. The
+Court of Henry VIII. had been visited by Erasmus, and by other men of
+letters of the Protestant connection. If the story of Shakespeare's
+presence in the group that surrounded Elizabeth be apocryphal, Edmund
+Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh undoubtedly paid their
+homage to the Virgin Queen. Charles I. was the patron of Van Dyck and an
+admirable connoisseur as well as encourager of true art wherever it could
+be found. Charles II., after his restoration, was less interested in
+painters and poets than in science.
+
+Before Queen Victoria, the Hanoverian Sovereigns had not identified the
+new dynasty with any special affection for the accomplishments which gild
+and refine life. The Prince Consort, at the outset of his career mastered
+two facts. First, he discerned, that, even in the absence of a national
+scheme of education, the taste for reading and culture bred not only by
+improved intelligence, but by the growth of material prosperity and the
+humanizing influences of foreign travel, must before long result in a
+marked improvement of the appreciation among the countrymen of Reynolds,
+of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of Southey, of all that sweetens and
+brightens daily existence. The Prince perceived, too, that the lines on
+which English social intercourse was developing must involve a demand for
+amusements and for recreations upon a larger scale than family reunions
+beneath the domestic life could provide. The theatre in England had not
+become then a considerable force. It would have been premature to
+anticipate the later advice of Mr Matthew Arnold to organize the stage.
+The demand for good music in public places and on reasonable terms; the
+growing interest in the works of English artists; above all the newly
+awakened interest among the whole community in the welfare of their least
+fortunate members;--these are the features of the time which in his survey
+of the domestic situation chiefly impressed the Prince.
+
+So early as 1840 his knowledge of musical science and his skill in musical
+execution were well known to all with whom he had been brought into
+contact. By this time it was generally perceived that a mistake had been
+made in not, from the first, establishing the Prince as the Queen's
+private secretary, and in delaying to entrust him with the control of the
+whole Household. The Prince's remarkable aptitudes had impressed the
+leading statesmen of both parties and through them the general public.
+Thus, in 1840 there existed a growing desire to turn to national account
+the special knowledge and exceptional talents of the accomplished husband
+of the Queen. On the 9th of October 1840 Lady Lyttelton, then in
+attendance at Windsor, has recorded that 'there arose from the room below
+hers sounds of an instrument which she did not at first recognize, played
+with such master skill, modulated so learnedly, winding through every kind
+of bass and chord, finally culminating in the most perfect cadence, then
+off again, louder first and afterwards softer. I only heard,' she adds,
+'the harmony, being too distant to catch the tune, or perceive the
+execution of the small touches. It was Prince Albert playing on the
+organ.' April 29 of the year now mentioned was, from the point from which
+it is now looked at, a memorable date in this blameless and beneficent
+career. Then it was that the Prince having been appointed one of the
+directors of the Ancient Concerts, discharged these duties for the first
+time. All the music had been selected by himself. He had attended the
+rehearsal with the Queen. Experts in this matter have dated from that day
+the revival of the public taste for classical music in this country.
+
+Nearly simultaneous with this was his appearance upon a public platform on
+one of those non-political occasions that his example has specially
+appropriated to the representatives of English Royalty. In the same year,
+too, at the very height of the London season, the Prince took the
+initiative in a function of a graver kind, but not less specially adapted
+for energies and knowledge to which under a Constitutional monarchy
+political life is not held to afford a proper outlet. The most important
+public meeting of the summer of 1840 was that convened for the purpose of
+encouraging the legislature to complete the machinery for the removal of
+the last traces of the slave trade. Technically the abolition had already
+taken place. Well grounded apprehensions, however, existed that the new
+'apprenticeship' which was to educate the emancipated negro for the
+blessings of freedom might sometimes be too much like the old servitude
+which it was designed to supersede. This occasion produced the first
+speech delivered on an English platform by the Prince Consort at a time
+when platform eloquence was less common than it has since become. The
+address pointed, pithy, without an ambiguous or superfluous word, was the
+model by which the speaker may well have shaped his subsequent utterances.
+Its terse felicities of phrase have since often been reproduced by his
+son, the Prince of Wales. As a corrective to the innate nervousness of a
+highly organized temper, he had carefully prepared these remarks, writing
+them out and rewriting them, so that nothing might be left to the chance
+inspiration of the moment.
+
+This was the first of a series of princely appearances on non-political
+occasions. To-day, and in the case of his descendants, these things are
+taken as a matter of course. During many years no great movement for the
+improvement by politically unsectarian agencies of human life has been
+considered complete without the active participation in it of the Crown,
+or, which comes to the same thing, a nominee of the Crown. That in its
+popular aspects the artistic movement which fills so large a space in the
+second half of this century was practically the creation of the Prince
+Consort's discriminating taste and patriotic industry would, if by
+nothing else be shown by the course of preparations for the Hyde Park
+Exhibition of 1851. Sir Robert Peel, at the time, repeatedly stated that
+without the collaboration and counsel of the Queen's husband, the
+Commission for the promotion and encouragement of the fine arts in the
+United Kingdom could scarcely have got through its work. On the other
+hand, while the public has accustomed itself to regard Lord Melbourne as
+the nearly exclusive influence for training the Sovereign and her husband
+in the tasks of Royal routine, one may point out that the Prince himself
+never failed to emphasize his personal obligations to Sir Robert Peel as
+his first trainer in the duties of an English public man. Nor from these
+associations did he acquire only a correct insight into the official ways
+of his new country. In his tastes and appreciations, the Prince Consort
+became as patriotic as any of the great men by whom he was surrounded.
+Some have questioned whether the patronage of a not unmixed English Court
+has been entirely favourable to the development of native genius in
+certain branches of the fine arts. The historic facts enumerated by Sir
+Theodore Martin on this point are worth mentioning.[63]
+
+On December 2, 1841, the Prince met on the official business of the
+Commission the Secretary, then Mr, afterwards Sir Charles, Eastlake. The
+latter entered upon the interview with an idea of resigning his post,
+should the Prince insist on the introduction of foreign artists. His Royal
+Highness anticipated his visitor by volunteering the remark that to him
+there appeared no necessity for so much as the employment of a single
+foreign artist even among those entrusted with the management of
+considerable works. 'In all that related to practical dexterity (the
+department in which it was assumed that some instruction for fresco would
+be necessary), the English were particularly skilful.' Such were the
+Prince's words as recorded by Sir Charles Eastlake. The same narrator adds
+that His Royal Highness volunteered many instances of English superiority
+over all other nations in everything concerned with artistic mechanism.
+'Even to the varnish on coaches,' said the Prince, 'it is surprising how
+much more perfect the English practice is than that of the Continent.' The
+talk then turned on the encouragement of fresco painting in England. The
+words of the Queen's husband are especially noticeable showing as they do
+his just appreciation of the conditions of artistic prosperity in England.
+Two great auxiliaries in this country seldom fail to promote the success
+of any scheme. Of the forces thus alluded to, fashion was one, high
+example was another. Hence the Prince inferred that if the Queen and
+himself set the example of having works of this kind done, the taste would
+extend itself to wealthy individuals. The English country seats which are
+the most beautiful in the world would acquire additional effect from the
+introduction of such a style of decoration. With such occupation the
+school would never languish, and would at least have time fully to develop
+itself. When on one occasion Mr Eastlake, in reference to the necessary
+limitation of frescoes compared them to sculpture in which nothing could
+be concealed, and in which this necessity involved the necessity of beauty
+also, the Prince replied: 'You have expressed in a few words what I would
+have said in many.'[64]
+
+This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the
+direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English
+Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the
+work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with
+English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art
+Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute
+and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not
+only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically
+placed the Queen's husband in the van of the new movement for the
+encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly
+than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the
+premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince's opportunities of good were
+increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a
+technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the
+importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They illustrate,
+as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular
+conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day
+with the Sovereign or the Sovereign's social and ceremonial vicegerents.
+
+Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the
+deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity
+concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving
+the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone
+living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince
+Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman,
+for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the
+Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing
+at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the
+statesman's country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort
+was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellorship of the
+University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the
+great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the
+next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the
+same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen's
+eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his
+countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the
+ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it
+is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical
+perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force,
+which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much
+created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.
+
+    The obliging information of Sir Arthur Bigge, of Viscount Cross, and
+    of Sir Francis Knollys, has enabled the writer accurately to state
+    such facts of Court organization as are legitimate matters of interest
+    to Her Majesty's subjects.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+CROWN AND SWORD
+
+    The Monro-Fawcett duel turned the Prince Consort's attention, as
+    representing the Crown, to duelling, the abolition of which must begin
+    with the army. Courts of Honour suggested as successful abroad. Why
+    distrusted by English opinion. Views of the Duke and others. Hence the
+    Court first occupied with army reforms to good results. Contrast
+    between military resources 1837-97. Special attention of Court to
+    military education. Old and new schools of officers compared. Duke of
+    Wellington as Commander contrasted with his latest successors. Growth
+    of rifle volunteers; special influences in military education, _e.g._
+    Edward Hamley. Military democracy. Why necessarily imperfect.
+
+
+So plausible a case may theoretically be made out for the duel as a social
+institution that it is not surprising the custom should have died hard in
+a combatant nation like the English. The ordeal by arms furnishes a simple
+if barbaric mode of settling personal differences without the scandal and
+the weariness of law; in an age whose boast is freedom of speech not less
+than of thought, whose bane is the degeneration of that chartered liberty
+into the unlicensed malignity and curiosity of small-talk, there always
+will be ill-conditioned persons whom only fear of the horsewhip, the
+rapier, or the pistol, can teach to discipline their tongue; all these
+things have been said in favour of the duel as a mode of social
+discipline. In practice, however, it was never found that the fear of a
+challenge ensured social discretion of tongue, or a higher standard of
+personal courtesy. When these combats were not farcical, as the duel has
+generally become in France, where it still survives, they proved the
+instruments of the professional homicide, who, trained to artistic murder,
+went about society, seeking a feud with those whom he or his patrons
+desired to be put out of the way. Stung to the quick by the brutalities of
+O'Connell, Sir Robert Peel, during the early forties demanded, as the
+story runs, the satisfaction which was not then an anachronism. The great
+Irishman replied that yielding to the expostulations of his wife, he must
+forego the pleasure of the encounter for which he was 'spoiling.' A second
+invitation was declined on the ground that the entreaties of his offspring
+had subdued the spirit of the warrior. Hence the point in Theodore Hook's
+epigram published in the _John Bull_ of the period:--
+
+  Some men in their horror of slaughter,
+  Improve on the scriptural command;
+  They honour their wife and their daughter,
+  That their days may be long in the land.
+
+The same statesman is known at a little later date to have been persuaded,
+not without difficulty, to abstain from sending a friend to his chief
+opponent[65] at the time of the latter's onslaughts on the Conservative
+concession of Free Trade. Since then, Wimbledon Common or Wormwood Scrubbs
+has probably never for a moment seriously suggested itself to any
+honourable gentleman as a possible place to which to adjourn a
+controversy with a parliamentary opponent.
+
+A duel was the incident which caused the first intervention of the Prince
+Consort in the social arrangements of English life. On the 1st of July
+1843, Colonel Fawcett had been shot by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant
+Monro. The latter had accepted the challenge most reluctantly; he had been
+the grossly aggrieved party.[66] Under the then existing code, the
+survivor's sole alternative to the certainty of being stigmatised as a
+coward had been to accept the risk of being hung for a felon. Eight years
+before the Queen's accession, in 1829, however, the great Duke of
+Wellington had faced Lord Winchilsea's pistol; the memories of the (1809)
+Canning-Castlereagh and other encounters did not then seem part of ancient
+history. The Prince Consort, with the military instincts of his race
+decided that the reform which he was bent on establishing must begin with
+the army. The authority of the Duke of Wellington was at this moment
+paramount equally in social, political, and military life. The great
+general was known himself seriously to have considered the subject. With
+him therefore, the Prince arranged an interview. Courts of Honour were
+suggested by the Prince as rational substitutes for the appeal to the
+sword. The Tribunals des Marechaux were said to have done good work in
+France; Courts of Honour had been followed with the best results in the
+Bavarian army. The Duke's objection to the proposal was the English
+distrust of a secret tribunal; the authorities of the navy took the same
+view as the Commander-in-Chief. Sir George Murray, then Master of the
+Ordnance, a serious and accomplished man of the world, bluntly remarked
+that quarrels would not be made up, or differences composed by the
+arbitration of others; that the law as it already existed could do all
+which was practicable to repress the practice. The Prince persevered with
+his purpose. His suggestion was laid by the Secretary of State for War
+before his colleagues in the Cabinet. Though the scheme was not adopted in
+the form suggested by the Prince, his action in the matter led to an
+amendment in the Articles of War (April 1844). Henceforward it was
+declared to be suitable to the character of honourable men to apologize
+and offer redress for wrong or insult committed, and equally suitable for
+the aggrieved party frankly and cordially to accept the amende. Thus on
+the initiative of the Queen's husband, there began the organization of
+public opinion on the lines that have long since made the ordeal by arms
+as practically obsolete in England as the ordeal by touch.
+
+The Queen's devotion to her army has always been that of a mother for her
+children; the Queen's gratitude evinced upon all possible occasions to her
+soldiers for what they have done in the field has ever resembled that of a
+woman to the protector of the weak against the strong. It was natural
+therefore that, amid his civilian duties, the new representative of the
+Throne, himself nurtured in a land that from being the Mark of Brandenburg
+was growing into a great military monarchy, should actively show his
+interest in the whole field of military reform. Later, when the post
+became vacant, the Prince Consort, after consulting with the Ministers of
+the day, declined more than once the Commandership-in-Chief. His
+suggestions for army reform, and for national defence during the period of
+the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny, and again during the
+Franco-Austrian wars were made with a sense of responsibility which the
+tenure of office could not have deepened as well as with a shrewd
+perception of the needs and possibilities of the time that no statesman of
+English birth could surpass. He had already been among the first to
+recognize the brilliant merits of the Duke of Wellington's plan for the
+defence of London, during the Chartist disturbances of 1848. To the
+Prince's discrimination it is largely due that this domestic exploit of
+the hero of Waterloo, not less memorable in its way than Waterloo
+itself,[67] came properly to be appreciated by the country. To this day
+the mighty fortresses which protect the shores of the Solent and
+Southampton Water, and which make that part of the previously too
+vulnerable South coast practically safe are to a great extent the
+memorials of the wisdom and exertion of the Prince Consort. He had
+already, while our soldiers were before Sebastopol, urged upon the
+Government of the day the establishment of militia depôts in place of the
+regulars should they be withdrawn by an emergency, at Malta and
+elsewhere, along the line of our Mediterranean possessions. When
+therefore, the national alarm caused by the words and actions of our
+French ally found its expression in Lord Palmerston's scheme of coast
+defences, the memorandum on which these measures were based had been drawn
+up by the Prince Consort at the wish of the Cabinet, and practically
+formed the basis of the action of Ministers.
+
+Nor of all the army reformers who have lived and worked since the Prince's
+day, is there one who has failed to testify his indebtedness to the
+suggestions of the husband of the Queen. In his many talks on this subject
+with the military advisers of the Government of the day, the Prince often
+anticipated those improvements in the administration of the land forces of
+the Crown which since his time have been carried out. As the Prince
+Consort correctly inferred from the character of the English people as
+well as from the pace of official movements in England, must be the case,
+the progressive changes in the English army have been effected piecemeal
+by slow or minute instalments. The method pursued here has differed not
+less from that followed in the reorganization of Continental armies than
+the composition of the army of England differs from that of the great
+fighting machines of the rest of Europe. In Prussia, after the defeat of
+Jena (1806); in Austria after France had triumphed for Italy on the field
+of Solferino (1859) the organic reconstruction of armies was possible.
+Nothing of the same sort has taken place in England. Nothing, as the
+Prince Consort perceived, of this kind could be effected here, unless
+under the conscription. That system the Queen's husband once observed was
+not likely to be established in England without a revolution.
+
+The changes which the Prince suggested in able memoranda to successive
+Ministers, which indeed he partly foresaw as coming, may in their general
+results briefly be glanced at now. The mere enumeration of the military
+resources of the country on the Queen's accession and on the eve of the
+sixtieth anniversary of that event needs few words to deepen the contrast.
+In 1837 the total military strength (regular army) of the country was
+101,000. Sixty years later these figures were 147,105.[68] In 1837 India
+was garrisoned by the Company's army of 26,500. In 1897 the Indian
+military strength was 74,299 British, 129,963 Native. The increase has
+been therefore, nearly threefold. In 1837 the Irish troops were 20,000. In
+1897 these were between 26,000 and 27,000. As against the 26,000 troops in
+the Channel Islands and Great Britain in 1837, there were in 1897, 81,516.
+The entire strength of the horsed-field artillery in the accession year
+was 72 guns--all at home. On New Year's Day 1897 the artillery total of
+all kinds at home and abroad was 219 batteries or companies. In 1837 the
+Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 12-pounder howitzers, and
+6-pounder guns; the Field batteries had 9-pounder guns, 24-pounder
+howitzers. The infantry still used the old flint 'Brown Bess,' which in
+the cant phrase of the time was warranted at 200 yards to miss a haystack.
+The Rifle regiments used the Brunswick rifle which at 400 yards, according
+to Lord Wolseley, could not implicitly be trusted. To-day, the equipping
+of our troops with the latest weapons of precision which contemporary
+science designs is of itself a great department of English artificership.
+Jealousy of the army is as much a bequest from Puritan times to the House
+of Commons, as jealousy of the Church. Under the two first Georges, bitter
+and tedious debates on the maintenance of the Hanoverian soldiers were of
+constant recurrence. As a consequence, the standing troops which in the
+Napoleonic wars had been 220,000 men were gradually reduced till in three
+years after the peace (1818), they were only 80,000 strong.
+
+Not without much pressure had Parliament during the earliest infancy of
+the Colonies provided a handful of soldiers for the protection of settlers
+in the lands beyond the sea as well as for the maintenance of civil order
+at home. It was the paucity of the numbers available for his orders which
+rendered the Duke of Wellington's scheme of London defence against
+Chartist attack so memorable a piece of strategy. Even the influence and
+popularity of this great soldier only secured the existence of a small
+army at home on condition that it did not flaunt itself ostentatiously
+before the civilian population. To keep up any fighting strength at all
+the non-combatant portion of the army was reduced to an ineffective
+minimum. Without exception, regiments were weak in men and horses. The
+four chief company depôts at home consisted of veterans waiting their
+discharge, of invalids, and of ineffective, or imperfectly effective,
+recruits.
+
+Sometimes, as during the Canadian and Jamaica troubles in the earlier
+years of the reign, additional troops were required for the Colonies.
+These were composed of volunteers from other regiments and of casual
+recruits. The _personnel_ of our army may be inferred from the Duke of
+Wellington's oft-quoted remark that the man who enlisted was the worst and
+most drunken inhabitant of the village. This was the scum of the earth
+which under officers trained on the playing fields of Eton, the Duke had
+led to victory in his Peninsular campaigns and in the Low Countries
+against the consummate veterans of the French army. To win the affection
+of his men; to make them feel that their commander was also their friend,
+and of the same flesh and blood as themselves never occurred to the great
+Duke. His latter-day successor, Lord Wolseley, on the Christmas day of
+1896, visited the Wellington Barracks to taste the pudding and test the
+comforts of the men. That was not the great Duke's way.
+
+The moral and social improvement in the private soldier since the era of
+humaner treatment began is shown by a progressive decrease in the number
+of Courts Martial. In 1876 they were 12,187, in 1895, 8,211, a reduction
+of about one-third. The treatment of soldiers by their superiors was
+admirably adapted to demoralize them as men without improving them as
+soldiers. When the recruit took the Queen's shilling, he ceased to be a
+free citizen. He had said farewell to the world outside the barrack yard.
+He became a nameless piece of martial machinery; sometimes he was
+indulged; more often he was flogged. Nothing that could extinguish respect
+for himself or his officers, was left undone. It had been the Duke of
+Wellington's business to win victories not to conciliate men. The moral
+and personal influence of such men as Lord Roberts and others which since
+the Duke's day has been exercised for the moral and physical advantage of
+the soldier is not an instrument that the hero of Waterloo often employed;
+he did not believe in it. Nor was it a soldier, but a schoolmaster, Dr
+Arnold of Rugby, who formulated the truth, that the best way of improving
+character is to treat persons on the assumption of their becoming what you
+wish them to be.
+
+To pass to other details in the military contrast between the sixtieth and
+the first years of the Queen's reign the short service system which has
+proved admittedly so effective had occurred as a possibility only to a few
+reformers of whom the Prince Consort was one, and Sir Charles Napier
+another. In 1837 enlistment was for life or twenty-one years; the seven
+years' term had been urged already by Napier. It was not however till 1847
+that the reduction to ten years was sanctioned and then only by way of
+special inducement for recruits when they were exceptionally few. Those
+who can recall the scenes witnessed outside public houses in the country,
+in the purlieus of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in London will not
+consider the term 'crimping' too strong an expression to apply to the
+process of forcing the Queen's shilling into the hands of half tipsy
+yokels, and entirely intoxicated or desperate roughs. Nor is it surprising
+that the Sergeant Kites of the period found all their arts of inventive
+persuasion, all their largesses of drink necessary to induce the gallant
+fellows whom they addressed to serve the Queen. Without the stimulating
+allurement of drums and fifes playing, of banners flying, and unless the
+future had been seen through a haze of beery or spirituous splendour, the
+tale of recruits would have fallen lamentably short.
+
+In the eyes of sober citizens of the industrial class, the life of the
+soldier seemed only one degree less dismal and shameful than the career of
+the hulks. As a fact the soldier's lot was perhaps half a century ago not
+much more tolerable than that of the convict shipped for his offences
+beyond seas. A prison with a chance of being killed in it represented in
+the popular eye the existence of the private soldier. It involved
+transportation with hard labour as a matter of course. One battalion first
+raised in 1700 had been the whole of those 137 years abroad on active
+service. When his destiny was less severe than this, a life insufferably
+tedious was led by him in barracks pestilently unhealthy. To-day, upon a
+different plane of comfort, and on a reduced scale of luxury, the private
+soldiers may be said to enjoy the same recreations and opportunities of
+improvement as his officer. He is the master of his own time during
+several of the best hours in every day. He has no more difficulty in
+obtaining leave up to midnight for a theatre visit than a Woolwich cadet
+in getting a Sunday exeat from the Academy. Rooms for study and pastime
+are provided within his barracks.
+
+Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in
+1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children
+herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever,
+with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their
+country's battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not
+wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The
+Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to
+time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a
+prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British
+punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after
+an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of
+parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire
+abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of
+Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was
+to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of
+regulars every other branch of the Service.
+
+Thus sixty years ago the Militia force of the country was declared by the
+Adjutant-General of the day practically to be non-existent. Before 1815
+this force had been a considerable body. After the Peace it dwindled down
+to less than 70,000; when the Queen mounted her throne, it was seldom or
+never regularly drilled. There had been no ballot for it since 1831.
+Twenty-eight years later, December 1895, the strength of an annually
+trained Militia was 107,742. The Militia, too, in 1837 was administered
+not as it now is by the War Office, but by the Home Secretary in
+conjunction with the Lords Lieutenant of Counties; its payment was
+provided for in the civil not the military estimates; in 1837 its expense
+was £192,115. The Yeomanry, then called Volunteers, comprised 18,000 men
+of all ranks, at a cost in round numbers of £105,400. In 1897 the
+Yeomanry, instructed not less systematically than the Militia, were a
+force of 11,678 men.
+
+Important additions to the permanent strength of the country against an
+emergency were made, largely on the Prince Consort's initiative, during
+the first decade of the reign. In 1842 the military pensioners already
+enrolled and liable to service were regularly organized, less however as a
+military power than as an aid to the civil Government, to the number of
+7,000 men. This, too, was the period in which (1846) Sir John Burgoyne
+submitted to Lord John Russell a State paper on that subject of coast
+defences which had already engaged the Duke of Wellington and had been
+taken up warmly as mentioned above by the Queen's husband. The Channel
+Tunnel scheme was then unborn in the brains of future projectors. Our
+military experts held England sufficiently to be weakened as it was by
+the isthmus of steam which bridged the Straits of Dover. Sir John
+Burgoyne's estimate in 1846 was that after providing for Ireland and for
+home fortifications, only a maximum of 10,000 men could be placed in the
+field; that the entire United Kingdom did not possess field guns enough
+for 20,000 men; that there were no reserves of muskets or military stores;
+that the dockyards were defenceless against any sudden attack. In 1847 the
+apprehensions caused by these expert disclosures moved Lord Palmerston,
+when Foreign Secretary in the Russell Cabinet, to suggest a loan for
+military works along the Hampshire and Dorsetshire coast. Nothing,
+however, was actually done until the Prince Consort in May 1859 secured
+the issue of instructions to Lords Lieutenant of Counties by the War
+Secretary. These resulted in the raising of the Volunteers. Lord
+Palmerston was himself Prime Minister then. The attitude of Napoleon III.
+towards England and the Austrian war scare of 1859 supplied the Government
+with the leverage for the vote needed to strengthen the coast protection
+of England in accordance with the Prince Consort's proposal of twelve
+years earlier. On June 23, 1860, the earliest Volunteer Review was held in
+Hyde Park. A week or so later, on July 2, the Volunteers first met on
+Wimbledon Common; the competition was opened by Her Majesty discharging
+her rifle and scoring the inaugural bull's eye.
+
+A quarter of a century later the Volunteers had risen from 119,000 in 1860
+to 226,752 in 1886, of whom 220,000 were efficients. At the number then
+reached subject to fluctuations of some thousands periodically they seem
+disposed to remain. In Great Britain 800,000 men of military age have
+passed through the Volunteers. Thus, not counting our natural rampart of
+sea, and a navy which public opinion, if not official patriotism, insists
+on maintaining at a high point, the coast fortresses bristling in nearly
+continuous array from Dover to the Land's End mask behind them little less
+than 1,000,000 citizen soldiers, who with some help from their brethren of
+the Royal Artillery could effectively man our coast batteries.
+
+Military education under teachers of the new school and the class of
+officers thus produced are the immediate outcome of the interest taken in
+the army by the Court at, and subsequently to, the time of the Prince
+Consort. The whole scheme of education under which the commanders of the
+future are trained and a general anxiety for the most beneficent use of
+the Queen's prerogative, were much in the thoughts of the Queen's husband.
+The council of military education was largely the work of the Prince, as
+also was the formation of the Aldershot camp. When a 'governor' was to be
+chosen for the Prince of Wales, the selection made was the first Commander
+at Aldershot and one of the chief members of the education council, Sir
+William Knollys, who, on the Prince reaching his majority became chief of
+his household. When that veteran was appointed Usher of the Black Rod he
+was succeeded as Private Secretary to the Heir Apparent by one so
+thoroughly trained to his administrative methods as his son, Sir Francis
+Knollys;--a man in whom common sense attains as nearly as is conceivable
+to the calibre of absolute genius. It was at the period now mentioned and
+under these influences that officers in the scientific corps began to get
+their proper share of army staff appointments and commands. So entirely
+have the old disabilities of that corps disappeared that to-day, in
+striking contrast to the earlier experience, an officer of Royal Artillery
+or Royal Engineers who in general respects shows the necessary aptitude
+enjoys the same chance as anyone else of staff employment in peace. When
+he has reached the grade of General officer, he will not be at any
+disadvantage in the process of selection for a command. Here merit alone
+tells now. Whatever arm of the Service to which he belongs the best
+candidate practically never fails to be chosen. Generally, in the opinion
+of the best professional judges, the young officer finds the army a
+self-supporting profession. The exact experience seems to be that a young
+man obtaining a commission in the infantry of the Line or in the Artillery
+can look forward at no distant date to marrying in fair comfort, and that
+as a bachelor he requires no larger allowance or private means than he
+would need in any other branch of the public employ, that, for example, of
+the Colonial Service.
+
+In cavalry regiments, or in the Household Brigade, life is more costly. In
+these cases, the young officer could scarcely subsist in comfort without
+private resources equal to those on which young men entering the
+diplomatic service must at the outset of their career be able to count.
+Obviously if the army is to be made a career sufficiently attractive for
+young Englishmen of first-rate abilities as well as of gentle birth, the
+prizes of the profession must not, for the sake of an unwise national
+economy, be too severely diminished in value. The complaint is general and
+just that the emoluments of those who win their way to the top are already
+unattractively small and few. It cannot be a satisfactory state of things
+under which no General officer can afford, without private fortune of his
+own, to take a command. Impolitic retrenchment has touched other positions
+than these. Thus, quite recently the salary of the Military Secretary to
+the Commander-in-Chief has been cut down from £2,100 to £1,500; that of
+Adjutant-General to the Forces from £2,700 to £2,100; that of Governor of
+the Royal Military Academy from £2,000 to £1,500. The unwisdom of these
+reductions and the comparative smallness of the highest army stipends,
+become the more apparent when it is remembered that all military
+appointments, unlike civil appointments from the Primacy of Canterbury
+down to a junior Treasury lordship, are for five years only, that the
+installation in these posts, and the establishment they require are
+necessarily costly; thus the choice is practically limited to men of
+means. Nor does a timocratic[69] scheme of military preferment accord well
+with the democratic ideal of careers unrestrictedly open to all talents.
+
+The reform in the system of officers' education which the Prince Consort
+launched his eldest son has already lived to see practically
+accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer
+at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his
+worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be
+recognised to-day in Thackeray's Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish;
+before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had
+developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course
+candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day,
+naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a
+shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But
+he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of
+history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There
+are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore
+or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps
+something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely
+an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers,--the
+school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was,
+and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.
+
+The man-of-war's-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books,
+with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better
+informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To
+speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has
+felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the
+atmosphere of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed
+through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to
+mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty
+years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between
+what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a
+future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the
+spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some
+looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after
+Albert Smith's medical student.
+
+Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any
+afternoon issuing from the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up
+gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly
+noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley.
+Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of
+the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian
+friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by
+the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of
+Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These
+were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went
+on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained
+to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this
+able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a
+right to be so by having done more than any other man of his generation
+for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who
+stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot,
+Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when
+there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his
+dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the
+intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than
+anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal
+partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of
+over-estimating the good done by his book on the _Operations of War_. This
+was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and
+tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those
+subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war
+out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts
+of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley's great
+treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and
+M'Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by
+years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the
+clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers
+how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the
+past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim
+to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct
+from that of mere information.
+
+Intellectual quality is not the only respect in which there has been
+lately witnessed a change among the officers of the army. The Crimean War
+was followed by many promotions to the grade of officers from the ranks.
+Since then the average number of commissions given in this way seems to
+have been about twenty-five a year. Of this number 16 have gone to
+infantry, 4 to cavalry, and the remainder to other branches of the
+Service. These promotions, suitable as they are to the day of democracy,
+cannot of course affect sensibly the tone or the _personnel_ of the
+officers of the Queen's army, who will continue to be, as they have been,
+men born to the social advantages of gentle station. The social fusion and
+personal intimacy of men whose antecedents and interests differ, though
+their official rank be identical, is not likely ever to be more complete
+than between English and native officers in the Indian Staff Corps
+regiments; though the difficulty in the way of amalgamation proceeds
+probably less from the exclusiveness of the older officer than from the
+indisposition of the new to avail himself of the social opportunities
+placed technically at his disposal.[70]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES
+
+    Great reduction of the navy, as well as of the army, between the
+    Napoleonic wars and the Queen's accession. But silently a reaction
+    soon set in. First beginnings of new policy. Reform in the training of
+    sailors in gunnery; later developments of naval education for officers
+    and men; the existing course compared with the past. Successive stages
+    in the replacement of sails by steam power. A navy transformed by
+    Steam and Iron. Lessons of contemporary experience gradually applied
+    to the English navy, especially those learnt from the American Civil
+    War and the Austro-Italian War.
+
+
+After the Napoleonic wars the British navy, like the British army, was
+greatly reduced. In the Navy List of 1837, 132 vessels are named. Sixty
+years later they had increased to 461. Now the naval policy of successive
+Administrations seems to have acquired the same continuity as belongs
+traditionally to foreign policy. It is a first principle to-day with all
+parties in the State that the iron walls which, as our first line of
+defence, have replaced the walls of wood, should not be reduced to a point
+at which they need fear the combined opposition, if not of Europe, still
+of the two or three most powerful of European fleets. At the moment when
+the great reductions in our fleet were contemplated, Napoleon at St
+Helena, in the course of the conversations recorded by O'Meara,[71] said:
+'It was bad policy to encourage the military mania instead of sticking to
+your marine, which is the real force of your country.' In 1832 the naval
+vote had been 4-1/4 millions. Two years later, it was reduced to 3
+millions. The fleet reductions did not, however, reach their limit until
+the year before the Queen's accession. Then the naval vote was reduced to
+2-3/4 millions, with the dwindling of our squadrons already noted.
+Contrast with this the 1896-97 estimate of £22,774,318, providing for the
+services of a total, every branch included, of 93,750 officers and men,
+inclusive of the 461 ships already named.
+
+The history of the naval transformations through which during the
+Victorian age we have passed, may be described as a succession of
+periodical scares, a steadily progressive instruction by science in its
+latest application to maritime affairs, and by the lessons contained in
+the experience of other countries. The English operations by sea during
+the Crimean War; in a still greater degree perhaps the improvements in
+naval construction, attack and defence, shown in the hostilities between
+the Federal and Confederate navies in the civil war on the other side of
+the Atlantic; later again the lessons taught by the engagements between
+Italian and Austrian squadrons, notably at Lissa;--these are the incidents
+that have gradually taught us, as well as our European neighbours, to
+bring our naval arrangements and appliances up to the latest mark of
+mechanical perfection.
+
+Even during the time when the security brought by relief after long war
+was causing England to neglect her navy, some of those movements which in
+Victorian days have given us our present race of seamen were in progress.
+
+Seven years before the Queen's accession, the 'Excellent,' as a gunnery
+school for sailors, had been established. Soon after its establishment, it
+was gradually enlarged and improved till it has become to-day the chief
+source from which our ships are manned. Before that institution, naval
+gunnery was taught, or not taught, at the discretion of the captains in
+command. From being, as at the beginning of the present age it was, always
+precarious and generally insufficient, the supply of sailors has become
+fairly adequate and regular. Weeks and months used to be wasted before a
+crew could be put together. The social haunts of seamen were visited by
+officers; thus eventually by promises or threats men were induced to join
+the ship. When the commission of the ship came to an end, the sailors were
+thrown adrift, usually returning to their civil vocations until a new job
+was offered. By the time of the Crimean War all this had been changed.
+Apart from the inducements of prize money sailors flocked in animated by a
+real enthusiasm. Thus though in France the naval conscription had existed
+since the time of Colbert the manning of the English fleet proceeded more
+quickly in Crimean days than that of the French. The continuous service
+for ten years certain, with the choice of prolonging that term and
+receiving a pension, has transformed the condition of our navy. Other
+reforms have given us in time of war a reserve of 20,000 sailors of the
+mercantile marine, the equivalents of our rifle volunteers on land. These
+are annually subject to gun and small arm drill on our coasts, and, in the
+opinion of an expert like Captain Eardley Wilmot, will prove adequate to
+any demand.[72]
+
+There have been later reforms than this in the professional education of
+our sailors. Till between forty and fifty years ago men and boys entered
+the navy without any previous training. In, or about 1855, all sailors
+entered the service as boys chiefly from fifteen to sixteen and a half
+years old. They now begin by passing from twelve to eighteen months on
+board the training ship. Here they are instructed in seamanship and
+gunnery. They thus bring with them to sea a practical knowledge of their
+duties. The system which has given us a new race of naval officers dates
+from nearly the same time as that which began to produce a fresh
+generation of seamen. Before 1857, no regular system of training
+midshipmen existed. All their knowledge was actually acquired afloat,
+exactly as Captain Marryat describes. The large ships only were furnished
+with regular naval instructors. Since the 'Britannia' was instituted in
+1857, all midshipmen receive from fifteen months to two years education in
+naval subjects and in mathematics. The educational term is not over when
+the professional career begins. The course of study necessary before the
+examination for Lieutenant can be passed has been greatly expanded.
+Formerly acting mates were supposed to satisfy all educational tests for
+Lieutenant in about three months. Now a year is occupied with these
+studies; the qualifying standard for the pass examination is pitched far
+higher than was ever known before.
+
+The transformation undergone by our navy which strikes the eye most
+forcibly is of course the replacement of the wooden walls by the floating
+ironclad and the substitution of steam for wind-filled sails as the
+propelling power of our fleet. A naval officer, Sir William Symonds,
+instead of a member of the School of Naval Architecture, was appointed
+Surveyor of the Navy; the first step towards improving ship construction
+was taken. Almost on the eve of the Queen's accession, certainly during
+all the earlier thirties, steamers 5 of which in all existed, were only
+used to tow ships of the line in and out of harbour; or at the utmost for
+a trip to Gibraltar or Malta. When Captain Charles Napier predicted that
+steam would soon become to the navy what cavalry is to the army, and have
+the post of honour, the prediction seemed impossible. The adoption of
+steam was a very gradual and tentative process. First the 'Active,' a
+46-gun frigate was fitted with paddles, but not as yet engines. The result
+was progress at a maximum of from 2 to 3 knots an hour. Captain Napier
+carried the experiment a little further; but in no case was steam yet
+exclusively relied on for working the paddles. When Queen Victoria came to
+the throne the navy included 5 steam paddle vessels. Each of them had
+three masts furnished with sails. All were generically known as steam
+sloops. The largest was 830 tons; the maximum of speed from 8 to 10 knots.
+Larger steamers called steam frigates, from 1,200 to 1,800 tons were
+introduced soon after the reign began. They were first actively employed
+at the bombardment of Acre in 1840, and notwithstanding their old lines of
+construction, proved the usefulness of armed ships at sea against forts on
+land. The Acre operations seem to have been important, as showing for the
+first time the skill of Victorian seamen in gunnery and in the management
+of the machinery of steam ships. Similarly, long before this only the
+skill with which English ships were handled had overcome, in their
+encounters with French, the faults of their design. The weight of metal
+thrown by the largest guns on board these earlier craft, _e.g._ the
+'Nelson,' was 2,750 lbs. Further steam progress was marked when, eight
+years after the reign began, the 'Erebus' and 'Terror' in which Sir John
+Franklin's expedition sailed for the Pole, were fitted with the screw.
+
+As yet iron had not been employed on the present scale in ship
+construction. Both in 1857 and 1858 larger ships than had yet been known,
+the 'Niagara' first, the 'Orlando,' the 'Mersey,' afterwards, were built,
+all, however, of wood. Long after steam was partially employed, sails were
+retained. Even during our Black Sea and Baltic operations in Crimean days,
+screw and paddle were still combined with canvas. Such success as our
+fleet secured at this time was not promoted by the excellence of our naval
+organization which according to Captain Eardley Wilmot, was not much
+better than our military.[73] The first lesson as to the new mode of
+motion by sea learnt from the naval operations in Crimean waters was
+recognized by Kinglake and is confirmed by Captain Eardley Wilmot as being
+that 'in regions where land and sea much intertwine, steam is stronger for
+attack than for defence.'
+
+The iron ships now almost as essential to the idea of a navy as steam
+itself, had been tried for different purposes long before our Admiralty
+adopted them; the material had been used, first in 1812 for canal barges,
+secondly, a little later, for the mercantile marine. Iron was not employed
+for our navy till the last days of William IV. The tragic fate of the
+first iron ship, the 'Birkenhead,' may well have prejudiced both the
+Department and the public against the new material.
+
+The iron-plated ship of the modern type appears to have been a French
+idea, first tried by Colonel Paixhaus in 1825. The floating batteries
+employed in the Crimean War in which Napoleon III. was specially
+interested, marked a fresh advance in this direction. Nor does it seem
+easy to overrate the value of the lessons in scientific seamanship derived
+from the French and English operations on the Black Sea, 1854-5. The
+result was the invitation by the Admiralty of designs from all quarters,
+the ordering of the 'Warrior,' designed by Mr Scott Russell, in 1859,
+completed in 1861.[74] This vessel was equipped with a battery extending
+her whole length. Before the fifties were out, the naval and the national
+mind had been familiarized with the idea of mastless ships, long repulsive
+to the national sense of the picturesque at sea. The 'Warrior,' however,
+was furnished with sails in addition to steam and marked an epoch in the
+development not only of the English navy, but of the navies of the world,
+as the first absolutely complete iron ship ever built.
+
+The French ships, earlier in point of time were not equally perfect as
+regards material. They were, in fact, wooden ships cut down and plated
+with iron. Thus with literal truth referring to the launch of 'Warrior'
+could our Naval Minister of the day, Sir John Pakington, describe the
+whole world as interested in the bold experiment. Other ships of the same
+kind soon followed, and of even larger proportions. It is to the credit of
+English workmanship that the building of these vessels at Chatham was
+performed by shipwrights who had hitherto worked only on wood; and that
+the craftmanship shown by them in the new material was pronounced by
+experts to be excellent. Timber having been definitely superseded by
+metal, there followed the long and technical controversy about the
+relative merits of turret and broadside armaments. The concentration of
+guns into a single citadel on board ship was first in England powerfully
+advocated by Sir E. Reed. Since then, the naval warfare between Federals
+and Confederates on the other side of the Atlantic, followed by the
+exciting manoeuvres off Cherbourg between the 'Alabama' and the
+'Keersage,' and in Europe the naval portions of the Austro-Italian war of
+1866 have taught lessons the full results of which are not, perhaps even
+yet, perfectly realized. So long is the experimental stage which has to be
+traversed before the newest system of maritime defence and attack with its
+complicated machinery can be said entirely to have reached what is alone
+to be called properly the scientific stage.[75]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE
+
+    The Prince Consort's influence in organizing pursuits and departments
+    of knowledge, a characteristic of the Victorian age. The Prince not
+    only the advocate of the 1851 Exhibition, but most active in the
+    movement that has given us South Kensington as an instrument in the
+    knowledge of art and science. The British Association foreshadowed by
+    a like organization in Germany which may have impressed the youthful
+    Prince Albert, but certainly set the example to the leaders of English
+    science. Like its German forerunners the British Association gradually
+    grew in popular favour. Its progress as shown by facts and figures.
+    Modern course of science summarized. The transforming influences of
+    science traced in all intellectual pursuits.
+
+
+If in a few words the contrast between the England of the later and the
+earlier part of the Queen's reign were to be summed up, it might be
+expressed by the single word, organization. For that process, as for its
+most impressive results, Victorian England is indebted primarily to the
+husband of its Queen. To-day Englishmen are reminded locally and visibly
+of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by the elaborately picturesque memorial of
+the man who spared no pains to secure its success, situated, as that
+monument is, on the spot where the great glass house once stood.
+
+That event was the earliest triumph of the new epoch of culture including
+science in its application to the conveniences or luxuries of daily life.
+From 1851 too, may be dated the organized encouragement of the inventor in
+all departments of scientific ingenuity.
+
+Such a world's show might in due course have been devised by the wit of
+man, even if the Queen's husband had not recalled for reproduction in
+England the idea of the Frankfort fairs of the sixteenth century.[76] It
+is quite certain that without the Prince's personal enterprise and
+sustained supervision, and but for the invaluable co-operation of the late
+Sir Henry Cole, the movement which has transformed the Court suburb from
+laundry grounds, or riding schools, into a centre of artistic or
+scientific education for the whole country had it taken place at all,
+would not have occurred till many years later than it actually did. The
+contrast between the South Kensington of the Queen's accession year with
+its suburban desolations, and of the sixtieth anniversary year, with its
+palaces of art, its private mansions rivalling those of Park Lane, its
+Imperial Institute, its provision for educational classes by day, for
+musical fêtes by lamplight, might have been indefinitely postponed.
+
+The name of Her Majesty written in the clear bold hand of youth when she
+became Queen may be read to-day in the register of the Royal Society. That
+entry prefigured the close connection between science and the Court which,
+for the first time in the history of the monarchy, was to signalize her
+reign. The period preparatory to the enthronement of science and art
+beneath the glass roof of Paxton was of scarcely less educational value to
+the Kingdom than, to most appliances of daily life, the Exhibition itself
+was to prove. The instructive addresses delivered at this time by the
+Prince Consort, now to a gathering of artists and writers, now to more
+popular audiences at Birmingham or elsewhere, may seem to those who read
+them to-day familiar or even commonplace. They were then entire novelties,
+not only from their authorship, but from their subject.
+
+In 1897 it appears the most natural and suitable thing in the world that a
+Royal Prince should vary the more strictly ceremonial functions of State
+by opening an art gallery in London, a science school in the provinces, an
+Imperial Institute, a Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington. Fifty
+years since such a part seemed of questionable wisdom to some, of
+dangerous precedent for the monarchy to others; at the best a foreign
+experiment which the Queen's husband would most wisely have left unmade.
+In the sixtieth year of the reign, there is no social gathering or private
+dwelling, there is scarcely a village inn, or country cottage, or a
+seaside lodging house, that by the paper on its walls, the designs of its
+furniture, the suspended pictures cut from illustrated prints, fails to
+remind one with eyes to see such things the extent to which ideas of art
+or ornament that began with the Prince and Sir Henry Cole have directly
+from South Kensington penetrated into every corner of the land, and made
+their humanizing influence felt beneath the roof of peasant as well as of
+peer.
+
+Even in the thirtieth year of the reign, these forces had scarcely
+advanced beyond the embryonic stage. Had the Prince Consort himself
+claimed visibly to exercise the Royal prerogative, on which as a fact he
+never presumed, he could scarcely have given a greater shock to the
+prejudices of those high in social position and near the Court who
+inherited from Hanoverian times a contempt for all distinctions save those
+of birth and rank.
+
+Up to the moment of his death the Queen's husband was endeavouring to make
+his wife's Court a centre not only of achievement in war, of statesmanship
+in peace, but of letters, art, science, and of the most famous among their
+contemporary ornaments. Death prevented the design from ever being carried
+out completely. The names of Alfred Tennyson and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
+are enough to remind one of the direction actually travelled by the Prince
+in producing some resemblance between the Windsor where a Victoria
+reigned, and the Weimar whose intellectual glories, a Goethe had typified.
+Here again the intellectual revolution which the Court began has been
+continued by those who represent the Crown to-day.
+
+Such knowledge of physical science as the Prince Consort's son possesses
+was largely imparted to him by the teacher Faraday, who was his father's
+choice. Appropriately enough, therefore, in the winter of 1897 did the
+Prince of Wales assist in founding the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal
+Society. The progress now spoken of seems to be symbolized by the
+acceptance of the word 'science' as the nearly exclusive synonym for that
+physicism which is strictly only one of the divisions that generically it
+includes. From the check to the regular teaching of physical knowledge at
+the disorganization spread through the world by the collapse of the Roman
+Empire, and by the concentration of human thought upon politics and
+theology, instead of those subjects first expounded by Thales, after him
+by Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy, till the day of the modern doctors had
+dawned, the conquests achieved by man over nature were inconsiderable.
+Francis Bacon's equalization of human _ingenia_, and his elaborately
+tabulated apparatus for studying phenomena, created an appetite for
+mastering the arcana of the visible universe, but did not satisfy it. As
+the Prince Consort clearly saw, Nature's secret had been yielded in the
+past, and would be surrendered in the future, not to founders of systems
+like a Verulam or a Descartes, but to actual discoverers who did not owe
+even their methods to the Schools.
+
+Half a century after Bacon's labours, Newton, with no help from Baconian
+methods discovered the law of gravitation, and with it the unity of
+sequences which pervade material creation. The cause of the slight
+progress of physical science whether before or immediately after Bacon
+formulated his method may be partly explained by the want of the material
+appliances for physical investigation. These in anything like their
+mechanical perfection of to-day are not much older than our present era.
+The agencies of glass, of alcohol, of microscopes and of other such
+appliances were as unknown to the physicists of Alexandria, of Athens, or
+of the Middle Ages as the electric wire itself. Where the subject matter,
+the heavenly bodies, the structure of the human frame, could be studied
+without elaborate machinery, the contemporaries or successors of the
+Ionian physicists who searched for the origin of all things in some single
+element, air, fire or water, seem rudely to have anticipated later
+discoveries. The Aristotelian philosophy and the rudiments of practical
+medicine, preserved together by Averrhoes, Avicenna, and the whole school
+of the Arabian thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, descended
+in each other's company to the Italian schoolmen, and were delivered by
+them to English students. Thus, on the eve of the present century, the
+indestructibility of matter, however Protean the forms of its
+manifestations, had been ascertained by European chemists. The year of the
+Queen's accession was also that of the publication of Whewell's _History
+of the Inductive Sciences_.
+
+In this age, as in that of Bacon, great lawyers have taken a foremost
+place among enquirers into the nature of things. Lord Brougham did
+something to methodize, and more to popularize, the facts of science. A
+greater lawyer than Brougham, Sir William Grove, Justice of the Common
+Pleas first, Judge of the High Court of Justice afterwards, was also
+professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution during the
+first decade of the reign. His discoveries with regard to the correlation
+of forces had not been entirely formulated when Dr Whewell's book
+appeared. Nor had Charles Darwin completed in his retirement at Down, in
+Kent, those researches which in 1859, gave the world _The Origin of
+Species_. This book, if the work of any single man ever did so, created an
+epoch, not in physical enquiry alone, but in every branch of human
+knowledge conducted on scientific principles.
+
+The Victorian Court had begun to encourage science before Darwin's great
+book was published. In 1847 the Prince Consort became Chancellor of the
+University of Cambridge, and in this capacity he was naturally brought
+into official and friendly relations with Dr Whewell, then Master of
+Trinity, as well as with other English leaders of scientific thought. The
+growing success of the British Association after its inaugural congress
+had been held, is not unjustly connected with the Prince's name. The idea
+of an annual parliament of learning was, like that of the Great Exhibition
+itself, not of English origin. Even in Germany, where the first trial of
+it had been made, prosperity had been gradual. At Halle, Frankfort,
+Dresden, and Munich, notwithstanding the personal distinction of its chief
+promoter Professor Oken, and its encouragement by many of the enlightened
+Kinglets who then divided the rule of the Fatherland, during the second
+decade of the century when the enterprise began, its most noticeable
+meeting does not seem to have numbered more than from 200 to 400. At
+Leipsic in 1822, the attendance was barely two score; six years later in
+Berlin, it amounted to 464. Before that assemblage probably had much
+impressed the young Prince Albert, it had stimulated the most
+distinguished representatives of scientific thought in England. Sir David
+Brewster, Sir John Herschel, Sir Humphry Davy based, upon the German
+example, an appeal to the English Government. The decline of arts and
+science in this country was attributed to their total neglect by the
+State, to the exclusion of men eminent in either of these departments from
+the titular decorations of the country, and to the heavy exactions from
+scientific inventors imposed by the fees payable under the patent law.
+
+More than two or three decades of the Victorian age had passed before art,
+science, and letters began to receive the State recognition now firmly
+acknowledged as their due. Both Bulwer Lytton and Macaulay had served in
+Parliament or in office fifteen years before they were ennobled.[77]
+Tennyson was the first English poet raised to the peerage who knew no
+politics save those of patriotism; to the same epoch, too, belongs a like
+honour bestowed upon three men of science at successive intervals:--now a
+physician, Playfair, now the physicist, Lord Kelvin, and again the latest,
+and to not a few the most welcome and significant of all, the inventor of
+the antiseptic treatment which has saved so many lives and limbs, who will
+henceforth be known as Lord Lister.
+
+It is suggestively prophetic of the new era which in the next reign was to
+open for letters, science and art in their relations to the English State,
+that while the country had been preparing for a revolution peaceful but
+complete in politics, there had assembled at York, September 29, 1831, a
+company which prognosticated the coming revolution throughout the whole
+region of popular thought and culture. The York meeting mustered less than
+200. It was intended only to launch the programme of the society. 'To
+point out the lines of direction in which the researches of science should
+move, to state the problems to be solved, the data to be fixed, to assign
+to every class of mind a definite task, to amend the laws relating to
+patents, to agitate for a Government provision to encourage and reward
+scientific research;'--these are the objects which Mr Harcourt enumerated
+in the first official document of the body. As proof of the vitality of
+the revolution which that Yorkshire company, less than 200 strong,
+introduced, it is enough to mention Dr Rae's Arctic voyages of 1853-4, the
+Challenger expedition of 1872, and the last Oxford University Commission
+which at the instance of the first scientific Premier England has ever
+known, Lord Salisbury, endowed scientific research as one of the estates
+of the realm, and has done something more than relieve that seat of old
+learning from the reproach of discouraging the newest sciences. Little
+perhaps did the doctors of divinity, and classical professors, when, on
+June 18, 1832, they welcomed the second senate of savants to its session
+on the Isis, imagine themselves to be fostering a movement which would
+partially oust from its emoluments and honours in their own Schools the
+old learning, and give to the new not only professorships for its
+teachers, but scholarships for the reward of its learners. As against the
+York meeting in 1831 of not much more than 100, the Oxford meeting of the
+Reform Act year attracted 700. In another twelvemonth the Cambridge
+meeting of June 25, 1833, was attended by 900. The Edinburgh meeting of
+September 8, 1834, mustered 1,298.
+
+Since then the most noticeable figures have been 1855--2,133, 1861--3,138;
+while 1887 crowns the list with 3,838. The figures necessarily are to some
+extent governed by the importance or attractiveness of the towns at which
+the meetings are held. The names on the books of the society are more than
+half a million. So progressive a thing is English science. The meeting
+itself is only a part of the work done. Throughout the year committees are
+investigating various branches of science prominent at the moment, and
+preparing their reports to be included in the Annual General Report, a
+document of over 1,000 pages. Social satire at first made merry over the
+learned ladies and gentlemen who combined mutual laudation of themselves
+with picnics, excursions and pleasure parties of all sorts in interesting
+neighbourhoods at the most agreeable season of the year. To-day no one
+denies the British Association the credit of having promoted the discovery
+of new facts in science, or at least having been the first agency to draw
+public attention to them. Within the last few years, it was at one of
+these Association meetings (Liverpool 1870) that Professor Huxley
+pronounced against the popular theory of spontaneous generation of the
+lower forms of life, thus placing on record his adherence to the theory of
+biogenesis as opposed to abiogenesis; life, in other words, could in every
+grade of creation only come from life, not from the corruption of death.
+Thus was a physical tradition that from the earliest times down to the
+seventeenth century had held its own, finally repudiated by the greatest
+authority of his day on all biological matters.
+
+Even this pronouncement seems to have been anticipated. A physicist less
+famous than Huxley, Schwann, some half a century before Huxley's day, is
+said to have been the first to criticize the abiogenesis doctrine as
+supported by no sufficient evidence. The tendency towards unity in
+multiplicity declared by the old Greek thinkers to characterize all true
+science marked the doctrines of the correlation of force as well as of the
+conservation of energy, both of them connected with this age. It was also
+inherent in the theory of evolution as explained by Charles Darwin in
+1859, 28 years, that is, after the British Association for the first time
+met. Even the great Kentish physicist of our day was not entirely the
+first in the field with the discovery that was to transform the whole
+region of thought. Early in the last century De Maillet had applied the
+principle of the survival of the fittest to the world of human life. On
+the eve of the present century Charles Darwin's ancestor, Erasmus, as well
+as German philosophers still more famous, elaborated with more ability
+and knowledge the same idea, which also underlay the discussions between
+the French Academicians, Cuvier and St Hilaire. However the ground may
+have been prepared for him, so far as any single man can be said to have
+discovered any great idea, Charles Darwin must be accounted the author of
+the theory of evolution as it is now understood.
+
+Whewell's survey of the inductive sciences at the beginning of the reign
+dimly forecasts some discoveries which have since been verified. It
+contains no word prophetic of the doctrine by which, in the countless
+possibilities of its application, every branch of science in little more
+than a quarter of a century was potentially if not actually to be
+transformed. The eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's accession
+has witnessed the completion by Mr Herbert Spencer of the monumental
+treatise that applies the doctrines of Darwin to subjects that Darwin had
+not specially studied, perhaps with results which Darwin himself had not
+entirely foreseen. Whether a reaction against Darwinism has already, as
+some think, set in; how far, and with what consequences, that movement may
+go, are as yet only matters of speculation.
+
+The exploration of the Italian soil has caused many chapters of Roman
+history to be rewritten more in accordance with the older traditions than
+with the newer learning. Like processes near the sites of Babylon and
+Nineveh have done much to vindicate the authors of the Pentateuch as
+chroniclers of fact; and have even created a reaction in favour of the
+Mosaic cosmogony, and the sacred narrative of the Deluge. Evolution as a
+philosophy is not altogether rejected by physicists of orthodoxy so
+unimpeachable as Mr St. George Mivart. More lately it has been discovered
+that an Anglican divine may keep an open mind on the subject of Darwinism
+and yet be made Archbishop of Canterbury. To the unlearned English vulgar
+the question is whether the visible universe and its inhabitants are more
+likely to have developed themselves by a series of indescribable processes
+than to have developed, as the Scriptural tradition has been interpreted
+as teaching, by a Power external to them and directing every stage of
+their progress. If it be said that evolution is the method in which that
+superhuman Power who is behind and above all often chooses to act, there
+is no reason why the occupant of Lambeth should not be as good an
+evolutionist as the scientific investigator whose nearest country
+neighbour at Down, Sir John Lubbock, appropriately presided over the
+Jubilee meeting of the British Association at York.
+
+The transformations effected in other departments of physical study during
+our age are not less remarkable. Many of them have been appreciably
+assisted by the social intercourse of mind with mind which the British
+Association has so signally promoted. Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ was
+published in pre-Association days and seven years before the Victorian age
+began. Its influence was in the same direction as that of Darwin; it
+suggested, that is, the enquiry why the natural processes that are said to
+explain the globe we inhabit should not explain also the presence of man
+upon it. Biology and anthropology, the two studies which have most been
+promoted by the Darwinian doctrine, can consequently be pronounced with
+truth the creations of the present age. As far back as Elizabethan times,
+electrical phenomena had been systematically studied. Many of these
+manifestations, however, especially their relations with heat and light,
+as well as most of their adaptations to the offices of daily life, belong
+to the era that opened in 1837.
+
+Photography of course was an unknown art in pre-Victorian days. Even when
+its predecessor, the Daguerreotype, discovered in 1839, had been
+considerably improved upon, it still remained a contrivance rather for
+distorting the human features than for faithfully reproducing them as
+photography does upon glass or paper, and with the addition of natural
+colours as photography now bids fair soon to have done.
+
+These achievements of a science which is generically new have not been
+accompanied with inactivity on the part of those sciences which, like
+astronomy, are probably in one shape or another nearly coeval with
+Creation itself. Long before the planet was actually discovered, the
+telescopes that swept the heavens had brought within their ken the spot at
+which in 1846 Neptune was proved to be. If the number of the heavenly
+bodies has not of late received many additions, new asteroids are
+constantly swimming into sight in the quarters where they had been
+suspected; comets, less looked for than these apparitions, are often
+announced to have flashed themselves upon the observer's sight.
+
+The influence of scientific thought and conceptions upon the language of
+literature as well as of daily life, is only less remarkable than the
+material conquests of science themselves. The most instructive instance of
+this is afforded by the scholarly and illustrious woman of genius who will
+always be known to fame as George Eliot. The popular idea of Mr Herbert
+Spencer having influenced her studies and her phraseology is not quite
+true. Mr Spencer was her own, and her companion's, friend. Her diction in
+her later works was inspired by the intellectual forces of her day. Of the
+formative power of these she was probably herself unconscious. If Herbert
+Spencer had a place among them, he was at least only one of several. From
+George Eliot, in that phase of her genius now under consideration, there
+has sprung a school. However original the gift of writers like Mrs Humphry
+Ward, it seems unlikely that their talents would have taken the direction
+they have received and found their expression in the language they employ
+unless the author of _Adam Bede_ and _Middlemarch_ had first supplied a
+new want or created a fresh intellectual taste by a style that our
+forefathers might have admired, but might not always have been able to
+understand.
+
+Of the many transformations wrought by Victorian science, not the
+least;--unscientific people might think it the greatest--is the
+assimilation of the idiom of fiction to that of the text books of the
+schools. The entire ethos of our oral diction not less than our
+literature has been revolutionized by science. When a parliamentary
+speaker illustrates his argument by a metaphor, it is not, as his
+forerunners once did, to the Latin and Greek classics, or even to
+literature at all, but to the laboratory, to the dissecting room, or to
+the crucible that he most frequently goes for his _trope_. The similes of
+the Attic masterpieces are taken habitually from those operations with
+which their naval empire familiarized the Athenian mind. Nor can these
+metaphors be understood without some remembrance of the processes which
+marine affairs involve. A similar acquaintance with the later operations
+of science is scarcely less useful for a proper appreciation of the most
+characteristic beauties of Victorian prose, by whatever master displayed.
+This dispossession of the literary by the scientific is universal.
+Following unconsciously perhaps the example of a great statesman, those
+who have in our day most widely differed from him on national affairs, a
+Randolph Churchill, or a Charles Stewart Parnell have reproduced the taste
+of a Salisbury in finding their recreations, not in the _belles lettres_
+that were congenial to the day of a Pitt or a Canning, but in the
+researches that a Tyndall, a Huxley, a Thomson, have popularized.
+
+Galileo's astronomical views found a useful ally by the incisive raillery
+of his literary style. The admirable prose of a Huxley and his fellow
+labourers has been no less effective for popularizing scientific studies
+with the public they have addressed. The social urbanity with which
+Nature and training have endowed Sir John Lubbock has prepossessed not a
+few on his own level in life in favour of those branches of physical
+enquiry that have enabled him to rehabilitate the moral character of the
+autumnal wasp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+CECILIA'S TRIUMPHS
+
+    The revolution in the conditions of English music--effected since its
+    first encouragement by the Victorian Court--illustrated by a contrast
+    between the social status of the musician to-day, and forty years ago.
+    Music always a tradition of the present dynasty. Handel. English
+    machinery for teaching music instituted under the Georgian era, and
+    perfected under the Victorian. Has English organization for musical
+    teaching outstripped English capacity for learning? Certain reforms
+    approved by high musical experts. Other individual agencies than those
+    of the Court favourable to Music during this century. Mendelssohn; his
+    encouragement of John Parry, the forerunner of Corney Grain, and
+    Arthur Cecil. Sir Charles Hallé, Herr Joachim, Grove, Sullivan.
+    Anglo-German ladies. Crystal Palace Concerts.
+
+
+The transformation, at once artistic and scientific, with which the Prince
+Consort as the past representative of the Crown, and his descendents as
+its present representatives, will always be chiefly associated, remains to
+be glanced at. One need not have reached middle age to be able to realize
+the revolution in the English capacity for the enjoyment as well as for
+the performance of music, vocal or instrumental, that has taken place
+since the Victorian age began. A dowdily dressed young woman, alighting
+from an omnibus at the street corner, trailing after her a fragment of the
+straw that littered the floor of her conveyance; her clothes, what was
+then called shabby genteel. She carried under her arm a roll of papers or
+a portfolio; she was insolently eyed by the servant who opened the door of
+the house in Portland Place at which she timidly knocked, and
+contemptuously motioned to take a seat in the hall until the drawing room
+was ready for the music lesson to be given to the young lady of the
+family. A hungry looking gentleman, of foreign aspect, and slightly French
+or German accent, also descended from an omnibus in the same quarter; he
+bore in his hand a black case which might be from its appearance a
+sarcophagus for a deceased cat, but which might be identified by more
+experienced observers as containing a fiddle. He was received by the
+servant at the front door not more ceremoniously than the instructress of
+a few hours earlier. This was the proprietor of a little orchestra which
+attended private dances. A few hours after he might be accompanying with
+his fiddle the wind instruments of his troupe, for Thackeray's Mrs Timmins
+gave that very night her little dance. If the musician played well, and
+pleased the head footman as well as the mistress of the house, he might as
+a special favour be invited downstairs to help the servants finish the
+cold chicken and the champagne heeltaps when the guests had gone.
+
+To-day the lady who condescends to teach the art of pianoforte execution
+to the young people in a popular London quarter drives up to the house in
+her own victoria and would no more be kept waiting a minute for her
+appointment than if she were a duchess in her own right. The accomplished
+foreigner who plays the violin alights from a brougham drawn by a pair of
+thoroughbreds. If he is to be induced to honour a friend in Grosvenor
+Square with his company at dinner, the invitation must be given at least
+three weeks beforehand. The 'master' must choose his own fellow guests,
+and supervise the menu before it is finally decided on; the dinner itself
+must be so arranged that to a moment it will occupy the time which the
+great man prescribes. The conversation must be so contrived as to
+coruscate with epigram, and to fascinate with anecdotes all warranted to
+be new, lest the diner of the evening should have the slightest touch of
+boredom. If these conditions are not satisfied, this arbiter of taste may
+refuse to sit through the meal. He is the chartered libertine of the
+dining rooms and drawing rooms of the great.
+
+England has always possessed a considerable school of national composers.
+These might have achieved the highest triumphs of genius without acquiring
+a fraction of that social ascendancy for their art which it has gradually
+won. Under the auspices of the Prince Consort first, the patronage of the
+Court was secured for the art of St Cecilia. That day already mentioned on
+which Lady Lyttelton first heard the Queen's husband playing on the organ
+at Windsor was an eventful one for the social esteem of music in the
+adopted country of the Royal executant. After this came the Prince's
+directorship of the Ancient Concerts, and the arrangement of its
+programmes on special occasions by himself. The club principle during the
+married life of the Queen had in its popular illustration not gone beyond
+infancy. Otherwise, one of the Royal Family would, as he has since done,
+regularly have handled the conductor's baton; while for the special
+amusement of another a series of smoking concerts might as to-day have
+been arranged in Piccadilly palaces.
+
+Music of course has always been a tradition of English Royalty. The Royal
+Academy of Music now domiciled in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, was
+founded in 1822 with the King as patron. It was opened March 24, 1823,
+with a small and precarious attendance of pupils seldom exceeding two or
+three score, even at the date of its receiving the Royal charter, June 23,
+1830. The number of students at Christmas 1896 was 500, all of whom were
+regular in their visits. The Royal College of Music at Kensington Gore was
+first founded as the National Training School in 1875. Its avowed motive
+was to honour the Consort's memory. It was due partly to the efforts of
+the Prince of Wales with a Committee of which the then Duke of Edinburgh
+was chairman. He was also a most indefatigable promoter of the whole
+scheme from the very first. Its first Principal was Dr, now Sir Arthur,
+Sullivan. Some years later, again at the Heir Apparent's initiative, as a
+result of a meeting held at St James's Palace, February 28, 1882, this
+institution was re-formed. It was opened in the building formerly occupied
+by the National Training School by the Prince and Princess of Wales, May
+7, 1883. Of this Sir George Grove was the first director, holding the post
+till Christmas 1894 when he was succeeded by Dr. C. H. H. Parry. The
+Charter of the Royal College was obtained in 1883. It has to-day an
+endowment of £130,000 which provides some 60 different scholarships. This,
+too, in its existing shape was opened by the Prince Consort's descendants,
+the Prince and Princess of Wales; it had at the Christmas of 1896, 300
+regular pupils. A very important part of the institution consists of the
+Donaldson museum of musical instruments; these were given to the College
+by Mr G. Donaldson in 1894.
+
+The Guildhall School of Music was founded in 1880 by that same Corporation
+which has done more perhaps than any other single body since the Queen's
+accession to promote the humanities of life. Its first Principal was Mr
+Weist Hill; he was succeeded by Sir Joseph Barnby, who again in 1896 was
+followed by Mr W. H. Cummings. This Guildhall School is undoubtedly the
+most popular institution of the kind which we possess. Its pupils at the
+Christmas of 1896 were 3,496. The other great metropolitan school of music
+is Trinity College, London. This was incorporated in 1875 under the
+Companies Act. Six years later, in 1881, it was reorganized upon a wider
+basis. The number of pupils at Christmas 1896 shows a steady increase.
+
+These and other institutions less important are only some of the national
+monuments to the progress of the study of music as an art during the last
+two or three decades.
+
+The organization and the educational machinery of music have now, in the
+opinion of those competent judges to whom the writer of these lines is
+indebted, reached a point beyond which further development is neither
+necessary nor desirable. Production and execution leave perhaps little to
+be wished for. Appreciation, however, of musical excellence is not
+universally proportionate to musical activity. Audiences more
+intelligently critical and better trained are apparently the chief
+_desiderata_, if composers and performers are to rise above mediocrity.
+Instruction in the art now spoken of has, of course, shared in the
+advantages incidental to the transformation of London from an insular into
+a cosmopolitan capital. As a result, the best teachers from all countries
+are available for the London learner.
+
+Nor in this respect does England to-day, as thirty years ago it did,
+compare disadvantageously with Leipsic, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgardt. There
+seems however reason to fear that, like Gwendolen Harleth in _Daniel
+Deronda_ before Klesmer, we fail in that important and indefinable
+quality, style. The best critics complain that, when a student has been
+through the regular course here, and has perhaps become a first rate
+technical musician, he seldom seems to get any further; he never, in other
+words, develops any individuality. To some extent this result follows the
+collective teaching of all academies. The area of level mediocrity is,
+however, it may be feared, larger here than in France or Germany. There is
+more of delicacy and daintiness in the French student; there is more of
+individual expansion and thoughtfulness in the German. Both are trained in
+academies. The quicker intuition and more intelligent appreciation of
+French and German audiences are in the opinion of unprejudiced critics
+attributed to this cause. Hence the expert, if consulted by an English
+student, probably would advise him to go abroad for a year or two when
+his technical course has been finished in England. Unfortunately the
+advice too often resembles that of a medical man who might prescribe a
+generous diet and a glass of port wine to an invalid labourer, earning
+less than £1 a week.
+
+In respect of education, cheapness and free scholarships seem to have been
+carried at least as far as is conducive to the real interest of learners
+in this country. A reform, favoured by many good judges, is to make
+payment for teaching universal with a few exceptions; then to give to
+students of promise an allowance sufficient to enable them to go abroad
+and complete their education. As it is, some risk is run of gratuitously
+training mediocrities, launching them on professional careers which can
+only land them in disappointment and poverty.
+
+The late Prince Consort, though the most highly placed, is only one of
+several individuals whose personal influence has conspicuously encouraged
+the growth and the gratification of a musical taste more or less
+cultivated. The discussion which agitated English taste in the eighteenth
+century as to the merits of German and other music is summed up in a
+familiar epigram as the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee:--
+
+  Some say, compared to Bononcini,
+  That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny;
+  Others aver that he to Handel
+  Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
+
+The commanding genius of the great German composer is enough to account
+for the traditional complaint that native genius in England has been
+eclipsed by foreign products. The Elector of Hanover had recognized
+Handel's genius before he became George I. of England, but began his reign
+by showing little favour to the composer, who had absented himself without
+leave from his duties at the Electoral Court. Already in Queen Anne's
+reign Handel's _Te Deum_ had celebrated in St Paul's Cathedral the
+conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. It was not till after his _Water
+Music_ had procured his restoration to favour that the new English monarch
+took him back into his service. Gradually, however, till in 1741 it was
+confirmed by the _Messiah_ produced in Dublin and by his operas in London,
+the triumph of the German over the Italian school thus advanced. Neither
+then nor later did it involve neglect of the great English composer of the
+seventeenth century, our own Henry Purcell,[78] organist at Westminster
+Abbey at eighteen years of age, and author of a greater number of songs,
+anthems, operas, glees and cantatas, at once famous and popular, than
+probably any other musician whom England has produced. Felix Mendelssohn
+of Hamburg, not less precocious than our own Purcell, also at eighteen
+produced an opera. His personal influence in England was scarcely less
+great than that of Handel, and of course tended towards the further
+popularization of Teutonic art: he lived on terms of intimate friendship
+during his different sojourns in this country with English musicians. The
+popular and accomplished pianoforte improvisatore, John Parry, who was
+familiar to the English public of this age from his connection with the
+German-Reed company, 1860-9, the forerunner of the Corney Grain and Arthur
+Cecil of a later day, might almost be called Mendelssohn's pupil. By
+Mendelssohn, Parry was first encouraged to adopt music as a profession;
+the present writer well remembers how he heard from John Parry himself the
+account of Mendelssohn's listening during half a winter night to the piano
+improvisations devised by the versatile genius of the then young man.
+
+Charles Hallé, born in Westphalia in 1819, and so just ten years younger
+than Mendelssohn was driven from Paris to London by the Revolution of
+1848, to which England was indebted for such an influx of foreign genius
+of all kinds to her shores. Beethoven, like Handel, first became known in
+Europe through a German Elector, him of Cologne. He died in 1827. Though
+the charm and fame of Beethoven had been steadily growing upon English
+critics and musicians first and upon the general public afterwards, to
+Charles Hallé[79] belongs the distinction of having done much towards
+popularizing this great author of classical music with the English public.
+The Musical Union which preceded the Popular Concerts was then directed by
+John Ella, whose programmes included Beethoven's sonatas, played by Hallé
+with great applause.
+
+The English public, if by voluntary culture it had not been disciplined
+into a genuine admiration for Teutonic music, as interpreted by various
+foreign executants, would have been wooed to its love by the educating
+influences of the Hungarian violinist Herr Joachim, deservedly reverenced
+by all circles of English society, ever receiving his homage with the
+dignified modesty of great genius. This director of the Royal Academy of
+Music at Berlin had, before that appointment, received the degree of
+Doctor of Music at Cambridge. The bow with which he elicited entrancing
+strains from his instrument was a social sceptre as well. When George
+Eliot was writing _Daniel Deronda_, Herr Joachim's social and artistic
+ascendancy had just reached its culminating point. A scientific musician
+herself, George Eliot visited those circles where first-rate music was to
+be heard. No writer more artistically found the suggestions of her
+characters in real life. The Herr Joachim whom English society knew is
+reflected so strikingly in the Herr Klesmer of whom the _Daniel Deronda_
+public reads as to warrant the conjecture that the master before whom
+Gwendolen Harleth trembled had been suggested by the violinist at whose
+feet the aristocracy of birth, beauty, wit, intellect and wealth with
+unfeigned admiration knelt down.
+
+Other individuals deserve a place in the catalogue of those who have
+helped on the musical movement of our times. Sir George Grove made a
+substantial addition to the musical wealth of the world by contributing a
+chapter to its musical romance; that which relates his discovery of the
+lost scores of Schubert in a Vienna cupboard. His dictionary of music will
+survive when the honourable record of his Directorship of the Royal
+College of Music may be forgotten. Sir Arthur Sullivan has not only
+illustrated with melodies, that have at once caught the ear of the town,
+the fantastic conceptions of Mr W. S. Gilbert's intellect; he has used his
+personal popularity on all levels of social London to diffuse improved
+notions of musical taste. Agencies of the same kind, collective as well as
+individual have not, during the Victorian age, been wanting.
+
+The _personnel_ of upper middle class society in England has been
+perceptibly affected by the entrance into it through the gate of marriage,
+of ladies of German origin, of great taste and accomplishments generally,
+and like all their nation, devoted to music. Hence among other things the
+increased patronage of the Italian Opera, of all high-class concerts in
+public as well as of musical artists in private by that well to do section
+of the Queen's subjects which combines the tastes of culture and of birth
+with the resources of trade. Its composition of the veritable materials of
+Paxton's Glass House for the Great Exhibition is not the only respect in
+which the Crystal Palace at Sydenham is connected with that enterprise of
+the Prince Consort as a reformer of English taste. To mention only its
+connection with the subject now being specially considered, the Crystal
+Palace has maintained its full orchestra since 1854. These concerts have
+been admittedly during near half a century prime instruments of
+metropolitan and suburban civilization. They have practically
+revolutionized the home life of tens of thousands of the prosperous
+commercial class which fixes its household gods out of earshot of Bow
+Bells. The impulse thus given to the study of the art on a basis wider and
+deeper than anything formerly existing can scarcely be exaggerated. It is
+of itself enough to explain why the number of English students of music in
+the nineties is so vastly larger than it was during any of the preceding
+decades.[80]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART
+
+    English art stimulated and strengthened to a degree second only to
+    science by the movements with which, through the Prince Consort, the
+    Victorian Court identified itself. Contrast between the social
+    consideration of artists now and fifty years ago. From Gandish to
+    Gaston Phoebus. Progress in the association of art with the government
+    of England, and general gain to all concerned in consequence. Gradual
+    endowment of art by the State and establishment of the existing
+    machinery for teaching art and displaying its triumphs to a cultivated
+    public. The work of South Kensington. Success of the Academy tested by
+    figures and facts. Reciprocal benefits to art workers and art patrons.
+    Foreign recognition of English art. The past, present and future of
+    English sculpture.
+
+
+The popularization and improvement of art in all its manifestations
+followed the 1851 Exhibition and the initiative of the Prince Consort in a
+degree second only to the development of science and music themselves.
+That the Court of Victoria and Albert should have been to the painters of
+a later day what the Court of Charles I. was to Van Dyck could not have
+been expected. The Consort's interest and judgment in pictures were
+inferior to his genuine concern for science. The complacency with which he
+regarded the canvases of Winterhalter could not promise much enthusiasm in
+the patronage of English painters. His rescue from disorder and decay of
+the Raphael cartoons, long before the Prince's day belonging to our
+Court, but by him first properly cared for and arranged, was not a work of
+creation, but was one of artistic development. His were the active mind
+and useful hand that rendered available for national instruction or
+delight the hereditary treasures of Crown and country which before his day
+were not indeed unknown, but were not perhaps properly appreciated in the
+country which possessed them. The rise of a moneyed and fairly cultivated
+class in English society was the chief element in the improvement of the
+social and commercial position of the English painter. These agencies
+happily coincided with the example set by the Prince to his successors of
+assisting at the great artistic gatherings of the year.
+
+Before May 3, 1851, the Crown had not been represented at the Royal
+Academy dinner. It has seldom been unrepresented since. Sir Charles
+Eastlake, in whose election to the Presidency the Queen and Prince had
+been much interested, had not brought oratorical euphuism to the same
+perfection as his successor, Lord Leighton. He was, however, a man of
+cultivated mind, of acceptable presence, and of well-bred speech. His
+proposal of the Prince's health was made in words that have to-day an
+historical value. The reply of the Prince blended a philosophic criticism
+less English than German, with an appreciation of our national masters
+which was entirely patriotic. It was, he said, the fate of all
+aristocracies to be assailed habitually from without, sometimes from
+within. The Academy being an aristocracy of the brush, must accept the
+position and turn to practical account any hints for improvement which it
+might contain.[81]
+
+These were still the days when art and artists had not migrated from the
+gloomy studios of unfashionable Bloomsbury to the gleaming palaces of
+modish Kensington. Sir Charles Eastlake's predecessor had been Sir Martin
+Archer Shee, who, very faintly disguised, appears in Thackeray's Mr Smee
+in _The Newcomes_. Gandish, the unappreciated genius of the palette at
+whose school, on Mr Smee's advice Clive Newcome is placed, is not a
+caricature at all of the most serviceable art teacher of that period whose
+real name was Sass and who counted among his pupils John Everett Millais.
+What has taken place since then is that in the smiles of popular favour,
+Thackeray's Gandish has blossomed into the Mr Gaston Phoebus of Lord
+Beaconsfield's _Lothair_. Colonel Newcome thought it a condescension to
+ask the painter of 'Boadishia' to dinner. That artist's later and
+transformed self would have resented an invitation at short notice as an
+impertinence; he would have bluntly excused himself on the plea of being
+pre-engaged to the Prime Minister,[82] the Heir Apparent, or to Windsor
+three months ago. The social prejudice, confined to a small section of the
+upper middle class, against the studio which lingered so long and so
+unintelligently in England is easily explained. It is identical in its
+origin with an equally unreasoning and antiquated feeling against
+doctors, singers and players. This superstition had disappeared in the
+days of Sir Henry Holland who, half a century ago was a welcome and
+honoured guest at the most exclusive houses; under men like Sir James
+Paget and Sir Richard Quain it has long since ceased even to be a memory.
+In each of these cases money is regarded as passing directly between the
+patronizing public and the employed professional. The purse is opened at
+the door of the theatre, the concert hall, or in the consulting room of
+the physician. That the payment is in the other cases as real though not
+as sensibly direct is ignored. The terms on which Sir Charles Eastlake was
+a visitor at the Victorian Court are those that have marked the subsequent
+relations of his successors with the Crown. The intellectual influences of
+a whole school of intelligent and highly educated critics following as
+nearly as they could the example of Mr Ruskin, has shed a dignity on the
+painter's calling that could not have resulted from material prosperity or
+the favour of high place alone.
+
+Sir Edwin Landseer, elected R.A. 1830, it may be said, years before the
+transformation now spoken of, was welcome in any house whose threshold he
+pleased to cross. His was rather the exception which proved the rule, and
+for these reasons; he flourished most just when Court patronage was making
+the Scotch Highlands fashionable; he was the painter of hounds, horses,
+animals themselves so eminently aristocratic that no Englishman with any
+pretensions to social breeding could affect disregard for them, or for
+their reproducer in art without losing caste. Hence it is that while
+fifty years since, the Clive Newcomes who took to painting were spoken of
+by their families in a low voice much as if they had taken to drink, the
+painter of repute to-day who chose to receive pupils[83] would have no
+more difficulty in filling his studio twice over, than a fashionable
+crammer for the army or Civil Service in filling his lecture room. As a
+fact it is not in the private studios of great artists that the Royal
+Academician of the future, unlike the intending exhibitor in the Parisian
+salon, is to-day generally trained. Sass had a rival, or a professional
+descendant, in the father of a clever versifier H. S. Leigh. Since that
+day, English artists have generally learnt their craft in the Royal
+Academy, or the Slade or other schools of England, or in foreign ateliers.
+These have transformed the surface of Victorian England. The same
+organization of art teaching, which is to-day at the disposal of all is
+said to have discouraged the development of individuality. Where genius
+exists, it is not very likely to be strangled by the conventions of a
+public school, nor to be prevented from exchanging State teachers for
+those whom native inspiration prompts it to prefer.
+
+The South Kensington[84] machinery is not the only artistic growth of the
+Victorian age. The National Gallery had been in existence more than ten
+years before the reign began (since 1824). It was not a popular
+institution until a year later, the architect Wilkins having made the
+design, the present building in Trafalgar Square was opened, April 9,
+1838. The nucleus of the collection was the Angerstein pictures,
+thirty-eight in number, bought by the Government for £57,000. Twenty-seven
+years had still to pass before the Trafalgar Square structure was enlarged
+to its existing size by a parliamentary vote of £50,000. The immediate era
+of the Queen's accession was marked by the purchase of a masterpiece of
+Murillo, a landscape by Salvator Rosa, and an important picture by Rubens.
+Still the Gallery lingered below the Imperial dignity of the nation to
+which it belonged. The Vernon bequest enriched it only when the Queen had
+been on the Throne ten years. It was not till after the Crimean War that
+Parliament could attend to artistic claims, and that under the
+Directorship of Sir Charles Eastlake, deservedly trusted by Crown and
+country, the rooms designed by Barry were added to the block which Wilkins
+had shaped.
+
+The institution, now endowed with the paintings that had belonged to Sir
+Robert Peel, began steadily to approach towards the dimensions and the
+dignity of an Art Gallery comparable with that of any other capital in the
+world. Nor probably have its perfections or its premises yet reached their
+final limit.
+
+While this was going on in London, the entire provinces were vigorously
+taking their part in the new movement. The death of the Duchess of
+Gloucester in 1857 was not allowed by the Queen's representative to
+interfere with his opening in that year the Manchester Art Treasures
+Exhibition, the completeness of which was largely due to the Royal
+encouragement to private owners to send their statues and paintings to the
+show. Thirty years later the Jubilee anniversary of 1887 was observed in
+the same city by a like display of the creations of British genius. Then
+the objects exhibited were the property no longer of the leisured, or a
+patrician class. They belonged also to the new patrons whom, during less
+than half a century, success in manufacture and commerce, accompanied by
+the liberal agencies of travel and education have stimulated to
+competition with the social order whose exclusive appanage art
+encouragement once was. The material proof of art progress is the increase
+of art values. Many instances of these were given in an earlier chapter.
+During his lifetime David Cox was glad to sell his landscapes for £20. Cox
+had formed his genius amid the rural scenes of Hereford. He never liked
+London. After living there fourteen years he settled at Birmingham. Here,
+during his lifetime he had the satisfaction of seeing his masterpiece in
+oil colour bought for £40. Ten years later, when the painter was dead, it
+secured £50 in the open market. In the early seventies a Birmingham
+manufacturer, the former partner of Mr Chamberlain gave for it £2,300. In
+the same way De Wint's landscapes during his lifetime seldom commanded
+more than £50. To-day they sometimes fetch £1,000, and are reckoned cheap
+at 700 or 800 guineas.
+
+The social consideration, and with it the commercial possibilities, of any
+professional calling have in England always been regulated by its degree
+of connection with the State. The department of practical art established
+at South Kensington with the encouragement of the Prince Consort under the
+Directorship of Mr Henry Cole in 1852 had no sooner expanded into the
+science and art department under the President of the Council instead of
+under the Board of Trade than the social repute of practitioners in all
+branches of decorative art appreciably improved.
+
+About this time, too, Marlborough House, up to that date an asylum for
+exhibited pictures and a receptacle for the Duke of Wellington's funeral
+car, suggested itself as a future residence for the Prince of Wales when
+he came to have an establishment of his own. In 1856-7, therefore, the
+House of Commons, without demur, allotted £10,000 for the removal of the
+chaos of artistic treasures from their temporary resting place in Pall
+Mall to their permanent home in South Kensington. Hither, therefore, were
+sent the national purchases made at the sale of the Bernal collection, a
+full account of which has been given in an earlier chapter.
+
+Directly art was in this way officially and substantially incorporated by
+the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in
+great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will
+remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the Dickens manuscripts
+and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the
+friend and biographer of Dickens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These
+had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-à-brac, and
+foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed
+away in the glass-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which,
+studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the '51
+Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English
+manufacture.
+
+South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears.
+Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which
+institutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at
+discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose,
+but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual
+endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable
+holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom;
+it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both sexes to pass through
+its art and science classes.
+
+This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England
+has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State
+when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth.
+Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting
+from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the
+same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire
+collection of Sir Robert Peel.[85]
+
+The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of
+English art is illustrated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal
+Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices
+itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the 'private'
+view of the Royal Academy become a fête day of fashionable society;--a
+promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street
+toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort's
+death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly
+to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense
+meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both sexes, art
+fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of
+critical aptitude or profession, and of some slight connection with
+periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the
+earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the
+Queen's reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they
+just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000.
+The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of
+391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as
+one might naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon
+the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season.
+Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were
+10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen's jubilee year of
+1887.
+
+The mutual relations of art and wealth are probably for the most part
+beneficial to each. The painter, during the latter half of the whole
+Victorian age, has been the chief educator of the plutocrat, as Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti shrewdly anticipated must prove the case. If the
+intellectual teaching of the brush were not easily apprehended, there
+would, for the representatives of the new wealth, have been no special
+training in the humanities at all. As it is, the aristocracy of wealth,
+following the creditable example of the aristocracy of birth, in England
+as well as Italy, has secured for itself mental culture not less than
+social distinction by its patronage of the creators of the nation's art.
+To that rôle it brings the shrewdness already displayed in making its
+fortune. Such a patron may be a generous paymaster; he insists on having
+value for his money; he is quick to detect scamped work, or shortcomings
+in technical detail; he no longer, as he was once fabled to do, buys his
+canvases at so much per square foot any more than he fills his library
+shelves by the yard. That no meritorious artist in Victorian England is
+now likely to live and die so miserably as Haydon is due to the fact that
+the newest wealth finds its natural outlet in the encouragement of the
+oldest art. No aggregate of spiritual or intellectual interests has ever
+been firmly established in England without being subject to some great
+organic movement as a test of vitality before its roots struck deep in the
+soil of British minds. Literature experienced many such phases. So did
+science. So also, in the Oxford Anglican movement and in others since
+then, did religion. Before, therefore, the new art was firmly enthroned in
+our midst, it was at once shaken and quickened by that nineteenth century
+revolution known as pre-Raphaelite; about this so much has been written by
+recent experts as to absolve one from the duty of dwelling on it in detail
+here. Art in the hands of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, and other
+men of genius entered upon this ordeal as a sectional and limited pursuit.
+It came forth a new national interest or rather one of European concern as
+well. Without that severe process of discipline, Leighton and Millais, to
+mention only two typical names, would not have taken their place as
+masters of the brush for a continental as well as for an insular public.
+Nor would the fame of the English school first known through the Paris
+Exhibition of 1855, extended by the Paris Exhibition of 1868, have secured
+for English artists representation in all the great galleries of the
+world, and have added to British painters or to their national themes the
+crown of foreign recognition and of cosmopolitan esteem. Later chroniclers
+of the Victorian age may be able to record the same progress in the
+sculptor's, as in the painter's art. Our climate is not favourable to the
+out of door triumphs of the plastic art. But those who have examined the
+statue of Outram in Pall Mall; who have gazed upon the effigy of the great
+Duke of Wellington by Alfred Stevens in St Paul's; or have noted the
+growing power as well as popularity of Hamo Thornycroft, still a young
+man, cannot doubt that, apart from the successful labours of a naturalized
+but most patriotic foreigner and his school, Sir Edgar Boehm, the English
+chisel is in a fair way of emulating the progress of the English brush.
+
+Commercial prosperity in art, as in other things, moves in cycles. The
+years between 1870 and 1885 were very prosperous to English painters. The
+lean years followed then, and are still being experienced while these
+lines are written. As to the high prices given at Christie's and set forth
+elsewhere in this volume, they have been generally for the works of old
+and departed masters. With very few exceptions, the decade between 1886
+and 1896 has witnessed none of those prices for contemporary artists which
+marked the preceding period. This, too, notwithstanding the standard of
+artistic work to-day is infinitely higher than it was; and that the
+paintings which were hung on the line and were the talk of the town thirty
+years ago, would have a very slight chance of being accepted at all
+to-day.[86]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE
+
+    Translation into fact of ideals not less than transformations seen in
+    the People's Palace, Whitechapel, and in the free libraries,
+    originated by the Ewart Act, affecting as they do all contemporary
+    life. The working of these in town and country. Proved connection
+    between popular education and morality; what books free libraries like
+    best. Analogous work for upper classes done by Mudie's, and by the
+    London Library. Their progress traced. Help rendered by these to
+    public servants and literary producers. Carlyle, Thackeray, etc.
+    Eclectic and educating influences of these shown in detail. The new
+    public and the new magazines. General review of influences at work.
+    Great services of minor poets and prophets of the period.
+
+
+Not only transformations, but translations of ideals into fact, mark our
+age. A popular novelist gave a fancy sketch of a palace in which art,
+pleasure, and instruction should meet together to gladden the lives of the
+London poor. Almost as soon as could have been done by the genius of
+Aladdin's Lamp, the People's Palace shoots up in the Mile End Road.
+
+In 1841 Thomas Carlyle sighed for the day when a 'people's library' should
+be as much a part of every town as Her Majesty's jail, or in his own grim
+words--Her Majesty's gallows. The reign was still young when the
+philosopher's vision began to take shape and substance. In every centre of
+population from the Tyne to the Thames, from the Thames to the Tamar, a
+place where, without payment, upon no other conditions save those of
+reasonably clean hands, and silence, the working man is as well off for
+newspapers and books as a Bishop at the Athenæum Club, has changed the
+Victorian landscape. These buildings, comely to look at, comfortable to
+enter, have competed with the later board schools in transforming the
+appearance of London suburb and provincial town. Where Knightsbridge
+merges into Chelsea first, and Fulham afterwards, there, during the early
+days of the reign, desolate fields and miry ways used to stretch their
+unlovely length. After dusk there were few lamps to light; the roads were
+not more safe than Hounslow Heath had been some generations earlier.
+To-day this district is covered by a mass of buildings in red brick or
+stone, of aspect rather more academic than the new quarter of Victorian
+Oxford. Among these are the free libraries, built, partly out of the
+public rates, partly out of private funds. If it chance to be Saturday
+night, hundreds of working men, decently clad, with parcels under their
+arms will be seen passing to and fro near these buildings. They are not
+going to the public house. The packages they carry do not imply a
+negotiation with the pawnbroker. The men are, in fact, returning to the
+library the books which, taken out some days earlier, have given them
+their reading during the week after the day's work has been done. Certain
+processes supplementary to these studies have still to be performed. Even
+in our age of improvement, the reference library kept by an artizan at his
+fireside is not extensive. Nothing quickens the intellectual appetite
+like its earliest gratification. As our student has travelled through the
+volumes which have occupied him, he has become aware of allusions for the
+full understanding of which fresh information is required. He has,
+therefore, while going along, made notes of points to look up. This,
+therefore, is one of his errands to-night.
+
+No professional visitor to the British Museum sets more systematically to
+work than our day labourer in the Fulham or Pimlico district. Before his
+visit this evening to the place of silence and of books he has, perhaps,
+had recourse to a member of the University Settlement in his
+neighbourhood, or possibly even to his own employer if the employer
+happens to be better read than the employed. The local librarian presently
+to be consulted needs to combine patience and method with something like
+omniscience. The note book is produced by our working man in which the
+points for enquiry have been jotted down. In a few minutes the official
+has placed the researcher on the right track. Before his studies are ended
+that night he will have hunted up facts and figures enough to furnish
+forth a leading article for a journalist, or a speech in Committee for a
+Member of Parliament.
+
+Not only in the industrial suburbs of the capital, but throughout the
+Kingdom, this is the sort of thing which takes place at least on one
+evening in every week. It is one among the many agencies which, nowadays,
+make the humblest reader so terrible a critic, and which cause a working
+man's meeting to be not less intolerant of mere rhetoric than the House
+of Commons itself.
+
+Like everything else which during our age has been brought towards
+perfection, the free library movement existed among us in germ from the
+earliest days, before indeed the books themselves were known. When
+Lancashire monasteries had ceased to be gratuitous places of literary
+study, their manuscripts and parchments were housed in the Chetham
+Library, with its old oriel windows at Manchester; in the Guildhall
+Library at London, certainly coeval with Whittington; in the libraries of
+Bristol or Liverpool which compete with London in antiquity, and with
+which the Protector Somerset is said to have made somewhat too free.
+
+The patronymic of the man who was the father of the free library as it is
+known in England to-day is preserved in the second name of Mr Gladstone.
+Mr Ewart belonged to an old Kirkcudbright family. He had been at Eton with
+Dr Pusey and Speaker Denison. In the spring of 1843 he obtained a
+Committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the conditions of
+popular reading throughout the United Kingdom. Disraeli, Monckton Milnes,
+Cardwell, Kershaw, were among the more famous names that the Committee
+included. Less than ten years after this, the Ewart Act, based on the
+Committee report was the law of the land.
+
+In the early autumn of 1852, the new legislation was celebrated in a very
+practical manner by the opening of the free library at Manchester; the
+town which had been the birthplace of the movement.
+
+Sir John Potter, the father of the present Mr T. B. Potter, took the
+chair. On the platform among the speakers were John Bright, Bulwer Lytton,
+Sir James Stephen, the future Lord Houghton, Dickens and Thackeray;
+Charles Dickens made a speech in his happiest, and therefore incomparable,
+vein, on the Manchester School, an expression then in many mouths. The
+success of the experiment first illustrated on the Irwell was gradual. The
+provinces led the way which at last the capital followed. So late as 1886,
+only two parishes out of the sixty-seven within the metropolitan area had
+adopted the Acts. By August 1891 this number had risen to thirty. Other
+London districts have since followed.[87] With time the result has been
+more than satisfactory. In the manner already seen it has affected the
+life and appearance of every town in the country, and has certainly
+provided a machinery without which as a supplement the educational
+apparatus of free schools would do little.
+
+To-day, therefore, in any large district, London or provincial, it is the
+exception for the Free Libraries Act not to be operative. That the power
+to read and the taste for reading does not always make good citizens, is
+of course true enough. On the other hand the close connection between
+ignorance and crime is instructively shown by a few historic statistics
+cited by Mr T. Greenwood, in his valuable volume on _Public Libraries_.
+These figures are to the following effect.
+
+In 1856 the number of young persons committed for indictable offences was
+14,000. In 1866, when the State had, by the action of the Privy Council,
+since 1833 assumed educational responsibility, and cheap literature of the
+better sort had, thanks to Charles Knight, and his many public-spirited
+imitators, become general, the number was decreased to 10,000. When School
+Boards were fully at work, there was a yet further reduction to 7,000; and
+this though the population had risen from 19 to 27 millions. Passing to a
+later date, out of 164,000 persons in prison between the years 1880-90,
+60,000 were entirely uneducated. Nor is it less suggestive that since the
+teaching of the people was seriously taken in hand by the State in 1870,
+no new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons
+have been changed into public libraries, or, as in the case of Milbank,
+have been converted into a fine art gallery.
+
+An objection is sometimes raised against the multiplication of free
+libraries on the ground that they promote exclusively the perusal of the
+most worthless fiction among the class least likely to be proof against
+the social dangers of this class of writing. No novel, perhaps, is so
+entirely mischievous as not to be preferable to the occupations from which
+for a few hours, it may withdraw the illiterate reader. In truth however a
+very careful examination of the facts by enquiries made at representative
+free libraries throughout the country justify the statement that novels
+form a stepping stone to books of a more seriously improving kind.
+
+The same statistics show the demand for fiction already to be on the
+decrease. Thus, in the case of the Newcastle-on-Tyne library; during a
+recent twelvemonth, of the books issued to readers 65·69 were fiction. The
+next year the proportion was 64·28. A year later it was 61·81. In 1896 the
+figures were 55·22. The latest enquiries show this decline in the demand
+for fiction to be steadily going forward. Further, the category of fiction
+is stretched by free libraries to include not only the coloured paper
+boards containing the latest sensational romance of the day, but all the
+masterpieces of Fielding, nearly all the writings of Defoe, the _Arcadia_
+of Sir Philip Sidney, the _Tristram Shandy_ of Lawrence Sterne, the _Don
+Quixote_ of Cervantes, and the Dialogues of Lucian.
+
+The remarkably elastic connotation with which the word fiction is thus
+invested, may make one doubt whether a case might not be established even
+for novel reading. As a fact the works most in demand at any typical
+London library, _e.g._, that of Chelsea, are not novels at all. Here the
+favourites seem to be Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_, thrice asked
+for on the day this library was visited, his _Ecclesiastical
+Institutions_, twice asked for. Aristotle's _Ethics_, the works of
+Spinoza, Martineau's _Types of Ethical Theory_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of
+Nations_, J. S. Mill's _Logic_, Professor Sayce's _Vindications of
+Revealed Religion by the Light of Ancient Monuments_, all Sir Charles
+Dilke's works of travel, Carlyle, Froude; _Cassell's Popular Educator_,
+Todhunter's _Euclid_ are in greater demand than any fictions. However many
+copies of these there might be, none, it is thought, would be often out of
+hand.
+
+It is not only what are called the industrial classes whose literary
+resources have been expanded and transformed during the Victorian age.
+Libraries for a different class of readers have of late years increased
+throughout the Kingdom, in the provinces not less than in the capital.
+Mudie's is, in the most literal sense of the epithet, a national agency.
+Its headquarters are in London. There is no town or village book club in
+the country, which is not fed from its metropolitan shelves. Mudie's
+Library was founded by the late C. E. Mudie, in 1842, two years after the
+St James's Square London Library. If light literature were alone in
+demand, this library would not flourish as during more than half a century
+it has done. Without it, many of the candidates for the Indian, the Home
+Civil Services and other such examinations would be unable to get up their
+books. A theologian like Canon Liddon turns new light on old truths. A
+pious and picturesque impressionist like Dean Arthur Stanley presents the
+scenes and incidents of sacred story as he has himself seen or imagined
+them. A Darwin propounds a fresh theory for the origin of life; a Froude
+rehabilitates a Tudor; a Freeman refutes a Froude; a Livingstone explores
+a Dark Continent; a Stanley recovers a reluctant Livingstone or an
+indignant Emin. A Green illustrates the growth of an English people; a
+Lecky supplements the work of a Buckle or makes the eighteenth century
+real as the nineteenth.
+
+Mudie's is the channel through which these streams of culture are conveyed
+to the majority of English readers; for, highly educated as the Victorian
+age may be, it is with books that its economies begin To buy volumes that
+can be borrowed or hired, is accounted wanton extravagance. A work which
+requires more study, which holds public attention longer than a novel,
+must obviously be most profitable to the circulating librarian. Nor would
+self-interest let him be a distributor of fiction alone or even primarily.
+
+The increase of novel readers as of novel writers is indeed the great
+literary feature of the day. Not less characteristic of the time are the
+new periodicals which have created a fresh public for themselves. The
+sixpenny magazines count their circulation by millions, and are borrowed
+from the library as well as bought by their readers. But it is the
+standard works, as shown by the instances already specified that give to
+Mudie's its deserved epithet of 'Select.'
+
+Rather more grave in its contents, and didactic in its origin and purpose,
+the London Library, in St James's Square has during more than half a
+century been a most productive agent in the culture not less of the whole
+upper middle classes than in the equipment for their tasks of writing men
+and women.[88] On the Mid-summer Day of 1840, with Lord Eliot in the chair
+there was held at the Freemasons' Tavern a meeting, the object of which
+was to provide literary workers and others at their homes with those books
+for which they then had to go to the reading room of the British Museum.
+The result was the formation of a Committee of the leading literary
+persons of the period, the drawing up of rules and of a list of
+desiderated books, the acquisition of premises in Pall Mall. Towards the
+end of December in the same year, the new institution was opened in its
+first home in Pall Mall with, on a smaller scale, the same kind of
+accommodations that it possesses to-day in St James's Square. As the
+earliest prospectus reminded the public, no less a person than Edward
+Gibbon had first lamented the lack of any lending library befitting the
+dignity of an Imperial capital in London.
+
+When, in the May of 1841, this library was first in working order, its
+stock was some 3,000 volumes. A year later these figures had risen to
+13,000. Since then, at an outlay of some £50,000, its contents have been
+increased to nearly 200,000. Situated in the heart of clubland, the
+Library has done for the education of clubmen, including penmen of every
+degree, all that Mudie's can have done for the instruction of families.
+Not that the London Library is without claim to be considered a domestic
+institution. Its reading room is frequented by as many lady journalists of
+the new school verifying references for their articles, as by male writers
+of an older type. There are few households where its books are not to be
+found. Carlyle and Thackeray are only two of the many well-known men who
+have been helped by it in suffusing historic descriptions with local or
+personal colour. It was to ascertain the exact hues of George Washington's
+waistcoat[89] that Thackeray consulted the late librarian Robert Harrison
+as to the classical authorities.
+
+Nor are there many writers of recent years in the English tongue, who have
+not been indebted to London Librarians from the days of Cochrane, the
+first of the line, to those of Hagberg Wright, his latest successor,[90]
+for seasonable hints as to what authorities most usefully to consult.
+
+As has been already seen, in the theory and practice of the culture now
+popularized in England, there is a growing tendency on the part of science
+and art to trench upon the ground formerly occupied by literature. The
+fashionable vocabulary of culture is itself an instance of this. Metaphors
+from the palette, the scalpel, the crucible, the retort, are applied to
+indicate the commonest and oldest literary phenomena. Or we hear of loaded
+epithets, of dynamic diction, of sonatas in sentences, of fugues in
+periods, and of new stratifications in style. Amid all our improvements we
+are a little mixed, and have still to decide where the province of the
+writer ends and that of his brother in some other art begins. This is a
+transient, as it is a transitional phase. It may perhaps confuse posterity
+which will scarcely recognize as the same language the lectures of Sir
+Joshua Reynolds, the orations of Lord Leighton, the art criticisms of
+Steele or Addison in _The Spectator_, of Walter H. Pater, of J. A.
+Symonds, in _The Cornhill Magazine_, or one of the monthly Reviews.
+
+The survey of the agencies now at work upon different social levels, shows
+that even thus the education which comes of reading, competes at some
+disadvantage with the instruction that is the result of lectures in class
+rooms, of demonstrations in scientific 'theatres,' of days and nights
+spent in museums of sculpture or in galleries of paintings.
+
+During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary
+system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work,
+was dominated by the presence of a few illustrious men, who naturally
+became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives,
+Dickens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the
+weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing,
+especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to
+so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire
+company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by
+Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary
+imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or
+successors. The author of _The Newcomes_ was outlived[91] by the
+accomplished writer of that series which began with _Pelham_ in 1828 and
+neared its end with _The Parisians_ almost fifty years later.
+
+While the anniversaries of the Queen's accession were few in number,
+Lytton by the side of Dickens, as a popular master of the pen, filled
+something like the place which Thackeray had occupied before him. During
+most of his time, another man of letters belonging like Lytton to the
+titled classes divided with Lytton the social patronage of literary
+beginners. No man of his day did so much as Lytton to help younger men
+with the booksellers, as in his old-fashioned phrase he was apt to call
+the publishers. He had indeed a rival or a colleague in these good offices
+in Lord Stanhope, then Lord Mahon, the historian, as also in Mr Monckton
+Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, the timely friend of Coventry Patmore,
+and the rescuer from great troubles of a forgotten but deserving poet
+David Gray.
+
+When as yet journalism as a profession was not fully organized, and young
+authors still looked first to the pillars of Paternoster Row, an
+introduction to Lord Lytton or to Lord Stanhope was the surest stepping
+stone to print. In this way Antonio Gallenga, then an obscure refugee,
+with associations of the dagger and bowl about him, having won the good
+word of Lytton, found a publisher for his _History of Piedmont_. This in
+its turn opened to him the office of the _Times_. Here he made his name
+not only as among the most brilliant, best informed and versatile of
+newspaper writers but, together with William Howard Russell, as a founder
+of that school of graphic newspaper narrative since represented by
+Archibald Forbes, Edward Dicey, B. H. Becker, G. A. Henty, George Augustus
+Sala, and John O'Shea.
+
+The development of the press has changed most of the conditions of
+literary life. For very many Englishmen of all classes, the periodical,
+daily, weekly, or monthly, is practically an exclusive synonym for
+literature itself. This fact of course has reacted upon the whole class of
+professional writers. The most commercially successful of men and women of
+letters are, as, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, they have been,
+authors of some novel which hits the taste of the moment, and fixes the
+interest of the town. When George Eliot wedded in her writings the
+artistic to the scientific spirit, she invented a combination unknown till
+then; she opened a gold mine for herself and the more dexterous of her
+disciples. Dickens and Thackeray both realized high prices for the labour
+of their pen. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were not far behind. But
+the men of this class were either original creators of literary types that
+will take their place with the characters of Shakespeare, and Cervantes,
+or else were masters in the manufacture of exciting and dramatic plots.
+
+Lord Lytton knew a little of everything, science included. He was indeed
+not only a marvel of varied productiveness but a consummate student,
+summing up in his own person all the intellectual interests and tendencies
+of his time. During his most industrious period, before he had attained
+Cabinet rank in politics, and before Carlyle's deeper studies of Fichte
+and Goethe had familiarized the English public with modes of German
+thought, Bulwer did more than anyone of his day to educate the average
+reader on lines, and in subjects, which now seem commonplace, but of
+which, when the dandy who dashed off _Falkland_, as Byron dashed off
+_Beppo_, had matured into the student who travailed with _Rienzi_,
+Englishmen knew nothing.
+
+The mental inquisitiveness and activity of a newly enlightened generation,
+resolved, like Bacon, to take all learning for its province, finds the
+reflection of some aspect of itself in every page of Bulwer. The polished
+conceits, the recondite illustrations drawn from every sphere of human
+thought or achievement, the similes sometimes as far fetched, and
+obscurely ingenious as those of Sir Piercie Shafton or of Euphues himself,
+suggest at times the inspiration of an universally-informed, and
+precociously-gifted youth who displays his cleverness before it is yet
+quite disciplined, and parades his patchwork learning before it is fully
+digested.
+
+In all these things Bulwer was essentially the product and the mirror of
+the new and eclectically educated Victorian age. He had been a young man
+of great fashion, a good specimen of that social school of which the
+younger Disraeli at his _Vivian Grey_ period was a bad specimen. A dandy
+of the older type through life Lytton remained. Tennyson's lines in
+_Punch_ on the padded man who wore the stays, stuck to him throughout life
+as did Thackeray's caricatures of Sir Edward Bulwig. People therefore
+insisted on finding affectations in his manner, and insincerities in his
+nature.[92] He saw his time in its entirety abroad as well as at home
+more clearly than most of his contemporaries. The reforming zeal and
+humanitarian spirit of his age were not expressed more powerfully, if to
+many persons more intelligibly, by Dickens himself than by Lytton.
+
+All the modern masters of English fiction are in their different ways as
+much the products of that series of movements comprehended in, or grouped
+round, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as Byron himself
+was in England the immediate progeny of that organic upheaval of thought
+and faith. The year of the accession produced Carlyle's _History of the
+French Revolution_. Four years later, the most powerful picture of these
+episodes presented by any writer of fiction was given to the world by
+Bulwer in _Zanoni_. To the same era of revolutionary influences belonged
+_A Tale of Two Cities_, in which Dickens not only illustrated after his
+own manner the age of Robespierre, but produced a work not inferior in
+literary art to the _Esmond_ of his great rival. Lytton's genius impelled
+him to mysticism, as George Eliot's associations inclined her to
+positivism. Both after their own manner dealt with human problems from
+what they respectively thought the scientific point of view. Add to this
+that Lytton remained a student annexing new domains of interest, thought
+and knowledge to the last; that he showed himself the prophet of the new
+and better France in _The Parisians_, as he had been the bard of the new
+England beyond the seas before the curtain fell on the fortunes and the
+friends of Pisistratus Caxton.
+
+Enough is said to vindicate his place as among the most representative
+writers of the age, as well as to explain the recent renascence of his
+writings in France and the growing popularity of his works as attested by
+the fresh editions issuing from the house of Routledge in England.
+Macaulay, though never a newspaper man, is in point of manner, the father
+of the leading article. The terse impressionist style which has much
+superseded the Macaulayan in the press may be referred to George Borrow,
+author of _The Bible in Spain_, than whom no one has influenced periodical
+writers more beneficially; to Kinglake in his _Eothen_; to his literary
+disciple, Lawrence Oliphant in _Piccadilly_; to the late Grenville Murray,
+whose 'Roving Englishman' in _All the Year Round_ contains the happiest of
+travel sketches, and whose Young Brown in the _Cornhill Magazine_ is a
+miracle of clever writing. Each of these has contributed to make such
+happy writers of concise prose as Jehu, Junior, in _Vanity Fair_, and
+Violet Fane, now Lady Currie, in her clever and original novel, _Sophy_.
+Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold complete a
+representative list of educators of popular taste during our age. They
+are, however, heroic instances. Others, with not a tenth of their fame
+have reached at least as far in their influence, and have brought their
+refining mission home to the masses with an intimacy not approached by
+their mightier rivals.
+
+Emerson's writings, his visit to, and lectures in, London in 1847 leavened
+English thought with the same spiritualizing quality which had long since
+penetrated the American mind. For one Briton who was inspired by Emerson,
+hundreds were charmed and humanized by Longfellow first, and by Whittier
+afterwards. If Longfellow's simple ballads had never been written, the
+higher offices of poetry, notwithstanding a Tennyson or a Browning, would
+have remained a mystery hidden from the toiling millions of the
+Anglo-Saxon world.
+
+The same gentle and gracious offices have been performed by less known and
+not always respected writers, Martin Tupper of the _Proverbial
+Philosophy_, and the late Hain Friswell of _The Gentle Life_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES
+
+    The newspaper press of all kinds, largely, the penny press,
+    exclusively, a Victorian product. Its recent growth reviewed. A
+    valuable rival to Parliament because its publicity assures
+    parliamentary efficiency. Growth of the cheaper journalism summarized.
+    The _Daily News_, the _Daily Telegraph_, the halfpenny press, morning
+    and evening as a special product of the age. The press and party.
+
+
+'Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.' Such, in reference to
+the then editor of the _Times_, was the remark made a year or two
+after the Victorian age had begun by Lord Lyndhurst, himself an
+ex-journalist,[93] to Charles Greville, the Diarist. Like opinions by
+equal authorities as to the successors of Barnes have been delivered
+frequently since, but are less known because the memoir-writer has not yet
+stamped them with immortality. No attribute of skill or power belonging to
+Barnes was wanting to Delane. To his weight with the public a
+characteristic tribute was once paid by a shrewd judge of editors as of
+men generally, Lord Beaconsfield. 'I think,' were that statesman's exact
+words, on a social occasion to Lord Granville, 'I had better postpone
+giving you my views of Delane till he is dead.'
+
+On her accession the Queen was congratulated by some 479 newspapers
+representing the collective press of the United Kingdom and its outlying
+islands. Her sixtieth commemoration gives a theme to 2396 journals
+published within the same area.[94] The English newspaper press which in
+effect began under one Queen, reached its final term of greatness under
+another Queen. 1837 is a landmark in newspaper history, because it was the
+first year in which the public press published the parliamentary division
+lists, and thus made another stride towards equality of influence with the
+legislature. Its effect was to increase the usefulness of Members of
+Parliament, as well as of the press itself. The Long Parliament made
+English freedom, but gagged the press.
+
+In 1712 Harley had taxed newspapers at a penny a sheet, and one shilling
+for each advertisement. Under North and Pitt successively, these taxes
+were raised to prohibitive figures. In 1836 Spring Rice had fixed the
+stamp duty at a penny, so that the first step towards newspaper prosperity
+was made on the eve of the Victorian age. The Victorian press means the
+penny press. That was only possible after the fourteenth year of the
+reign, and the repeal of the paper duty in 1851.
+
+Popular politics are changed as little by newspaper articles as are
+political votes by parliamentary speeches. The press rather organizes
+political opinion. Existing convictions are deepened. But the average
+reader chooses his newspaper not because he wants to be converted, but
+because his self love is flattered by seeing his formed ideas reflected in
+its columns. The modern newspaper is therefore a Victorian creation. In
+its best form it belongs to England alone. In no other country is there a
+second _Times_, as since 1788 the older _Universal Register_ has been
+called; no such epitome of foreign history from day to day; no such
+reflection, in letters to the editor, of English opinion.
+
+So far as the cheap newspaper is due to any one man, it may be connected
+with the name of the first proprietor of the _Athenæum_, like its latest,
+a Charles Wentworth Dilke. In the twelfth year of the Victorian age the
+_Daily News_, to which the short editorship of Charles Dickens gave
+literary distinction rather than commercial success, its proprietors,
+Bright, Cobden, Walmsley, called in Mr Dilke, as the great newspaper
+organizer of his day. He at once reduced the price, though not yet to its
+final penny. In 1865 the proprietary was enlarged by the late Mr S.
+Morley, Mr Labouchere and others, with the intention of turning it into a
+penny paper. That was done. Its success was made by its foreign
+correspondence during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. Meanwhile, the
+_Daily Telegraph_, started by Colonel Sleigh in 1856, had been acquired,
+enlarged, and improved by the strenuous ancestors of its present owners.
+It at once electrified the town by its original writing of all kinds,
+notably its Paris correspondence. The letters to the _Times_ from the
+Crimea of William Howard Russell, first caused the Sebastopol
+enquiry;--then in 1855 produced the Roebuck motion[95] and with it the
+fall of the Government of Lord Aberdeen. In this way the whole conception
+of the province of the press was enlarged. Soon there sprung up a new and
+organized profession of the pen. If to-day the political writing of the
+great London dailies be below the mark of that of the two _Couriers_ and
+some later publicists in France, its special and descriptive
+correspondence by a Forbes, a Henty, a W. W. Knollys, a Pearce, a Becker,
+a Conan Doyle, a G. W. Steevens, in point of graphic vigour, of accurate
+and comprehensive swiftness of execution, is superior to anything which
+other periodicals of Europe can show.
+
+The Jubilee Year of 1887 witnessed the completion of a revolution in the
+public press, that had in fact begun a twelvemonth earlier. Hitherto the
+great London broadsheets had either been affected really if not
+professedly to one of the great political parties; or had, as in the case
+of the _Times_, not less than of the chief weekly journals, made some show
+of impartially criticizing both parties alike. In 1886 the Liberal party
+was rent in twain by the Irish policy of its greatest member. The result
+with the press was to divest political writers of all show of
+independence. Those journals which accepted the great leader's view were
+converted into uncompromising champions of the scheme that their opponents
+said would dismember the monarchy. Those, on the other hand, which
+resisted the great statesman's plan found themselves by the force of
+events they could not control detached from their earlier traditions of
+independence and converted into the enemies of political Liberalism not
+only on one issue, but on all.
+
+From that day newspaper criticism of men and measures has practically
+ceased. With a few able exceptions, signally that of the _Daily
+Chronicle_, the paramount task of the press in the sixth decade of the
+epoch is to support a combination of groups rallied not under a party
+flag, but an Imperial banner. About the same time another newspaper change
+may be said to have taken place. Hitherto, the anonymous system had been
+fairly preserved. The names of newspaper writers were not known beyond
+their office, or at least beyond Fleet Street. Now, however, English
+journalism was undergoing two distinct and mutually antagonistic
+processes. On the one hand it had by the agency of the great newspapers
+with their enlarged staffs and various departments been organized into a
+liberal profession, attracting specialists of all kinds to its columns. On
+the other hand its pleasures and its profits had gathered a host of camp
+followers who as amateurs vied with the older professionals. Next, persons
+of fashion or of quality took to the proprietorship or editorship of new
+journals, as, till then, they had taken to the owning and management of
+theatres for the benefit of personal friends. In _Lothair_, someone
+advises the hero to amuse himself with theatre proprietorship 'as being
+the high mode for all swells.' The paper next enjoyed the same vogue as
+the playhouse.
+
+The former secrecy now became impracticable. As had long been the case
+with the monthly periodical, the weekly print first and the daily print
+afterwards showed a tendency towards a transformation from an organ of
+collective opinion into a platform for individual display. The new
+editor's chief business was not as formerly to point the gun for the
+marksmen of the pen to fire, but to recruit writers with well known names.
+If their signatures were suppressed, the authorship, as it was intended it
+should do, speedily transpired. Fleet Street became a whispering gallery
+of press gossip. Its murmurs were heard throughout the land.
+
+What the sixpenny magazine is to the monthly press that the halfpenny
+newspaper is to the daily. The first daily journal at this price, the
+_Echo_, after some startling vicissitudes came into the capable hands of
+John Passmore Edwards, a Celt of Cornwall with all the characteristics of
+his race. Morning as well as evening rivals at the same price sprung up
+like mushrooms after rain. _Evening News_ or _Star_ at night, the
+_Morning_, the _Leader_ are only a few of the fresh notes added to the
+music of the London street vendors. No urchin so ragged that he does not
+proclaim the printed wares of a millionaire _in esse_ or _in posse_.
+Believers in literature as part of popular education will think it a good
+sign that book reviews, and articles of a kindred sort are features in
+characteristically Victorian newspapers. Signally in the arrangements for
+supply of foreign news, a revolution extending throughout the whole press
+of the country has been effected by the enterprise of these journals. The
+telegrams on which for its tidings from abroad the public used exclusively
+to depend, have been often superseded by the dispatches of special
+representatives of their journal stationed abroad.
+
+Every journal has now become its own Reuter. Men like Alfred C.
+Harmsworth, being millionaires as well as resourceful journalists, thought
+no more of having their own agents in every capital at the end of a
+telegraphic wire than of arranging a little Arctic expedition on their own
+account. They have thus forced the hand of newspaper proprietors all
+round. The leisurely descriptive writing has gone out. The condensed
+three-line paragraph has come in. The _Daily Mail_ has shown a busy
+generation which reads its papers as it takes its lunch standing at a
+buffet, that the essence of the day's news of the world can be read in a
+few odd minutes as easily as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were once
+packed into a nutshell.[96]
+
+For this new journalism new men have been needed. In most cases very young
+men; generally fresh from Balliol or Trinity where they have perhaps won
+Fellowships as well as First Classes, but in appearance often not much
+older than a public school sixth form boy. Youth is an error which
+unfortunately time too soon corrects.
+
+In ability, in conscientious use of increased power; in education, in
+social position, in all the best guarantees of responsibility, the British
+press has improved immeasurably within the present age. Even now it shows
+signs of perceiving that a certain amount of political impartiality
+towards the great leaders of State and Church renders its praise, its
+censure, and its criticism the more effective because the less mechanical.
+The condition of things which has made so many great newspapers patriotic
+partizans instead of independent guides must in its nature be temporary.
+When it has gone by, and a more normal state of affairs is re-established,
+there will be perhaps no compensating disadvantages to the increasing
+influence with which the Victorian age has endowed and is yet endowing
+what is really a fourth estate.[97]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE
+
+    Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive
+    feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court
+    through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided
+    with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular
+    sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new
+    nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed.
+
+    Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between
+    these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and
+    curative medicine also entitled to credit. General course of medical
+    progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained
+    usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors,
+    with particular instances.
+
+
+Before the Victorian age, there had been no legislation for the purpose of
+helping the helpless, housing the homeless, providing for the health of
+those whose birth-right was the squalor, the starvation, the disease, that
+come from systematic neglect. Here, as in other things, the representative
+of the Crown, transformed from a political power into an agency of social
+good, led the way. The Prince Consort, moved by the condition and by the
+address of the ballast heavers in the East End of London took the
+initiative; the legislature gradually followed. Thus was the principle
+established and acted on that one of the prime duties of the State is to
+those for whom from any other quarter there is no help.
+
+The last instance of that wholesome truth was the Dilke Commission for the
+better housing of the poor aptly presided over by the Prince Consort's
+eldest son in 1885. Exactly forty-five years earlier than this, Colonel
+Slaney's[98] motion in the House of Commons produced an enquiry into the
+health of towns. Local Improvement Acts had been multiplied to the number
+of 500. There was still no proper drainage. The Duke of Buccleuch's
+Commission of 1848 led to the Public Health Act of the same year. As the
+cholera invasions of 1853 and of 1865-6 showed, the Local Boards
+established by the Act of 1848 were too permissive in their operations to
+be fully effective. Edwin Chadwick, and Southwood Smith had from the first
+co-operated with the Queen's husband. Their activity did not cease when
+the earliest steps to reform had been taken: 1858 witnessed fresh
+improvements.[99]
+
+It was not till 1875 that the confused mass of sanitary laws was
+consolidated. Then the Local Government Board which, with the powers of
+the superseded Poor Law Board, had been established in 1871 was in full
+and in most beneficent work. Still the Commission that last investigated
+the matter, due as it was largely to Lord Shaftesbury, showed many evils
+still to remain. Overcrowding was worse in the West London rookeries than
+it had been in the East. In 1885 the Dilke Commission Act gave fresh power
+to local authorities to destroy unhealthy dwellings.
+
+The machinery which thus exists as the sixth decade of our epoch draws to
+its close, is therefore tolerably complete. Guarantees for its promptly
+being put into motion are still wanted. Not only the credit, but the very
+conception of this wholesome function of the State belongs entirely to our
+era, and arises out of the enlarged idea of Royal service which fills the
+modern mind.
+
+Strictly consistent with family tradition is the effort of the Prince of
+Wales to help those who are only one degree more helpless than the
+dwellers in city and suburban alleys and courts in time of need. To free
+the London hospitals of debt will crown the edifice of sick relief that in
+Crimean days the Queen and her husband began.
+
+From the departure of Miss Florence Nightingale[100] and her trained staff
+for the Crimea in 1854 must be dated the birth of nursing as a polite
+profession. But for that mission of mercy one would hear nothing of the
+contemporary parade of nurses in the height of the London season in the
+grounds of Marlborough House. The fashionable vogue of the vocation may
+sometimes attract modish recruits who have not counted the cost.
+
+Amiable sympathy is not the sole qualification which the lady nurse needs.
+Self-consciousness is as much a disqualification as a shuddering dislike
+of sick room scenes. It is also the attribute that the patient is the most
+quick to observe. Not a few of the sick whom the ministering angel of the
+new school desires to relieve may still sigh for the presence by their
+bedside of the displaced Mrs Gamp instead of the young lady in the
+coquettish muslin cap and dainty grey frock who casts complacent glances
+at herself as she passes the mirror, and with an air not quite suited for
+a sick room offers her patient his medicine or his barley water as if she
+were suggesting black coffee, green Chartreuse, and a cigarette after a
+whitebait dinner. These defects will no doubt be mended when the lady
+nurse is more habituated to her calling. Decayed billiard markers, and
+scripture readers who have gone wrong, will not eventually figure so
+largely among the self-sacrificing males who also find their career in
+tending the invalid. The scandals of which the nurse (old style) was
+sometimes the heroine still live in the pages of Dickens. They arose from
+the rumoured hastening of the sick man's death by the scriptural practice
+of laying a wet cloth over his mouth. Any scandals with which the nurse
+(new style) might be connected would perhaps come from the desirable
+marriage that she arranges for herself in the sick room or from the
+legacies made to her by grateful patients, but disputed by thankless
+relations. These things, therefore, should be no doubt regarded not as
+slurs upon her disinterestedness, but as tributes to her efficiency.
+
+Inside the hospital the same transformation has been effected as in the
+aspect of the ministering angels themselves. The grave young gentlemen in
+training for the medical profession have nothing about them left of the
+lamp breaking, policemen baiting, medical student of Albert Smith. If
+sometimes one reads of the too engrossing attractions for these youths of
+the sylphs who flit to and fro in the wards, the answer is obvious--'Evil
+be to him who evil thinks.'
+
+Hospital management is the subject not for a few pages in a single book,
+but for a library in itself. One or two not controversial facts may be
+given. Throughout the Victorian age a marked feature in medical charities
+has been the supplementing of the historic hospitals with many new
+dispensaries and establishments for special diseases. If the latest
+hospital endowments are smaller than those originating in an earlier
+century, the explanation is less a decline in eleemosynary purpose or
+power than the development of the value of the property assigned to the
+older foundations.[101] Thus the revenue of St Bartholomew's in the middle
+of the sixteenth century seems to have been only £371 a year. Towards the
+close of the nineteenth century it is £32,000 a year. During our own era
+hospital benefactions approaching a quarter of a million are far from
+unknown. These do not include such special and comparatively recent
+hospitals as that for consumption, with the 40 new dispensaries connected
+with it.
+
+To epitomize the facts; the total of London hospitals or infirmaries with
+wards for the sick amounts to 49. The movement still goes forward. So vast
+is the scale on which these buildings, less houses than towns in
+themselves, were first planned that in many of them there is yet room for
+fresh beds. This is only a specimen of what has been, and is being, done
+throughout the kingdom. There thus seems a fresh argument in favour of
+continuing to London itself an institution like St Thomas's, Southwark,
+the removal of which to the country was not long since suggested.
+
+Like all gracious works, these places are twice blessed. They relieve
+those who are in need. They humanize those whom prosperity and comfort
+might make callous. Before our age began, no one thought of sending game
+or fruit to the sufferers or convalescents within these places of refuge.
+Now it is the exception for the millionaire not to make the spoils of his
+fashionable battue pay tithe to those for whom such food is often the best
+of physic. The costly flowers that decorate the drawing rooms or dining
+rooms during the season are not discarded as rubbish when the festivity is
+over. They are scrupulously tended so as not to lose their freshness.
+Presently their hues and fragrance will relieve the bleak expanse of
+white-washed wall in those places where our sick are nursed away from
+their own homes.[102]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The contrasts of our age include a marked connection between the
+organization of the healing art and the advance of medical science on the
+one hand and the reduction of the death rate on the other. In 1855 the
+mortality of the United Kingdom was 23 per 1,000. In 1875 it was 21 per
+1,000. In 1895 it had fallen to 18 per 1,000. The figures,[103] and the
+conclusions to which they point, are tributes, not only to medical skill
+in healing disease, but to sanitary reform in preventing it.
+
+Before the Victorian age began the whole population of these Islands
+awaited the periodical onsets of pestilence with the resigned fatalism of
+the Turk, or with the passive submission of latter day London to the
+incubus of snow. The notorious consequences of unhealthy living prompted
+no preventive measures. Divine wrath was believed to express itself in
+deadly epidemics. When that anger was assuaged health would return. Till
+then human remedies could do little. Meanwhile, the truth that Providence
+helps those who help themselves was being scientifically shown. Hence in
+1838, a State enquiry into the whole matter was instituted. In 1848 the
+legislation began which, by promoting cleanliness, at once disarmed
+disease. John Simon proved the propagation of pestilence to proceed by
+impure particles. In 1858-65, on his initiative, the Government
+strengthened the defences of public health. The entrance of foreign
+plagues was stopped at our ports. Three sons of a clever West of England
+doctor named Budd[104] had been trained from their childhood in practical
+medicine by their father. These doctors showed the connection between
+impure water and typhoid fever, as before them Snow had shown between
+cholera and water. When the improvements suggested by these researches
+were adopted health generally benefited. Consumption statistics became
+less alarming every year. Fevers of all kinds were successfully combated.
+Since vaccination had become general, smallpox cases had fallen by at
+least one-half.
+
+Meanwhile, the discovery of anæsthetics, of chloroform by Professor J. Y.
+Simpson of Edinburgh in 1848, of ether in 1846 by Morton and Robinson of
+the United States, at once robbed surgical operations of their terrors,
+and rendered them practicable in cases where till then they could not
+safely be tried. In 1860 came the antiseptic treatment of Sir Joseph,
+since Lord, Lister. Before then, the nervous system had been explored
+successfully by Carpenter.[105] Instruments for examining by reflected
+lights the hidden parts of the human frame had been invented by several
+English surgeons. Operations for certain internal tumours, that had
+hitherto defied removal, were first performed by Cæsar Hawkins, born 1798,
+brother of the famous Oriel Provost, a pupil of Brodie at St George's; and
+more recently by Spencer Wells.
+
+More than a half of the medical discoveries of the period are English.
+The latest perhaps, certainly not the smallest if the least known, was the
+treatment by the late Sir William Gull of the swellings technically known
+as myxoedema by an entirely new process, that of supplementing deficiences
+of the thyroid gland with matter taken from animals. The throat
+specialists of Germany found much to learn from the late Morell Mackenzie.
+Not till 1860, was the scheme of medical education perfected in its
+present shape by the College of Physicians, which to-day, under its
+President and two Censors, arranges all examinations; while the Medical
+Association represents the whole profession, bringing its grievances and
+needs before the legislature. The average of ability throughout the
+practitioners of the country is as noticeable as the achievements of its
+scientific pioneers. The treatise on _Heredity_ in disease by Dr Douglas
+Lithgow, on gout and allied complaints by Dr Robson Roose, and on the
+medical uses of electricity by Dr W. S. Hedley, are instances of permanent
+contributions by busy practitioners to the scientific knowledge of their
+daily labours.
+
+The late Dr Quinn, the late Oscar Clayton, are men who have improved the
+status of their calling by their social services and gifts, and have
+helped to extend the authority of the physician over every department of
+life. We have long since shaken off the rule of priests. Some may think we
+have already placed ourselves under a despotism of doctors, who by their
+word can make or mar the reputation of places and climates if not of
+characters and of men; and on whom the obligations of professional
+etiquette seem at least equal to their sense of responsibility to the
+public.[106]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
+
+    The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated
+    by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization
+    of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of
+    Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures
+    illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and
+    abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant
+    and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the
+    Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In
+    the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly
+    critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on
+    the new High Church critics, _e.g._ _Lux Mundi_ and _The Sermon on the
+    Mount_.
+
+
+A verger at St Mary's Church, Oxford, during the sixties used devoutly to
+thank his Maker that after having heard University sermons for thirty
+years, he still remained a Christian. Conflicts within, attacks without,
+at least as severe as any to which either was exposed during the Georgian
+epoch, have been the lot of the Christianity whose depository is the
+Church of England during the Victorian age. Neither Christian faith, nor
+the Church that is its national expression, has come forth maimed or
+weakened from that ordeal. Modern scepticism scarcely aims at substituting
+for a Divine Being any tangible object of faith. It retires from the
+discussion with the remark that high and invisible things are beyond human
+knowledge. Hence nothing in agnosticism, however hostile its tendency to,
+need be inconsistent with, Revelation. The mere statement of difficulties
+in the way of belief and of purely abstract alternatives to belief makes
+no proselytes.[107]
+
+Freethinkers of the last century appealed, and were limited, to the rich.
+The secularists who are their successors since 1840 pose as the friends of
+the poor. Neither school can consider itself a power. The Victorian age is
+in fact above all others an age of religious revival. This has been
+largely due to the influence of the Court. From the _entourage_ of the
+later Georges and of William IV. the best of their subjects held aloof.
+Had the year of Revolution come then instead of in 1848, the English
+throne, whose possessor lacked all personal hold of the people, might have
+shared the fate of continental crowns.
+
+The Queen saw nothing of any Court until she presided over a transformed
+Court of her own. Her subjects no sooner knew their fresh ruler than they
+were powerfully impressed by the contrast of her blameless life and
+society to anything of which they had read, heard, or seen. Under such a
+sovereign, a change in the whole spirit of the nation's religious life
+naturally followed. Thinking minds had indeed long been in a state of
+spiritual ferment. The Tractarian movement had begun with Keble's Assize
+Sermon five years before the Queen's accession. Its full results were not
+to be seen till 1846.
+
+Meanwhile, in the third year of the reign the idea of reviving
+Convocation, which since 1717 had been suspended, of which Burke had said
+that it was without functions save to pay compliments to the king and then
+dissolve, took form; since 1850, that body has met. Unreformed this
+clerical parliament still remains. As in 1864 it declared _Essays and
+Reviews_ heretical, but could not punish the men whom it branded, so,
+to-day, a canon of Convocation, though approved by the Crown, has no
+binding power. But the days when the _Times_, long since convinced of its
+Erastian errors, could sneer at Convocation as 'a clerical debating
+society with a long name' are altogether gone by.
+
+Many who are by no means ardent Churchmen, or are outside the Church
+Communion, are interested to know the actual opinion of Convocation on
+social and industrial questions of the hour, as this opinion is expressed
+by educated men who reflect the views of their cloth at least as
+faithfully as the House of Commons reflects the views of the people. Thus,
+during the recent sittings of a single year, Convocation in its two
+provinces with their divisions into lower and upper Houses, has discussed
+and suggested solutions of subjects so varied as sisterhoods and
+deaconesses, betting and gambling, popular education, soldiers' marriages,
+marriage law amendment Bills, spiritual provision for workhouses, clergy
+discipline Bill, the relations between the Church and State in the
+Colonies. Even in its unreformed condition, this body can scarcely fail to
+be of some use in officially telling Parliament men the opinion of the
+Church, which, on any view of it, is at least a considerable corporation,
+on matters affecting clerical interests or popular morals. In the remote
+event of the Church being disestablished, Convocation is a useful drilling
+ground on which Churchmen of all degrees can be trained to collective
+action.
+
+What are the facts relating to the Church to-day? At the opening of this
+age, the beneficed clergy were often unfit for their posts; they were very
+largely indifferent to their duties. The attacks on the Establishment led
+by the Lord Henley of that day and others, shortly after the 1832 Reform
+Act, were more organized and plausible than anything which has been
+witnessed since. There are, after all, not many things more national in
+England than the Church. Even the differences of the clergy, and the
+professed desire of some among them to be free from State supervision,
+have not lessened the national regard for the Established Faith. The
+attack from within, therefore, seems likely to be weathered not less
+successfully than the attack from without.
+
+The parochial system of the Church--its clergy resident in every village
+where the squire is often an absentee, has struck its fibres too deep into
+the soil of English life, to be rooted out by any sectarian agitation. The
+best proof that Church endowments do not check, but rather encourage,
+private beneficence is the amount of money donations to the Established
+Church during the present age. Gifts to the Church, whether in the shape
+of lands, tithes, other rent charges, stock or cash, represent roughly a
+sum of £5,500,000, yielding a perpetual yearly income of £181,940.
+
+The second of the two Acts establishing the Ecclesiastical Commission is
+of Victorian date. The operations of this body have increased the incomes
+of Church livings by £1,016,775 a year, or by a capital sum of
+£30,599,100; and this during the twelve years ending 1896-97. Queen Anne's
+bounty does not, indeed, seem to have been uniformly administered with
+such wisdom. Its funds have sometimes been granted to incumbents to
+enlarge houses, schools, and other buildings beyond the point at which
+there was an assured income for the maintenance of these fabrics. The
+Tithes Commutation Act is not blamed for the periodical return of hard
+times for the clergy. The distress itself is partial, sometimes
+exaggerated. Still, there seems to have been a general reduction of
+incomes in rural districts by 25 per cent. No offertories, which in towns
+greatly help the clergy, can make the country deficiency good. The
+suggestion of repealing the Act which put down pluralities so as to
+concentrate several poor preferments in one incumbent is not likely to be
+acted on. But some relaxation of the Act might be a feasible concession to
+a growing opinion. Rich livings are sometimes the worst served. Some
+re-adjustment of stipends after a new enquiry seems, therefore, likely to
+be proposed.
+
+So much for the purely English aspect of clerical activity in our age. The
+alliance in the foreign enterprise of the Church with the State coincides
+exclusively with the Victorian reign. In 1841 the Colonial Bishopric fund
+was begun. By 1851 the Colonial episcopate was fairly organized. Four
+years after the Queen's accession there were 10 Anglican dioceses out of
+England. Sixty years after that accession there are 92.[108] These sees
+are grouped into provincial Synods. This foreign Church, one in doctrine
+with the Established Church at home, is modified in its agency and
+development to suit the soil to which it is transplanted. The late Sir J.
+R. Seeley, with respect to its calming influences amid jarring faiths, has
+in a familiar passage dwelt on the Christianity of the English Church as a
+reconciling element between the rival creeds of the Eastern world. Add to
+this the organization of episcopal Protestantism of the Anglican type, not
+only in the West Indies and in our Canadian Dominion, but in the United
+States themselves.[109]
+
+A fair idea may thus be formed of the State Church in its character of a
+veritable catholic, not less than a national, power. Improved organization
+does not always argue increased efficiency. The machinery of the Roman
+Empire was never more elaborate than when it was in a state of atrophy.
+Coinciding, however, with the unmistakable signs of spiritual life at home
+and abroad, the domestic resources and the foreign work of the national
+religion are tributes alike to the efficacy of the Church as a world-wide
+instrument of righteousness, and to the increased motive power of religion
+during the Victorian age. With the spiritual work that has been done,
+certain names very briefly must be associated. The Oxford Tractarianism
+between 1832-46 is only one of many manifestations of religious life which
+mark that epoch, and which nearly perplexed into infidelity the Oxford
+verger aforesaid. In extreme Evangelicalism outside our Church, the
+followers of Wesley, regardless of their founder's injunction not to form
+a separate sect, were perfecting their system when the reign began. In
+1833, an English clergyman at Plymouth, J. L. Darby, left the National
+Church and founded the sect of 'Brethren' who take their name from the
+Western seaport where he had officiated. Fifteen years later, in 1848,
+Plymouth Brethrenism was itself divided by one of Darby's followers, named
+Newton; he created a clique of his own now called by their rival
+religionists, the loose, or open, Brethren. The missionary and literary
+activities of this little sect are really remarkable. In 1843
+Presbyterianism across the Tweed had a schism of its own. The secession of
+Chalmers on the issue of State patronage resulted in the founding of the
+Free Kirk. The religious activity of the epoch has been universal. Among
+the older dissenting bodies, Congregationalists, in point of numbers,
+influence, in national repute of their leaders, perhaps come first. These
+in 1837, numbered 170,000 full members. Now they number nearly 400,000. Of
+the Baptists there were, in 1837, 125,000. Sixty years later they are
+340,000. This increase is due to the single agency of C. H. Spurgeon,
+whose personal influence is not yet fully realized but may be judged from
+the circulation by millions of his posthumous Sermons, as well as by the
+pulpit imitations of him in all Communions, not excepting the high
+Anglican pulpits. Hence of course Nonconformist numbers depending largely
+on individual attractions, are subject to greater fluctuations than in the
+Establishment. Roman Catholics have increased in the large towns of
+England and in the Colonies. In 1837 their priests were less than 1,000.
+Fifty years later they were in round numbers 2,500. Their Churches have
+risen from 600 to 1,350. The activity of British Evangelicalism is farther
+shown by the doubling of the income of the British and Foreign Bible
+Society during the reign, by the cost of a New Testament being ten-pence
+in 1837, a penny in 1897. Similarly the income of the Propagation of the
+Gospel Society is very nearly twice, and of the Church Missionary Society
+almost thrice, as much to-day as it was in the Accession year.
+
+Among Nonconformist bodies, numbers vary according to the eminence of
+individual leaders, rising by bounds with a Spurgeon, diminishing
+temporarily with some of his successors. Similarly, among Anglican
+Communicants numbers fluctuate according to the influence of the leaders
+of the great schools, a Liddon, or a Ryle, a Maurice, a Webb Peploe, or a
+Lefroy. R. W. Dale, of Birmingham, whose work on the Atonement is a
+recognised text book, even among many Anglicans, did as much as A. P.
+Stanley of Westminster, to soften down sectarian differences, and to
+command the respect of other Communions. Nor has Dale had any lack of
+worthy successors now living. Unless religion had been ineradicable in the
+national, because in the human, mind, results very different from this
+general increase in the number of all religious Communions, judged by
+whatever test, would have been witnessed.
+
+Scarcely had the Church recovered from the shock of Newman's secession,
+and the agitating effects during two decades of High Church and Low Church
+controversies[110] when Dr Mansel, then an Oxford tutor and
+professor,[111] in his ardent, but not wholly discreet zeal, expressed
+views on the relations of the Infinite to the finite which, as F. D.
+Maurice perceived, declaring the Deity to be unknowable by man, might be
+perverted into an apology for agnosticism. That religion did not really
+suffer is due in some degree to Benjamin Jowett. This good and honest
+scholar's life was spent in educating young men into useful Christians,
+into serious citizens, and into sincere believers. He claimed liberty; he
+loved truth. He ridiculed with quiet satire the religious nescience and
+despair which Mansel's terrific propaganda had been distorted into making
+the vogue. When Dr Temple was made Primate:--the first and greatest
+tribute was paid to the variety of Oxford ecclesiasticism that would be
+rightly described not as the broad, or high, but as the hard Church.
+There could be no more striking instance of the transformation in
+religious ideas witnessed during our age than the fact that the volume to
+which Dr Temple and Mr Jowett both contributed, _Essays and Reviews_, was
+branded by Convocation as heretical during the sixties, and is discovered
+to be harmless during the nineties.
+
+So qualified a judge on these matters as Mr Stopford Brooke deplores the
+declension of religious liberalism into something indistinguishable from
+unbelief. But as Professor Mansel's orthodox zeal for the dignity of his
+faith helped his enemies rather than his friends, so the services rendered
+by his devout successors are not always unmixedly conducive to the old
+faith. The 'higher criticism' has been a dubious ally of Biblical
+Christianity. _Lux Mundi_ distinguished between the historic and mythic
+elements in the _Pentateuch_. The gifted editor of that work has more
+recently[112] applied the same method to the sayings of the Founder of
+Christianity, and has seemed to some to sanction the evaporation into
+proverbs of some Divine utterances.[113]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY
+
+    The new Court as head of the old society. Social transformations which
+    would most strike one revisiting the London West End in 1897. Going to
+    Court. Multiplication of clubs in St James's and Pall Mall, but
+    disappearance of gambling clubs. Socially transforming effects of the
+    Parliamentary Committee in 1844. Then and now. 'Play and Pay' betting
+    modified by its recommendations. Necessary connection between horse
+    breeding and horse racing. Cricket--then and now. The new football or
+    the old prize ring. Indoor amusements. Transformation, by development,
+    of Victorian chess. The men and events which have made it what it is.
+    Ladies' drawing room work. Middle class English ladies the great
+    readers nowadays. Fashionable needlework of all kinds from 1837-97.
+
+
+The transformed society of the Victorian age may be regarded as a new
+combination of old elements. The interests, and the pursuits represented
+in it have always existed. The grouping and the mutual relations are the
+only novelty. Even during the Prince Consort's time, the Court had begun
+to be the federal head of the many coloured corporation which, under the
+name of society, has superseded the 'genteel' or 'polite' world of earlier
+days. That all liberal professions or worthy pursuits should find their
+natural head among the representatives of the Crown was the central idea
+of the Queen's husband. So far as the opportunities of a short life
+allowed, he translated this notion into practice. It was reserved for his
+eldest son to witness, and himself largely to promote, the full
+realization of Prince Albert's purpose. The result is that to-day not only
+diplomacy or soldiership, statemanship or wealth, sends its envoys to a
+transformed Court. There is no sort of human achievement or distinction
+that, directly it has won the approval of the people, lacks the
+recognition, personal or vicarious, of the people's rulers.
+
+Each of the callings noticed in the present survey, clerical or lay, sends
+its deputies to Marlborough House or Sandringham in the same way that
+diplomacy and arms are represented at a Royal drawing room or levée. For a
+reflection of the chief currents of thought, of the favourite pursuits of
+the most absorbing interests and influences of Victorian England, the
+historian will have to consult the list of visitors to the Heir Apparent's
+house, or read the account of his doings. The Prince Consort was attacked
+by the Tories in 1846 because he listened to Peel's speeches on Free Trade
+from the Peers' Gallery in the Commons. In 1897 the Prince of Wales
+attends daily the State trial of South African celebrities at Westminster,
+and is praised for a fresh proof of his interest in Colonial affairs. No
+artist or author; no sailor, soldier, cricketer or actor, makes his mark
+upon his age without some tribute from a popular Court to prowess that is
+already a household word with the multitude.
+
+Thus in its relations to those aspects of national life in which the
+people itself is most interested, the Court of to-day has been transformed
+into a federal head of the entire motley system. If the competition of
+individuals for personal recognition in the highest quarter sometimes
+embitters social life, that is not the Royal patron's fault.
+
+Among the changes which would make the fashionable quarter of the town
+most difficult of recognition to-day by one who knew it only in the early
+years of the reign, is the multiplication of joint stock palaces called
+clubs, which are really co-operative homes for poor gentlemen.[114] The
+absence of the gaming houses of which Crockford's was only one among many;
+and the widely representative quality of the ladies and gentlemen whom our
+stranger might notice driving to Court on a presentation day during the
+season is as visible as the disappearance of the West End hells.[115]
+
+In the seventh year after the Queen's accession, the House of Commons'
+Committee on Gambling began its sittings. It was presided over by Lord
+Palmerston. Among the witnesses it examined were men well known in every
+section of London or of national life. Trainers, jockeys, magistrates,
+policemen, all contributed to the remarkable picture of contemporary life
+and manners, contained between the covers of this document.
+
+The state of the law as regards gambling was then, as now, obscure.
+Magistrates shrank from giving constables a chance of confirming their
+suspicions as to houses of shy-looking exterior; but generally in the
+streets off St James's nearly every third house was a place of play.
+Between Pall Mall and the east side of Leicester Square, some 36 gambling
+houses were proved to exist. At Crockford's itself the tables were
+honestly managed. It was the perversion of Crockford's example which did
+the harm. Thus, some half dozen years before the Great Exhibition,
+Crockford's ceased to exist; its humbler but more mischievous imitators
+were also weeded out. An improved epoch began. Before the twentieth
+anniversary of the Accession, the building at the top of St James's Street
+described by Disraeli in the first chapter of _Sibyl_ had become under the
+style of 'The Wellington' the best restaurant of the kind then, or for
+many years, known to London. Thereafter, indeed, it reverted to a club,
+the 'Argus' first, and then the 'Devonshire;' but a gambling club no more.
+The periodical flutter caused by rumoured scandals, is itself evidence of
+the improved standard of social morals. One other result of this
+Enquiry[116] is probably felt among sporting persons to-day.
+
+Lord Palmerston's Committee pronounced against play and pay betting, that
+is, the system under which the bet is valid whether the horse runs or
+not. In betting at the post for ready money the bet is off to-day if the
+horse does not start. Not only is the Turf more popular than it ever was
+before. It binds sections of the polite world more closely together than
+they are held by any political or ecclesiastical cement. It is thus a
+social interest of the first importance which a prudent statesman makes a
+point of conciliating not less than he would the clergy, the lawyers, or
+even the licensed victuallers. The constantly increasing encouragement
+given to the Turf by men who have no personal end to serve, and whose
+refinement must be revolted by the aspect of many of its accessories,
+justifies the conclusion that the racecourse is indispensable to the breed
+of horses.
+
+From the Plantagenet and Tudor period the best horses in England were
+raced; they were made better that they might be raced more successfully.
+Hence the wise introduction, for beauty as the crown of strength, of Arab
+blood, especially under Charles II. and onwards. The early excellence of
+stallions followed. The sires of racers begot also English hunters, so
+that the best horses in the hunting field to-day derive their pedigrees on
+one side from the founders of the best racing blood. The general utility
+animal, seen in carriages and cabs, is bred in the same way but has just
+fallen below the hunter level. Thus, without thoroughbred sires, the
+excellence of our horses generally must decline. The expense of breeding
+the best quadrupeds of the stud book is so heavy that without the
+stimulus of racing, the stock could scarcely be maintained.
+
+The long distance plates on the Turf dating back to the time of Anne have
+been replaced by the Queen's premium stallions, periodically on view at
+Islington, and at the disposal, for a small fee, of horse owners
+throughout the country. These fine animals are almost all the winners of
+races. The necessary expense of racing suggests the usefulness, as in an
+earlier chapter was seen, of the sporting plutocrat to the Turf, and hence
+to the national quadruped generally. Unless the sport gave to its
+followers some sort of social diploma, the wealthy breeders whom the mart
+has furnished to the racecourse, from the earliest of the Rothschilds down
+to the latest of the Hirsches or the Maples, would scarcely have given
+time and money to their own pleasure as well as to the country's good.
+
+To pass to the horse in another aspect, the conjectural estimate of packs
+of hounds at the beginning of the hunting season in 1837 was 28. At a
+corresponding date in 1897 the ascertained figures were 61. This does but
+faintly indicate the change undergone by the national sport. Not even John
+Leech's pictorial satire in _Punch_ could deter the Cit from the hunting
+field, or discourage him from educating himself into a more than passable
+rider across country. Capel Court has or had a cry of beagles of its own.
+At longer distances from London than the Surrey pastures 15 per cent. of
+the wearers of pink and buckskin wear on ordinary days the glossy uniform
+of the brokers and jobbers of the House. A little earlier in the year,
+these sportsmen were tramping after partridges by the early September
+twilight that they might be at their business in the City before the West
+End sits down to breakfast. This is a specimen of what goes on throughout
+the kingdom. On the outskirts of all great cities, co-operative shootings
+are as common as co-operative stores.
+
+Other pastimes are too much in daily evidence to need many words or to
+allow the apprehension that the male acceptance of the feminine lawn
+tennis implies any degeneration in the Victorian race of youth. The
+addition of Scotch golf to English games, and the vast improvement as to
+pace, style, and time shown by crews at Henley or on the Metropolitan
+waters in 1897 over 1837 may dispel any fears of a deterioration of
+youthful stamina or of muscular zeal. Whether as regards its own surface
+or the meadows which it waters, the Thames in the South, like the Tyne or
+Mersey in the North, is still a river that feeds the sea of English
+manhood.
+
+As regards cricket, it is impossible to compare ancient or modern players,
+batsmen or bowlers; so entirely have the conditions of the game been
+transformed. The high scoring of the later Victorian days which would have
+amazed earlier players seems due, first, to the vastly improved pitches,
+making as they do, almost any bowling fairly easy; secondly, to the great
+increase of good players, consequent of course upon the evergrowing
+popularity of the game. The first of these facts, the improved pitches,
+explains why the difficult shooter that before 1875 was so fatal to
+batsmen at Lord's has now become a very rare ball. Although the power of
+the bat seems to-day greater than that of the ball, the ground had no
+sooner become easy and overhand bowling allowed, than the utmost was done
+to equalize the attack and defence. Hence the bowling is much straighter
+than of old; long leg and long stop no longer have a place among the
+fieldmen, and the absence of long leg hitting and fielding makes the game
+less interesting for spectators; still the grounds improve, the scoring
+consequently increases. The feature which has transformed the bowling
+seems to be that now the best bowlers are fast with a break even on a hard
+wicket: whereas formerly they only broke on a sticky wicket. The still
+astounding power of the best bowlers is shown by the havoc they make when
+they get a sticky wicket to bowl on. In fine weather there is no serious
+obstacle to the stupendous scoring; the batting is of a more monotonous
+type than it used to be, and the play therefore less interesting to
+onlookers.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, individual influence has been a transforming power.
+Between 1871 and 1883 when W. G. Grace was at his best, no fast bowler
+could do anything with him. Slow bowling, therefore, was adopted to keep
+down his run getting. As this batsman has taken his place among the
+veterans the old swift style has come into vogue once more. In the opinion
+of the greatest experts of modern cricket, as W. G. Grace is the most
+formidable bat, so Richardson of Surrey first, after him, Spofforth, the
+Australian, in his middle career, have been the most difficult bowlers.
+
+The popularity of football, whose vogue is a recent Victorian growth is
+shown by the collection of 50,000 spectators at the Crystal Palace, to
+witness a final tie for the Association Cup. Admissions of 20,000 and
+30,000 are daily events in all great towns; the money thus paid by the
+public has created the professional football player. Hence many questions
+on which authorities differ. The subject has divided the different
+football unions: the northern Rugby clubs having seceded to found a union
+of their own. The feuds among football legislators are thus as varied and
+violent as the forms of muscular ferocity which the game itself allows.
+That these can be minimized by a strenuous and keen referee is probable;
+that when this functionary is slack, professional football resembles the
+revival of the prize ring in disguise is admitted.[117] Football may seem
+to the mere observer almost to have become a misnomer, when carrying the
+ball is part of the game; when hands, shoulders, chest, fists, are nearly
+as active as legs and feet.
+
+Among indoor games chess is that which has been transformed the most
+during our age. Here something may be attributed to the example of the
+Prince Consort, who was not, however, an invincible player, but more to
+his youngest son, the lamented Prince Leopold, who did a good deal to
+popularize the game. In point of universal popularity chess will never
+quite rival whist or billiards. It lacks the element of chance in the
+first, and the display of physical skill in the second which must ever
+chiefly fascinate men. The chess player, too, when well matched, uses more
+brain power than the whist player. Each has to keep the judgment
+perpetually alert. But the conventions in chess are left behind when the
+opening has been matured into the mid game, while the conventions of whist
+relieve the whist player continuously during the progress of the rubber.
+
+Throughout the whole of this age chess has grown in favour among us. In
+most of our large towns for every chess club existing in 1847, there are
+ten or fifteen in 1897. On the Queen's accession English chess players
+still felt the stimulus given to the game in London from 1780-95 by André
+François Danican, commonly known as 'Philidor.' Hence may be dated the
+earliest English chess clubs, and the scientific study of the game. Three
+years before the Victorian age began, a series of matches was played by
+the English Alexander MacDonell and the French Labourdonnais. In 1844, the
+English Howard Staunton defeated the French St Amant in a match which
+decided the championship of the world. This, followed in 1847 by the
+publication of Staunton's _Chessplayer's Handbook_, brought hundreds more
+to the board.
+
+Another agency in the same direction was the presence in Europe of a young
+American, Paul Morphy. His play was, upon the whole, the finest the world
+has ever seen. He crossed the Atlantic in 1857; at the close of 1858 he
+had beaten every European noteworthy enough to try conclusions with him.
+The effect of these triumphs, won by a youth of twenty-one in the most
+difficult of all games, was electrical. No considerable town in the
+country was without its chess clubs. Nor is the influence more recently
+exercised by J. H. Blackburne less remarkable in its way. His skill in
+playing games without the board, exhibited in all parts of the United
+Kingdom, has raised up many imitators, but scarcely an equal.
+
+With these great players there have come also fresh scientific discoveries
+in the conduct of the game itself; the first of these as to time was the
+Scotch Gambit, partially anticipated indeed by Italian writers in the last
+century, but owing its new name and later vogue to its adoption by the
+Scotch players in the correspondence match between Edinburgh and London,
+1824 to 1826 and subsequently improved upon in 1837. About that latter
+year, too, W. D. Evans, of the Royal Navy, invented the Gambit which now
+bears his name. Stimulated by these British achievements, the Austrian
+players hit upon the Vienna or Queen's Knights game which was first made
+famous during the tournament of 1873. In this country, most of these
+advances have been sensibly helped by the movement that the _Illustrated
+London News_ began in 1842, which the whole press has since followed, of
+publishing chess problems.
+
+An exhibition of feminine needlework justly forms a feature in the
+Commemoration shows of the period. In 1837 the decorative functions of the
+needle were oftener shown by English women of the middle classes than by
+acknowledged fashion leaders. In 1867 it is the middle class ladies who do
+most of the reading and the ultra-fashionable ones who do most of the
+fancy work. What transformations has this latter passed through? In 1857,
+as it had been in 1837, the mode was to work patterns for cushions and
+screens with Berlin wool on canvas. The squareness of the cross stitch was
+fatal to artistic effect; the covering thus decorated went out of fashion
+soon after Rowland's Macassar hair oil ceased lavishly to be used, and
+heads no longer gleamed with unguent. The frame work was succeeded by that
+known to the Afghans as 'boning,' and to Britons as crochet, while chairs
+and sofas still needed some protection from locks not yet wholly
+unanointed. Even the crochet coverlets, tied with little pink ribbons,
+began to disappear when people left their hair to nature. But the artistic
+instinct was slowly helping forward this sort of work.
+
+More popular than crochet had ever been, leather frames for pictures, cut
+out of leaves copied from Nature, or the pinning down of fern leaves on a
+soft cloth or silk began to be; for these Indian ink, used with a fine
+brush made an effective background. Ruskin's gospel of following Nature
+had not been preached in vain. Accomplished women like the late Lady
+Marion Alford began to revive, with improvements of her own, the art of
+embroidering flowers, plants, birds and butterflies in wool or silk; while
+the stately arum lilies were used for screens, and gorgeous poppies for
+curtains. Next came a renascence of lace work. Many amateurs produced
+beautiful samples of pillow and point; but the work was trying to the
+eyes, and competed unfairly with the poor professionals of Honiton or
+Nottingham.
+
+The early days of Ritualism popularized the copying of the borders of the
+old painted missals and prettily occupied many drawing rooms. Oil painting
+on pottery, wood, and glass came in during the early South Kensingtonian
+period. All young ladies now were water colour artists, or busied
+themselves with colouring panels and dados on their friend's walls. Brass
+work was a later and not very long lived development. It was costly; it
+was noisy; the long suffering male gradually rose up against it. Iron
+work, the torturing into fantastic shapes of ductile strips of metal, was
+a little more enduring; but it required too much accuracy and too many
+instruments ever to be very popular. The beautiful glass painting in
+churches of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford was admired rather than
+reproduced.
+
+Irish cabins supplied a modish industry to English drawing rooms in drawn
+linen work. The principle of this seems to be hem stitching, or unbinding
+work into the spaces left by the drawn threads. Poker work done within the
+outline traced by this simple instrument on a wooden board, is practised
+successfully by ladies of genius who could touch nothing without adorning
+it, but is scarcely to be commended to bunglers or in school rooms.[118]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND COLONIAL
+
+    Significance of the New Law Court buildings in London. Early efforts
+    after law reform in Parliament. No appreciable result till 1841. Slow
+    progress and subsequent changes, culminating in the 1869 Commission,
+    and the 1873 Judicature Act. The popular consequences of this, and
+    general view of our legal system as it affects to-day the Colonies as
+    well as the mother country.
+
+    Transformation in our Colonial system shown by the latest facts and
+    figures. Special usefulness as well as Imperial value of the Colonies
+    to England. Social fusion of the mother country and the Colonies
+    prefigured by the presence and influence on both sides of the Atlantic
+    of the American element in the best society in London. Individual
+    influences which have promoted this movement, and are doing the same
+    thing for our Colonial cousins, as for our American.
+
+
+No architectural change during the age has more affected the perspective
+of Fleet Street and the Strand than the disappearance of Temple Bar and
+its replacement by the griffin which marks its former site, and the
+erection of the Royal Courts of Justice that now flank the central
+thoroughfare. This is the outward and visible sign of a transformation not
+less great, as regards the administration of the law within the new palace
+of justice itself.
+
+The Reform Act of 1832 was followed by various movements in Parliament in
+the direction of law reform. The proposals and their very slight results
+were solely technical; the public reaped no appreciable benefit so long as
+the separation of the Common Law Courts from the Court of Chancery
+existed, and on different sides of Westminster Hall two legal systems,
+often mutually antagonistic, were at work. Ten years after the Accession,
+the monopoly of Serjeants of Law in the old Court of Common Pleas was
+swept away. Still justice was delayed. During the early days of railway
+enterprise, commerce was obstructed, by the postponement, for inadequate
+or vexatious reasons, of the trial of cases arising out of bills of
+exchange on which large sums of money depended, and which, till they were
+decided, blocked commercial enterprise. This may be looked back to now as
+the scholastic era in nineteenth century law administration. The
+categories into which causes and kinds of legal action and pleas, were
+divided, in their pedantic complexity, recalled the tortuous refinements
+of the logical school men upon the comparatively simple predicaments of
+Aristotle.
+
+In 1851 a flagrant and inveterate anomaly was removed by the success of
+those law reformers who had long in vain protested against the absurdity
+of disallowing the evidence of persons immediately interested in the suit.
+After this, the movement did not pause till the Commission of 1869 was
+appointed, with the result that in 1873 there passed the Judicature Act
+which has amalgamated conflicting usages into a homogeneous system, and
+produced the long desired fusion between Equity and Law. The ancient
+divisions are perpetuated to-day not in different Courts but in different
+divisions of the same Court. The result briefly stated is that
+notwithstanding the real difference which still exists between Equity and
+Law, and the practical division of the Bar into two branches, Law and
+Equity can to-day be administered by the same Courts and one judge can
+give suitors the same relief as any other judge.
+
+There is now no possibility of a question being decided by one tribunal
+according to Common Law principles, and by another according to the
+principles of Equity. To prevent any chance of confusion it has further
+been enacted that wherever the rules of Equity and Law seem to conflict,
+those of Common Law are to prevail. The principle of a division of labour
+still exists. Every judge, that is, does not transact every sort of
+business. The judges in the Chancery division are still specially charged
+with the execution of trusts and other such matters, even as happened in
+the case of their predecessors fifty years ago. To do justice with as
+little regard as may be to forms and precedents is the visible object of
+the administrators of the law in every department. That professional
+prejudices should have disappeared was not to be expected, and, perhaps,
+not to be desired. But the exclusive etiquette of judges and lawyers is
+not greater than prevails in other professions, among doctors,
+diplomatists, or divines. The plaintiff in person is no more welcome in
+the reformed, than in the unreformed, Courts; nor, in the interests of
+public time and of common sense, is it probably to be wished that he
+should be. The two principal and practical defects in the administration
+of English law that still need attention would seem to be--one, the
+barbarous system which still obtains through the imperfect arrangements of
+the Circuit Courts of keeping untried prisoners unreasonably long in
+prison. Of late cases have been noticed in which persons, proved on trial
+to be innocent, have been detained in prison for weeks or months. The
+second defect is the undue licence allowed to the legal profession of
+protracting the hearing of cases secondary in their importance by the
+accumulation of unnecessary evidence and cross-examination. This has often
+been objected to, but has seldom been firmly controlled by the judges.
+
+The great public benefit conferred by the reforms whose monument is the
+New Law Courts hard by the church of St Clement Danes, may be condensed
+into the remark that whereas from 1837 to 1875 it was an accident whether
+the right party won his case, the presumption in favour of his success in
+1897 is so strong as almost to amount to a certainty.
+
+Of another sort of fusion, that between the two divisions of the legal
+profession, solicitors and barristers, much has been heard. But in Canada
+and some other Colonies some inconvenience and disadvantage are found to
+result from the absence of any distinction between barristers and
+solicitors. Gradually, perhaps, a solution in practice is being arrived
+at. Without mentioning individual names it is the fact that among the men
+who now stand highest, whether at the Bar or on the Bench, many while
+students at the Inns of Court have perfected themselves in the practical
+details of law by voluntarily attending the offices of great firms of
+solicitors, whether in Westminster or elsewhere.
+
+The palace of justice whose opening marked the close of the fourth decade
+of the reign, commemorates, in a fashion of its own, the unity of the
+Empire as well as the late achieved unity of the administration of
+justice.
+
+Among the Queen's subjects are nations not only of every creed and of
+every colour, but trained in obedience to every code of law which human
+skill has devised. Since the modern era of our Colonial Empire began in
+1836, the practice has been to continue to those dependencies the laws
+under which they were when they came into being, or when they were first
+acquired by diplomatic cession or military conquest, always provided that
+these pre-existent systems do not contradict the fundamental principles of
+British jurisprudence. Thus, in British Guiana, in the Cape Colony, and in
+Ceylon, the letter and spirit of Roman-Dutch law have been continued under
+English rule. In lower Canada, French forms have become so confused as to
+be impracticable: the laws of this province are to-day identical with
+those in vogue in England at the time of its acquisition in 1763,
+periodically of course improved by modern lights. In the Mauritius, the
+French Code Civile and the French Code de Commerce still exist. It is for
+the sovereign embodying in her own person the unity of the Empire to
+decide through the Privy Council, that is, to-day, through the Judicial
+Committee in all disputed cases what the particular law of the locality
+may be.
+
+On page 227 of the writer's earlier book _England_, etc., the Colonial as
+well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Privy Council Judicial
+Committee was explained in detail. Since those words were written an
+important step has been taken under an Act passed some years ago by Lord
+Herschell. By this, the Chief Justice of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry de
+Villiers, Chief Justice Sir Henry Strong of Canada, Sir Samuel Way, Chief
+Justice of South Australia, have been added to the Judicial Committee of
+the Privy Council, in order to strengthen that body with special reference
+to the Roman-Dutch, French-Canadian and Australasian law, in legislation
+and practice. Here too, it is well to refer to the recent formation of the
+Society of Comparative Legislation. This body is actively engaged and has
+already done good work in classifying materials throughout the Empire, as
+well as in accumulating a compendium of information which will greatly
+promote the simplicity and uniformity of the laws of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some distinct idea must, however, be formed of the concrete reality
+connoted by the familiar expression 'Colonial Empire,' beginning, as in
+truth for our generation it did, with the founding of the Australasian
+capital called Adelaide, after his Queen, in the last year of William IV.,
+but practically co-extensive in its growth with the reign of his
+successor. The area of the United Kingdom is 121,000 square miles. That of
+its possessions in foreign parts is 8,725,000 square miles. In other
+words the mother country is only in extent a seventieth part of the Empire
+of which that mother country is the nucleus.
+
+To put the facts somewhat differently this British Empire, covering some
+9,000,000 square miles, occupies a fifth part of the habitable globe. No
+other world power such as this has been known to past or can be found in
+present history. The British Empire of the Victorian age is five times as
+large as was the Empire of Darius five centuries before the Christian Era
+began. It is four times the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Among
+modern Powers, the Empire of Great Britain is larger by an eighth than
+that of Russia; it contains 230 millions more people. It is sixteen times
+as great as the foreign dominions of France; forty times as great as the
+Empire of Germany. Seven days and nights of continuous travelling are
+required to cross the American Continent. The lands which owe allegiance
+to the monarch of these Islands are three times as extensive as those
+composing the Republican Empire of the United States.
+
+The relative progress, according to the population test, of the mother
+country, and the nationalities, voluntarily incorporated into her
+government, beyond seas will best be judged by the facts and figures of a
+comparatively recent contrast, such as is alone practicable in the case of
+an essentially modern experience. Between 1871, then, and 1881, the
+increase in the inhabitants of the United Kingdom was at the rate of 10
+per cent. In the case of our American Colonies it was 19 per cent.; in
+the case of our Australasian it was 42 per cent. The same progress which
+has marked our recent history in other respects than numbers at home, has
+not been wanting with our kin beyond sea. Thus, in respect of education;
+in the single province of Quebec, then fairly typical of our other
+possessions, in 1837 barely one-fourth of the population could read; less
+than one-tenth could make even a pretence at writing. In 1897 there are in
+the same province 4,000 schools, with a total of 200,000 scholars, each of
+whom is periodically certified by examiners to be making gradual progress
+in the prescribed standards, according to age, and qualified individually
+to swell the claim upon the Government grant for efficiency.
+
+As for higher teaching, all our principal Colonies have their
+Universities. In the mother country, corresponding progress since the
+legislation of 1870 was at work was shown by the ability of the framer of
+that measure, the late W. E. Forster, himself well known in the Colonies,
+before his death in 1885, to point to the fact that the school attendance
+from being seven per cent. before his Act was passed had within fifteen
+years' operation of that measure risen to seventeen per cent. In the
+Australasian Colonies the results are not less striking than in the mother
+country or in the Canadian. In 1837 New South Wales was without a
+constitution as well as without any elementary education machinery of its
+own. Within rather less than half a century the institution of responsible
+government had been followed by an Education Act on the same lines as the
+English Act of 1870, but providing inter-mediate schools as well, with the
+result that the last census in Victoria shows that, of every 10,000
+children of school age, 9,500 could read, and more than 8,500 could write.
+
+These are specimen cases which establish the point that the extension of
+English power is accompanied by the spread of whatever advantages modern
+civilization can bring. As was seen in the preceding chapter, since the
+Colonial Bishoprics movement of 1851, religion has followed everywhere in
+the wake of our Empire. So, too, has education. These are the things which
+distinguish the Colonial methods of Great Britain from those of any other
+country whether in earlier or in contemporary times.
+
+Dependencies, _i.e._ places necessary for the maintenance of Empire, but
+not suitable for permanent British habitation; Crown Colonies, controlled
+by a Governor, and legislated for by orders in Council, with, as soon as
+the soil is ripe for it, some representative Council on the spot,
+reduplications of the mother country under foreign suns, with
+Constitutions of their own and representative Government after the pattern
+of the United Kingdom; these are the different heads under which the
+Colonial Empire that has grown up in our age may be divided. As this
+Empire is in itself new, so the machinery for its central administration
+in the form in which it now exists is a product of the present reign.
+Evelyn the diarist, writing under date February 28th, 1671, mentions his
+appointment as a member of the Committee of the Privy Council, that had
+been established in 1660 for controlling the foreign plantations. This
+Council in 1672 was joined to the Council of Trade, the entire body being
+called the Council of Trade and Plantations. That was reconstituted in
+1695, and again in 1748, when India came under its charge, continuing to
+remain under it until the appointment of the Board of Control in 1784.
+
+At the beginning of our century, War and Colonies formed the province of a
+single Secretary of State and continued to do so till 1854. The first
+Colonial Secretary holding that office alone was Sir George Grey, followed
+in 1859 by the Duke of Newcastle. This was the Peelite duke whose father
+had founded the Newcastle scholarship at Eton, and who himself accompanied
+the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1859. The Colonies were not the
+department he had desired when Lord Palmerston formed his last Government,
+but he did his work not unsympathetically and bequeathed his post in good
+order to Cardwell. The ablest of the earlier Colonial Secretaries was
+without doubt Lord Grey, son of the Reformer, who held the office in Lord
+John Russell's Administration. During the forties, especially in 1849,
+Colonial sensitiveness was wounded by the perpetual motions brought
+forward in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume and others of his party for
+reducing the salary of Colonial Governors,[119] accompanied as these
+motions were by language not complimentary to the new polities. Not
+without party criticism had the office of Parliamentary Under Secretary
+been created in 1810. The same opposition was called forth by the
+appointment of Permanent Under Secretaries, and Legal Advisers to the Home
+Government in 1867, in 1870, 1874, and by the vote for the new Colonial
+offices in Downing Street first occupied in 1876. In 1897 politicians of
+all parties take the same patriotic pride in the Colonial Empire, while an
+ex-Radical leader is that Empire's Minister. The increased popularity of
+Colonial in preference to United States emigration is shown by the fact
+that in 1837 35,264 persons went to the Colonies, and some sixty years
+later the number was 52,029.
+
+The pride that the Queen's subjects take in the Empire beyond seas,
+created by Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and the honour they derive from it are
+accompanied by the growing interest with which the Colonies are regarded
+by political thinkers who see in their development an anticipation of the
+constitutional movements soon to be witnessed on British soil. The
+Australian legislatures have not only kept pace with, they have stolen a
+march on, the socialistic Radicals of the old country. New Zealand
+generally has led the way. This and three other Colonies, New South Wales,
+Victoria and Tasmania, have adopted Woman's Suffrage with the legislative
+freaks which seem to be its sequel. To the action of this franchise is
+attributed the proposal recently made in one of these Parliaments to give
+every domestic servant a statutory holiday once a week. Tasmania, too,
+will not apparently be satisfied till she has secured the Swiss Referendum
+for ending disputes between the two legislative Chambers by submitting the
+single point in issue to the constituencies. Tasmania, also, has made
+several efforts, as yet unsuccessfully, to acclimatise the Hare system of
+proportional representation which is now forgotten in England, save when
+some theorist uses a periodical re-adjustment of our franchise, to revive
+its interest. South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, have also
+attempted, but not as yet carried, the establishment of national banks;
+perilous experiments enough for any new, or for that matter old, country.
+
+Individual effort gave England its Colonies. The same agency--as embodied
+in a Gibbon Wakefield, who began life by being Secretary to Lord Durham in
+Canada 1838, who, 1839, obtained the annexation and colonization of New
+Zealand, and who in 1849 published _The Art of Colonization_; in a Sir
+William Molesworth, the pioneer of Colonial self-government; who,
+obtaining from Palmerston the great object of his ambition, the Colonial
+Secretaryship 1853, died shortly afterwards; more recently in the fourth
+Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary (1866-7; 1874-8)--applied the social
+cement which has joined the new countries with the old in personal rather
+than in merely political relation. Colonial patriotism was also reasonably
+gratified on its intellectual side by Mr Lowe's sojourn in New South
+Wales 1843-50, and by Sir Robert G. W. Herbert's share in the
+Administration of Queensland before he became Colonial Under Secretary in
+London.
+
+A shrewd Colonial statesman not long since observed that if another flying
+Australian, but a born and bred Colonial horse, were to win the Derby, no
+whisper of separation from the British Crown would ever be heard among the
+most advanced of Colonial democrats. Popular enthusiasm at the Antipodean
+winner of the Blue Ribbon would spread from Epsom Downs throughout the
+kingdom; it would be flashed along every wire or transmitted by every
+cable to the four winds of heaven; the Colonists would cease to complain
+that they, or their products, were not appreciated by the mother country.
+This half serious remark contains more than a grain of truth; it points to
+the fact that the grievance alleged by our kinsman beyond sea against the
+headquarters of their race is sentimental, rather than practical. Pending
+the Derby winner from beyond seas, the less sternly democratic of
+England's Colonial cousins have appreciated the peerages bestowed on a few
+of them, and can point to other substantial proofs that they have become a
+power in English society. Thus they have founded clubs in London; they
+possess a party of their own in the House of Commons, and entertain the
+social leaders of the old country at their balls and parties during the
+season in famous restaurants, or at their own homes.
+
+Till the Victorian age was well developed, the latter day American
+elements in London fashion were unheard of. To-day these leaven the whole
+of our social life. It is those born under the Stripes and Stars who
+relieve, at a princely rental, English nobles of house property which its
+owners are not occupying, and supply Countesses and Duchesses to the
+English peerage. The great feature of our time has been the concentration
+of our people in the Metropolis. A like gravitation to towns has indeed
+taken place throughout the whole country. Between the eighties and the
+nineties, the increase of the urban population has been 3,016,579; the
+decrease of the rural has been 139,545.[120]
+
+With respect to this movement, as in other matters, London has shown
+itself the true mirror of England. For a proof of this, it would be enough
+to mention the Langham Hotel, and those caravanserais which have followed
+it, down to the latest and most palatial of all, the Hotel Cecil. That the
+capital thus socially re-created has been successfully reorganized as the
+most cosmopolitan and modish centre of fashion for two hemispheres is due
+largely to the agency of American dollars and American arbiters of
+elegance. In the thirties and the sixties the gifted men who were sent to
+represent the United States in the old country, a Washington Irving, and a
+Lothrop Motley, made their Embassies social centres for the most pleasant
+company of the time, attracted famous men from their own country, one of
+whom, the Rev. Cleveland Coxe,[121] formed a lasting link between the two
+chief branches of the Anglo-Saxon Church, most of these Transatlantic
+visitors left behind them brilliant reputations as conversationalists.
+
+More recently a Russell Lowell and a Bayard have adorned this tradition.
+In their day, the American season following hard upon the London season
+proper has become a regular, and to all concerned most profitable,
+observance in the social calendar. The dictatresses of polite life from
+the other side of the Atlantic generally have been educated in Paris, not
+a few of them by the daughter of Emile Souvestre at that institution for
+turning intelligent girls into charming women, Les Ruches, Fontainebleau;
+they always bring with them to their London homes the tastes of citizens
+of the world. These tastes are gratified as successfully on the Thames as
+on the Seine; it is _la belle Americaine_ who has most visibly impressed
+her image on the capital where, since the Second Empire fell, she has
+chiefly delighted to dwell; she decided that English life needed
+enlivening: she has enlivened it and continues to do so effectually. Some
+restlessness is constitutional to her, as also to the Anglo-Indians and
+Colonials who are perennially so much with us; thus largely to please her
+the London season is now subdivided into innumerable parts. It would be
+truer to say some form of that season lasts all the year round. The
+constant locomotion from one centre, or from one country seat to another,
+began, as has been already seen, with the Prince Consort. It has not been
+discouraged by later representatives of the Crown. From the day that in
+1860 the Prince of Wales visited the tomb of George Washington, he has
+never lost the American heart. The new London régime exactly suits the
+future peeresses of the old country when they are fresh from New York.
+
+The constant alternations of Hyde Park promenades, not only with suburban
+racecourses, but with long days under summer suns given to Thames-side
+picnics, or with rapid flittings on any opportunity to and fro between
+Mayfair on the one hand, the Boulevard des Italiens, Monte Carlo, or
+Homburg on the other: these innovations have been brought about by the
+American Londoner more than by any other single person. The Colonial
+millionaire or millionairess has not yet been so fully developed as their
+Transatlantic equivalents. But the process is going steadily forward, no
+doubt with similar results to follow.
+
+The contrast between the amount of international friction that was caused
+before the Oregon Boundary dispute, and the Trent difference, between the
+two countries were composed in 1846 and in 1863, respectively, and the
+comparative ease with which the Venezuela Question in our own day was
+settled, suggests the solid international advantages of the arrangement
+under which New York and London have become socially one and the same
+capital, having their pleasures, their lions and lionesses, their
+favourite composers, authors, dramatists and players, in common.
+
+The late Mr Samuel Ward, who is as well remembered in London as in New
+York, and who liked to be called the prince of _bon vivants_ at
+Delmonico's, the king of the lobby at Washington, was a cultivated little
+old gentleman, of whom it is difficult to conceive as ever having been
+much less, or more, than some seventy-odd years of age. He was known
+throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon world as 'Uncle Sam.' He had become
+popular in English society soon after the examples of the then Lord
+Hartington and Lord Rosebery included America in the grand tour of every
+educated Briton. He really did something to entitle him to his universal
+sobriquet. He was the founder of a social and literary Anglo-American
+school which has struck its roots deep in the chosen homes of English
+fashion. As Californian gold preceded Australian, so the Transatlantic
+force that has transformed the social England of our day has come before
+the fully organized exercise of a Colonial power of the same sort. But
+every year brings one visibly nearer its final development, with all the
+international advantages which will no doubt accompany that event.[122]
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  ADDRESSES of Prince Consort on Exhibition of 1851, 322.
+
+  AGNEW, Mr (now Sir William), sketch of, 51;
+    gives £10,100 for Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire, 52.
+
+  ALFRED Club, the 'Dandies' Club, 5;
+    named after Count Alfred D'Orsay, 5.
+
+  ALMACK'S, subscription balls at, at end of 18th century, 196;
+    modern suburban subscription balls, imitations of, 197.
+
+  AMERICAN elements in modern London Society, 435;
+    countesses and duchesses, 435;
+    embassies and ministers--Washington Irving and Motley, 435;
+    Russell Lowell and Bayard, 436;
+    ladies, their education in Paris, 436;
+    restlessness a characteristic feature of, 436.
+
+  ANÆSTHETICS, discovery of, 395;
+    Simpson's use of, at Edinburgh, 395;
+    Morton and Robinson's work in connection with, at New York, 395.
+
+  APPETITE for higher teaching, universality of, 161.
+
+  ARISTOCRACY of birth and wealth, Sir R. Peel's attitude towards, 13.
+
+  ARKWRIGHT, inventor of spinning jenny, founder of two county families,
+        37.
+
+  ARMY, traditional jealousy of, by House of Commons, 297;
+    a bequest from the Puritans, 297;
+    strength of, reduced by two-thirds immediately after Waterloo, 297;
+    _personnel_ of, during Napoleonic Wars, 298;
+    social position of private soldier in, 299;
+    treatment of soldiers in, by Duke of Wellington, 299;
+    by Lords Wolseley and Roberts, 299;
+    flogging in, not abolished until 1860, 301;
+    as a profession, now self-supporting, 305;
+    except in guards and cavalry, 305;
+    retrenchment of pay in, impolitic, 306;
+    education of officers in, in 1837, 307;
+    in 1897, 307;
+    promotions from ranks of, 310;
+    average annual number of, 310;
+    remarks on, 310.
+
+  ART, improvement in, since Exhibition of 1851, 349;
+    promoted by rise of wealthy and cultivated classes, 350;
+    in the days of Sir Martin Archer Shee, 351;
+    of Sir Charles Eastlake, 352;
+    of Leighton and Millais, 360.
+
+  ARTISTS, old social prejudice against, 351;
+    same as against doctors, singers and players, 351;
+    alleged reason for, 352;
+    foreign education of, in painters' studios, 353;
+    English training at Royal Academy, Slade or other schools, 353.
+
+  ATHENÆUM Club, doors of, opened to Macready and the Keans, 211.
+
+  AUSTIN, Charles, his two fortunes made out of railway bills, 35.
+
+  AVELAND, Lord, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 15.
+
+
+  B
+
+  BACON, Francis, Lord, fillip given to scientific study by, 324.
+
+  BARNES, editor of the _Times_, 'The most powerful man in the country,'
+        380.
+
+  BATH, Marquis of, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  BEACONSFIELD, Earl of, _see_ Disraeli.
+
+  BEDCHAMBER Plot, account of, 263.
+
+  BELL, Andrew, founder of Bell's scholarships at Cambridge, 133;
+    first promoter of a scheme for national education, 133.
+
+  BOARD Schools, growth of, 147;
+    for elementary instruction, 147;
+    playgrounds and gymnasia at, 147;
+    for higher grade teaching, 147;
+    laboratories and workrooms at, 147;
+    improvements in private schools produced by, 148.
+
+  BOLEYN, Anne, Queen of Henry VIII., descended from Sir Godfrey Boleyn, a
+        Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  BRASSEY, Thomas, railway contractor, sketch of, 35;
+    millionaire, before he built his last railway, 35.
+
+  BRAYBROOKE, Lord, descended from Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Mayor of
+        London, 14.
+
+  BRITISH Association, steady success of, 326;
+    idea of, not of British origin, 326;
+    smallness of early meetings of, at Leipsic and Berlin, 326;
+    associated with names of Prince Consort and Lord Salisbury, 327;
+    appeal of Brewster, Herschel and Humphry Davy to Government on behalf
+        of, 327;
+    objects of, described at meeting at York, 328;
+    meetings of, at Oxford 1831, Cambridge 1832, Edinburgh 1833, 329;
+    over 500,000 members of, at the present time, 329.
+
+  BRITISH and Foreign Bible Society, _see_ Missionary Societies.
+
+  BROUGHAM, Lord, his work in relation to popularizing science, 325.
+
+  BUCKINGHAM, Duke of, descended from Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Mayor, 14.
+
+  BUILDINGS, Municipal, great improvement in architecture of, 43;
+    and in that of warehouses and shops in towns, 43;
+    and in private houses of suburban London, 43.
+
+
+  C
+
+  CABINET system, discovered by Sunderland, son-in-law of Marlborough, 262;
+    definite triumph of, in 1828, 263.
+
+  CARPENTER, Doctor, exploration of the nervous system by, 395.
+
+  CHADWICK, Edwin, his work as a sanitary reformer, 389.
+
+  CHARTISM, formerly an active force, now a name, 252;
+    most of the demands of, now matured into law, 252;
+    Duke of Wellington's defence of London against, 294.
+
+  CHESS, progress of study of, 417;
+    Prince Leopold as a player of, 417;
+    comparison of, with whist and billiards, 417;
+    stimulus given to game of, by 'Phillidor,' 417;
+    and by Staunton, Paul Morphy and Blackburne, 418;
+    invention of gambits at, 418;
+    the Scotch gambit, 418;
+    Evans's gambit, 418;
+    the Vienna or Queen's Knights gambit, 418;
+    publication of problems on, by _Illustrated London News_, 419;
+    imitated by other papers, 419.
+
+  CHURCH of England, status of, in 1897, 401;
+    national regard for, 401;
+    parochial system of, 401;
+    benefactions to, during present era, 402;
+    reduced incomes of livings belonging to, 402;
+    notwithstanding work of Ecclesiastical Commission, 402;
+    and of Queen Anne's bounty, 402;
+    readjustment of incomes of livings needed, 402;
+    dioceses of, abroad, 403;
+    clergy of, abroad, 403;
+    christianity of, a reconciler of rival creeds, 403;
+    tributes to world-wide efficacy of doctrines of, 404.
+
+  CLUBS, beneficial effect of, for adults, in west end of London, 117;
+    established in east end by university settlements, 117;
+    as co-operative homes for poor gentlemen, 410;
+    increase of social, 410;
+    decrease of gambling clubs, 410;
+    working men's, combined with gymnasia, 119;
+    popularity of, with wives of working men, 120;
+    mostly federated with Working Men's Club and Institute Union, 123;
+    democratic sentiments of east end, 129.
+
+  COLE, Sir Henry, his work at South Kensington, 322.
+
+  COLONIAL emigration, in 1837 and 1897, compared, 432.
+
+  COLONIAL Empire, area of, compared with area of England, 427;
+    compared with Persian and Roman Empires, 428;
+    and with Russia, Germany, France and America, 428;
+    progress of, as indicated by increase of populations, 428;
+    by advance in education, 429;
+    by institution of Colonial Parliaments, 429.
+
+  COLONIAL offices, in Downing Street, completed in 1876, 432.
+
+  COLONIAL party in House of Commons, 434.
+
+  COLONIAL peerages, 434.
+
+  COLONIAL secretary, Sir George Grey, first, in 1854, 431;
+    office of, previously held in conjunction with some other office, 431.
+
+  COLONIAL secretaries, eminent, Duke of Newcastle in 1859, 431;
+    Lord Cardwell, 431.
+
+  COLONIES, social development of, in the past, 438;
+    anticipations of, in the future, 438.
+
+  COLONISTS, London clubs devoted to, and their friends, 434;
+    Radicalism of, 432;
+    as displayed in Legislatures of New Zealand, New South Wales and
+        Victoria, 432.
+
+  COMMERCIAL middle class, growth of, 259;
+    beginnings of, in the days of the Edwards, 259;
+    culminated with Cobden, 259;
+    not five Conservative members connected with, in 1835, 260.
+
+  COMMONS, House of, composition of, in 1707, 252;
+    number of members of, in 1707, compared with 1879, 254;
+    altered manners of members of, 254;
+    'cockcrowings' in debates of, on Church Rates, 254;
+    'disorder' in, during debates on Mr Gladstone's second Irish Bill, 254.
+
+  CONSTITUENCIES, right of appeal to, 263;
+    permission to appeal to, given to Sir R. Peel in 1841, 263;
+    alternative of immediate or postponed appeal to, placed before the
+        Queen in 1868 by Disraeli, 264.
+
+  CONTRAST between condition of working classes now and twenty years ago,
+        153.
+
+  CONVOCATION, revival of, in 1854, 400;
+    declares _Essays and Reviews_ heretical, 400;
+    reflects, as a clerical parliament, views of church, 400;
+    work of, illustrated, 400;
+    possible use of, in event of disestablishment, 401.
+
+  CORPORATION Act, introduced by Lord John Russell in 1835, 93;
+    two millions of Englishmen affected by, 93;
+    abuses prior to passing of, 94;
+    London not included in operation of, 95;
+    reasons for excluding London from operation of, 103.
+
+  CORRUPT Practices at Elections Bill, 1883, 260.
+
+  COUNTRY squire, disappearance of, in country and in Parliament, 259.
+
+  COUNTY Councils, election of councillors to, 99;
+    co-optation of aldermen from among councillors of, 99;
+    term of office in, 100;
+    presidents of, county magistrates, 100;
+    elections to, by ballot, 100;
+    expenses of elections to, defrayed out of county rate, 100;
+    jurisdiction of, how far co-ordinate with that of Quarter Sessions,
+        100;
+    does not extend to public house licensing, 100;
+    mixed committees of old and new magistracy, 100;
+    checks and limitations on borrowing powers of, 101;
+    controlled in different parts of England by different classes, 102;
+    judicial functions of magistrates unaffected by, 105;
+    peers as chairmen of, 112;
+    representatives of, on governing bodies of secondary schools, 140.
+
+  COUNTY Councils Act, 1888, principle of, same as that of Corporation
+        Act, 1835, 92;
+    number of administrative counties under, 99;
+    electoral divisions of counties under, 99;
+    electors, 99;
+    municipalities inside County Council area, dealt with by, 99.
+
+  COURT, The, the federal head of Society. 408;
+    central idea of Prince Consort's policy, 408;
+    illustrations of the working of the idea, 409.
+
+  COX, David, his pictures, 355;
+    prices received by him for, in his lifetime, 355;
+    prices paid for pictures by, now, 356.
+
+  CRANBORNE, Viscount, title from Sir Christopher Gascoigne, Lord Mayor of
+        London, 15.
+
+  CRICKET, growth of, during Victorian era, 414;
+    increased power of the bat, 415;
+    pre-eminent position of W. G. Grace as a batsman, 415;
+    and of Richardson as a bowler, 415.
+
+  CRIME, statistics of, 366;
+    close connection between ignorance and crime, 367.
+
+  CRYSTAL Palace, magnificence of orchestra at, 348;
+    maintained continuously since 1854, 348;
+    concerts, influence and æsthetic value of, 349.
+
+
+  D
+
+  'DAILY Telegraph' started in 1856 by Colonel Sleigh, 382.
+
+  DANDIES, the toilettes of, 4.
+
+  DARBY, J. L., founder of sect of Plymouth Brethren, 404;
+    split among followers of, 404.
+
+  DARWIN, Charles, publication by, of _Origin of Species_, 326;
+    epoch in science created by, 326;
+    doctrine of survival of the fittest enunciated by, 330;
+    anticipated in point of time by Dr Maillet, 330;
+    and foreshadowed by Erasmus Darwin and others, 331;
+    relations of Herbert Spencer and, 331;
+    apparent reaction against theories of, setting in, 331.
+
+  DEATH-RATE, steady reduction in death-rate, due to progress of physical
+        and surgical science, 394;
+    from 23 per million in 1855, 394;
+    to 21 per million in 1875, 394;
+    and 18 per million in 1895, 394.
+
+  DE LANE, John T., editor of the _Times_, sketch of, 5;
+    his influence and power, 10;
+    his personality kept in background, 11;
+    Disraeli's remark, 'I had better postpone giving my views of De Lane
+        till he is dead,' 380.
+
+  DEMOCRACY, instinctive, of great English schools, 174;
+    modern, confirmed by Lodger Franchise in boroughs by Act of 1867, 260;
+    completed by extension to counties in 1884, 260.
+
+  DENBIGH, Earl of, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  DEVONSHIRE, the Duke of, and Sunday crowds in Hyde Park, 155.
+
+  DILKE, C. W., proprietor of _Athenæum_ newspaper, 382;
+    called in to edit _Daily News_ in 1849, 382;
+    reduces price of paper, 382.
+
+  DILKE Commission, presided over by Prince of Wales, 389;
+    power to destroy unhealthy dwellings, result of, 389;
+    a consequence of the enlarged idea of royal service, 390.
+
+  DISRAELI, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, sketch of, 67;
+    the Young England school of 1846, 68;
+    services rendered by the Young England movement, 69;
+    influence of the _Coningsby_, of, on opening of parks, 70;
+    sends Lord Rowton to visit and report on Clerkenwell outrage, 73;
+    impressions made on Lord Rowton by visit, 74.
+
+  DISTRICT Councils, establishment of, 83;
+    seats on, objects of ambition among a certain class, 84;
+    jurisdiction of, commensurate with that of rural sanitary authority,
+        85;
+    special business of, 85;
+    members of, guardians of the poor, 85;
+    female members of, 85;
+    chairmen of, become county magistrates, 86;
+    assessment, part of duty of, 87.
+
+  DIXIE, Sir Wolston, Lord Mayor of London, ancestor of the peerages of
+        Compton and Northampton, 14.
+
+  DONALDSON Museum of Musical Instruments at South Kensington, 341.
+
+  DUELLING, practice of, discussed, 290;
+    still in vogue in time of Sir Robert Peel, 291;
+    abolition of, attempted by Prince Consort, 292;
+    courts of honour suggested as substitutes for, 292;
+    amendment of articles of war, April 1844, the first real blow to, 293.
+
+  DUELS, celebrated, between Canning and Castlereagh, 1809, 292;
+    Wellington and Winchilsea, 1829, 292;
+    Monro and Fawcett, 1843, 292.
+
+
+  E
+
+  EAST END, homes founded in the, by Oxford and Cambridge, 75;
+    St Margaret's House in the, 75;
+    population of, tact required in dealing with, 130;
+    resentment of patronage by, 130.
+
+  EASTLAKE, Sir Charles, President of Royal Academy, 350;
+    proposes health of Prince Consort at Royal Academy dinner, 350;
+    reply of Prince Consort, 351.
+
+  EDUCATION, Act 1870, W. E. Foster's, 136;
+    School Boards established by, 136;
+    compulsory only when voluntary efforts failed, 136;
+    Act 1880, Mundella's, 136;
+    made compulsory under, 136;
+    made free by Act of 1891, 137.
+
+  EDUCATION Department, first organisation of, in 1839, 135;
+    first vice-president of, appointed in 1856, 135;
+    not concerned with Secondary Education, 162.
+
+  EDUCATION, National, State responsibility for, ignored till 1833, 133;
+    Samuel Whitbread earliest promoter of, 134;
+    proposes foundation of National Schools for, in 1809, 134;
+    scheme of, brought forward by Lord Brougham, 1820, 134;
+    first grant towards, in 1833, 133;
+    Lord Melbourne's attempt to include Roman Catholics in benefit of
+        grant for, in 1839, 134;
+    Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, first promoters of a general and
+        practical scheme for, 1836, 133;
+    previously left to be dealt with by Church of England and other
+        religious bodies, 133.
+
+  EDUCATION, Private, by reading and by lectures, compared, 373.
+
+  EGLINTON, Earl of, pre-eminence of, in early Victorian era, 3.
+
+  ELIOT, George, influence of Herbert Spencer on, 334;
+    and through her on language of literature, 334.
+
+  ENDOWED Schools Act, 1874, objects of, 138;
+    work accomplished by, 139.
+
+  ENDOWED Schools Commission, now merged in Charity Commission, 162.
+
+  EPPING Forest, Crown rights over, sold in 1842, 17;
+    declared a public pleasure ground, 1882, 17.
+
+  ETON, example of social evolution of Victorian era, 169;
+    not injuriously affected by the 'new rich,' 169;
+    expenses of education at, not increased, 170;
+    lessons learnt at, which books cannot teach, 171;
+    Latin verses, things of the past at, 171;
+    honours at Oxford and Cambridge during last forty years, 173;
+    social discipline of, shared with Harrow, 175;
+    successes of, boys direct from school in Civil Service examinations,
+        177;
+    at Woolwich and Sandhurst, 177;
+    public opinion at, favourable to work at school, 178;
+    new workshops at, for use of school, 178;
+    study of natural science at, 178;
+    classics and mathematics not displaced at, 178.
+
+  ETONIANS, distinguished, of Victorian era, 171-3;
+    the 12th Earl of Derby, the most typical of, 178.
+
+  EVOLUTION, the sociological feature of Victorian era, 169.
+
+  EXETER School, connection of, with Cambridge University extension
+        system, 192.
+
+  EXPLORATIONS, at Pompeii, 331;
+    and at Babylon and Nineveh, 331;
+    effects of, on Roman and Biblical histories, 331.
+
+  EXPORTS, English, stationary during early part of century, 17;
+    rapid increase of, on discoveries of gold, 1848-55, 23;
+    value of, for the twenty-five years preceding repeal of the Corn-laws,
+        1885 millions, 44;
+    succeeding repeal, 3031 millions, 44;
+    for last twenty-five years, 1871-96, 6290 millions, 44.
+
+
+  F
+
+  FALKNER, J. Pascoe, founder of Melbourne, alive in 1866, 25.
+
+  FARADAY, and the Prince of Wales, 323;
+    laboratory of, at Royal Institution, 323.
+
+  FARREN, the, family a race of actors, 215;
+    Percival, at Haymarket Theatre, 215;
+    William, 215.
+
+  FAUCIT, Miss Helen, now Lady Martin, 215;
+    Shakesperian impersonations of, 215;
+    abiding influence exercised by, on the profession, 215.
+
+  FERRIER, Dr, his work in connection with the brain, 395.
+
+  FINES, in factories, disapproval of, 154;
+    lists of, compelled to be displayed in buildings, 155.
+
+  FISCAL Reforms, effects of, of Cobden, Bright and Peel, 16.
+
+  FITZWILLIAM, Earl, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  FOOTBALL, popularity of, 416;
+    a recent growth, 416;
+    feuds among players at, 416;
+    dangers of a referee at modern matches, 416.
+
+  FOREIGNERS, resident in England, over 200,000, 222;
+    number of, doubled in twenty years, 222;
+    majority of, engaged in business, 222;
+    and nearly one-half of total number in London, 222;
+    European, about 170,000, 224;
+    American, about 26,000, 224;
+    remainder Asiatics or Africans, 224;
+    proportion of males to females among, 224;
+    distribution and employments of, 226;
+    pauperism amongst, 226;
+    small proportion of, employed as clerks, 227;
+    opinions of, on changes in appearance of English people in twenty
+        years, 152.
+
+  FOREIGN intelligence, no longer dependent on telegrams, 386;
+    vast machinery and expenditure for supply of, 386.
+
+  FRANCE, industry in, effects of revolution on, 21;
+    all classes in, involved in common ruin, as a consequence of
+        revolution, 21.
+
+  FREE Libraries, establishment of, 362;
+    popularity of, 363;
+    sketches of working-men students at, 364;
+    origin and gradual growth of, 365;
+    the Chetham Library, 365;
+    the Guildhall Library, 365;
+    the Manchester Library, 365;
+    the Ewart Act, and its relation to, 365;
+    growth of metropolitan free libraries, 366;
+    examination of books most in demand at the, 368.
+
+  FUSION of classes, product of Victorian era, 114;
+    and keynote of our epoch, 201;
+    a process of levelling up, not down, 201.
+
+
+  G
+
+  GALLOWS, in public highways until Lord Grey's Reform Act, 40.
+
+  GAMBLING, committee on, in 1844, 410;
+    number of, hells in 1841, 411;
+    'Crockfords' as a, club, 411;
+    'play and pay,' abolished 412.
+
+  GLADSTONE, W. E., and Sir Robert Peel, comparative popularity of, 10;
+    scheme of, for converting consols in 1853, 22.
+
+  GOLD, importation of, from Russian mines, 1837-47, 16;
+    discovery of, in California, 1848, 17;
+    in Ballarat, 1850, 17;
+    gloomy predictions of Chevalier and Cobden as to consequences of
+        discoveries of, 18;
+    views of Sir Roderick Murchison as to same, 18;
+    'Nature's Currency Restriction Act,' 18;
+    of Sir Archibald Alison as to same, 19;
+    'Nature's Currency Extension Act,' 19;
+    output of Mexican and Peruvian mines in fifteenth century, £800,000,
+        19;
+    Australian diggings in 1850-1, £18,000,000, 19;
+    fallacious arguments, as to effect of, based on 'grain test,' 19;
+    demonetization of, in Holland, 20;
+    advantages of supply of, recognized by Prince Consort, 20;
+    influx of, into Bank of England, 22;
+    decrease of bank rate, 22;
+    conversion of £3 per cent. consols, 22;
+    interest on Exchequer Bills, 1-1/2 per cent. per annum, 22;
+    Australian cities built by, 24.
+
+  GOLD fields, emigration to, in 1852, 369,000, 21;
+    average for five years succeeding discovery of, 250,000 per annum, 21;
+    maximum emigration to, in any one year, 500,000, 21;
+    costs of living at, 22;
+    rise of wages here, consequent on rush to, 23;
+    scarcity of agricultural labour in country, 23;
+    reduced to 100,000 per annum before 1859, 25.
+
+  GOLDWIN Smith, his fear of result of popularly elected Parliaments, 261.
+
+  GOLF, revival of, as an English game, 414.
+
+  GOOCH, Sir Daniel, chairman of Great Western Railway, 37;
+    his fortune not made in railways, 37.
+
+  GRAMMAR schools, wasteful geographical distribution of, 141;
+    well endowed, with insufficient scholars, 141;
+    cases of, Chudleigh, Ashburton, Totnes and Bovey Tracey in Devon, 141;
+    Walsingham, Norwich, Ipswich and Bury Saint Edmunds in East Anglia,
+        142;
+    Ossett and other schools in the north, 142;
+    suggestions for utilizing decayed, 143;
+    instances of beneficial modifications of established, 143;
+    Bath College, excellent work done by, 143;
+    amalgamation of Somerset College and Sydney Grammar School, 143;
+    Charterhouse, successfully removed from London to Godalming, 144;
+    Archbishop Holgate's, removed from Hewsworth to Barnsley, 144;
+    policy of maintaining the old, as machinery for Secondary Education,
+        144.
+
+  GRANTS for educational purposes, growth of, 135;
+    first grant in 1833 of £20,000, 134;
+    in 1857, amounted to £451,000, 135;
+    in 1860, exceeded £1,000,000, 135;
+    in 1870, were £1,125,000, 136.
+
+  GRESHAM, Sir Thomas, first of the Great Loan negotiators, 64.
+
+  GROUPS, government by, as in France, 240;
+    as distinguished from government by party, 240;
+    cycle of, a possibility in store for England, 273.
+
+  GROVE, Sir George, discovery of lost scores of Schubert, 347;
+    dictionary of music by, 347.
+
+  GROVE, Sir William, discoveries with regard to correlation of physical
+        forces, 325.
+
+  GUILDHALL School of Music, founded in 1880, 341;
+    3496 pupils at, at Christmas 1896, 341.
+
+
+  H
+
+  HALLÉ, Charles, born in Westphalia, 1819, 345;
+    Beethoven's music popularized in England by, 346.
+
+  HAMLEY, Sir Edward, sketch of, 308;
+    his work on the _Operations of War_, 309.
+
+  HANDEL, genius of, 344;
+    recognized by George I. when Elector of Hanover, 344;
+    his _Te Deum_ performed at St Paul's in Queen Anne's reign, 344;
+    _Messiah_ produced at Dublin in 1741, 344.
+
+  HELPLESS, the, legislative help for, distinctive of Victorian era, 388;
+    initiated by Prince Consort, 388.
+
+  HENRY VIII., privileges of people as enjoyed under Plantagenets,
+        contracted under, 93;
+    and under Elizabeth, 93;
+    practically ceased to exist under the Stuarts, 93.
+
+  HENTY, joint-founder of Melbourne, alive 1882, 25.
+
+  HERCOMER, Professor, receives pupils into his studio, 353.
+
+  HIGHER Grade Elementary Schools, in effect secondary schools, 148;
+    sixty, under control of English School Boards, 149;
+    thirty-nine of the, organized as science schools, 149;
+    4606 boys and 2023 girls, students at, 149.
+
+  HIGHER Grade Schools Examination Board, 147.
+
+  HOSPITALS, Prince of Wales's fund for relief of, from debt, 390;
+    transformation in, during Victorian era, 391;
+    in character of medical students at, 392;
+    in management and organization of, 392;
+    revenues of, modern and ancient compared, 392;
+    St Bartholomew's in 1650 and in 1890, 392;
+    special and general, 392;
+    number of, in London, 392;
+    game, flowers and other presents for, the fashion and rule, 393.
+
+  HOUNDS, packs of, number of, in England in 1837, 413;
+    number of, in England in 1897, 413;
+    subscribers to and supporters of, in 1897, 414.
+
+  HOUSE of Lords, debates such as formerly took place in House of Commons
+        now confined almost exclusively to, 258;
+    composition of, similar to composition of old House of Commons, 258;
+    really a representative body, 264;
+    socially indistinguishable from Commoners in many ways, 265;
+    Peers in, created for political and social distinction, 266;
+    Peerages in, conferred on Lord Carrington, Macaulay, and Tennyson, 265;
+    later on, on Lord Armstrong, on widow of W. H. Smith and on Lord
+        Glenesk, 265.
+
+  HUDSON, George, the railway king, 6;
+    his gorgeous chariot, 6;
+    his personal appearance, 6;
+    his house at Albert Gate, 6;
+    entertains royalty, 7;
+    his fall, 7, 30;
+    hotel life at Calais, 7;
+    compared with Beau Brummell, 7;
+    born at York, son of a linen draper, 15;
+    drives train conveying Queen and Prince Consort to Cambridge, 29;
+    member for Sunderland, 30.
+
+  HUXLEY, Professor, and spontaneous generation, 330;
+    his observations anticipated by Schwann, 330.
+
+  HYDE Park, the social parade ground of the kingdom, 1;
+    originally a royal pleasure ground, 2;
+    visitors to, in different decades compared, 3;
+    bicycles admitted into, 7;
+    early water drinkers in, 9;
+    succeeded by early riders in, 9;
+    condition of, between 1840 and 1860, 7.
+
+
+  I
+
+  IMPORTS, value of, during last twenty-five years, nearly 10,000 millions.
+
+  INCOME-TAX, gradual increase of, 25;
+    extended to Ireland, 1855, 25.
+
+  INCOMES, assessment of, in 1855, 308 millions;
+    1875, 571 millions;
+    1882, 612 millions.
+
+  INDESTRUCTIBILITY of matter, ascertained chemically in eighteenth
+        century, 325.
+
+  INDUSTRIES, no increase in staple, during recent years, 236;
+    decrease in agricultural, 236;
+    new, constantly arising, 236.
+
+  INTERMEDIATE Education Act, 149.
+
+  IONIAN physicists, anticipation of modern discoveries by, 325.
+
+  IRISH Famine, compared with that at Orissa, 231;
+    remarks on, in connection with Malthusian doctrine, 232.
+
+  IRVING, Sir Henry, sketch of, 217.
+
+  ISLINGTON in 1840, still a country suburb, 40.
+
+
+  J
+
+  JACOB Omnium, nickname of Thackeray's friend, Big Higgins, 6.
+
+  JERSEY, Lady, popularity of, in early Victorian period, 10.
+
+  JEWS, sufferings of, in England, under Henry III., 54;
+    levies on, Westminster Abbey completed by, in reigns of Richard III.
+        and Henry VII., 54;
+    only twelve families of, in England, in 1633, 54;
+    re-establishment of, in England by Cromwell and Charles II., 54;
+    the Rodrigues and Goldsmids the heads of the, in time of George III.,
+        55;
+    the Rothschilds originally Frankfort, 55;
+    no magistrates or sheriffs before 1837, 60;
+    Lord Campbell's bill for removing this disability of, 60.
+
+  JOACHIM, Herr, popularity of, in England, 346;
+    director of Royal Academy of Music, Berlin, 346;
+    Doctor of Music of Cambridge, 346;
+    portrait of, by George Eliot, 346.
+
+  JOWETT, Benjamin, personal efforts of, to extend first-class education,
+        156;
+    favoured scheme of unattached students at Oxford, 183;
+    lecture-rooms at Balliol opened to non-collegiate students by, 183.
+
+
+  K
+
+  KEAN, Charles, actor, 1820-68, son of Edmund, 210;
+    educated at Eton, 210;
+    social position of, 211.
+
+  KEAN, Edmund, Byron's eulogy of, 210.
+
+  KEMBLE, frigid classicism of, 210.
+
+  KINGLAKE, A. W., historian of Crimean War, 11;
+    last survivor of early Hyde Park equestrians, 11.
+
+
+  L
+
+  LADIES College, Cheltenham, work of, in East End, 122.
+
+  LADIES of the Court, 280;
+    Mistress of the Robes, 280;
+    Ladies of the Bedchamber, 280;
+    Women of the Bedchamber, 280;
+    Maids of Honour, 280;
+    functions of the several, 281.
+
+  LANDSEER, Sir Edwin, elected R.A., 1830, 352;
+    social position of, exceptional, 352.
+
+  LANSDOWNE, Marquess of, pre-eminence of, in early Victorian days, 4.
+
+  LAW, administration of, in Colonies, 426;
+    Roman Dutch Law in Ceylon, Guiana, and at the Cape, 426;
+    French forms of, still retained in Canada, 426;
+    Code Civile continued in Mauritius, 426.
+
+  LAW Courts, effect of, on Fleet Street and the Strand, 422;
+    commemorate the unity of the Empire as well as the unity of
+        administration of justice, 426.
+
+  LAW reform, small results of, so long as two legal systems at work in
+        Westminster Hall, 423;
+    abolition of monopoly of serjeants-at-law, a step in, 423;
+    permission to take evidence of persons interested in suit, a further
+        important step in, 423;
+    appointment of commission to enquire into, 423;
+    Judicature Act, 1873, result of commission of 1869, 424;
+    fusion of law and equity by Judicature Act, 424;
+    principle of, laid down, that where equity and law conflict equitable
+        doctrines shall prevail, 424;
+    room for, in connection with the circuit system, 425;
+    benefits of, to general public, summary of, 425.
+
+  LAWN tennis, subscription clubs for, 196;
+    part of revolt of sons and daughters of middle class, 196.
+
+  LEGION Memorial, The, probably drawn up by Defoe, 274;
+    low-water mark of Parliamentary popularity, 275.
+
+  LEGISLATION, modern, salutary effect of, 140;
+    on governors and teachers as well as on the taught, 140.
+
+  LISTER, Lord, his discovery of the antiseptic treatment, 395.
+
+  LITERARY Leaders, of Victorian era, 373;
+    Dickens and Thackeray as, compared, 373;
+    Lord Lytton, Lord Stanhope and Monkton Milnes as patrons of, 374.
+
+  LITERATURE and art, encouraged by Crown from Henry VIII. until Queen
+        Anne, 282;
+    neglected by the Hanoverian Kings, 282;
+    revived encouragement of, by Queen Victoria, 282;
+    influence of Prince Consort in revival, 282.
+
+  LOCAL Councils of Education, proposal to establish, 164;
+    functions of proposed, 164;
+    suggested composition of, 164;
+    suggested machinery for carrying out, 165.
+
+  LOCAL Government Act, 1888, educational functions of County Council
+        under, 140.
+
+  LOCAL Government Board, establishment of, 1871, 389.
+
+  LOCAL Improvement Acts, number of, prior to 1840, 389.
+
+  LONDON, the pleasure ground of the world, 217;
+    the influence of Americans in making, 435;
+    the true mirror of England, 435.
+
+  LONDON City Mission, opinions of missioners of, on East-end progress,
+        126.
+
+  LONDON, Corporation of, always a popularly elected body, 103;
+    commission of 1853 for inquiring into affairs of, 104;
+    judicial functions of Lord Mayor and Aldermen preserved to, 106;
+    powers of an ordinary Borough Council retained by, 106;
+    an example to provincial townships, 106;
+    intense feeling of corporate life in, 106;
+    impression made by, on foreigners, 107;
+    relations of, to London County Council, 107;
+    four representatives of, on County Council, chosen by ratepayers, 108;
+    charities and hospitalities of, 108;
+    relation of Commissioners of Sewers to, 109.
+
+  LONDON County Council, differs from other County Councils, 103;
+    judicial functions of officers of corporation left untouched by, 106;
+    eminent men who have been chairmen of, 112.
+
+  LONDON Library, The, foundation and objects of 370;
+    first started in Pall Mall, 371;
+    its usefulness and growth, 371;
+    difference between, and Mudie's Library, 371.
+
+  LONGFELLOW, far-reaching influence of, as a poet, 379.
+
+  LORD-Mayors of London, number of noble houses founded by, 14;
+    attributes of, in minds of foreigners, 110;
+    not merely head officers of a great city, 110;
+    territorial estates, schools and other foundations controlled by the,
+        110.
+
+  LORD-Mayor's day, traditional entertainment of ministers on, 14;
+    improvement in demeanour of mob on, 140;
+    characteristic of improvement in the masses, 140.
+
+  LOWE, Robert, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, early educational reformer,
+        135;
+    introduces principle of payment by results, 135;
+    advice of, to educate our masters, followed, 151;
+    his sojourn in New South Wales, 434.
+
+  LYELL, Sir Charles, his work in relation to geology, 332;
+    influence of the _Principles of Geology_, 332.
+
+  LYTTON, Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton, 327;
+    fifteen years in office as a public servant before being raised to the
+        peerage, 327.
+
+
+  M
+
+  MACAULAY, T. B., afterwards Lord, fifteen years in office as a public
+        servant before raised to peerage, 327.
+
+  MACREADY, actor, 1827, 51, born 1793, died 1873, 209;
+    favourite with clergy, whom he taught elocution, 210;
+    social acceptance of, in London, 211.
+
+  MAGISTRATES, 1000 elective, since District Councils instituted, 86;
+    instances of working men as, 86;
+    and agricultural labourers as, 86;
+    and an ex-policeman as, 86;
+    effect upon rural mind of elective element among the, 90;
+    powers of borough, since Corporation Act of 1835, 95;
+    specially qualified county, elected to County Councils, 98.
+
+  MAKING up parties, modern fashion of, for theatres, 197;
+    for dinners or suppers at restaurants, before or after theatres, 197.
+
+  MALLOCK, W. H., statistics relating to 'Classes' and 'Masses,' 32;
+    contribution of railways to prosperity of both, 34.
+
+  MALTHUS, Doctor, doctrines of Malthus, considered generally, 228;
+    increase of population during Victorian era considered in connection
+        with, 231.
+
+  MANDATES, popular, at elections, modern doctrine of, 272.
+
+  MEDICAL discoveries, English, of Victorian era, large proportion of to
+        whole, 396;
+    treatment of myxoedemia by Sir William Gull, one of the latest, 396.
+
+  MEDICAL education, scheme of in England, perfected in 1860, 396;
+    relation of College of Physicians to, 396.
+
+  MEMBERS of Parliament, 'English politics to the English youth,' 246;
+    average age of, in 1837, over fifty years, 246;
+    in 1897, under forty years, 246.
+
+  MENDELSSOHN, Felix, born at Hamburg, 344;
+    his precocious genius, 345;
+    his influence in England, 345;
+    patron of John Parry, 345.
+
+  METROPOLITAN 'Board of Works,' established 1855, 105;
+    product of Metropolitan Local Management Act, 1855, 105;
+    unity of administration for the parishes of London by, 105.
+
+  MIDDLE class, modern English, restlessness of, 194;
+    result of rapid locomotion and cheap press, 194;
+    influx of continental ideas among the, 194;
+    relaxation of orthodoxy of, 197;
+    all sections of, enfranchised by Reform Bill of 1832, 239.
+
+  MILLIONAIRES, Victorian, and their trades, 24;
+    sheep farmers of Australia, 24;
+    Brassey, the railway contractor, 35;
+    Jones Lloyd, a banker, 42;
+    Hope, a merchant, 42;
+    Bass and Guinness, brewers, 42;
+    Maple, retail tradesman, 42.
+
+  MILITARY education, establishment of council of, 304;
+    formation of Aldershot camp for, 304.
+
+  MILITARY resources of country, 296;
+    comparison of, in 1837 with those of 1897, 296;
+    incapacity of, to place 10,000 men in field in 1846, 303;
+    inadequacy of reserves of guns and stores, 303.
+
+  MILITIA, practical non-existence of, at Queen's accession, 302;
+    last ballot for, in 1831, 302;
+    strength of in 1895, 302.
+
+  MINERALS, £29,000,000 worth of, recovered in 1855, 32;
+    £80,000,000 worth of, recovered in 1895, 32.
+
+  MINING and steam industries compared, 32;
+    results of, 32.
+
+  MISSIONARY societies, activity of, during Victorian era, 405;
+    British and Foreign Bible Society, income of, doubled, 405;
+    Society for Propagation of Gospel, income of, doubled, 405;
+    Church Missionary Society, income of, trebled, 405.
+
+  MIXED metaphors, modern, instances of, 372;
+    signs of the overlapping of literature by science and art, 372.
+
+  MOLESWORTH, Sir William, pioneer of colonial self-government, 433;
+    Colonial Secretary, in 1853, 433.
+
+  MUDIE'S Select Library, founded in 1842, 369;
+    far-reaching usefulness of, 369.
+
+  MUSIC, revolution in, and in taste for, during Queen's reign, 337;
+    the lady teacher of, in 1837, 337;
+    and in 1897, 338;
+    patronage of, by Court, 339;
+    fondness for, a tradition of English royalty, 340;
+    Royal Academy of, 340;
+    triumph of German over Italian school of, 344.
+
+  MUSICAL education, in England and on Continent compared, 342;
+   encouraged and promoted by Prince Consort, 343.
+
+  MUSICIAN, the professional, sketch of, in 1837, 338;
+    and in 1897, 339.
+
+
+  N
+
+  NATIONAL character, insularity of, disappearing generally, 194;
+    cosmopolitanism of, among upper classes, 204;
+    imitated by the middle class, 205.
+
+  NATIONAL debt, gradual reduction of, during Queen's reign, 45;
+    reduced from £821,000,000 after Crimean War, in 1856, 45;
+    to £652,000,000 in 1896, 45.
+
+  NATIONAL Gallery, established in 1824, 354;
+    present building of, opened in 1838, 354;
+    Angerstein Collection, the nucleus of, 354;
+    Vernon bequest to, in 1847, 354;
+    £70,000 paid for Sir Robert Peel's collection, 355;
+    £70,000 paid for 'Ansidei Madonna' to the Duke of Marlborough, 358.
+
+  NAVY, training of officers and men of, 307;
+    reduction of, on conclusion of Napoleonic Wars, 311;
+    132 vessels on, list on Queen's accession, 311;
+    461 vessels on, list at Queen's diamond jubilee, 311;
+    Parliamentary vote for, in 1837, £3,000,000, 312;
+    in 1897, £23,000,000, 312;
+    establishment of H.M.S. _Excellent_ as gunnery school for, 313;
+    manning of the, 313;
+    the naval reserve of the, 314;
+    institution of H.M.S. _Britannia_ for education of midshipmen for, 314;
+    introduction of steam into the, 315;
+    five paddle-wheel steamers in, at Queen's accession, 315;
+    condition of, at outbreak of Crimean War, 316;
+    recognition of value of, by Kinglake, 317;
+    and of the special value of steam in, 317;
+    the floating batteries of Crimean War, first ironclads of, 317;
+    the _Warrior_ first sea-going ironclad of, 317;
+    turret and broadside armaments in, of to-day compared, 319.
+
+  NEEDLEWORK, embroidery and lace, as fashionable amusements, 419.
+
+  NEIGHBOURHOOD guilds, the, of New York, 121.
+
+  NEW educational authority, the want of a, 161;
+    must have an elastic operation, 161;
+    necessary functions of a, indicated, 162.
+
+  NEW South Wales, colony of, 25;
+    no foreign trade before 1848, 25;
+    exports from, in 1878 amounted to £13,000,000, 25;
+    imports into, in 1878 amounted to £17,000,000, 25;
+    valuable coalfields of, 25.
+
+  NEW York, advantages of intimate social connexion between, and London,
+        437.
+
+  NEWSPAPERS, English, number of in 1837, only 479, 381;
+    number of in 1897, 2396, 381;
+    heavily taxed by Harley in 1712, 381;
+    and by North and Pitt afterwards, 381;
+    taxation of, lowered by Spring Rice in 1836, 381;
+    repeal of paper duty in 1851, and rise of penny, in consequence, 381;
+    the _Echo_, the first of the halfpenny, 385;
+    increase of halfpenny, of late years, 385;
+    reviews of books in, 385;
+    great improvement in general character of, 387;
+    growing tendency of, towards political impartiality, 387.
+
+  NEWSPAPER writers, growth of, as a class, 374;
+    instances of, Russell, Forbes, Dicey, Sala and others, 375;
+    action and reaction of, on the public press, 375;
+    Macaulay as one of the, father of the leading article style, 378;
+    no longer really anonymous, 385;
+    the recruiting of writers with well-known names for, 385;
+    the youth of modern, 386.
+
+  NEWTON, Sir Isaac, his discovery of law of gravitation, 324.
+
+  NIGHTINGALE, Florence, her training in Germany, 390;
+    the trained nurses who accompanied, in 1854, 390;
+    influence of, on origin of nursing as a profession, 390;
+    supercession of the 'Mrs Gamp' and decayed billiard-markers of former
+        days, 391;
+    tributes to efficiency of system started by, 391.
+
+  NONCONFORMISTS, subject to greater numerical fluctuations than
+        established churches, 405;
+    reasons for same, 405;
+    the numbers of the Congregationalists in 1837 and 1897, 404;
+    the numbers of Baptists in 1837 and 1897, 404.
+
+  NOVEL writers of eminence since Sir Walter Scott, 375;
+    commercial successes of, 375;
+    George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, as
+        instances of, 375;
+    Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli as, compared, 376.
+
+
+  O
+
+  ORGANIZATION, faculty for, of Prince Consort, 320;
+    of exhibition of 1851, by Prince Consort, 320.
+
+  OVERLAPPING of schools, waste of educational energy caused by, 161.
+
+  OXFORD, number of unattached students at University of, 183;
+    system of control over unattached students at, 183;
+    system of teaching the unattached at, 183;
+    honours gained at, by the unattached students, 184;
+    exemplary conduct of unattached at, 185;
+    professor of modern history at, formerly an unattached student, 186;
+    social clubs for undergraduates at, 188;
+    effect of social clubs at, on 'union society,' 188.
+
+  OXFORD and Cambridge, middle class examinations, beginnings of, 147;
+    still uphold the standard of general culture in England, 150.
+
+
+  P
+
+  PALMERSTON, Lord, sketch of, 4;
+    descent from Sir John Houblon, Lord Mayor of London, 15.
+
+  PARISH Councils, apparent tendency of, 80;
+    female members of, 80;
+    subjects of discussion at, 81;
+    'one man one vote' for, 81;
+    effect of, to restore many old manorial rights, 82;
+    sense of responsibility developed by, 83;
+    seldom convened more than once a year, 84;
+    differences between, and County Councils decided by the Local
+        Government Board, 84;
+    obliged to hold their sittings in the evening, 90.
+
+  PARISHES, English, prior to 1894, 77;
+    State represented by squire in, 77;
+    Church by vicar in, 77;
+    the village by the village club in, 77;
+    subjects of interest to inhabitants of rural, 78;
+    change which has come over, since 1894, 78;
+    the village meeting halls, modern centres of, 78;
+    home rule in, since 1894, 79;
+    the grouping of, great care taken in, 80.
+
+  PARLIAMENT, an assembly of business men, 268;
+    abhors rhetoric, 268;
+    submits to ascendency of great masters of eloquence, 269;
+    will not tolerate commonplace speeches, 269;
+    local Houses of, 269;
+    Houses of, burnt in 1834, 239;
+    temporary building for the meeting of, 239;
+    the new Houses of, several years building, 239;
+    House of Lords side of, opened after thirteen years, 240;
+    House of Commons side, opened after sixteen years, 240;
+    peeresses' gallery in, 241;
+    ladies' cage in, 242;
+    members of (see members of Parliament);
+    types of members, in the past, 247;
+    more modern types of, 251;
+    acceptance of position of delegates by, 256.
+
+  PARLIAMENTARY, oratory, change in fashion of, 248;
+    classical quotations no longer a feature of, 248;
+    business language used in modern, 249;
+    proceedings, foreign interest taken in, 249;
+    hospitality, five o'clock tea on Terrace, 245;
+    stage, and theatrical stages, parallel between, 250;
+    humorists, a succession of, 251;
+    children of the church, a regular supply of, 251;
+    obstruction, methods of, practised by Parnell, 255;
+    closure, the remedy for obstruction, 256.
+
+  PAROCHIAL schools, first suggested by S. Whitbread in 1807, 134.
+
+  PAUPERISM, statistics of, in England, 45;
+    50 per cent. less in 1897 than in 1857;
+    enormous reduction of, in the Midlands, 88;
+    and in Sussex, 88;
+    reduction in, a direct consequence of Act of 1834, 88;
+    less frequent application of workhouse test in cases of, 89.
+
+  PEEL, Sir Robert, sketch of, 4;
+    his seat on horseback, 4;
+    popular respect in which held, 10.
+
+  PEERAGES, modern, conferred on representatives of science and art, 327;
+    on Tennyson as a poet, 327;
+    Playfair as a physician, 327;
+    Kelvin as a physicist, 327;
+    Lister as a surgeon, 327.
+
+  PEOPLE'S Palace, The, a fanciful sketch of Sir Walter Besant, 362;
+    difficulties of administration in connection with, 125.
+
+  PERIODICALS, magazines and reviews, their popularity, 267;
+    used as substitutes for parliamentary speeches, 267;
+    mutual advantages to publisher and member of Parliament of the use of,
+        as substitutes for speeches, 267.
+
+  PHELPS, pupil of Macready, his position on stage, 216.
+
+  PHOTOGRAPHY, a production of the Victorian era, 333.
+
+  PHYSICAL investigations, appliances for, former want of, 324;
+    perfection of appliances now, product of Victorian era, 324.
+
+  PICTURES, prices of, in 1649, 46;
+    gradual rise in, 47;
+    great sums paid by Russian Emperor, 48;
+    £30,000 realised by sale of the Walpole, in 1842, 49;
+    £60,000 by sale of the Bernal Collection of, in 1856, 50;
+    Gainsborough's picture of the 'Sisters' sold for £6615 in 1873, 52;
+    resold in 1887 for £9975, 52.
+
+  PITT, William, peerages bestowed on wealthy men by, 13;
+    his theory that £40,000 per annum should command a peerage, 42.
+
+  PLUTOCRAT, education of the, by painters, as prophesied by Rossetti, 359;
+    the prophecy fulfilled, 359.
+
+  POOR, ignorance respecting the condition of the, 71;
+    the brothers Mayhew and the London, 71;
+    the Greenwoods and the casual ward, 72;
+    Leighton, Hicks-Beach and Denison, their work amongst the, 73;
+    the Dilke Commission for inquiry into the housing of, 389.
+
+  POOR-LAW, under the Act of 1834, 87;
+    the Unions under the Act, called the New Bastilles, 87;
+    marked improvement in condition of working class since, 87.
+
+  POPULAR, constituencies organised by Reform Bill of 1832, 238;
+    franchises, a few abolished by Bill, 239;
+    meetings, displacement of great parliamentary speeches by, 257.
+
+  POPULATION, increased, 30 per cent. during last sixty years, 234;
+    comparison of, with increased means of subsistence, 235.
+
+  PRE-RAPHAELITE, the, revolution in art, 360;
+    its effect on English art, 360.
+
+  PRESBYTERIANISM and the Free Kirk of Scotland, 404.
+
+  PRESS, the, anonymous system of, modified by various agencies, 384;
+    enlarged staffs employed on, 384;
+    amateurs and others, 384;
+    proprietorship of the newspaper, a fashion, 266;
+    a reflex of English thought and life, 266;
+    reptile of Germany, unknown in England, 266;
+    connection of leading men with special portions of, 267;
+    competition of periodicals with the newspaper, 267;
+    result of Gladstone's Irish policy on the, 383;
+    political independence of, affected by that policy, 383.
+
+  PRESTON, strike at, the first great struggle between labour and capital,
+        24.
+
+  PRINCE Consort, sagacity of, early discovered, 20;
+    cultivation of artistic sense in English manufactures, due to, 20;
+    influence of, in shaping monarchy of to-day, 276;
+    sets example of royal sympathy with extra political activities of
+        daily life, 276;
+    early training of, in view of his possible future home, 277;
+    reforms the domestic economy of the palace, 278;
+    attacks on, in clubs and drawing-rooms, 279;
+    as well as in the inferior press, 279;
+    institutes office of master of the household, 280;
+    promotion of science and art by, 282;
+    skill of the, as an organist, 284;
+    first public speech of, on the slave trade in 1840, 285;
+    revives the taste for classical music, 285;
+    initiates royal platform speeches on non-political matters, 285;
+    influence of Sir Robert Peel on the, 286;
+    Sir Charles Eastlake and the, friendship of, 288;
+    visits of Queen and, to Sir Robert Peel, 289;
+    to Louis Philippe, 289;
+    to Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Leeds, 289;
+    elected chancellor of the University of Cambridge, 289;
+    declines the post of commander-in-chief, 294;
+    suggestions of, for a system of national defence, 294;
+    acts as director of Ancient Concerts, 339;
+    rescues the Raphael cartoons from decay, 349;
+    efforts of, to make Court the centre of literary, scientific and
+        artistic efforts, 323.
+
+  PRINCE of Wales, ubiquity of, 289;
+    untiring energy of, derived from his father, 289;
+    visit of, to tomb of George Washington in 1860, 437.
+
+  PRISONS, no new, built since 1870, 367;
+    several, converted into public libraries, 367;
+    one of the, now the site of a fine art gallery, 367.
+
+  PRIVATE theatricals, local clubs for, 197.
+
+  PRIVY Council, judicial committee of, 427;
+    functions of, 427;
+    constitutional modifications of, 427.
+
+  PRIVY Purse, succession of able men who have acted as, 281;
+    distinction between, and Privy Seal, 281.
+
+  PROBLEM, the educational, awaiting solution, Higher grade schools, 139.
+
+  PUBLIC Health Act, 1875, embodiment of efforts of individuals extending
+        over forty years, 99.
+
+  PUBLIC Schools, increased numbers at, 96;
+    Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, Cheltenham and others;
+    products of Victorian era, 96.
+
+  PUBLIC School Act, 1868, effect of, 139.
+
+  'PUNCH,' Staffordshire miner, as delineated by, no longer true, 154.
+
+  PURCELL, Henry, born 1675, 344 (note);
+    organist at Westminster when eighteen years old, 344;
+    prolific composer, 344;
+    German unintentional compliment to, 344.
+
+
+  Q
+
+  QUAKER School at Ackworth, specially complimented by the Education
+        Commission, 146.
+
+  QUARTER Sessions, sketch of county town during, 97;
+    before Corporation Act and afterwards, 97.
+
+  QUEEN Elizabeth, comparison of, with Queen Victoria, 275.
+
+
+  R
+
+  RACEHORSE, the, indispensable to breed of horses, 412;
+    antiquity of, 412;
+    introduction of Arab blood into, 412;
+    social diploma to breeders of, 413.
+
+  RAILWAY, the Manchester and Liverpool, death of Huskisson on, 28;
+    pays ten per cent. dividend in 1836, 29;
+    Queen did not travel by, until 1842, 28;
+    1800 miles of, open in England in 1843, 28;
+    enterprise, reaction in, in 1846, 31.
+
+  RAILWAYS, capital invested in, in 1850, £230,000,000, 31;
+    in 1894, £985,000,000, 31;
+    receipts of, in 1855, £21,000,000, 32;
+    in 1895, £84,000,000, 32;
+    how far, have enriched the landowners, 36;
+    wealth derived from, compared with that from other sources, 37;
+    nationalisation of, objections to, 38;
+    State control of, 38;
+    England and America, the two exceptions to, 38.
+
+  REACTION, signs of, against educational enthusiasm, 165;
+    grounds of, 165.
+
+  READING School, connection of, with Oxford University extension system,
+        192.
+
+  RELIGIOUS education, struggle over, sketch of the, 137.
+
+  RELIGIOUS thought, various phases of, 398;
+    gratitude of Oxford verger for remaining a Christian, 398;
+    modern scepticism and, 398;
+    influence of Court on, 399;
+    Tractarian movement as a phase of, 399;
+    agnosticism as a phase of, fillip given to, by Dr Mansel, 406;
+    progress of, stayed by Benjamin Jowett, 406;
+    the 'hard' church, 407;
+    Dr Temple as representative of, 407;
+    _Lux Mundi_, 407.
+
+  ROMAN Catholicism, increase of, in large towns, 405;
+    and in colonies, 405;
+    increase of numbers of priests and churches, 405.
+
+  ROTHSCHILD, Lionel, issues Irish famine loan, 1847, 59;
+    lends £16,000,000 to English Government in 1854, 59;
+    advances £4,000,000 for purchase of Suez Canal shares, 1876, 60;
+    elected to Parliament as member for London, 1847, 60;
+    unable to take his seat until 1866, 60;
+    hospitalities at Gunnersbury, 61;
+    death of, in 1879, 61.
+
+  ROTHSCHILD, Mayer A., of Frankfort, founder of the family in the
+        eighteenth century, 55;
+    known as the Croesus of Europe, 55.
+
+  ROTHSCHILD, Nathan Mayer, arrives in England at end of the eighteenth
+        century, 56;
+    buys bills on English Government during Napoleonic Wars, 56;
+    transmits funds to English forces in Peninsula, 56;
+    wrongly said to have watched the Battle of Waterloo, 56;
+    story of his agent at Ghent, 57;
+    early news of victory received by him from Ghent, 57;
+    causes dividends and interest on foreign stocks and loans to be paid
+        in London, 57;
+    lends £12,000,000 to the English Government in 1829, 58;
+    buys Gunnersbury, 58;
+    death of Mayer Amschel in 1836, 59.
+
+  ROTHSCHILDS, the foreign loans of the firm, 61;
+    connection of the, with Egypt, 62;
+    monthly advances by the, to Egyptian Government, 62;
+    take security of private letter of English Foreign Secretary, 62;
+    charitable generosity of the, 62;
+    patrons of sport, 65;
+    and of art, 65;
+    loyalty of the, to England, 66;
+    influence of the, on Judaism generally, 66.
+
+  ROWING, the, of 1837 and 1897 compared, 414.
+
+  ROYAL Academy of Music, 340;
+    foundation of, in 1822, 340;
+    original site of, 340;
+    charter granted to, 1830, 340;
+    number of students at, in 1837, 340;
+    and in 1897, 340.
+
+  ROYAL Academy of Painting, 350;
+    Crown represented at dinner of, for the first time in 1851, 350;
+    speech of Sir Charles Eastlake at, 350;
+    and reply of the Prince Consort, 350;
+    visitors to Exhibition of, in 1837, 358;
+    and in 1897, 358.
+
+  ROYAL College of Music, 340;
+    founded in 1875 as a training school, 340;
+    reformed in 1882, 340;
+    charter granted to, in 1883, 340;
+    present endowment of, 341;
+    scholarships at, 341;
+    opened by H. R. H. Princess of Wales, 341.
+
+  ROYAL Society, Queen's signature in register of, 321.
+
+  RURAL population, decrease in, during last twenty years, 325.
+
+
+  S
+
+  SANITARY reform, reduction in death-rate due to, 394;
+    work of John Simon in connection with, 395;
+    and of the Budds and Dr Snow, 395.
+
+  SAVINGS banks, deposits in, doubled in ten years ending 1896, 45.
+
+  SCHOOL Board, instances of successful, boys, 156;
+    at universities and in Civil Service examinations, 156;
+    and of girls, 157;
+    at Girton College and elsewhere, 157.
+
+  SCHOOL Board children, increase in number of, under the Free Education
+        Act, 1891, 137;
+    numbers of, for five years preceding Act, 269,903, 138;
+    for five years succeeding Act, 521,860, 138.
+
+  SCIENCE and art, slowness of State recognition of, 320.
+
+  SCIENCE and Art Department, grants made by, to schools, 138.
+
+  SCIENTIFIC Corps, the, engineers and artillery, 305;
+    recent recognition of rights of, in army, 305.
+
+  SCULPTORS, Alfred Stevens, effigy of Wellington by, 361;
+    Hamo Thornycroft and Sir E. Boehm, works of, 361;
+    growing popularity of English, 361.
+
+  SCULPTURE, our climate not favourable to exhibitions of, 361;
+    progress of, in England, notwithstanding, 361.
+
+  SEASIDE resorts, imitation of continental examples at, 208.
+
+  SECONDARY schools, estimated proportion of population educated at, does
+        not exceed 2.5 per 1000, 145;
+    proportion very variable, 145;
+    from 1.1 per 1000 in Lancashire, 145;
+    to 13.5 in Bedfordshire, 145;
+    private, efficient service rendered to education by, 146;
+    plea for State help to private, 146;
+    of the great city companies, 149;
+    especially those of the drapers', the goldsmiths' and the grocers',
+        149.
+
+  SKATING rinks, shock to old-fashioned ideas caused by, 195;
+    first revolt of sons and daughters of middle class illustrated at, 195.
+
+  SLANEY, Colonel, motion by, for enquiry into health of towns, 389.
+
+  SMALLER endowed schools, old practice of farming out, 140;
+    evil effects of, 141;
+    vigorous dealing of corporations with the practice, 141;
+    closing of, recommended by the commissioners, 141.
+
+  SOCIETY, still a close corporation, 198;
+    but more and more subject to external influences, 198;
+    recruited from alien elements, 199;
+    ideal standard of, unaltered, 202.
+
+  SOCIETY of comparative legislation, 427.
+
+  SOMERSET, Duchess of, the Queen of Beauty at Eglinton tournament, 3.
+
+  SOUTH America, English loans to Republics of, 16.
+
+  SOUTH Kensington, the whole of, market gardens in 1840, 41;
+    contrast between the, of 1840 and that of 1890, 321;
+    labours of Prince Consort in connection with, 322;
+    entirely the growth of the Victorian era, 354;
+    an artistic 'Mecca,' 354;
+    Department of Practical Art at, 356;
+    under control of Board of Trade, 356;
+    Department of Science and Art at, 356;
+    under control of President of the Council, 356;
+    Marlborough House Collection, removed to, in 1856, 356;
+    Forster bequest of Dickens's manuscripts to, 357;
+    institutions affiliated to, 357;
+    30,000 pupils annually pass through the Science and Art Department at,
+        357.
+
+  SOVEREIGN, constitutional influence of, 261;
+    increased since days of absolute monarchy, 261;
+    surrender of political initiative by, 261;
+    compensated by increase of social ascendancy of, 261;
+    technical right of, to nominate and dismiss ministers, 261;
+    exercise of that prerogative in 1834 by William IV., 262;
+    the permanent head of a department of the State, 262;
+    view of Prince Consort, as to Sovereign's position, 262;
+    self-effacement of, impossible under Parliamentary Governments, 264;
+    the sole guarantee for continuity of policy, 271;
+    duty of Sovereign to judge which party in state can best carry on the
+        government of the country, 271.
+
+  STEAM, transformation of country by, 27.
+
+  STEPHENSON, George, his invention at first decried, 28;
+    sums up relations between the railways and the country, 37.
+
+  SULLIVAN, Sir Arthur, his work and public services, 347.
+
+  SUNDAY Schools, started by Robert Raikes late in eighteenth century, 133.
+
+  SURGEONS, work of eminent, 395;
+    exemplified by Cæsar Hawkins, Benjamin Brodie and Spencer Wells, 395.
+
+
+  T
+
+  TAIT, Archbishop and family, riders in Hyde Park, 9.
+
+  TEACHERS, profession of, no proper representation of, 163;
+    assistant, in secondary schools, underpaid, 164.
+
+  TECHNICAL Education Act, 1890, for teaching handicrafts, 160;
+    grants authorised to be made by, 100.
+
+  TERRY, the family, a family of actors and actresses, 216;
+    Kate (Mrs Arthur Lewis), peerless in melodrama, 215;
+    Ellen, as a comedian, 216.
+
+  THACKERAY, W. M., distinguished figure in Hyde Park, 6.
+
+  THAMES, shocking condition of, between 1804 and 1866, 40.
+
+  THEATRE, The, position of, in early Victorian times, 41;
+    advice of Matthew Arnold, to organize, 209;
+    Macready, first organizer of, 1827 to 1851, 209;
+    difficulties experienced by him in attempt, 209;
+    dulness of, long after it became respectable, 212;
+    Lord Lytton's _Money_, dramatized for, 212;
+    Robertson's _Society_ produced at Prince of Wales's, 212;
+    revival of popularity of, 213;
+    caused by production of Robertson's plays, 213;
+    Lyceum, under Bateman, 214;
+    Miss Bateman as Leah at, 214;
+    first appearance of H. Irving at, 214;
+    opinions expressed by George Lewes and George Eliot on Irving at, 215;
+    result of influx of strangers into London, on Victorian, 218;
+    the suburban, of recent times, 218;
+    status of, raised by succession of high-class actors, 219.
+
+  TOLLEMACHE, Lord, of Peckforton, sketch of, 12;
+    the harness and trappings of his team, 12.
+
+  TROLLOPE, Anthony, sketch of, 12;
+    his sturdy cob, 12.
+
+
+  U
+
+  UNIVERSITIES, advice to settlers in East End, from, 130;
+    extension lectures of, 180;
+    Oxford and Cambridge brought to people's doors by, 180;
+    revolution in domestic life at the, 180;
+    less noticeable at Oxford than at Cambridge, 180;
+    unattached or non-collegiate students at, 181;
+    a return to mediæval usage, 181;
+    comparative cost of education to unattached students at, 182;
+    fellows and tutors of colleges at the, 189;
+    altered habits and duties of fellows and tutors, 189;
+    alteration due to extension lectures and similar causes, 190;
+    scope of, extension lectures, 190;
+    synopsis of course, distributed beforehand, 190;
+    local schools and colleges in communication with, 192.
+
+  UNIVERSITY settlement in East End of London, 115;
+    clubs for adults encouraged by, 117;
+    dominant idea of, 120;
+    multifarious duties of a settler in, 121.
+
+  URBAN population, increase of, during last twenty years, 435.
+
+
+  V
+
+  VANDERBILT, Commodore, sells fleet of ships to buy railway shares, 34.
+
+  VICTORIA, colony of, indebted mainly to gold for its progress, 24;
+    gold raised in, between 1851 and 1859, 89 millions, 25;
+    imports rose to £30 per head of population, 26;
+    exports to £56 per head of population, 26.
+
+  VICTORIAN squire, often a self-made man, 200;
+    seldom violates old traditions, 200;
+    life of, at hall or manor, 200;
+    not very different from his predecessor, 200;
+    supports the subscription pack, 201;
+    breeds shorthorns, 201;
+    and becomes a judge of cattle, 201.
+
+  VOLUNTEERS, instructions to Lords-Lieutenant in 1859 to raise, 303;
+    Prince Consort's influence in securing issue of, 303;
+    first review of, in Hyde Park, 23d June 1860, 303;
+    number of, in 1860, 119,000, 303;
+    in 1886, 226,752, 303;
+    800,000 men, still of military age, in Great Britain, have been, 304.
+
+
+  W
+
+  WAGES, increase of, of working classes, in Victorian era, 43.
+
+  WAKEFIELD, Gibbon, sketch of his career, 433;
+    his _Art of Colonization_, 433.
+
+  WARD, Samuel, sketch of, 437;
+    nicknamed 'Uncle Sam,' 438;
+    founds a social and literary Anglo-American school, 438.
+
+  WARWICK, Earl of, descended from Sir Samuel Dashwood, vintner, a Lord
+        Mayor of London, 15.
+
+  WATKIN, Sir Edward, exceptional position of, 37.
+
+  WEALTH, aristocracy of, unknown before 1851, 42.
+
+  WELLINGTON, Duke of, personal sketch of, 4;
+    popular respect shown to, at all times, 10.
+
+  WHEWELL, Dr, historian of the Inductive Sciences, 325.
+
+  WINDSOR, compared with Weimar, 323.
+
+  WORKING Men's Club, established at Lancaster in 1860, 118;
+    and Institute Union, functions of, 126;
+    founded by Lords Brougham and Lyttleton, 118.
+
+  WORKING Men's College, Great Ormond Street, 118;
+    founded by Maurice and Thomas Hughes, 118.
+
+
+  Y
+
+  YOUTH, change in figure and appearance of English, 202;
+    improved expression on countenances of, 203;
+    taller and better set up, 203;
+    women as well as men, 203;
+    lofty stature and Junonian majesty of modern English feminine, 203.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Colston & Coy., Limited. Printers, Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Edited by Dr Ernst Regel--Berlin, 1894.
+
+[2] The grandfather of the fifth Marquess. As Lord Henry Petty, he had so
+long since as 1806 been Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1848 he was
+President of the Council, and led the peers in the Russell Government.
+Died 1863.
+
+[3] But much of the Forest being saved by the Common rights had not at any
+time been enclosed.
+
+[4] _The Age of Gold_, vol. i. p. 37.
+
+[5] While these lines are being prepared for the press there appears in a
+London newspaper a statement of the prices current at the Western
+Australia gold fields in the summer of 1896. They may be compared with the
+figures given in the text and are as follows:--Tea 3s., flour 10d., sugar
+1s., bacon 3s., beef and mutton 4d. to 8d., cheese 2s. 6d., coffee 3s.,
+tobacco 8s., and preserved potatoes 1s. 9d. per lb.; milk (condensed) 1s.
+9d. per tin; flour 20s. per 50 lbs.; and eggs 10s. a dozen; but the cost
+of living generally, as compared with earnings, is low. On the Ashburton
+River gold fields mutton is 4d., beef 6d., flour 10d., tea 3s., sugar 9d.
+to 1s., preserved potatoes 1s. 6d., salt 1s., rice 1s., and oatmeal 1s.
+3d. per lb. On the Yilgarn gold fields meat is 9d. to 1s. a lb., flour
+10s. to 30s. per 50 lb. bag, tea 3s. 6d. a lb., and other provisions are
+equally scarce and dear. At Coolgardie, to the east of Yilgarn, flour
+costs £3 per 200 lbs., bread 1s. per 1-1/2 lb. loaf, butter 2s. 3d. per
+lb., potatoes 6d. per lb., sugar 8d. per lb., tinned milk 1s. 3d. per lb.,
+bacon 1s. 9d. per lb., salt 6d. per lb., and board and lodgings £3 to £7 a
+week. On the Murchison gold fields in the North, the prices per lb. are:
+Flour 8d., sugar 8d., tea 3s. 6d., tobacco 6d., fish 1s. 6d., mutton 8d.,
+beef 8d., butter 3s., and tinned meats 1s. 3d.
+
+[6] Still more than this was given to get men on the home voyage from
+Melbourne.
+
+[7] See _Our Railways_. By John Pendleton. Cassell & Co.
+
+[8] Brought down to 1897 instead of 1881, these _mutatis mutandis_ figures
+are derived from Mr Mallock's most useful book.
+
+[9] In the West of England, with which the writer is specially acquainted,
+this is generally the case.
+
+[10] These figures are taken from 'Art Sales,' by George Redford,
+privately printed, 1882.
+
+[11] Now Sir William Agnew.
+
+[12] All the details of art prices given in this chapter are derived from
+Mr G. Redford's authentic record of art sales, first privately printed in
+1888. For other information the writer is indebted to the late Sir J. E.
+Millais, P.R.A.
+
+[13] See Picciotto's Anglo-Jewish History for all these early facts about
+the Jews.
+
+[14] The idea of the Exhibition being 'universal' was not that of the
+Prince, but of the Committee of the Society of Arts. It was first
+suggested in fact by Mr Thomas Winkworth.
+
+[15] Most of the time he was at Ghent. His stay there is known in French
+history as _La cour de Gand_.
+
+[16] These anecdotes are given from Mr Reeves' volume already mentioned.
+They are suggestive of incident if not uniformly accurate in fact. The
+correction of the Waterloo incident given above commended itself to some
+among Baron Lionel's friends who would be likely to know.
+
+[17] While Lord Palmerston has become a historical name, Lord
+Beaconsfield's precedents are daily, alike by friends and foes, cited as
+living forces.
+
+[18] See _Quarterly Review_, July, 1896.
+
+[19] This anecdote was often told by Lord Shaftesbury.
+
+[20] Not, however, the most appreciated by his master.
+
+[21] Now of course Battersea Park.
+
+[22] Who, to the regret of all who knew his abilities, died February 1897,
+having exercised influence rather than achieved distinction.
+
+[23] While he yet lives, his enduring monuments are his blocks of working
+men's dwellings in the King's Cross district and elsewhere.
+
+[24] The guarantees against undue delegation are stringent and successful.
+
+[25] Opinions vary as to the workability of this clause in the shape in
+which it left the Lords.
+
+[26] _E.g._ In a typical Surrey village, where there are no
+Nonconformists, the Chairman is the Vicar, but of 38 Gloucestershire
+parishes, where dissenters abound, only in two or three.
+
+[27] Urban District Councils have taken the place of Local Boards; they
+are in fact town councils of those districts which are not incorporated
+into municipalities.
+
+[28] Molesworth's _History of England_, vol. i. p. 19.
+
+[29] As a fact, the County chairman is most likely a J.P. already.
+
+[30] For valuable facts and figures, bringing this chapter down to the
+latest date the writer is indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin and his staff at
+the Local Government Board, as for much other useful help to Sir Henry
+Fowler, Sir Charles Dilke, the Rev. Charles Cox, D.D., and to Mr G. W. E.
+Russell.
+
+[31] In addition to Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Henry Fowler and others already
+mentioned, the writer is indebted for invaluable help in the preparation
+of facts and the revision of proofs in this portion of the book to Mr W.
+J. Soulsby the accomplished private secretary to a succession of Lord
+Mayors of London.
+
+[32] An account of the University Settlements in East London. Edited by
+John M. Knapp, Oxford House, Bethnal Green. Rivington, Percival & Co.
+1895.
+
+[33] _England: Its People, Polity and Pursuits._ 2 vols. Cassell & Co. 1
+vol. Chapman & Hall.
+
+[34] This usage varies under different Administrations and at different
+epochs. Mr Forster [1870] was an actual Education Minister. His Liberal
+successors have been so since; his Conservative successors only in a
+qualified sense.
+
+[35] See Report of the Secondary Education Commission, vol. i. _passim_,
+but especially, pp. 44, and seq.
+
+[36] These have produced not a few famous men even in this generation:
+Thus Bishop Stortford shares with Oriel, Oxford the honour of educating Mr
+Cecil Rhodes.
+
+[37] As the writer has a personal reason for knowing, this is the year in
+which the amalgamation first took a definite shape, though it was not
+perhaps fully carried out till a little later.
+
+[38] This point was dwelt upon strongly in the letters of London
+correspondents to the French press at the time of the 1887 Jubilee.
+
+[39] Recent legislation providing for the information of the working
+classes on this point, by the display of lists in factories, has not given
+entire satisfaction to the persons interested.
+
+[40] The statistics showing the new rungs in the educational ladder in
+this chapter have been supplied to the writer by Mr G. H. Croad of the
+London School Board, by other gentlemen in like positions and by private
+friends in the Education Department. Thanks are also due to Sir John
+Gorst, and to Mr Mundella for the kind trouble they have taken in checking
+the facts of the narrative portion, and for making valuable suggestions.
+
+[41] This, during the youth of the late Rev W. G. Cookesley was said by
+that authority to be, not hyperbole, but historical fact.
+
+[42] This title has been denied to the King here named, but Waynflete,
+also an Eton benefactor as well as official, was himself transferred by
+Henry from Winchester to Eton, becoming Headmaster and Provost
+successively.
+
+[43] For the facts and figures in this chapter showing the relations of
+the old public schools to the new educational tests, as for the facts of
+Eton expenditure, the writer is indebted to the Rev. Edmond Warre, D.D.,
+the Headmaster, who has placed at his disposal all the necessary data.
+
+[44] See _Eothen_, edn. 1896--Blackwood, p. 7.
+
+[45] Now in vogue at nearly all the pleasure towns in southern England.
+
+[46] The name of Frank as well as of Charles Mathews was often on the
+bills of this theatre during the sixties.
+
+[47] Census of England and Wales, 1891. Vol. iv. General Report, pp. 64
+and fg.
+
+[48] For a valuable dissertation, to which the present writer is much
+indebted on this subject, see A. J. Ogilvy--_Westminster Review_, 1891.
+Vol. 136, pp. 289 to 297.
+
+[49] W. Cunningham on the Malthusian theory--_Macmillan's Magazine_, Dec.
+1883.
+
+[50] In addition to the published official statistics from which the above
+facts and figures are taken, the writer is indebted to the
+Registrar-General for much useful information, and to Mr G. Shaw-Lefevre
+for further friendly help.
+
+[51] See Molesworth's _History of England_. Vol. i. p. 90 and fg.
+
+[52] Commons Journal, xci. 319.
+
+[53] In the Upper House, there is perhaps no one to whom the classics are
+more familiar as literature than Lord Morley.
+
+[54] For nearly all the details as to the structural arrangements of the
+two Houses of Parliament, and to the particulars of what may be called
+their social life, the writer desires to express his grateful
+acknowledgments to Mr Archibald Milman, C.B., a Clerk of the House of
+Commons. On other parliamentary points, he is not less indebted to Sir
+Charles Dilke, and to many more Members of Parliament, only a few of whom
+now survive.
+
+[55] See the following extract from the _Daily News_, Dec. 16, 1896:--
+
+MR GLADSTONE ON PARLIAMENTARY CHANGES.--Mr Gladstone having read an
+article in the _Westminster Review_ entitled 'The Old M.P. and the New,'
+by George A. B. Dewar, writes that, speaking from recollection, he thinks
+there were not five members of the Conservative party in 1835 who sat in
+the House of Commons by reason of their connection with trade or industry.
+He describes the change which has come about in the composition of the
+party since then as 'simply marvellous.'
+
+[56] 'It is the Queen's doing,' is the statement of the newspapers of that
+year; but seems to apply not to the dismissal of Lord Grey, but of Lord
+Melbourne who had followed him.
+
+[57] The reference to Lord Palmerston and the _Morning Post_ is
+historical.
+
+[58] It might be argued of course with much plausibility that this order
+of things has begun long since, and that, the verbal distinction
+notwithstanding, government by party has always, from another point of
+view been government by groups.
+
+[59] This (1701) followed the Kentish petition to the Commons protesting
+against distrust of the King, and desiring that the addresses of the loyal
+petitioners might be turned into Bills of Supply.
+
+[60] Sir Theodore Martin's 'Life,' chapter i. These references are in all
+cases to the People's Edition.
+
+[61] 'Life,' p. 11.
+
+[62] Before Prince Albert's reforms, the jurisdiction of the Palace
+interior was divided between the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Steward.
+The Lord Chamberlain was responsible for providing the lamps, the Lord
+Steward for lighting them; before a pane of glass or cupboard could be
+repaired, months sometimes passed; all external repairs were in the hands
+of the Woods and Forests, on which it therefore depended how much daylight
+should be admitted through the windows. More than two-thirds of the indoor
+servants seemed without control, coming in, going out, when, and with whom
+they chose.--'Life,' pp. 26-27.
+
+[63] 'Life,' p. 21.
+
+[64] 'Life,' p. 21.
+
+[65] Not, as was long said, Mr Disraeli, but Mr Disraeli's then titular
+leader, Lord George Bentinck.
+
+[66] At this interval, traditions as to the merits of the quarrel may
+differ. The account here given is from the most authentic source
+existing.--Martin's 'Life,' p, 29.
+
+[67] This opinion used to be expressed very strongly by Lord Raglan who
+commanded in the Crimea. It was shared by the French military experts of
+the day.
+
+[68] The figures in the earlier estimate are taken from the _Imperial
+Federation Journal_, June 1886: Those of the later date are supplied by
+the Army Estimates, and by the courtesy of Lord Lansdowne and his
+colleagues at the War Office.
+
+[69] This (_i.e._ distribution of honours according to property) seems
+from _Ethics_, Book viii. ch. 10, the exact meaning of the convenient
+compound.
+
+[70] For the chief facts in these remarks on the army, where they are not
+directly drawn from the Blue Books, or as above specified from the
+Imperial Federation Journal, the writer is indebted, and would express his
+thanks, to Lord Lansdowne, Secretary of State for War; to Field Marshal
+Lord Wolseley, and to his old and distinguished friend General Sir Henry
+Brackenbury.
+
+[71] Quoted by Captain Eardley Wilmot in _The Development of Navies_, p.
+1.
+
+[72] _The Development of Navies_, p. 12.
+
+[73] P. 27.
+
+[74] The 'Warrior,' at this time standing by herself, was a vessel of
+9,210 tons. Thirty-five years later the advance made in our ideas of
+dimension and power may be judged from the fact that on Jan. 31, 1895, the
+'Majestic' was launched. Her tonnage was 14,900, an increase of 5,690 on
+her predecessor. Unlike the 'Warrior' of an earlier date, the 'Majestic'
+was only one of several, the building of which began at the end of 1894,
+the last parliamentary record of which reaches to the spring of 1896.
+Briefly to summarize the results that emphasize the contrasts between the
+two epochs, the average size of vessels built at the present time
+approaches thrice that of twenty years ago. Then too, steel was not used
+for ship building; now it is gradually supplanting iron. Of late there
+have been more ships built than formerly on a less colossal scale. The
+result is partially due to the dimensions of the Suez Canal whose depth is
+not equal to an ironclad of the first magnitude. Time, apparently, is
+still needed to show if our seamen can develop a skill as great in
+handling these iron leviathans as in controlling those wooden craft, their
+management of which was the admiration of the world.
+
+[75] Apart from the parliamentary papers bearing on the navy, Captain
+Eardley Wilmot's _The Development of Navies_ is the literary authority
+that has been found most useful in preparing this chapter. The writer is
+however, chiefly indebted to the details with which he has been kindly and
+copiously supplied by the present First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr Goschen
+and his staff, especially Lord Encombe.
+
+[76] In the nineteenth century, on a much smaller scale, exhibitions had
+been held in Paris 1801, 1806, 1836, 1849, as well as in Belgium, Germany
+and Spain. The true precursor of the '51 Exhibition has been discovered by
+Mr Molesworth (History ii. p. 363) in the Covent Garden Free Trade Bazaar
+1846.
+
+[77] Macaulay's House of Commons speeches in the 1832 Reform Bill debates
+are famous. When he was best known as a writer, he had been Secretary at
+War (1839) and Paymaster General (1846). Lytton at the zenith of his
+literary fame had been Colonial Secretary under Lord Derby in 1858, before
+he was made a peer in 1866.
+
+[78] The vitality of Purcell's fame at the 200th anniversary of his death
+was attested by the celebrations of 1895. Since then a very remarkable
+tribute to his greatness has been given accidentally in an unexpected
+quarter. The great German classical authority, the Bach Gesellschaft (vol.
+xlii. p. 250) prints as a doubtful work of Bach, Purcell's Toccata in A
+which is given in the Harpsichord and Organ volume of the Purcell Society
+(p. 42). That a work of Purcell's should have been mistaken for one of the
+very greatest organ writer's who has ever lived, and that by Bach's own
+jealous countrymen, is a panegyric more significant than words on our own
+great national composer.
+
+[79] _Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé_ (Smith, Elder & Co.)
+illustrates with interesting detail the service rendered to Beethoven by
+this great exponent of his genius.
+
+[80] For the facts and figures contained in this survey of our musical
+state, the writer desires to express his special obligations to Sir George
+Grove, and to Sir Arthur Sullivan, both private friends of many years
+standing.
+
+[81] Martin's 'Life,' People's Edition, part ii. p. 63.
+
+[82] The habit of inviting other than parliamentary guests, men famous in
+art or science, to the State dinners on the eve of the session began with
+Mr Gladstone, and after him Mr Disraeli.
+
+[83] A class chiefly, if not exclusively, represented by, to his honour be
+it said, Professor Herkomer.
+
+[84] While these pages are passing through the press, the French critic,
+M. Yriarte, writing in the _Times_, gives the following interesting
+testimony to the world-wide value of this British centre of humanity and
+culture:--To-day for all of us foreigners South Kensington is a Mecca.
+England there possesses the entire art of Europe and the East, their
+spiritual manifestations under all forms, and Europe has been swept into
+the stream in imitation of England. Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Nuremberg,
+Basle, Madrid, St Petersburg, Moscow, the large towns of America itself
+have now their South Kensingtons; but in the original one of England still
+unfinished, where the splendour of the start (excessive, as it seems to
+me) contrasts with the inertia of the last fifteen years, the
+inconceivable treasures are becoming so much heaped up as to be a
+veritable obstacle to study. How is it possible to study this
+extraordinary series of textiles of all times and countries, ranged one
+upon another, overlapping and hiding one another, without proper
+perspective and proper light?
+
+[85] £70,000, to which the Duke of Marlborough reduced the £100,000 which
+he originally asked.
+
+[86] For the information embodied in this chapter, the writer is under
+many obligations to the late Sir John E. Millais, to the late Sir Philip
+Cunliffe Owen, long Director at South Kensington, and Mr F. A. Eaton, the
+present Secretary to the Royal Academy.
+
+[87] Greenwood, p. 291.
+
+[88] Thackeray, when writing _The Virginians_, Carlyle, in the preparation
+of all his later works, are authentic and only the more illustrious
+instances which could be given.
+
+[89] Such was the precise garment mentioned by Mr Harrison when he told
+the story to the present writer.
+
+[90] To whom, while at work on portions of this book at a distance from
+London, the present writer owes much courteous help.
+
+[91] By exactly ten years, Thackeray dying 1863, Lytton 1873. The
+increased interest in Dickens is shown by Messrs Chapman & Hall's latest
+editions, the revived interest in Lytton by Messrs Routledge's new
+ventures.
+
+[92] Personally, Lord Lytton was more correctly appreciated in Paris where
+in his last years he much lived. His unfailing presence of mind in
+physical difficulties or dangers compelled the admiration of all who knew
+him. A Colonial Secretary himself, he first showed, in the closing
+chapters of _The Caxtons_, that sense of the greatness of our Colonial
+empire, to-day a commonplace but unknown up to then.
+
+[93] John Copley, afterwards Lord Lyndhurst, and John Campbell, afterwards
+Lord Campbell, during their student days at the Bar, both wrote for the
+London papers, chiefly theatrical critiques.
+
+[94] These figures for the later date are taken direct from Mitchell's
+Newspaper Press Directory 1897; for the earlier from a note by Mr Garnett
+in Mr Ward's _Reign of Queen Victoria_; Mr Garnett's statistics being
+apparently derived from an article contributed probably by Albany Fonblanc
+to an early number of the _Westminster Review_.
+
+[95] Carried in the January of 1855 a majority of 157 (305 to 148).
+
+[96] Successes of a new sort have been made. The penny newspapers had paid
+by their advertisements; when the price of the paper on which they were
+printed exceeded a certain figure, circulation beyond the amount necessary
+to maintain advertisements was not therefore in itself a paramount object.
+The new halfpenny sheets realized on every copy sold a profit larger even
+proportionately than the penny papers had ever made on their copies,
+advertisements of course excepted.
+
+[97] For the commercial details of newspaper enterprise, the reader is
+referred to the author's earlier work _England_, etc., where he duly
+acknowledged his obligations to his editorial chief and personal friend,
+Mr W. H. Mudford, of the _Standard_; for the fresh facts and figures here
+given the writer is indebted to Sir Charles Dilke, to Mr H. Labouchere, to
+an article on _Halfpenny Papers_ by Mr F. A. McKenzie in the _Windsor
+Magazine_ for January 1897, and above all to Mitchell's invaluable
+_Newspaper Press Directory_.
+
+[98] M.P. for Shrewsbury since 1832.
+
+[99] Each reform was followed by a fresh diminution in the death rate.
+
+[100] This lady, in addition to her natural gift of organization, had been
+trained at the Prussian hospital of Kaisersworth. Accompanied by her
+friends, Mr and Mrs Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall, and 37 nurses, she
+reached Scutari November 5, just in time to tend the wounded after
+Balaclava.
+
+[101] Sampson Low's _Charities of London_, p. 2.
+
+[102] The statistics illustrative of this subject have been derived
+exclusively from Mr Sampson Low's _Charities of London_, at the places
+already indicated in the footnotes. For the other facts to complete the
+little picture, the writer is indebted to friends who have made this
+subject their special study, such as Lady Priestley, or reluctantly to his
+own personal experience.
+
+[103] For these statistics, some of them perhaps now given for the first
+time the writer is beholden to Sir Brydges Henniker, Registrar General.
+
+[104] This most gifted family came originally from Plymouth or its
+neighbourhood, sending representatives to Bath, Bristol and Barnstaple.
+The Barnstaple Budd, universally respected, died 1896.
+
+[105] Dr Ferrier's work on the brain, mapping it out according to its
+functions, appeared 1876 and also perhaps marks an epoch.
+
+[106] Shortly before his death, the late Sir Andrew Clark assured the
+present writer that his remarks in his earlier work, _England_, on the
+medical profession were accurate in all respects and applicable to the
+existing state of things. For the purpose of the present volume when the
+writer was first contemplating it, and was in occasional correspondence
+with Sir Andrew, the great physician kindly made a few fresh hints. These,
+with the information of Sir William and Lady Priestley, have been
+indispensable to the writer throughout.
+
+[107] Evidence in support of this has been collected by the writer
+throughout the manufacturing districts, an important fact being that where
+secularism was most organized, there well-to-do mechanics and artizans are
+Communicants, and often Sunday School teachers as well.
+
+[108] The Ramsden Sermon, preached before Oxford University June 12, 1892,
+pp. 10, 11.
+
+[109] These Bishoprics, 75 in America, 4 in other countries, that is 79 in
+all, control (1897) 4,666 clergy; among the church goers 622,194 are
+Communicants. The total of Anglican clergy in foreign parts, at the period
+of the Queen's accession, excluding Bishops, was 897. In 1850 it was
+1,193. To-day (1897) it is 4,312. Roughly, therefore, the increase has
+been 300 per cent.
+
+[110] The most noticeable being the Gorham dispute about _Baptismal
+Regeneration_ 1850, which issued in defining the Evangelical status, as in
+1847 Hampden's bishopric had secured the broad Church position. In 1871
+the Frome case secured the highest doctrines on the Eucharist. These three
+decisions practically constitute the Charters of the three chief parties
+in the National Church.
+
+[111] Not Dean of St Paul's till 1869.
+
+[112] _The Sermon on the Mount_, 1897.
+
+[113] For the information as to the Church of England embodied in this
+chapter, the writer's thanks are sincerely tendered to the Rev. H. W.
+Tucker of the S.P.G. Society; to the Rev. J. C. Cox, D.D., Holdenby, North
+Hants; to the Rev. A. L. Foulkes, Steventon, Berks; and to Mr G. W. E.
+Russell. No official statistics of the numbers in the different Churches
+exist. The basis of the estimate given is supplied by the statistics of
+the _Federation League Journal_, June, 1886.
+
+[114] This is not the conventional idea of clubs. Thackeray, who knew
+club-life well, first illustrated this view. An examination of the tariff
+and general charges at the professional clubs in Pall Mall or St James's
+would show the absolute truth of the description.
+
+[115] The Honourable Mr Algernon Bourke has a more than amateur experience
+of modern clubs. While these pages are passing through the press, he gives
+it as his opinion that nowadays there is practically no play in clubs. All
+who know anything of the subject would confirm the general truth of that
+statement.
+
+[116] See _passim_ the evidence taken before this Committee printed in the
+1844 Parliamentary Blue Books.
+
+[117] The reluctance of referees to interfere is natural and pardonable in
+view of the fashionable brutality not only of the players but the
+spectators. A proof of this may be found in a typical instance reported in
+a daily paper:--A FOOTBALL REFEREE ASSAULTED.--A disgraceful scene was
+witnessed at Lincoln last night after the close of the League match
+between Lincoln City and Newton Heath. The decisions of the referee (Mr
+Fox, of Sheffield) gave great dissatisfaction to the crowd, and the
+hostile demonstration commenced when he awarded the Heathens two penalty
+kicks in quick succession. After the match he had to seek shelter in the
+secretary's office for some time, and when he did leave the ground he was
+badly assaulted by several roughs. The windows of a cab in which he drove
+to his hotel were completely smashed.
+
+[118] In the diverse materials for this chapter, the writer has been
+helped greatly by the volume on the Turf in the Badminton Series, but in
+all which has to do with horses by the Earl of Dunraven, by Lord
+Ribblesdale, by Mr Leopold de Rothschild; in all that relates to cricket
+and football by the Hon. and Rev. E. Lyttelton, Headmaster of Haileybury
+College, and in the football facts by one of Mr Lyttelton's Haileybury
+colleagues. His chess facts have been given him by a great West of England
+authority in the game, H. Maxwell Prideaux. For his knowledge of ladies'
+work he is indebted, as in _England_ he was, to Miss F. S. Hollings.
+
+[119] The motion in 1849 for the Sierra Leone reduction was, as Hansard
+shows, only one of a series of such proposals. Hume's views on the
+Colonies were much those which Mill had set forth in his famous
+Encyclopædia Britannica article. Mill may have been against Colonial
+expansion, but not against Colonial retention.
+
+[120] On this subject see the very interesting and accurate statistics
+compiled by Mr F. Leveson Gower, and published by the Cobden Club.
+
+[121] A. Cleveland Coxe, then Rector of Grace Church, Baltimore, published
+his _Impressions of England_, 1856. His Ballads and Carols, ecclesiastical
+or religious, especially one entitled _In Dreamland_, abound in graceful
+fancy, and have had a popularity among English and American Anglicans
+approaching that of _The Christian Year_.
+
+[122] For the facts relating to the administration of law, the writer is
+indebted to Sir Edward Clarke, and to the Master John MacDonell, of the
+High Court of Justice. The facts and figures with respect to the Colonies
+have been drawn from official sources as well as from the very valuable
+_Imperial Federation League Journal_ for June 1886. He is further
+personally beholden for the local colour inparted to his Colonial
+descriptions by the private information of Sir Robert G. W. Herbert, Sir
+Julius Vogel, Mr John Bramston, and other Colonial officials. The
+privately printed papers of the fourth Lord Carnarvon distributed among
+his personal friends (1897), opportunely confirm and illustrate the views
+here given of the Colonial past, present, and future.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Social Transformations of the Victorian Age, by T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott</title>
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age,
+by T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Social Transformations of the Victorian Age</p>
+<p>       A Survey of Court and Country</p>
+<p>Author: T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott</p>
+<p>Release Date: February 27, 2012  [eBook #39001]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)<br />
+    from page images generously made available by<br />
+    Internet Archive<br />
+    (http://www.archive.org)</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031472768">
+      http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031472768</a>
+	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1><small>SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS<br />
+OF THE<br />
+VICTORIAN AGE</small></h1>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">SOCIAL<br />
+TRANSFORMATIONS<br />
+OF THE VICTORIAN AGE</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="large"><i>A SURVEY OF COURT AND COUNTRY</i></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><small>BY</small><br />
+<span class="large">T. H. S. ESCOTT</span><br />
+<small><i>Author of &#8216;England, its People, Polity and Pursuits,&#8217;<br />
+&amp;c., &amp;c.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER&#8217;S SONS<br />
+153-157 FIFTH AVENUE<br />
+1897</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2><i>PREFACE</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>It may be well very briefly to explain the relation in which the present
+work stands to a survey, not a history, of modern England undertaken by
+the same author some years ago. That earlier work was originally published
+by Messrs Cassell and Co. in two volumes. It was reprinted, first by them,
+secondly by Messrs Chapman and Hall, in a single volume. Into that
+re-issue of his <i>England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits</i> (the labour of
+revision being much lightened by the obliging help of Mr Francis
+Drummond), the author introduced certain references to social or
+legislative changes effected since the original edition of the work
+appeared. Without organic disturbance of its plan, and risk of consequent
+confusion to the reader, it would have been impossible to bring down that
+book to the year 1897. The writer does not in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> following pages
+pre-suppose any knowledge of his former book on the part of the readers of
+his present one. He has, however, held himself absolved from the duty of
+repeating in this book minute accounts of institutions fully described in
+its predecessor. Such repetition seemed the more undesirable because the
+earlier book is still in wide circulation here; while it has been
+translated into several European languages, and has been adopted as a text
+book in the higher grade State schools of Germany,<a name='fna_1' id='fna_1' href='#f_1'><small>[1]</small></a> and of other
+countries. The method of workmanship adopted in <i>Social Transformations of
+the Victorian Age</i> is identical with that pursued in the case of <i>England,
+Etc.</i></p>
+
+<p>This new book being, like its predecessor, not a history, but a series of
+different views from a common standpoint, the sketches of national life
+and character as well as of national institutions at work, have in all
+cases been made from personal observation; supplemented<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span> by the assistance
+of the highest experts in their different departments to whom the writer
+had access. Often, he is glad to say, the same private friends who helped
+him in the seventies have been able to renew that help in the nineties.
+Thus, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Robert Herbert, Mr Mundella, Mr Archibald
+Milman of the House of Commons, and Mr Albert Pell have generally and
+specifically repeated the assistance lent to him twenty years earlier. In
+most cases it is hoped the assistance given has been acknowledged in its
+proper place. In many cases the advantages of this service extend beyond
+any particular passage. In all which relates to the new schemes of local
+government the writer is particularly indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin or
+members of his staff; to Sir Henry Fowler; to Sir Charles Dilke; to the
+Rev. J. Charles Cox, LL.D., of Holdenby, as in ecclesiastical matters to
+the Rev. A. L. Foulkes of Steventon, and to the Rev. H. W. Tucker, D.D.,
+of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> references to
+certain phases of social history, especially about the early railway
+period, he has learned much from Lord Carlingford, Mr Markham Spofforth,
+Mr J. C. Parkinson, and from Sir W. H. Russell. And finally he would
+specially thank several gentlemen of the Education Department, as well as
+the Vice-President himself, Sir John Gorst. It is hoped that, as in the
+case of the writer&#8217;s <i>England</i>, so in that of his new book, the
+collaboration of those who are, in their different provinces, experts, has
+ensured a more uniform accuracy than in a volume dealing with such a
+variety of subjects would otherwise have been attainable.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">T. H. S. E.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+<p class="title"><i>CONTENTS</i></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE NEW WEALTH,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS OF &#8216;SIBYL,&#8217;</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE LADDER OF EDUCATION,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">&#8216;THE PLAY&#8217;S THE THING,&#8217;</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING MILLIONS,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS<br />UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA,</td>
+    <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_259">259</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">274</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">CROWN AND SWORD,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_290">290</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_320">320</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">CHAPTER XXIV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">CECILIA&#8217;S TRIUMPHS,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_337">337</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">CHAPTER XXV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_349">349</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">CHAPTER XXVI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_362">362</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">CHAPTER XXVII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_380">380</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">CHAPTER XXVIII</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_388">388</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">CHAPTER XXIX</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_398">398</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">CHAPTER XXX</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE QUEEN&#8217;S SUBJECTS AT PLAY&mdash;ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_408">408</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXXI</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:&mdash;HOME AND COLONIAL,</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_422">422</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">INDEX</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_439">439</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="giant">Social Transformations</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<p class="title">TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Difference between English society in the earlier and later years of
+the Queen&#8217;s reign illustrated from the composition of Hyde Park
+crowds, first, when the Park was a playground for the Royal children,
+and a parade ground for social celebrities, secondly, as it has become
+since. Different generations of Victorian Royalty. Great noblemen,
+Lord Lansdowne, Lord Eglinton, Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Shaftesbury, The
+Duke of Wellington. Statesmen, Earl Grey, Sir Robert Peel. Other
+celebrities, social, or intellectual, or literary. The dandies, some
+of them sketched by Thackeray, Morgan O&#8217;Connell, the original of &#8216;The
+O&#8217;Mulligan,&#8217; Alfred Montgomery, Alexis Soyer, Lord Adolphus
+Fitzclarence, 1848-51. Tall forms of Thackeray and Jacob Omnium
+overtopping the crowd. The editor of the <i>Times</i>, J. T. Delane, on
+horseback. The absence in later days of eminent individuals like
+these; the old editor and the new. A. W. Kinglake among the last
+riders in Hyde Park of veterans who write. Commerce in the Park and in
+society represented by &#8216;King&#8217; Hudson before and after his fall. Lord
+Tollemache, of Peckforton, the last of great nobles familiar to
+English crowds.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>As it is to-day, so, during the earlier years of the present reign, both
+before and after the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park was the social
+parade ground, not only of the capital, but of the Kingdom. Then, as now,
+its human panorama was the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>representative reflection of the social
+conditions not less than of the typical personages of the era.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the later forties or the fifties, the loungers from the
+provinces were certainly not less numerous in Hyde Park than to-day.
+Foreign visitors were beginning to be a feature in the Metropolitan
+summer. But the scale on which the London season half a century ago was
+observed was so small as to resemble but faintly its successors known to
+the present generation. Society scarcely exceeded the dimensions of a
+family party. Hyde Park itself seemed a Royal pleasure ground first, a
+popular resort afterwards, to which strangers were, as to the Park at
+Windsor, admitted by favour of the first Constitutional Sovereign, to
+behold the pastimes of the rising generations of Royalty. The little boy
+and girl, steering their ponies through the maze of carriages, horses, or
+pedestrians, were the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. Observers
+noted with appreciative criticism the progress made from day to day by the
+young riders. Other of the Queen&#8217;s descendants of age still more tender,
+followed with their parents in an open carriage, the exact build of which
+had been introduced by the Prince Consort, and were manifestly being
+instructed by their father or mother in the art of acknowledging
+gracefully the respectful salutations of spectators.</p>
+
+<p>The company crowding the Park, and most familiar to London onlookers
+differed from the crowds of succeeding decades, first, in the monotony of
+its composition, secondly, in the commanding ascendancy of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> some among the
+individuals whom it numbered. This was a kind of feudal age in our social
+development. The monarch was surrounded by subjects, the splendour of
+whose station, or the lustre of whose endowments caused them to shine
+forth in their exalted firmament, with a light of their own not reflected
+by, though comparable with, that of Royalty itself. Two noblemen, during
+the first quarter of a century of the Queen&#8217;s reign, one Scotch, the other
+English, seemed to eclipse the rest of the peerage. The Earl of Eglinton,
+of the period now referred to, was famous, even among Englishmen, from the
+tournament held some years earlier in 1839 at Eglinton Castle, and
+described by Mr Disraeli in his last novel, <i>Endymion</i>. The lady who had
+been the Queen of Beauty upon the occasion, the Duchess of Somerset, was
+then a synonym for all which women envy or men admire. When she appeared
+in Hyde Park, the crowd gazed at her carriage with the awed admiration
+that they bestowed on those born to thrones. North of the Tweed, Lord
+Eglinton summed up to his adoring countrymen, in his own person, all the
+influence, the dignity, the splendour, the power, and all the other
+attributes of greatness with which the principle of birth could be
+endowed. What Lord Eglinton was in Scotland, or to the natives of Scotland
+in London, Lord Lansdowne<a name='fna_2' id='fna_2' href='#f_2'><small>[2]</small></a> had long been to all classes of Englishmen,
+not more in his native county than in London. Here, during the earlier
+Victorian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> seasons, he was conspicuous in Hyde Park, generally by his
+perfect demeanour of high breeding, specially by this blue coat and
+voluminous white neck investment. After him, slowly riding on a horse
+whose familiarity can best be expressed to readers of to-day by comparing
+it with that sometime attained by the white cob of Mr Lowe, Lord
+Sherbrooke, there appeared, in the blue coat and white trousers of the old
+r&eacute;gime, the figure before whom all heads instinctively uncovered, the
+great Duke of Wellington. On horseback, also, were two other men, second
+only in eminence to the Duke himself, Lord Palmerston, and Sir Robert
+Peel. The first still wore his years lightly and was as much at home in
+the saddle as in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel, still a remarkably
+handsome man, had the enthusiasm of the equestrian. Those who can recall
+the loose connection between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the steed which
+he bestrode, can form an idea of the &#8216;seat&#8217; of the great Sir Robert.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the representatives of the reigning family and to the statesmen
+who were the props of the young Queen&#8217;s throne, the attention of the Hyde
+Park crowd was fixed upon a little group of gentlemen, remarkable for the
+perfection of their toilettes, and for the special attention manifestly
+bestowed upon their hair, not as to-day cut down to the scalp, but falling
+gracefully over the white collar. These were the dandies. The last of the
+tribe has not long passed away. But as a race they have left no
+successors. The late Mr Alfred Montgomery had for his associates Count
+Alfred D&#8217;Orsay, whose Christian name was perpetuated by a dandies&#8217;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> club.
+&#8216;The Alfred&#8217; flourished in Albemarle Street till a decade or two since.
+Its founder survived till the nineties, Alexis Soyer, high priest of the
+mysteries of the fine art of cookery as well as the original of
+Thackeray&#8217;s &#8216;Mirobolant&#8217; in <i>Pendennis</i>. Others who sat for their
+portraits to the novelist were well known in the fashionable section of
+the Hyde Park crowd. Morgan John O&#8217;Connell, a leader of dandies, was of
+course there. There, too, was that other O&#8217;Connell, known by his friends
+as Lord Kilmarlcock, from whom Thackeray never denied that he had taken
+the traits of The O&#8217;Mulligan. Possibly, too, there might have been seen
+here Mr Arcedeckne, whom the same novelist has immortalised in &#8216;Harry
+Foker,&#8217; and who thus early in the Victorian era prefigured the social
+friendship since grown more common between the gentlemen who live to
+labour, and their comrades who live to enjoy. Still more noticeable among
+the Hyde Park loungers on foot, standing not far from D&#8217;Orsay and
+Montgomery were the two inseparables, the then Sir George Wombwell and
+Lord Adolphus, better known as &#8216;Dolly,&#8217; Fitzclarence, the latter curiously
+like Lawrence&#8217;s picture of George IV.</p>
+
+<p>The editor of the <i>Times</i>, J. T. Delane, scarcely less powerful in the
+social and political system than in his own office, would have been
+mistaken, by those who did not know him personally, for the plain country
+gentleman whose life he liked to lead. His square, neatly compacted
+figure, with cleanly shaven upper lip, and penetrating, but pleasant,
+expression of eyes, was among the last to enter and to leave the Park. Not
+less well known to most Londoners and to many provincials were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> two of Mr
+Delane&#8217;s literary friends, though not both of them wrote for his paper.
+One of these was Thackeray, towering above all the smaller men. The other
+was tall Thackeray&#8217;s taller friend known to his contemporaries as &#8216;Big&#8217;
+Higgins, still better known to the public at large as Jacob Omnium. The
+two were generally to be found together. The eyes of all passengers were
+strained, and their tongues silenced as these two tall lumbering figures
+man&oelig;uvred slowly up or down the Row; not so much ridden in then as it
+was afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>But neither the intellectual workers, nor the social butterflies attracted
+more attention than a middle-aged, rather over-dressed lady in a very
+gorgeous carriage, which might have become a Lord Mayor, and a big, heavy
+man, with drab-coloured, wiry hair, who sometimes sat beside her. The
+chariot and its occupants seemed to interest the country visitors in the
+Park more than did the distinguished persons already mentioned. The
+gentleman was George Hudson, the &#8216;railway King,&#8217; who had not only made a
+fortune himself, but had been the cause of many others rolling in wealth
+scarcely less than his own. Within a few years he was still visible in the
+same enclosure, not, however, in the gaudy equipage, but as a pedestrian.
+The crash, in fact, had come. King Hudson had fallen on evil days. But
+having dragged none down in his descent, nor disclosed any secrets of the
+prison house, he kept friends who helped him in his adversity. The house
+at Knightsbridge, which is now the French Embassy, knew of course Hudson
+no more. Its fashionable assemblages since it became a diplomatic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+residence cannot have been more brilliant than those which met there when
+Hudson was its master. Nor, indeed, has its social splendour since been
+eclipsed by any of those more recent hosts whom commercial success has
+incorporated among the sons and daughters of fashion. Hudson&#8217;s dinner
+table, or Mrs Hudson&#8217;s reception room, were graced, habitually by the
+great Duke of Wellington, by the Duke of Cambridge, and occasionally by
+other Princes of the blood Royal. Nor, during his decline, did Hudson fail
+to carry himself with good humour, and even dignity. His simple, harmless,
+almost pathetic vanity had perhaps combined with his shrewd Yorkshire
+common sense to support him under his adversities. A sum which realised
+&pound;600 a year had been subscribed for him, the trustees of his annuity being
+Sir George Elliot, and Mr Hugh Taylor. His wife and his sons were alive.
+But he preferred living in a solitary lodging in London. His freedom from
+all anxiety made this season of eclipse, he protested, the happiest time
+of his life. A courteous recognition from the great Lord Grey in the Park,
+or the kindly concession to him of the chair which he had occupied, in
+other years, in the smoking room of the Carlton, shed something more than
+a transitory gleam of comfort upon his darkened fortunes, and were recited
+by the old man with his north country burr to the friends with whom, to
+the last, he used to dine. Like another fallen star of a different system,
+in an earlier age, Beau Brummell, Hudson passed several years of his
+eclipse at a hotel in Calais, where he was visited by more friends than
+had ever looked in upon the great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> dandy of the Georgian epoch during the
+twilight hours of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Such, then, were the chief among the more representative figures to be met
+with on the brightest and most varied of the social parade grounds of the
+capital during the earlier years of the Victorian epoch.</p>
+
+<p>No single element conspicuous in the Hyde Park of the later years of the
+Victorian era was absent from that earlier crowd at whose composition we
+have glanced. The social prominence of English plutocracy whether
+represented by the great money brokers, whom, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic,
+Piccadilly has always known, or by Yorkshire Hudson, whom it knew fitfully
+during the short spell of his splendour, has been, from Elizabethan or
+still earlier times, a feature and a force in the social economy of the
+town. That which, seen between the Magazine and Apsley House, would have
+most surprised Hyde Park loungers in the early Victorian days, had they
+been able to lift the curtain of the future, is not the fact of the best
+coaches of the Four in Hand Club being owned by men whose names have no
+English sound, and whose taste for horseflesh is not hereditary; but
+rather the vogue now attained by prevailing bicycles. Even here, perhaps,
+one ought rather to recognize the reintroduction of a fashion whose idea
+is as old as the hobby horse itself than a mode as indisputably modern as
+the safety wheel or the pneumatic tyre.</p>
+
+<p>The Princes and Princesses who once rode their ponies between Albert and
+Stanhope Gates are now bearing a part in the government of Empires, but
+are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> seldom for long unrepresented in the moving and glittering throng.
+The &#8216;city&#8217; in the Row is not a novelty. The Church began with Archbishop
+Tait to be more prominently represented than was ever known before. The
+most emancipated of bygone occupants of Lambeth would scarcely have looked
+forward to the time when a cavalcade composed of archiepiscopal children,
+led by a Primate himself in the van, with his Chaplain bringing up the
+rear, would canter to and fro along the Row. Hyde Park is not to-day
+visited by early water drinkers who believe in the virtues of the probably
+forgotten spring in Kensington Gardens hard by. But not many hours after
+dawn, the novelty, as to early Victorian observers it would have seemed,
+may be witnessed of ladies and gentlemen issuing in bands from their
+Tyburnian or Kensingtonian homes to gain an appetite for breakfast, and a
+store of fresh air for the day&#8217;s confinement, by making at least once the
+circuit of the Park while the roads are at their emptiest, and the
+dewdrops still glisten on the flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Something else than the extended popularity of London&#8217;s most serviceable
+&#8216;lung&#8217; is suggested by the contrast between Hyde Park as it is now, and as
+it was three or four decades since. The dandies are not the only feature
+in the social landscape one looks for in vain. The commanding
+personalities of individuals of either sex which seemed common on every
+social plane thirty or forty years since have largely disappeared now. The
+levelling influences of a democratic epoch have reduced to a uniformity of
+unheroic proportions those who represent in our public places<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> the
+interests, the occupations, the achievements, or the society of their day.
+It is called a prosaic age. It is certainly, as compared with its
+predecessors, a lilliputian one. At the very zenith of his power, Mr
+Gladstone in the streets or parks of London, never fixed the attention of
+the crowd to the same degree as his political master, the great Sir Robert
+Peel. The adroit, accomplished, and singularly successful soldier, who,
+since the Duke of Cambridge&#8217;s retirement, has been Commander-in-Chief,
+resembles the Duke of Wellington in stature. Neither Lord Wolseley, nor
+any of his contemporaries, compels as yet from street crowds the mute
+veneration and awe which the simple fact of his unrivalled pre-eminence as
+a subject secured for the Duke of Wellington whenever he set foot in
+Piccadilly, or turned his horse&#8217;s head in the direction of the Horse
+Guards down Constitution Hill.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the Royal Family there is no great lady who like an earlier Lady
+Jersey is greeted as a queen by crowds to which she can only be a name. In
+the same way, the average of efficiency in journalism was never so high as
+at present, nor the editing as well as the writing and compiling of
+newspapers ever more competently performed. The editor, however, of the
+stamp of John Thaddeus Delane does not, nor by the circumstances of the
+time could, any longer exist. The responsible head of a great newspaper
+office has necessarily become less a creator of public opinion, less even
+of an interpreter, which Delane signally was, of middle class English
+thought, than the custodian of a commercial interest, the vicegerent of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+proprietor who regards the journal, first, as a great organ of public
+opinion; secondly, as the instrument for achieving his own patriotic
+purposes in his own way. While Delane was yet living, the able conductor
+of another great daily journal was ambitious to fill a place like Delane&#8217;s
+in the social and political system. It was a sad mistake. In journalism,
+more than anywhere else, as this gentleman ought to have known, given the
+requisite capacity which he undoubtedly had, a man may exercise almost any
+power he likes on condition that he himself remains in the background, and
+neither in jest nor earnest magnifies his apostleship too much. The
+consequence was, in the particular case now spoken of, that after some
+years of patient forbearance on the owner&#8217;s part, his solicitor waited on
+the editor one fine morning at his country house, and curtly handed the
+gentleman, who thought himself indispensable, a formal note of dismissal.
+Stories were told of occasional collision even between Mr Delane and the
+proprietary of the great newspaper. These were for the most part doubtless
+apocryphal. The one thing which observers knew for certain was that when
+the commercial master of the newspaper appeared during the evening in the
+same room as its literary controller, Mr Delane generally found that he
+had an engagement at his office. Some years after the date at which Hyde
+Park retrospectively has been presented, the best, if not the only, well
+known man of letters to be observed on horseback was A. W. Kinglake, the
+historian of the Crimean war. When he passed away there was left
+stout-hearted, short-tempered Anthony Trollope, who, up to the time of
+his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> fatal seizure, pounded his sturdy cob so many times round the
+enclosure between Cumberland and Albert Gates, just as a few hours earlier
+in his study, whether in or out of the vein, he had completed a fixed
+number of words of his new novel. These knights of the pen are followed
+(1897) by Frederic Harrison, Leslie Stephen and W. S. Lilly. The last
+quarter of a century in London finds us with many adequate representatives
+of national industry and achievement. The hero who in any department sums
+up the exploits and the tendencies of his age will with difficulty be
+found. The fact that it is the day of great successes does not prevent its
+being comparatively the age of small men. So long as the veteran Lord
+Tollemache, of Peckforton, survived to drive his team in its harness of
+untanned leather from Marlborough Gate to Portman Square, the peerage in
+its social aspect did not lack one whom Carlyle would have admitted to be
+in his way a hero. Since 1890, when Lord Tollemache died, Burke and
+Debrett contain no name whose owner is the cynosure of the holiday crowd
+in at all the same degree as that last survivor of those noblemen whose
+figures at an earlier period of this reign were as well known to the
+popular eye as their position or eccentricity was celebrated in popular
+talk.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<p class="title">THE NEW WEALTH</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Commercial plutocracy not seen in England for the first time under
+Queen Victoria, but dates from Queen Elizabeth or earlier. Wealth,
+birth, intellect, often united in England. City traders being Lord
+Mayors who from 1452 onwards have founded noble houses. The chief
+elements in the new nineteenth century wealth considered. Gold
+discoveries in California 1848, in Australia 1850. Their transforming
+influences at home and abroad. Expert opinions of the period on the
+consequences and the durability of the new gold. Different views and
+calculations of Sir Archibald Alison, Sir Roderick Murchison,
+Chevalier and Cobden. A new civilization resting on gold. Australian
+millionaire farmers preceded millionaire gold diggers. Effects of new
+gold upon circulating and fixed wealth of England tested by property
+assessments.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&#8216;I respect the aristocracy of birth and of intellect. I do not respect the
+aristocracy of wealth.&#8217; The remark is attributed to the great, or second,
+Sir Robert Peel. It proceeds upon a confused view of the social principles
+indicated by the words. It comes, somewhat inappropriately, from the
+political successor of the William Pitt who bestowed more peerages upon
+the possessors of mere wealth than any Minister before his time had done.
+The distinction drawn by Sir Robert Peel between the different
+aristocracies of England involves some misconceptions of social history.
+In Austria there existed during the last<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> century, there perhaps survives
+faintly to this day, an antagonism between the principles of birth and of
+wealth such as England has never known. With more than conventional
+fitness is the Premier of the day, whether peer or commoner, the guest on
+each 9th of November of the First Magistrate of London City. Within five
+centuries, at least fourteen noble houses have been founded by ten Lord
+Mayors.</p>
+
+<p>In 1452 Sir Godfrey Feilding, mercer, was the Lord Mayor from whom the
+Earls of Denbigh descend. Five years later another trader, Sir Godfrey
+Boleine sat in the chair of Whittington. One of his lineage, a generation
+or two later, as Earl of Wiltshire, gave Henry VIII. his second wife, and
+England her first Protestant Queen. Some ninety years thereafter, Lord
+Mayor Sir John Gresham, grocer, supplied from his numerous family a Duke
+of Buckingham, and a Lord Braybrooke. In 1557 Sir Thomas Cooke, draper,
+was installed in the Mansion House. To his descendants at least two
+patents of nobility were granted, the peerages of Salisbury and of
+Fitzwilliam. In 1570 a clothworker, Sir Rowland Heyward, became chief of
+the City Corporation. He was the ancestor of the Marquises of Bath.
+Fifteen years subsequently to this date, Sir Wolston Dixie, of the
+Skinners Company, was at once the Sovereign of the City and the forerunner
+of the peers bearing the titles of Compton or of Northampton. During the
+earliest years of the seventeenth century there reigned to the East of
+Temple Bar Sir John Houblon, a grocer. His descendants were to number
+amongst them the Irish Viscounts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> who in the fulness of time gave to Queen
+Victoria in Lord Palmerston the most popular and powerful Premier during
+the first half of her reign. Within another hundred years Lord Mayor Sir
+Samuel Dashwood, vintner, became a progenitor of future nobles only less
+prolific than his sixteenth century predecessor, Sir Thomas Cooke. Those
+who sprang from him obtained in due course the peerages of Warwick and
+Brooke. When in 1711, as Tory Ministers, Harley and Bolingbroke dined at
+the Guildhall, they were entertained by Sir Gilbert Heathcote whose
+posterity was ennobled by the styles of Aveland and Donne. One of Lord
+Salisbury&#8217;s Christian names, and his second title, that of Viscount
+Cranborne, perpetuate the memory of the Sir Christopher Gascoigne who was
+Lord Mayor of London during the first Ministry of Henry Pelham, in 1753.</p>
+
+<p>These instances serve circumstantially to remind us that the titled, like
+the untitled aristocracy of the country has always represented, as it
+represents to-day, in nearly equal proportions industry and intelligence
+in enterprise, perhaps even more than antiquity of descent. The dramatic
+circumstances of his rise and of his fall; the extent to which the latest
+developments of science, adventure and speculation were embodied in the
+person and in the career of the York linendraper&#8217;s son, make George
+Hudson, the &#8216;railway King&#8217; specially conspicuous amongst those on whom
+shrewdness and opportunity conferred material success. But the type is not
+merely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> as old as the present century. It has existed as long as English
+civilization itself.</p>
+
+<p>When Queen Victoria came to the throne, there was little in the signs of
+the times to betoken as near at hand the national prosperity which was
+firmly established before she had been seated on her throne five and
+twenty years. National depression followed the exhaustion of English
+energy and finance which had been caused by the struggle with France. Long
+after the heavy war taxation had ended with Waterloo, and the conqueror of
+Waterloo had as ruler of the State reduced army expenses to an
+unexpectedly low figure, the national fortunes were at an alarmingly low
+ebb. Sinecures had been nearly abolished. A further saving of expense had
+been expected by the partial or practical disbandment of the Yeomanry. But
+between 1815 and 1845 the series of bad years was broken only in 1822-5.
+Even then, English enthusiasm at the liberation of South America from
+Spanish rule was followed by reaction consequent upon the sinking of
+British millions in loans to the Spanish Republics of the New World.
+During the first decade of the Victorian epoch, better harvests coincided
+with the importation of gold in small quantities from the Ural mines. The
+railway enthusiasm provided fresh employment for the working classes. More
+even than by gold and railways was done by the fiscal reforms due to
+Cobden, Bright, Peel, Villiers and Gladstone to give impetus to trade, and
+commerce, and to make England the market of the world. Hence the origin
+and multiplication of English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> millionaires. The country was thus
+gladdened by fitful gleams of a long unknown prosperity. But budgets
+continued to be bad, and Whig finance was in chronic disrepute. During no
+small part of a century, English exports had remained almost stationary at
+&pound;51,000,000 a year. The distress was aggravated by the cotton spinning
+failures of 1842-3. On the eve of these the Burnley guardians told the
+Home Secretary of the inadequacy of their funds for the relief of local
+necessities. So gloomy indeed seemed the national fortune, that the
+Government of the day sold the Crown rights over Epping Forest. Nor as a
+fact was it till the forty-fifth year of the Queen&#8217;s reign that in 1882,
+this historic pleasure ground presented those scenes with which it is
+chiefly identified to-day.<a name='fna_3' id='fna_3' href='#f_3'><small>[3]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>The first of the most striking transformations of the Victorian era took
+place in the eleventh year of the Queen&#8217;s reign and continued during two
+or three years thereafter. The gold discoveries in California began in
+1848. They differed from those which had preceded them elsewhere on
+American soil in the circumstance that the new treasures were distributed
+among the entire population, and were not confined to a small band of
+despotic aliens, as had happened under the sway of the Spanish chiefs and
+the Incas of Peru. In 1850-1 the same precious metal as three years
+earlier had been yielded to diggers on the Californian slopes and on the
+banks of the Sacramento River was found to exist in the alluvial plains of
+Ballarat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> in our own Australian colonies. The practical value of these new
+sources of wealth was variously regarded by political critics and
+scientific economists. The French Chevalier, and our own Cobden predicted
+as a result of the new gold supplies a fall in the value of money, a
+revolution in property, the doubling of wages and prices and the
+impoverishment of capitalists. Others foretold the speedy exhaustion of
+the new gold mines. That view was sanctioned by the expert authority of
+the famous geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, who spoke of the limits of
+the recently discovered gold as &#8216;Nature&#8217;s Currency Restriction Act.&#8217; Sir
+Archibald Alison, not an incautious person, and certainly no friend to
+innovation, elaborately supported a contrary opinion. He engaged in a
+series of minute calculations for the purpose of showing that the gold
+supply now available could not be used up within four centuries. When the
+alluvial soil was drained of its precious deposits, there would, as Alison
+argued, remain the parent rocks, the cost of working which seemed likely
+to diminish and not to increase with time. Nor was this authority less
+sanguine as to the beneficent effects upon all classes and interests of
+the new gold. Commerce, he argued, would be promoted at every turn. With
+increasing production there would be fresh employment, a practical
+decrease in taxation, and generally in the payments made by the poorer
+classes to the rich. Before the Australian discoveries of 1850, scarcity
+of gold had, as Alison contended, raised the value of money, and
+emphasized the difference between the rich and the poor. The Currency<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+Restriction Act had been passed in 1844. &#8216;Nature&#8217;s Grand Currency
+Extension Act&#8217; was the name given by the historian to the fresh sources of
+wealth revealed in Bendigo and Ballarat. The facts and figures were
+something to the following effect. The discoveries of 1850-1 had added
+sixteen or eighteen millions to the world&#8217;s money in comparison with the
+eight or ten millions which in the fifteenth century and onwards had been
+provided by Mexico and Peru. On the other hand the economist Chevalier
+anticipated that, as a consequence of the new gold, money in ten years
+would fall by one half. &#8216;In 1800,&#8217; so ran the argument of this economist,
+&#8216;the annual addition to the gold of Christendom was barely two and a half
+millions. In 1848 it amounted to thirty-eight millions. In 1858 the total
+was a hundred and ninety millions. Hence,&#8217; he insisted, &#8216;between 1858 and
+1868 the additions to the world&#8217;s available stock of the precious metal
+would be at least as much as the aggregate of additions during the three
+preceding centuries, that is four hundred millions sterling.&#8217; The stages in
+this induction may be thus briefly epitomized. During the three and a half
+centuries since the voyages of Columbus and of Cabot opened the New World
+to the Old, two thousand millions sterling had been added to the gold and
+silver of our planet. The hectolitre of wheat before <span class="smcaplc">A.D.</span> 1492 cost in
+Paris from 2s. 6d. to 2s. 9d. Between 1848-58 it cost 16s. 8d. In other
+words if the usual grain test be applied, money had fallen during three
+and a half centuries to nearly one-sixth of its original value. It was
+upon calculations like these as well as upon certain other considerations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+that Chevalier based his argument that the fresh influx of gold would make
+money fall again by three-fourths of its value. This was in effect to say
+that to procure the same amount of subsistence as hitherto four times as
+much gold would be required. Cobden&#8217;s anticipations were to the same
+effect. So general was the belief of an impeding depreciation of gold and
+appreciation of silver that Holland actually demonetized gold and adopted
+silver as its standard money. All these fears were doomed to
+disappointment. The hopes were more than realized. The third quarter of
+our present century has proved the most prosperous which modern Europe or
+the world has ever known. A careful and voluminous writer on this subject,
+the late R. H. Patterson<a name='fna_4' id='fna_4' href='#f_4'><small>[4]</small></a> attributes this miscalculation to the &#8216;famous
+currency principle&#8217; which grew up after the great war.</p>
+
+<p>The agencies that have changed the material basis underlying the structure
+of English society were thus fairly now in operation. They were
+supplemented by other circumstances all tending to produce the same
+result. Chief among these was the fact of the English coal supply
+surpassing that of other countries in its abundance and its universal
+distribution by land and sea. The character and the progress of the
+Victorian era are due in no small degree to the sagacity and shrewdness of
+the Prince Consort. He was now the first to recognize that the time had
+come when the cultivation of the artistic sense was alone needed to make
+the English workman the best in that world of which from the days of
+Chatham onwards, his country<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> had been pre-eminently the workshop. French
+industry had not even yet recovered from the blow dealt to it by the
+revolution of the last century. That effacement of an earlier r&eacute;gime had
+differed in important particulars from all analogous movements in earlier
+ages. The havoc, the massacres, the proscriptions and confiscations of
+ancient Rome during her passage from a Republic to an Empire, had
+seriously affected the highest classes alone. The substitution for the
+French monarchy of a Robespierre first, of a Napoleon afterwards, had
+involved all orders in a common ruin. The Queen&#8217;s husband made it the
+business of his life to insure the maintenance of the advantage which
+history itself had thus given to English industry and manufacture, and
+which the fresh supply of the precious metal directly favoured.</p>
+
+<p>The universal attraction to Englishmen of the Australian gold fields may
+be summarized in a very few facts and figures. In 1852 the English
+emigrants to the treasure stores of the Antipodes were 369,000; a larger
+number, that is, than was represented by the increase of the Queen&#8217;s
+subjects at home through the excess of births over deaths. Our population
+in fact stood still in order that Australia, like California, might be
+peopled. During the four or five years of the gold fever under the
+Southern Cross, we sent out 1,356,000; more, in other words, than the
+whole population of Scotland at the time of the Union. The annual average
+of English emigrants was thus a trifle over a quarter of a million.
+Somewhat later, the collapse of the railway mania in England and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+potato famine in Ireland, swelled the average total of this annual exodus
+to nearly half a million.</p>
+
+<p>Other results of the influx of gold during the second Victorian decade
+remain to be epitomized. The precious metal in the Bank of England, from
+less than eight millions in 1847, increased to twenty-two millions in
+1853. The Bank rate during the whole decade was two per cent. The growth
+of trade was suddenly but steadily promoted. During 1853, twenty millions
+more of gold money than within any preceding twelvemonth changed hands
+among the public. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that a belief in
+the permanence of the low interest rate just mentioned caused Mr
+Gladstone, when Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1853, to bring
+forward a scheme for the conversion of a portion of the three per cent.
+Consols, into Consols bearing a lower rate of interest, and that the
+interest on Exchequer Bills was a penny a day or one and a half per cent,
+per annum. The harvests of 1853-4 in England had been bad. The fresh
+purchases by the gold mine countries of English goods fully compensated us
+for the loss from this cause. The value of that custom may be judged from
+the figures which show the cost of life at the gold mines. In the early
+fifties flour rose to four times, meat to five times their usual value. An
+egg or a pill cost a dollar each.<a name='fna_5' id='fna_5' href='#f_5'><small>[5]</small></a> For a miner in tolerable luck &pound;2 were
+not an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> exceptional day&#8217;s earnings. Nor between the years 1849-55 and
+onwards were the effects of the gold discoveries on foreign and domestic
+trade less noticeable. Within a single period of twelve months, the value
+of our exports increased by one-fourth. Most of these were required by
+consumers in California or in Australia as the case might be. The rise of
+wages owing to the rush to the gold fields amounted in 1851-2 nowhere to
+less than twenty per cent.; in some trades it was twenty-five per cent. In
+London the price of bricks was increased by fifty per cent. Liverpool,
+Manchester, Birmingham shared the general prosperity. Agricultural labour
+was not paid at a rate proportionate to its scarcity. The extent of that
+scarcity may be judged from Sir Morton Peto&#8217;s suggestion that the Militia
+should be called in to complete the operations of harvesting which were
+interrupted by the inducements offered by contractors to navvies at wages
+varying between four shillings and threepence, and four shillings and
+sixpence a day. Thus the competition of the gold fields industry was
+directly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>instrumental, not only in increasing trade, and therefore
+production and wealth in the mother country, but in improving the
+condition of the industrial classes at home.</p>
+
+<p>This rise in wages was not however a pure gain. Before the end of 1855
+prices had increased by nearly one-half. The Preston strike of 1853-4
+opened that campaign between industry and capital which has been paid for
+by the representatives of both with so serious a deduction from their
+profits. Before the Preston strike, the unions had been mainly political
+organizations; thereafter they became industrial. Meanwhile on the other
+side of separating oceans new Englands were being created with incredible
+rapidity by the new gold. Already indeed Her Majesty&#8217;s subjects, without
+leaving their native land knew something of the Eldorado which Australia
+constituted even before the treasures of Ballarat and Bendigo had been
+unearthed. While as yet the nugget was a prize of the future, fortunes
+were realized by the shearing of flocks. Long before the 1851 Exhibition
+the Australian millionaire, returned to his native land, had become
+familiar to Victorian London. He did not yet often live in Grosvenor
+Square. He was to be found frequently in the best houses of the scarcely
+less palatial Westbourne Terrace or at a later date in Rutland Gate. The
+gold which enriched England created Australia, whose capitals can scarcely
+be said to have existed before the thirteenth or fourteenth year of the
+present reign. Gold gave to Victoria civilization and government.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> It
+built Melbourne. The same omnipotent agency changed New South Wales from a
+sparsely-inhabited tract to a populous and prosperous State. The extreme
+youth, as national life is computed, of Australia will perhaps best be
+realized when it is remembered that the founder of Melbourne, John Pascoe
+Falkner was yet alive, and welcomed to his capital the Duke of Edinburgh
+on the occasion of his visit to the Antipodes in 1860; and that Henty,
+Falkner&#8217;s associate and senior, survived at least to 1882.</p>
+
+<p>In no department of industry were the immediate profits of Australian gold
+more appreciable than in our transoceanic mercantile marine. During the
+fifties European emigrants crowded every ship. Seamen&#8217;s wages leapt up by
+a bound to &pound;4 a month.<a name='fna_6' id='fna_6' href='#f_6'><small>[6]</small></a> Between 1851 and 1859 the annual rate of
+emigrants was a hundred thousand. The gold raised during this period in
+Victoria fell little short of eighty nine millions. Imports rose to thirty
+pounds per head of the Victoria population, exports rose to fifty-six
+pounds per head. Previously to 1851 New South Wales could not be said to
+possess a foreign trade. In less than thirty years, by 1878, this commerce
+was reckoned annually by thirteen millions of exports, fifteen millions of
+imports. In New South Wales, too, the gold excitement was followed
+immediately by prosperity in coal fields which yielded not less than a
+million sterling. These are the circumstances that, rather than any
+domestic speculations or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>industries, explain the growth of the London
+plutocracy which has been so prominent a feature of the era now under
+consideration. Under Queen Elizabeth and the Cecils, fortunes made by
+lucky ventures in American and Indian trade were conspicuous. Under the
+Georges, after the victories of our great Admirals Howe, Jervis, Anson,
+foreign wealth was poured into England continuously long before large
+revenues were realized by the development of our mineral wealth. It has
+been already said that during some time after the Queen&#8217;s accession there
+prevailed general distress chequered by the influx of gold from Russia and
+by the beginnings of railway enterprise. From the earliest fifties a
+change for the better set in, with what results the income tax returns
+will show. The impost was extended to Ireland in 1855. In that year the
+assessed incomes were three hundred and eight millions. Ten years later
+the amount was three hundred and ninety-six millions. After another decade
+it was five hundred and seventy-one millions. In the financial year 1882-3
+the figures were &pound;612,836,058.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<p class="title">TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">All projects of increased speed in locomotion denounced when first
+proposed. Sir Henry Herbert, M.P., in seventeenth century, on journeys
+between Edinburgh and London in a fortnight. Parliament on railways.
+Lord Clanricarde, Colonel Sibthorp, etc. George Hudson, the railway
+King. Charles Guernsey, the original of Thackeray&#8217;s &#8216;de la Pluche.&#8217;
+Progress and sequel of the railway fever of 1846. The Queen&#8217;s first
+railway journey. Hudson and his fall. Comparison between mines and
+railways as sources of national wealth. Mr W. H. Mallock&#8217;s
+demonstration that the working classes of the United Kingdom have
+increased in wealth more noticeably even than the upper classes.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The truth of Mr Disraeli&#8217;s humorous description, in his Edinburgh speech
+of 1868, of boots at the Blue Boar agreeing with the chambermaid at the
+rival Red Lion about the folly and iniquity of railways, appears to be
+rooted in the constitution of human nature. All readers are familiar with
+the picture of the English traveller, drawn by Mr Apperley in his famous
+<i>Quarterly</i> article, <i>The Road</i>. This imaginary passenger had gone to
+sleep in the days when public conveyances could not be counted on to
+perform more than some half dozen miles an hour. He awakes in the era of
+the lightning coaches and quicksilver mails timed to perform twice that
+distance within the sixty minutes. If, as arch&aelig;ologists say,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> a certain
+Ericthonius of Athens<a name='fna_7' id='fna_7' href='#f_7'><small>[7]</small></a> invented some fifteen centuries <span class="smcaplc">B.C.</span> the first
+chariot of which authentic record exists, he, too, was perhaps regarded as
+an enemy rather than as a benefactor by some among his amazed
+contemporaries. More than 3,000 years after the Attic revolutionary an
+English Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Herbert, said that a man who
+proposed to travel to and fro between Scotland and England within seven
+days each way would be voted fit for Bedlam.</p>
+
+<p>By 1843, thirteen years, that is, after the historic steam locomotive
+between Manchester and Liverpool which caused the death of Mr Huskisson,
+the great railway systems of England existed in a form more or less
+complete. Eighteen hundred miles in all were open for traffic. Parliament
+had authorized the expenditure on them of seventy million pounds. Sixty
+million pounds had been so spent already. An average of three hundred
+thousand passengers was carried weekly. Neither by the opinion of
+parliament nor of the public were railways regarded with unequivocal
+favour, or even at all times with toleration. Colonel Sibthorp could say
+in the House of Commons that he considered all railways as public frauds
+and private robberies. Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord Lansdowne, the Duke of
+Wellington, Lord Clanricarde, all spoke of George Stephenson&#8217;s invention
+in the same contemptuous tones. The <i>Morning Post</i> in February 1842 dwelt
+with satisfaction on the fact that &#8216;the Queen never travels by railway;&#8217;
+while Prince Albert who did sometimes patronize the train between Windsor
+and London was obliged only too often to protest:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> &#8216;Not quite so fast, Mr
+Conductor, if you please!&#8217; Within four months of the <i>Morning Post&#8217;s</i>
+announcement, the <i>Railway Times</i> was able to record that Her Majesty made
+her first trip on the Great Western. A few months later the Royal
+passenger accomplished the distance between Southampton and Vauxhall in
+less than two hours without a hitch. Five years subsequently the Queen and
+Prince Consort journeyed to Cambridge for the installation of His Royal
+Highness as Chancellor in a train driven, as Her Majesty records, by
+George Hudson, the railway King. Between 1836 and 1846 the English mind
+was fairly reconciled to the new method of transit. The day had finally
+gone by when, as they had done a little previously, a firm of London
+solicitors could refuse the business of the Brighton line on the plea that
+coaches would drive off the trains in a month. From 1836 and onward the
+Liverpool and Manchester, the London and Birmingham, and the North Midland
+lines were all paying ten per cent. During 1846, the year of the railway
+mania, 440 railway Bills passed authorizing the construction of 8,470
+miles and the raising of &pound;180,138,901.</p>
+
+<p>This was the zenith of the shortlived splendour of George Hudson, the
+railway King. He has been seen already in these pages, amid the Hyde Park
+crowd in the early forties, resting his large heavy person in his wife&#8217;s
+chariot. The man himself had first become known on the City Board of
+Health in York. Afterwards he was elected Mayor of his native town. In
+that capacity he made the acquaintance of George<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> Stephenson. In 1845 the
+son of the York linendraper, now a power in the railway world was returned
+to the House of Commons as Member for Sunderland. His parliamentary career
+is alone, if at all, remembered to-day by the frequent encounters on the
+floor of the House between himself and Mr Bernal Osborne. Diverting
+memories of these were often recalled for the benefit of his friends by
+Hudson&#8217;s antagonist, with the generous admission of the raconteur that he
+had, in the ex-King, usually found his match, if not in humorous retort
+and thrust, yet in substantial argument. Two years after the &#8216;King&#8217; drove
+the engine which took the Queen and her Consort to Cambridge, suspicions
+of Hudson&#8217;s motive and conduct took (April 19, 1849) a definite shape. The
+shareholders of the Midland demanded a Committee of Inquiry. The
+incriminated Chairman resigned his post, and quietly accepted his
+permanent eclipse. It was noticed to his credit at the time, and has not
+since been denied, that he made no efforts at self exculpation, disclosed
+no names or confidential transactions, and thus refused, as unquestionably
+it was in his power to do, to associate persons of the highest
+consideration with himself in his fall. Hudson was only the type of a
+class whose members were invested by the railway passion of the period
+with brief splendour and unsubstantial prosperity. In the Upper House,
+Lord Clanricarde mentioned how Charles Guernsey, a broker&#8217;s clerk, had
+subscribed fifty-two thousand pounds for shares in the London and York
+line. This was the undoubted original of Thackeray&#8217;s &#8216;de la Pluche.&#8217; The
+total of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> gains appears to have amounted to thirty thousand pounds.
+The essential facts of the sequel with very little of fictitious
+amplification are given by the novelist.</p>
+
+<p>A reaction, as has been seen, followed the morbid enterprise of 1846. Its
+results, however, have endured to the present hour. In 1845 the United
+Kingdom possessed only two thousand four hundred miles of iron way. The
+capital invested upon these was only eighty-eight millions. Before 1850,
+the capital had increased to two hundred and thirty millions. To-day the
+aggregate miles of the railways of the United Kingdom are little, if at
+all short, of twenty thousand. The expenditure has been six hundred and
+thirty millions. The gross annual income is sixty millions. In order to
+appreciate with approximate accuracy the part played by the steam
+locomotive in the creation of nineteenth century wealth in England, or to
+define with practical distinctness that familiar term &#8216;the railway
+interest;&#8217; it is necessary to examine this matter more in detail. In 1855
+the total of capital represented by the United Kingdom railways was
+&pound;297,584,709. In 1894, the latest date to which the Board of Trade returns
+are published, the total was &pound;985,387,855. After forty years, therefore,
+the railway investments of these Islands had increased by &pound;687,803,146.</p>
+
+<p>Another chief source of national wealth and industrial employment during
+this reign has been provided by mining enterprise. In respect of the money
+value of each, what are the relations which the yield of subterranean
+labour has borne to the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>enterprises of steam upon the surface of the
+earth? In 1855 the value of all the minerals brought to the light of day
+is expressed by the figures &pound;29,579,001. The figures referring to railways
+for the same year were, it will be remembered, seen to be &pound;21,507,599.
+This comparison between the two shows therefore that in 1855 the mines
+exceeded the railways in value in round numbers, by eight million pounds.
+The exact figures of the excess were &pound;8,071,402. Forty years later this
+balance is more than redressed. In 1894 the total of mineral wealth was
+&pound;80,900,453. The entire railway receipts were &pound;84,310,831. In other words,
+the surface opulence of the United Kingdom had not only made good its
+inferiority to the subterranean wealth, but had advanced beyond that
+rival, in round numbers, by three and a half million pounds. The exact
+figures were &pound;3,410,378.</p>
+
+<p>The interesting analysis of the resources of the different orders of the
+community contained in Mr W. H. Mallock&#8217;s &#8216;Classes and Masses&#8217; supplies
+tolerably conclusive evidence that the results of mining and railway
+enterprise have been distributed not very unequally between the rich and
+the poor, or, as Mr Mallock rather puts it, between income tax payers on
+&pound;1,000 or upwards a year and those who, earning less than &pound;150 a year, pay
+no income tax at all. His estimate is that the population of England
+contains seven hundred thousand families, equal to a total of three
+million souls, &#8216;with means of subsistence, insufficient, barely
+sufficient, or precarious.&#8217; Although these figures represent the entire
+population at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> Norman conquest, Mr Mallock is able to show that
+relatively to all inhabiting this realm the necessitous class has
+decreased, not increased. In the seventeenth century, one-third of the
+dwellers in Sheffield, then (1615) as to-day a great manufacturing centre,
+were dependent on charity. Thirteen years after the Queen&#8217;s accession
+(<i>i.e.</i> 1850), out of every two hundred of our population nine were
+paupers. In 1882 the proportion of pauperism was only five. Between 1850
+and 1897 the population has increased from twenty-eight millions to
+thirty-eight millions. The income-tax payers have increased from one
+million and a half to nearly eight millions.<a name='fna_8' id='fna_8' href='#f_8'><small>[8]</small></a> Incomes between &pound;150 and
+&pound;1,000 have increased from three hundred thousand to nine hundred and
+ninety thousand. Incomes above &pound;1,000 have increased from twenty-four
+thousand to sixty thousand; or, as this authority finds it more convenient
+to put it, the middle class has grown by six hundred and ninety thousand.
+The rich have been re-inforced by only thirty-six thousand. On the other
+hand Mr Mallock is able to dispose of the fallacy that during the present
+reign the very richest class have grown richer still. In 1850 the incomes
+of fifty thousand pounds and upwards were seventy-two thousand; in 1897
+they are nearer a hundred thousand; thus while the fairly well-to-do
+middle classes have increased by hundreds of thousands, the professional
+plutocrats measure their increase only by a few simple thousands. Briefly
+summarized, the arithmetical argument of Mr Mallock<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> is as follows. In
+1800 the whole wealth of the country was two hundred and forty million
+pounds. Of that amount the workers took one hundred and eleven million
+pounds, leaving for the middle classes and the rich one hundred and thirty
+million pounds. Three quarters of a century later, or more exactly in
+1881, Mr Mallock&#8217;s latest date, making his argument still more applicable
+to 1897, the total of national wealth was one thousand three hundred
+millions. Of this the workers had six hundred and sixty millions. The
+working classes had thus, from being twenty millions behind the rich at
+the opening of the century, advanced twenty millions beyond the rich
+towards its close. From these figures, the inference is fair, and indeed
+irresistible, that railways like other inventions have contributed to the
+material prosperity of all classes equally, and have not enriched the
+capitalists alone.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding George Hudson, who has become merely a memory, or Charles
+Guernsey, the stockbroker&#8217;s clerk who was his lowly imitator, the railway
+plutocracy would seem to be a phrase more full of sound than of practical
+meaning. If to this remark the name of Vanderbilt be objected, the true
+facts of the case rather confirm than disprove the present remark.
+&#8216;Commodore&#8217; Vanderbilt was a rich man before he ever owned a railway
+share. He sold a fleet of steamers to purchase control of the New York
+Central Railway. Had he invested the capital realized by this preliminary
+transaction in any of the industries of his nation, such as the tinning of
+beef from a cattle ranche in California, or the curing of bacon at
+Chicago, he might have made the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> same or an even larger fortune. Railway
+diplomacy was only the accidental employment of Mr Vanderbilt&#8217;s
+extraordinary genius for creative finance. The same talents exercised upon
+any other material, or expended in any other career could scarcely fail to
+have commanded same results. In another department of the industry
+afforded to intellect by the steam locomotive, Charles Austin made two
+fortunes out of railway Bills. His abilities as an advocate were probably
+unequalled among the generation to which he belonged. Since Austin&#8217;s day
+lawyers of the same, or something like the same capacity have amassed
+wealth not inferior to Austin&#8217;s out of electric patents practice, or in
+other branches of law which have been specially in request at the moment.
+While the railway fever of the forties was at its height, a little man
+with an intellectual head covered by a proverbially shabby hat might often
+of an afternoon have been seen walking down Parliament Street. He never
+failed to bestow a copper upon the crossing sweeper at the point where the
+Home Office stands to-day. Formerly the contractor usually lavished on the
+man a four-penny bit. But times were bad. The vail was reduced to a
+quarter of that amount. The donor humorously anticipated the day when he
+might be glad of a reversionary interest to the broom and shovel employed
+outside the Horse Guards. That calamity, which of course never seriously
+threatened, was averted. The little gentleman with the ostentatiously
+neglected head-gear, Thomas Brassey, was a millionaire long before he
+built his last railway. But his contemporary, Thomas Cubitt, made the same
+fortune<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> out of building Belgravia. Railways have also often enriched the
+landowners through whose estates the lines have run. So high an authority
+as Mr Samuel Laing holds that the owners of the soil have been over
+compensated by the companies generally for the acquisition of their land.
+To this, however, the country gentlemen would reply that in countless
+instances they have received no more than the agricultural value for their
+acres.<a name='fna_9' id='fna_9' href='#f_9'><small>[9]</small></a> Certainly the profits of this class from railways have not
+exceeded the gains which have accrued from the selling or leasing of other
+property for building purposes. The railway interest, then, as a phrase
+scarcely points to the existence of railway shareholders as a caste or
+even a separate class. Railway shares, as the statistics above quoted
+show, are distributed in fairly equal proportions through all classes of
+the community. The learned professions, especially the Church, are
+represented as well as the State or capital in these proprietorial bodies.
+In the great majority of instances, the separate sums held are small.
+Thus, ten years ago, the London and North Western Railway with its ninety
+millions of capital had about thirty thousand debenture and stock holders.
+Three thousand pounds scarcely represent what could be regarded as a
+plutocratic investment. As for the men who were the early captains of
+railway industry, they none of them secured more than modest competences.
+Vignoles, Stephenson, Brunel, Hackworth, Allport, Cawkwell, Grierson; none
+of these founded, none of their descendants are likely to found,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+territorial families. Sir Daniel Gooch, so long the chairman of the Great
+Western, left six hundred thousand pounds to his posterity. The greater
+portion of this sum was made, not in railways, but in coal and in
+telegraphs. Sir Edward Watkin, who is still with us, and to whose
+enterprise neither the mountain precipice nor the realm of air is
+inaccessible, has perhaps been not less prospered. It would not however be
+easy to multiply instances of railway opulence like these.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand Arkwright of the spinning jenny has founded two rich
+county families. His rival, Hargreaves, established another. The true
+conclusion on this subject seems to be that the wealth invested in our
+railways is only one, if the most conspicuous manifestation of the wealth
+of the community. No better summary of the facts could be found than the
+shrewd phrase into which George Stephenson condensed the whole subject.
+&#8216;The country made the railways, and in return the railways made the
+country.&#8217; The prosperity of the manufacturing classes which has coincided
+with the Victorian era provided the money that built the railways. In
+return the early development of our railway system enabled us to get so
+far in advance of Continental nations as merchants and manufacturers that
+our rivals have not yet caught us up, and perhaps never will.</p>
+
+<p>The future development of the English railway system may be a tempting and
+instructive topic for speculative experts, but is not for a general
+survey, such as the present. The issues between traders and framers of
+railway rates for the carriage of merchandise are periodically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> expressed
+in the demand for the acquisition of the iron roads, like the telegraphic
+wires, by the State. The mighty sections of the Anglo-Saxon race on either
+side of the Atlantic present the two great exceptions to the State
+proprietorship or State control of the public locomotives. Seeing that
+half the railway mileage and capital of the world belongs to the United
+Kingdom and to the United States, these exceptions are themselves of
+considerable importance. The incorporation of the railway systems of the
+United Kingdom into the national service would, it has been calculated,
+involve the doubling of the annual Budget, and an addition to the
+permanent Civil Service of five per cent, of our male population. If this
+estimate be correct, it seems likely that a Minister of the Crown will
+think even more than thrice before he seriously proposes the assumption of
+such a responsibility by himself and his colleagues.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Apart from his general obligations to the work on Railways (2 vols.
+Cassell &amp; Company, 1894, by Mr John Pendleton), the writer expresses
+his grateful acknowledgment for valuable help in this portion of his
+work privately received from Mr Acworth, the great authority on modern
+railways throughout the world, and from Mr A. J. Wilson, the eminent
+writer on financial and commercial topics.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<p class="title">THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Contrast between the London of the forties and the London of to-day.
+Gas and steam chiefly mark the century. City traders still living at
+Islington. The theatre not yet an institution. The parks still uncared
+for. Thames pollutions still recall Dickens&#8217; description of Quilp&#8217;s
+home. The future South Kensington cabbage beds or waste ground.
+Absence of enormous fortunes outside commercial millionaires. Evidence
+of increasing national prosperity afforded by statistics of picture
+sales. The growth of these sales from Charles I. till to-day. The
+Beckford, the Horace Walpole and other sales. Gradual rise in value of
+great masters. Memorable sales and personages at Christie&#8217;s.
+Gainsborough&#8217;s Duchess of Devonshire episode.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The chief resemblance between the London which Queen Victoria first knew,
+and the capital as it was seen by her subjects on her jubilee anniversary
+in 1887, is the appearance of the steam locomotive at the railway termini
+and upon the waters of the Thames. Passing to more permanent
+characteristics, only the great national buildings would enable those
+present at Her Majesty&#8217;s coronation to identify the pre-Exhibition
+Metropolis with the capital of to-day. Even Hyde Park, that, as has been
+seen, was then, as now, the recreation ground of polite London, presented
+an aspect very different from its appearance on the approach of the
+sixtieth commemoration of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>commencement of the reign. Like all the
+other Royal enclosures, the Hyde Park of the forties or fifties was
+decorated by no flower beds and was in other respects habitually ill-kept.
+General sanitation had yet to reach its infancy. The Thames remained
+almost as unwholesome and repulsive a stream as at an earlier epoch the
+Fleet Ditch had been. Dickens&#8217; description in <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i> of
+&#8216;Quilp&#8217;s&#8217; haunts was a sketch from life equally graphic and accurate of
+the condition of the river&#8217;s shore between London Bridge and the Strand.
+The site of the river embankments of to-day swarmed at low water with
+mudlarks gathering fragments of coal and other refuse which had dropped
+from the wharves that lined the banks on both sides of the river. If the
+ladies who to-day take tea on the Terrace of the House of Commons had
+exposed themselves so persistently on the spot where that structure now
+stands, instead of catching a catarrh, they might have feared a
+pestilence. Even in the course of the short suburban drives made by the
+coaches of the Four-in-Hand Club after their meet at the Magazine, the
+ladies who to-day occupy the box seat would have run the risk of being
+shocked by the sight of corpses hanging on the gallows. Lord Grey&#8217;s Reform
+Act had been added to the Statute Book before this relic of barbarism
+disappeared. The midlands were busy with preparations for the first appeal
+to genuine constituencies when certain electoral canvassers, merrily
+pursuing their work outside Leicester were horror-stricken amidst their
+fun by the sight of a lifeless form fashionably dressed in blue coat and
+gilt buttons swinging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> to and fro on a gallows tree by the roadway. The
+body was that of a young master printer, who had been hung for a
+particularly abominable murder. More decent times happily were near. This,
+which many men now living can remember, was the last gibbet that ever
+disgraced the Queen&#8217;s highway. The city workers when they did not dwell
+above their offices, lived for the most part at Islington, still a country
+suburb, or took the bus or coach to and fro between the more rural
+Tottenham or Highgate and their counting room or shop. The ground which is
+to-day covered by the mansions, the hotels, and the flower beds of South
+Kensington was then either used as cabbage gardens, nursery grounds, and
+riding schools, or was given up to the loafers and ruffians of the
+streets, who chose the forenoon of Sunday as the time for settling their
+differences with their fists.</p>
+
+<p>As a popular institution the theatre was practically unknown to the early
+Victorian era. The old patent houses were supported precariously. Their
+rivals of more recent date were on the chronic verge of bankruptcy. Night
+after night popular actors and actresses performed to empty benches.
+Pleasure seekers from the West were more likely to make up a party to see
+a man hanged than to make up a party for the play.</p>
+
+<p>The new millionaires came in with the new gold. At this earlier date, the
+men who had realized great fortunes in business, who did not belong on the
+one hand to the wealthy territorial noblesse, or to the financial
+plutocracy on the other might be counted on the fingers of a single hand.
+The Rothschilds had been settled among us for a century. Their opulence
+had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> passed into a proverb. Other names belonging to the millionaire
+category were Arkwright, Strutt, Jones Lloyd, better known to the present
+generation as Lord Overstone, and Hope. The forerunners of that
+aristocracy of wealth which sways society to-day, of the Guests, the
+Crawshays in the iron trade, had not yet appeared. Half a century had
+passed since the second Pitt had declared that &#8216;every man with forty
+thousand a year had a right to a peerage.&#8217; The Listers, the Holdens, and
+others were already prosperous manufacturers in the Bradford district. The
+brewing interest already knew its Basses and its Guinnesses. The peerages
+and the baronetcies with which these families have since been decorated
+were reserved for a much later stage of the reign. Even the uncrowned
+kings of the Australian or Californian gold mines had no subjects in
+London till the World&#8217;s Show of 1851 had passed into history. The gradual
+advancement of the great retail traders typified by the name Peter
+Robinson, or Maple, to a corresponding dignity on a different level did
+not take place till our own decade. The social polish and refinement which
+are the attributes of the new wealth to-day, had not half a century since
+become dreams of fancy. Rude plenty and coarse splendour characterized the
+entertainments and the dwellings of the early Victorian plutocracy, as
+they had marked the hospitality of our Saxon or Norman ancestors. It is a
+commonplace of conversation to say that none can foretell where the
+movement which during the last half century has set in with all classes is
+to stop. Not only the wages of the working classes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> but the payments of
+professional and every kind of skilled industry have increased at a rate
+predicted to be impossible; but every shilling buys from thirty to fifty
+per cent. more than formerly of the necessaries and comforts of life. The
+Prince Consort, as has been already said, did more than any other
+individual of his day to quicken English workmanship with the artistic
+sense. The task that waits for accomplishment now is seemingly to develop
+intelligence and thrift in the masses. If this work be carried to the
+point which may be expected from the progress made during the last half
+century, the conditions of the national life in England cannot fail to
+improve more rapidly than anywhere else in the world.</p>
+
+<p>The new municipal buildings which have risen in all the great towns of the
+kingdom during the last four or five decades; the warehouses, offices, and
+shops that, if seen in Venice, would be admired for the artistic splendour
+of their exteriors, but which pass unnoticed on the Thames, the Mersey,
+and the Irwell; these are some among the outward and visible signs of the
+progressive prosperity of all classes of the community, since the
+treasures of Australia and California first were poured into England, and
+since the Serbonian bog of Chat Moss was turned into a safe and solid
+track for the steam engine. Other indications, not less conclusive and
+perhaps more picturesque, of the same truth are the decoration of the
+outskirts of every town with private villas set in landscape gardens which
+half a century ago would have seemed worthy of Chatsworth, and with public
+parks not less cared for than Royal pleasure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> grounds, the acquisitions of
+corporate enterprise, or the gifts of individual munificence. The hard
+facts and figures which have accumulated since in 1846 the British ports
+were opened to the merchandise of all nations explain in detail the
+transformation that has been witnessed. During the quarter of a century
+before the repeal of the Corn Laws, the total value of English exports, of
+products, of manufactures was one thousand and eighty-five millions.
+During the twenty-five years that followed the repeal, the value was three
+thousand and thirty-one millions; in other words, an increase of nearly
+two hundred per cent. The second quarter of a century since Free Trade,
+that is from 1871-1896 has raised the total value of our exports to six
+thousand two hundred and ninety-nine millions; and this in the face of the
+great and continuous fall of prices during recent years. Our import trade
+has expanded even in greater proportion. The total value of imports of
+merchandise during the years between 1871-1895 was nine thousand seven
+hundred and sixty-three millions. These figures do not exhaust the
+national profits of Free Trade. Our increased business with the great
+markets of the world abroad has meant a vast extension of employment among
+the masses at home. There is not only more work to be done. It is paid for
+at a higher rate than was ever known. Articles of necessity, not more than
+of luxury never before known in industrial households, are to-day common
+beneath the workman&#8217;s roof. With comfort, sobriety, and thrift, which are
+indeed the parents of comfort, have increased too. The Chancellor of the
+Exchequer in his last Budget stated that within ten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> years the deposits of
+the savings banks have more than doubled. The evidence furnished by
+statistics of pauperism is not less significant. In the spring of 1896
+poor relief was given to 739,021 as compared with 897,370 in 1857. And
+this although the population had grown in forty years from nineteen
+millions to over thirty millions. In 1857 the ratio of paupers to
+inhabitants was more than 47 in 1,000. In 1896 the ratio is 24 in 1,000.</p>
+
+<p>The proof of national prosperity afforded by the income-tax returns was
+given at length in the preceding chapter. Entirely to exhaust the
+statistical evidence available for the propositions now advanced there may
+be cited the figures connected with the National Debt. This is being paid
+off out of the successive surpluses of annual revenue over expenditure. In
+1856 after the Crimean War, the Debt stood at eight hundred and
+twenty-nine millions, or about &pound;29, 12s. per head of the population. In
+1895 it had been reduced to six hundred and sixty millions, or about &pound;17,
+6s. per head of the population. The amount of the Debt in March 1896 was
+six hundred and fifty-two millions. Thus, in the last thirteen years, the
+money responsibilities of the nation have been reduced by one hundred
+millions. Enthusiasts for Richard Cobden&#8217;s memory have therefore some
+reason for declaring that since the measure which the genius of himself
+and John Bright conceived, and the statesmanlike energy of Mr Villiers
+promoted, was written on the Statute Book, a new England has been created.
+Nor has anyone seriously denied the connection during the r&eacute;gime of
+Protection between wheat at from 53s. to 112s. a quarter and the
+intolerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> distress of the working classes in town and country expressed
+in ricks blazing and Riot Acts read. With the first relaxation in the
+Protective Tariff, some improvement began. It continued very gradually but
+certainly till at last the new prosperity as shown by the figures and
+facts already cited was fairly established.</p>
+
+<p>The prices commanded by famous pictures at the great art sales of the
+present and preceding periods have not uniformly attested the correctness
+of the popular criticism. They have, however, at all times afforded a
+practical criterion of the growing wealth of the country, and above all of
+the standard of expenditure current among the educated classes; seen in
+this light, the figures are not irrelevant to the present purpose. Picture
+sales have been a feature in the social and artistic life of England
+during more than two centuries. In 1649, by order of the Parliament, the
+collection of Charles I., the most discriminating and perhaps the greatest
+of Royal patrons of art, was offered to public competition. It realized a
+trifle less than fifty thousand pounds, probably not half of what it cost
+its original owner, who is said to have paid for the &#8216;Mantua&#8217; pictures
+alone eighty thousand pounds. At a later sale, however, many of these
+paintings found purchasers at from &pound;500 to &pound;800 apiece. Thus, even in
+these early days, was the coming rise in artistic values faintly
+foreshadowed. But no continuous increase was yet noticeable. Not quite a
+century after this, Harley, Lord Oxford&#8217;s celebrated collection was
+dispersed. The polite education of the well-to-do classes had then made
+considerable advances. The first of the Indian Nabobs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> had returned home
+with the spoils of the Pagoda Tree in his pocket to end his days in the
+coffee houses of St James&#8217;s. The commercial classes were generally
+prosperous. Many Sir Vistos, complying with the whisper of the familiar
+demon &#8216;had a taste.&#8217; The conditions of the time were therefore not
+unfavourable for prices conspicuously higher than had been given for the
+Stuart collection. Nevertheless, the interest aroused by the Oxford sale
+was so languid, art fanciers were so little enterprising, that the highest
+price recorded on this occasion was eighty-nine pounds, five shillings for
+the &#8216;Jacob and Laban&#8217; of Sebastian Bourdon. The Italian masters commanded
+on an average only five guineas apiece. A superb specimen of Claude
+Lorraine encouraged no bidder beyond twenty-seven pounds, six shillings.
+Holbein&#8217;s since famous portrait of the Duchess of Suffolk went for fifteen
+pounds, four shillings and sixpence. Rembrandts scarcely found purchasers
+at twelve guineas or even six. Pictures then supposed to be by Michael
+Angelo could be had for a few pounds. The highest price paid at the Oxford
+sale, the only one running into three figures was one hundred and
+seventy-five pounds, five shillings, for Van Dyck&#8217;s &#8216;Sir Kenelm Digby and
+family.&#8217; On the other hand, a second Van Dyck of unrecorded title went for
+five pounds, fifteen shillings. This was the period in which Hogarth&#8217;s
+masterpieces were bought for prices ranging between a maximum of
+eighty-eight pounds and a minimum of twenty-seven pounds. This
+depreciation did not continue long. Soon after the Oxford sale of 1741,
+the paintings by which Hogarth is best known<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> were readily purchased at a
+thousand pounds apiece. Even, however, after the nineteenth century had
+opened, no sudden rise in art values took place. In 1823, at Beckford&#8217;s
+Fonthill sale, the principal treasures only realized an average of
+thirty-one pounds each, the whole collection of pictures, four hundred and
+twenty-four in number, produced thirteen thousand two hundred and
+forty-nine pounds, fifteen shillings. In the year before the great
+Exhibition at the King of Holland&#8217;s sale, a &#8216;Holy Family&#8217; attributed to
+Raphael found no bidder beyond two hundred and fifty pounds.<a name='fna_10' id='fna_10' href='#f_10'><small>[10]</small></a> A
+European sensation was created by the agent of the Russian Emperor giving
+on this occasion, three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three pounds
+for a chef d&#8217;&oelig;uvre of Leonardo da Vinci. But the &#8216;Trinity&#8217; by Rubens
+was not considered specially cheap at six hundred and fifty-eight pounds.
+Famous portraits by Dutch masters at three hundred and thirty pounds each
+were looked upon as extravagant. The characteristic profusion of the
+famous Marquis of Hertford in paying fourteen thousand pounds for some ten
+or twenty pictures furnished during some weeks the talk to the town. In
+another quarter of a century, in 1876, at the Bredel sale, the &#8216;Enamoured
+Cavalier&#8217; by an artist not of the highest distinction, realized a price
+almost unprecedented then, but often repeated and increased since, of four
+thousand, three hundred pounds. That the upward movement of prices, to
+culminate some time later as will presently be seen in a memorable
+transaction of the saleroom, had fairly started twenty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> years ago, is
+evident from the details of the present retrospect. That the new
+development was at that date in its infancy may be inferred from the fact
+that at the Albert Levy sale in 1876 a landscape by Gainsborough which has
+since changed hands for thousands secured only a few shillings over three
+hundred and sixty-seven pounds. Eight years later at the Quilter sale of
+1884, the enhanced value of foreign masters formed a much more conspicuous
+testimony to the growing affluence of the classes which supply the
+virtuosi of these later days. On that occasion the &#8216;Heidelberg&#8217; of Turner
+was after a keen competition knocked down for not much less than two
+thousand pounds. The same artist&#8217;s &#8216;Zurich&#8217; in the same year went for
+twelve hundred and sixty pounds, nearly twice as much as it had secured
+only a decade earlier. Incidentally for those to whom such facts and
+figures are interesting on artistic, and not social, grounds, the
+conclusion from such an analysis as has now been attempted seems to be
+that since the Strawberry Hill sale and later the Bernal sale, the best
+works have continuously and conspicuously increased in value, but that,
+especially in the case of later Italian painters, Guido, etc., pictures of
+moderate merit have become a drug in the market. If Sir Robert Walpole was
+the first of modern parliamentarians, his son was equally the eighteenth
+century founder of the existing race of art connoisseurs. During the April
+and May of 1842, the collection of the toy villa whose Gothic pinnacles
+overlook the Thames yielded in round numbers thirty thousand pounds. After
+an interval of fourteen years the treasures of Ralph Bernal, whose death
+deprived the House of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> Commons of a Chairman of Committees as that of his
+son was afterwards to eclipse its gaiety, formed the event of the season
+of 1856. In the course of a thirty-one days&#8217; sale the total realized was
+twice that of the Walpole sale, in other words more than sixty thousand
+pounds.</p>
+
+<p>These figures seem insignificant when contrasted with the heroic prices of
+our own epoch. Of these only a few and not the highest have yet been
+glanced at. Compare with the modest totals just mentioned the competition
+and the sums of money, both without precedent, expended in Christie&#8217;s
+salerooms during the seventies and eighties of the century. The rostrum
+mounted by the auctioneer may be, as is said, identical with that used in
+the earliest days of the house a century ago. It is the only visible link
+with the past still remaining. The quality of the crowd of buyers is not
+more changed than the prices which they are prepared to give; or the
+national opulence which these prices indicate. In those earlier days the
+salerooms were in Pall Mall instead of King Street, St James&#8217;s. These
+premises were only vacated, as many now living can remember to clear the
+way for the still youthful Royal Academy before it had, on its journey to
+Burlington House, reached the stage of Trafalgar Square. The keen Celtic
+face of Doyle, director of the Irish National Gallery; the strikingly
+handsome and Venetian profile of Sir Frederick Leighton; the delicately
+chiselled and thoughtful features of Woolner, more than creditable as a
+sculptor, far more than merely graceful as a poet; these among the company
+of possible buyers represented the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>professionally expert element. The
+late Sir William Gregory with his fine brow and leonine head, whose
+many-sided culture suggests the complete man of the Herbert of Cherbury
+type whom our ancestors worshipped; another Irishman on whom a picture
+acts as a magnet on steel, Lord Powerscourt; among Scots Lord Rosebery;
+the Duke of St Albans whose physiognomy in those days recalled his Stuart
+ancestry; the interested and intelligent presence of a representative of
+that exotic wealth which has encouraged English industry and art so much,
+Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild; these are among the best known members of
+the general circle. Nor should there be omitted the form of a tradesman
+whose position next to the auctioneer, and whose telegram and account book
+in hand proclaim his occupation. This is Mr Agnew, pre-eminently a
+creation of the new wealth of the Victorian epoch, as well as the promoter
+of not a few artists&#8217; prosperity. To-day the enterprising trader is to
+prove himself the idol of the saleroom by paying the largest sum ever
+known to have been given for a single painting. And that in opposition to
+the peer of the longest purse of the day, the late Lord Dudley. That noble
+connoisseur by his bid of ten thousand guineas seems at first to have
+secured for Park Lane Gainsborough&#8217;s portrait of the Duchess of
+Devonshire, who won by her kiss the Westminster election for Charles Fox.
+Just as the hammer of fate is about to descend, the dealer intimates an
+advance. Amid applause, such as salutes the Derby winner on Epsom Downs,
+Mr Agnew<a name='fna_11' id='fna_11' href='#f_11'><small>[11]</small></a> is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> declared the possessor of the incomparable canvas for the
+price, as yet unheard in any saleroom, of ten thousand one hundred
+guineas. Three years before this, in 1873, &#8216;The Sisters,&#8217; also by
+Gainsborough, had brought six thousand, six hundred and fifteen pounds.
+Fourteen years after its first sale, in 1887, the same painting realized
+nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five pounds. Recent changes in the
+law of entail have undoubtedly tended to promote these unprecedented
+prices. The chief cause, however, is the general augmentation of wealth
+and the more lavish scale and ideas of expenditure that have penetrated
+all classes of the community.<a name='fna_12' id='fna_12' href='#f_12'><small>[12]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<p class="title">THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Specific instances of the fusion with native elements of the owners of
+foreign wealth, especially in the case of the Jews. Growth in England
+from early days of Hebrew plutocracy. Different views as to number of
+Jew families, the names of these as preserved by Jewish writers.
+Westminster Abbey under Richard III. and Henry VII. completed with Jew
+money. Later settlements of Jews in England date from Charles II.
+Under George III. the prosperity of the Goldsmids foreshadows the
+future power of the Rothschilds. Early beginnings of the Rothschilds,
+on the Continent and in England. Rothschild and Waterloo; Rothschild
+and the Bank of England. Services of the family to the English State.
+Their method of using their wealth under Baron Lionel and his
+successors. Their example to others of their race and their work
+amongst their own people.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The close assimilation of the newer elements of English life to the older;
+the gradual but unchecked identification in pursuits, habits, culture and
+tastes of the aristocracy of wealth with that of birth have been already
+mentioned. More detailed illustration of these distinctive movements of
+the Victorian era are necessary to enable us to form an adequate idea of
+the personal and enduring influence exercised upon the society of England
+by those who since their national dispersion, have in all countries
+illustrated in themselves the chief developments and agencies of wealth.
+From the popular expressions sometimes employed about the Jews in England
+to-day, one might suppose they had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> become considerable among us only
+during the Victorian epoch. Few people, as they look at Westminster Abbey,
+remember that this monument of the national Christianity which the piety
+of Edward the Confessor began was completed under Richard III. and Henry
+VII. with money levied from the Jews.<a name='fna_13' id='fna_13' href='#f_13'><small>[13]</small></a> Under Henry III. the sufferings
+of the chosen race in England had been severe. Thereafter, a gradual but
+progressive improvement in their position took place. But so late as 1633,
+according to a Hebrew authority named Haham, quoted in the <i>Anglia
+Judaica</i>, astounding though the statement sounds, there were only twelve
+Jewish families in this country. The distinction of re-establishing the
+race on British soil has been claimed for the protectorate of Cromwell. It
+really belongs to Charles II., and actually occurred during the first few
+years after the Restoration. One of the comparatively few Anglo-Jewish
+conversions to Christianity took place about this time. Close to the
+Abbey, which his ancestors&#8217; wealth had completed, in the church of St
+Margaret&#8217;s, Westminster, an Israelite physician, Speranza Collins, abjured
+the faith of his fathers, and was formally received into the Anglican
+Communion by Dr Warmester, Dean of Westminster. By the time that the house
+of Brunswick was established on the throne, the fabric of Anglo-Jewish
+plutocracy had well nigh built itself up. The great natural philosopher
+Emmanuel Da Costa, whom the Italian Jews of the eighteenth century
+furnished to England, compiled a list by name of all his countrymen living
+under the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> sovereignty of George III. In this list there are no
+Rothschilds. The patronymics of most frequent occurrence are Rodrigues,
+and Goldsmid. This latter seems to have been the Semitic family which,
+under the third George, occupied the position most closely analogous to
+that filled by the house of Rothschild under Queen Victoria. The country
+houses in the Sheen and Richmond district with their deer parks and
+vineries owned by Abraham and Jacob Goldsmid, foreshadowed distinctly the
+later beauties in the same region of Gunnersbury, if not of the more
+distant Mentmore.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the eighteenth century, the Frankfort Rothschilds, the
+friends and bankers of the Prince of Hesse-Cassell, were a power in
+Germany only second to that of the Empire. The capital on the Main had
+from the days of Charlemagne been a trading centre. During the sixteenth
+century, its fairs caused the place to be the market of the world, and
+three hundred years later may have given to the Prince Consort<a name='fna_14' id='fna_14' href='#f_14'><small>[14]</small></a> the
+first idea of the great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Long before Mayer Amschel
+Rothschild, the founder of the firm died, the prices of Frankfort were
+being studied as closely as those of Antwerp or Rotterdam. The third
+brother of Anselm Mayer, who controlled till 1855 the Frankfort branch,
+was evidently the first great financial genius of his family. His
+enterprise and judgment made him the Cr&oelig;sus of Europe. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> also at a
+critical point in his career prompted him to save from ruin more than one
+Paris bank reeling under the effects of North American insolvencies. At
+the close of the last century, the English business of the Rothschilds was
+transacted by the firm of Van Notten. A dispute with a Lancashire
+manufacturer on whom Germany and Austria depended for their cotton goods,
+sent Nathan Mayer Rothschild from Frankfort to England. In this way the
+English house came into existence, and the necessity for foreign agents
+outside the family ceased. The Napoleonic wars, as is well known, largely
+contributed in their successive incidents to the earlier fortunes of the
+family. Already the first Rothschild had speculated largely in the bills
+on the English Government given by the Duke of Wellington for the support
+of the British troops. Settled in London he provided the channels for the
+regular transmission of funds to the forces in the Peninsula. Early in
+1800, he was the first man on the London Stock Exchange. His agents
+followed in the train of every regiment. His couriers in their specially
+chartered ships were on every sea. Rothschild himself, unseen by others,
+watched the Battle of Waterloo. He crossed the Channel in a fishing boat,
+and arrived in London, to find it full of rumours of the English defeat.
+Casually appearing on the Stock Exchange, he received the condolences of
+the City on his ruin. Only he himself knew what his investments were.
+Instead of being ruined, he had added a million to the family wealth. Such
+at least is the conventional account. The foregoing details are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> in
+substance taken from an entertaining volume by John Reeves on <i>The
+Rothschilds</i>, published by Messrs Sampson Low.</p>
+
+<p>The present writer has, however, some reason to question the accuracy of
+the tradition of a Rothschild secretly watching the great battle. The
+account that Baron Lionel&#8217;s friends generally gave is as follows. During
+the great Corsican&#8217;s usurpation of the First Magistrateship in the French
+State, the lawful possessor of the Throne, Louis XVIII. was living in
+retirement in Belgium.<a name='fna_15' id='fna_15' href='#f_15'><small>[15]</small></a> The Rothschilds, on the early morrow of the
+decisive battle, sent a courier to the King&#8217;s villa near Ghent, to gather
+from the reception of the news by His Majesty how the fortune of the day
+had gone. The King&#8217;s sitting room was on the ground floor with windows
+looking on the garden. In that enclosure the Rothschild emissary took up
+his station, so that, himself unseen, he could observe what passed on the
+other side of the windows. Presently a rider, fresh from his horse, still
+booted, spurred, and mud splashed, entered the chamber, made a low
+obeisance to its dethroned occupant, who, on his part, graciously extended
+his fingers which the messenger gently touched with his lips. Hence the
+outside spectator inferred Napoleon&#8217;s defeat, and proceeded at once to his
+principals in London. As an English financier this is the Rothschild who
+popularized foreign stocks and loans in this country by causing the
+interest and dividends to be paid in London, instead of, as heretofore,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+abroad. Four years after Waterloo, he first identified himself closely
+with the English Government by undertaking a loan of twelve millions. His
+profit on the transaction was one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. With
+this sum he bought Gunnersbury, formerly the home of Amelia, aunt of
+George III., which had since passed into the hands of a private citizen
+named Copland. The Rothschilds naturally and honourably took their place
+among the lords of the soil in their adopted country. He who is now spoken
+of encountered, perhaps provoked, much opposition from rival financiers,
+and more than once measured swords with the Bank of England which had
+hesitated about technicalities of discount. Shortly after this the New
+Court potentate called at the Bank bringing with him a sum of twenty-one
+thousand pounds in &pound;5 notes,<a name='fna_16' id='fna_16' href='#f_16'><small>[16]</small></a> each deposited in a separate bag. Seven
+hours were occupied in changing this paper into gold. For the time the
+general business of the establishment was arrested. The strategy succeeded
+completely. The next day it was announced that in future the Rothschild
+bills would be taken as the Banks&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>In the July of 1836 a pigeon fluttered in through the open window of the
+New Court counting house. The bird had travelled from Frankfort; it
+brought the news of the death in his native town of the great head of the
+firm. Many religious ceremonies of the Hebrew race<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> have, during these
+last few years, been converted into great functions of modish society. The
+ceremonial series began when the body of the first great Rothschild known
+to England, in the presence of the whole Corps Diplomatique attached to
+the Court of St James&#8217;s, was committed to the earth in the East End
+cemetery of his race. With that event the latter day history of the
+Rothschilds begins. Henceforward the business was to be conducted by
+Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild&#8217;s four sons in England, together with their
+uncles abroad. Of these sons Nathaniel settled in France, Lionel, Nathan
+Mayer and Anthony managed the English firm. Under the r&eacute;gime of Baron
+Lionel Rothschild whom many now living remember well, the first great act
+of association with the English Government was in 1847 the Irish Famine
+Loan, supplemented as it was by munificent subscriptions for the relief of
+the distress which the failure of the potato crop had caused. Seven years
+later Baron Lionel carried out the sixteen millions loan for the English
+Government. The transaction for which the Lionel administration is best
+remembered by the present generation is the advance for the purchase of
+the Suez Canal shares in 1876. The announcement of that negotiation by the
+Prime Minister of the day in conjunction with his compatriots in the City,
+came as a surprise to the English people at large. It has, however, on the
+highest authority since transpired that when in 1874 Mr Disraeli took
+office, he had already decided upon acquiring for England a preponderating
+interest in the international waterway. Nor is it impertinent to assume
+that during the Sunday visits which the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>statesman, as Mr Disraeli and as
+Lord Beaconsfield, paid to the suburban home of Baron Lionel, this scheme
+may sometimes have been discussed. Four millions was the sum advanced by
+New Court, one hundred thousand pounds represented the total of the
+Rothschild 2&#189; per cent. profit.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Baron Lionel had been in possession of a seat in the House of
+Commons some ten years, won though that seat had been only after a
+prolonged struggle. At the beginning of the century no Jew magistrate or
+sheriff existed. In 1837, Sir David Salomons became sheriff of London and
+Middlesex, but the true faith of a Christian test prevented him from
+serving. Eventually, to oblige the City, Lord Chancellor Campbell
+introduced a Bill removing this disability. Parliament, however, was still
+closed against the Jew. Ten years later Lionel Rothschild, with Lord John
+Russell, was elected M.P. for London. The Jewish Parliamentary Relief
+Bill, supported by Mr Disraeli as well as Mr Gladstone, passed the House
+of Commons, to be thrown out in the Lords. In 1850 another measure shared
+the same fate. The sixth decade of this century had come before the first
+Rothschild took his place on the green leather benches. Mr Disraeli&#8217;s last
+novel, <i>Endymion</i>, as rich as any of its predecessors in personal
+portraits, contains in the character of Mr Neuchatel, the banker, the most
+graphic pen and ink sketch of the financier now mentioned. In the grounds
+of Gunnersbury, statesmen of both parties, diplomatists from every Court,
+foreigners of every grade of distinction met each other. Here Mr Disraeli
+chatted amicably with Lord Palmerston, the turbulence of whose foreign
+policy he was fresh from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> denouncing in the House of Commons. Hither Louis
+Napoleon, when an exile in London, drove in his friend Count Alfred
+D&#8217;Orsay&#8217;s cabriolet. Here the veteran Lord Lyndhurst instructed in habits
+of English thought his aptest pupil, then a showy but still obscure
+politician soon to become the pillar of the Tory party. It was by Baron
+Lionel that the Rothschild hospitalities were begun on the scale on which
+they have since continued. First came the marriage of Baron Lionel&#8217;s
+eldest daughter, Leonora, to her relative, Alphonse Rothschild. Persigny,
+then French Ambassador in London, made a speech which the Paris Academy
+recognized as classical in its perfection. Mr Disraeli, always
+pre-eminently happy on these occasions, delighted host, hostess, and
+guests by a coruscation of glittering antitheses, and flashing epigrams in
+affectionate honour of the bride and bridegroom. The ex-Lord Chancellor,
+Lord Lyndhurst himself, in whose honour the Baroness Mayer had given a
+f&ecirc;te a few days earlier at Mentmore, said a few words so happy in their
+arrangement, so dignified in their cadence that they were subsequently set
+to candidates for the Newcastle medal at Eton to translate into Attic
+prose.</p>
+
+<p>Not twenty years have passed since, on Baron Lionel&#8217;s death in 1879, the
+fortunes of the house have been controlled by the Lord Rothschild of
+to-day with his brothers Alfred and Leopold as his partners. The loans for
+the Hungarian, Brazilian, and Chilian Governments are only a portion of
+the New Court enterprises since 1879. In the eyes of England and of
+Europe, their most important undertaking has been in relation with Egypt.
+In 1885, at the moment that the Western<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> powers were at diplomatic feud
+with each other about the land of the Pharoahs, Egypt itself drew more and
+more near to complete bankruptcy. The calamity was only averted by monthly
+advances from the Messrs Rothschild upon no legal security, but on the
+strength of a private note from the late Foreign Secretary, Lord
+Granville. This is the testimony of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach speaking as
+Chancellor of the Exchequer after he had succeeded Mr Gladstone in 1885.
+The nine millions loan issued in that year was, of course, highly
+successful for its negotiators. But this good fortune had been preceded by
+an anxious season of protracted risk encountered with unfailing public
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p>The Semitic capitalists of the century have been compared to a foreign
+garrison quartered in every European country, never completely fused with
+the native population, always separated from the national life, and
+potentially hostile to the domestic interests of the land which it
+occupies. In the case of the financial family whose connection with
+Victorian England has now been summarized this description is not borne
+out by the facts. Their activity as financiers and generosity as citizens
+during calamitous seasons like the Irish famine, are only specimens of the
+services rendered by the Rothschilds to their adopted country. No
+exceptional distress comes upon any portion of the United Kingdom without
+eliciting a letter of womanly sympathy from the Queen, and the opening of
+a subscription list in the City. At the head of this list the name of the
+New Court firm is tolerably sure to be seen. Members of a race whose
+history is like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> that of the Jews one of razzias, confiscations,
+disqualifications, patiently borne and slowly overcome, can scarcely be
+expected to betray no consciousness of these antecedents in their habit
+and speech. The bearing of the Jew, whatever pinnacle of greatness he may
+have climbed, is traditionally the bearing of a man on the defensive,
+prepared, if he sees an opening, to anticipate the necessity of resentment
+by showing his ability to repel offence. Those who, whether by individual
+experience or by ethnic tradition, have been schooled in experiences like
+these, are not likely to show morbid delicacy in their deportment towards
+others. The mart and the bourse to which the Jews have been driven are
+defective schools of social culture. Asiatic plutocrats are sure,
+therefore, wherever they may be settled, to provoke enemies in the very
+act of creating clients and dependents. The English Rothschilds of every
+generation have found opportunities of performing private not less than
+public kindnesses. In spite of, or rather perhaps because of this, they
+have wounded many susceptibilities, for there may be an insolence of
+neediness not less than of wealth. Fairness, however, requires the
+admission that the successive representatives of the great Semitic house
+in respect of the performance of the duties of citizenship as well as in
+the wise, not less than the beneficent use of wealth, have set an example
+to the fellow countrymen of their adoption in general, and to their
+financial rivals in particular. The employment of great wealth in
+accordance with the principles of magnificence and of taste was esteemed
+so highly by the cultivated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> Greeks of old as to receive from Aristotle a
+concrete illustration in his category of virtuous characters. The same
+tradition was preserved and exemplified in those republics of medi&aelig;val
+Italy that wore the closest resemblances to the older democracies of
+Hellas which history records. It was not unknown in England at that period
+when London was to the Englishman what Florence had been to the Florentine
+under the Medici, or, at an earlier age, what the City of the Violet Crown
+had been to the contemporary of Pericles. A similar sense of the public
+usefulness and patriotic obligations of great wealth animated the citizens
+of London under our own Edwards, and had previously found many modes of
+effective expression under Elizabeth. Those were &#8216;the gorgeous days&#8217; in
+which the trader of one of the great chartered companies in the Indies or
+across the Atlantic, having made some exceptionally successful venture, on
+returning safely to his native land, and to the township which had been
+his cradle, was wont to testify his gratitude to Providence by
+embellishing the place of his birth with buildings or gardens, with
+galleries or terraces, many of which, as in the case of the gifts of Sir
+Thomas Gresham, the first of the great loan negotiators, endure to this
+day, not only in the college which bears his name, but in the Royal
+Exchange. By no family, not of English birth; by few Englishmen
+themselves, either under Queen Victoria or her predecessors, have the
+public and national responsibilities imposed by financial success, or by
+hereditary millions, on their possessors been recognized so frankly, or
+been <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>illustrated with so happy and impressive a blend of splendour and
+propriety, as by the descendents of the bankers of the Princes of
+Hesse-Cassel who in the first days of this century issuing from their
+natal judengasse at Frankfort established themselves in England, and at
+the same time, or shortly thereafter, fixed their emporia in the great
+Continental capitals as well.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever their natural pride in the creative power of their wealth, no one
+can lay it to the charge of the Rothschilds that in the use of this
+instrument they have lost sight of their duties to the land of their
+adoption. In any faithfully written chronicle of English art or sport
+since both were organized among us on their present plan, the name of this
+family must fill no small space. Their services to the breed of horses may
+be surmised from the popularity of Baron Lionel Rothschild&#8217;s success in
+the race for the Derby with Favonius in 1871, as well as from the
+popularity which his son has since won in the same pastime. Their private
+houses are museums of art which have encouraged English not less than
+Continental talent, and which are open to every visitor who is interested
+in their contents. Since the Rothschilds were settled in Piccadilly and
+Mayfair, many others of their race have made a position in the polite life
+of the capital and of the country. That each of these, to mention only
+Murrietas, Oppenheims, Bischoffsheims, have fixed the ends and regulated
+the scale of their expenditure with a regard for refinement as well as
+pomp, and that the more prominent members of a no longer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> despised race
+have been incorporated thoroughly into the ranks of the native gentry, is
+due largely to the personal initiative and influence of the New Court
+dynasty. Nor is it merely their wealth and the influence which money has
+brought that have placed the Rothschilds at the head of Semitic settlers
+in England. Their loyalty to their nation has never been eclipsed by other
+interests. They have not only endowed hospitals and built synagogues. They
+have always exerted a pacific and unifying influence upon the various and
+sometimes mutually conflicting Hebraic factions; at one time they have
+reconciled to each other different schools of Teutonic Judaism. At another
+they have performed the same good office for Israelite communities outside
+their own Teutonic pale.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<p class="title">SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Private and individual efforts which have quickened the sense of
+citizenship in England and bridged the gulf between rich and poor.
+Historic and abiding influences of the Young England movement of 1846.
+How it facilitated the Factory Acts and prompted private owners to
+open their parks to the public. Temple Gardens and Lincoln&#8217;s Inn.
+Effect produced by the brothers Mayhew with their <i>London Labour</i> and
+<i>London Poor</i> during the fifties, and also by certain articles in the
+<i>Times</i> and <i>Quarterly Review</i>. Lord Shaftesbury, the Poor Man&#8217;s Peer.
+Origin of Public School and University settlements in great towns.
+Edward Denison and his friends before Arnold Toynbee. Individual
+example acting on public or corporate owners. Educate the public and
+actuate legislation when the time is ripe for it. Sir Erasmus Wilson&#8217;s
+gift of Cleopatra&#8217;s Needle preceded beautification of Thames
+Embankment.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The practical sense of citizenship by which, in the preceding chapter, the
+Jewish community in England has been seen to be animated is among native
+Englishmen themselves pre-eminently the development of the Victorian era.
+Its manifestation in the capital was preceded by its active display in the
+provinces. Few individuals of our epoch have more appreciably and
+definitely impressed the image of their genius on the social history of
+their age, than Benjamin Disraeli, first, and only, Earl of Beaconsfield.
+This is not the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> occasion on which to examine his position in, and
+services to, the public life of the period, as well as his place in the
+inner economy of the polite world. In the social movement of the
+industrial classes of the community, especially in their relations with
+their more highly placed neighbours, the work done by this remarkable man
+is not less conspicuous than it is seemingly enduring.<a name='fna_17' id='fna_17' href='#f_17'><small>[17]</small></a> The political
+school which, at the outset of his career his genius created, that of
+Young England in the ninth year of the present reign, did not last long as
+a political organization. It was never intended to do so. Of the little
+coterie whose inspiring literature is contained in the trilogy of romance
+that is constituted by <i>Coningsby</i>, <i>Sibyl</i>, and <i>Tancred</i>, the sole
+survivor is the Duke of Rutland. Even he, perhaps, is better known to many
+readers as Lord John Manners. He was first introduced to the general
+public by the style of &#8216;Lord Henry Sidney&#8217; in his friend&#8217;s earliest novel.
+With pardonable pride in a letter incorporated by the editor of the
+<i>Quarterly Review</i> in an article on <i>Sibyl</i>,<a name='fna_18' id='fna_18' href='#f_18'><small>[18]</small></a> the Duke of Rutland
+points back to the undoubted service which the sentiment generated by the
+Young Englanders rendered to Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, and to Mr
+Oastler in their gradually successful efforts to pass the First Factory
+Act as well as generally to soften, perhaps even to sweeten the daily lot
+of the suffering, the defenceless, and the poor. At that time, the humane
+and religious fervour of Lord<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> John Russell had not yet leavened, as it
+soon afterwards did, aristocratic Whiggism. Mr Gladstone&#8217;s spiritualizing
+touch was still to be laid upon the party that he was yet to join. The
+scientific economists of the school of Peel, comprising as they did Cobden
+and Bright, were the enemies of the movement. Even the pioneer of that
+movement, who afterwards nobly vindicated his claim to the title of the
+Poor Man&#8217;s Peer, was indignantly asked what he, Lord Shaftesbury, had been
+doing, when Lord Ashley was fighting for the Ten Hours Bill of 1844.<a name='fna_19' id='fna_19' href='#f_19'><small>[19]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>His virtuous indignation obscured this critic&#8217;s view of the fact that the
+peer he praised was identical with the peer he denounced.</p>
+
+<p>If this were the context in which to illustrate the political permanence
+of the Young England agency, it would be enough to point to the
+perpetuation in the knights, dames, and chancellors of the Primrose
+League, of the sensibility to picturesque or semi-feudal effects which
+inspired Disraeli and his friends in their manipulation of Conservative
+sentiment. These qualities, at an interval of just half a century, were to
+reappear in Disraeli&#8217;s aptest<a name='fna_20' id='fna_20' href='#f_20'><small>[20]</small></a> pupil, Lord Randolph Churchill. As a
+social and unpolitical testimony to the quickening power of the new
+England propaganda, when its promulgation was an affair of yesterday, it
+may be mentioned that at the Queen&#8217;s accession, as for many years
+thereafter, it was comparatively an unknown thing for the private parks
+surrounding gentlemen&#8217;s houses in the provinces to be used as people&#8217;s
+pleasure grounds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> Show places on such a scale as Blenheim or Chatsworth
+existed then as they exist to-day. Even in the case of the former of
+these, in pr&aelig;-<i>Coningsby</i> or ante-Victorian days, it is not likely to have
+occurred to a Duke of Marlborough, as it did occur to the seventh
+successor of John Churchill, being the eighth Duke, to engage a special
+train to convey several thousands of East End children from their native
+courts and alleys to the undulating woodlands of his Oxfordshire park.
+Within a few years of the appearance of <i>Coningsby</i>, Eaton was only one of
+the great parks which, so long as certain reasonable restrictions were
+observed, became not less free to town or country labourers with their
+wives and children than Kensington Gardens, or, as what till our age was
+called Battersea Fields.<a name='fna_21' id='fna_21' href='#f_21'><small>[21]</small></a> Royal patronage had not been withheld from
+the movement. The memories of the present generation stop short of a time
+when Windsor Park, together with the gardens and terraces of the Castle,
+was inaccessible to excursionists by the Great Western Railway to view the
+natural panorama bright with all the beauties of &#8216;blossom week,&#8217; or to
+hear the band on the slopes play the favourite pieces of the Queen. The
+capital was not yet fully abreast with this piece of social progress. Long
+after the gardens and the general maintenance of the public parks endowed
+them with fresh attractions, the private pleasure grounds of corporate
+owners were closed. The new philanthropic reforms were introduced here by
+the noble structure of the Thames Embankment. The Temple Gardens had,
+indeed, long been open. The flower beds and their careful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> tending were
+still to come. The Benchers of Lincoln&#8217;s Inn were more exclusive. The new
+buildings, as they are called, flanking this enclosure, date from 1845.
+The Lincoln&#8217;s Inn Fields&#8217; theatre had disappeared in 1848. Nearly half a
+century was still to elapse before the leafy paradise in the heart of this
+austere kingdom of Chancery law was to ring with childish voices from the
+courts and alleys which abut on Chancery Lane.</p>
+
+<p>Within fifty years of the Queen&#8217;s accession, the personal example of that
+Lord Shaftesbury whose name has been mentioned already was to bear rich
+fruit. In the <i>Times</i> newspaper during the earlier sixties, there appeared
+a leading article on the subject of the homeless poor of London. It was
+equally noticeable for the humanity which inspired it, and for its
+vigorous and graphic expression. Not long before this, an interest, then
+entirely new, had been imparted to the grim subject by an essay in the
+<i>Quarterly Review</i> based on the then comparatively recent volumes about
+London labour and the London poor by the brothers Mayhew. A host of
+writers have treated this subject subsequently. Many of them,
+conspicuously the late Thomas Archer, with a thoroughness and freshness of
+knowledge scarcely inferior to that with which it had been approached by
+the Mayhews. But in their hands the topic was absolutely new. Without
+hyperbole, in literal truth, the West End was then not only ignorant of
+how the East End lived, but with very rare individual exceptions, entirely
+indifferent to the mingled squalor and tragedy of that existence. Horace
+Mayhew survived to a vigorous and remarkably handsome old age, dying only
+a few<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> years ago. His work on the deeper depths of London poverty was the
+one effort of his life. All his energies were thrown into it. The work
+when finished, if it did not exhaust him, left him so depressed by the
+misery which he had been investigating that he had no mind to return to
+the lighter departments of periodical letters wherein his career
+commenced, and his earlier reputation was made. A long period of social
+indifference and legislative lethargy as to the condition of the very poor
+in the capital and in other great towns now ensued. In 1865, the first
+editor of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, Frederick Greenwood, conceived the idea
+of commissioning his brother James, a well known writer on social
+subjects, to pass a night in the casual ward of a workhouse, rumours of
+abuses in the management of which were then attracting attention. About a
+year after this, a winter of exceptional severity afflicted the poorest
+portions of London, near the Docks and elsewhere, with the combined
+calamities of lack of labour, and as a consequence with famine,
+firelessness, and pestilence. Three friends, each of them then young men,
+all Conservatives by conviction and all under the influence of the
+philanthropic teaching of Disraeli&#8217;s novels, were in the habit of
+frequently meeting with a view of maturing some scheme for the relief of
+that destitution at the East End, with which existing agencies of help had
+proved themselves impotent to deal. One of these belonged to a well known
+Shropshire family, Baldwyn Leighton.<a name='fna_22' id='fna_22' href='#f_22'><small>[22]</small></a> Another, Sir Michael<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+Hicks-Beach, has since become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The third was a
+son of a former Bishop of Salisbury. Edward Denison was equally quick to
+master the dominant facts in a social situation, and to take the action
+that seemed the best thereupon. Within a few days, he decided that the
+first step towards remedying the evils recorded morning after morning in
+the newspapers must be personal acquaintance with their magnitude, and
+their origin, as well as with the habits and homes of the distressed
+masses. Denison, therefore, established himself in a small house in
+Whitechapel, the very heart of the necessitous district.</p>
+
+<p>Since then, the example thus set has been followed frequently. Denison of
+course was sometimes visited in his East End lodging by his West End
+friends. These returned, bringing with them a more vivid sense of the
+industrial suffering just outside the doors of the polite world than
+literary descriptions, however graphic, could convey to the perfunctory
+reader of the morning paper. Other incidents were to prove unexpectedly
+instrumental in deepening the interest of well-to-do Londoners in their
+destitute neighbours. Within a year or two of Denison&#8217;s mission, the
+Fenian outrage at Clerkenwell Prison not only robbed many poor families of
+their breadwinners, but left them literally homeless. Disraeli, at that
+time Prime Minister, sent down his private secretary to distribute alms
+among the victims of the explosion. Mr Montague Corry, since Lord
+Rowton,<a name='fna_23' id='fna_23' href='#f_23'><small>[23]</small></a> saw sad and strange sights during this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> charitable errand. His
+recital of these experiences was followed by liberal subscriptions to the
+sufferers from Pall Mall and Mayfair. From that day to this, not only has
+the stream of charity flowed less sluggishly; there has been also awakened
+a new personal and intelligent interest in the condition of the most
+squalid of poverty&#8217;s perennial children. That feeling has not evaporated
+in charitable doles. Substantial funds have been organized by private or
+corporate munificence for improving the dwellings of the poor and for
+practically testifying the neighbourly solicitude of more fortunate
+citizens.</p>
+
+<p>The demoralizing effects of public executions were exposed by Thackeray.
+His essay, &#8216;Going to see a man hung&#8217; gave shape, and eventually success to
+the movement for the hanging of criminals within, and not outside, the
+prison walls. So, at an earlier day, Dickens, who of all our greatest
+writers was the first to interest the public in the waifs and strays in
+the London streets, had initiated in <i>Oliver Twist</i> a social demand for
+workhouse reform. The best causes are liable to abuse and caricature.
+There have been moments when, since the Mayhews wrote, sympathy with the
+lot of the London poor has seemed in danger of becoming overdone, or being
+degraded into a fad, a craze, a fashionable hobby, and thus of ceasing to
+be an actuating conviction. The modish popularity of &#8216;slumming&#8217; as it used
+a few years ago to be called had of course its absurd aspects, but was,
+nevertheless, not an unhealthy sign. It could be compared to the froth
+upon the surface which concealed, and did not necessarily weaken, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+stimulating and strengthening qualities below. Whether this philanthropic
+curiosity was displayed in town or country, the social truth of which it
+constituted evidence was that the commercial spirit and its harsher
+influences, not unfortunately uncommon among the upper classes in the
+early days of the new poor law, were becoming obsolete, and that the class
+fusion born of class sympathy to which De Tocqueville has attributed our
+later freedom from organic revolutions was in steady process of evolution.
+Edward Denison came first of all, and could only see with the eye of faith
+the fruits which his example was to bear in the beneficent experiment of
+Arnold Toynbee and in the People&#8217;s Palace. So it has continued, till
+to-day the University and public school settlements in the East End of
+London and in other great cities are institutions not less deeply rooted
+than the parochial system itself. The kindly work is not confined to a
+single sex. St Margaret&#8217;s House, Bethnal Green, the ladies&#8217; branch of the
+Oxford agency, presided over by Mrs Burrows, is as firmly established as
+the homes founded by Trinity or Christ Church in the same neighbourhood.
+Throughout the English speaking world, the same beneficent inspiration
+seems to have been almost simultaneously operative. One hears of analogous
+enterprises in the great cities of Australia and in the United States. The
+American movement even claims seniority over the English. Andover House,
+Boston, was in full working order before the cognate agencies in our own
+capital were complete. The devotion of Trade Unionists to their Union has
+been employed as a figure to illustrate the mutual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> loyalty to a great and
+good idea of those brought up in the same College or University or public
+school. This reciprocal enthusiasm has now been active and productive long
+enough to entitle it to the praise of solidity and permanence. The public
+and legal provisions for quickening the sense of citizenship in town and
+country will presently be examined in detail. That which seems important
+to bear in mind is that the legislature did not interpose its machinery
+until the private agencies, social or moral, already recapitulated, had
+done their work. Even the improvement in the open spaces of the capital
+which is so marked a feature in metropolitan progress during the last few
+decades, has been helped or encouraged largely by private initiative. The
+late Mr Matthew Arnold recognized as a graceful and original act of public
+service, the transport of Cleopatra&#8217;s Needle from Alexandria to London at
+the cost of Sir Erasmus Wilson. Before the obelisk was established on the
+Thames Embankment the municipal authorities had prepared a home for it and
+converted into daintily kept pleasure grounds the little enclosures by the
+side of the riverain promenade.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<p class="title">THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Reflection of the Estates of the Realm in the old divisions of rural
+life in England. Modifications in the system introduced by recent
+changes in local government. The English village as it now is. The
+public house as a place of resort largely displaced by the parish
+meeting room. The quickened sense of civic life shown in the speech
+and bearing of the villagers. The exact functions of the Parish
+Council, or Meeting. Relations between Parish and District Councils.
+Retrospect of English Poor Law system. Greater popularity of the
+District Councils. Other duties than of Poor Law Guardians discharged
+by District Councils. Clergy and Squires. How affected. District
+Board&#8217;s composition. Its relations with magistrates, and popular
+feeling.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Before 1894, English parishes in rural districts possessed, as they still
+do, three centres of local life. The State was represented by the squire,
+or chief landowner, often, as may still be the case, an absentee. The
+Rectory, or Vicarage, with the neighbouring church was the geographical
+depository of spiritual power. The village inn, or public house, was the
+place of popular meeting, and with its adjoining skittle-alley was the
+source of popular amusement. Here the gossip of the neighbourhood was
+discussed, or the local newspaper read. London journals did not, and do
+not, often enter remote neighbourhoods in the provinces. The doings of the
+Imperial Parliament,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> or the Concert of the European Powers were, as they
+remain, of little interest to the rural tillers of the soil in comparison
+with the wages paid by the farmers in the district, the supervision, or
+the lack of it, exercised by lords of the land over the cottages of the
+poor. Nothing more struck the stranger who wished to acquire information
+as to the daily lot of the rural population, and as to opportunities for
+their improvement, than the prevailing ignorance or indifference about the
+facts of their daily life. It was not exactly Christian acquiescence in
+chronic want and squalor as a Divine dispensation. It was rather an
+unreasoning suspicion as to the motives of the enquirer, and as to the
+consequences to themselves of the answers given, which, if it did not seal
+the villagers&#8217; lips, restricted their replies to inarticulate grunts or
+evasive generalities.</p>
+
+<p>Within the fifth decade of the present reign, all this has either changed
+entirely or has been appreciably modified. The public house, or inn,
+stands indeed where it stood. The tap is no longer the parish club room.
+Even the skittle-alley has lost many of its attractions. The authority of
+the Manor House has been divested of the superstitious sanctions with
+which it was once clothed. The squire and the parson are regarded as
+well-meaning persons with a good deal of human nature, after all, about
+them. As for the geographical centre of village existence, it is no longer
+the roof tree of the publican, but the village meeting hall. This, in the
+majority of cases, would never have existed but for the initiative of the
+clergyman. He it is who with no parliamentary sessions to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> attend during
+half the year, with no town house always ready to receive him, passes most
+of his time among his own people; and thus combines in his own person,
+very often, the two separate principles of Church and State. This village
+assembly room is furnished with the chief county and market town
+newspapers. It is without carpets or draperies, and does not consequently
+retain tobacco smoke. If, therefore, the villager likes a dry pipe while
+he reads, or chats, it may at stated hours be allowed him. Gradually,
+therefore, he has grown to regard the place as his betters regard the
+House of Commons, as the best club of which he knows. The publican may
+suffer, but all other members of the little community have gained.</p>
+
+<p>At the present moment, the manner and the countenances of the rural
+company, apart from the subjects of their more than usually animated
+conversation, indicate a season of exceptional importance. The truth is,
+that an election for the village parliament is imminent. Whether the name
+be parish council or parish meeting, the reality is the same. That reality
+since Sir Henry Fowler&#8217;s amendment in 1894 practically implies Home Rule
+for every parish in rural England. The franchise is in effect universal.
+Without regard to income or place of domicile every parishioner whose name
+occurs in the local government or parliamentary register has a vote, and
+is in addition entitled to attend the parish parliament. So systematic is
+the preservation of the separate individuality of every village, that
+where the number of inhabitants is below<a name='fna_24' id='fna_24' href='#f_24'><small>[24]</small></a> 300, and the gathering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> is
+called a meeting, not a council; no association of that particular village
+with others is allowed to supersede the separate meeting. The executive
+body is thus always the parish meeting. The grouping order necessary for
+the amalgamation of parishes for council purposes is never given without
+the closest scrutiny by the County Council first, or confirmed by the
+Imperial authority in London afterwards. In no case is the parish meeting
+dispensed with. Amongst the groups we have seen discussing their affairs,
+one might have noticed women as well as men; for though by the decision of
+the Court of Appeal in the case of Drax <i>v.</i> Ffook, women can vote as
+occupiers and not as owners, they are, whether spinsters or wives,
+eligible to be parish councillors. Should the parish be without a village
+hall, the schoolroom is the usual place of assembly. The one spot
+peremptorily forbidden by the law is the public house; unless no other
+rendezvous be procurable for love or money. It is still too early to
+pronounce definitely as to the permanent effect of these institutions. The
+general tendency has perhaps been towards the falsification alike of the
+extreme hopes and fears which they first raised. Their jurisdiction
+includes all the functions of the old vestries and their officers,
+together with other novel and more drastic prerogatives. The discussions
+are often limited to dull details of mechanical routine, but are
+sometimes, as to-day, sufficiently animated. In the typical parish (a
+generalization from actual experience), the question of opening or closing
+footpaths across fields chances closely to divide parochial opinion. A
+little time ago, the vexed problem was the limits of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> a village green
+which had been so much diminished by encroachments as to cease almost to
+exist. Another issue that a little while hence will furnish material for
+debates not less vivacious is that of allotments for cottagers. Here as in
+the other cases, there is a strong faction on either side. A heavy
+parochial whip has been sent out by the two sets of leaders. If the matter
+is decided in the affirmative, and the allotment or village green
+extension, as the case may be, is carried, a measure of expropriation may
+follow, should the County Council, as superior body, sanction the scheme,
+and should the Local Government Board, after hearing the case of the
+dissidents, confirm the parochial proposals. As a check to parochial
+extravagance, the money to be advanced by the central authority is not to
+exceed one-half the value of the local rates. Inheriting the power of the
+vestries which they displaced, the bodies now mentioned have in their
+hands the appointment of overseers of the poor. &#8216;One man, one vote&#8217;<a name='fna_25' id='fna_25' href='#f_25'><small>[25]</small></a> is
+the universal principle. The employers of labour, that is the farmers, are
+consequently liable to be placed in the minority by their servants. Hence
+proceeded the assertion that the signal withdrawal of the farmers from the
+Liberal party, as being morally responsible for the measure, largely
+brought about the crushing defeat of the Gladstonians at the general
+election of 1895. If the farmers were animated by any such resentment
+towards the party which they identified with the real authorship of the
+Act, the feeling has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> already to a great extent passed away. What remains
+of it will no doubt evaporate as eventually sentimental grievances of this
+kind seldom fail in England to do. Impartial evidence, gathered at first
+hand, does indeed show that the increased mutual knowledge generated
+between farmers and their hands in the parish meeting room has resulted in
+an actual improvement of the relations between the two classes. All the
+national processes which legislative change sets in motion have worked
+slowly in England. It was not till the third or fourth appeal to the
+constituencies under Household Franchise was made that the permanent
+results of the peaceful revolution in 1868 could be computed with even
+approximate accuracy. The final consequences of the extension of the
+franchise to counties by the Liberals in 1884 have not yet declared
+themselves. It would, therefore, be premature as yet to make any definite
+deductions, social or political, as to the working of a system which has
+been operative only since 1894.</p>
+
+<p>One thing more about them may, however, be said. As in the case of the
+farmers where, with a fair measure of conciliation and tact, the occupiers
+of the soil find their official intercourse with its tillers unexpectedly
+harmonious, so as regards the relations between the villagers and the
+clergyman, in the position of the latter as the spiritual, and often
+inevitably to a great degree the temporal, head of the community. Briefly
+stated, the effect of the Parish Meeting, or Parish Council, is to restore
+to the villagers certain of the rights which, in the old Manor Courts,
+they had possessed. Where the clergyman combines with the practical sense
+of an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> educated man a freedom from a suspicious antipathy to the civic
+activities of his flock, there is not only no jealousy of the parson&#8217;s
+intervention in the deliberations of the parish hall; but the experience
+which he is likely to bring to the work is welcomed by the councillors as
+a valuable aid to their discussions. If, when standing for a seat on the
+council, the rector issues an address savouring of dictatorial
+self-assertion; if from his pulpit he prescribes a plan for the conduct of
+these elections; the reverend gentleman may find himself at the bottom of
+the poll. When, however, he deals with his parishioners on the assumption
+of their equality in all non-religious matters with himself, he disarms or
+prevents jealousy. He has a fair chance of being chosen by acclamation to
+the president&#8217;s chair at the little Board.<a name='fna_26' id='fna_26' href='#f_26'><small>[26]</small></a> Parish Councils have for
+the first time in the rural history of England developed a sense of
+responsibility among those to whom a decade ago the idea of rural
+citizenship, with obligations as well as rights, was unintelligible. They
+have, therefore, impressed the minds of those concerned in them with some
+sense of power. Thus far, no tendency has been displayed to use that power
+in a revolutionary fashion. A body which, like the average parish
+parliament, numbers from five to eleven, is not likely to prove a
+tempestuously democratic, or violently revolutionary assemblage. Finally,
+though, on the requisition of three members to the chairman the council
+may be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> convened at any time, its actual convention is never brought about
+more than thrice, and seldom more than once in a twelvemonth. Not the
+least good which this institution carries with it in most neighbourhoods
+is its creation of wider, less mean, more liberal interests in daily life,
+and with these interests, subjects of conversation for the village
+community more generous than private affairs of individual
+households;&mdash;what Hodge, the ditcher, does so late at night in the
+neighbourhood of the squire&#8217;s game preserves; how much money the
+carpenter&#8217;s wife paid for her new bonnet; or how her daughters afford so
+gaudy a display of Sunday finery. That the new machinery has thus far
+worked with less friction than might have been expected may be inferred
+from the statistics courteously forwarded to the present writer from the
+Local Government Board under date August 7th 1896. As has been said
+already, the Imperial authority at Whitehall acts as arbitrator in all
+cases of difference between the popular Parish Councils and the more
+exclusive County Councils as to the acquisition of land for allotments. At
+the time now mentioned, it was the calculation of the President of the
+Local Government Board that four cases had occurred of appeals by Parish
+Councils against the refusal of the County Council to make the allotment
+order; and that in fourteen cases in which orders have been made by County
+Councils, eight protests against them have reached the Local Government
+Board from persons immediately interested.</p>
+
+<p>Ascending from the lowest deliberative unit in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> new scheme of local
+self government one passes from the Parish Council to the District
+Council. If it can be questioned whether the average villager as yet fully
+appreciates the gift of power made to him by the legislature in 1894, no
+such doubt can exist as to those bodies that are a little higher in the
+deliberative scale, the District Councils. The local parliament in the
+parish hall may sometimes be unattended by a single cottager. The District
+Council, if it be not as yet popular, is at least never neglected. Seats
+on it were from the first objects of local ambition. This is only what
+might have been expected in an age, a marked feature of which is the
+quickened interest of all sections of the community in whatever affects
+the health or comfort of the labouring classes. The District Council, as
+its name implies, has a more than parochial dignity. Its jurisdiction is
+practically commensurate with the sphere of the old Rural Sanitary
+Authority. The relief of pauperism however, forms a first and special care
+of this body, the members of which are also the Guardians of the Poor. Its
+place of assembly is the chief small town of the neighbourhood; not indeed
+the County town, but generally a convenient town where there happens to be
+a railway station. The District Council has already contracted certain
+associations of local fashion. The ladies of the country side have entered
+warmly into its business, and often constitute a majority of its most
+active members. There is, of course, the complaint of impulsiveness
+brought against the District Councillors. Thus the domestic idea is
+regarded by them with more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> respect than it secured from their
+predecessors, the Boards of Guardians. Guardians were elected by the
+plural vote of the larger ratepayers. They had, moreover, to satisfy a
+property qualification in their own persons. District Councils in theory
+know nothing of, and in practice are affected little by, such conditions.
+The ex-officio magistrate, without which no Board of Guardians was
+complete, is systematically absent from the new District bodies. The
+<i>personnel</i> of the new Councils, which occupy a place midway between the
+Parish and the County assemblies, presents a notable contrast to that of
+the superseded Boards of Guardians. County magistrates are not, in virtue
+of that office, ordinary members of these bodies, which are almost solely
+elective. The dignity of the body, however, is well maintained. The
+chairman of the District Council becomes, in consequence of that position,
+a County magistrate with powers as plenary as if he were the nominee of
+the Lord Lieutenant. Sometimes, of course, the chairmen of the District
+bodies are already magistrates. That is, however, the exception. There now
+exist in the United Kingdom about a thousand elective magistrates, being
+chairmen of District Councils. By far the greater part of these are new to
+their legal responsibilities. A few are working men. One District Council
+in Northamptonshire is presided over by the master of a small railway
+station on the Midland line. Another has for its chairman an agricultural
+labourer; a third is controlled by an ex-policeman; a fourth by one who
+supports himself on the cultivation of sixteen acres of land. The effect
+of popular election is not limited to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> the discharge of those duties
+connected with pauperism and sanitation that are the primary concern of
+the District bodies. Assessment committees, and school attendance
+committees are both drawn from the District Councils. The latter of these,
+it is generally admitted, have done their work better since they ceased to
+be composed exclusively of employers of labour, and since they have become
+representative of industry as well.<a name='fna_27' id='fna_27' href='#f_27'><small>[27]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>The Poor Law, which has been in force during the whole of the Victorian
+era, was, as scarcely needs to be said, among the earliest achievements of
+the Reformed Parliament. Bitter and prolonged as was the resistance to
+portioning out the country afresh for the relief of pauperism instead of
+congregating the poor of each parish in their own workhouse, the
+beneficent results of the change have long since been universally
+admitted. &#8216;The new Bastilles&#8217; was the name first given to the unions which
+the Act of 1834 created, by the opponents of the Bill, with a view to
+excite popular feeling against it. Only the most hardened paupers, who
+objected on principle to industry of any kind, complained of the modicum
+of labour exacted from the occupants of the new workhouses. Even these
+shirkers have become reconciled to some sort of industry. The improvement
+in the habits of the whole working class was conspicuous and immediate.
+Thus, as in his History of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> the period, Mr Molesworth points out,<a name='fna_28' id='fna_28' href='#f_28'><small>[28]</small></a> in
+four unions of the Midlands, there were in 1834, 954 able-bodied paupers.
+In June 1836 there were only 5. All the rest were in regular work. In the
+county of Sussex, the most inveterately pauperized in England, there were
+in 1834, 6,160 paupers. The Act had not been in operation two years before
+this total was reduced to 124. By 1836 the Act had become operative in
+twenty-two counties. The average of the reduction of the rates in these
+was 43&#189; per cent. The Commissioners of Enquiry, on whose report the new
+legislation was based, predicted that the application of their principles
+would restore and improve industry, would create or confirm habits of
+thrift, would increase the demand for labour as well as the wages of the
+labourer, and generally would promote the welfare of those who lived by
+manual toil. The Queen had not ascended her throne when the erewhile
+opponents of the Measure confessed that these anticipations were already
+fulfilled. It was not to be expected that bodies so essentially different
+from the old Boards of Guardians as the District Councils are would
+administer the Poor Law in the same spirit or on the same principles as
+their predecessors. Few socio-economical questions of the day have
+provoked controversy so bitter, or divided skilled and conscientious
+partizans into such mutually envenomed factions as the conditions on which
+relief from the rates should be granted to the necessitous poor. The
+uncompromising advocates of the workhouse test<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> system, compulsory
+residence, that is, within the workhouse walls, maintain that in this way
+only can systematic pauperization be avoided, and that so alone will the
+not uniformly industrious poor realize the stigma of coming upon the
+rates. On the other hand, it may be argued that in innumerable cases
+timely charity from the common fund will prevent the utter break up of a
+needy, but not necessarily indolent home. Paupers, it may be said, who
+will not work, and who are, therefore, not proper objects of compassion,
+are never kept by any sense of pride or shame from taking up their
+quarters in the local union. Thus, may it not be false economy to make
+absolute destitution and homelessness a preliminary condition of parochial
+help? On these points, those who differ will never agree. What it is now
+relevant to point out, is that the administrative methods of the new
+Councillors have very generally shown a reaction from the more stringent,
+and less sympathetic policy of the old Boards of Guardians. Thus, the
+workhouse test is far less often than formerly made the condition of poor
+relief.</p>
+
+<p>Organization in every department of activity or interest is the most
+conspicuous movement of the last quarter of this century. Some years must
+yet elapse before we know the exact point to which the legislation now
+reviewed has disciplined and stimulated the inhabitants of rural England.
+The object of the controllers of the vestries that the Parish Meetings
+have superseded was to keep village administration in the hands of a
+privileged and comparatively leisured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> minority. Hence it was not unusual
+to fix the hour for the vestry meeting at 9 a.m.; when of course the male
+population would be at work in the fields. Under the Act of 1894 the
+Parish Councillors are bound to hold their sittings in the evening after
+the day&#8217;s work is done. From a historical point of view this legislation
+cannot be charged with being revolutionary. The powers which the new
+bodies have assumed in checking encroachments upon common land and other
+like offences are indeed considerable. That prerogative is not an
+innovation. It is rather a revival of the authority which in the old Manor
+Courts, presided over by the steward of the Manor lord, the freeholders
+could exercise. Beyond question, the most far-reaching and important
+change introduced into country life by the new machinery is the infusion
+of the elective element into the nominated magistracy. This has not yet
+received the attention it deserves. Under the earlier r&eacute;gime, as has been
+said, certain guardians had a seat at the Union Board because they were
+magistrates. Under the existing dispensation certain Justices of the Peace
+owe their place on the magisterial Bench to the fact of their performing
+the duties of District Councillors and Guardians of the Poor. The
+relations between the two positions are thus exactly inverted. That the
+tendency of this change is to soothe the suspicions once widely prevalent
+as to the principles on which Justices&#8217; justice was administered does not
+seem disputable. It has also positively increased the respect in the rural
+mind for the law itself as the expression of wisdom<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> and equity. The
+cordiality with which the older magistrates, nominated to the Bench by the
+Lord Lieutenant, have generally welcomed their popularly chosen colleagues
+has undoubtedly strengthened this wholesome sentiment. Finally, the same
+career in the local polity as of old remains practically open to men
+serving on the Commission of Peace. Where the old J.P. Guardian was a man
+who did good work on the Union Board, he seldom now is debarred from doing
+it still. Even when he is locally unpopular, a well-earned reputation of
+ability or aptitude for affairs is pretty sure to bear down purely
+personal objections and secure his return to the District Board; a
+tolerably conclusive proof of the fitness of the parochial constituencies
+for the measure of autonomy which they have received.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<p class="title">THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">General effect of the legislation of 1888 on the English County
+system. Some analogy between the principles of corporation reform
+(1835) and County administration reform (1888). But the earlier act
+did not touch, as the later did, the power of magistrates in Quarter
+Sessions. Social circumstances, <i>e.g.</i>: the growth of an educated and
+leisured class of residents in country towns which have made the time
+ripe for the new legislation, and distributed throughout England a new
+class of capable local administrators. Contrast between County town
+life before and since the establishment of County Councils. Social
+pictures of county supremacy on Sessions days in the old era at hotels
+and shops. County self government has not destroyed the old County
+traditions nor deprived the old administrators of their former career.
+Exact functions of County Councils, and points of administrative
+communion between them and the old magistrates. Local idiosyncrasies
+of these Councils, North and South.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The legislation of 1888 has influenced the entire scheme of life in
+provincial England. The social prestige of the County system, centred in
+the extra-judicial power of the magistrates at Quarter Sessions, had not
+been affected prejudicially by the Corporation Reform Act with which, two
+years before the Queen&#8217;s accession, the Whig Ministers in the newly
+reformed Parliament supplemented the Poor Law changes. The principle
+underlying the County Council Act of 1888, and before that the Corporation
+Act of 1835 was the same.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> Both marked a return to a more ancient but a
+less exclusive system rather than a sudden introduction of a new. Like the
+monarchy itself, the borough corporations were in their beginnings
+genuinely popular. As in the case of the Throne, so in that of the
+provincial polities; it was the Tudor sovereigns who narrowed and
+enervated the privileges of their subjects. Under the Plantagenets and
+throughout the Middle Ages, the corporations were elected by popular
+constituencies, the freemen of the town. Contracted in their scope under
+Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, these charters of urban freedom were, under the
+Stuarts, so remodelled as to transfer from the burgesses to the Crown the
+appointment of municipal officers. Municipal liberty having passed away
+first, municipal purity gradually followed. The abuses in civic life had
+at last equalled the corruptions which reduced parliamentary elections to
+a farce. Within a year of Lord Grey&#8217;s Reform Act, the urban scandals
+became too gross to be ignored longer by a comparatively purified House of
+Commons. As in the case of the procedure with reference to the Poor Law,
+so in the business of municipal reform a Commission was appointed to
+investigate the corporations of the United Kingdom. The national
+enthusiasm for the men who had carried electoral reform against the House
+of Lords, against the Duke of Wellington and against the King was soon
+followed by a Tory reaction. In the hope of regaining for his party some
+of the popularity which it had lost, Lord John Russell in the summer of
+1835 submitted the new measure to the House of Commons. Two millions of
+Englishmen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> were affected by the scheme. The then existing municipal
+bodies had been shown as little to represent the property, the
+intelligence, even the population of the towns as the unreformed
+Legislature had reflected the convictions and desires of the Kingdom.
+Charitable funds, bequeathed by former benefactors for the impartial
+relief of local want, had by the abuses of years, been diverted wholly
+from their original purpose. They were dispensed habitually to the
+political friends of the men who had for the time the upper hand in the
+affairs of the borough. These moneys seldom mitigated any honest distress;
+they were squandered in the periodical junketings of the authorities of
+the township, with the political partizans who were their fellow feasters.
+Two novelists of our time have drawn famous pictures of the same great
+nobleman. The original of Disraeli&#8217;s &#8216;Lord Monmouth&#8217; in <i>Coningsby</i> was
+the Marquis of Hertford, whose henchman, the &#8216;Mr Rigby&#8217; of the novel, was
+the John Wilson Croker of real life. Thackeray&#8217;s &#8216;Marquis of Steyne&#8217; in
+<i>Vanity Fair</i> was the other literary likeness of the same titled original.
+In real life the Marquis of Hertford, as &#8216;an honest burgess,&#8217; was a chief
+member of the Council of Oxford city. The Right Honourable John Wilson
+Croker, his lordship&#8217;s steward, and his confidant in all things were the
+chief associates of this eminent noble in the control of the municipality
+of the University town. The Corporation Act of 1835 swept away these
+scandals, and made municipal government a fairly popular reality.
+Thenceforward in all corporate boroughs, the Town Council was chosen by
+resident<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> inhabitants rated to the relief of the poor. Since 1835 the
+power of the magistrates in boroughs is exercised by the borough bench
+with an appeal to Quarter Sessions, that is, to the County. The measure
+did not a little towards re-establishing the popular privileges which had
+existed before the Tudor encroachments. London was not included in the
+Act. With that exception, all English towns on the Queen&#8217;s accession had
+for two years been in the enjoyment of self-rule. Cobden is one of the
+many opponents of caste exclusiveness who have testified to the purity and
+efficiency of the unpaid magistracy in their functions of County
+administrators. These persons were of course never responsible to any
+constituent body. They satisfied the property qualification by the
+possession of &pound;300 in land, or by the receipt of an income of &pound;100 a year.
+Notwithstanding the thoroughness of the work done by them on the Quarter
+Sessions committees for regulating extra-judicial business, they
+represented no interest except that of the party enjoying political power,
+the supreme embodiment of which was the Lord Lieutenant of the County.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, there had been great changes in the composition of the
+residents at, or in the neighbourhood of the chief provincial towns of
+England. The close of the Crimean War reinforced the class now mentioned
+by the addition of educated, but not generally wealthy, men, who desired
+peacefully to spend the residue of their days in districts with which
+family ties made them familiar or which conveniences of sport or education
+rendered attractive. The absorbing powers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> of the capital have
+progressively increased during recent decades. Opulence and fashion have
+swollen the great public schools of the country to unmanageable
+dimensions. Still, to a large percentage of English parents in the upper
+middle class, Eton and Harrow are not the only two possible schools of the
+realm; life may be lived as pleasantly, and more economically, in
+provincial centres like Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, or Cheltenham as within
+the metropolitan radius. Schools, not less than hotels, have become
+matters of joint stock enterprise, and of federal proprietorship. The
+excellent places of teaching which abound in such towns as those just
+mentioned are pre-eminently a product of the Victorian era. Thus it has
+come to pass that, at innumerable spots throughout provincial England,
+during recent years there have settled families, not pretending to
+historic antiquity or distinction, but still agreeably supplementing the
+social resources of the County district. Many, perhaps most of these
+newcomers have served the Queen in peace or war, abroad as well as at
+home, and are thus likely to have acquired administrative experience of
+different sorts. These are just the people qualified to relieve their
+older neighbours, the local squirarchy, in their administrative work. If
+the machinery for establishing County Councils had been created in the era
+of the Corporation Reform Act, or during the first half of the present
+reign, it would have been premature, would at least comparatively have
+failed, instead of proving, as it has done, a signal success. How this
+institution works will best be judged by contrasting certain phases of
+County town<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> life to-day and in the pre-County Council epoch. To visit
+such a town on a day when the magistrates were sitting at Quarter Sessions
+was like making an excursion into feudalism. One used to alight at the
+stable yard of the chief hotel to find no room for one&#8217;s horse. The
+County&#8217;s steeds had possession of the best stalls. They could not of
+course be displaced by, or consort with, the quadrupeds of less
+considerable riders. Inside the building, the same tale was retold and on
+every storey illustrated afresh. The apartment normally the coffee room
+was consecrated to the exclusive use of a select party of County justices
+who were still at luncheon. The drawing room on the first floor was in the
+occupation of the women kind of their relatives who were just about to
+refresh themselves after shopping with a cup of tea. The member of the
+general public who entered the chief shops of the place on the day devoted
+to County customers found himself and his patronage at a discount. The
+tradesman, in civil terms, profoundly regretted his inability to attend to
+the chance comer until he had satisfied the needs of the County justices&#8217;
+ladies who were expecting every moment to be called for by their lords
+from the Sessions House.</p>
+
+<p>Socially, not less than geographically, the County continues to exist. The
+wives and daughters of the country gentlemen who are County J.Ps. set the
+fashion in their neighbourhood and are still regarded as moulded out of a
+clay slightly superior to that of which their neighbours consist. But as
+an object of fetish worship the County has in most districts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> disappeared.
+The chief linen draper in the town, as he watches the County ladies, in
+their dilatory fashion, toy with one fabric after another, can scarcely
+suppress a look of impatience on his well disciplined face. He happens to
+be, not less than the father and husband of these ladies, himself a member
+of the new County parliament. He is exercised by a fear lest the special
+committee of the body on which he is serving should have decided the
+question of certain alterations in the approach to the local capital in
+which he is interested, before he has had time to get to the place of
+meeting. Unconsciously, perhaps, his manner towards the lady relatives of
+his council-colleague, the squire and magistrate, has lost something of
+its old deference. Still, the foundations of the social system remain the
+same. The fusion between classes of which the County Council is the
+expression rather than the cause has not brought us appreciably nearer the
+revolution and the Red Republic than had been done by the earlier
+parliamentary reforms. Here, as in the case of the District bodies, the
+law of the survival of the fittest is unrepealed, amid the administrative
+changes of the hour. County magistrates who are specially qualified for
+County administration are elected to the new Councils in numbers
+sufficient to leaven these bodies. The service that they performed on the
+committees of the old Sessions is still discharged by them on the Boards
+that are of more recent growth. The venue of their exertions is changed.
+The opportunity of their labour remains the same. Probably the association
+of County gentry with country town traders widens the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> view of the
+squires, acts as an incentive to greater energy, and is actually
+productive of better work. Certainly, since this machinery has been in
+operation the intellectual resources of the chief centres of population
+within the jurisdiction of the County Council have been improved. New art
+and science museums have come into existence. The people&#8217;s parks, which
+were already known in country towns, are better kept. New reading rooms
+and libraries have opened their doors.</p>
+
+<p>During the rather more than half a century that elapsed between the
+Corporations Act of 1835, and the Local Government Act of 1888, the chief
+reforms effected were in the province of sanitary administration, were
+mainly due to the efforts of individuals, such as Mr Stansfeld in 1872,
+and were generally incorporated in the Public Health Act of 1875. These
+sanitary measures contained the principle on which the area of the United
+Kingdom was finally redistributed. For the purposes of County Councils,
+England is mapped out into sixty-one administrative counties. Each of the
+electoral divisions of which the County consists has a Councillor of its
+own. The electors are practically almost identical with the parliamentary
+constituencies. In the case of municipalities inside the County area, the
+Local Government Board decides the share of representation to which it is
+entitled, and allots to it on the Council one or more members, as the case
+may be. In addition to the councillors created by purely popular election,
+a certain number of aldermen, not to exceed one-fourth of the whole body
+are chosen by co-optation among the Councillors <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>themselves. The term of
+Council office is three years. The chairman, however, who is not forbidden
+to receive a salary, holds his place only for one year. Like the District
+chairman, the County president too, without satisfying any pecuniary
+qualification, becomes, by virtue of his office, a County magistrate.<a name='fna_29' id='fna_29' href='#f_29'><small>[29]</small></a>
+Like the Council electors, the chairman and the six co-opted aldermen are
+subject only to the condition of having the County vote. As in
+parliamentary elections so in County elections, the polling is by ballot.
+The incidental expenses, however, which are strictly regulated by the
+number of the constituency, are defrayed, not by the candidate or his
+friends as in parliamentary competitions, but out of a County fund. The
+prerogatives of magistrates in whatever appertains to the licensing of
+public houses, and exercised in Quarter and Special Sessions, are
+untouched by the new bodies. With that exception, the functions of Quarter
+Sessions are superseded practically by the Councils. As a consequence, the
+sessional attendances of the magistrates have largely fallen off; though
+there still exist many opportunities for joint action between the new
+Councils and the old Sessions. For instance, the County police is
+controlled by a committee whose members are selected from the old
+magistrates and the new Councillors. Again, when the object is to acquire
+fresh land for popular use; to open or endow local museums or libraries,
+to establish emigration funds to the Colonies or elsewhere, united action
+between the two bodies is usual, but not compulsory.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>It has been seen already that the Local Government Board at Whitehall
+looks for the endorsement by the County Council of the Parish Council&#8217;s
+proposal to acquire land for allotments and, with that purpose, to obtain
+loans from the State purse. Similarly, the borrowing powers for less local
+objects of the Councils are definitely limited. The consent of the
+Imperial authority is needed to enable the Council to borrow for permanent
+works or to issue County stock. The Council&#8217;s annual Budget is closely
+criticized not only in debate by the Councillors themselves, but by the
+Local Government Board. The property rated to the County Rate which is the
+security for all loans is inspected periodically by Imperial officers. The
+accounts are examined by Imperial auditors. Meanwhile, it may be
+conjectured justly that the considerable remnant of country gentlemen of
+the old school, that is, the nominated magistrates, who have seats on the
+new Councils, secure a salutary continuity of administration and
+expenditure between the new r&eacute;gime and that which preceded it. There is,
+of course, far more of local variety and of adaptability to the needs of
+special neighbourhoods in the composition of the Councils than it was ever
+possible there should be in the <i>personnel</i> of the Quarter Session
+administrators. This fact would alone make it unsafe, as may be seen by
+one or two instances, to generalize about these bodies. If in the
+Midlands, in the Metropolitan shires, and in the South Western counties,
+power remains to a great extent in the hands of the old order, and only
+the tenant farmers on a large scale have influence on the Councils, the
+experience of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> northern mining districts and of Wales is very
+different. Throughout the Principality, as well as on the Gloucester and
+Monmouth frontier, the small farmers, who are Nonconformists to a man,
+find themselves, for the first time in their lives, a decisive power in
+their neighbourhood. The same is the case in Durham. Here the colliers,
+also for the most part Nonconformists, containing among them many of the
+finest, most upright, and manly specimens of the English race, practically
+dominate the Council of the Northern shire.<a name='fna_30' id='fna_30' href='#f_30'><small>[30]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<p class="title">COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Reasons why London was not included in the Corporation Reform Act of
+1835. Popular character of its municipal government contrasts with
+Royal encroachments of various periods. Various schemes and
+commissions of City reform since the Queen&#8217;s accession. 1853
+Commission alone produced practical result in the establishment in
+1855 of Metropolitan Board of Works. Relations between this Board and
+the City. In 1888 Board of Works superseded by London County Council.
+Exact relations between London County Council and the City
+Corporation. National and Imperial uses of Lord Mayor illustrated.
+Possible changes of the future. Class fusion illustrated by titled
+Mayors and other provincial usages.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The London County Council, which has little in common with the bodies
+already examined except the name, has been reserved to a chapter dealing
+chiefly, like the present, with the polity of the capital. For the
+exclusion of London from the Corporation Act of 1835, sufficient reasons,
+whether of principle or procedure, may be assigned. To the former category
+belongs the fact that the City Corporation, even during the encroachments
+of the Tudors and the Stuarts, had, unlike other towns, maintained its
+original liberties. It was, amid all its vicissitudes, not, as were the
+corporations described above, a self chosen, but a popularly elected,
+body. Secondly, the Corporation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> Commissioners did not think that a period
+within three years of Lord Grey&#8217;s Reform Act, before the ground swell of
+the excitement, caused by that measure, had subsided, was suitable for
+deciding complex and far-reaching issues like those presented by the civic
+system grouped round Guildhall. At the same time the Commissioners
+expressly recorded their opinion that the magnitude of the problem ought
+not indefinitely to postpone an attempt at its solution and that the
+difference between the administrative problems of the provinces and the
+capital was one chiefly of degree. In their separate report of 1837 the
+Commissioners confined their observations on municipal London to cautious
+negatives. The suggestion of creating a congeries of Metropolitan
+municipalities had even then been made, as it has often been renewed
+since. This proposal was officially condemned on the ground that it would
+only remove an anomaly by provoking an abuse. At the same time, certain
+functions of local administration were specified which, within the
+Metropolitan area would be performed most efficiently and economically
+under the control of a single authority. In 1853 a special Commission
+enquiring into the affairs of the City Corporation, among various, but not
+very definite proposals, hinted that the seven parliamentary boroughs, of
+which London then consisted, might supply the machinery for a heptarchy of
+municipalities administratively associated in a central Board of Works.
+That body was to be composed of persons chosen by the different boroughs
+of the capital. No active steps were taken towards the heptarchical
+subdivision of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> capital. But in 1855 the Metropolis Local Management
+Act was introduced by Sir Benjamin Hall. The result was the Metropolitan
+Board of Works, which remained an active power until it was superseded by
+or incorporated in the London County Council of 1888. All the then
+existing parishes and vestries of London sent members elected by the
+vestries to this central body. The Board of Works supplied the long
+desiderated unity of administration. If during its thirty-three years of
+rule it made many enemies, it also effected great improvements. In 1884
+the Administration of Mr Gladstone produced a fresh measure of London
+reform. The chief feature of this was the absorption by the City of the
+powers of the Metropolitan Board, and the redistribution of parochial
+functions concentrated upon the City Corporation but now to be divided
+among new local bodies. This proposal proved equally unacceptable to the
+City which was already overburdened, and to the parochial bodies which
+were soon to be superseded. It had, however, advanced the question a
+perceptible degree; had renewed popular interest in London reform, and
+helped to create the public opinion which, four years later, in 1888,
+enabled the Cabinet of the day to include London in the Bill for
+establishing County Councils throughout the kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>In the provinces, as has been seen, the County Councils practically have
+taken over the civil and administrative duties of magistrates formerly
+exercised at Quarter Sessions, but have in no way touched the judicial
+functions of these gentlemen as representatives<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> of the Queen&#8217;s justice.
+In the same way, the London County Council has left absolutely unimpaired
+the judicial power of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen organized in their
+various courts to execute and administer the civil and criminal law
+according to the historic traditions of the capital. The Common Council of
+London City has, therefore, to-day the powers which belong to an ordinary
+borough council. Outside the City limits, the London County Council with
+respect to drainage, sanitary arrangements generally, new streets and
+local improvements of all kinds, in courteous, rather than compulsory,
+concert with the City discharges the functions of the former Board of
+Works, or of a County Council in the provinces.</p>
+
+<p>That this friendly association between the two Metropolitan bodies, the
+old and the new, should be practicable is what a knowledge of the past
+would lead one to expect. In civic affairs London has always been an
+encouragement and example to provincial townships. The magnitude of its
+area, the preoccupation of its inhabitants with the complex interests and
+exhausting activities of their daily life render London, as Cobden and
+others have always discovered, an impracticable headquarters for political
+agitation. But long before our great provincial centres had been possessed
+with that intense feeling of corporate life which is now the boast of
+Manchester or Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, or Leeds, the traders who
+did their business under the shadow of Guildhall were united by a
+citizenship scarcely less stimulating and constraining than that of the
+little Republics of old Greece. One, and each of them, they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> took a
+patriotic pride in the material perfection to which the conveniences or
+comforts of their existence had been brought. Thus, as Lancashire has seen
+with exultation the reflection of its collective life in the great cities
+on the Irwell, or the Mersey, the entire Kingdom and Empire have always
+recognized the symbol of their unity as well as of their greatness in the
+prosperity or in the institutions of London City. Nor does anything more
+impress the mind of our foreign neighbours or our Colonial fellow-citizens
+than the response to appeals for help in the day of distress which issue
+from the Mansion House as from the heart of the English race. It is thus
+no exaggeration to say that the past records and contemporary services of
+London have proved of some moral use in promoting the success of the very
+latest municipal reforms. That a final stage in the evolution of London
+government has yet been reached no one believes, least of all the men who
+completed the preliminaries for the formation of the London County
+Council. The Commissioners of 1886-7 have themselves pointed out the
+anomaly of applying to London, even though it be called a County, that
+form of administration which is primarily intended for provincial shires
+necessarily identified not with commerce and trade, but with rural
+pursuits and interests. The City Corporation and the London County Council
+will both be relieved when the existing period of transition with its
+occasional friction and confusion is terminated. The relations between the
+two bodies must necessarily be mutually those of armed vigilance rather
+than of cordial alliance. What is known as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> Unification Commission
+was, it must be remembered, appointed at the instance of the London County
+Council. The chief points of the proposal thus made was as earlier
+paragraphs have shown practically to merge the City in some new municipal
+body to the East of Temple Bar. As matters are, while the Lord Mayor and
+Aldermen are not County Councillors of London, the City of London has four
+representatives on the Council. These, however, are not the nominees of
+the Corporation, but are chosen by the ordinary civic constituency, the
+ratepayers. As a matter of fact, though by a coincidence, of the four
+present representatives on the Council of the City, one is an Alderman,
+and another a common Councilman. But they were not chosen in these
+capacities. As little therefore as the vestries or as the local boards is
+the Corporation directly represented in the London County Council, which
+was created by the Act of 1888. When, in addition to its hospitable and
+charitable functions, the services rendered by the City to the cause of
+national education are remembered; when it is considered that nearly all
+the great Guilds help by exhibitions to support poor students at the
+Universities, and that they also make regular and liberal contributions to
+the Science and Art department at South Kensington as well as to the
+Finsbury Institute for the technical training of mechanics and artizans,
+the extreme unwisdom of any scheme of London reform which shall, by
+wounding the pride, discourage the generosity of the historic interests
+now mentioned, becomes self-evident.</p>
+
+<p>However cordial at the different points where they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> are brought into
+contact the relations may be between the old Corporation and the new
+Council, it is seemingly agreed on all sides that the true method for
+administering that vast and not yet finally circumscribed area inhabited
+by what De Quincey once called &#8216;the nation of London,&#8217; has still to be
+devised. The suggestions for future reform are innumerable in quantity and
+Protean in character. Whether the existing areas of separate control
+inside or outside the City gates should be maintained; whether they could
+be replaced conveniently by five or ten, by six or fourteen, separate
+municipalities; these are the problems that, as in the past, so in the
+future, seem likely long to divide the minds of Metropolitan reformers.
+The City Corporation has already divested itself, <i>e.g.</i> in its relations
+with the Commissioners of Sewers, of certain functions which normally
+belong to a town council. Hence, it has been suggested that this process
+might be continued till the Lord Mayor and Aldermen practically merged
+themselves in the existing County Council of the capital. In that event,
+the administrative jurisdiction of the County Council, instead of stopping
+abruptly at Temple Bar, as it now does, would stretch from the Strand to
+the Guildhall. From thence it would radiate throughout the region
+generally spoken of as the City. There does not seem much likelihood of
+the fulfilment of this contingency. Such a scheme could not work well
+unless it were embraced with practical unanimity by those whom it
+immediately concerned. The Lord Mayor of London, and the authorities
+gathered round him, naturally regard with jealousy even the apparent
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>infringement of their historic prerogatives and immemorial dignities. Nor
+in the interests, not of the City alone, but of the nation at large is it
+desirable that anything should be done which might actually impair the
+prestige, or even sentimentally wound the vanity of the exceedingly
+useful, and uniformly patriotic and generous men who are installed by
+annual succession in the Mansion House. The lofty attributes with which
+the French press and stage have invested the Lord Mayor are not entirely
+caricature. They indicate corresponding realities. The Lord Mayor has
+always been and remains to-day far more than the local head of a great
+municipality. In all parts of the Three Kingdoms, he, with his colleagues,
+controls territorial estates equal in extent, and far more than equal in
+revenue to a Continental Duchy. The Guildhall, with its library and
+museum; the Mansion House; schools and institutions like the City of
+London School, Ward&#8217;s City of London School for Girls, the Guildhall
+School of Music; these are only a few of the foundations that are
+naturally presided over by the Lord Mayor. They all exist, not so much for
+the glory of the City, as for the service of the community. Possibly it
+might be useful to classify the complicated functions of the Sovereign of
+the City. It would then be seen how far the principle of devolution could
+be applied to his various attributes in their daily exercise. There are
+those who have imagined that within the empire of the Lord Mayor of the
+future there might be created subordinate municipalities which would act
+as local committees under his central control.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>Few better proofs of the general intelligence and efficiency of the County
+Councils could be given than the wisdom with which they have discharged an
+educational duty of the first importance imposed upon them by a new
+parliamentary statute. The Customs and Excise Act of 1890 placed certain
+funds for the development of technical instruction at the disposal of the
+Councils. That duty in the opinion of the critics at Whitehall was
+performed so efficiently as to suggest the formation of committees from
+the Councils to ascertain local needs of technical training as well as
+practically to control, in the place of School Boards, the elementary
+education of the Kingdom. The Measure wherein that proposal was embodied,
+the Education Bill of 1896, has been withdrawn. The tribute to the
+capacity of the Councils remains. The educational functions with which it
+was suggested to charge these bodies, will without doubt, some day be
+performed by them.</p>
+
+<p>The wholesome fusion of classes promoted in the country villages and towns
+by recent local government reforms has been already noticed. The same
+tendency has been pleasantly illustrated at other points in the social
+scale. The legislation of 1888 neither diminished the prestige nor
+trenched upon the province of the Imperial Parliament. The only point at
+which it can be said to have touched that body was the process connected
+with the acquirement of land for public purposes by Parish Councils. Here,
+it will be remembered; if the order, decided on by a majority of the
+Parish Councillors, is ratified by the County Council; if, after that, it
+passes the ordeal of the Local Government Board; then the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> Whitehall
+department issues its sanction for the purchase of the land in question.
+That order has forthwith the validity of an Act of Parliament, without
+having gone through the different stages incidental to legislation at
+Westminster.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, hereditary legislators have to a considerable extent
+practically interested themselves in, and placed their experience at the
+disposal of, the County Councils; just as, with regard to Parish Councils,
+the clergy and gentry have been seen assisting at the deliberations of
+their tenants or their flock. The first chairman of the County Council of
+London, Lord Rosebery, only abdicated that office to become Prime
+Minister. Among his successors were the former permanent head of the Board
+of Trade, Lord Farrer, the Vice-President, Sir J. Hutton and Sir Arthur
+Arnold. The same process of social amalgamation has been witnessed in the
+provinces not less signally than in the capital. The premier peer of
+England, the Duke of Norfolk, has been Mayor of Sheffield. Lord Derby has
+filled the same office at Liverpool. Lord Windsor, in succession to Lord
+Bute, has been Mayor of Cardiff. Lord Beauchamp has presided over the
+Corporation of Worcester. Lord Hothfield, one of the largest landowners in
+Westmorland, has been Mayor of Appleby. Lord Lonsdale has been Mayor of
+Whitehaven, Lord Zetland has held the same position at Richmond. Lords
+Dudley, Ripon, Warwick, and Crewe, have presided each of them over the
+Corporations of the towns from which respectively they derive their
+titles. If this be a reversion to an earlier usage of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> aristocracy in
+England, the precedent had been almost forgotten before the practice was
+revived. The analogy that to most persons will more readily have suggested
+itself is rather that of the cities of medi&aelig;val Italy; when the commercial
+community of Genoa was presided over by a lineal descendant of the Doges;
+when a Doria was at the head of the municipality of Rome; when Milan and
+the Lombard capitals, which first instructed England in arts of luxury and
+in modes of splendour, were controlled by Magistrates whose pedigrees
+might have stretched back beyond the Empire to the classical Republic. If
+the civic association of the titular nobility with the new democracy of
+England were not popular it could not exist; and titled Mayors would cease
+to be returned by popular constituencies. If on the other hand the
+municipal compliments failed to bring with them to their recipients an
+opportunity of usefulness as well as a sense of honour, they would not be
+accepted. The plain historical truth is that the patrician landowners of
+England have recognized the opportunity of removing the remnant of
+traditional estrangement between themselves and the masses of their
+countrymen of which so much was heard during the years immediately
+following the new Poor Law of half a century since. Of that sentiment,
+little known except by hearsay to the present generation, the most vivid,
+and not the least trustworthy record is still to be found in a fiction
+already mentioned in these pages, Mr Disraeli&#8217;s <i>Sibyl</i>. Nothing but
+reciprocal good can come of these relations between the classes and the
+masses, to apply to them the distinguishing terms used by Mr Gladstone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+An apprenticeship to the routine work of municipal affairs in view of the
+changed subject matter of the questions of the day is more likely to prove
+practically serviceable for those born into the condition of hereditary
+statesmen than a course of diplomatic lounging in the Courts and
+Chanceries of the world, or even than the grand tour which now extends
+from Calcutta in one direction to Chicago in another. The class fusion
+that is so signally the social product of the present reign has culminated
+in the conditions which, in the fulness of time, legislation has rather
+recognized than produced. Long before provincial self government was
+established upon the lines indicated by the Acts of 1888 and 1894, the
+spirit which in 1867 prompted Edward Denison to take up his dwelling in
+Whitechapel had been exemplified by philanthropists of both sexes in
+London and elsewhere. The sister of Mr Chamberlain is one of several
+ladies at Birmingham who systematically co-operated for purposes of house
+to house visiting in the poorest quarters of the town that they might
+practically instruct the wives and daughters of working men in the arts of
+domestic management, and in the possibility of keeping the humblest homes
+happy, healthy, comfortable and clean. Similar organizations have done a
+like work in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and no doubt in all
+our great centres of population.<a name='fna_31' id='fna_31' href='#f_31'><small>[31]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<p class="title">THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS OF &#8216;SIBYL&#8217;</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Exterior of a University settlement in the East End. The scene in the
+street. Various functions of the University settlers within. General
+supervision of health arrangements; putting the law in motion to that
+end. Conciliation between masters and men. The higher culture for East
+End pupils. Coaching a Bethnal Green four. Earlier efforts in this
+direction. S.W. slum boys in Belgravian drawing rooms. The young lady
+and the ubiquitous jockey. The settlements and clubs of to-day at the
+East End of London foreshadowed by earlier organizations in the
+provinces by the agencies of the Christian socialists; the working
+man&#8217;s colleges, etc. The inside life of settlements and clubs to-day.
+Schools of character to all concerned. General analogy between West
+End and East End clubs. Some details of the good work done for, and
+by, both sexes, young and old. A City missioner&#8217;s testimony. Then and
+now in the East End. A. Toynbee; T. H. Green and this movement. Rules
+suggested by personal experience for the conduct of this intercourse
+between different classes.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>In a street broad and clean, as many of those at the extreme East End of
+London are, but still in the heart of an unmistakably poor, often a
+squalid quarter, is a house which, resembling its fellows in architecture,
+presents even as to its exterior the appearance of being inhabited by
+persons of a better sort. On the pavement outside groups of men, women and
+boys are waiting for admission. The door is opened presently, not by a
+servant of either sex, but by a person, evidently a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> gentleman, in the
+prime of early and athletic manhood. The men and women are introduced into
+a room on the ground floor. Their host hears perhaps of a fever having
+broken out not a hundred yards off; of a home distrained upon for unpaid
+rent by an impatient landlord, or gutted of its furniture by the broker&#8217;s
+man, of a local inspector&#8217;s failure to order the demolition of dwellings
+unfit for human habitation, of a strike imminent near the Docks, and
+likely in its results to leave tens of households without clothing or
+food. If this be the tale poured into the ears of the young Oxford or
+Cambridge graduate, he at once hurries off to see whether his personal
+influence, strengthened as it is by some years of varied local experience,
+cannot move the landlord to give his tenants one more chance; or whether
+the tact, that is not likely to grow rusty from lack of practice, cannot
+promote a compromise between masters and men; or whether the knowledge of
+municipal law, acquired by many months of careful reading, with the help
+of local illustrations, cannot be so brought to bear upon the parochial
+officer as to induce him duly to execute the letter of the Sanitary
+Statute.</p>
+
+<p>If none of these things have to be done the lads may be called into the
+chamber which serves the resident for the purpose of study and pupil-room.
+It is, in fact, just such another den as very likely may have been
+occupied by our graduate a couple of years ago when he was an Eton master
+and saw his private pupils at his quarters in Keate&#8217;s Lane. It by no means
+follows that the subject of his conversation with these East End lads is
+primarily scholastic or strictly educational. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> University resident at
+the East End has brought with him the taste for athletics of all kinds
+which he acquired on the Isis or the Cam. He devotes as much time to
+teaching his East End pupils cricket or oarsmanship as to awakening and
+satisfying their interest in learning or letters. He and his party are
+therefore very likely to be seen taking the omnibus or rail if the
+afternoon be fine, to Putney or Hammersmith, where the spectators on the
+bank will soon be cheering a Bethnal Green four practising starts with a
+Leander or a University crew.</p>
+
+<p>The building of whose interior a glance has been given is probably the
+hired house in which two or three members of the Academic or Public School
+settlement live. It may be one of the many clubs for adults, for boys or
+girls, which to-day are scarcely less common in the purlieus of Poplar
+than are clubs of a different sort in St James&#8217;s or Pall Mall. These
+institutions are among the chief instruments of civilization on which the
+new settlers rely. No one now doubts the service to the manners and the
+morals of the upper classes rendered by the joint-stock caravanserais of
+the West End. Three bottle men, as readers of Thackeray may see for
+themselves, lasted throughout the epoch of coffee houses. They very
+generally disappeared with the replacement of coffee houses by clubs, and
+with the early adjournment from the dinner table to the smoking room. A
+club-man in his cups was found to be a nuisance. A new public opinion was
+created against an old vice. Protracted potations rapidly became, as
+Hamlet desired, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, till a
+toper in St James&#8217;s became as rare<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> as a bishop in a billiard room. An
+analogous reform in the East End as in the West has been worked by a like
+agency. The fittings and the environments of the institution differ in the
+two regions. Their moral influence is identical in both. In this matter,
+too, as in so many other modes of social improvement, the Metropolis
+followed the lead of the provinces. East End clubs, in contradistinction
+to boozing-dens, existed indeed long before University settlements were
+known, or before Edward Denison&#8217;s first visit to Whitechapel was paid; but
+not before at Lancaster in 1860, the Working Men&#8217;s Mutual Improvement and
+Recreation Society had flourished for some little time. In like manner,
+the University settlements now spoken of, had been preceded by the
+organized efforts of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, and other
+representatives of what was then called Christian socialism, to establish
+by the college for working men in Great Ormond Street a living connection
+between University influence and industrial well being. Even working men&#8217;s
+colleges had existed in the country before F. D. Maurice made his London
+experiment. Sheffield witnessed the first of these during the early
+fifties. Oxford and Cambridge towns were not long behind. Thus the
+promoters of academic settlements were not without the benefit of the
+experience of their earlier predecessors as well as of the public spirited
+association of their contemporaries. The Working Men&#8217;s Club and Institute
+Union had been founded in 1862 by Lord Brougham and Lord Lyttelton. Much
+of the machinery, as well as a nucleus, for the endeavours of the
+settlers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> of a latter day was ready to their hands before they began their
+work. But the idea of the combination of gymnasium with club, and of the
+subordination of the roughest kind of physical exercise to the ends of
+social culture had not been illustrated on any extensive scale before
+institutions like the Repton or the Oxford House clubs were controlled by
+men who took this way of doing honour to the name of their University or
+their school.</p>
+
+<p>Before this, ladies living in Belgravia, revering the memory and example
+of Maurice, were in the habit of inviting to their drawing rooms from the
+alleys and by-ways in which the fashionable district abounds poor boys who
+could not be tempted, even with the bait of magic lanterns, to the night
+school. The work was found to be rather too exacting. The chivalry of
+street boyhood did not, as might have been foreseen, prevent the urchins
+from gratifying their sense of fun at her expense in the drawing room of
+the amateur teacher. The joke of giving, as their names, those of the
+famous jockeys of the hour, Fordham, Archer, Cannon, as the case may be,
+proved too good to be resisted. Gravity, once disturbed, could not be
+restored. The pupils could do nothing but laugh at each other&#8217;s fun. Their
+would-be instructress had to acquiesce in their removal when the servant
+came to clear away the tea things. A public feeling in favour of order and
+even cleanliness has long since been generated in the boys&#8217; clubs
+controlled by the University settlers. First the prejudice against collars
+as an article of attire goes out; then a feeling in favour of washed hands
+sets in. In the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> recreation rooms upstairs boxing gloves are provided as a
+safety valve for the escape of the superfluous humours of Arab animalism.
+Then by slow degrees comes the hour when bagatelle boards may be
+introduced without danger of their being used for the breaking of heads,
+or of the bagatelle cues being employed for the perforation of the
+lath-and-plaster walls instead of for the propulsion of the ivory balls.</p>
+
+<p>The parents are provided with the same sort of accommodation as their
+children. The adult clubs are chiefly of two kinds. In some, the first
+purpose is political. In that case the society becomes an agency for the
+propagation of Radical ideas, and probably an outwork of Trades-Unionism.
+But from many of these foundations politics, which are generally
+synonymous with advanced Liberalism, are excluded. In the majority, if not
+in all, of the non-political clubs, intoxicating drinks, though under
+conditions they were sanctioned by the early founders, are by common
+agreement, prohibited also. The popularity of these clubs with the wives
+of their habitu&eacute;s is a sufficient proof of the sobering tendency of the
+new resorts. In all cases, the women gain scarcely less advantage from
+them than the men. Each club is an organization for social entertainments
+and hospitalities to which members are free to bring all their women-kind.</p>
+
+<p>The dominant idea of the University settlement to which these clubs are
+subsidiary, is to give the poorest and most densely populated working
+class districts the benefit of a resident gentry such as, in the clergyman
+or the squire, is generally <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>commanded in rural parishes. The local
+separation between employer and employed; the fact that the workers do
+not, as they used to do, dwell to-day within sight of their masters, but
+are segregated into colonies of their own in another quarter of the
+capital, and have no access to persons better informed than themselves in
+the troubles and perplexities, big or small, of everyday existence, first
+prompted those who realized the perils of this situation, to make, as far
+as might be, common lot with their less fortunate fellow creatures. In New
+York, where these societies seem to have been known longer than in
+England, the phrase employed is Neighbourhood Guild. To obtain the local
+knowledge which can alone enable the most wise or charitable to give
+effective help, habitual residence under conditions and in neighbourhoods
+identical with the class to be benefited is absolutely necessary. The
+University settler becomes in fact a sort of Delphic Oracle, consulted on
+all embarrassing contingencies by the entire neighbourhood. To vary the
+simile, the enquiries made of him are not less various than the questions
+which the editor of a popular print undertakes to answer in his
+Correspondence column. The doubts and complications arising out of the law
+of landlord and tenant, especially out of that enigmatic being, the
+compound householder who so long obstructed the path of Household
+Franchise, require a practical knowledge of often abstruse legal points
+and sometimes compel resort to a professional solicitor. The precise steps
+necessary to put in motion the Statute<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> for the removal of hopelessly
+insanitary dwellings are not likely to be within the knowledge of the
+dwellers by the Docks. These are only a few of the knots which for the
+instruction of those he has chosen for neighbours, the University settler
+must be prepared to untie. And this is only one of the duties which he
+actually performs. He not only takes part in the municipal government of
+his neighbourhood; he helps others to take part in it, too. Already he has
+himself sat on School Boards and trained grown-up pupils to fill his
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University
+settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of
+the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy
+the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that
+are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies&#8217;
+College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public
+schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in
+hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works
+of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor
+mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the
+conventional &#8216;day in the country,&#8217; but a sojourn of weeks, or even months,
+in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant
+uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought
+to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham
+ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few
+hours&#8217; journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little
+charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their
+homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were
+first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes
+may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic
+lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas
+tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general,
+though not uncontrolled, romp.</p>
+
+<p>Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers
+aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than
+indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated
+to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent
+part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said,
+decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be
+forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over
+all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any
+breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average
+standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving.
+Generally and individually the club members have realized that their
+material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and
+in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach
+of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship.
+Such a conviction indicates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> the progress made towards the creation of a
+healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would
+have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any
+sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even
+destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their
+brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin
+East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End
+has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced
+them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their
+dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled:
+<i>The Universities and the Social Problem</i><a name='fna_32' id='fna_32' href='#f_32'><small>[32]</small></a> do indeed include some
+rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy
+in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to
+Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of
+pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did
+not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might
+have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the
+baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of
+putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose
+of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> General Booth, who
+both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that
+poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original
+sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on
+fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into
+habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas
+of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of
+gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People&#8217;s Palace, for
+some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact,
+were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young
+patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick
+slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much
+above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social
+deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the
+superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the
+Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable
+advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar
+and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less
+outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know
+unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service
+which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The
+work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather
+than &aelig;sthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the
+neighbourhoods they visit. Their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> opinion of the practical results of the
+agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a
+missioner to the present writer: &#8216;It marks an epoch in East End
+civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have
+despaired.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men&#8217;s
+Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is
+no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious
+it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist,
+should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie&#8217;s subscribers, or
+should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the
+British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the
+union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by
+the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with
+wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers&#8217;
+Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to
+which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves
+have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more
+highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclop&aelig;dias like Mr Augustus Hare
+or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to &#8216;take walks&#8217; with them.
+Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct
+them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are
+the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the
+student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The
+biographies of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic
+vicissitudes of the Republics of medi&aelig;val Italy, even the philosophy as
+well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after
+a day&#8217;s manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate
+returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to
+be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago,
+or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship,
+as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate
+benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold
+Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral
+philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the
+disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present
+to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it
+had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato,
+or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most
+valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of
+his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a
+prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local
+bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught
+more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford
+settlers at the East End have improved upon Green&#8217;s example, with much of
+his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the
+East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating
+to that part of unfashionable London.<a name='fna_33' id='fna_33' href='#f_33'><small>[33]</small></a> Thanks mainly to the influence
+and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements
+in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households
+had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social
+results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the
+writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the
+later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of
+course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social
+disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the
+increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and
+drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those
+purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still
+incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been
+examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous.
+The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers
+is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district,
+whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the
+settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his
+joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training
+that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of
+which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a
+founder.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> The assistance of those in such a position as the University
+settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. &#8216;We always
+need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford
+Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can
+keep things going pretty well for ourselves.&#8217; Such is the common remark of
+the settler&#8217;s friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt.
+The University settler and his friends in his own station are not,
+however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society
+is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the
+atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If
+the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or
+profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the
+same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde
+Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a
+suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after
+edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own
+equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at
+the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require,
+not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people
+need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction,
+whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man,
+but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who
+are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the
+field against the heaviest odds, are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> perfectly manageable. The most
+aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of
+fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among
+their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their
+bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity
+they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the
+courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ
+from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these
+ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a
+single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who
+consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty
+begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No
+section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate
+order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class.
+The genuine working man in the working man&#8217;s club causes none of those
+embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that
+of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of
+Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to
+be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden
+rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense
+on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position,
+let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any
+conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above
+all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the
+manual overture<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing
+that the maker &#8216;has no false pride.&#8217; A greater mistake there could not be,
+as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith
+in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother&#8217;s footman on
+receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him
+who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure
+and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison&#8217;s and of
+Arnold Toynbee&#8217;s influence for good with their inferiors was that they not
+only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own
+work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them
+and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the
+gulf separating &#8216;the two nations&#8217; of the English people.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<p class="title">FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the
+Queen&#8217;s accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the
+people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel
+Whitbread&#8217;s faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster&#8217;s Education Act.
+Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and
+Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department
+completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or
+Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and
+the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the
+Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891.
+Elementary education now organized. External change in the English
+landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently
+made towards this.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national
+activity the special features of English life during the last half of this
+century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational
+arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly,
+with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady
+progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within
+measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English
+boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the
+highest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which
+merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career
+open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than
+half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State
+practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching
+purposes a grant of &pound;20,000. The sum with annual increments was
+thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in
+Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the
+Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a
+twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of
+organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and
+the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just
+named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George&#8217;s Channel never
+neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on
+the eve of the Queen&#8217;s accession, thousands of working men and women owed
+practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the
+close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In
+the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of
+the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English
+clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell
+Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a
+scheme of instruction for the whole English people.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> Parliament fitfully
+recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the
+son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E.
+Forster&#8217;s reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal
+of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the
+earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in
+the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to
+enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself
+brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The
+project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry
+which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we
+have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the &pound;7,000,000 now
+spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for
+that purpose of, &pound;20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we
+have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an
+interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne&#8217;s Administration excited
+much obloquy, and raised the &#8216;No Popery&#8217; cry against them, by allowing a
+share in a grant, now increased to &pound;30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The
+House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of
+religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a
+majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with
+certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto,
+the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first
+time an Education Department was organized under the Lord<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> President of
+the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was
+appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston&#8217;s long term of office, in 1857,
+the Education grant rose to &pound;451,000. It became more expressly understood
+that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in
+the Vice-President.<a name='fna_34' id='fna_34' href='#f_34'><small>[34]</small></a> With the steady increase of the annual grant, its
+province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle
+of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer
+limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had
+been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence.
+Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The
+quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in
+proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was
+more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the
+efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the
+Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education
+reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment
+by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in
+schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The
+teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase
+in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> Vote amounted to
+one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe&#8217;s drastic, if
+indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that
+sum.</p>
+
+<p>No fundamental change took place till the Education Act of 1870, always
+associated as that will be with the name of W. E. Forster. Dealt with as
+to its provisions, its working and its results, in elaborate detail in the
+author&#8217;s preceding work, <i>England</i>, the Measure now rather more than a
+quarter of a century old will here be summarized sufficiently by reminding
+the reader that this legislation empowered the election of School Boards
+throughout the Kingdom, but maintained the system of voluntary
+subscriptions, and only compelled the institution of School Boards where
+voluntary effort had failed, and in the Time Table Conscience Clause
+provided a security for individual liberty. Mr Mundella&#8217;s Act of 1880 made
+education absolutely compulsory throughout England and Wales, whereas
+before then the power of compulsion was left to the local authorities. In
+all State-aided schools, religion was to be taught either at the beginning
+or end of school hours, so that, without disturbance to the general
+curriculum individual children could be withdrawn from the sacred lesson
+at their parents&#8217; will, without incurring any disability on that account.
+These provisions met with the usual fate of legislative compromises. They
+deeply offended many sections. They entirely pleased none. The battle
+between religious and irreligious training, between what have been called
+the National<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> and the Denominational systems was not decided in 1870. It
+has been fought over again more than once since then. It remains unsettled
+to this day.</p>
+
+<p>During the whole of that decade, the Education Acts were supplemented with
+detailed legislation of a consolidating or modifying kind. No organic
+change took place till in 1891, the Government of Lord Salisbury adopted
+the first of the three Fs, long since propounded by Mr Chamberlain, and by
+abolishing the School pence which scarcely repaid the trouble of their
+collection, made elementary education as free to all children in the land,
+as by the law of 1870 it had practically become compulsory. The proposal
+to free the schools was not universally popular with the party to whose
+lot it fell to execute that policy. So, notwithstanding its exclusive
+traditions, that party had, under Mr Disraeli a quarter of a century
+earlier by its Household Suffrage Bill, recognized and established the
+English democracy. The plea on which those who had begun by resisting free
+schools finally accepted them was the expediency of accepting the
+inevitable first, and secondly the practical wisdom of obtaining credit
+for Conservatism by doing well and wisely that which at some future time
+the opposite party would have ingratiated themselves with the masses by
+doing badly. The results of free education were speedily visible in the
+increase of the children educated throughout the land. The increase of
+children in schools during the five years preceding the Free Education Act
+of 1891 had been 269,903. During the quinquennial period after the Act the
+increase was 421,860, or, in round numbers,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> just double. The first rung
+in the educational ladder for the benefit of all classes of the Kingdom
+had been fixed firmly by the Act of 1870. It was not, nor was ever,
+regarded by its authors as a complete Measure. It provided no regular
+system of higher grade schools intermediary between the most elementary
+teaching, and the more liberal culture of the grammar schools. The only
+supplement that it received from the Government under which it had become
+law was the Endowed Schools Act of 1874 for re-arranging the funds and
+remodelling the curricula in secondary endowed schools throughout the
+country. Private effort and local enterprise usefully came in where Mr
+Foster&#8217;s Education Act had stopped short. In various parts of England, and
+especially in the great northern counties of Lancashire, Durham and York,
+School Boards, fortunate enough to possess controlling spirits of
+exceptional enlightenment, exercised their legal power to establish
+schools of a higher kind specially for the teaching of science or art, and
+generally for the tincture of the youthful mind with a more generous
+training. Such schools received additional grants from the Science and Art
+Department at South Kensington.</p>
+
+<p>In this way the 1870 Act at once partially enabled the child of the
+poorest parents to mount through the elementary schools, to the secondary
+schools of the Kingdom and thence to those seats of learning at which the
+picked youth of the country enjoy the choicest opportunities of mental
+culture, or are qualified for the highest posts in after life to which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+English ambition can aspire. The problem now to be solved, which is in
+actual process of solution and of which a few years more may probably
+dispose, is the completion of the national ladder of learning by a more
+thorough organization of the agencies for advanced knowledge throughout
+the country, and for the passage of the pupil from schools of the lowest,
+to schools of the higher grade. Just as, during recent years of the
+present reign, successive Reform Bills have increasingly nationalized the
+legislative Chambers at Westminster; so the tendency and the result of the
+transformations undergone by the great public schools and by the
+Universities, that they feed, is to draw more closely together the bonds
+uniting these institutions with the nation as a whole, to widen their
+curriculum, to infuse a popular element into their governing bodies, and
+to make them not merely the instructors, but the representatives of the
+intellectual interest of the land. By remodelling the governing bodies of
+Eton, Winchester and Harrow, the Public Schools Act of 1868 appreciably
+quickened and deepened the sense of public responsibility inherent in
+these corporations. Nearly thirty years&#8217; experience of the Endowed Schools
+Act justifies the statement that the work accomplished for the grammar
+schools of the country is analogous to the results which the earlier
+legislation has yielded in the case of the more famous seats of youthful
+study.<a name='fna_35' id='fna_35' href='#f_35'><small>[35]</small></a> A wholesome spirit of competition now animates the governors of
+these old if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> often still obscure endowments,<a name='fna_36' id='fna_36' href='#f_36'><small>[36]</small></a> and daily causes fresh
+usefulness to be extracted from money resources, long suffered to remain
+idle. Later legislation, whose general aspects have already received
+attention in these pages, has conspired to deepen the sense of obligation,
+and to stimulate to efforts, most salutary for the taught, alike the
+governors of and the teachers in the schools.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, important
+functions, educational and financial, were given to the new County
+Councils. The grammar schools were quick to perceive a new opportunity. In
+1889, thirteen representatives of the Councils, in some cases at the
+instance of their older colleagues, received seats on the governing bodies
+of the Secondary Schools. The corporations thus reformed have already
+begun vigorously to deal with an abuse inveterate in their smaller
+schools. Where the value of the endowment, from charges on the property of
+which it consists or from a fall in the value of land, has fluctuated the
+governors have been in the habit of farming out the school to the
+headmaster. They have, that is, assigned to him the income of the trust,
+and such fees as he can charge. In return, the pedagogue takes upon
+himself the charges of working the school, and of the teaching of a fixed
+number of free boys. The tendency of this arrangement is, of course, to
+repeat in the present day the experiences of Do-the-boys Hall under Mr
+Squeers in <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>. The headmaster has upon him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> the burden
+not only of his educational work, but of the solvency of his daily
+business. His own stipend is too small to admit of his paying competent
+assistants. He becomes a pensioner on the caprice of well-to-do parents,
+and the instrument of their not generally very enterprising will, or of
+their too enlightened pleasure. The only chance for the small secondary
+schools thus circumstanced is their rescue by some of the more
+public-spirited and opulent of the governors. But this relief is
+forthcoming so rarely that the Commissioners generally recommend the
+closing of all schools existing under these conditions and the application
+of their endowments to purposes less obviously foredoomed to failure.
+Other instances of the waste of existing resources for secondary education
+are even more frequent and not less serious. Grammar schools of competent
+calibre are often geographically crowded so close together as to obstruct
+and paralyse their mutual efforts. Thus in South Devon there is at
+Chudleigh a grammar school of considerable repute. Within a radius of
+sixteen miles, <i>e.g.</i> at Ashburton, Totnes, and Bovey Tracey, there are
+similar schools capable of good work, but lacking a population of parents
+and children to fill their empty benches. A like experience has often
+occurred in the case of establishments which, not being endowed grammar
+schools have not come under the notice of the Commissioners. Bath, for
+instance, has long possessed more educational opportunities than most
+other cities in the West of England. The oldest of her proprietary
+colleges, that in the district known as &#8216;Grosvenor,&#8217; to some extent became
+merged in the less ancient Sydney<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> College. That in due time produced a
+successful offshoot, the Somerset College. These two latter institutions
+during some time were healthily stimulated by mutual competition. At last
+the rivalry became profitable only to the prestige and numbers of the
+secondary schools that, managed on the same principles, had come into
+existence first at Cheltenham, then afterwards on the Clifton downs, near
+Bristol. In 1885,<a name='fna_37' id='fna_37' href='#f_37'><small>[37]</small></a> the Somerset and Sydney Colleges were amalgamated
+under a single headmastership by the title of the Bath College. This
+to-day is doing an excellent work. But it is the North and East of England
+where by the needless reduplication or ill-advised contiguity of schools
+of the same grade the most flagrant breaches are committed against the
+first laws of educational economy. Thus, in the West Riding, the grammar
+school of Ossett has a fair endowment but practically no scholars. Again,
+Walsingham in Norfolk, with less than 1,000 inhabitants, possesses a
+substantially endowed school, the boys attending which had decreased from
+32 in 1884 to 11 in 1894. Not far off at Ipswich, Norwich, and Bury St
+Edmunds, are establishments of historic fame, and of present competence.
+As an alternative to the continued waste of such opportunities, and to
+promote the local completion of the educational ladder indicated in the
+beginning of this chapter, the Commissioners suggest that the Walsingham
+school should be transferred bodily to Fakenham, a prosperous and not
+distant town, or that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> Walsingham funds should be converted into
+scholarships and exhibitions to be held at other places of education
+within the County. There are other small grammar schools which, while just
+paying their way, have evidently no considerable career before them. Here
+the spirit of commercial impatience is apt to suggest the conversion of
+these places of teaching into elementary schools of the better sort. But
+the places now spoken of often have honourable traditions, and resemble
+families that, through no fault of their members, have, by misfortune,
+come down in the world. Local patriotism dwells fondly on the creditable
+past of such institutions, and would be wounded by their irrecoverable
+degradation. Surely, therefore, these schools might have the chance of
+retrieving their position. That, in effect, is what the Commissioners say.
+Assign to the decayed grammar schools their exact place in a reorganized
+system of secondary education. On condition of their adapting themselves
+to the place thus appointed to them, assist them out of the public funds
+to regain full effectiveness, and, together with that, to renew their past
+prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>Within the last few years an illustrious proof has been given that a great
+school is not necessarily so sensitive a plant as to depend for its
+life-blood and vigour on the essential qualities of the soil wherein its
+founders first fixed its roots. &#8216;The Grey Friars&#8217; of Thackeray&#8217;s novels,
+the Charter House school, which, in R. C. Jebb, now Professor of Greek in,
+as well as M.P. for, Cambridge University, has produced probably the first
+scholar of the latter half of this century, has been removed recently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> to
+the great advantage of the physical health and literary industry of its
+scholars from its ancient home in London city to the rural neighbourhood
+of Godalming town. A precedent for the same policy in less famous
+instances, exists. At Hewsworth, in the West Riding, Archbishop Holgate&#8217;s
+grammar school has been closed from lack of pupils. Its endowment was
+merged in that of the grammar school at Barnsley, a town of some 36,000
+inhabitants, midway between Sheffield and Wakefield. Within half a dozen
+years, the Barnsley school, thus reinforced, had achieved prosperity, and
+had adopted the chief recommendations for effective teaching made by the
+Commissioners. One thing is at least clear. If liberal education, the
+process, that is, of the development of the whole intellectual nature,
+without immediate reference to the supply of material needs, is not to
+become a mere tradition; if, in other words, literary culture be worth
+preserving as an instrument for training the mind, the cry for merging the
+grammar schools in agencies of specialist and technical teaching must not
+be adopted without consideration. The highest experts in this matter agree
+that the scientific and technical instruction, which is visibly a paying
+investment, runs in these days no risk of neglect, but that there does
+exist a danger of the first aims and the true methods of intellectual
+training being ignored. Even thus, fairly equipped as England is with the
+machinery for secondary teaching of the scientific sort; still better
+furnished as she might be with a more economical administration of
+existing resources, fresh provision must be made on a liberal scale before
+the national appliances are complete.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> The Commissioners have estimated in
+those counties to which they have paid special attention the number of
+boys or girls educated at secondary schools at 21,878 or 2&middot;5 per 1,000 of
+the population. As might be expected, the local inequalities revealed by
+this analysis are very great. Thus, in Bedford, because of the great
+Harpur endowments of that small county, the proportion per 1,000 is 13&middot;5.
+In Lancashire the population has altogether out-grown the secondary
+endowments available: the proportion per 1,000 is only 11. In Yorkshire it
+is only 2&middot;1. In Warwickshire, notwithstanding the splendid foundations of
+Edward VI. at Birmingham, and the wealthy and famous schools of Warwick
+and Coventry the proportion remains as low as 5&middot;2.</p>
+
+<p>While these aspects of latter day education are being considered, the
+honourable connection of the new Local Government bodies with schools must
+not be ignored. Liverpool, like South Lancashire generally, is not ill
+supplied with agencies for secondary or technical instruction. The means
+of the capital and of the county would both be inadequate but for the very
+liberal contributions made by the County and City Councils to the schools
+owned by religious and secular proprietors for boys and girls. The
+companies thus spoken of are enabled by the Councils to carry on more than
+one particular school at a loss, even though the deficiency be not made
+good by the profit on other schools of the group. In view of the fact
+stated above that a great educational pioneer of this century, Joseph
+Lancaster, was a Quaker, it is interesting to know that the most recent
+Education Commission selects for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> special compliment the Ackworth Friends
+School, open to members of the Society from all parts of the world, in the
+West Riding of Yorkshire. The more searchingly the enquiry is made, the
+more distinctly there emerges the fact that private venture schools
+created by voluntary effort, conducted by individual enterprise, render
+the most effective service to secondary education. These institutions open
+their doors for public examination. They cannot, therefore, be unworthy of
+State help. Their headmasters and their chief assistants generally are
+University graduates, and were often trained at one of the older public
+schools. A fresh rung in the ladder of educational ascent will have been
+made when these schools, 30 per cent. of whose teachers are University
+graduates, receive official registration as well as whatever material
+assistance State recognition can confer. State organization of national
+teaching primary or secondary by means of official examination and by
+grants of money proportioned to the proficiency established by these
+ordeals, is, as we have seen, and as it must always be remembered, not
+more than half a century old, and in a national sense, scarcely therefore
+passed beyond its infancy. The progress indicated in the preceding remarks
+justifies the expectation that before very long the edifice will be
+crowned with a completeness worthy of the strength with which the
+foundations have been laid, and more than one storey of the fabric has
+been already reared.</p>
+
+<p>Other agencies now fairly at work in this enterprise remain to be
+mentioned. Before the Universities had sent their resident representatives
+to the East End of London,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> and to the slums of other great cities, they
+had actively identified themselves with the encouragement and the testing
+of secondary teaching throughout the land. The Oxford and Cambridge middle
+class examinations began to be held during the early sixties in the chief
+towns of provincial England. Very soon afterwards, there were organized
+successively the Higher Schools Examination Board, conducted by the two
+Universities, and the University Extension Lectures which presently will
+be examined here with some detail.</p>
+
+<p>But by this time the fresh appliances for elementary and secondary
+education, both directly or indirectly growing out of the legislation of
+1870, had changed the physical, not less than the intellectual, aspect of
+the whole country. In the city as in the suburbs, in the provinces not
+less than in the metropolis, the whole landscape was thickly dotted with
+new piles of buildings, in all cases constructed with marked regard to
+convenience and health, substantial always, in some cases really handsome.
+These were the new Board Schools, some for the most elementary instruction
+of the rising generation, some for higher grade teaching, or for imparting
+to older children the rudiments of scientific and technical knowledge. In
+the former case the buildings were surrounded with gravel playgrounds,
+furnished with swings, parallel bars, and other gymnastic appliances, all
+used under the direction of an expert teacher, who alternately with the
+drill sergeant came on duty during play hours. The structures annexed to
+the actual class-rooms of more advanced pupils were furnished within as
+laboratories and work rooms. Here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> the pupils were apprenticed to the
+initial duties of the chemist, the gasfitter, the electrician, or of any
+other vocation they were destined in after life to follow. One result of
+this new start in the State schools was the stimulus of a competition that
+produced a perceptible increase of efficiency in the private schools not
+necessarily identified with any religious denominations. These private
+schools still exist; and by the greater elasticity of their system, and
+special opportunity of encouraging individual originality in the learners
+they are the salutary and indispensable adjuncts of the State
+institutions. The generally superannuated and often inefficient dominie,
+alternating between slumber over the text book from which he was supposed
+to teach, and unprovoked aggressions with his cane upon the knuckles or
+any other available part of the persons of his nearest pupils, is now
+replaced by a master in the prime of life and energy, who, if not a
+graduate in a University, has the certificate from one of the many
+examining bodies which attest his fitness for the place. Almost
+imperceptibly to-day, the elementary school matures into the secondary
+school. Nor is the development always indicated by a change of name, for
+higher grade elementary schools, to employ their official title, in which,
+after all his Standards have been passed, the Board School boy, between 15
+and 17 years old is placed, are in effect not less of secondary schools in
+their way than Cheltenham or Westminster. Controlled indeed by the School
+Boards, they prepare their pupils for matriculation at the London or other
+Universities, or for entrance upon professional life. Thus, in 1894,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+exclusive of the capital, the English School Boards controlled no fewer
+than sixty establishments of this higher type. Of that number thirty-nine
+were organized science schools. The fabric of the buildings had been
+provided out of the rates. The cost of the superior teaching was defrayed
+by private munificence, or by the State grants conferred by the Science
+and Art Department which, in South Kensington began as, and still is, a
+portion of the Department in Whitehall. The number of boys and girls,
+according to the latest statistics, educated in these superior Board
+Schools is 4,606 boys, 2,023 girls. Outside London, the great majority of
+the institutions now spoken of are in the Northern, the Midland and the
+Eastern counties. Advantage to all concerned might be expected to accrue
+could these higher Board Schools be managed, if not in active concert, yet
+with the practical approval, and pecuniary encouragement, of the County
+Councils. When, therefore, by the withdrawn Bill of 1896, it was proposed
+to invest County Councils with educational powers, but not, save in rural
+districts, to displace School Boards, the new duties contemplated for
+those Councils were not those for which they entirely lacked preparation.
+In addition to all this, the great City Guilds, notably the Drapers,
+Grocers, and Goldsmiths provide for secondary teaching not only in London,
+but wherever their property lies, a machinery of proved effectiveness. The
+more recent Intermediate Education Act fills in Wales the interval between
+the schoolroom and the workroom; its precedent is sure to be followed
+elsewhere. The means, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>therefore, of technical training accessible to the
+very humblest classes of the community, cannot be described as inadequate.
+While the tendency thus is for places of secondary teaching to become
+training grounds for special, technical, or professional instruction, it
+is satisfactory that Oxford and Cambridge should hold before the eyes of
+the country the standard of the more general culture which is identical
+with real education, and should bring to the very doors of the humblest
+homes throughout the country the effective and inexpensive agencies for
+securing this teaching.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<p class="title">THE LADDER OF EDUCATION</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Mr Lowe&#8217;s advice thirty years ago now fairly fulfilled. Individual
+influence co-operating with the State reforms the true secret of
+recent educational advance. Animating effect felt throughout the
+country of Benjamin Jowett&#8217;s educational example at Oxford. The
+practical and concrete test of the helpfulness of the educational
+ladder to the entire community applied in detail. Instances of Board
+School boys, and of sons of day labourers who have risen to
+distinction with the help of the new educational agencies. Experiences
+of the Clerk of the London School Board and others. Missing rungs
+still to be supplied to the ladder by reorganization or slight
+enlargement of existing resources. Need of reorganizing the teaching
+profession by new local and central councils. Dangers besetting the
+present movement illustrated.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The theory, and, in outline, the practice, of the educational reforms
+reserved for the most recent years of the present reign have now been
+explained with as much fulness as the scheme of this work permits. It
+remains concretely, if of necessity briefly, to answer the question: What
+actually has been done? No Blue Books, or other educational statistics are
+necessary to convince one of the reality and magnitude of the enterprise
+already accomplished. &#8216;Let us educate our masters,&#8217; was the advice of Mr
+Lowe when, in the House of Commons, he bewailed so brilliantly and
+bitterly the era of the new democracy begun by the legislation of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> 1867-8.
+The advice has been followed. A new generation has sprung up, which is
+demonstrably better educated and more humanized than any of its
+predecessors. The diminution of pauperism and crime; the gradual
+disappearance from London and from other great towns of the uncontrollably
+rough element among the street observers of public holidays; the growing
+competition among the industrial classes of museums or picture galleries
+with drinking bars on Sundays and on popular feasts; these are the more
+superficial signs of the progress already made and still going forward.
+Intelligent foreigners,<a name='fna_38' id='fna_38' href='#f_38'><small>[38]</small></a> the very men who are said to anticipate the
+judgments of posterity, declare that within the last twenty years the
+physiognomical type of the London street loungers and loafers has visibly
+improved; that the look of the vulture which was habitual on faces pinched
+by hunger, and puffy or pallid with debauchery, is no longer the
+dominating expression of feature; that the rapacious arabs of the pavement
+who were formerly ready to devour the new comer outside Charing Cross or
+Victoria railway stations, where they have not disappeared, have become
+orderly, intelligent, and not altogether the reverse of polite. It
+requires perhaps an Englishman to appreciate at their true worth, the more
+delicate gradations of this improvement as it is illustrated elsewhere. Go
+into the pit or gallery of a London theatre, on the Surrey side or in
+Hoxton. In look, in manner, and in the kind of conversation between the
+acts, the play-goers have changed. If there were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> ever any danger of an
+orange or ginger-beer bottle descending from the gallery to the pit, the
+peril is now obsolete. Should the situation be Shoreditch or the City
+Road, the strains of the orchestra intermittently may be accompanied by
+voices joining in the chorus with original variations. But the melodies,
+however irregular, only express an honest holiday enthusiasm. Schools
+elementary, whether of the first or second grade, secondary, technical or
+scientific, explain much of this new improvement in the facial
+characteristics and at all public places in the general deportment of the
+humblest of Her Majesty&#8217;s subjects. But they do not account for the entire
+change. Something like twenty years ago, when a work named <i>England</i> was
+in preparation its author by personal inspection of the localities
+mentioned, ascertained that the latest reports on the truck system as in
+some parts of Staffordshire it continued to exist, and of the agricultural
+gangs in more northern counties, faithfully depicted the social condition
+of great masses of the mining and rural population. The same local
+examination to-day presents a cheering contrast to the writer&#8217;s earlier
+and depressing experiences. In every town and village of the United
+Kingdom it is now easier than was ever known before for the very poorest
+to live in a cleanly, a godly, sometimes even in a comfortable fashion.
+All the necessaries, most of the superfluities, of existence are to-day
+unprecedentedly cheap. Wages have risen all round, till a pound a week has
+become the normal pay of unskilled adult labour in the town, and about
+twelve shillings in the country. Some conspicuous evils in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> our industrial
+system have indeed yet to be removed. The fines and deductions<a name='fna_39' id='fna_39' href='#f_39'><small>[39]</small></a> to
+which, often without just cause, the earnings of factory hands are
+subjected, have been denounced with just severity, though in moderate
+language, on platforms and in print, by Sir Charles Dilke. On this side of
+the Millennium finality in social legislation will prove, it is to be
+feared, not less difficult than in political matters Lord John Russell
+found, to his disappointment, was the case. The advance of civilization
+itself creates new social conditions which call in their turn for
+periodical legislation. Till the resources of all classes are equalized,
+there must be some who cannot protect themselves, on whose behalf the
+legislature must interpose.</p>
+
+<p>That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as
+well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades
+since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be
+impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class,
+would no longer be represented, even by <i>Punch</i>, as proposing to &#8216;heave
+half a brick&#8217; at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As
+for setting the bull-pup at the parson&#8217;s little boy, the suggestion is
+less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous
+undergraduate, the son of the collier&#8217;s employer who is home for his
+College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of
+Devonshire is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the
+frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park
+round the Reformers&#8217; Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies&#8217; Mile as
+being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That
+implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the
+discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of
+the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord
+Mayor&#8217;s Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the
+Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal.
+The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the
+world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken.
+As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in
+comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk
+hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a
+new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban
+railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their
+Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a
+welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults
+who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school
+days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries;
+the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share
+with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a
+new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but
+wholesomely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as
+that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.</p>
+
+<p>Before considering the provisions necessary to complete the educational
+ladder, it will be well from specific instances to see what the facilities
+already established have done towards promoting the ascent from the Board
+School to the University. The following instances now published for the
+first time, are supplied by the courtesy of the Clerk of the London School
+Board. In 1879 a boy whose first learning was gained at a primary London
+Board School, obtained on entering a secondary school the Carpenters&#8217;
+Foundation Scholarship, together with the Conquest gold medal. Shortly
+afterwards he became captain of the City of London School. Proceeding
+thence to Cambridge, he won a Foundation Scholarship at Trinity;
+eventually was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, became
+next a Fellow of Trinity; and subsequently held a high position in the
+Board of Trade. Another lad of equally humble birth in 1880 got a
+mathematical scholarship at Queen&#8217;s College, Cambridge, was among the
+Senior Optimes in the Tripos and in 1886 was appointed a mathematical
+master at one of the great public schools. In 1881, another Board School
+boy, having received the Greek and Latin certificate from the Universities
+Examining Board won a classical scholarship at St John&#8217;s, Oxford, and
+afterwards a First Class in Classical Moderations. A little later he was
+placed fourth in the First Class of Civil Service candidates. He has since
+developed into a useful official of the Local Government Board. Another
+boy of like antecedents won a scholarship at St John&#8217;s College,
+Cambridge;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> subsequently came out first class in one division, second
+class in another division, of the Theological Tripos; carried off the
+Jeremie Septuagint prize, open to the whole University, and afterwards
+became a successful parish clergyman. Other distinctions won by candidates
+of the same category are a scholarship at the City of London School; in
+1883 a first place in the competition for vacancies in the India Office;
+in another case, and with the other sex, in 1885, the fifth place in the
+London Matriculation test, the Gilchrist and Reid scholarships, and later
+First Class Academic Honours for English. This instance is the more
+memorable because it is the earliest distinction of the sort won by a
+Board School girl. Since then the same young woman has become an assistant
+teacher at the Ladies&#8217; College in Jersey. This example has often been
+repeated since. Three or four of the prize winners at Girton College
+during the later eighties were London Board School girls. The well-known
+senior curate of St Saviour&#8217;s, Everton, Liverpool, a High Honours
+Cambridge graduate, had been a Board School boy. His colleague had been
+enabled by a Fishmongers&#8217; scholarship to enter at Sidney Sussex College at
+Cambridge. In the summer of 1880, F. J. Wild was the first London Board
+School boy who went to Balliol. Nine years afterwards, this lad entered
+the Indian Civil Service, and became Assistant Magistrate and Deputy
+Collector in the North-West Provinces. &#8216;Bachelor of Science, Bedford
+College, first division, 1891;&#8217; &#8216;Recommended by Wesleyan Conference for
+training in their theological institutes and for the Home ministry;&#8217;
+&#8216;Teacher at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> Diocesan Training College;&#8217; these are comparatively common
+entries in the catalogue of Board School honours for this decade. In or
+since 1893, there have been some half dozen cases of Board School boys
+taking College and University Honours at Oxford as well as good places in
+the Indian Civil Service competition. The experience of the London Board
+Schools is not unlike that of similar institutions in the provinces. A
+decennial calendar after the Oxford precedent of distinctions academic or
+professional won by Board School pupils is a volume which it would really
+be worth while to prepare, and materials for which are accumulating on all
+sides. Pending the completion of the ladder for ascent in the normal way
+from the Board School to the University, private encouragement supplies
+many of the missing rungs. Thus, the vicar of a Herefordshire village
+noticed the quickness of his gardener&#8217;s son; helped him to enter the
+Hereford County School. From this the lad got a scholarship to Malvern
+College. Afterwards, one of the first Board School boys who won that
+honour, he carried off the entrance blue ribbon of a Balliol scholarship.
+In due course the gardener&#8217;s boy took a first class in Classical
+Moderations, and a first class also in Classical Greats.</p>
+
+<p>Typical instances have now been cited sufficient in number and variety to
+show that, as seems to be the general opinion of the last Education
+Commission, notwithstanding incompletenesses and imperfections here and
+there, enough has already been done to enable every clever boy in whatever
+station he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> is born by his own industry and volition to secure the same
+opportunities of cultivating his gifts as the nobleman&#8217;s son who wins the
+Newcastle medal at Eton. The personal effort and initiative of the late
+Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, did more perhaps than has been done by
+any other individual to promote this work. Under him the College of
+Wycliffe not only maintained the prestige which it had acquired in the
+days of Dr Jenkyns, and which was greatly increased by the successor of
+Jenkyns, Robert Scott, but became at once the patron and the pattern of
+minor places of education throughout the country. Provided they showed
+ability and industry, the day labourer&#8217;s and the artizan&#8217;s son were
+welcomed from the provincial grammar school as warmly at Balliol as the
+Sixth Form boy from Harrow or Eton. The connection between secondary
+schools of all grades in the provinces and the University on the Isis had
+already been promoted by the agency of local examinations; it was rendered
+more intimate by the Socratic interest which Jowett took in the
+intellectual welfare of the rawest lad from the country if only he showed
+the slightest sign of mental promise. Jowett&#8217;s stimulating sense of
+citizenship was felt during his life in the remotest corners of the
+country. Its animating influences have survived his death; they still
+operate as an inspiring force wherever the domains of municipal and
+educational life converge. This good man and patriotic citizen did not
+live to witness the active assumption of educational responsibilities by
+the County and Borough Councils from which, not vainly, he hoped great
+things. An educational system in thorough touch with Oxford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> and Cambridge
+on the one hand and on the other hand with primary village schools; this
+was the ideal that Jowett, Lake and Stanley advocated to the earlier
+School Enquiry Commissions. Jowett lived long enough to see in the case of
+several great provincial grammar schools, notably that of Bradford, his
+ambition fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>In many, if not in most districts, the new provincial Councils have now
+added as many rungs to the educational ladder as could fairly be expected.
+The wants which still await fulfilment are definite. They ought not to
+prove very difficult to supply. Local endowments supplemented by a
+moderate amount of State help, will, if wisely directed, provide the
+larger facilities still needed for the promotion of higher grade
+elementary school pupils to grammar schools. In order that there may be no
+further waste either of the money or of the machinery for national
+education, a drastic scheme of reorganization seems to be a cardinal
+necessity. Secondary education is a phrase too mechanically interpreted as
+a synonym for technical or scientific education. If the Statutes be
+interpreted literally, the County Councils are empowered only to levy a
+rate for a higher school grant when the teaching which that grant defrays
+is to enable a boy or girl to learn the elements of some remunerative
+handicraft, and is thus expressly sanctioned by the Technical Education
+Act of 1890. If the Councils have gone beyond this, and pecuniarily
+ministered to the needs of a more generous culture, they have acted, so to
+speak, at their own peril, or that action has been rendered possible by
+the private liberality of their more opulent members. In addition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> to this
+need of a new definition of the ambiguous epithet and substantive employed
+so often in the foregoing text, a new educational authority which can
+officially survey every department of the entire field of teaching has
+become indispensable. Centralized at Whitehall this authority will to some
+extent inevitably be. Its operation, however, must be highly elastic. The
+conditions of its control must be adaptable to the infinitely varying
+conditions, social, geographical, material, sentimental, of the United
+Kingdom. The most recent enquiries show that there is much less
+dissipation of educational energy by the mutual overlapping of schools
+than might be expected. The single instance of this sort to which
+attention has been directed by the last Commission is that of Bolton,
+where there exists an unprofitable competition between the grammar school
+and the Church Institute Boys&#8217; School. Elsewhere, however, as at Leeds and
+other great towns of the North, Mechanics&#8217; Institute Schools, Higher Grade
+Board Schools, trench respectively on each other&#8217;s province, though each
+of them, by slightly varying its curriculum, does good work and is in
+great local demand. The explanation of the latter fact is the universality
+of the appetite for higher teaching created in the large centres of the
+English population. The most frequent, and with proper care the most
+easily remediable form of overlapping occurs when the higher divisions of
+a lower grade school retain pupils already ripe for a higher grade school.
+What are the exact limits to be placed respectively to the provinces of
+elementary schools of both grades? and what to the grammar schools on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+one hand, or the University schools on the other with which the
+rudimentary institutions ought closely and cordially to co-operate? these
+are problems with which, in the fifty-ninth year of Her Majesty&#8217;s reign,
+there does not exist any single authority competent to deal. The confusion
+between the jurisdiction of the educational bodies now in being is
+comparable with that which existed in the relations of the various
+administrative authorities and areas in the case of local government
+before these functions were comparatively simplified by the legislation of
+1874 and of 1888. The Education Department in London has no concern with
+secondary schools save so far as some of these are inextricably
+intermingled in their operations with the finance or the teaching of
+primary schools. The Charity Commission wherein the Endowed Schools
+Commission is now merged, can only take cognizance of the agencies for
+higher teaching for a special purpose and from a single point of view.
+This loose and very partially effective machinery of control has since
+1890 received a new element of complexity from the educational power
+vested with such happy results as it has been in the County Councils. The
+educational branch of the Privy Council office in London has long
+attracted to it young men of industry and talents from the Universities as
+well as of considerable administrative ability developed at a later date
+by official experience.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the profession of the teacher becomes more highly organized each
+year. The value of its material interests is constantly increasing. It
+still remains without any direct representation in the official<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> world
+comparable with that which is secured to the civil and military services
+by the Council of the Secretary of State for India. The headmasters&#8217;
+annual conference has during the last few years supplied a useful medium
+for the interchange of opinions and experiences between the recognized
+chiefs of their vocation. The College of Preceptors has its occasional
+meetings. Certificated assistant teachers have formed themselves into a
+loosely coherent body of their own. None of these can, except in an
+indirect way, place their practical experience at the disposal of the
+central authority whose consent is necessary for any organic change in the
+teaching subjects of schools that receive a public endowment. In the case
+of schools whose speciality is a sound commercial education, proofs of
+late have multiplied that the object of this training may often be more
+faithfully accomplished, to say nothing of the intellectual gain to the
+learner if the boy who is going to stand behind a counter, and may
+sometimes be called upon to write a business letter for his employer, is
+instructed in something beyond the arts of summing and penmanship. Many
+boys of the humblest birth show a remarkable aptitude for applied logic
+and political economy when the elements of physical science fail entirely
+to attract their minds. The educational council which might be auxiliary
+to the Vice-President of the Council will perhaps number amongst its
+members men who, from their own practical knowledge, can give sound advice
+in cases where the teacher ought to be entrusted with the power of
+adapting the education, not merely in a general way to the vocation that
+is hereafter to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> engage the learner, but to the idiosyncrasies of the
+pupil as well. The stipends of assistants in secondary schools are often
+unwisely and wastefully low. Men and women who work so hard as these
+persons do are entitled to the assurance that their emoluments will be
+regulated by the consideration that comes of knowledge as well as the
+severer equities of commerce.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing, therefore, as all who on this matter speak from
+experience agree, is to establish local councils for educational purposes
+which by the prevention of confusion and overlapping between schools of
+different grades, will directly promote the economy of educational force
+not less than of expenditure. As for the central authority which the
+interests alike of teachers, of taught, of children and parents, of the
+State, and of its subjects demand, substantial unanimity as to the
+composition of that body exists among those who are most qualified to give
+an opinion. Generally it is suggested that the new Council might be shaped
+after the model of the Indian Council. To come to particulars, there would
+be, in the first instance, a certain number of Crown nominees; secondly,
+the Universities, perhaps the great public schools or other public
+educational bodies, would be asked to select representatives of their own.
+Another element in the new central authority would be experienced members
+of the teaching professions. These might be chosen partly by the
+headmasters in conference, but to some extent by the assistant teachers
+employed in every variety of public schools from the highest to the
+lowest. It would seem on the whole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> advisable to select the teachers&#8217;
+members by the direct vote of the class immediately concerned. The
+machinery for doing so would not be difficult. Voting papers, as in the
+case of London University in the choice of appointments to the Senate, or
+of professional representatives on the Medical Council, would be employed.
+In this way, every registered teacher would have a voice in regulating the
+details and rewards of his profession to the great increase, as cannot be
+doubted, of its <i>esprit de corps</i>. In the case of elections to the local
+authority for preventing waste and confusion between local schools an
+analogous method might be employed. The registered teachers, that is,
+would in each neighbourhood choose their proportion of the members of the
+local educational body.</p>
+
+<p>Signs are sometimes visible of a reaction from the enthusiasm for
+educational progress that has engaged the national energies during the
+last half century. There is a danger, one is told, of educating boys or
+girls beyond their capacities, and above their station. The increased
+competition for the positions of governess and clerk, means misery and
+ruin to many of the candidates who would be more suitably, comfortably,
+and far more remuneratively employed in domestic service, or in manual
+labour according to their sex. The virtues of humility and respect for
+superiors are said to be crushed out in the scramble for knowledge that
+may enable its possessors to better themselves. Servant maids, one is
+told, no longer confine their demands to permission to wear a fringe, but
+stipulate for a pianoforte in the basement, or a bicycle with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> which to
+take their airing on their Sundays out. That upon the humbler levels of
+the community the progress from ignorance to education should be
+accompanied by real or apparent disturbances of the personal relations
+between classes was to have been expected. Seasons of transition such as
+the present always generate a certain amount of personal friction or of
+social displacement. Those just being emancipated from the illiteracy or
+semi-barbarism which have been the traditions of centuries have not yet
+overcome the agitating strangeness of their new and improved condition.
+Those above them in the social scale have not yet been able to decide
+whether to conciliate their educated inferiors as possible friends, or to
+stand on their guard against them as actual enemies. As the situation
+becomes more familiar, it will prove less strained. Common sense as a
+supplement to their zeal, seems the chief want of the educational
+reformers, official or private, of the day. The tendency is to postpone
+the development of intelligence to the acquisition of knowledge. The
+masters whom we are now educating are not in the habit of using their
+minds for the mere pleasure of intellectual exertion. Hence they often
+give an impression of being far less intelligent than they really are. The
+correct use of common words in the mother tongue ought orally, not out of
+any lesson book, to be taught all boys and girls. The difficulty
+experienced by the persons now spoken of in clearly answering a simple
+question is often insurmountable. The tendency is, not to digest the query
+as a whole, but to catch some word used in it and then to make a remark
+suggested by the association of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> sound of the syllables, and so
+practically to evade the question put. The cheap diffusion of newspapers
+and magazines confirms rather than corrects these failures to concentrate
+the mind in the casual talk of everyday life. It is not beneath the
+dignity of the State educator to deal with the defect.<a name='fna_40' id='fna_40' href='#f_40'><small>[40]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<p class="title">THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Social importance of Eton, Harrow, and other great schools, as
+representing the social evolution of the epoch. The conventional
+mistake that the new wealth has been injurious to the social tone or
+scholarly studies of public schools. In the case of Eton the historic
+details and educational statistics prove the falseness of the
+statement. Progress of the school shown by success in the new as well
+as old examinations during the incriminated period of the last forty
+years. New social elements have increased the value but not the
+expense of Eton. The fourteenth Earl of Derby as a typical Eton
+product.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The whole region of public elementary and secondary education, whose
+improvement is so conspicuous an incident in the recent domestic or social
+annals of the time, has now been indicated at sufficient length and
+minutely enough to convey an accurate notion of the facts. One may,
+therefore, pass to those educational levels which stand a little higher,
+and up to which recent reforms of popular education are, as has been seen,
+gradually assisting the progress of Board School children. The
+sociological feature of the present reign has already been described in
+these pages as a process<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> less of revolution, than of evolution; of the
+natural incorporation of new elements into an old fabric, of the
+harmonious assimilation on the part of a polity that is the growth of
+centuries, of the ideas and types that are the products of to-day. These
+processes can nowhere be witnessed more crucially in operation than at
+those little worlds, the great public schools such as Eton and Harrow,
+which, as they have ever been, are the faithful microcosms of the great
+worlds that lie beyond them. Many of the accounts of Eton which
+periodically find their way into print seem inspirations from Baron
+Munchausen. The school that during centuries has been the special training
+ground for the country gentlemen of England, which was once to such an
+extent the nursery of future lords spiritual and temporal as to enable Dr
+Keate to include among his titles to respect the fact of his having
+flogged in their youth the whole Bench of Bishops,<a name='fna_41' id='fna_41' href='#f_41'><small>[41]</small></a> is conventionally
+represented as corrupted at its heart by the predominating influence of
+the sons of the &#8216;new rich&#8217; on its classic soil. The parent who wishes his
+son to be at the school where his sire, and his sires before him, had
+been, is disgusted by reading romantic accounts of the bank balances in
+Windsor town kept for their boys by the plutocrats, Saxon or Semitic, of
+the City. It may, therefore, be said authoritatively that thus far
+research has failed to bring to light a single instance of the new rich
+Etonian who possesses during his school days a banking account of his own.
+Now, not less than formerly, the lad who returns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> to his tutor&#8217;s or his
+dame&#8217;s with a &pound;5 note in his pocket is looked upon by his comrades as in
+luck.</p>
+
+<p>Forty years ago, when a Public School Commission was making its enquiry,
+the cry of the commercial Cr&oelig;sus swamping the country squire was first
+raised. The most practical proof of its hollowness is that the expenses of
+Eton, if still prohibitive to many parents, have not increased of recent
+years. What has rather happened is that the school outlay has been
+remodelled. The charges are to-day inclusive. If comparatively fresh items
+figure in the school accounts, the incidental outlay on casual
+subscriptions and a long catalogue of extras is now superseded. The real
+cost of Eton and of other schools like it is what the individual boy
+chooses, or what his friends allow. The expensive habits of the Etonian
+are more a domestic, than a scholastic, growth. No advocate of the
+<i>nouveau riche</i> theory has ever asserted that the scale of living in the
+clubs of Pall Mall has become insufferably profuse since gentlemen
+enriched by commerce, prone, like Mr Mantalini, to despise details of
+petty cash, have been made free of these establishments. There is not, nor
+has there ever been, the slightest danger of the Etonian or Harrovian of
+the old aristocratic order being corrupted by plutocratic schoolfellows.
+The son of Sir Gorgius Midas in real life proves to be a quiet, sensible
+lad, with a just and shrewd sense of the value of money, and perhaps less
+likely to waste his father&#8217;s substance in the &#8216;sock shops&#8217; under the
+shadow of Windsor Castle than his form comrade, the son of the squire whom
+Sir Gorgius could buy up half a dozen times over. At<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> other places than
+the great public schools of England, a studious boy may find himself more
+in the way of amassing knowledge. Nowhere will he learn so many lessons
+useful for the daily conduct of life, which books do not impart. Nowhere
+will he have such opportunities for the acquisition, the development and
+the display of practical common sense. So far back as the later fifties of
+this century, an Eton master, the late Mr Durnford, the respected father
+of him who still represents the same family on the Eton staff, alluding to
+the decline in the manufacture of Longs and Shorts in pious Henry&#8217;s
+shades, could say: &#8216;Latin verses are with us things of the past.&#8217; There
+is, however, no reason, as the list of Eton honours at Oxford or Cambridge
+will show, for imputing to Eton any decline in the essentials of classical
+scholarship. Since the new wealth is supposed to have contaminated the
+standard of plain living and high thinking among the old gentry, in 1851,
+the famous son of a famous father, a name venerable in the Law Courts and
+on the Thames, J. W. Chitty, an old Etonian, won at Oxford a first class
+Vinerian Scholarship, followed by a Fellowship at Exeter. About the same
+time R. G. W. Herbert the late Permanent Head of the Colonial Office
+carried off, as a scholar of Balliol, the Hertford and the Ireland, and a
+Fellowship at All Souls. The late Lord Carnarvon was not so infected by
+the plutocratic idleness of Eton as to miss when at Christ Church the
+highest honours of the Classical Schools.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later when according to the conventional view the &#8216;rich
+vulgarians,&#8217; as the Mrs Major Pompley<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> of <i>My Novel</i> calls them, must have
+entirely crowded out the sons of squires as well as the humanities
+themselves, another country gentleman&#8217;s son, the late Edward Herbert who
+died at Marathon in 1870, had as his brother scholar at Balliol, also from
+Eton, another son of a Western squire, Edmond Warre, to-day Headmaster of
+his old school. In the same year the son of a &#8216;squarson&#8217; to employ Sidney
+Smith&#8217;s useful term, also an Etonian, Henry Barter of Merton, the evil
+associations of plutocracy notwithstanding, won the highest mathematical
+together with second class classical honours at Oxford, and was only just
+beaten by the present Bishop of Hereford, for the University Scholarship
+in mathematics. This list of instances belongs to the era (the fifties)
+when the corruptions of the new wealth were most rampant at Eton, seems to
+refute the mechanical charge; that list may be closed with the name of a
+country gentleman&#8217;s son, since then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Michael
+Hicks-Beach, who, Eton and Christ Church notwithstanding, took a first
+class in the Modern History schools in 1858. About the same time the
+member of a Liverpool mercantile family, the son of a great statesman, W.
+H. Gladstone, had not at Eton so unlearned all he had been taught
+elsewhere as to be prevented from winning a studentship at Christ Church.
+His contemporary at Eton, A. C. Swinburne, the poet, won at Oxford the
+Taylor scholarship for modern languages about the same time. The catalogue
+might be extended indefinitely. The representative names likely to convey
+the fullest idea to the general reader have now been mentioned. A further
+selection of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> patronymics would confuse rather than instruct or interest.
+It will be enough to say that in or since the sixties down to 1896, of the
+highest honours in the Schools or in the Colleges at Oxford 400 were
+obtained by the sons of country gentlemen who, notwithstanding the new
+wealth had like their fathers before them been sent to Eton and who were
+not apparently quite demoralized by that ordeal. At Cambridge the total of
+Academic distinctions won by Etonians of the same grade as at Oxford, is
+as might have been expected higher, and amounts in round numbers to 550. A
+competent judge in these matters, speaking with no personal prejudice in
+favour of the school of Henry VI.<a name='fna_42' id='fna_42' href='#f_42'><small>[42]</small></a> or of its Cambridge sister King&#8217;s
+College, but with much experience of classical examinations, J. Y.
+Sargent, told the present writer not long ago, that Eton was the one
+school in England whose boys could write tolerable Greek prose.</p>
+
+<p>Any social change that may have come over the place since the introduction
+of the new wealth into the country would seem to be very different in fact
+from that described by fiction. The presence of a large number of boys
+whose parents derive their income from no hereditary acres and whose
+domestic associations are therefore different from those of the country
+gentleman&#8217;s son has indeed produced an effect, but one which is the very
+opposite of its current misrepresentation. Before the Victorian era<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+opened, well-to-do commercial fathers were, as readers of <i>Coningsby</i> will
+remember, in the habit of sending their sons to the seat of education most
+in vogue with the titled and untitled patricians of the realm. Such
+influence as these have had has proved notoriously healthful to the whole
+school community. The newcomers have with scarcely an exception been
+trained from childhood to an adequate appreciation of the value of money
+and are the last boys in the world to be permitted to squander it for mere
+show. Before their advent to the place, Eton might have been charged with
+narrowness or partiality in the composition of its life; congenial enough
+as the training ground of peers, opulent commoners, diplomatists, and
+other destined dignitaries of State or Church, but less salutary for lads
+who had their own way to make in the world, and who while doing so, must
+expect to come into collision with the men of the City, the office, and
+the shop. The genius of every great English school is essentially
+democratic. Boys are valued by their fellows not for what they have, but
+for what in themselves they are; not for the antiquity of their family
+descent, nor for the depth of their father&#8217;s purse. The boy who dazzled
+his mates with the glitter of sovereigns fresh from the Mint would be
+suppressed as promptly by the public opinion of the place as the toady or
+the parasite. To-day no English lad is so little likely idly to waste his
+parents&#8217; cash as the young Etonian.</p>
+
+<p>There is no school which so far as social discipline is concerned better
+enables its boys to dispense with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> University and yet lose so little
+by not going there, or which turns out its boys such ready-made little men
+of the world as the foundation of Henry VI. That this is to-day the
+special attribute of Eton, possessed by it in common perhaps with Harrow,
+is due to the circumstance of its having become representative of the
+entire life, commercial, not less than squirearchical or patrician, urban
+not less than rural, of the whole country. The truth is that the <i>nouveau
+riche</i>, as he is represented by the popular imagination, is the product of
+romance, or the creation of the stage. The antagonism between the socially
+emancipated of yesterday and the descendants of houses which had become
+considerable before constitutional government in England was known is
+imaginary and in direct contradiction of the experiences of daily life.
+The son of the new man of one generation as to his tastes, his prejudices,
+his politics, his pursuits, the performance of his duties, the choice of
+his pleasures, becomes, in the next, socially indistinguishable from the
+scion of the oldest nobility. On all points he has unconsciously, as is
+the way with the imitative race of boys, modelled himself after the
+pattern of those country gentlemen, divines, civilians, soldiers, and
+sailors, who are for the most part the reverse of plutocratic, and whose
+sons have been brought up at home under conditions which would make them
+physically intolerant of the bad taste that may be defined as a missing of
+the due proportion of relative things. The Lancashire trader&#8217;s son who at
+school finds himself next in form to the boy of ancient family is quick to
+imbibe the social traditions and intuitions with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> which the atmosphere is
+charged. He has been sent to school to make acquaintances perhaps as well
+as to learn; but certainly not to dazzle his schoolfellows by the glitter
+of his father&#8217;s gold. If the Manchester lad possesses more pocket money
+than some of those in his &#8216;house,&#8217; he is pretty certain also to set them a
+wise example in the careful spending of it. The truth is that with the
+whole system of public examinations and with literary competitions
+narrowing the entrance to all kinds of professional life, the genius of
+the place at the great public schools has undergone the same modifications
+as at the Universities. The schoolboy who has obtained his exeat for a few
+days as he bounds off to the station to catch his train, may be thought to
+have left all care behind him. Enjoyment, however, is very probably not
+the reason of his visit to his friends in London.</p>
+
+<p>Sandhurst or Woolwich examinations, competitions for the home or foreign
+service at Burlington House are quite as likely to be the object in view
+as the visit to the dentist by day or to the theatre by night. This early
+acquaintance with the responsibilities of life exerts a sobering influence
+on the most constitutionally volatile of Eton or Harrow striplings. The
+lad whose path of pleasure is darkened by the shadow of the ubiquitous
+examiner loses prematurely the juvenile appetite for veal and ham pies,
+jam tarts, ginger beer, even for cocoanut paste. When there are not
+examinations at a distance, the ingenuity of Oxford and Cambridge provides
+the machinery for them hard by the Playing Fields on the Thames or Byron&#8217;s
+Tree at Harrow on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> the Hill. &#8216;Posing&#8217; in some form goes on all the year
+round. It has become in effect obligatory on the public school boy to
+obtain before going up to the University the certificate which frees him
+from the Littlego examination, or which if he enters on other careers,
+secures him an analogous dispensation.</p>
+
+<p>The higher certificates in the University examinations are not easy to
+obtain. They uniformly indicate a high standard of proficiency. The
+success of Eton in these ordeals has been steadily progressive during the
+last twenty years. From 39 in 1875 the Eton candidates had risen to 88 in
+1896. The total of certificates and distinctions won by these, an
+aggregate of 1,413 candidates, was, during this period of twenty years,
+1,516. Meanwhile the number of Eton boys who, without passing through an
+intermediary stage at the professional crammers, take good places direct
+from their school in the Indian and Home Civil Service competitions has
+increased during the last few years by something like 10 per cent. The
+Eton &#8216;Army&#8217; class is also doing well. The number of boys proceeding to
+Sandhurst and even to Woolwich straight from school as others proceed
+straight to the University increases annually. These statistics go some
+way towards disproving the conventional reproach made largely by ignorance
+against the most representative of English public schools of being
+socially and economically demoralized, or intellectually sunk in indolence
+by the malignant influences of the new wealth. If there were any truth in
+such an accusation, the maintenance of the traditional standard of
+scholarly excellence in exceptional cases would not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> be combined, as
+to-day it is, with the visibly demonstrated improvement in the work of the
+rank and file of the boys. The truth is, that at all our great schools,
+Eton like the rest, the new elements among the boys have tended to produce
+a wholesome change in the public opinion of the place distinctly
+favourable to a higher average of school industry. The ideal Etonian of
+history is, and seems likely long to continue, the fourteenth Earl of
+Derby, translator of the <i>Iliad</i>, and perhaps the most brilliant
+parliamentary debater of the century. &#8216;He saps like Gladstone, and he
+fights like Spring.&#8217; So runs Lord Lytton&#8217;s spirited and familiar line
+concerning this most typical of Eton worthies. No one would have welcomed
+more warmly than he the statistical evidence here given that under its
+latest Headmaster, the study of the new ologies, and the manual mechanics
+practised in the Eton workshops which Dr. Warre has established have not
+ousted the older humanities from their place, and that, the new wealth
+notwithstanding, it has ceased to be a reproach against any boy at the old
+school that he is a sap.<a name='fna_43' id='fna_43' href='#f_43'><small>[43]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<p class="title">THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Changes in the social life of Oxford and Cambridge visible on the
+surface since 1860. Social differences between Oxford and Cambridge as
+places of residence. General results of the unattached student system
+established in 1868. The idea of the University as distinct from the
+colleges, socially prominent in earlier days, has acquired new
+prominence since. The admission of non-collegiate students.
+Vicissitudes in the popularity of the Union as a social club and as a
+debating society. Its earlier distinction repeated in later years. The
+unattached students&#8217; scheme in its practical details and working.
+Academic successes of students, especially in Theology. The Extension
+Lectures scheme, personal details and general results.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Under the new and quickening influences imported into the second half of
+the present century, the changes in the conditions of social life are more
+visible at the two great Universities than at the public schools. The
+public school boy has been seen hastening to the railway station that he
+may catch the train which is to convey him from the place of industry, not
+to the old holiday fields, but to a fresh seat of studious exertion. In
+like manner, a fair proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates now pass
+the greater portion of their lives in hurrying to catch trains from their
+academic termini to scenes of provincial activity. The commercial
+traveller of the old order as Dickens described him was not more
+incessantly on the road than the Oxford or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> Cambridge Extension lecturer.
+He, like the movement he represents, is the product of the age that has
+given us Bradshaw. Oxford and Cambridge have in fact been brought to the
+doors of those who cannot themselves go to Cambridge or Oxford. Nor is the
+new element, among those who have taken their degree, the only change that
+has been witnessed in the <i>personnel</i> of the place. Enough has been
+written about the domestic revolution which has transformed what till the
+later sixties, had continued a cloister into a flourishing provincial
+centre of family life; about the nursemaids with perambulators in the
+parks, the children trundling their hoops along Addison&#8217;s Walk, or playing
+ball under the statelier avenue which fringes the Christ Church meadows.
+In reality this feature in the social polity of Oxford, however
+interesting or striking, has never marked so visible a contrast to the
+preceding epoch as it may have done at Cambridge. The capital on the Isis
+has always been a considerable county town. From a time to the contrary of
+which memory does not run, Oxford has had extra-academical attractions of
+its own for persons without any interest in its studies. It has always
+been a hunting, steeplechasing, and generally a sporting centre. Its
+neighbourhood is probably more picturesque than that of its sister on the
+Cam. Like other midland counties, its environments have never been without
+more manor houses and country gentlemen&#8217;s residences than is the case with
+the academic section of East Anglia. As far back, therefore, as the later
+fifties certainly, and it may be much further, social Oxford possessed an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+existence not less distinct from, or independent of, academic Oxford, than
+Windsor, Harrow on the Hill, Rugby, Cheltenham, or Marlborough possess a
+social machinery of their own apart from the schools which are a feature
+in their respective neighbourhoods.</p>
+
+<p>What will really strike the eye of one revisiting Oxford after a long
+interval is less the signs of the latest developments of domestic life
+than the appearance of greater youthfulness in the undergraduates. Where
+this juvenility is real, and not the illusion of the spectator&#8217;s own
+advancing years, it is largely to be explained by the order of students
+new since 1868. Not without much opposition or till after long resistance,
+the Oxford statutes in that year relaxed the most exclusive condition
+written on their page by the disciplinarian severity of Archbishop Laud. A
+return to the medi&aelig;val usage was sanctioned. Once more it became possible,
+after a lapse of three centuries, for young men to go to the University
+without going to college. The Vice-Chancellor matriculated students
+furnished with credentials of respectability, and with enough of learning
+to satisfy the masters of the schools. Provided, in other words, they had
+a fair prospect of passing Responsions, which do not constitute one of the
+public examinations, but mark the survival of the old entrance ordeal
+prescribed in the days when the University was everything and the Colleges
+comparatively nothing. If he were not legally of age, the formal consent
+to his life in lodgings of his parents or guardians was further required
+from the non-ascript undergraduate, as well<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> as a general testimonial to
+the probability of his deriving educational benefit from his new
+opportunities. Littlego might be excused by the delegates in the case of
+students not intending to proceed to their degree, but only to study
+systematically some special subject. In the place, however, of the
+&#8216;Smalls&#8217; testamur, or its equivalent, the special student was tested
+closely as to his aptitudes for the subject of study he professed.</p>
+
+<p>The total yearly cost, all entrance fees included, of the non-collegiate
+youth would average between &pound;50 and &pound;60, instead of thrice that sum, not
+perhaps an exaggerated estimate, for his collegiate brother. &pound;10 covers
+handsomely all the initial outlay. The period of residence required for
+the degree is twelve terms. These must be kept in what is called &#8216;full
+term&#8217; which is rather later than the almanac term, and also in a duly
+licensed lodging house. In exceptional cases these conditions may be
+dispensed with. In no case will the undergraduate who has no porter&#8217;s
+lodge to pass before he &#8216;knocks in&#8217; at night find more liberty than the
+intramural student. His landlord or landlady in the town may perhaps
+promise not to communicate some irregularity to the authorities. But so
+surely as the unattached commits the smallest breach of academic
+discipline, sooner or later it will reach the official ear; he will find
+himself a marked man.</p>
+
+<p>Men who are now middle aged, or even elderly, looking back to their
+college days will recollect that there prevailed an invisible system of
+surveillance, and even espionage, much more close and real than it was at
+all pleasant in the days of one&#8217;s youth to admit. That<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> supervision has
+now become more subtle, ubiquitous and unavoidable, till at last the
+unattached freshman realizes that wherever he may be, he lives and moves
+in a whispering gallery, as much as if he were a famous figure, in the
+heart of London society and of the London season.</p>
+
+<p>The practical success of this innovation was immediate. It has been
+tolerably complete. Within thirty years of its introduction, that is on
+the 1st of January 1896, the University books showed the existence of 480
+graduate or undergraduate non-collegiates. Of these 245 were at the date
+mentioned <i>in statu pupillari</i>. The authorities to which these students
+are immediately subject are the Vice-Chancellor, the two Proctors, a
+Censor who stands in the relation of College tutor to the whole body; two
+other tutors associated with him who give advice on all subjects, and
+seven delegates, being members of Convocation. The Censor is the head of
+the whole unattached system; to him intending students should apply for
+all practical information. The teaching available for the University
+alumni now mentioned is at least as effective and wide as any of the
+colleges can offer.</p>
+
+<p>At the instance of Mr Jowett, a great friend of the scheme, other colleges
+than Balliol soon opened their lecture rooms to non-collegiate guests. The
+Honour tutors especially allocated to the unattached, include
+distinguished Fellows of Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln, Magdalen,
+University College, Wadham and Worcester, as well as famous theologians
+from Keble, or a non-collegiate M.A. not less accomplished than the
+present Professor of Modern History, Mr York Powell of Christ Church. The
+extent to which the young men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> thus provided for have profited by their
+opportunities, may be judged from the following epitome of examinational
+statistics. Two first classes in Classical Moderations, 2 also in
+Mathematical; 13 seconds in Classical Moderations; 39 third classes in the
+same examination; 7 Mathematical thirds in Moderations; these represent
+the distinctions gained in the older Honour Schools by the students who as
+an institution have not yet completed their third decade. Although thus
+far they do not seem to have done very brilliantly in the Philosophy and
+History Schools, they have won a first class in Jurisprudence, 2 in Modern
+History, 12 in Theology, 3 in Natural Science, one in Oriental Studies, as
+well as some dozen places in these studies below the coveted level of
+<i>classis prima</i>. The Bachelor of Civil Law examination is known to be one
+of the hardest on the Isis. In this the unattached may be credited with
+one first class, one second, as well as one third and one fourth. During
+the period now spoken of, several University prizes have been carried off
+by the new comers. Thus a non-collegiate candidate has won the Denyer and
+Johnson scholarship in Theology four times, the Pusey and Ellerton
+scholarship (Hebrew) the same number, as also the Senior and Junior
+Kennicott (also Hebrew). The Davis scholarship in Chinese was for the
+fifth time won a few years ago by an unattached, and for the second time
+the Taylorian scholarship in Modern Languages. Among older and better
+known distinctions open to all comers, the Arnold Historical essay has
+been won by an unattached; the Chancellor&#8217;s English essay, and the
+Ellerton essay have been won twice. While it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> will thus be seen that the
+new students have acquitted themselves specially well in Theology, they
+have in twenty-four cases gained open scholarships, and in three cases
+open Fellowships. The Bowden Sanskrit, the Burdett-Coutts scholarships
+also figure among their list of honours. In the Pass schools 310, a
+proportion of 72 per cent., have satisfied the examiners. As an instance
+of their being on their entrance up to the scholastic level of the average
+public school boy, 30 or 40 unattached have elected to pass Responsions
+before matriculation and have done so without any difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>The general conduct of the new undergraduates, who, some prophets had
+predicted, would demoralize the University by their rowdy example, has
+been with scarcely an exception, exemplary. Only one disciplinary case, to
+employ the euphemism of the last official report, seems to have occurred.
+With the enterprising alacrity which to their own credit, to the good of
+their colleges, to the benefit of the whole University, the
+representatives of the different societies on the Isis display in
+attracting special talent to the foundations in which they are
+respectively interested, some absorption of the unattached into the
+colleges was inevitable. It has, however, been less than one might have
+expected. The average of these migrations does not vary much, and seems to
+proceed at the rate of between 20 and 25 per year. Nor, apparently, does
+there exist any dissatisfaction among the non-collegiates with their own
+position in the City of Colleges. Thus when they migrate to a college, the
+attraction is generally found to be the exceptional facilities for
+instruction in a special study,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> <i>e.g.</i> Natural Science or History,
+afforded by the foundation in question. As, by implication, has been
+already stated, Mr J. A. Froude&#8217;s successor in the Chair of Modern History
+was, throughout the greater portion of his career, a non-collegiate.
+Together with the present Recorder of Londonderry, Professor York Powell
+was one of the first batch of unattached students in 1868. Superior
+conveniences for the studies respectively to their taste, rather than
+economy, were the motives which sent the future Professor and the future
+Irish lawyer, Mr T. G. Overend, to the University and not to college. Mr
+Powell took his degree as a member of Christ Church; Judge Overend was
+unattached to the last. Both obtained high Honours in the Schools. The
+after success of each began directly they left the University. Having been
+called to the Irish Bar in 1874, Mr Overend was in 1885 the leader of his
+circuit as well as a Queen&#8217;s Counsel. His health alone caused him to give
+up his practice and take a County Court judgeship.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far the unattached graduates in residence never at any given time
+seem to have exceeded 50. Their rivalry with the colleges is, therefore,
+in point of numbers not very formidable. Nor do they seem appreciably to
+have affected the social or intellectual life of the place. Like the great
+public schools the two Universities are to the present generation what
+they were to its predecessors. Athletic accomplishments have declined as
+little as general scholarship. The pastimes, however, are conducted far
+more economically than was once the case. Instances of young men being
+hampered during their professional struggles by the evil legacy of
+University<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> debts have decreased so steadily as to justify the hope of
+their ultimate and entire disappearance. Thus the Oxford undergraduate as
+Leech used to depict him, or as Thackeray in <i>Pendennis</i> drew the typical
+pupil of both Universities; throwing away his father&#8217;s money at the end of
+the term in London in exaggerated tips to hotel waiters and cabmen, is
+to-day as much of an anachronism as the Etonian in his teens who has not
+learnt that if care is taken of the shillings, the pounds will take care
+of themselves. In one particular, though perhaps accidentally, the
+non-collegiate undergraduate as an institution has coincided an
+interesting modification of the social conditions of Oxford life. Early in
+the present century, the conception of an academic as distinct from and
+independent of a collegiate polity was more present to the undergraduate
+of that epoch than it was to his successors half a century or so later.
+This fact is one among the explanations of the popularity of the
+University Union Debating Club during the student days of Mr Gladstone as
+well as of the comparative disfavour into which it had fallen during the
+student days of, for example, Lord Randolph Churchill. There appear,
+however, periodically to take place reactions in favour of the nursery
+ground of future orators. Mr Asquith, already of Cabinet rank, to whom
+probabilities, as well as Lord Rosebery&#8217;s words, point as a coming leader
+of the House of Commons, belonged to a slightly older generation than
+Churchill. Before he took his degree in 1863, he had established the same
+sort of reputation for himself in the Union as had been won two or three
+generations earlier by Mr Gladstone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> and as seventeen years afterwards
+was to be won in the same arena by Mr G. N. Curzon, in 1897 Foreign Under
+Secretary.</p>
+
+<p>During the later sixties, there came into existence, as further
+developments of what was practically a collegiate example, social clubs
+for undergraduates. These, in effect, though not in theory, were generally
+recruited from a few colleges. Such societies have doubtless not lost
+their earlier popularity. They have witnessed a fresh access of favour to
+the University Union Club. They have perhaps helped themselves to
+contribute to it by causing the Union, in the supply of creature comforts,
+to compete with the collegiate lounges. A room for the reading of novels
+had been regarded as a dangerous innovation at the Union before 1865. It
+was not till after that year that a smoking room was sanctioned, or the
+refreshments of tea or coffee supplied. That in the future as in the past
+the chief work of the Universities will be done through the agency of the
+colleges is no doubt not less true than that at Eton, like Harrow, the
+tutorial system will co-exist with the most liberal and sweeping
+innovations which may be introduced. The colleges depend for their success
+on the same conditions as the non-collegiate delegacies. In prosperous
+seasons when trade is good and money plenty, there will be few vacant
+rooms either inside the college walls or outside in the licensed lodging
+houses. When times are bad, the list diminishes. Thus in the October term
+of 1896, 621 freshmen entered the colleges as compared with 734 in the
+preceding twelvemonths; Christ Church had only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> increased by 11; Worcester
+doubled its numbers; at the same time Magdalen, always a popular college
+with the public, had fallen from 53 to 40, Balliol from 49 to 36, Lincoln
+from 24 to 17. As for the non-collegiates, there was not only no increase
+but an actual diminution; the figures here were less by 11 than in the
+preceding twelvemonth.</p>
+
+<p>The great contrast which in comparing it with its normal condition two or
+three decades ago would be noticed by the Oxonian who revisits Oxford
+to-day is the change from an habitually stationary to a visibly locomotive
+population on the part of those who formerly seldom left their college
+rooms. Down the chief streets of the towns on the Isis and the Cam
+respectively, even at the very height of term time, there is a constant
+succession of cabs conveying young men in the prime of life to the railway
+termini. These are the fellows and tutors of the different colleges whose
+predecessors seldom or never used to leave their University during term,
+save when college business took them for a few hours to their lawyers in
+Lincoln&#8217;s Inn, or to the college estate bailiffs and stewards in the
+country. Such are not the missions that explain this increase of railway
+bound traffic when as yet no vacation is in sight. Those now spoken of as
+hurrying off to some provincial spot are well known in their University
+and a few hours hence will be warmly welcomed at their provincial
+destinations as Extension Lecturers on subjects of popular interest. What
+has happened is this. Certain enlightened inhabitants of both sexes in
+some district of manufacturing Lancashire or in agricultural Devon have
+been struck with the state of ignorance in which their school course has
+left many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> young men and women. At the same time they have noticed
+indications of a wish with those of maturer years to make up for early
+neglect by later application to branches of study of all kinds. Books
+alone have failed to supply the want. Intelligent and profitable reading
+is a scientific habit properly to be acquired only by those who have been
+drilled into it and who have already some general acquaintance with the
+topics treated in the written page.</p>
+
+<p>The County Council, as we have repeatedly seen, discharges already some of
+the functions and dispenses some of the funds of an Educational
+Department. Very possibly private munificence accompanies if it does not
+prompt this corporate enterprise. The next step is to communicate with the
+University Extension Lecture agency at whichever University, Oxford,
+Cambridge, London, or Victoria, according to the preference displayed.
+After the expenses have been guaranteed, the lecturer appears. To enable
+his hearers intelligently to grasp his plan of discourse, the discourse
+itself is prefaced by the distributions of a synopsis, which is in its way
+a work of literary art, whose readers, without any other help than its
+perusal may gather something more than a mere foretaste of the ground to
+be covered, or of the instruction to be conveyed. Such a syllabus as that
+of the Oxford lectures by Mr Shaw or Mr Marriott on different periods of
+English or French history, like the Reformation of 1529, the Revolution of
+1689, or the age of Louis XIV. at once assists the working men for whom
+they were planned, and serves as a model for the taking of notes. Each
+lecture of every course<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> of twelve is followed by a class during which the
+lecturer is in the Scotch term heckled by his audience. Essays are set,
+looked over, and returned to the writers with marginal corrections. At the
+end of each course an examination of both sexes is held, and certificates
+of merit are granted. The sons and daughters of the local gentry, day
+labourers in factory, field, office, or shop figure in nearly equal
+numbers among the students, the women being slightly the more numerous,
+and acquit themselves equally well in the examinations.</p>
+
+<p>The system has only attained to its present completeness within the last
+few years. The idea of it had occurred to Oxford reformers so far back as
+1850 when residents and non-residents alike were asking how the
+educational machinery on the Isis or the Cam could be made more available
+for all classes of their fellow subjects. The Oxford Hebdomadal Board was
+addressed on the subject, the names of Lord Ashley, Mr Gladstone, Lord
+Sandon being among the signatories.</p>
+
+<p>The great Dr Pusey, whose mind was as truly liberal as his Churchmanship
+was high, had been struck recently by the number of great Anglican divines
+who were the sons of small tradesmen. It was for Oxford to revive the
+example of the ancient monks of Durham, and to devise means for bringing
+the University within the reach of the poorest in the land. Another member
+of Christ Church whose pointed features, dark complexion, saturnine habit
+and rare scholarship will be recalled by many readers of these lines, Mr
+Osborne Gordon, joined with Professor Hussey in impressing by almost daily
+protests this popular duty on his too <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>exclusive Alma Mater. At this time
+religious tests existed in all their historic severity. There was no
+matriculation without signing the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Common
+Prayer Book, and no degree till after a like process with reference to the
+Three Articles of the Thirty-Sixth Canon.</p>
+
+<p>These facts account for the then dominant Liberalism of educated opinion
+inside and outside the University. Had tests ceased to exist when they
+were abolished in Ireland, as both Canning and Sir Robert Peel at one time
+or another had suggested, it is scarcely speculation to say that the
+demand which in 1868 brought about the unattached system and, after
+another decade or so, the Extension Lecture system, might not have
+organized itself with such drastic results. The non-collegiates might have
+come into existence while as yet the Great Western Railway approached the
+Cherwell no nearer than Didcot. The Extension Lecture machinery was not
+less dependent upon the propulsive power of steam than the iron engine of
+Stephenson itself. To-day Bradshaw&#8217;s Guide is as indispensable a part of
+the lecturer&#8217;s equipment as his manuscript notes. Here, as at other points
+in our secondary education, more organization and more endowments are
+required. There should be more inducements to young and competent
+graduates who have the knack of imparting their own knowledge to large or
+small classes to take up this work as a career, not as an occasional
+auxiliary to other occupations. The Extension centres also need to be
+supplemented more largely with local colleges such as that for which
+Reading is indebted to Oxford and Exeter to Cambridge.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<p class="title">FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The concrete personal result of the civic, social, and educational
+processes already described is now to be examined. The personal
+contrast between the new generation of young men and women of the
+middle class, most likely to strike an Englishman returned to London
+after long absence. Sex emancipation. The typical physique of both
+sexes has been visibly modified, amongst other agencies by bicycle
+practice. The stately maiden or matron of the period was unknown to
+John Leech; has been drawn faithfully by Du Maurier. Some social
+ideals are unchanged, but older middle class ideals have passed out of
+date.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>In the foregoing chapters a general view has been given of the social
+conditions under which, modified it may be by the influences of his
+historic past, the character of the average middle class Englishman of the
+Victorian epoch is formed. What is the personal result, the concrete
+individual product of these forces? The epithet &#8216;middle class&#8217; is employed
+in deference to traditional wont, but is in great measure misleading
+because the tendency of the age, the uniformity of the social and
+educational discipline through which most Englishmen pass tends
+increasingly to obliterate distinctions of conventional grade, and in
+tastes, pursuits, prejudices, to assimilate all to a single type. &#8216;They
+look upon you as we do upon a December fall of snow; as a seasonable,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, sent for some good purpose, to
+be revealed hereafter.&#8217; The restlessness which in the British visitor
+puzzled the Mussulman when <i>Eothen</i> was written as a national quality has
+of late increased among us.<a name='fna_44' id='fna_44' href='#f_44'><small>[44]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>From those who represent Royalty to those who represent manual labour for
+daily bread, an impatient restlessness is socially a note of the period
+which has perfected steam locomotion by sea or land, and by the electric
+telegraph has almost annihilated time. The cheap press, with its
+ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and
+occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated
+Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation,
+into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the
+world, ever on the lookout for new excitements, habitually demanding
+social pleasure in fresh forms. The insularity of the national character
+has to some extent disappeared in the tide of new ideas, and novel modes
+of life that from Continental sources are perpetually overflowing into our
+land. The Universities, as shown in a preceding chapter, have been brought
+to the door of the labourer at his bench, to the shop assistant at his
+counter, to the clerk at his desk. If this does not always imply an
+universal access of real education, no one who knows the England of to-day
+can doubt that it never fails to mean the multiplication of all kinds of
+knowledge, or to generate the social aspirations, and the thirst for that
+kind of self-improvement, real or imaginary, which is accompanied<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> by a
+growing demand for social existence of an animated kind, for a daily life
+less insular in its organization and less restricted to the domestic
+hearth. Some prejudices, as was natural among a conservative people, were
+on its first introduction excited against the new order of things.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the seventies of our century the social craze of what was called
+&#8216;rinkomania&#8217; set in. Any available buildings were laid down with floors
+more or less lubricated, on which the sons and daughters of the various
+sections of the great middle class, shod with a peculiar adaptation of
+wheels, slipped about, and called it skating. These resorts were no doubt
+admirably conducted. Acquaintances made at them were probably blameless.
+They often perhaps ended in blissful and desirable marriage. But not
+without a shock to her sense of maternal propriety did the English matron
+of old-fashioned ideas see, or hear of, her daughter being twirled round
+in the arms of some youth just introduced, or perhaps without even the
+preliminary of that easy form. The young woman could cite plausible
+precedent for the process. The most fond and nervous of mothers suffered
+her fears to be allayed. No evil, and it may be hoped some good, to mind
+and body, came perhaps from these experiences.</p>
+
+<p>It was, nevertheless, an innovation on the usage of generations to which
+bygone ancestors and ancestresses would not readily have reconciled
+themselves. In plain words it signified the revolt of the sons and
+daughters of the middle class against their exclusion from modes of social
+enjoyment that to their contemporaries slightly above them in the social
+scale had long been allowed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> They had read of the subscription balls
+planned by the astute Scot, John Almack, at Willis&#8217;s Rooms, in the last
+quarter of the eighteenth century. More recently they had seen accounts of
+subscription dances in what were then aristocratic watering places like
+Scarborough, or of the more cosmopolitan revels where chaperons were
+largely dispensed with by their well-born charges at Baden-Baden and
+Homburg. What claim did the accident of birth constitute to a monopoly of
+the more stirring and less exclusive forms of pleasure? Thus it came to
+pass that the pastime which followed the generally patrician Almacks at
+the interval of a century from being a romp of children became the mildly
+gymnastic function of youths and maidens of maturer years.</p>
+
+<p>The next stage in this progress is marked by the popularity of the
+lawn-tennis ground. The private gardens of urban or suburban villadom were
+soon too small for the wielders of the racquet. The common enclosure of
+the crescent, the square, or the &#8216;Gardens,&#8217; was coveted one day by the
+players. It was possessed the next. After this, the transition to
+lawn-tennis subscription clubs, with public grounds, and championship
+matches open to all comers was easy and natural. The parlour of home soon
+dwindled into an insignificant spot to the overgrown boys and girls
+engaged in &#8216;All England&#8217; tournaments of their own.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the gentlemen and ladies who called themselves society, and to
+whom a portion of the newspaper press was set apart, were indulging more
+enterprising tastes still, in a manner duly recorded by their daily and
+weekly journals. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> rage for &#8216;making up a party&#8217; for everything;
+researches into the London slums, or visits to the French play, came in;
+superstitious veneration for the ceremonial etiquette of a past day went
+out. The mere expedition to the theatre was scarcely stirring enough
+without the preliminary dinner or the subsequent supper at the modish
+restaurants which cause certain quarters of London metaphorically to abut
+on the Boulevard des Italiens or on the Palais Royal. They who now from
+afar imitated this glittering example had not, it is true, like their
+betters, any &#8216;smart&#8217; sets of their own.</p>
+
+<p>That was no reason why the favourites of fortune should have all the fun
+to themselves. The daughters of the professional class and of those below
+them in the social scale were as well educated, as intelligent, as
+personally presentable, as those whom a partial chance had made
+conventionally their superiors. Why should the persons born with the
+proverbial gold spoon in their mouths alone be emancipated? Friskiness was
+an attribute not confined to the born inheritors of that which called
+itself society.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the laws of middle class orthodoxy were subjected to a process of
+general relaxation like to what, rightly or wrongly, was fancied to have
+taken place in more exalted circles. Clubs for private theatricals
+followed the subscription dances, in suburban town halls. Bayswater
+wanderers or South Kensington shooting stars reproduced some theatrical
+favourite from the repertory of the Prince of Wales&#8217;s or the Gaiety on the
+amateur boards of Westbourne Grove, Brompton, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> Chelsea. In all things
+the accredited exemplars of the latest and most cosmopolitan mode were
+followed by the younger generation of the classes that conventionally were
+still regarded as strongholds of the ethical severity which Puritan
+ancestors handed down. The development was of course inevitable. In the
+long run it will not be found to have done any harm. But incidentally it
+has involved a considerable modification of the old ideas and habits of
+many hundreds among Her Majesty&#8217;s subjects whose special attribute was
+once supposed to be, in Froissart&#8217;s phrase, &#8216;to take their pleasures
+sadly.&#8217; Lord&#8217;s Cricket Ground on an Eton and Harrow match day; the Hyde
+Park Magazine as the meeting point of the Four-in-Hand Club; any one of
+some half-dozen eating houses bordering on Bond Street, frequented under a
+Gallic title by the home-staying Briton; these have ceased to be the
+appanage of Belgravia or Mayfair alone; the crowd which resorts to them is
+quite as representative of the newest interests as of the oldest acres.</p>
+
+<p>In theory and in practice &#8216;society&#8217; considers itself, and to some extent
+is still, a close corporation. It is bordered by a fringe not always
+easily to be distinguished from the holy fabric itself. Its doings are
+more and more moved by influences originating outside its own limits. If
+this were not so Lord Beaconsfield would not have been able truthfully to
+say in his last novel <i>Endymion</i> that London which during the earlier days
+of the Queen&#8217;s reign was a very dull place had now become a most amusing
+one. No one knew the capital better or during his later years had tasted
+of its lighter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> pleasures more discriminatingly than the critic who made
+this remark.</p>
+
+<p>As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of
+the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so
+English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power
+of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively
+recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those
+with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews
+its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old
+and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is
+unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.</p>
+
+<p>In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the
+present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen&#8217;s
+Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house
+wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation
+of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and
+might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror.
+As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new r&eacute;gime has
+involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth
+is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower
+charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to
+leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer
+succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly
+without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial
+magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres.
+Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical
+indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be
+unlet; his sons&#8217; bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in
+marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the
+old Hall at his &#8216;rent dinner,&#8217; the squire, one of a long race of squires,
+has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton,
+Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of
+education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since
+Lord Cairns&#8217; Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the
+earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection
+with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed
+into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county
+town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill
+owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life
+lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new
+proprietors violates few of the old traditions.</p>
+
+<p>The squire of to-day, who was the banker, solicitor, or brewer of
+yesterday, reproduces very successfully the existence of the more ancient
+predecessors whom events have caused him to expropriate. His son is at the
+same school, at the same college, or in the same regiment as the son of
+his predecessor; his daughters are not less fond than the daughters of his
+predecessor of riding to the meet, or of driving in state to the county
+ball. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> himself is more diligent in the business of quarter sessions,
+transferred to County Council, than the squire before him was; his wife is
+not likely to neglect the duties of the parish Lady Bountiful; her poultry
+yard may be decimated by Reynard; her husband refuses on that account to
+connive at the enormity of shooting a fox. Rather will he take a pride in
+being able to boast that when there is a meet on his property, the coverts
+are never drawn blank. In due time he may accede to the mastership of the
+subscription pack which more liberally than his predecessor he supports.
+The last squire was a judge of horses and cattle at the County Show; the
+new squire will doubtless in due course fill that position; meanwhile,
+though he may have been born in a warehouse and bred at a desk, his taste
+for shorthorn breeding is worthy of an exclusively territorial lineage; he
+himself plays as well as dresses the part to perfection, and might be
+matched for tramping across stubble or plough and bringing down partridges
+against the least commercial of the squirearchy.</p>
+
+<p>This is only typical of what during many years has been taking place among
+all classes. A discreetly generous administration of the Poor Law operates
+in the long run as an insurance payment against revolution. The fusion of
+classes not less than the organization of professions or enterprise is the
+keynote of our epoch. The process has, without an exception, been one of
+levelling up, not down. The classes called indifferently higher, or older,
+have proved to possess an unexpected aptitude for communicating the
+tastes, the pursuits, the habits, the very instincts, which have descended
+to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> them from their forefathers, to the newcomers that the distribution of
+wealth, the opportunities of industry, the innumerable vicissitudes of
+life, have incorporated gradually into themselves. Thus it has come to
+pass that society in England, in itself the most miscellaneous of all
+conceivable composites, is saturated throughout and cemented as to its
+different parts by a real homogeneity. The method of attainment has
+varied, will continue to vary infinitely; the ideal standard remains
+uniform. In most country districts, the notable exceptions being the
+mining regions of the North, or the aggressively Nonconformist portions of
+Wales, the old J.Ps. where their qualities entitle them to do so, have as
+a preceding chapter has shown held their own against their new colleagues
+on the County Councils. The achievement finds its exact counterpart in the
+broader and more purely social processes just described.</p>
+
+<p>That which has been called the restless, the aspiring, self-assertive,
+inquisitive spirit of the age is not confined in its manifestations to any
+section of the community, urban or rural, territorial or commercial, of
+gentle or ungentle birth. It has been accompanied by a distinct change in
+the figure and in the general appearance of the English youth of both
+sexes. Suppose an Englishman who had left his country at an early period
+of the present reign, and who, having made his fortune in the Colonies,
+had returned to pass the residue of his days in his native land. What are
+the changes that would most impress his mind? It cannot be doubted that
+foremost among these would be the visible obliteration of the conventional
+distinction between the aristocracies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> of birth and money, the oligarchies
+of manufacture and of land. As from the window of his club, from his seat
+in the hotel coffee-room, from his position at the theatre, the opera, or
+from his chair in Hyde Park, he watched the representatives of the new
+order which during a few decades had sprung up in the old country, he
+would be aware of an improved expression of countenance upon the faces of
+the quietly and well dressed young men, of figures taller, better set up,
+and better carried, among the young women as well.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal of English womanhood as represented in the sketches of George du
+Maurier is a faithful generalization from actual life, historically
+accurate in all its essential details. Even the lofty stature since the
+bicycle began to develop certain muscles and parts of the human frame, is
+now seen to be no figment of the artist&#8217;s imagination. The feminine forms
+which, towering majestically above the thrones of wheelwork, look down
+upon the dwarfed passenger or equestrian, are to-day perceived to have
+been presented on no exaggerated scale in the pages of <i>Punch</i>. English
+women have always had a beauty and a durability of attractiveness unique
+throughout the world. It is only of late years that to these qualities,
+consequently on improvements on their physical regimen, the maids and
+matrons of Britain have added a certain Junonian majesty of proportion
+that John Leech could not depict simply because in his day it did not
+exist, but that is portrayed with the fidelity of historic truth by the
+pencil of John Leech&#8217;s successor. This latter development has been an
+unmixed good. The transition from the eventless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> purely domesticated
+existence to the locomotive, semi-public, generally unsettling, and
+exciting life in the case of the future wives and mothers of middle class
+Englishmen, has had its transient disadvantages. It was not indeed to be
+expected, nor was it possible, that the change from samplers and school
+rooms to skating rinks, lawn tennis tournaments, bicycle grounds, and
+suppers after the play at restaurants, could be accomplished with perfect
+smoothness, or that the bread-and-butter miss described by Byron should
+without any jar to the nerves of her compatriots develop into the girl of
+the period, though on a less aggressive scale than she was once sketched
+by a popular novelist in a famous article. The most circumspect of
+chaperons, the most drastic of duennas cannot ensure her charges against
+sometimes making ineligible acquaintance on these public pleasure grounds.
+The records of the Law Courts show that the dancing youths of subscription
+ballrooms, in the suburbs, are not invariably conducive to the domestic
+happiness of middle class homes. The development was to be expected. The
+percentage of friction or scandal was inevitable. As Brummel&#8217;s valet said
+of his master&#8217;s crumpled neckcloths: &#8216;These are our failures;&#8217; in other
+words, they are the social miscarriages incidental to the strangeness of
+the new order. As the class now spoken of becomes more habituated to the
+cosmopolitan modes which it has assumed, the r&ocirc;le will doubtless be played
+without any misadventures.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing less than a progress from insularity to cosmopolitanism is the
+social enterprise in which the upper classes led the way, and in which
+those who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> are always ready to imitate their example have followed them.
+The fashion is not yet fully acclimatised. For that reason carping
+critics, unjustly perhaps, have suggested that English families who take
+their holiday at Boulogne-sur-Mer would do well not to carry with them on
+their return to their suburban homes in England the social usages which
+flourish in the Assembly Rooms of an Anglicized French watering-place.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<p class="title">&#8216;THE PLAY&#8217;S THE THING&#8217;</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Summary of the agencies and incidents preparing the way for the
+revival of the theatre as a popular institution, Macready and his
+purifying influences inside the theatre. Charles Kean at the
+Princess&#8217;s. Usefulness of Rugby and Eton associations to each of these
+respectively. Miss Faucit (Lady Martin); her last appearance at Drury
+Lane; her enduring influence on the profession. Mrs Boucicault, Miss
+Kate Terry, Mrs P. H. Lee, Miss Ellen Terry and others. Henry Irving;
+his first London hit at the St James&#8217;s, afterwards at the Lyceum under
+Bateman. His success characterized. T. W. Robertson&#8217;s plays. Other
+circumstances of the time favourable to the new popularity of the
+play.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>At the different seaside resorts fringing the greater part of southern
+England from Beachy Head to Penzance, by the new sort of life organized at
+Eastbourne, Hastings, and innumerable other places, one is reminded very
+practically that only twenty miles of intervening sea separate the French
+from the English coast. The British climate may be less favourable than
+that on the other side of the Straits for the open air existence of the
+French littoral. The more praiseworthy, therefore, and not the less
+persistent are the efforts of visitors and residents on the unsunny side
+of the Channel to acclimatize themselves to the <i>al fresco</i> habits of
+Boulogne, Dieppe, Trouville, or Biarritz.</p>
+
+<p>Brighton has not yet very visibly changed its r&eacute;gime<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> since the days when
+George IV. lived at the Pavilion. Its newer rival, Eastbourne, has taken
+advantage of a local conformation, and especially of a paved sea front to
+present the stranger with various little reproductions of what is most
+characteristic in the social exterior of French holiday life during the
+bathing season. It is not only one or two families, mutually intimate,
+which meet and pass together the greater portion of the day on the
+esplanade that lies in the shadow of Beachy Head. The whole place
+practically turns out, settles itself down for a day&#8217;s occupation, if the
+weather be fine enough, on the causeway above the pebbled shore. The
+ladies produce knitting instruments or appliances for domestic needlework.
+The men have their newspapers or books. The circle exactly after the
+French fashion is formed, big enough in compass to admit all the polite
+population of the place. When the luncheon hour approaches, there is a
+move not from off the sea front, but to some of the covered shelters that
+stud at intervals the esplanade. Improvised tables are covered with white
+cloths. The company, that the French stranger at a glance recognizes as
+belonging to the order of <i>bourgeoisie</i>, proves itself long to have
+outgrown the dislike to public meals common to most English men and women
+at the period of the Queen&#8217;s accession. At night the boarding houses,
+hotels, or private dwellings that in a long line rise just above the sea
+terrace seem practically to amalgamate themselves into a single dancing
+hall.</p>
+
+<p>Other instances, more picturesque, or at least more suggestive, of the
+naturalization of continental examples, at English holiday resorts may be
+given. Eastbourne<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> is indebted for the full development of its natural
+attractions and for the addition of its beauties of art to the Duke of
+Devonshire. Amongst other buildings with which the place has been enriched
+is a town hall of graceful proportions and artistic aspect. This building
+is crowned by a clock tower so exquisitely shaped and standing out in such
+classic profile against the dark South Downs in the background as to
+justify the local vaunt that had it been in Florence sightseers from all
+parts of the world would have flocked to see it; and guide books would
+long since have commemorated the glories of, a new Campanile added to the
+historic list of fair structures. While the Eastbourne clock tower is
+awaiting the architectural canonization it deserves, the town itself has
+still more closely approached to southern exemplars by starting a carnival
+of its own.<a name='fna_45' id='fna_45' href='#f_45'><small>[45]</small></a> The slovenly and bedraggled mummeries into which the
+Italian saturnalia have degenerated have not prevented the enterprising
+authorities of the Sussex watering place from mimicking the battles of
+flowers and confetti that are still supposed to relieve the approach of
+Lent in the City of the Popes, but which as a fact have during late years
+only formed another feature in Roman vulgarity. One advantage over its
+more Southern original the Sussex shore imitation possesses. Real confetti
+are not employed. Pellets of tissue paper are missiles at once less costly
+and less dangerous than sugar plums. In other respects the continental
+type has been reproduced rather too faithfully. Whether on the Corso, the
+King&#8217;s Road, Brighton, the Esplanade or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> Terminus Road, Eastbourne, the
+whole pageant, as to the costume, the humours, and the hand artillery of
+the mummers, resembles equally the scenes on the return from the Derby by
+road to be witnessed between Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.</p>
+
+<p>It was, perhaps, the foreign imitations in the social scheme of English
+life increasingly visible during his later years to Matthew Arnold which
+inspired that close observer with the advice to his countrymen to organize
+the theatre. To some extent, indeed, the counsel had long been
+anticipated. The organization of the stage into a wholesome agency of
+popular amusement and teaching began with Macready, the earliest of that
+line of considerable actors who have served their generation during the
+Victorian epoch. But the prejudice against the play prevailing among other
+than the austerer classes long survived the work of this great reformer of
+the English stage. The company which fills a theatre to-day in respect of
+ethics and behaviour is not inferior to the fashionable occupants of an
+opera box on a subscription night.</p>
+
+<p>It was not always so. When between 1827, the year of his first, and 1851
+the year of his last, appearance at Drury Lane, Macready was the head of
+the theatrical world, he found some difficulty in eliminating certain
+objectionable elements from the auditorium of Drury Lane. He persisted
+with his work. At last the moral atmosphere of a London playhouse was
+admittedly as unexceptionable as that of Exeter Hall. Macready himself who
+was born in 1793, and lived till 1873, had been educated at Rugby, as
+Charles Kean<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> who followed him, had reached the Sixth Form at Eton.
+Macready, too, was in his day almost as much a favourite with the clergy
+of the Established Church as, since his <i>The Sign of the Cross</i>, Mr Wilson
+Barrett has become in ours. If the Etonian Keate inspired respect by the
+consciousness of his having birched future generations of statesmen, the
+Etonian Macready reflected the prestige of respectability upon his
+profession from the fact that during his retirement at Sherborne in
+Dorsetshire, most of the Anglican clergy noticeable for their elocution
+had received lessons from him in the art of reading.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Kean&#8217;s acting life covered the period between 1820 and 1868. Like
+Macready, he was a favourite in the provinces before he made his mark on
+the London boards. With him there began, or was fairly established, the
+improvement of stage, scenery, costume, and in all incidental accessories
+that has been brought to so high a point of perfection by the genius,
+industry, and well-judged lavishness of Henry Irving. Byron&#8217;s enthusiasm
+still glows in the words of his famous eulogy on the acting of Charles
+Kean&#8217;s father, Edmund Kean, who seems to have been perhaps the most
+powerful and moving artist that the English stage has known. The energy,
+passion and fire of the Keans marked a reaction from, and were to some
+extent a protest against the stately and frigid classicism of the school
+of Kemble. They thus appropriately coincided in point of time with that
+romantic movement in English poetry which in his satire Byron ridiculed,
+but which in his practice he did so much to promote. The epoch, during
+which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> these attributes were displayed by Kean and his followers, roughly
+may be said to have synchronized with the season of the influence on the
+thought and diction of English poetry exercised through the publication of
+the <i>Reliques</i> of Thomas Percy, who, towards the end of the last, and
+early in the present, century, was successively Dean of Carlisle and
+Bishop of Dromore. This book probably did more than any other single
+volume ever issued from the press, to quicken and complete the revolt of
+English taste against the formal models of the age of Pope. From the
+personal life, character and wide social acceptance both of Macready first
+and of Charles Kean afterwards, the English drama directly, as well as
+indirectly, was a gainer. In those days the social fusion was not nearly
+so complete as it has since become; but Macready and the younger Kean had
+both been popular in their school days. In after life Rugby and Eton
+respectively rallied round them. The amalgamating agency of the Garrick
+Club, practically so familiar at rather a later day, was not then an
+operative force. But of the Athen&aelig;um and similar institutions Macready and
+in his turn Kean must have been free; their private acquaintances and
+visiting lists were as large and as representative as those of their
+successors during the present decade of the Queen&#8217;s reign.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, however, under a dynasty of high tragedians that the full
+development, as a social and intellectual force, of the Victorian drama
+was to be attained. Long after the theatre became respectable, it remained
+dull. The audience seldom dwindled to the point of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> invisibility which a
+little time before was in some theatres habitual, and not infrequent in
+all. Before the period now spoken of, Lord Lytton, of whose place in
+letters more will be said elsewhere, had gone some way towards repeating
+the dual successes in Parliament and at the playhouse achieved by Sheridan
+in an earlier day. <i>Money</i> was produced in 1840. Exactly a quarter of a
+century afterwards a dramatic hit not less palpable and destined to have
+results more considerable was made by an author till then little known on
+the London stage. The year in which <i>Society</i> was played at the Prince of
+Wales&#8217;s, till then the Queen&#8217;s Theatre, in a street off the Tottenham
+Court Road, will be remembered by the theatre-goer as that in which Henry
+J. Byron&#8217;s last burlesque was produced on the same boards and in which one
+of the actors in that extravaganza, <i>Don Giovanni</i>, Mr John Hare, took,
+for the first and only time in his life, a woman&#8217;s part on the stage,
+wearing the petticoats of Zerlina, the simple peasant girl. The real
+significance of this occasion lay in its marking a new era in the fortunes
+of the nineteenth century drama. The germ of Anthony Trollope&#8217;s novels of
+domestic life, may be seen in Bulwer-Lytton&#8217;s fictions of <i>The Caxtons</i>
+school. The part performed by the author of <i>Society</i> and its dramatic
+sequels for the English play resembled the performances of Anthony
+Trollope with regard to the English novel. Like Bulwer, Robertson
+fashioned his dialogue on the model of Sheridan. The writer of <i>Money</i>
+laboured to reproduce the antithetic polish of his original. The author of
+<i>Society</i> and the series that followed it was attracted rather by the
+caustic repartee<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> in which the author of <i>The School for Scandal</i>
+excelled. The change thus introduced at a theatre of which till then few
+had ever heard, was the substitution of the realities of contemporary life
+in drawing room, club, shooting field or camp for the threadbare
+traditions, stilted sentiment, and fustian talk of conventional melodrama.
+Whether the original were, or were not, too trivial for reproduction, it
+is at least human nature to which the mirror was now for the first time
+during recent years held up. The contrast between Robertson and most of
+his immediate predecessors who were nearly his contemporaries was not less
+marked than that between those masterpieces of the Laura Matilda school,
+which delighted Mrs Wititterly, and the works of Miss Edgeworth, or that
+between the <i>Great Cyrus</i> and the author of <i>Waverley</i>. The <i>dramatis
+person&aelig;</i> of Robertson were the men and women, the youths and maidens, the
+old bucks and young officers, the pretty servant girls, their ogling
+followers, the dapper apprentices, the seasoned topers whom the English
+public had long known from Leech&#8217;s drawings in the &#8216;London Charivari,&#8217; but
+who had not often been met with recently on the London stage. Now, for the
+first time within the experience of many, the theatre became the fashion;
+the stalls at the Prince of Wales&#8217;s first, and at other houses soon
+afterwards, were peopled by occupants as modish as the Italian Opera when
+Piccolomini sang in <i>Traviata</i>. Even then, however, the first night of a
+new drama, though at the most popular playhouse fell very short of
+reproducing the personal distinctions of a premi&egrave;re at the Com&eacute;die
+Francaise or the Palais Royal.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> That was to follow in due time. Early in
+the sixties an impressario, with judgment sharpened by American
+experience, became the lessee of the same theatre, the Lyceum, which
+twenty years earlier had been managed by Charles Mathews and Madame
+Vestris. The first great feature in Mr Bateman&#8217;s management was the
+powerful and picturesque acting of his accomplished daughter in <i>Leah</i>
+first and in some Shakespearian parts afterwards. About the same time an
+actor with whose name in coming years the Lyceum was to be more widely
+associated had given the public specimens of an art surprisingly vigorous
+and picturesque. Henry Irving first played before a London audience in
+1859. In 1866 he had the good fortune to be cast with Miss Herbert (Mrs
+Crabbe) in one of those character parts in which he has had few equals,
+the worthless, persecuting husband in <i>Hunted Down</i>. This was in the
+theatre that witnessed the first triumphs of the great singer Braham, that
+more recently had been filled from pit to gallery by the laughter loving
+admirers of Mr and Mrs Frank Mathews,<a name='fna_46' id='fna_46' href='#f_46'><small>[46]</small></a> or by the appreciative few who
+realized the charm of the more subtle impersonations of Alfred Wigan. The
+place, therefore, was of good omen for the rising star. The most
+accomplished dramatic critic whom in England the century has produced,
+George Henry Lewes, and the lady who bore his name, but is best known to
+the public as George Eliot, author of <i>Adam Bede</i>, both witnessed the
+d&eacute;but. &#8216;Ten or fifteen years hence,&#8217; said<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> the gentleman, &#8216;that young man
+will be where Kean once was, at the head of the English stage.&#8217; &#8216;In my
+opinion,&#8217; faintly murmured the lady, &#8216;he is there already.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the popular taste of English playgoers had been educated by the
+impersonations of Miss Faucit as well as by her own literary expositions
+of Shakespeare&#8217;s characters, and by the written discourses of her future
+husband, Sir Theodore Martin on cognate subjects. The daughter of an
+actress, Lady Martin received her first education for the stage from an
+actor, one of a race of actors, Percival Farren, of the Haymarket Theatre.
+This is the family which at the end of the eighteenth century gave a
+Countess, acknowledged on Mrs Abington&#8217;s retirement to be the first
+actress of her day, to the Derby peerage. Its living representative, the
+gifted and exemplary William Farren, more than recalls to the present
+generation the genius of his predecessors. Soon after her arrival in
+London, Miss Faucit joined Macready&#8217;s company, and her &#8216;Juliet&#8217; became a
+classical performance. Probably the last occasion that this lady was seen
+on the London stage is her performance of &#8216;Rosalind&#8217; in <i>As You Like It</i>
+at Drury Lane during the sixties. As a proof that Lady Martin has
+exercised an abiding influence on her profession for good it is enough to
+mention the names of Mrs P. H. Lee, as &#8216;Juliet,&#8217; of Mrs Boucicault, the
+graceful and accomplished wife of a popular husband, Miss Kate Terry (Mrs
+Arthur Lewis), peerless in romantic melodrama, under the lesseeship of
+Benjamin Webster at the Adelphi. Some bright particular star from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+days of Sir Walter Scott downwards has never failed any generation of the
+Terry family; Henry Irving&#8217;s inexhaustible co-adjutress has only
+illustrated anew the ancestral tradition. Artists whether of the pen or
+pencil, practically experienced in all the publics of Europe, have been
+unanimous in testifying that there is none with whom conscientious toil
+and excellence are so sure ultimately to yield the reward of fame and
+profit as the public of England.</p>
+
+<p>The theatre with us was firmly established as an honourable and lucrative
+institution directly men of intellectual power and of competent education
+began to throw their energies into it as they might have done into the
+law, the legislature or any other of the liberal professions. Samuel
+Phelps was born some ten years later than Macready; he was trained in
+Macready&#8217;s company; under him Sadler&#8217;s Wells became once more the
+prosperous school of classical drama. Some years junior to Phelps, Walter
+Montgomery laboured in the same line. Both of those men unconsciously were
+preparing the way for Henry Irving; they were each endowed with high gifts
+of mind as well as with shrewd common sense. Their detractors of course
+were not wanting. Neither Montgomery nor Phelps, on the score of public
+appreciation, had more reason to complain than Henry Irving himself. If,
+therefore, the reason is asked for the revived popularity of the play in
+all grades of English life, the answer must be not so much the exceptional
+brilliance of individual successes as the qualifications of industry not
+less than aptitude which a succession of actors has brought to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> the
+vocation. Sir Henry Irving, as a stage artist may have his mannerisms or
+defects. Whatever career he might have embraced, he would have made his
+mark in it, because, besides being a great actor, he is a remarkably
+clever and far-seeing man. He is therefore in this way historically true
+to the best associations of his art.</p>
+
+<p>Public speakers at theatrical fund dinners are apt to cite as novel
+instances of the drama&#8217;s popularity the proportion of young actors who
+have been educated at Eton or taken a degree at Oxford. So far from this
+being a novelty, it is rather, as the illustrations mentioned above show,
+the reversion to an older order. Henry Irving&#8217;s knighthood only implied
+the just recognition of qualities that in another walk of life would have
+earlier elicited for their possessor a like distinction from the State.</p>
+
+<p>In accounting for the approximation as to popularity of a London to a
+Paris premi&egrave;re which to-day so much impresses the foreign visitor, other
+circumstances must be remembered. During the last decade or two,
+especially since the collapse of the second French Empire, the English
+capital has been, to an entirely new extent, the pleasure ground of the
+world, and at all seasons of the year contains a large floating population
+of strangers, Anglo-American or European, as well as of British subjects
+visiting for a few days from other parts of the Kingdom, the capital on
+the Thames. These birds of passage seldom possess a large social
+acquaintance in the capital; the men among them do not always belong to
+clubs; the ladies are too busy shopping to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> invite, or to make, calls; the
+theatre is thus for a constantly increasing proportion of those who sleep
+within the bills of mortality the easiest and the most attractive form of
+pleasure. Hence as might be expected, the far more amusing repertory of
+the Victorian theatre at the end of this century than at any previous
+epoch. With a Pinero, or a Grundy, to mention only two typical names; with
+pieces so diverting as <i>Charley&#8217;s Aunt</i>, or <i>Bootles&#8217; Baby</i>, to mention
+only one or two representative plays, the Englishman whose chief pastime
+the play has become finds laughter moving relaxation as effectually, more
+economically, and to himself a great deal more intelligibly within the
+roar of his own Strand, than by travelling to a Paris boulevard. The
+integral part now occupied by the play in the life of the most respectable
+portion of the middle class is shown by the spacious theatres that have
+lately risen in such decorous suburbs of the metropolis as Brixton.</p>
+
+<p>Its utility as an agency of mental improvement and moral teaching is
+suggested by the surprising success of the new religious drama that
+beginning perhaps with the <i>Judah</i> of H. A. Jones, has reached its climax
+of well deserved success in <i>The Sign of the Cross</i> of Wilson Barrett. The
+suburban theatres have not as yet provided a great field for original
+talent in the playwright; as might be expected, their patrons seem to
+prefer pieces that have already received the stamp of public approval.
+While musical comedies indicate an increasingly popular compromise between
+Drury Lane and the <i>Alhambra</i>, the romantic drama has once more proved to
+be not less attractive than when three decades since<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> <i>The Corsican
+Brothers</i> first filled the Princess&#8217;s with enthusiastic audiences. This
+perhaps at the present moment is the latest of all the successful revivals
+on the English stage. The plays respectively founded on novels, <i>The
+Prisoner of Zenda</i>, and <i>Under the Red Robe</i>, are not only above the
+average as to merit, but show that the popularity of the cup-and-saucer
+drama of Albery and Robertson is consistent with a vigorous affection for
+the melodrama which in Bulwer&#8217;s <i>Lady of Lyons</i>, and in Boucicault&#8217;s
+<i>Colleen Bawn</i> once absorbed the enthusiasm of the pit.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<p class="title">THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING MILLIONS</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Technical reasons rendering an exact comparison of foreigners settled
+in England at different dates impracticable. Approximate results
+yielded by the analysis of official figures, and their lessons. Danger
+of German competition with English clerks exaggerated. Actual
+occupations followed by foreigners. Allegations concerning alien
+pauperism tested. Proportion of foreign to English pauperism in
+London. Percentage and nationalities of foreigners in great towns of
+England and their occupations. Theories about population, especially
+Malthus. The Malthusian doctrine examined by the light of English
+experience. Objections to it summarized. The truth and the details of
+English population since 1793. Views of Dr Price and others as to
+decrease refuted by Cobbett. Figures and facts of increase. How the
+non-pressure on means of subsistence can be explained. New industries.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>In the preceding chapter it was mentioned that one of the elements in the
+increased popularity and prosperity of the theatre as an English
+institution is the growing addition of foreigners to our native
+population. This will be a convenient place at which not only to analyse
+the composition of the foreign influx to our shores, but generally to
+examine the rate and the results of the increase of our population.
+Official data for the numerical estimate of the strangers within our gates
+is not forthcoming with the certainty and completeness that might be
+desired. The reason given by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> parliamentary report<a name='fna_47' id='fna_47' href='#f_47'><small>[47]</small></a> is intelligible
+enough; and is to the following effect. The English census takes
+cognizance of birthplaces, not of nationalities. British subjects who have
+been born abroad are indeed asked to state the fact, but frequently fail
+to do so. When the return reaches the Registrar General, the confusion is
+frequently such as to render it doubtful whether the foreign birthplace
+implies a foreign nationality as well. This uncertainty was not removed,
+but was rather increased, when the Enumerating Officer exercised his
+ingenuity in deducing the national identity from the surname. For instance
+few patronymics are more distinctively German than M&uuml;ller. None is more
+likely to be written by an English clerk as the indubitably British
+Miller. The result has been at different times an understatement of
+
+residents in England who are foreigners both by nationality and birth, and
+an overstatement of the foreign-born British subjects. The operation of
+the principle adopted in the last census is exactly opposite to this; it
+tends to overrate foreign subjects domiciled in England and to underrate
+English subjects who were born beyond seas. The general consequence is
+that as the Report already mentioned reminds one, the foreign residents
+returns for 1891 are not minutely comparable with those for previous
+censuses. It will be enough to restrict ourselves on this point to the
+returns of the last three censuses 1871, 1881, 1891, a period of twenty
+years. Of persons being foreigners both by birth and nationality residing
+at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> these epochs in England and Wales, there were in 1871, 100,638; in
+1881 there were 117,999; in 1891 there were 198,113. The process indicated
+by these figures seems to have been at varying rates going forward through
+a long series of years.</p>
+
+<p>For the two decades between 1871 and 1891, the growth of foreigners among
+us was 98 per cent. It will, therefore, probably not be a serious
+miscalculation to estimate the total of strangers within our gates as
+having doubled itself during the more recent years of the Queen&#8217;s reign.
+This estimate derives fresh probability from the fact that between 1881
+and 1891 the increase of foreigners domiciled in England outstripped by
+nearly six-fold the augmentation during the previous decade. The greater
+part of foreigners in England and Wales are with us for business purposes,
+or are sailors on board ships trading with England. As, therefore, might
+be expected, most of them are to be found in the great industrial centres,
+or at the large seaports. Thus, of a total of 198,113, 95,053, or nearly
+one-half were enumerated in London; 15,536 in the suburban counties of
+Surrey, Kent, Middlesex, Essex. Lancashire contained 25,109 with an
+overflow of 2,254 into the suburban parts of Cheshire. In Yorkshire there
+were 15,755; in the mining counties of Durham, Glamorganshire,
+Northumberland, though not engaged in mining but in shipping coals, there
+were 14,908. The foreign miners, it may be said, actually at work in
+England are very few. The town in which the total proportion of foreigners
+to the population has always been highest is of course London (the
+strictly metropolitan area); the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> London foreign population is 23 to
+1,000. In the suburban districts of West Ham, Willesden and Tottenham the
+proportion is 10 to 1,000. In the provinces, next to London come Cardiff
+with 21 per 4,000, South Shields and Manchester each with 18 per 1,000,
+Leeds and Grimsby each with 16, Liverpool and Hull each with 14; Newport
+and Swansea each with 12; the other towns where a proportion of 10 per
+1,000 is reached are Sunderland, Hastings and Brighton. Of the 198,000 odd
+foreigners now under consideration, 1,804 are Asiatics coming from China,
+Persia, Arabia or elsewhere; 1,062 are from Egypt or some other part of
+Africa; 26,226 are Americans; out of these 19,740 belong to the United
+States, the subjects of the Stripes and Stars enumerated as domiciled
+among us in 1881 were 17,767, an increase of 11&middot;1 per cent, during the
+decade. The number of English living abroad is of course immeasurably
+greater than that of foreigners living in England. Thus in the case of the
+United States alone, in 1891 there were settled 1,008,220 English people;
+this was an increase of 35&middot;2 per cent. over those enumerated in 1881.</p>
+
+<p>The complaint that foreign competition in England itself is crowding
+native industry out of the market recurs periodically; it renders of
+special importance to Englishmen the estimate of the European foreigners
+who have, during the period now under review, immigrated to our shores.
+The total of those composing this category, men, women and children, has
+been 168,814; as for the reasons already explained one is cautioned to
+remember, this is an outside<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> calculation owing to the inclusion in it of
+many who though British subjects, omitted to set this forth in their
+schedules. Of the 168,814 European foreigners, 101,255 were males. From
+this total may be deducted 7,421 as boys under 15, and 3,039 as men of
+upwards of 65; the sailors, in number 15,035 should not appear in the
+estimate. When all deductions under these headings of industrial
+ineffectives have been made there is left an aggregate of 75,760 effective
+competitors with native industry on English soil, whom during these
+decades their respective countries have equipped and sent forth against
+us.</p>
+
+<p>With our own population of 37 millions steadily increasing, the numerical
+rivalry seems less alarming than might have been imagined. As a matter of
+fact that rivalry strictly speaking may be larger than the provisional
+estimate now given would show. It sometimes happens within the experience
+of local registrars that to avoid English jealousy and so to have a better
+chance of obtaining work, industrial aliens Anglicize their own
+patronymics, change them for purely English names, or give English towns
+and counties as their places of birth; for the most part these deceptions
+are detected by the enumerator. In St George&#8217;s in the East, however, in
+Spitalfields, in Mile End Old Town and elsewhere some registrars seem to
+think the fraud often passes undiscovered; but others, with equal
+experience, disavow any reason for the suspicion of such a practice within
+their areas.</p>
+
+<p>As in the case of our Scotch and Irish colonies, so, too, with our
+settlers from the European continent the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> men largely outnumber the women.
+Whereas in the general population there are 106 women to every 100 of men,
+and 35 per cent. of the people are under 15 years of age; among the
+European foreigners there are only 67 women to every 100 men; only 8&middot;8 per
+cent. of the whole are under 15. In the case of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes,
+chiefly of course, sailors, there are four men to every woman, and
+sometimes as many as seven or eight. That in the case of Belgians, French
+and Swiss permanently settled in England, the men are outnumbered by the
+women is of course to be explained by the demands made for the former in
+the capacity of governesses, milliners, and serving maids. The figures
+relating to the sex of the strangers within our gates, as might be
+expected, fluctuate. Especially notable is the difference between the
+statistics for 1881 and for 1891; in the former year children under 15
+formed 6&middot;4 per cent. of all foreigners; in 1891 the percentage had risen
+to more than 8.</p>
+
+<p>The inference to be drawn from this statistical contrast suggests a new
+kind of immigration and probably implies that with a view to permanent
+settlement in England the foreigner was transporting his household gods
+bodily to our shores. Much has of late been heard about the crowding of
+pauper aliens into England. Some of the figures just examined may have
+involved cases of outdoor relief. Of this there is no evidence. But that a
+very serious addition was in this way made to the pauperism within English
+workhouses does not appear to be true. The exact figures and facts on this
+point may perhaps as well<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> be given; of the 36,871 foreign Europeans
+living at the time of the last census in the East End of London, only 105
+had seen the inside of an English union; out of the other (English)
+668,243 inhabitants of these parts of the town 13&middot;5 per 1,000 were pauper
+inmates; in other words, the proportion of foreign to native pauperism in
+those districts where foreigners chiefly congregate was less than
+one-fourth of the proportion of paupers in the remaining population. Of
+these foreigners inside English unions 51 were Germans; 16 were French; 14
+were Russians or Poles; 5 were Swiss; of the remainder no more than 4 came
+from any single foreign State.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;Made in Germany&#8217; is a phrase round which there has centred lately much
+controversy, political, economical, social and personal. This will have
+prepared the reader to hear that on an analysis of the nationality of our
+foreign residents, Germany heads the list with 50,599; Poles and Russians
+come next with 45,074; then the French with 20,797; afterwards follow in
+the order indicated with numbers fluctuating between 10,000 and 5,000
+Austrians or Hungarians, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss; no other nationality
+contributed more than 5,000; the Russian and Polish names, which, after
+the Germans, constitute the majority are so unmistakable as to render a
+comparison between their numbers in 1881 and in 1891 tolerably safe. This,
+for reasons already stated, is not so in the case of foreigners with less
+distinctive patronymics. In 1881 the Poles or Russians enumerated were
+14,468; in 1891 they were 54,074; the increase in ten years had thus been
+some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> 212 per cent. Germans, in number 50,599, constitute nearly one-third
+of our whole foreign population. Of that moiety, 1,981 are teachers; 1,198
+musicians; 5,358 domestic servants in private families or inns; 659 are
+professional cooks. To pass to a higher social category, 1,207 Germans are
+established in business as brokers and merchants; 1,966 as clerks; 393 are
+commercial travellers; 2,833 are sea-faring men; 282 are jewellers or
+goldsmiths; 889 are watchmakers; 794 cabinetmakers; 1,309 are butchers;
+2,340 are bakers; 276 are sugar refiners; only 592 are classed as general
+labourers; 5,042 are occupied in ministering to the needs, luxuries, or
+vanities of the person from the making of coats to the dressing of hair,
+or the preparation of feathers for Court head dresses.</p>
+
+<p>From these figures two facts of some interest emerge. The business clerks
+who are complained of as interfering so disastrously with the clerical
+labour market of Englishmen do not represent the largest contingent of
+Teutonic industry among us. Numerically the most serious competition of
+German with English industry is in the case of domestic servants. German
+tailors are second in order of importance; the clerks come after, not only
+these, but other occupations. Next to Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium and
+Spain seem to supply the most numerous competitors with the industry of
+the British middle classes.</p>
+
+<p>The growth of the purely English population, not complicated by any
+foreign elements accompanied, as it has been, with a steady increase of
+national prosperity is enough to supply instructive material to the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>philosophical enquirer into the facts and figures of English progress
+during the Victorian epoch. Before looking into these by the light of the
+once accepted theory of population it will be as well clearly to state
+what these doctrines are, as well as to summarize the criticisms to which,
+on the face of them, they are open. The doctrine of Malthus was first put
+forward by him at the end of the last century. During the first years of
+the present, while the reverend philosopher was professor of history and
+political economy at Haileybury, few subjects excited so much interest or
+controversy among writers on political philosophy or comparative
+statistics. The doctrine, as it was originally propounded by its author,
+is that population tends to increase in geometrical ratio, that
+subsistence only increases in numerical ratio. It followed, therefore,
+that unless the population be periodically thinned by the external
+influences of pestilence or war, the poorest classes chronically must be
+at starvation point, and that unless the multiplication of the race be
+checked by prudential restraints, within a given time the point will be
+reached at which the population on this planet is altogether in excess of
+the means for its support. On the threshold of the discussion which this
+proposition elicited, the obvious remark was that it asserted not an
+actuality but a possibility. Hence, unless, instead of a tendency, a
+proved experience could be asserted; unless, in other words, in the place
+of a tendency to increase existing, a historical increase could be
+established, the commentators on Malthus maintained that the danger which
+he foresaw was too remote to be reckoned with. The following is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> line
+taken by the critics of the Malthusian theory. It was declared to rest
+upon a series of hypotheses which as a matter of fact were never
+fulfilled. Granted that if the progression foreseen by Malthus took place,
+the calamity apprehended must ensue; it was maintained, as a matter of
+fact, that the abundant safeguards existing in practice were ignored by
+the alarmist <i>doctrinaires</i>. Supposing each marriageable pair upon the
+earth to marry first, and to produce afterwards as many children as a
+normally healthy couple may expect, not only subsistence, but standing
+room in this world would fail them. Experience, however, shows the
+fulfilment of any such forecast to be a moral impossibility. In daily
+practice there are apart from difficulty of subsistence many checks which
+avail to keep increase of population within reasonable bounds.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, statistics show that more than half the human beings born die from
+accidents or ailments before reaching marriageable age. Of those who
+actually reach that age, an uncertain, but considerable proportion fail to
+find mates; the men perhaps because they are over fastidious or selfish;
+the women possibly because they lack attractions of dower or person. With
+many more the course of true love runs crooked; the desired partner not
+being attainable, a solitary life is led. In other cases, the fear of not
+being able to maintain a conventional position acts as a deterrent. Then
+there is the considerable percentage of cases where legitimate
+opportunities of marriage are denied. Thus Colonial frontier men in
+solitary wilds have few opportunities of courtship or matrimony. Soldiers
+constantly changing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> their station; or sailors with a brevet wife in every
+port, are not usually marrying men, or the founders of numerous families.
+Of those who marry, many have no children, some have only one; others have
+sickly children who die. On the assumption that everyone in the world
+married, each pair must have two children to keep up the population.</p>
+
+<p>Hence the critics of the Malthusian theory have calculated that, striking
+out of their count those who cannot or will not marry, and those who,
+marrying, are childless; merely to maintain the population without
+increasing it, every married couple ought to produce a family of six.
+Though according to the Malthusians themselves this sufficiently liberal
+allowance of progeny might be reached without any calamitous consequences,
+practical acquaintance with the contingencies of domestic life shows that
+this quantum will not often be reached. If in any part of the world there
+existed conditions favourable to marriage and to fecundity, it was in
+Australia, shortly after the earliest gold discoveries, but when many
+immense fortunes had been made in farming; here there was work for all,
+wages were high, living cheap, cultivable, but uncultivated land abounded;
+finally there were no catastrophic checks from earthquake, pestilence or
+famine to the multiplication of human beings; if, therefore, the
+Malthusian doctrine could anywhere be verified, surely it would be here.
+Notwithstanding all these inducements to marriage and the propagation of
+the species, the actual rate of population increase was 2 per cent. a
+year.</p>
+
+<p>Hence it may perhaps be inferred that this represents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> the normal rate.
+That falls far short of the geometrical rate which the Malthusians would
+have us expect. The physiological truth, as expounded by experts in these
+matters would seem to be that in proportion as subsistence is more
+abundant and of a better kind, life more regular and artificial, fertility
+decreases. Scientific physicists point as proof of this statement to the
+fact that wild animals when domesticated or in good condition are less
+prolific than in their normally savage and poor state. So it is with women
+in the western wilds of Ireland, or in the Scotch Highlands. As their food
+and clothing are scarce and coarse, their maternity increases. The
+inference from the facts now cited clearly is that whatever the terms of
+the Malthusian proposition may mean, their significance does not warrant
+the conclusions that ardent Malthusians have at all times drawn from them.</p>
+
+<p>But it has been asserted that famine and plague are the Divinely appointed
+checks to the growth of population; thus showing some external restraint
+upon the multiplication of the race to be necessary to prevent population
+outstripping subsistence. The most familiar proofs offered of such an
+assertion are the periodical famines in India, especially that in the
+province of Orissa, and the Irish famine from the potato failure in 1846.
+On these proofs the following remarks suggest themselves. In the case of
+Orissa, numbers had nothing to do with the famine or consequent mortality;
+the people died because the heat of the sun untempered by rain literally
+scorched the food supply out of existence;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> if there had been only as many
+hundreds as there were millions, the same calamitous result, though on a
+numerically smaller scale, would have ensued; a province of Central India
+was decimated because the food did not exist. The famine therefore was
+real.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of Ireland, no famine at the close of the first decade of the
+Queen&#8217;s reign existed in the same sense that it had done in Orissa; the
+potato crop alone failed; corn, dairy produce, food products generally
+were plentiful; corn in fact was being exported from Ireland while the
+Irish themselves were perishing from starvation. The calamity therefore
+was less the stoppage of supplies by Providence as a check on population
+than a pecuniary failure. Nor was it a visitation as regards which man
+could plead exemption from responsibility. The potato rot did not come
+upon the Irish peasantry in a day or in a week. The disease had appeared
+in Eastern Europe so early as 1844 and 1843; it was scientifically certain
+that eventually it would reach Ireland. When, after due warning it
+attacked the plots of miserable soil reclaimed by peasant industry from
+hillside and bog, the destruction of the staple of native food wrought by
+it was gradual. Weeks and months were required to complete the process of
+rotting. Nothing was done. The people died not from the unkindness of
+nature, but from the neglect of man. Had the prudential restraints of the
+Malthusians limited the numbers to half the actual total, the agrarian
+policy which was responsible for the diet of potatoes instead of corn
+would have resulted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> in the same poverty and, therefore, in the same
+death.<a name='fna_48' id='fna_48' href='#f_48'><small>[48]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>One is not here concerned with the abstract truth of the theory of
+population enounced by Malthus, but with its applicability to, or its
+instructiveness in the case of, the England of Queen Victoria. What then
+are the facts of population here to be dealt with? The multiplication of
+the inhabitants of this country is known never to have been so rapid as
+during the century which opens with the French Revolution in 1793, and
+which witnesses at its close the sixtieth anniversary of Her Majesty&#8217;s
+accession. Earlier periods of augmentation may therefore be omitted. A
+hundred years ago, Dr Price, maintaining population actually to have
+
+decreased, spoke of its decline as a great danger. Cobbett and other more
+accurate observers, or less incautious generalizers, in opposition to Dr
+Price, established circumstantially the fact of an increase; but the
+possibility of a contrary view being taken is as suggestive as it now
+seems remarkable.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Thorold Rogers has been guided by his study of prices to the conclusion
+that the standard of comfort in living began to rise among us from the
+Reformation of the sixteenth century progressively onwards; and that even
+during the eighteenth century the masses were enjoying a golden age.
+Between 1750 and 1800;&mdash;the period during which the factory system began
+to be known, and the problems of population and production<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> were both
+closely discussed,&mdash;no fear of population getting ahead of subsistence
+suggested itself. Similarly during the Corn Law agitation 1840-6, the
+increase of production from English soil, notwithstanding the
+economico-agrarian law of diminishing return was proved to have outgrown
+the population. Later and more detailed statistics show that since 1831
+population with us has increased 30 per cent., capital 100 per cent.,
+purchasing power 600 per cent. During the last half century the average
+price of corn has been falling. Our demand for foreign corn has increased
+and is increasing. This evidence fortified by the income-tax returns,
+forbids the notion that during the last two centuries population in
+England has outstripped the means of its support. The conclusion is
+therefore irresistible that the natural tendencies to increase of
+inhabitants, whatever the occult possibilities may be, practically are
+counteracted by motives invisible and undefinable, perhaps, but not less
+potent. As a writer in <i>Macmillan&#8217;s Magazine</i><a name='fna_49' id='fna_49' href='#f_49'><small>[49]</small></a> points out, population
+generally increases up to the relative limit set by the power of procuring
+subsistence at any given time and place. The absolute limit as is shrewdly
+remarked, could only be reached when the highest skill and organization
+have extracted the last possible morsel of food from the earth; that
+experience has not yet been reached. So far from population always getting
+ahead of subsistence, its increase is by no means invariably as rapid as
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> development of the food supply. Both between 1560 and 1760; again
+between 1830 and 1880, this seems to have been the case in England.</p>
+
+<p>During many years, as each decennial census has appeared, timid
+sociologists may well have felt misgivings whether England could continue
+to support her ever multiplying millions. The fears of science have not
+been verified by the facts of experience; thus exactly a quarter of a
+century since the census return of 1871 seemed to leave no escape from the
+conclusion, that population had already all but overtaken the means of
+subsistence, or that unless our numbers were at once arrested, it must in
+a very short time do so. Since 1871 we have added 7 millions to our
+population, the equivalent, that is, of 1,200,000 families and the same
+number of working men. Instead of the pressure on subsistence being
+greater, or the average condition of our people being worse, the exact
+opposite has occurred. In comparison with the state of things two decades
+since, the masses among us are to-day better housed, better clothed,
+better shod, better fed, better educated. There is, as in an earlier
+chapter was shown, a steady decrease of pauperism; the number of those who
+with their dependents of all kinds live on the result of their
+investments, is growing constantly. Whether it be due to the reduction in
+the cost of conveyance, to the opening up of fresh fields of supply, or to
+the appreciation of gold, the fall in prices of the chief articles of
+consumption, corn, sugar, tea, cotton, timber, is a visible and a great
+benefit to the country.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>The fact that the increase between 1881 and 1891 fell short by about a
+quarter of a million of that which signalized the preceding ten years has
+been demonstrated by statistical experts of scientific authority not to
+indicate pressure on means of subsistence, but to be explicable by the
+stationariness of the population in many rural districts as well perhaps
+as by the disinclination, reflected from French and American precedent, of
+Englishwomen indefinitely to fulfil the functions of maternity.</p>
+
+<p>During the period now spoken of, with the exception of mining, the great
+staple industries of the United Kingdom have none of them increased, while
+agriculture has decreased. It may, therefore, well seem problematical how
+the 1,200,000 fresh heads of families have found a livelihood for
+themselves and their belongings.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation can only be that several new, as they are often nameless
+industries have during this time come into existence. Birmingham, the home
+of small industrial enterprises and in a less degree Sheffield, would of
+themselves explain the mystery. And here specific mention of a personal
+experience seems necessary. When the present writer by local observation
+was first acquiring material for such writing as that of which this book
+consists, he visited among other places Sheffield, under the obliging
+personal conduct of its then, and happily its present, Member, Mr A. J.
+Mundella. Close to one of the largest factories in that capital of cutlery
+and furnaces is a small establishment owned by a single proprietor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> who
+from that source of income alone, has realized a considerable fortune.
+This gentleman contracts for the purchase of all the refuse, the waste
+paper, the gilt or tin foil and other unconsidered trifles included which
+accumulate in the rubbish heaps of other premises. On their reaching his
+place of business, they are placed in a furnace; all the impurities are
+burnt out of them. There remains a nondescript residuum of charred and
+apparently worthless substances. Some of these, however, contain particles
+of gold dust; these are placed into a crucible; eventually there is often
+left a deposit of the precious metal which the jewellers are ready to buy.
+The gold watch chain worn by the Sheffield industrialist now spoken of,
+was of several carats, and was manufactured entirely out of the yield of
+this refuse. The incident is worth mentioning as a concrete suggestion
+drawn from real life of the protean methods of industrial money-making
+that are constantly being discovered by the ingenious and unabashed
+industry which in Virgil&#8217;s phrase, conquers all things.<a name='fna_50' id='fna_50' href='#f_50'><small>[50]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<p class="title">THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Comparative novelty of constitutional government as understood to-day,
+and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the
+Queen&#8217;s reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey&#8217;s
+Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with
+the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the
+Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent
+changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to
+Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier
+parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy
+to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P.
+Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction.
+Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Constitutional Government and a popular legislature, did on Her Majesty&#8217;s
+accession, both exist in England. Neither of them was more than four or
+five years old. Each therefore had arrived only at the experimental stage.
+The Reform Bill of &#8217;32 had scarcely begun to be operative when its
+imperfections made themselves felt. For the first time indeed in English
+history popular constituencies had been organized by that Measure. But
+while all householders rated at &pound;10 and upwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> had a voice in the
+national Government, various old historic franchises had been abolished.
+At Preston, for example, the suffrage had previously been in practice
+universal; so that there, and at Windsor like Preston, the Reform Act had
+a disfranchising effect.<a name='fna_51' id='fna_51' href='#f_51'><small>[51]</small></a> All sections of the middle class were
+enfranchised by the Measure of 1832.</p>
+
+<p>With some show of reason it was complained that, while numbers were now
+supreme, opinions and interests were, as in the case of pocket boroughs,
+better able to make themselves felt under the nominally exclusive r&eacute;gime
+which had been swept away. The new constitution was not the only
+parliamentary novelty that signalized the opening of the Victorian epoch.
+In addition to a new parliament returned by fresh constituencies there had
+recently risen at Westminster a new Palace containing of course a House of
+Commons comparatively fresh from the workmen&#8217;s hands. The old structure
+had been burnt down in 1834. The pile of buildings designed by Barry as
+its architect which is now so familiar a feature in the London landscape
+did not assume its present proportions in all their completeness till the
+reign had entered upon its second decade. During the six years between
+1834-40 the Houses sat in a temporary building which had been run up with
+miraculous rapidity. As nearly as possible ten years after Her Majesty
+received the early visit of her Chancellor at Kensington Palace, more
+exactly on April 13, 1847, the Peers took possession of their new
+Chamber.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>Three years later, May 30, 1850, the Commons met for the first time
+beneath the roof that shelters them to-day. Since the People&#8217;s
+Representatives and the Barons were constituted into separate Assemblies,
+the building which the famous Clock Tower surmounts is in fact the fourth
+meeting place that has been assigned to the Commons of England. It was not
+till 1547, the first year of Edward VI. that the chapel of St Stephen in
+Westminster Palace was prepared for the Commons. Before that date they had
+assembled in the Chapter House.</p>
+
+<p>The Speaker&#8217;s Chair was then the former seat of the Abbot. Beneath this
+roof were passed the Statute of Provisors 1350, the Statute of Pr&aelig;munire,
+the Act of Supremacy, and the Act of Submission. Until St Stephen&#8217;s became
+the synonym for the Popular House, party government can hardly be said to
+have been, even rudimentarily, established. Government by groups, the rule
+in the French Chamber theoretically held to be so mischievous in England,
+but in whose direction we seem to be making further progress each year,
+was practically the rule in the pre-St Stephen&#8217;s period. Nor would it be
+easy to exaggerate the influence favourable to a hard and fast dichotomy
+into parties exercised by the structural arrangements of the secularized
+shrine.</p>
+
+<p>What are the points of contrast in the economy of the Commons&#8217; House of
+Parliament and its precincts to-day which would most strike the shadowy
+observer revisiting the place by the glimpses of the moon after half a
+century&#8217;s absence.</p>
+
+<p>The accommodations of comfort, study or pleasure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> that now make the House
+of Commons not perhaps the best but a really good club, are only the
+fulfilment of undertakings which our imaginary spectator would remember as
+having been begun when he was last there. Neither would he be much
+surprised by the increase in the occupants of the Strangers&#8217; Gallery; nor
+in the greater conveniences enjoyed by the reporters. Long before the
+necessity for Barry&#8217;s new building had arisen these improvements in the
+internal fittings of any House of Commons were anticipated. When in 1847
+the Hereditary legislators were about to settle in their new home, they
+were much exercised by the conditions under which, and the exact places
+where, their wives and daughters should view the progress of their
+debates. The first suggestion of appropriating to the peeresses the
+gallery that runs above the Ministerial Bench elicited from the late Lord
+Redesdale the blunt remark: &#8216;It will make the place like a casino.&#8217; To-day
+the bright toilettes lit up by the sun pouring through the multi-coloured
+glass, and blending with the bright tints of the decorated walls form
+nearly the most picturesque feature in the afternoon of a London season.</p>
+
+<p>Amazement, approbatory or the reverse, at this spectacle is the beginning
+of surprises which the spectral visitor would find in store. Descending
+into the hall which separates the two Houses, he would meet a commoner
+acting as a squire of dames, escorting detachments of ladies to points
+whence they could best see the House of Commons celebrities of the hour.
+Looking through the swing door of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>Representative Chamber, the
+parliamentary Rip Van Winkle would for the first time in his experience
+note the flutter of muslins and silks through the grating that bars the
+compartment just above the reporters&#8217; benches, and that is known to-day by
+the name of the Ladies&#8217; Cage. In 1834 this was a novelty as yet undreamed
+of. The germs of it may perhaps first be detected during the opening year
+of the present century.</p>
+
+<p>In 1800 the admission of the Irish Members after the Act of Union involved
+structural alterations in the Chamber. Among other things a chandelier was
+fixed in the centre of the ceiling. At the same time a round hole was cut
+for the escape of the hot air. The top of the orifice was protected by a
+balustrade. From above this chandelier ladies were permitted
+surreptitiously to peep over. In that extremely uncomfortable and rather
+perilous position they saw what they could of the speakers and heard
+murmurs of the debate. The first subsequent novelty was the introduction
+of a few chairs. The temporary structure for the Commons after the 1834
+fire was in the old House of Lords formerly known as the Court of
+Requests, occupying as it did much, if not all, of the site of Edward the
+Confessor&#8217;s palace. The Lords themselves at that time met in the present
+St Stephen&#8217;s where the Commons meet to-day. Nor was it till after the
+first Reform Bill that the domiciles of the two Assemblies were exchanged.</p>
+
+<p>In the building which served the Commons between 1836-40, no provision was
+made for ladies. By the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> report of the select committee of 1836 this fresh
+accommodation was suggested. On the 3d of May in that, or in the following
+year, the House ordered<a name='fna_52' id='fna_52' href='#f_52'><small>[52]</small></a> that a place should be provided where, with
+less discomfort, and more dignity than from the lamp balustrade, ladies
+could listen to the speeches, and catch an occasional glimpse of those who
+delivered them. In the temporary structure the exact spot thus allocated
+to them seems to have been behind the Speaker&#8217;s chair, if not actually
+beneath the floor. Experts at least have discovered no alternative
+situation as possible. The Ladies&#8217; Gallery of to-day as it exists just
+above the Reporters&#8217; box is divided into three parts. The western third is
+reserved for Mrs Speaker. It is called by that lady&#8217;s name. Here she
+receives as her guests personal friends or semi-official personages of her
+own sex. The two eastern thirds of the compartment now spoken of are at
+the disposal of Members for their wives and friends. There is a ballot for
+the Ladies&#8217; Gallery a week in advance. Certain representatives of the
+people have been favoured, as the result of consummate dexterity or rare
+luck, with singularly uniform success in this ordeal. During the earlier
+period to which reference has been made, there are believed to have been
+instances in which ladies clandestinely found a place not only in the
+balustrade above but in the ventilating chamber beneath the floor. Thus,
+when they did not flutter as angels above, they burrowed like moles below.
+Nor, as we have seen, was it till Barry&#8217;s plan had become an architectural
+fact that the wives and daughters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> of the people&#8217;s elect were delivered
+from these two predicaments.</p>
+
+<p>To-day a lady visiting the House of Commons during debate has her 5
+o&#8217;clock tea as comfortably as in her own drawing room. If the weather be
+sultry, or the debate tedious, she can refresh herself during the interval
+between tea and dinner with strawberries and ice as luxuriously as at
+Gunter&#8217;s in Berkeley Square. During the more monastic period of the modern
+House of Commons, there occurred a short interval in which a very few
+ladies on the floor of the House itself on the same side as the Treasury
+Bench were stationed on chairs so placed that their occupants could hear
+without being seen. One day a sudden witticism of an orator upset the
+gravity of the listening stateswomen, and scandalized the Speaker. That
+laugh proved fatal. Henceforth Members were forbidden expressly by the
+House to secrete ladies in any part of the Chamber, either above or under
+the floor. To-day in the interior of the Chamber itself ladies are not
+more visible than formerly. The proposal to remove the grille that
+converts their gallery into a cage is still made periodically; but with as
+yet no great appearance of success.</p>
+
+<p>Outside but still beneath the parliamentary roof, or within the
+parliamentary precinct, the sex that is no longer &#8216;suppressed,&#8217; pervades
+the place at all hours. The Members&#8217; dining room, where male strangers can
+be invited, is not yet open to guests of our new <i>ecclesiazus&aelig;</i>. All other
+parts of the premises are already pervaded by them. In the basement a room
+has been discovered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> in which the fair guests of Members can be
+entertained when the debate is over by a supper which may well repair the
+omission of a dinner. The river frontage of the Westminster Palace during
+some years has been surrendered at discretion to the politicians of the
+petticoat. Lord Redesdale foresaw the coming resemblance of the interior
+of the Peers&#8217; Chamber to a music and dancing saloon. Even his alarmist
+imagination never pictured at the height of the London season an assembly
+of ladies upon the Terrace just outside the Chamber, enjoying as the
+guests of the elected of the democracy ices, strawberries and cream, all
+the other modish adjuncts of 5 o&#8217;clock tea. This they have done since
+1888. More recently there have been added waitresses attractively dressed
+in a black and white uniform. Some years ago Mr John Bright, a special
+habitu&eacute; of the tea room, arranged a subscription for a wedding present to
+the young person who presided over the cups and saucers, when on her
+marriage she retired into private life. Even that statesman would not
+perhaps have undertaken his graceful and chivalrous task in the case of a
+whole regiment of tea room nymphs.</p>
+
+<p>The lady M.P. has still to come into existence. Her sex controls votes and
+vicariously receives them. In New Zealand and other Colonies the same sex
+records votes directly as well as influences votes indirectly. If, as
+other precedents might suggest, the mother country is advancing towards
+the Colonial usage, is there any abiding reason why to their parliamentary
+influence already established beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> doubt, the mothers and daughters of
+England should not add the responsibility to public opinion which a
+parliamentary seat would bring and which they now escape?</p>
+
+<p>The personal changes in the composition of the House of Commons are only
+less striking than the innovations in its social life. Years have passed
+since Mr Disraeli&#8217;s oft reiterated remark that the future of English
+politics was to the English youth. In a sense different perhaps from that
+which the phrase was first intended to bear, this consummation seems in
+gradual process of fulfilment. In 1837 a chief amusement of visitors to
+the House of Commons was to count the number of bald heads in the
+Assembly. Those phenomena, as the legitimate results of age, are very
+nearly unknown to-day. During the first three decades of the Queen&#8217;s reign
+the average age of a Member was between 50 and 60. Now it is probably not
+much more than 40. Often it happens that senators are so fresh from school
+as to be unable to forget their schoolboy phraseology, and to address the
+Speaker in the exact terms they used but the other day to the master of
+their Form. Thus, &#8216;If you please, Sir, Mr Speaker, Sir!&#8217; is the opening
+often heard of late years from a boyish senator who rises to address the
+House in response to the eye of its President. In other respects, the
+typical M.P. has changed not less conspicuously. Men of the social and
+political quality who followed the lead of Sir Robert Peel first, and of
+Mr Disraeli afterwards, who could be taken for nothing else than the
+country gentlemen that they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> were, have been replaced by men whose
+antecedents and whose interests are not less manifestly commercial.</p>
+
+<p>Long after the abolition of the Corn Laws the description of the
+Conservative party given in the Life of Lord George Bentinck continued to
+be true. A glance sufficed to show that these &#8216;men of metal and of acres&#8217;
+were the products of their native soil. Specimens of this class lingered
+at times pretty plentifully after Household Franchise was added to the
+Statute Book. The tall erect figure of Mr Newdegate, broadened, but not
+bent, by age, still retaining much of the elasticity of youth; the less
+rugged and angular, but physically not less well developed, presence of
+Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, Knightley; these were specimens of Members
+not uncommon within the memory of the present generation. To the same
+order, in spite of a very different appearance, belonged the parliamentary
+Cato of those days, Mr J. W. Henley, the veteran Member for Oxfordshire.
+If the wisdom of the House, its occasional intolerance, and its hereditary
+good sense, were ever incarnate in an individual, they resided surely
+beneath the compact sturdy figure with the countenance, seamed and gnarled
+as of an ancient oak, of that remarkable man. Before Quarter Sessions had
+given place to County Councils, Mr Henley and others of his class ceased
+to be known in their places.</p>
+
+<p>These were the men, contemporaries of Disraeli and Northcote, brought up
+in the same parliamentary, often in the same social, school as them.
+These, too, were they who for his mastery of parliamentary law, his
+excellence of parliamentary manner, and his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>maintenance of historic
+standards in parliamentary debate, could almost tolerate the Liberalism of
+Mr Gladstone. With a pang they anticipated the day when his withdrawal
+would rob the Assembly of the last surviving monument of the eloquence and
+bearing which used to be the familiar attributes in the first assembly of
+gentlemen in the world. Already debating of the old stately order had
+begun to go out of fashion. Thirty years after the Queen&#8217;s accession, in
+the Reform discussions of 1867, Mr Lowe had made one of the latest and
+happiest hits ever secured by a familiar phrase from Virgil. In 1881,
+after the death of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone pointed a reference of
+the same kind with not less felicity when he applied to his rival on
+returning from Berlin the words by which the Latin poet indicated the
+commanding presence of Marcellus among the winners of the <i>spolia opima</i>.</p>
+
+<p>With these exceptions, there is no recent record of signally successful
+quotation in the House of Commons from classical authors. Not indeed for
+want of classical scholars. Professor Jebb, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir M. W.
+Ridley, are at least the equals in this respect of their seniors.<a name='fna_53' id='fna_53' href='#f_53'><small>[53]</small></a> The
+simple reason is that Latin and Greek quotation which were once held to
+be, as Mr Disraeli said of invective, an ornament of debate, have passed
+into the heritage of outworn words and faces. To-day if honourable
+gentlemen illustrate their meaning by a metaphor or clench an argument by
+an epigram, they go for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> their <i>tropes</i> and ideas, not to the library, but
+to the laboratory. Thus one of them not long since was heard to compare
+the mind of an opponent to a series of condensing chambers. The masters of
+the grand style in parliamentary oratory, as it may be called, cannot be
+said to have passed away while David Plunket, Lord Rathmore, lives. But
+the business of the House of Commons is done in Committee. A Committee of
+the House of Commons is like a committee of any other gentlemen
+professedly met together to transact the greatest amount of work in the
+shortest space of time. Telling arrangement of ideas, clearness of
+thought, conciseness of phrase, dexterous support of special views by
+figures and facts; these are the qualities bred in the parliamentary
+atmosphere to-day. In such categories are the ideals consciously aimed at
+to be found. No competent person seriously supposes the average of
+intellectual power in Parliament to have declined. Mr Gladstone and other
+experts have testified that it has increased, and that the 1893 Parliament
+contained more men of first rate capacity than any within modern memory.</p>
+
+<p>The interest taken by the nations in the doings of the House of Commons
+has not permanently abated, nor is likely to do so, seeing that its
+attraction resides less in the letter of its debates than in the
+circumstance of its being a continuous commentary on the social as well as
+political history of the day, a concentration, epitome, and amalgam of the
+human nature of the period. The vicissitudes of human affairs, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> sudden
+growth, the not less sudden rupture, of human friendships; the involuntary
+perjuries of political allies surely as laughable in the sight of Jove as
+the perjuries of lovers; the sworn confidants and colleagues in one
+Administration transformed into the mortal antagonists of the next; these
+are the episodes of everyday life reflected upon the stage of the Theatre
+Royal St Stephen&#8217;s. Can they then, fail to be more full of dramatic charm
+than the entertainments provided in any other playhouse of the realm? The
+parallel between the theatrical and parliamentary stage might be made
+still closer. As on the former, so on the latter there are certain stock
+parts always sure to be enacted, whatever the title of the play, or the
+nature of the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>The Mr Henley already named, pre-eminently representative as he was of the
+hard good sense and rugged honesty of the Tory squire, was not a novelty
+in the Chamber. He had his forerunner in the &#8216;down-right&#8217; Shippon, as Pope
+calls him, of a Georgian House of Commons. He it was who, as a Jacobite
+opposed to Sir Robert Walpole yet said of himself and his adversary, &#8216;He
+is for King George; I am for King James. We differ on most things; but
+Robin and I are the two most honest men in Parliament.&#8217; The theatrical and
+parliamentary analogy might be illustrated much further. One or two more
+instances will suffice. The stage character whose chief function is to
+keep the audience smiling and to enliven dulness by a laugh has his exact
+analogue in the parliamentary humorist, whose very rising is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> the signal
+for a burst of anticipatory merriment. In the nineteenth century the name
+of that humorist has been, during its first half, Sir Charles Wetherell.
+He relieved the severity of the 1831-2 Reform Bill discussions by
+convulsing his hearers with laughter at the farcical absurdity of his
+sallies, or by the ludicrous incongruity of the metaphors with which he
+pointed his invective.</p>
+
+<p>Half a century later the name of the performer is changed. The function
+discharged is identical. In the place of a Wetherell there sits now a
+Bernal Osborne, now a Patrick Boyle Smollett, now a William Gregory, and
+again a Wilfried Lawson, or a Labouchere. In any case the wag is
+indispensable to the proceedings of the House. In every new Parliament he
+makes his appearance, if not quite so early, yet with the same regularity
+as the Queen&#8217;s Speech, or the Debate on the Address.</p>
+
+<p>Other r&ocirc;les are equally familiar, and with the same undeviating regularity
+are forthcoming. High or Low Church, dry or Evangelical, the different
+champions of the Church, each in their own era and from their own point of
+view, come forward to defend the national Establishment. These are the
+gentlemen whom in once addressing a deputation of them Mr Disraeli
+characteristically styled &#8216;the children of the Church.&#8217; Of this section,
+during the earlier decades of the reign, Sir Robert Inglis was a chief.
+Round him were grouped a little band in which Mr Spooner, and thereafter
+the intrepid Mr Newdegate, and poor Mr Whalley, with his jaded, hunted
+look, had a place. The burly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> presence of Sir John Mowbray, the less
+robust, but wiry figure of Mr Talbot, both Members for Oxford University,
+belong to a later date. When these may have disappeared, successors are
+already visible to take their place. The stalwart form and patriarchal
+beard of Sir John Kennaway, the less athletic and more sensitive figure of
+Mr Stanley Leighton are even to-day powers in that ecclesiastical faction.
+The two sons of Lord Salisbury, Lord Cranborne and Lord Hugh Cecil belong
+to another generation, but to the same category of ecclesiastical
+defenders.</p>
+
+<p>During the Queen&#8217;s earlier years, Chartism, that is to-day only a name,
+was an active force. Most of the points of the Charter itself have quietly
+become law. The Septennial Act has not indeed been repealed; but
+practically the term of parliamentary life has been shortened. The ballot
+has quietly superseded the hustings. Payment of Members is seriously
+discussed. Election expenses have been much reduced. By the Redistribution
+Bill of 1884, an appreciable step towards equal electoral districts has
+been taken. The Georgian House of Commons, indeed the House till the full
+effects of the first Reform Bill were felt, was so small, its members so
+preponderantly came from the upper class of society as to give the
+Assembly the air rather of a family party than of a national forum.</p>
+
+<p>From 1707 to the beginning of this century, the English, Welsh and Scotch
+numbered 558. The Act of Union at the beginning of the century added 100
+to the House of Commons of 1801. The additions to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> the House made by the
+Reform Bill of 1832 in the case of Wales and Ireland 5 each, of Scotland
+8, were exactly compensated by the reduction of English Members. The
+Measure, therefore, which created popular constituencies and with them a
+popularly representative Chamber left St Stephen&#8217;s numerically unaltered.
+As to quality, it socially modified rather than, as is sometimes said,
+revolutionized the Assembly. Nor, as to figures, did the Household
+Franchise Bill of 1868 enlarge the Chamber. The 7 fresh representatives to
+Scotland, and the 1 to Wales were balanced exactly by the disfranchisement
+of 8 English constituencies. The House of Commons remained therefore 658.
+An increase began with the Reform Bill of 1885. The emancipation of the
+agricultural labourer by the franchise on the same conditions as his urban
+brother involved the sole increase since the Irish union to the numbers of
+the House of Commons. Even that is only represented by 12. The whole of
+this increase was for the benefit of Scotland. Two new Members were indeed
+received by England under the latest franchise re-arrangement. Two were
+also lost by Ireland. Thus the Irish disfranchisement balances the English
+enfranchisement. The sole nett profit in the transaction accrued
+therefore, as has been said, to Great Britain beyond the Tweed.</p>
+
+<p>While the House of Commons as to arrangements, occupants and visitors has
+changed more than once during the period comprised in this survey, there
+has been in the opinion of experts like Mr Gladstone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> no diminution of
+ability in its general debates. The amount of varied and accurate
+knowledge displayed during discussions in Committee by the rank and file
+of its members has increased appreciably since the Derby-Disraeli Reform
+Act. But, it is said, as our constitution has become more democratic, our
+popular legislators have grown unmannerly. Those who know the volumes of
+parliamentary history summarizing debates in the House during the French
+Revolutionary epoch of 1793-5 may be disposed to doubt the justice of this
+censure. The violent personality of the recriminations between individual
+members of the two Whig sections at this period; the revolting grossness
+of the metaphors and the epithets by which the intellectual majesty of
+Burke stooped to express his loathing for the new Radicals on both sides
+of the Channel; the personal menaces exchanged by competitive debaters of
+smaller calibre; leave no room for doubt on the point. Two years after the
+first Reform Act, Church rates and other ecclesiastical topics gave rise
+in the debates upon them to scenes and noises, cockcrowing amongst them,
+that scandalised the parliamentary decorum of the period, as disgraceful
+beyond all precedent. These incidents were attended by a degree of
+parliamentary disorder which was habitually in excess of the ebullitions
+however scandalous, provoked during the session of 1893 by the Second
+Irish Government Bill of Mr Gladstone. The great change of recent years in
+parliamentary methods is of course the organized obstruction on frivolous
+and irrelevant pretexts raised during debate. Even this is not the novelty
+that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> some have seemed to suppose. During that distant era when no
+chandelier hung over the heads of Members, the only illuminants known in
+the Chamber were candles. A formal motion was made that these should be
+brought in. The early practitioners of obstruction seized upon this issue
+to delay the discussion. Motions for adjournment became effective
+instruments for delay during the Reform discussions of 1832. They were
+then employed with success generally, and with humour sometimes by the
+popular Sir Charles Wetherell, and in case of unpalatable amendments by Mr
+Sheridan. While motions for adjournment have thus always been used as
+methods of delay, they naturally have had different aspects at various
+times. Thus when employed for fighting a Bill to which conscientious
+objection was entertained, these motions differed entirely from those to
+the same ostensible end made by the feigned opponents of perfectly
+harmless Measures. Mr Pope Hennessy was practically the founder of this
+later and indiscriminate opposition to all attempts to legislate.</p>
+
+<p>The late Mr Parnell extended that system to routine business such as the
+nomination of Committees, also to unobjectionable votes in supply, and
+finally in 1877 to private Members&#8217; Bills as well as Government Bills,
+with the avowed aim of paralysing the whole machinery of Statute law. The
+late Sir Stafford Northcote, who more than any other statesman of our time
+resembled, in his conscientious caution and chivalrous devotion to
+principle, Mr Perceval, dealt perhaps too gently with this abuse of forms,
+nor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> saw fit to employ the new rule that was suggested to him by the
+consummate experience of the late Sir Thomas May. Mr Gladstone&#8217;s
+management of this matter in 1881-2 was more drastic; it would have been
+successful but for the tactics of the late Lord Randolph Churchill and the
+present Sir John Gorst. After this came in 1888 the leadership of Mr W. H.
+Smith, resulting as it did in 15 new Rules. The practical result of the
+latest changes in House of Commons procedure may be summarized popularly
+and briefly as follows. The French principle of closure already adopted in
+all other Popular Assemblies is now part of the law of the English
+Parliament. This instrument can be moved for at any time. It depends
+wholly on the Speaker or, if the House be in Committee, on the Chairman,
+whether the motion for it be put to the House. If put it is generally
+opposed. Then follow debate and division. For its adoption there must be
+not only a majority but one composed of not less than 100 Members.</p>
+
+<p>With its larger numbers, the representative character of the House of
+Commons has been increased also. The steps by which it has acquired
+control of the executive as well as the legislative machinery of
+government need not be recapitulated here. Its moral, educational and
+social influence in the country is probably not proportionate to its
+actual power. The theory of delegacy so indignantly repudiated by
+Conservative speakers during the first Reform Bill debates is to-day
+accepted and actively illustrated by a majority of Members. More and more
+the tendency is for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> constituencies to call into existence a
+Government to undertake a specific task of legislation whose scope is
+defined by the individual possessing for the moment the national
+confidence. To support in that special work that particular statesman, or,
+if he falls into disfavour, to thwart him, the householders send to St
+Stephen&#8217;s men whose discretion is restricted within very narrow limits.</p>
+
+<p>This arrangement immensely increases the authority of the democratic
+favourite of the moment. It is less favourable to the prestige or
+usefulness of the Chamber as containing the collective wisdom of the
+nation. The aptitude for business talk that shall be to the point in
+Committee has not, when the House has a mind to it, declined. The great
+speeches, no sooner delivered than they constitute national text-books,
+are less frequent than the display of excellence in debate. Afraid of
+boring the Assembly, dreading the imputation of mere rhetoric, the Member
+who has something to say usually prefers delivering it to his constituents
+at his periodical reunion with them, or upon some other extra
+parliamentary occasion. The terse diction and urbane gravity of manner of
+Sir Charles Dilke made him, during his Foreign Under-Secretaryship, a
+parliamentary model. Such oratorical efforts as he sometimes made, were
+reserved for the meetings with his electors. The clever young politician,
+being on his promotion, speaks when he can that he may give his future
+chief a taste of his quality. Popular meetings therefore, and the
+periodical press have detracted from the House of Commons as a school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> of
+eloquence, or as a national educator. On the other hand the House of Lords
+has no constituencies in the background. Its time is less preoccupied. It
+is to-day far more representative of the English people than was the House
+of Commons a few years before the Queen&#8217;s accession. It does indeed
+chiefly consist now of men whose station and whose antecedents are not
+very dissimilar from those of the House of Commons before that Chamber had
+been thrice Reformed. Hence some of those debates, especially on foreign
+policy, or grave points of constitutional procedure that used to mark
+epochs in the Elective Chamber are now almost confined to the Hereditary
+House.</p>
+
+<p>Outbursts of periodical petulance against the Peers will doubtless
+continue. Such Radicals as may be left in England to-day are at heart far
+more tolerant of a second Chamber, composed as that at Westminster is,
+than were the &#8216;root and branch&#8217; men not merely of Cromwell&#8217;s day, but of
+half a century ago. Something therefore may perhaps be said on behalf of
+the opinion that any movement which may be successful against the House of
+Lords is likely to affect the House of Commons as well.<a name='fna_54' id='fna_54' href='#f_54'><small>[54]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<p class="title">CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House
+of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social
+characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old
+County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament.
+Modifications in <i>personnel</i> of the Liberal party since the great
+fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of
+the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone&#8217;s opinion and experience on this
+subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in
+the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to
+House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of
+Lords and local debating societies.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The average age of its members is not the only respect in which, during
+the Queen&#8217;s reign, the House of Commons has been gradually transformed. If
+the country squire of the old school of Mr Henley has disappeared from it,
+that is because he is now as unknown in his own county as in Pall Mall.
+The social composition of the Whig, or Liberal, party was finally and
+entirely altered about the period of the first Reform Bill. The change had
+indeed been going forward from the earlier epoch when the middle class of
+commerce began to be, as from the days of the Edwards it was tending to
+become, the greatest power in the country. The replacement of the old
+Whig, with his territorial associations, by the new Liberal,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> like Mr
+Cobden, was only the last stage in the development of self-government in
+England. In truth, however, the kind of progress now spoken of was not
+limited to any single political connection. The Nestorian experience of Mr
+Gladstone testifies it to have been not less noticeable among Tories than
+among Whigs. There were not, he thinks, in 1835 five members of the
+Conservative party owing their seats to commercial or industrial
+influences. The change which has come about in the composition of the
+party since then is &#8216;simply marvellous.&#8217;<a name='fna_55' id='fna_55' href='#f_55'><small>[55]</small></a> The specific legislation that
+has surrounded the English Crown by a democracy, is the extension of the
+lodger franchise to boroughs in 1867, to counties in 1884, and the
+cheapening of elections by the Corrupt Practices Bill of Sir Henry James
+in 1883. Notwithstanding these advances, the blend between authority and
+freedom has never been more fortunately conspicuous nor more wisely active
+in this country than since the period of its self-government began. Before
+1870 it used to be said that the Pope, shorn of his temporal power, would
+exercise a prerogative not weaker, but stronger than when he was sole lord
+of Rome. Whether that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>prediction has, or has not been fulfilled, the
+influence that a constitutional Sovereign can exercise in the United
+Kingdom has increased rather than diminished since the days of absolute
+monarchy were over. Whatever in the way of political initiative the
+Sovereign has surrendered has in the department of social ascendancy and
+civic influence, been restored with interest to the Crown. The late Sir
+Henry Maine, differing in that respect from earlier political theorists,
+has in that very suppleness and elasticity which his predecessors praised
+discovered a source of weakness to the English constitution. So shrewd an
+observer as Mr Goldwin Smith bitterly complains of the fickleness of
+popularly elected Parliaments, and their quickness to reflect the external
+influences of the moment, as of the chief dangers to our political
+stability. Into that controversy it is needless to enter. It may seem
+strange to those who have had more than half a century&#8217;s experience of her
+loyalty to constitutional principles; but in 1837 no one certainly knew
+whether the young Queen would not insist upon her technical right to
+nominate and dismiss her Ministers at will. Less than four years had
+passed since her uncle William IV. had practically exercised that
+prerogative. In 1834 Lord Althorp was called by his father, Lord
+Spencer&#8217;s, death to the Upper House. Lord Grey had long wished to resign
+the Premiership. His unsatisfactory relations with the King made him seize
+this opportunity of doing so. The Sovereign accepted the resignation of
+the Cabinet with more than alacrity. Substantially therefore, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+morally, there would seem something in the statement that William IV.
+dismissed the Whigs to please himself.<a name='fna_56' id='fna_56' href='#f_56'><small>[56]</small></a> As Mr Gladstone in one of his
+essays has shown, the principle giving cohesion as well as joint and
+separate vitality to the members of a Cabinet independently of the
+personal pleasure of the Sovereign had been established before then. First
+actively applied if not discovered by Sunderland, the son-in-law of the
+great Duke of Marlborough, the Cabinet system, as Mr Gladstone has shown,
+can scarcely be said definitively to have triumphed till 1828, when George
+IV. reluctantly accepted Canning for Prime Minister. William IV., Mr
+Gladstone&#8217;s first Royal master, is, it may be noticed in passing, admitted
+by his early servant to have used his prerogative unwisely; but is
+defended from the charge of having used it unconstitutionally. So great is
+the distance in political thought traversed since 1834 by the statesman as
+well as by others.</p>
+
+<p>No thought of reverting to this family precedent has ever probably
+occurred to her present Majesty. The comparison of the position
+voluntarily occupied by the Sovereign to-day to that of the permanent head
+of a great department of the State unchanged by Ministerial or electoral
+vicissitudes, roughly but not altogether inaccurately conveys some idea of
+the practical influence of the Crown upon the politics of the period.
+Continuous experience of public affairs is not however the sole source of
+the influence upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> them which a constitutional monarch may be enabled or
+obliged to exercise. The familiar Bedchamber Plot, presently to be
+mentioned more in detail, and the momentary friction between the Sovereign
+and her responsible statesmen that followed it, is now known to have
+originated in a misapprehension. The Minister only desired that a few
+ladies should give up their places in the Household. The Sovereign
+resisted the dismissal of her entire suite. If, indeed, a solution of the
+difficulty had not been found; if, that is, the Queen had pressed her
+personal wishes to the point of the Premier&#8217;s retirement, it is by no
+means certain that she would have lacked constitutional arguments
+justifying her course. A sort of plebiscite in 1841 had been given to Sir
+Robert Peel. On some national issues of broader import, the popular
+feeling at this time notoriously had not been expressed with convincing
+clearness. On all sides there seemed balance and consequently confusion of
+public opinion. From the altitude of her throne, and by the light of her
+ancestral knowledge, the Queen might have argued that she saw the
+situation more correctly than her Ministers in Parliament or her people
+outside, and so have vindicated the dissolution of the House had she
+chosen to adopt that course. This prerogative of sanctioning the recourse
+of a Minister to the constituencies is one of which the Crown can never
+finally divest itself. In the last resort, however much he may wish to
+abdicate his power, the first magistrate of a State must be prepared on
+that point for a definite individual <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>responsibility. The latest
+indubitable illustration of this truth was given in 1868. In that year Mr
+Gladstone&#8217;s Irish Church resolutions secured the defeat of the Disraeli
+Government. The Conservative Premier did not, as precedent for doing even
+then existed, resign immediately. He placed before the Queen the
+alternative of a dissolution then, or six months later, leaving absolutely
+to the Crown the responsibility of the choice. If that situation has not
+since exactly repeated itself, obviously from the very nature of things it
+is one which may at any moment recur. Thus it will be seen that under
+parliamentary government, the self effacement of the Sovereign is an
+impossibility. Years have passed since the sense of popular disappointment
+at the visible results of the Grey Reform Act found expression in
+<i>Coningsby</i>, and since the Sidonia of that romance ridiculed to his young
+disciple the imperfect vicariate of a House of Commons. However essential
+a part of our institutions it may be, its power and popularity are not
+to-day without competitors in popular favour. These rivals to the House of
+Commons are in their way as much as itself integral parts of the national
+life. If, notwithstanding all the gibes against it, the House of Lords,
+composed as it is to-day, be not a representative body, nothing which
+exists in England can deserve that epithet. Socially the peers of the
+later Victorian epoch are as a whole indistinguishable from the Commoners
+at St Stephen&#8217;s of an earlier epoch. They reflect at least as faithfully
+the variety, the interests, the pursuits, and the convictions of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+nation. The great difference between election to the Lower and promotion
+to the Upper House is that the former generally goes by local interest.
+The latter depends usually on political service, on personal merit, or
+individual achievement. That distinction was unknown before the present
+generation. Macaulay, a great writer and the best informed man of his day,
+received a peerage. His personal claims to the honour were admitted by
+reason of his place in the party which from 1832 he had continuously
+served in Parliament. His pretensions to a peerage were emphasized by his
+services as a State official. He had occupied Cabinet rank; he had been
+Secretary at War when that office was equivalent to a Secretaryship of
+State. No coronet was ever given to literary genius alone before that
+conferred upon Lord Tennyson.</p>
+
+<p>The younger Pitt is reported to have said that any man with &pound;40,000 a year
+had a right to a seat in the House of Lords. Some of his creations notably
+that of Lord Carrington gave effect to that opinion. These peerages,
+however, did but foreshadow faintly the elevations of men actually engaged
+in commerce as in the case of Lord Armstrong, vicariously through his
+widow in that of Mr W. H. Smith, and many more. The press, too, is not
+less representative than the House of Commons. Nor in all probability is
+Lord Glenesk the last representative of journalism, as he has been the
+first to receive a seat in the Hereditary legislature. Under any
+circumstances, the well placed English newspaper is likely to be not less
+expository of public opinion than any body of gentlemen, by whatever mode
+elected,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> sitting at Westminster. Special tendencies of the time make the
+press an exceptionally lifelike measure of the thoughts and wishes in
+every department of life of every section of the English people. Newspaper
+proprietorship has in fact become not less a fashion of the day than
+theatrical lesseeship was a few years since. A number of men agreed on
+certain points such as the development or exploitation of particular
+enterprises, are seized with the conviction that &#8216;an organ&#8217; is essential
+to their success. They combine, therefore, to buy or to press into their
+service by subsidies some printed sheet which may yet have the ear of the
+nation but which happens just now to have fallen upon evil times. If no
+such opportunity as this present itself, newspaper starting has become a
+recognized industry of commerce. After a time, therefore, a new literary
+champion of the Empire enters the lists. Its real object may be narrow and
+even personal. Its managers know that if their end is to be accomplished
+it must be veiled by a programme of more disinterested generalities, and
+that popular sentiment should form the first study of its conductors. In
+this way therefore, apart from the great newspaper oracles of the time
+which in all but name are national enterprises, the press has increasingly
+an inducement, that never fails, to hold up the mirror to the convictions,
+prejudices and sentiments into which public opinion can be analysed. The
+reptile press of Germany is, upon any considerable scale, not known in
+England. The connection between most journals whose support is envied, or
+whose opposition is dreaded, and some or more of the leading public men of
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> day, has been often very close<a name='fna_57' id='fna_57' href='#f_57'><small>[57]</small></a> and is perhaps, still not quite
+unknown.</p>
+
+<p>The newspaper, however, is but a single agency for the literary influence
+exercised upon the public life of the day. Of late years periodicals,
+appearing at less frequent intervals, have among politicians themselves
+competed in attractiveness with the national assemblies at Westminster. In
+proportion as parliamentary reports have been in the daily press reduced
+to a few columns and in the case of all but speakers of the first rank to
+a few paragraphs or sentences; parliamentarians themselves have
+substituted the monthly Review for the stenographer or for Hansard as the
+depository of their views. Technically the presence of reporters in the
+gallery is even to-day connived at rather than constitutionally
+sanctioned. Yet the leader of the House of Commons, not very long since,
+reminded his hearers that those who were not present at his speech might
+master his points by referring to the parliamentary reports next day.
+Members with a taste for writing, having some carefully thought out
+message to deliver on an intricate topic of foreign or domestic policy are
+increasingly inclined entirely to pretermit the parliamentary stage of
+their exposition. By reserving their remarks for the monthly periodical,
+they can be sure of fixing popular attention more conspicuously. Their
+signatures are appended to their effusions. The editor incurs no
+responsibility either for the substance or the form of the opinions
+delivered. The reciprocity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> of the arrangement is, between him and his
+contributor, complete. On the one hand the literary impressario secures
+the advertisement of a familiar if not a famous name, good as he knows it
+to be for the sale of a certain number of copies, each one of which
+represents a clear if a small profit. On the other hand, assuming the
+senator to deserve an audience, he is more likely to secure one when his
+views are placed before the public for the first time with all the
+advantages of good type and paper, when they are read comfortably in
+library or club, not listened to with an effort, and even then but
+partially heard in the exhausted atmosphere of the House of Commons. Again
+if the Popular Chamber still be of the same intellectual calibre as of
+old, it has grown also more manifestly fastidious and more demonstratively
+intolerant of speakers who do not hit its taste. As Sir James Mackintosh
+and Lord Macaulay in different words both said, it was always a Chamber
+whose tastes and verdict were incalculable. Since, under a democratic
+franchise, it has become an Assembly primarily of business gentlemen, the
+chances of failure to satisfy it are so alarmingly numerous as to prevent
+all but the most self assured and impassive from making the effort. It
+prides itself above all things on its business-like tastes. Therefore, it
+abhors any approach to rhetoric. It fails not to remember its traditions
+of eloquence, or the ascendancy over itself which to a master of words and
+phrases, to a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lowe, a Canning, a Peel, it was
+proud to accord, like a horse that knows, and that takes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> a pleasure in,
+its rider. Therefore the House expects from those who address it something
+more than the bald, business talk of the Board room; an aptitude for
+clothing sound original reasons in diction which shall be without
+pretentiousness, but that shall not lack felicity and point always, and
+epigram sometimes. If these conditions be forthcoming; if the Chamber be
+in a good humour; if it be neither too long nor too soon since it lunched
+nor too near the hour when it dines; then the elective legislators will
+perhaps for a short time give their ear to one who rises at the right
+moment and in favour of whom they are predisposed. The conditions are
+obviously severe. It is therefore not to be wondered at that candidates
+for oratorical honours at St Stephen&#8217;s tend steadily to diminish.</p>
+
+<p>There is another kind of rivalry to which of late years the House of
+Commons has been exposed, which may excite a smile, but which is in its
+way a reality to be reckoned with. This is not that of the provincial
+platform, of the public meeting room, or of the debating society in its
+older development. These latter have always, among the lower middle
+classes, fulfilled a function like that of the University Unions among the
+classes somewhat better to do. Coger&#8217;s Hall was the school of discussion
+in which the late Charles Bradlaugh acquired great power of direct and
+incisive utterance as well as a perfect control over his temper. London
+and all the great provincial towns have as many of these places as ancient
+Rome possessed of gladiatorial schools. A really new growth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> of the last
+quarter of the nineteenth century is the local Houses of Commons. These
+sprung up in and for every quarter or suburb of London, and in many
+provincial districts as well. They are still known, and sometimes much in
+vogue. They are not of course recognized by the legislature. Nor, as in
+the case of the municipal bodies which we have already seen at work, is
+their machinery controlled by the Local Government Board. A seat in them
+has been known to be as much an object of rivalry among an increasing
+class, as a place on the green leather benches of Westminster. The member
+for Kennington or Lavender Hill in the south of London, for Westbourne
+Grove or Shepherd&#8217;s Bush in the west, for Haverstock Hill in the north,
+may even be as considerable a personage with his immediate friends in the
+district as the member for Westminster in the Imperial Parliament. The
+leader in the Hampstead House of Commons, or the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer in that which meets on Richmond Hill is not certain that he
+would change his place with his titular equivalents at St Stephen&#8217;s. These
+are considerations that may explain why the House of Commons, whose
+supremacy was unchallenged under a Peel, a Stanley, a Palmerston, a
+Disraeli, a Gladstone, is regarded no longer with awe, sometimes with the
+familiarity that breeds contempt.</p>
+
+<p>As yet this diminution of parliamentary prestige, if such there really be,
+is indicated only by a floating sentiment. It finds expression chiefly in
+social chatter or in newspaper flippancies. Nor in the present decade of
+the Victorian epoch are there many positive signs of our representative
+system being superseded by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>controlling will of an individual autocrat
+for whom the late Mr Froude thought the time was steadily approaching. The
+same remark might with equal truth probably be made of every part in our
+national polity. It is certainly true of the House of Lords not less than
+of the monarchy. The position practically occupied by the Crown to-day, is
+that which the Prince Consort many years ago marked out for it. Some of
+these functions he was himself able to assist the Queen in discharging. To
+him there seemed to devolve upon the monarchy duties analogous to those
+discharged by the permanent officials in the great departments of State.
+Amid the vicissitudes of party, the rise and fall of Ministers, the
+changes of popular opinion, the Crown was in his judgment the one
+guarantee for continuity in policy, domestic not less than foreign. The
+occupant of the Throne took, as Ministers of State, those whom
+parliamentary majorities and public opinion indicated. The Sovereign
+however had other functions than merely to register and sanction the wish
+of subjects and the decisions of Commons. Chief among these, as every
+other page of Sir Theodore Martin&#8217;s book during the Peelite and
+Palmerstonian periods clearly shows, was to judge of the quarters whence a
+stable Administration could be formed; whether, in fact, Lord John
+Russell, Lord Palmerston, or Lord Derby, in a balanced state of
+parliamentary feeling, had the best chance of carrying on the Queen&#8217;s
+government to the welfare of the realm and the confidence of its
+representatives. The most familiar aspects of the political and
+parliamentary situation have ceased to be now what in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> Prince
+Consort&#8217;s day they habitually were. The doctrine that Ministers are the
+free choice of the Sovereign was never propounded absolutely by the
+husband of the Queen. The doctrine was rather assumed by him in the
+interests of the national convenience than expressed in any terms defining
+the Royal prerogative. The slow process of absorption of the Peelites into
+the Liberal ranks; the lifelong rivalry of Lord John Russell and Lord
+Palmerston produced, during much of the Prince Consort&#8217;s time, a condition
+of unstable equilibrium in party organization, which in these later days
+of popular mandates, general elections which are plebiscites and of
+overwhelming majorities which amount to commissions of the democracy, it
+is not easy to realize.</p>
+
+<p>Some there were who thought that the Liberal disruption of 1886 might
+reproduce in English politics the precarious and fluctuating relations of
+parties and statesmen that seemed between 1852 and 1865 to have become
+permanent. Had that forecast been fulfilled, the Sovereign to-day might be
+confronted with personal responsibilities of Ministerial selection which
+would have recalled the duty devolved upon her during earlier portions of
+her reign. Nothing of the kind has happened. The event of ten years ago
+has resulted not in party instability, but in fresh fixity of tenure to
+the political conglomerate that the constituencies have as yet shown no
+wish to dismiss. Of course in time the same conditions as of old must
+recur. The national organization of which Liberals as well as
+Conservatives are constituent parts, will at some day or other upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+issues perhaps now unsuspected resolve themselves into their elements.
+Ancient lines of demarcation will again declare themselves. A cycle of
+government by groups may yet be opened.<a name='fna_58' id='fna_58' href='#f_58'><small>[58]</small></a> People and Parliament may
+still wait for the Royal choice to close an interval of confusion and of
+doubt. In whatever form this reversion to an older order may present
+itself, whatever the exact contingencies in store, the occupant of the
+Throne as has been shown above cannot divest himself of the right,
+therefore of the duty, of giving a casting vote when his officers of State
+hesitate, as Mr Disraeli did in 1868, as to the exact moment when the
+appeal to the constituences most advantageously can be made.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<p class="title">ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The general power and usefulness of the English Crown strengthened,
+and not weakened, by the constitutional transfer of political power to
+Parliament and Ministers. The national aims of Queen Victoria and
+Queen Elizabeth contrasted. Possibility of the Sovereign more
+correctly than Parliament or Ministers interpreting indications of
+national will. What happened under Queen Anne may conceivably occur
+under some of her successors. The facts concerning the monarchy as
+they are to-day. Posthumous recognition of the soundness of the Prince
+Consort&#8217;s views on the sphere of Royal duties, and the legitimate
+field of the Crown&#8217;s activities. His influence still a living force.
+Court offices, and reforms attributable to him. The present Prince of
+Wales exactly follows his father&#8217;s example.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Whatever of power may have been resigned by the Crown in the way of
+political authority has since that resignation abundantly been recompensed
+to it in the direction of social authority. The latest predecessor of her
+own sex upon the English Throne correctly interpreted as against
+periodical parliamentary majorities the loyalty of the nation to the
+Anglican Establishment; then a synonym for High Church Toryism. The Legion
+Memorial,<a name='fna_59' id='fna_59' href='#f_59'><small>[59]</small></a> probably drawn up by Daniel Defoe, marks the lowest point of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>unpopularity ever reached by the House of Commons. No one would venture
+to say that a repetition of such an experience, however unlikely, is more
+impossible under Queen Victoria, than at one time it might have seemed
+under Queen Anne. The chances of a revival, with the national consent, of
+the personal prerogative of the Sovereign in Church and State affairs,
+though far from being inconceivable towards this changeful close of the
+century are too problematical for serious calculation. Like Queen
+Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, from her accession to the Throne, proposed to
+herself as an ideal the affection of her people. The Tudor Sovereign,
+however, amid all her desire for the personal attachment of her subjects,
+bated no jot of her queenly dignity or hereditary pretensions. The
+Hanoverian Sovereign who blends the lines of Tudor and Stuart in her own
+person has always kept before her an object equally distinct, but far more
+congenial to the graciousness of her sex. An Elizabeth never willingly
+allowed the tenderness of the woman to eclipse the majesty of the Queen. A
+Victoria has never, consciously or unconsciously, veiled the motherhood of
+her people by the pomp of their ruler. The stages by which the conception
+of English sovereignty that is to-day a national possession has attained
+its present completeness, must now be examined. From her sex, and the
+circumstances of her life, it has long been inevitable that some of the
+social functions (in the sense in which that epithet is now used) of the
+Sovereign should be discharged vicariously by other members of the
+reigning House. Whether it be Prince and Heir Apparent, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> Royal Duke
+makes no difference to the present argument. The idea of the monarchy
+actually operative among us to-day whether in its constitutional,
+ceremonial, or social attributes is at all points stamped with the impress
+of one systematizing and controlling mind.</p>
+
+<p>That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never
+was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more
+vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that
+has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply
+to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member
+of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so
+familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign
+or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth
+century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time
+when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or
+resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian
+England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned
+individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was
+who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, assistance in
+the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more
+conspicuously associated with the representatives of the kingly principle
+in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms.
+Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> from
+earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with
+an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the
+accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the Duchess
+of Kent, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert:
+&#8216;The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin&#8217; (the Princess
+Victoria).<a name='fna_60' id='fna_60' href='#f_60'><small>[60]</small></a> Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte
+naturally supplied the first link of cousinly association between his
+nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course
+wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial
+diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be
+developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and
+the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that
+the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast
+by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more
+difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found
+impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of
+a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and
+institutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne&#8217;s
+over sanguine anticipations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted
+countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that
+the proposed allowance of &pound;50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+suggested, reduced to &pound;21,000, was to be fixed at &pound;30,000. All he
+regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of
+science would be necessarily more restricted than he had hoped.<a name='fna_61' id='fna_61' href='#f_61'><small>[61]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>Naturally the economy of the Court system was the first to feel the
+reforming influence of the man who afterwards helped profoundly to modify
+the whole system of English life at large. The first opposition was
+encountered at the hands not of an Englishman, but of a fellow
+countrywoman of his own, the Baroness de Lehzen, who, from being the young
+Queen&#8217;s governess, had become the head of her household. The abuses and
+extravagance of the Royal establishment shocked, as they well might have
+done, the frugal Prince. Nor was it only that the money expended yielded
+no proportionate return of comfort and convenience. The very rudiments of
+domestic supervision were found to be wanting. Windsor Castle was only one
+degree better than Buckingham Palace. Those employed about the Royal
+dwelling not only had themselves free ingress into the living rooms of the
+family, a nondescript gathering of camp followers, loafers and errand boys
+also contrived to pass in and out unchallenged. On one occasion a boy was
+found, with no felonious intent, to have passed the night under a sofa in
+a parlour next to the Queen&#8217;s bedroom. The lad had no wish to have done
+so. He was simply shut in, unperceived by those whose business it was to
+lock up.<a name='fna_62' id='fna_62' href='#f_62'><small>[62]</small></a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> In this work the Prince Consort was confronted by the
+opposition which the reformer of inveterate abuses never fails in any
+department of life to encounter. The administration of the Palace
+household below stairs in a less wantonly wasteful manner was held to
+threaten the dignity of those about the Throne. A check upon weekly bills
+in the basement was suspected of veiling a sinister design on the
+constitution of Church and State. Sir Robert Peel in 1841 had dwelt on the
+difficulty of domestic reforms in the Palace. In 1843 he acknowledged the
+economy and efficiency with which the Queen&#8217;s Household was now conducted.
+The Minister was vilified in the cheap weekly papers as a joint
+conspirator with those foreigners who christened their treason by the fair
+names of retrenchment and order. He was even attacked in clubs and drawing
+rooms by fine and fashionable people for being ready to compromise the
+dignity and disturb the equilibrium of the British Crown. The chief point
+of the Prince Consort&#8217;s Court improvements was concentration of
+responsible power upon a single individual in the place of its confused
+distribution among mutually conflicting understrappers. In this task he
+was aided by Baron Stockmar who had all the national aptitude of the
+German for the details small and great in the domestic routine of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> palaces
+and princes. The ultimate result of these operations was to invest a
+Master of the Household identical in all respects with that functionary as
+he exists to-day, with supreme jurisdiction over the domestic arrangements
+of the Sovereign, able directly to communicate with the departments for
+executing the different repairs. Other duties gradually gathered round
+this personage. To-day, as the Prince Consort had always purposed, it is
+upon him that there devolves the duty of issuing at the Royal command,
+invitations to guests to sleep and dine beneath the Queen&#8217;s roof.</p>
+
+<p>The composition of the Queen&#8217;s immediate entourage is now practically the
+same as that decided upon by Her Majesty in conjunction with the Prince
+Consort. The ladies of the Court, that is, consist of the Mistress of the
+Robes, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Women of the Bedchamber, and the
+Maids of Honour. The first named of these, the Mistress of the Robes, is
+in her way, a State official. She must not be below the rank of a Duchess.
+She changes with the Government of the day. Her attendance on the Queen is
+limited to State occasions. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, all of them
+peeresses, are in number eight. One of them is invariably waiting upon the
+Queen. These are the ladies who in 1839 Sir Robert Peel, when forming his
+Administration, thought should be changed. The Women of the Bedchamber are
+also eight. These generally are only in attendance when the Mistress of
+the Robes is present. One of them is always near the Sovereign. The Maids
+of Honour are also eight in number. These<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> must be either the daughters or
+grand-daughters of peers. They have the courtesy title of &#8216;Honourable.&#8217;
+Two of them are always in waiting for a month at a time. The Prince
+Consort also in selecting the officers of the Household, showed special
+care and judgment in his choice of the person who discharges the duties of
+Privy Purse. From the days of Colonel Phipps, or Colonel Anson, to Sir
+Fleetwood Edwards; these have been men of first rate financial and
+administrative capacity. Misled by a similarity of terms, some persons
+seem to fancy there exists a vital association between the gentleman who
+fills that position in the Queen&#8217;s Household and the nobleman who, as Lord
+Privy Seal, has a seat in the Cabinet of the day, and who in 1896-7 was
+Viscount Cross. Hence the recurrent announcements in the newspapers that
+this statesman has been summoned to Windsor or Balmoral to assist Her
+Majesty with her business papers. The present opportunity therefore may
+usefully be taken to contradict the construction placed upon the character
+of the visit of that Minister to the Court. This the present writer has
+the very highest authority for doing. The connection between the Cabinet
+and Court offices whose names so closely resemble each other is in no
+sense organic. Lord Cross, now spoken of, is eminent for his knowledge of
+business of all kinds. He is a man of the widest and most varied
+experience in every department of civil and political affairs. He had a
+seat in Lord Beaconsfield&#8217;s last Cabinet. Than him the Queen possesses
+to-day few older servants, or more trusty friends. In that capacity, not
+in virtue of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> Ministerial position, it is that Lord Cross finds
+himself so frequently the guest of his Sovereign.</p>
+
+<p>The Prince Consort&#8217;s reforms in the economy and administration of the
+Court itself, though not the least valuable or necessary of his labours,
+naturally appealed less directly to the popular interest than his other
+activities, by the results of which the land of his adoption is to-day the
+gainer. Not a moment had been lost by the Prince in beginning to realize
+his early idea of associating for the first time since the days of the
+Stuarts the Sovereign with the promotion of letters, science, and art. The
+Court of Henry VIII. had been visited by Erasmus, and by other men of
+letters of the Protestant connection. If the story of Shakespeare&#8217;s
+presence in the group that surrounded Elizabeth be apocryphal, Edmund
+Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh undoubtedly paid their
+homage to the Virgin Queen. Charles I. was the patron of Van Dyck and an
+admirable connoisseur as well as encourager of true art wherever it could
+be found. Charles II., after his restoration, was less interested in
+painters and poets than in science.</p>
+
+<p>Before Queen Victoria, the Hanoverian Sovereigns had not identified the
+new dynasty with any special affection for the accomplishments which gild
+and refine life. The Prince Consort, at the outset of his career mastered
+two facts. First, he discerned, that, even in the absence of a national
+scheme of education, the taste for reading and culture bred not only by
+improved intelligence, but by the growth of material prosperity and the
+humanizing influences of foreign<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> travel, must before long result in a
+marked improvement of the appreciation among the countrymen of Reynolds,
+of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of Southey, of all that sweetens and
+brightens daily existence. The Prince perceived, too, that the lines on
+which English social intercourse was developing must involve a demand for
+amusements and for recreations upon a larger scale than family reunions
+beneath the domestic life could provide. The theatre in England had not
+become then a considerable force. It would have been premature to
+anticipate the later advice of Mr Matthew Arnold to organize the stage.
+The demand for good music in public places and on reasonable terms; the
+growing interest in the works of English artists; above all the newly
+awakened interest among the whole community in the welfare of their least
+fortunate members;&mdash;these are the features of the time which in his survey
+of the domestic situation chiefly impressed the Prince.</p>
+
+<p>So early as 1840 his knowledge of musical science and his skill in musical
+execution were well known to all with whom he had been brought into
+contact. By this time it was generally perceived that a mistake had been
+made in not, from the first, establishing the Prince as the Queen&#8217;s
+private secretary, and in delaying to entrust him with the control of the
+whole Household. The Prince&#8217;s remarkable aptitudes had impressed the
+leading statesmen of both parties and through them the general public.
+Thus, in 1840 there existed a growing desire to turn to national account
+the special knowledge and exceptional talents of the accomplished husband
+of the Queen. On the 9th of October 1840<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> Lady Lyttelton, then in
+attendance at Windsor, has recorded that &#8216;there arose from the room below
+hers sounds of an instrument which she did not at first recognize, played
+with such master skill, modulated so learnedly, winding through every kind
+of bass and chord, finally culminating in the most perfect cadence, then
+off again, louder first and afterwards softer. I only heard,&#8217; she adds,
+&#8216;the harmony, being too distant to catch the tune, or perceive the
+execution of the small touches. It was Prince Albert playing on the
+organ.&#8217; April 29 of the year now mentioned was, from the point from which
+it is now looked at, a memorable date in this blameless and beneficent
+career. Then it was that the Prince having been appointed one of the
+directors of the Ancient Concerts, discharged these duties for the first
+time. All the music had been selected by himself. He had attended the
+rehearsal with the Queen. Experts in this matter have dated from that day
+the revival of the public taste for classical music in this country.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly simultaneous with this was his appearance upon a public platform on
+one of those non-political occasions that his example has specially
+appropriated to the representatives of English Royalty. In the same year,
+too, at the very height of the London season, the Prince took the
+initiative in a function of a graver kind, but not less specially adapted
+for energies and knowledge to which under a Constitutional monarchy
+political life is not held to afford a proper outlet. The most important
+public meeting of the summer of 1840 was that convened for the purpose of
+encouraging the legislature to complete the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> machinery for the removal of
+the last traces of the slave trade. Technically the abolition had already
+taken place. Well grounded apprehensions, however, existed that the new
+&#8216;apprenticeship&#8217; which was to educate the emancipated negro for the
+blessings of freedom might sometimes be too much like the old servitude
+which it was designed to supersede. This occasion produced the first
+speech delivered on an English platform by the Prince Consort at a time
+when platform eloquence was less common than it has since become. The
+address pointed, pithy, without an ambiguous or superfluous word, was the
+model by which the speaker may well have shaped his subsequent utterances.
+Its terse felicities of phrase have since often been reproduced by his
+son, the Prince of Wales. As a corrective to the innate nervousness of a
+highly organized temper, he had carefully prepared these remarks, writing
+them out and rewriting them, so that nothing might be left to the chance
+inspiration of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>This was the first of a series of princely appearances on non-political
+occasions. To-day, and in the case of his descendants, these things are
+taken as a matter of course. During many years no great movement for the
+improvement by politically unsectarian agencies of human life has been
+considered complete without the active participation in it of the Crown,
+or, which comes to the same thing, a nominee of the Crown. That in its
+popular aspects the artistic movement which fills so large a space in the
+second half of this century was practically the creation of the Prince
+Consort&#8217;s discriminating taste and patriotic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> industry would, if by
+nothing else be shown by the course of preparations for the Hyde Park
+Exhibition of 1851. Sir Robert Peel, at the time, repeatedly stated that
+without the collaboration and counsel of the Queen&#8217;s husband, the
+Commission for the promotion and encouragement of the fine arts in the
+United Kingdom could scarcely have got through its work. On the other
+hand, while the public has accustomed itself to regard Lord Melbourne as
+the nearly exclusive influence for training the Sovereign and her husband
+in the tasks of Royal routine, one may point out that the Prince himself
+never failed to emphasize his personal obligations to Sir Robert Peel as
+his first trainer in the duties of an English public man. Nor from these
+associations did he acquire only a correct insight into the official ways
+of his new country. In his tastes and appreciations, the Prince Consort
+became as patriotic as any of the great men by whom he was surrounded.
+Some have questioned whether the patronage of a not unmixed English Court
+has been entirely favourable to the development of native genius in
+certain branches of the fine arts. The historic facts enumerated by Sir
+Theodore Martin on this point are worth mentioning.<a name='fna_63' id='fna_63' href='#f_63'><small>[63]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>On December 2, 1841, the Prince met on the official business of the
+Commission the Secretary, then Mr, afterwards Sir Charles, Eastlake. The
+latter entered upon the interview with an idea of resigning his post,
+should the Prince insist on the introduction of foreign artists. His Royal
+Highness anticipated his visitor by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> volunteering the remark that to him
+there appeared no necessity for so much as the employment of a single
+foreign artist even among those entrusted with the management of
+considerable works. &#8216;In all that related to practical dexterity (the
+department in which it was assumed that some instruction for fresco would
+be necessary), the English were particularly skilful.&#8217; Such were the
+Prince&#8217;s words as recorded by Sir Charles Eastlake. The same narrator adds
+that His Royal Highness volunteered many instances of English superiority
+over all other nations in everything concerned with artistic mechanism.
+&#8216;Even to the varnish on coaches,&#8217; said the Prince, &#8216;it is surprising how
+much more perfect the English practice is than that of the Continent.&#8217; The
+talk then turned on the encouragement of fresco painting in England. The
+words of the Queen&#8217;s husband are especially noticeable showing as they do
+his just appreciation of the conditions of artistic prosperity in England.
+Two great auxiliaries in this country seldom fail to promote the success
+of any scheme. Of the forces thus alluded to, fashion was one, high
+example was another. Hence the Prince inferred that if the Queen and
+himself set the example of having works of this kind done, the taste would
+extend itself to wealthy individuals. The English country seats which are
+the most beautiful in the world would acquire additional effect from the
+introduction of such a style of decoration. With such occupation the
+school would never languish, and would at least have time fully to develop
+itself. When on one occasion Mr Eastlake,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> in reference to the necessary
+limitation of frescoes compared them to sculpture in which nothing could
+be concealed, and in which this necessity involved the necessity of beauty
+also, the Prince replied: &#8216;You have expressed in a few words what I would
+have said in many.&#8217;<a name='fna_64' id='fna_64' href='#f_64'><small>[64]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the
+direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English
+Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the
+work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with
+English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art
+Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute
+and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not
+only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically
+placed the Queen&#8217;s husband in the van of the new movement for the
+encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly
+than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the
+premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince&#8217;s opportunities of good were
+increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a
+technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the
+importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They illustrate,
+as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular
+conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day
+with the Sovereign or the Sovereign&#8217;s social and ceremonial vicegerents.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the
+deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity
+concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving
+the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone
+living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince
+Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman,
+for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the
+Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing
+at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the
+statesman&#8217;s country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort
+was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellorship of the
+University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the
+great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the
+next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the
+same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen&#8217;s
+eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his
+countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the
+ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it
+is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical
+perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force,
+which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much
+created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The obliging information of Sir Arthur Bigge, of Viscount Cross, and
+of Sir Francis Knollys, has enabled the writer accurately to state
+such facts of Court organization as are legitimate matters of interest
+to Her Majesty&#8217;s subjects.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<p class="title">CROWN AND SWORD</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The Monro-Fawcett duel turned the Prince Consort&#8217;s attention, as
+representing the Crown, to duelling, the abolition of which must begin
+with the army. Courts of Honour suggested as successful abroad. Why
+distrusted by English opinion. Views of the Duke and others. Hence the
+Court first occupied with army reforms to good results. Contrast
+between military resources 1837-97. Special attention of Court to
+military education. Old and new schools of officers compared. Duke of
+Wellington as Commander contrasted with his latest successors. Growth
+of rifle volunteers; special influences in military education, <i>e.g.</i>
+Edward Hamley. Military democracy. Why necessarily imperfect.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>So plausible a case may theoretically be made out for the duel as a social
+institution that it is not surprising the custom should have died hard in
+a combatant nation like the English. The ordeal by arms furnishes a simple
+if barbaric mode of settling personal differences without the scandal and
+the weariness of law; in an age whose boast is freedom of speech not less
+than of thought, whose bane is the degeneration of that chartered liberty
+into the unlicensed malignity and curiosity of small-talk, there always
+will be ill-conditioned persons whom only fear of the horsewhip, the
+rapier, or the pistol, can teach to discipline their tongue; all these
+things have been said in favour of the duel as a mode of social
+discipline.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> In practice, however, it was never found that the fear of a
+challenge ensured social discretion of tongue, or a higher standard of
+personal courtesy. When these combats were not farcical, as the duel has
+generally become in France, where it still survives, they proved the
+instruments of the professional homicide, who, trained to artistic murder,
+went about society, seeking a feud with those whom he or his patrons
+desired to be put out of the way. Stung to the quick by the brutalities of
+O&#8217;Connell, Sir Robert Peel, during the early forties demanded, as the
+story runs, the satisfaction which was not then an anachronism. The great
+Irishman replied that yielding to the expostulations of his wife, he must
+forego the pleasure of the encounter for which he was &#8216;spoiling.&#8217; A second
+invitation was declined on the ground that the entreaties of his offspring
+had subdued the spirit of the warrior. Hence the point in Theodore Hook&#8217;s
+epigram published in the <i>John Bull</i> of the period:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Some men in their horror of slaughter,<br />
+Improve on the scriptural command;<br />
+They honour their wife and their daughter,<br />
+That their days may be long in the land.</p>
+
+<p>The same statesman is known at a little later date to have been persuaded,
+not without difficulty, to abstain from sending a friend to his chief
+opponent<a name='fna_65' id='fna_65' href='#f_65'><small>[65]</small></a> at the time of the latter&#8217;s onslaughts on the Conservative
+concession of Free Trade. Since then, Wimbledon Common or Wormwood Scrubbs
+has probably never for a moment seriously suggested itself to any
+honourable gentleman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> as a possible place to which to adjourn a
+controversy with a parliamentary opponent.</p>
+
+<p>A duel was the incident which caused the first intervention of the Prince
+Consort in the social arrangements of English life. On the 1st of July
+1843, Colonel Fawcett had been shot by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant
+Monro. The latter had accepted the challenge most reluctantly; he had been
+the grossly aggrieved party.<a name='fna_66' id='fna_66' href='#f_66'><small>[66]</small></a> Under the then existing code, the
+survivor&#8217;s sole alternative to the certainty of being stigmatised as a
+coward had been to accept the risk of being hung for a felon. Eight years
+before the Queen&#8217;s accession, in 1829, however, the great Duke of
+Wellington had faced Lord Winchilsea&#8217;s pistol; the memories of the (1809)
+Canning-Castlereagh and other encounters did not then seem part of ancient
+history. The Prince Consort, with the military instincts of his race
+decided that the reform which he was bent on establishing must begin with
+the army. The authority of the Duke of Wellington was at this moment
+paramount equally in social, political, and military life. The great
+general was known himself seriously to have considered the subject. With
+him therefore, the Prince arranged an interview. Courts of Honour were
+suggested by the Prince as rational substitutes for the appeal to the
+sword. The Tribunals des Marechaux were said to have done good work in
+France; Courts of Honour had been followed with the best results in the
+Bavarian army. The Duke&#8217;s objection to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> proposal was the English
+distrust of a secret tribunal; the authorities of the navy took the same
+view as the Commander-in-Chief. Sir George Murray, then Master of the
+Ordnance, a serious and accomplished man of the world, bluntly remarked
+that quarrels would not be made up, or differences composed by the
+arbitration of others; that the law as it already existed could do all
+which was practicable to repress the practice. The Prince persevered with
+his purpose. His suggestion was laid by the Secretary of State for War
+before his colleagues in the Cabinet. Though the scheme was not adopted in
+the form suggested by the Prince, his action in the matter led to an
+amendment in the Articles of War (April 1844). Henceforward it was
+declared to be suitable to the character of honourable men to apologize
+and offer redress for wrong or insult committed, and equally suitable for
+the aggrieved party frankly and cordially to accept the amende. Thus on
+the initiative of the Queen&#8217;s husband, there began the organization of
+public opinion on the lines that have long since made the ordeal by arms
+as practically obsolete in England as the ordeal by touch.</p>
+
+<p>The Queen&#8217;s devotion to her army has always been that of a mother for her
+children; the Queen&#8217;s gratitude evinced upon all possible occasions to her
+soldiers for what they have done in the field has ever resembled that of a
+woman to the protector of the weak against the strong. It was natural
+therefore that, amid his civilian duties, the new representative of the
+Throne, himself nurtured in a land that from being the Mark of Brandenburg
+was growing into a great military<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> monarchy, should actively show his
+interest in the whole field of military reform. Later, when the post
+became vacant, the Prince Consort, after consulting with the Ministers of
+the day, declined more than once the Commandership-in-Chief. His
+suggestions for army reform, and for national defence during the period of
+the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny, and again during the
+Franco-Austrian wars were made with a sense of responsibility which the
+tenure of office could not have deepened as well as with a shrewd
+perception of the needs and possibilities of the time that no statesman of
+English birth could surpass. He had already been among the first to
+recognize the brilliant merits of the Duke of Wellington&#8217;s plan for the
+defence of London, during the Chartist disturbances of 1848. To the
+Prince&#8217;s discrimination it is largely due that this domestic exploit of
+the hero of Waterloo, not less memorable in its way than Waterloo
+itself,<a name='fna_67' id='fna_67' href='#f_67'><small>[67]</small></a> came properly to be appreciated by the country. To this day
+the mighty fortresses which protect the shores of the Solent and
+Southampton Water, and which make that part of the previously too
+vulnerable South coast practically safe are to a great extent the
+memorials of the wisdom and exertion of the Prince Consort. He had
+already, while our soldiers were before Sebastopol, urged upon the
+Government of the day the establishment of militia dep&ocirc;ts in place of the
+regulars should they be withdrawn by an emergency, at Malta and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+elsewhere, along the line of our Mediterranean possessions. When
+therefore, the national alarm caused by the words and actions of our
+French ally found its expression in Lord Palmerston&#8217;s scheme of coast
+defences, the memorandum on which these measures were based had been drawn
+up by the Prince Consort at the wish of the Cabinet, and practically
+formed the basis of the action of Ministers.</p>
+
+<p>Nor of all the army reformers who have lived and worked since the Prince&#8217;s
+day, is there one who has failed to testify his indebtedness to the
+suggestions of the husband of the Queen. In his many talks on this subject
+with the military advisers of the Government of the day, the Prince often
+anticipated those improvements in the administration of the land forces of
+the Crown which since his time have been carried out. As the Prince
+Consort correctly inferred from the character of the English people as
+well as from the pace of official movements in England, must be the case,
+the progressive changes in the English army have been effected piecemeal
+by slow or minute instalments. The method pursued here has differed not
+less from that followed in the reorganization of Continental armies than
+the composition of the army of England differs from that of the great
+fighting machines of the rest of Europe. In Prussia, after the defeat of
+Jena (1806); in Austria after France had triumphed for Italy on the field
+of Solferino (1859) the organic reconstruction of armies was possible.
+Nothing of the same sort has taken place in England. Nothing, as the
+Prince Consort perceived, of this kind could be effected<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> here, unless
+under the conscription. That system the Queen&#8217;s husband once observed was
+not likely to be established in England without a revolution.</p>
+
+<p>The changes which the Prince suggested in able memoranda to successive
+Ministers, which indeed he partly foresaw as coming, may in their general
+results briefly be glanced at now. The mere enumeration of the military
+resources of the country on the Queen&#8217;s accession and on the eve of the
+sixtieth anniversary of that event needs few words to deepen the contrast.
+In 1837 the total military strength (regular army) of the country was
+101,000. Sixty years later these figures were 147,105.<a name='fna_68' id='fna_68' href='#f_68'><small>[68]</small></a> In 1837 India
+was garrisoned by the Company&#8217;s army of 26,500. In 1897 the Indian
+military strength was 74,299 British, 129,963 Native. The increase has
+been therefore, nearly threefold. In 1837 the Irish troops were 20,000. In
+1897 these were between 26,000 and 27,000. As against the 26,000 troops in
+the Channel Islands and Great Britain in 1837, there were in 1897, 81,516.
+The entire strength of the horsed-field artillery in the accession year
+was 72 guns&mdash;all at home. On New Year&#8217;s Day 1897 the artillery total of
+all kinds at home and abroad was 219 batteries or companies. In 1837 the
+Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 12-pounder howitzers, and
+6-pounder guns; the Field batteries had 9-pounder guns, 24-pounder
+howitzers. The infantry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> still used the old flint &#8216;Brown Bess,&#8217; which in
+the cant phrase of the time was warranted at 200 yards to miss a haystack.
+The Rifle regiments used the Brunswick rifle which at 400 yards, according
+to Lord Wolseley, could not implicitly be trusted. To-day, the equipping
+of our troops with the latest weapons of precision which contemporary
+science designs is of itself a great department of English artificership.
+Jealousy of the army is as much a bequest from Puritan times to the House
+of Commons, as jealousy of the Church. Under the two first Georges, bitter
+and tedious debates on the maintenance of the Hanoverian soldiers were of
+constant recurrence. As a consequence, the standing troops which in the
+Napoleonic wars had been 220,000 men were gradually reduced till in three
+years after the peace (1818), they were only 80,000 strong.</p>
+
+<p>Not without much pressure had Parliament during the earliest infancy of
+the Colonies provided a handful of soldiers for the protection of settlers
+in the lands beyond the sea as well as for the maintenance of civil order
+at home. It was the paucity of the numbers available for his orders which
+rendered the Duke of Wellington&#8217;s scheme of London defence against
+Chartist attack so memorable a piece of strategy. Even the influence and
+popularity of this great soldier only secured the existence of a small
+army at home on condition that it did not flaunt itself ostentatiously
+before the civilian population. To keep up any fighting strength at all
+the non-combatant portion of the army was reduced to an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> ineffective
+minimum. Without exception, regiments were weak in men and horses. The
+four chief company dep&ocirc;ts at home consisted of veterans waiting their
+discharge, of invalids, and of ineffective, or imperfectly effective,
+recruits.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, as during the Canadian and Jamaica troubles in the earlier
+years of the reign, additional troops were required for the Colonies.
+These were composed of volunteers from other regiments and of casual
+recruits. The <i>personnel</i> of our army may be inferred from the Duke of
+Wellington&#8217;s oft-quoted remark that the man who enlisted was the worst and
+most drunken inhabitant of the village. This was the scum of the earth
+which under officers trained on the playing fields of Eton, the Duke had
+led to victory in his Peninsular campaigns and in the Low Countries
+against the consummate veterans of the French army. To win the affection
+of his men; to make them feel that their commander was also their friend,
+and of the same flesh and blood as themselves never occurred to the great
+Duke. His latter-day successor, Lord Wolseley, on the Christmas day of
+1896, visited the Wellington Barracks to taste the pudding and test the
+comforts of the men. That was not the great Duke&#8217;s way.</p>
+
+<p>The moral and social improvement in the private soldier since the era of
+humaner treatment began is shown by a progressive decrease in the number
+of Courts Martial. In 1876 they were 12,187, in 1895, 8,211, a reduction
+of about one-third. The treatment of soldiers by their superiors was
+admirably adapted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> to demoralize them as men without improving them as
+soldiers. When the recruit took the Queen&#8217;s shilling, he ceased to be a
+free citizen. He had said farewell to the world outside the barrack yard.
+He became a nameless piece of martial machinery; sometimes he was
+indulged; more often he was flogged. Nothing that could extinguish respect
+for himself or his officers, was left undone. It had been the Duke of
+Wellington&#8217;s business to win victories not to conciliate men. The moral
+and personal influence of such men as Lord Roberts and others which since
+the Duke&#8217;s day has been exercised for the moral and physical advantage of
+the soldier is not an instrument that the hero of Waterloo often employed;
+he did not believe in it. Nor was it a soldier, but a schoolmaster, Dr
+Arnold of Rugby, who formulated the truth, that the best way of improving
+character is to treat persons on the assumption of their becoming what you
+wish them to be.</p>
+
+<p>To pass to other details in the military contrast between the sixtieth and
+the first years of the Queen&#8217;s reign the short service system which has
+proved admittedly so effective had occurred as a possibility only to a few
+reformers of whom the Prince Consort was one, and Sir Charles Napier
+another. In 1837 enlistment was for life or twenty-one years; the seven
+years&#8217; term had been urged already by Napier. It was not however till 1847
+that the reduction to ten years was sanctioned and then only by way of
+special inducement for recruits when they were exceptionally few. Those
+who can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> recall the scenes witnessed outside public houses in the country,
+in the purlieus of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in London will not
+consider the term &#8216;crimping&#8217; too strong an expression to apply to the
+process of forcing the Queen&#8217;s shilling into the hands of half tipsy
+yokels, and entirely intoxicated or desperate roughs. Nor is it surprising
+that the Sergeant Kites of the period found all their arts of inventive
+persuasion, all their largesses of drink necessary to induce the gallant
+fellows whom they addressed to serve the Queen. Without the stimulating
+allurement of drums and fifes playing, of banners flying, and unless the
+future had been seen through a haze of beery or spirituous splendour, the
+tale of recruits would have fallen lamentably short.</p>
+
+<p>In the eyes of sober citizens of the industrial class, the life of the
+soldier seemed only one degree less dismal and shameful than the career of
+the hulks. As a fact the soldier&#8217;s lot was perhaps half a century ago not
+much more tolerable than that of the convict shipped for his offences
+beyond seas. A prison with a chance of being killed in it represented in
+the popular eye the existence of the private soldier. It involved
+transportation with hard labour as a matter of course. One battalion first
+raised in 1700 had been the whole of those 137 years abroad on active
+service. When his destiny was less severe than this, a life insufferably
+tedious was led by him in barracks pestilently unhealthy. To-day, upon a
+different plane of comfort, and on a reduced scale of luxury, the private
+soldiers may be said to enjoy the same recreations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> and opportunities of
+improvement as his officer. He is the master of his own time during
+several of the best hours in every day. He has no more difficulty in
+obtaining leave up to midnight for a theatre visit than a Woolwich cadet
+in getting a Sunday exeat from the Academy. Rooms for study and pastime
+are provided within his barracks.</p>
+
+<p>Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in
+1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children
+herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever,
+with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their
+country&#8217;s battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not
+wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The
+Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to
+time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a
+prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British
+punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after
+an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of
+parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire
+abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of
+Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was
+to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of
+regulars every other branch of the Service.</p>
+
+<p>Thus sixty years ago the Militia force of the country was declared by the
+Adjutant-General of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> day practically to be non-existent. Before 1815
+this force had been a considerable body. After the Peace it dwindled down
+to less than 70,000; when the Queen mounted her throne, it was seldom or
+never regularly drilled. There had been no ballot for it since 1831.
+Twenty-eight years later, December 1895, the strength of an annually
+trained Militia was 107,742. The Militia, too, in 1837 was administered
+not as it now is by the War Office, but by the Home Secretary in
+conjunction with the Lords Lieutenant of Counties; its payment was
+provided for in the civil not the military estimates; in 1837 its expense
+was &pound;192,115. The Yeomanry, then called Volunteers, comprised 18,000 men
+of all ranks, at a cost in round numbers of &pound;105,400. In 1897 the
+Yeomanry, instructed not less systematically than the Militia, were a
+force of 11,678 men.</p>
+
+<p>Important additions to the permanent strength of the country against an
+emergency were made, largely on the Prince Consort&#8217;s initiative, during
+the first decade of the reign. In 1842 the military pensioners already
+enrolled and liable to service were regularly organized, less however as a
+military power than as an aid to the civil Government, to the number of
+7,000 men. This, too, was the period in which (1846) Sir John Burgoyne
+submitted to Lord John Russell a State paper on that subject of coast
+defences which had already engaged the Duke of Wellington and had been
+taken up warmly as mentioned above by the Queen&#8217;s husband. The Channel
+Tunnel scheme was then unborn in the brains of future projectors. Our
+military experts held England sufficiently to be weakened as it was by
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> isthmus of steam which bridged the Straits of Dover. Sir John
+Burgoyne&#8217;s estimate in 1846 was that after providing for Ireland and for
+home fortifications, only a maximum of 10,000 men could be placed in the
+field; that the entire United Kingdom did not possess field guns enough
+for 20,000 men; that there were no reserves of muskets or military stores;
+that the dockyards were defenceless against any sudden attack. In 1847 the
+apprehensions caused by these expert disclosures moved Lord Palmerston,
+when Foreign Secretary in the Russell Cabinet, to suggest a loan for
+military works along the Hampshire and Dorsetshire coast. Nothing,
+however, was actually done until the Prince Consort in May 1859 secured
+the issue of instructions to Lords Lieutenant of Counties by the War
+Secretary. These resulted in the raising of the Volunteers. Lord
+Palmerston was himself Prime Minister then. The attitude of Napoleon III.
+towards England and the Austrian war scare of 1859 supplied the Government
+with the leverage for the vote needed to strengthen the coast protection
+of England in accordance with the Prince Consort&#8217;s proposal of twelve
+years earlier. On June 23, 1860, the earliest Volunteer Review was held in
+Hyde Park. A week or so later, on July 2, the Volunteers first met on
+Wimbledon Common; the competition was opened by Her Majesty discharging
+her rifle and scoring the inaugural bull&#8217;s eye.</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of a century later the Volunteers had risen from 119,000 in 1860
+to 226,752 in 1886, of whom 220,000 were efficients. At the number then
+reached<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> subject to fluctuations of some thousands periodically they seem
+disposed to remain. In Great Britain 800,000 men of military age have
+passed through the Volunteers. Thus, not counting our natural rampart of
+sea, and a navy which public opinion, if not official patriotism, insists
+on maintaining at a high point, the coast fortresses bristling in nearly
+continuous array from Dover to the Land&#8217;s End mask behind them little less
+than 1,000,000 citizen soldiers, who with some help from their brethren of
+the Royal Artillery could effectively man our coast batteries.</p>
+
+<p>Military education under teachers of the new school and the class of
+officers thus produced are the immediate outcome of the interest taken in
+the army by the Court at, and subsequently to, the time of the Prince
+Consort. The whole scheme of education under which the commanders of the
+future are trained and a general anxiety for the most beneficent use of
+the Queen&#8217;s prerogative, were much in the thoughts of the Queen&#8217;s husband.
+The council of military education was largely the work of the Prince, as
+also was the formation of the Aldershot camp. When a &#8216;governor&#8217; was to be
+chosen for the Prince of Wales, the selection made was the first Commander
+at Aldershot and one of the chief members of the education council, Sir
+William Knollys, who, on the Prince reaching his majority became chief of
+his household. When that veteran was appointed Usher of the Black Rod he
+was succeeded as Private Secretary to the Heir Apparent by one so
+thoroughly trained to his administrative methods as his son, Sir Francis
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>Knollys;&mdash;a man in whom common sense attains as nearly as is conceivable
+to the calibre of absolute genius. It was at the period now mentioned and
+under these influences that officers in the scientific corps began to get
+their proper share of army staff appointments and commands. So entirely
+have the old disabilities of that corps disappeared that to-day, in
+striking contrast to the earlier experience, an officer of Royal Artillery
+or Royal Engineers who in general respects shows the necessary aptitude
+enjoys the same chance as anyone else of staff employment in peace. When
+he has reached the grade of General officer, he will not be at any
+disadvantage in the process of selection for a command. Here merit alone
+tells now. Whatever arm of the Service to which he belongs the best
+candidate practically never fails to be chosen. Generally, in the opinion
+of the best professional judges, the young officer finds the army a
+self-supporting profession. The exact experience seems to be that a young
+man obtaining a commission in the infantry of the Line or in the Artillery
+can look forward at no distant date to marrying in fair comfort, and that
+as a bachelor he requires no larger allowance or private means than he
+would need in any other branch of the public employ, that, for example, of
+the Colonial Service.</p>
+
+<p>In cavalry regiments, or in the Household Brigade, life is more costly. In
+these cases, the young officer could scarcely subsist in comfort without
+private resources equal to those on which young men entering the
+diplomatic service must at the outset of their career be able to count.
+Obviously if the army is to be made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> a career sufficiently attractive for
+young Englishmen of first-rate abilities as well as of gentle birth, the
+prizes of the profession must not, for the sake of an unwise national
+economy, be too severely diminished in value. The complaint is general and
+just that the emoluments of those who win their way to the top are already
+unattractively small and few. It cannot be a satisfactory state of things
+under which no General officer can afford, without private fortune of his
+own, to take a command. Impolitic retrenchment has touched other positions
+than these. Thus, quite recently the salary of the Military Secretary to
+the Commander-in-Chief has been cut down from &pound;2,100 to &pound;1,500; that of
+Adjutant-General to the Forces from &pound;2,700 to &pound;2,100; that of Governor of
+the Royal Military Academy from &pound;2,000 to &pound;1,500. The unwisdom of these
+reductions and the comparative smallness of the highest army stipends,
+become the more apparent when it is remembered that all military
+appointments, unlike civil appointments from the Primacy of Canterbury
+down to a junior Treasury lordship, are for five years only, that the
+installation in these posts, and the establishment they require are
+necessarily costly; thus the choice is practically limited to men of
+means. Nor does a timocratic<a name='fna_69' id='fna_69' href='#f_69'><small>[69]</small></a> scheme of military preferment accord well
+with the democratic ideal of careers unrestrictedly open to all talents.</p>
+
+<p>The reform in the system of officers&#8217; education which the Prince Consort
+launched his eldest son has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> already lived to see practically
+accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer
+at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his
+worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be
+recognised to-day in Thackeray&#8217;s Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish;
+before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had
+developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course
+candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day,
+naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a
+shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But
+he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of
+history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There
+are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore
+or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps
+something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely
+an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers,&mdash;the
+school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was,
+and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.</p>
+
+<p>The man-of-war&#8217;s-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books,
+with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better
+informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To
+speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has
+felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the
+atmosphere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed
+through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to
+mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty
+years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between
+what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a
+future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the
+spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some
+looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after
+Albert Smith&#8217;s medical student.</p>
+
+<p>Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any
+afternoon issuing from the Athen&aelig;um Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up
+gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly
+noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley.
+Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of
+the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian
+friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by
+the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of
+Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These
+were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went
+on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained
+to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this
+able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a
+right to be so by having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> done more than any other man of his generation
+for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who
+stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot,
+Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when
+there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his
+dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the
+intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than
+anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal
+partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of
+over-estimating the good done by his book on the <i>Operations of War</i>. This
+was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and
+tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those
+subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war
+out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts
+of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley&#8217;s great
+treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and
+M&#8217;Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by
+years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the
+clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers
+how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the
+past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim
+to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct
+from that of mere information.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>Intellectual quality is not the only respect in which there has been
+lately witnessed a change among the officers of the army. The Crimean War
+was followed by many promotions to the grade of officers from the ranks.
+Since then the average number of commissions given in this way seems to
+have been about twenty-five a year. Of this number 16 have gone to
+infantry, 4 to cavalry, and the remainder to other branches of the
+Service. These promotions, suitable as they are to the day of democracy,
+cannot of course affect sensibly the tone or the <i>personnel</i> of the
+officers of the Queen&#8217;s army, who will continue to be, as they have been,
+men born to the social advantages of gentle station. The social fusion and
+personal intimacy of men whose antecedents and interests differ, though
+their official rank be identical, is not likely ever to be more complete
+than between English and native officers in the Indian Staff Corps
+regiments; though the difficulty in the way of amalgamation proceeds
+probably less from the exclusiveness of the older officer than from the
+indisposition of the new to avail himself of the social opportunities
+placed technically at his disposal.<a name='fna_70' id='fna_70' href='#f_70'><small>[70]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<p class="title">FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Great reduction of the navy, as well as of the army, between the
+Napoleonic wars and the Queen&#8217;s accession. But silently a reaction
+soon set in. First beginnings of new policy. Reform in the training of
+sailors in gunnery; later developments of naval education for officers
+and men; the existing course compared with the past. Successive stages
+in the replacement of sails by steam power. A navy transformed by
+Steam and Iron. Lessons of contemporary experience gradually applied
+to the English navy, especially those learnt from the American Civil
+War and the Austro-Italian War.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>After the Napoleonic wars the British navy, like the British army, was
+greatly reduced. In the Navy List of 1837, 132 vessels are named. Sixty
+years later they had increased to 461. Now the naval policy of successive
+Administrations seems to have acquired the same continuity as belongs
+traditionally to foreign policy. It is a first principle to-day with all
+parties in the State that the iron walls which, as our first line of
+defence, have replaced the walls of wood, should not be reduced to a point
+at which they need fear the combined opposition, if not of Europe, still
+of the two or three most powerful of European fleets. At the moment when
+the great reductions in our fleet were contemplated, Napoleon at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> St
+Helena, in the course of the conversations recorded by O&#8217;Meara,<a name='fna_71' id='fna_71' href='#f_71'><small>[71]</small></a> said:
+&#8216;It was bad policy to encourage the military mania instead of sticking to
+your marine, which is the real force of your country.&#8217; In 1832 the naval
+vote had been 4&#188; millions. Two years later, it was reduced to 3
+millions. The fleet reductions did not, however, reach their limit until
+the year before the Queen&#8217;s accession. Then the naval vote was reduced to
+2&#190; millions, with the dwindling of our squadrons already noted.
+Contrast with this the 1896-97 estimate of &pound;22,774,318, providing for the
+services of a total, every branch included, of 93,750 officers and men,
+inclusive of the 461 ships already named.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the naval transformations through which during the
+Victorian age we have passed, may be described as a succession of
+periodical scares, a steadily progressive instruction by science in its
+latest application to maritime affairs, and by the lessons contained in
+the experience of other countries. The English operations by sea during
+the Crimean War; in a still greater degree perhaps the improvements in
+naval construction, attack and defence, shown in the hostilities between
+the Federal and Confederate navies in the civil war on the other side of
+the Atlantic; later again the lessons taught by the engagements between
+Italian and Austrian squadrons, notably at Lissa;&mdash;these are the incidents
+that have gradually taught us, as well as our European neighbours, to
+bring our naval arrangements and appliances up to the latest mark of
+mechanical perfection.</p>
+
+<p>Even during the time when the security brought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> by relief after long war
+was causing England to neglect her navy, some of those movements which in
+Victorian days have given us our present race of seamen were in progress.</p>
+
+<p>Seven years before the Queen&#8217;s accession, the &#8216;Excellent,&#8217; as a gunnery
+school for sailors, had been established. Soon after its establishment, it
+was gradually enlarged and improved till it has become to-day the chief
+source from which our ships are manned. Before that institution, naval
+gunnery was taught, or not taught, at the discretion of the captains in
+command. From being, as at the beginning of the present age it was, always
+precarious and generally insufficient, the supply of sailors has become
+fairly adequate and regular. Weeks and months used to be wasted before a
+crew could be put together. The social haunts of seamen were visited by
+officers; thus eventually by promises or threats men were induced to join
+the ship. When the commission of the ship came to an end, the sailors were
+thrown adrift, usually returning to their civil vocations until a new job
+was offered. By the time of the Crimean War all this had been changed.
+Apart from the inducements of prize money sailors flocked in animated by a
+real enthusiasm. Thus though in France the naval conscription had existed
+since the time of Colbert the manning of the English fleet proceeded more
+quickly in Crimean days than that of the French. The continuous service
+for ten years certain, with the choice of prolonging that term and
+receiving a pension, has transformed the condition of our navy. Other
+reforms have given us in time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> of war a reserve of 20,000 sailors of the
+mercantile marine, the equivalents of our rifle volunteers on land. These
+are annually subject to gun and small arm drill on our coasts, and, in the
+opinion of an expert like Captain Eardley Wilmot, will prove adequate to
+any demand.<a name='fna_72' id='fna_72' href='#f_72'><small>[72]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>There have been later reforms than this in the professional education of
+our sailors. Till between forty and fifty years ago men and boys entered
+the navy without any previous training. In, or about 1855, all sailors
+entered the service as boys chiefly from fifteen to sixteen and a half
+years old. They now begin by passing from twelve to eighteen months on
+board the training ship. Here they are instructed in seamanship and
+gunnery. They thus bring with them to sea a practical knowledge of their
+duties. The system which has given us a new race of naval officers dates
+from nearly the same time as that which began to produce a fresh
+generation of seamen. Before 1857, no regular system of training
+midshipmen existed. All their knowledge was actually acquired afloat,
+exactly as Captain Marryat describes. The large ships only were furnished
+with regular naval instructors. Since the &#8216;Britannia&#8217; was instituted in
+1857, all midshipmen receive from fifteen months to two years education in
+naval subjects and in mathematics. The educational term is not over when
+the professional career begins. The course of study necessary before the
+examination for Lieutenant can be passed has been greatly expanded.
+Formerly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> acting mates were supposed to satisfy all educational tests for
+Lieutenant in about three months. Now a year is occupied with these
+studies; the qualifying standard for the pass examination is pitched far
+higher than was ever known before.</p>
+
+<p>The transformation undergone by our navy which strikes the eye most
+forcibly is of course the replacement of the wooden walls by the floating
+ironclad and the substitution of steam for wind-filled sails as the
+propelling power of our fleet. A naval officer, Sir William Symonds,
+instead of a member of the School of Naval Architecture, was appointed
+Surveyor of the Navy; the first step towards improving ship construction
+was taken. Almost on the eve of the Queen&#8217;s accession, certainly during
+all the earlier thirties, steamers 5 of which in all existed, were only
+used to tow ships of the line in and out of harbour; or at the utmost for
+a trip to Gibraltar or Malta. When Captain Charles Napier predicted that
+steam would soon become to the navy what cavalry is to the army, and have
+the post of honour, the prediction seemed impossible. The adoption of
+steam was a very gradual and tentative process. First the &#8216;Active,&#8217; a
+46-gun frigate was fitted with paddles, but not as yet engines. The result
+was progress at a maximum of from 2 to 3 knots an hour. Captain Napier
+carried the experiment a little further; but in no case was steam yet
+exclusively relied on for working the paddles. When Queen Victoria came to
+the throne the navy included 5 steam paddle vessels. Each of them had
+three masts furnished with sails. All were generically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> known as steam
+sloops. The largest was 830 tons; the maximum of speed from 8 to 10 knots.
+Larger steamers called steam frigates, from 1,200 to 1,800 tons were
+introduced soon after the reign began. They were first actively employed
+at the bombardment of Acre in 1840, and notwithstanding their old lines of
+construction, proved the usefulness of armed ships at sea against forts on
+land. The Acre operations seem to have been important, as showing for the
+first time the skill of Victorian seamen in gunnery and in the management
+of the machinery of steam ships. Similarly, long before this only the
+skill with which English ships were handled had overcome, in their
+encounters with French, the faults of their design. The weight of metal
+thrown by the largest guns on board these earlier craft, <i>e.g.</i> the
+&#8216;Nelson,&#8217; was 2,750 lbs. Further steam progress was marked when, eight
+years after the reign began, the &#8216;Erebus&#8217; and &#8216;Terror&#8217; in which Sir John
+Franklin&#8217;s expedition sailed for the Pole, were fitted with the screw.</p>
+
+<p>As yet iron had not been employed on the present scale in ship
+construction. Both in 1857 and 1858 larger ships than had yet been known,
+the &#8216;Niagara&#8217; first, the &#8216;Orlando,&#8217; the &#8216;Mersey,&#8217; afterwards, were built,
+all, however, of wood. Long after steam was partially employed, sails were
+retained. Even during our Black Sea and Baltic operations in Crimean days,
+screw and paddle were still combined with canvas. Such success as our
+fleet secured at this time was not promoted by the excellence of our naval
+organization which according to Captain Eardley Wilmot, was not much
+better than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> our military.<a name='fna_73' id='fna_73' href='#f_73'><small>[73]</small></a> The first lesson as to the new mode of
+motion by sea learnt from the naval operations in Crimean waters was
+recognized by Kinglake and is confirmed by Captain Eardley Wilmot as being
+that &#8216;in regions where land and sea much intertwine, steam is stronger for
+attack than for defence.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>The iron ships now almost as essential to the idea of a navy as steam
+itself, had been tried for different purposes long before our Admiralty
+adopted them; the material had been used, first in 1812 for canal barges,
+secondly, a little later, for the mercantile marine. Iron was not employed
+for our navy till the last days of William IV. The tragic fate of the
+first iron ship, the &#8216;Birkenhead,&#8217; may well have prejudiced both the
+Department and the public against the new material.</p>
+
+<p>The iron-plated ship of the modern type appears to have been a French
+idea, first tried by Colonel Paixhaus in 1825. The floating batteries
+employed in the Crimean War in which Napoleon III. was specially
+interested, marked a fresh advance in this direction. Nor does it seem
+easy to overrate the value of the lessons in scientific seamanship derived
+from the French and English operations on the Black Sea, 1854-5. The
+result was the invitation by the Admiralty of designs from all quarters,
+the ordering of the &#8216;Warrior,&#8217; designed by Mr Scott Russell, in 1859,
+completed in 1861.<a name='fna_74' id='fna_74' href='#f_74'><small>[74]</small></a> This vessel was equipped<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> with a battery extending
+her whole length. Before the fifties were out, the naval and the national
+mind had been familiarized with the idea of mastless ships, long repulsive
+to the national sense of the picturesque at sea. The &#8216;Warrior,&#8217; however,
+was furnished with sails in addition to steam and marked an epoch in the
+development not only of the English navy, but of the navies of the world,
+as the first absolutely complete iron ship ever built.</p>
+
+<p>The French ships, earlier in point of time were not equally perfect as
+regards material. They were, in fact, wooden ships cut down and plated
+with iron. Thus with literal truth referring to the launch of &#8216;Warrior&#8217;
+could our Naval Minister of the day, Sir John Pakington, describe the
+whole world as interested in the bold experiment. Other ships of the same
+kind soon followed, and of even larger proportions. It is to the credit of
+English workmanship that the building of these vessels at Chatham was
+performed by shipwrights who had hitherto worked only on wood; and that
+the craftmanship shown by them in the new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> material was pronounced by
+experts to be excellent. Timber having been definitely superseded by
+metal, there followed the long and technical controversy about the
+relative merits of turret and broadside armaments. The concentration of
+guns into a single citadel on board ship was first in England powerfully
+advocated by Sir E. Reed. Since then, the naval warfare between Federals
+and Confederates on the other side of the Atlantic, followed by the
+exciting man&oelig;uvres off Cherbourg between the &#8216;Alabama&#8217; and the
+&#8216;Keersage,&#8217; and in Europe the naval portions of the Austro-Italian war of
+1866 have taught lessons the full results of which are not, perhaps even
+yet, perfectly realized. So long is the experimental stage which has to be
+traversed before the newest system of maritime defence and attack with its
+complicated machinery can be said entirely to have reached what is alone
+to be called properly the scientific stage.<a name='fna_75' id='fna_75' href='#f_75'><small>[75]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<p class="title">TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The Prince Consort&#8217;s influence in organizing pursuits and departments
+of knowledge, a characteristic of the Victorian age. The Prince not
+only the advocate of the 1851 Exhibition, but most active in the
+movement that has given us South Kensington as an instrument in the
+knowledge of art and science. The British Association foreshadowed by
+a like organization in Germany which may have impressed the youthful
+Prince Albert, but certainly set the example to the leaders of English
+science. Like its German forerunners the British Association gradually
+grew in popular favour. Its progress as shown by facts and figures.
+Modern course of science summarized. The transforming influences of
+science traced in all intellectual pursuits.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>If in a few words the contrast between the England of the later and the
+earlier part of the Queen&#8217;s reign were to be summed up, it might be
+expressed by the single word, organization. For that process, as for its
+most impressive results, Victorian England is indebted primarily to the
+husband of its Queen. To-day Englishmen are reminded locally and visibly
+of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by the elaborately picturesque memorial of
+the man who spared no pains to secure its success, situated, as that
+monument is, on the spot where the great glass house once stood.</p>
+
+<p>That event was the earliest triumph of the new epoch of culture including
+science in its application<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> to the conveniences or luxuries of daily life.
+From 1851 too, may be dated the organized encouragement of the inventor in
+all departments of scientific ingenuity.</p>
+
+<p>Such a world&#8217;s show might in due course have been devised by the wit of
+man, even if the Queen&#8217;s husband had not recalled for reproduction in
+England the idea of the Frankfort fairs of the sixteenth century.<a name='fna_76' id='fna_76' href='#f_76'><small>[76]</small></a> It
+is quite certain that without the Prince&#8217;s personal enterprise and
+sustained supervision, and but for the invaluable co-operation of the late
+Sir Henry Cole, the movement which has transformed the Court suburb from
+laundry grounds, or riding schools, into a centre of artistic or
+scientific education for the whole country had it taken place at all,
+would not have occurred till many years later than it actually did. The
+contrast between the South Kensington of the Queen&#8217;s accession year with
+its suburban desolations, and of the sixtieth anniversary year, with its
+palaces of art, its private mansions rivalling those of Park Lane, its
+Imperial Institute, its provision for educational classes by day, for
+musical f&ecirc;tes by lamplight, might have been indefinitely postponed.</p>
+
+<p>The name of Her Majesty written in the clear bold hand of youth when she
+became Queen may be read to-day in the register of the Royal Society. That
+entry prefigured the close connection between science and the Court which,
+for the first time in the history<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> of the monarchy, was to signalize her
+reign. The period preparatory to the enthronement of science and art
+beneath the glass roof of Paxton was of scarcely less educational value to
+the Kingdom than, to most appliances of daily life, the Exhibition itself
+was to prove. The instructive addresses delivered at this time by the
+Prince Consort, now to a gathering of artists and writers, now to more
+popular audiences at Birmingham or elsewhere, may seem to those who read
+them to-day familiar or even commonplace. They were then entire novelties,
+not only from their authorship, but from their subject.</p>
+
+<p>In 1897 it appears the most natural and suitable thing in the world that a
+Royal Prince should vary the more strictly ceremonial functions of State
+by opening an art gallery in London, a science school in the provinces, an
+Imperial Institute, a Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington. Fifty
+years since such a part seemed of questionable wisdom to some, of
+dangerous precedent for the monarchy to others; at the best a foreign
+experiment which the Queen&#8217;s husband would most wisely have left unmade.
+In the sixtieth year of the reign, there is no social gathering or private
+dwelling, there is scarcely a village inn, or country cottage, or a
+seaside lodging house, that by the paper on its walls, the designs of its
+furniture, the suspended pictures cut from illustrated prints, fails to
+remind one with eyes to see such things the extent to which ideas of art
+or ornament that began with the Prince and Sir Henry Cole have directly
+from South Kensington penetrated into every corner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> of the land, and made
+their humanizing influence felt beneath the roof of peasant as well as of
+peer.</p>
+
+<p>Even in the thirtieth year of the reign, these forces had scarcely
+advanced beyond the embryonic stage. Had the Prince Consort himself
+claimed visibly to exercise the Royal prerogative, on which as a fact he
+never presumed, he could scarcely have given a greater shock to the
+prejudices of those high in social position and near the Court who
+inherited from Hanoverian times a contempt for all distinctions save those
+of birth and rank.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the moment of his death the Queen&#8217;s husband was endeavouring to make
+his wife&#8217;s Court a centre not only of achievement in war, of statesmanship
+in peace, but of letters, art, science, and of the most famous among their
+contemporary ornaments. Death prevented the design from ever being carried
+out completely. The names of Alfred Tennyson and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
+are enough to remind one of the direction actually travelled by the Prince
+in producing some resemblance between the Windsor where a Victoria
+reigned, and the Weimar whose intellectual glories, a Goethe had typified.
+Here again the intellectual revolution which the Court began has been
+continued by those who represent the Crown to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Such knowledge of physical science as the Prince Consort&#8217;s son possesses
+was largely imparted to him by the teacher Faraday, who was his father&#8217;s
+choice. Appropriately enough, therefore, in the winter of 1897 did the
+Prince of Wales assist in founding the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal
+Society. The progress now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> spoken of seems to be symbolized by the
+acceptance of the word &#8216;science&#8217; as the nearly exclusive synonym for that
+physicism which is strictly only one of the divisions that generically it
+includes. From the check to the regular teaching of physical knowledge at
+the disorganization spread through the world by the collapse of the Roman
+Empire, and by the concentration of human thought upon politics and
+theology, instead of those subjects first expounded by Thales, after him
+by Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy, till the day of the modern doctors had
+dawned, the conquests achieved by man over nature were inconsiderable.
+Francis Bacon&#8217;s equalization of human <i>ingenia</i>, and his elaborately
+tabulated apparatus for studying phenomena, created an appetite for
+mastering the arcana of the visible universe, but did not satisfy it. As
+the Prince Consort clearly saw, Nature&#8217;s secret had been yielded in the
+past, and would be surrendered in the future, not to founders of systems
+like a Verulam or a Descartes, but to actual discoverers who did not owe
+even their methods to the Schools.</p>
+
+<p>Half a century after Bacon&#8217;s labours, Newton, with no help from Baconian
+methods discovered the law of gravitation, and with it the unity of
+sequences which pervade material creation. The cause of the slight
+progress of physical science whether before or immediately after Bacon
+formulated his method may be partly explained by the want of the material
+appliances for physical investigation. These in anything like their
+mechanical perfection of to-day are not much older than our present era.
+The agencies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> of glass, of alcohol, of microscopes and of other such
+appliances were as unknown to the physicists of Alexandria, of Athens, or
+of the Middle Ages as the electric wire itself. Where the subject matter,
+the heavenly bodies, the structure of the human frame, could be studied
+without elaborate machinery, the contemporaries or successors of the
+Ionian physicists who searched for the origin of all things in some single
+element, air, fire or water, seem rudely to have anticipated later
+discoveries. The Aristotelian philosophy and the rudiments of practical
+medicine, preserved together by Averrhoes, Avicenna, and the whole school
+of the Arabian thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, descended
+in each other&#8217;s company to the Italian schoolmen, and were delivered by
+them to English students. Thus, on the eve of the present century, the
+indestructibility of matter, however Protean the forms of its
+manifestations, had been ascertained by European chemists. The year of the
+Queen&#8217;s accession was also that of the publication of Whewell&#8217;s <i>History
+of the Inductive Sciences</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In this age, as in that of Bacon, great lawyers have taken a foremost
+place among enquirers into the nature of things. Lord Brougham did
+something to methodize, and more to popularize, the facts of science. A
+greater lawyer than Brougham, Sir William Grove, Justice of the Common
+Pleas first, Judge of the High Court of Justice afterwards, was also
+professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution during the
+first decade of the reign. His discoveries with regard to the correlation
+of forces had not been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> entirely formulated when Dr Whewell&#8217;s book
+appeared. Nor had Charles Darwin completed in his retirement at Down, in
+Kent, those researches which in 1859, gave the world <i>The Origin of
+Species</i>. This book, if the work of any single man ever did so, created an
+epoch, not in physical enquiry alone, but in every branch of human
+knowledge conducted on scientific principles.</p>
+
+<p>The Victorian Court had begun to encourage science before Darwin&#8217;s great
+book was published. In 1847 the Prince Consort became Chancellor of the
+University of Cambridge, and in this capacity he was naturally brought
+into official and friendly relations with Dr Whewell, then Master of
+Trinity, as well as with other English leaders of scientific thought. The
+growing success of the British Association after its inaugural congress
+had been held, is not unjustly connected with the Prince&#8217;s name. The idea
+of an annual parliament of learning was, like that of the Great Exhibition
+itself, not of English origin. Even in Germany, where the first trial of
+it had been made, prosperity had been gradual. At Halle, Frankfort,
+Dresden, and Munich, notwithstanding the personal distinction of its chief
+promoter Professor Oken, and its encouragement by many of the enlightened
+Kinglets who then divided the rule of the Fatherland, during the second
+decade of the century when the enterprise began, its most noticeable
+meeting does not seem to have numbered more than from 200 to 400. At
+Leipsic in 1822, the attendance was barely two score; six years later in
+Berlin, it amounted to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> 464. Before that assemblage probably had much
+impressed the young Prince Albert, it had stimulated the most
+distinguished representatives of scientific thought in England. Sir David
+Brewster, Sir John Herschel, Sir Humphry Davy based, upon the German
+example, an appeal to the English Government. The decline of arts and
+science in this country was attributed to their total neglect by the
+State, to the exclusion of men eminent in either of these departments from
+the titular decorations of the country, and to the heavy exactions from
+scientific inventors imposed by the fees payable under the patent law.</p>
+
+<p>More than two or three decades of the Victorian age had passed before art,
+science, and letters began to receive the State recognition now firmly
+acknowledged as their due. Both Bulwer Lytton and Macaulay had served in
+Parliament or in office fifteen years before they were ennobled.<a name='fna_77' id='fna_77' href='#f_77'><small>[77]</small></a>
+Tennyson was the first English poet raised to the peerage who knew no
+politics save those of patriotism; to the same epoch, too, belongs a like
+honour bestowed upon three men of science at successive intervals:&mdash;now a
+physician, Playfair, now the physicist, Lord Kelvin, and again the latest,
+and to not a few the most welcome and significant of all, the inventor of
+the antiseptic treatment which has saved so many lives and limbs, who will
+henceforth be known as Lord Lister.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>It is suggestively prophetic of the new era which in the next reign was to
+open for letters, science and art in their relations to the English State,
+that while the country had been preparing for a revolution peaceful but
+complete in politics, there had assembled at York, September 29, 1831, a
+company which prognosticated the coming revolution throughout the whole
+region of popular thought and culture. The York meeting mustered less than
+200. It was intended only to launch the programme of the society. &#8216;To
+point out the lines of direction in which the researches of science should
+move, to state the problems to be solved, the data to be fixed, to assign
+to every class of mind a definite task, to amend the laws relating to
+patents, to agitate for a Government provision to encourage and reward
+scientific research;&#8217;&mdash;these are the objects which Mr Harcourt enumerated
+in the first official document of the body. As proof of the vitality of
+the revolution which that Yorkshire company, less than 200 strong,
+introduced, it is enough to mention Dr Rae&#8217;s Arctic voyages of 1853-4, the
+Challenger expedition of 1872, and the last Oxford University Commission
+which at the instance of the first scientific Premier England has ever
+known, Lord Salisbury, endowed scientific research as one of the estates
+of the realm, and has done something more than relieve that seat of old
+learning from the reproach of discouraging the newest sciences. Little
+perhaps did the doctors of divinity, and classical professors, when, on
+June 18, 1832, they welcomed the second senate of savants to its session
+on the Isis, imagine themselves to be fostering a movement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> which would
+partially oust from its emoluments and honours in their own Schools the
+old learning, and give to the new not only professorships for its
+teachers, but scholarships for the reward of its learners. As against the
+York meeting in 1831 of not much more than 100, the Oxford meeting of the
+Reform Act year attracted 700. In another twelvemonth the Cambridge
+meeting of June 25, 1833, was attended by 900. The Edinburgh meeting of
+September 8, 1834, mustered 1,298.</p>
+
+<p>Since then the most noticeable figures have been 1855&mdash;2,133, 1861&mdash;3,138;
+while 1887 crowns the list with 3,838. The figures necessarily are to some
+extent governed by the importance or attractiveness of the towns at which
+the meetings are held. The names on the books of the society are more than
+half a million. So progressive a thing is English science. The meeting
+itself is only a part of the work done. Throughout the year committees are
+investigating various branches of science prominent at the moment, and
+preparing their reports to be included in the Annual General Report, a
+document of over 1,000 pages. Social satire at first made merry over the
+learned ladies and gentlemen who combined mutual laudation of themselves
+with picnics, excursions and pleasure parties of all sorts in interesting
+neighbourhoods at the most agreeable season of the year. To-day no one
+denies the British Association the credit of having promoted the discovery
+of new facts in science, or at least having been the first agency to draw
+public attention to them. Within the last few years, it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> at one of
+these Association meetings (Liverpool 1870) that Professor Huxley
+pronounced against the popular theory of spontaneous generation of the
+lower forms of life, thus placing on record his adherence to the theory of
+biogenesis as opposed to abiogenesis; life, in other words, could in every
+grade of creation only come from life, not from the corruption of death.
+Thus was a physical tradition that from the earliest times down to the
+seventeenth century had held its own, finally repudiated by the greatest
+authority of his day on all biological matters.</p>
+
+<p>Even this pronouncement seems to have been anticipated. A physicist less
+famous than Huxley, Schwann, some half a century before Huxley&#8217;s day, is
+said to have been the first to criticize the abiogenesis doctrine as
+supported by no sufficient evidence. The tendency towards unity in
+multiplicity declared by the old Greek thinkers to characterize all true
+science marked the doctrines of the correlation of force as well as of the
+conservation of energy, both of them connected with this age. It was also
+inherent in the theory of evolution as explained by Charles Darwin in
+1859, 28 years, that is, after the British Association for the first time
+met. Even the great Kentish physicist of our day was not entirely the
+first in the field with the discovery that was to transform the whole
+region of thought. Early in the last century De Maillet had applied the
+principle of the survival of the fittest to the world of human life. On
+the eve of the present century Charles Darwin&#8217;s ancestor, Erasmus, as well
+as German philosophers still more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> famous, elaborated with more ability
+and knowledge the same idea, which also underlay the discussions between
+the French Academicians, Cuvier and St Hilaire. However the ground may
+have been prepared for him, so far as any single man can be said to have
+discovered any great idea, Charles Darwin must be accounted the author of
+the theory of evolution as it is now understood.</p>
+
+<p>Whewell&#8217;s survey of the inductive sciences at the beginning of the reign
+dimly forecasts some discoveries which have since been verified. It
+contains no word prophetic of the doctrine by which, in the countless
+possibilities of its application, every branch of science in little more
+than a quarter of a century was potentially if not actually to be
+transformed. The eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen&#8217;s accession
+has witnessed the completion by Mr Herbert Spencer of the monumental
+treatise that applies the doctrines of Darwin to subjects that Darwin had
+not specially studied, perhaps with results which Darwin himself had not
+entirely foreseen. Whether a reaction against Darwinism has already, as
+some think, set in; how far, and with what consequences, that movement may
+go, are as yet only matters of speculation.</p>
+
+<p>The exploration of the Italian soil has caused many chapters of Roman
+history to be rewritten more in accordance with the older traditions than
+with the newer learning. Like processes near the sites of Babylon and
+Nineveh have done much to vindicate the authors of the Pentateuch as
+chroniclers of fact; and have even created a reaction in favour of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>
+Mosaic cosmogony, and the sacred narrative of the Deluge. Evolution as a
+philosophy is not altogether rejected by physicists of orthodoxy so
+unimpeachable as Mr St. George Mivart. More lately it has been discovered
+that an Anglican divine may keep an open mind on the subject of Darwinism
+and yet be made Archbishop of Canterbury. To the unlearned English vulgar
+the question is whether the visible universe and its inhabitants are more
+likely to have developed themselves by a series of indescribable processes
+than to have developed, as the Scriptural tradition has been interpreted
+as teaching, by a Power external to them and directing every stage of
+their progress. If it be said that evolution is the method in which that
+superhuman Power who is behind and above all often chooses to act, there
+is no reason why the occupant of Lambeth should not be as good an
+evolutionist as the scientific investigator whose nearest country
+neighbour at Down, Sir John Lubbock, appropriately presided over the
+Jubilee meeting of the British Association at York.</p>
+
+<p>The transformations effected in other departments of physical study during
+our age are not less remarkable. Many of them have been appreciably
+assisted by the social intercourse of mind with mind which the British
+Association has so signally promoted. Lyell&#8217;s <i>Principles of Geology</i> was
+published in pre-Association days and seven years before the Victorian age
+began. Its influence was in the same direction as that of Darwin; it
+suggested, that is, the enquiry why the natural processes that are said to
+explain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> the globe we inhabit should not explain also the presence of man
+upon it. Biology and anthropology, the two studies which have most been
+promoted by the Darwinian doctrine, can consequently be pronounced with
+truth the creations of the present age. As far back as Elizabethan times,
+electrical phenomena had been systematically studied. Many of these
+manifestations, however, especially their relations with heat and light,
+as well as most of their adaptations to the offices of daily life, belong
+to the era that opened in 1837.</p>
+
+<p>Photography of course was an unknown art in pre-Victorian days. Even when
+its predecessor, the Daguerreotype, discovered in 1839, had been
+considerably improved upon, it still remained a contrivance rather for
+distorting the human features than for faithfully reproducing them as
+photography does upon glass or paper, and with the addition of natural
+colours as photography now bids fair soon to have done.</p>
+
+<p>These achievements of a science which is generically new have not been
+accompanied with inactivity on the part of those sciences which, like
+astronomy, are probably in one shape or another nearly coeval with
+Creation itself. Long before the planet was actually discovered, the
+telescopes that swept the heavens had brought within their ken the spot at
+which in 1846 Neptune was proved to be. If the number of the heavenly
+bodies has not of late received many additions, new asteroids are
+constantly swimming into sight in the quarters where they had been
+suspected; comets, less looked for than these apparitions, are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> often
+announced to have flashed themselves upon the observer&#8217;s sight.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of scientific thought and conceptions upon the language of
+literature as well as of daily life, is only less remarkable than the
+material conquests of science themselves. The most instructive instance of
+this is afforded by the scholarly and illustrious woman of genius who will
+always be known to fame as George Eliot. The popular idea of Mr Herbert
+Spencer having influenced her studies and her phraseology is not quite
+true. Mr Spencer was her own, and her companion&#8217;s, friend. Her diction in
+her later works was inspired by the intellectual forces of her day. Of the
+formative power of these she was probably herself unconscious. If Herbert
+Spencer had a place among them, he was at least only one of several. From
+George Eliot, in that phase of her genius now under consideration, there
+has sprung a school. However original the gift of writers like Mrs Humphry
+Ward, it seems unlikely that their talents would have taken the direction
+they have received and found their expression in the language they employ
+unless the author of <i>Adam Bede</i> and <i>Middlemarch</i> had first supplied a
+new want or created a fresh intellectual taste by a style that our
+forefathers might have admired, but might not always have been able to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>Of the many transformations wrought by Victorian science, not the
+least;&mdash;unscientific people might think it the greatest&mdash;is the
+assimilation of the idiom of fiction to that of the text books of the
+schools. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> entire ethos of our oral diction not less than our
+literature has been revolutionized by science. When a parliamentary
+speaker illustrates his argument by a metaphor, it is not, as his
+forerunners once did, to the Latin and Greek classics, or even to
+literature at all, but to the laboratory, to the dissecting room, or to
+the crucible that he most frequently goes for his <i>trope</i>. The similes of
+the Attic masterpieces are taken habitually from those operations with
+which their naval empire familiarized the Athenian mind. Nor can these
+metaphors be understood without some remembrance of the processes which
+marine affairs involve. A similar acquaintance with the later operations
+of science is scarcely less useful for a proper appreciation of the most
+characteristic beauties of Victorian prose, by whatever master displayed.
+This dispossession of the literary by the scientific is universal.
+Following unconsciously perhaps the example of a great statesman, those
+who have in our day most widely differed from him on national affairs, a
+Randolph Churchill, or a Charles Stewart Parnell have reproduced the taste
+of a Salisbury in finding their recreations, not in the <i>belles lettres</i>
+that were congenial to the day of a Pitt or a Canning, but in the
+researches that a Tyndall, a Huxley, a Thomson, have popularized.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo&#8217;s astronomical views found a useful ally by the incisive raillery
+of his literary style. The admirable prose of a Huxley and his fellow
+labourers has been no less effective for popularizing scientific studies
+with the public they have addressed. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> social urbanity with which
+Nature and training have endowed Sir John Lubbock has prepossessed not a
+few on his own level in life in favour of those branches of physical
+enquiry that have enabled him to rehabilitate the moral character of the
+autumnal wasp.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<p class="title">CECILIA&#8217;S TRIUMPHS</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The revolution in the conditions of English music&mdash;effected since its
+first encouragement by the Victorian Court&mdash;illustrated by a contrast
+between the social status of the musician to-day, and forty years ago.
+Music always a tradition of the present dynasty. Handel. English
+machinery for teaching music instituted under the Georgian era, and
+perfected under the Victorian. Has English organization for musical
+teaching outstripped English capacity for learning? Certain reforms
+approved by high musical experts. Other individual agencies than those
+of the Court favourable to Music during this century. Mendelssohn; his
+encouragement of John Parry, the forerunner of Corney Grain, and
+Arthur Cecil. Sir Charles Hall&eacute;, Herr Joachim, Grove, Sullivan.
+Anglo-German ladies. Crystal Palace Concerts.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The transformation, at once artistic and scientific, with which the Prince
+Consort as the past representative of the Crown, and his descendents as
+its present representatives, will always be chiefly associated, remains to
+be glanced at. One need not have reached middle age to be able to realize
+the revolution in the English capacity for the enjoyment as well as for
+the performance of music, vocal or instrumental, that has taken place
+since the Victorian age began. A dowdily dressed young woman, alighting
+from an omnibus at the street corner, trailing after her a fragment of the
+straw that littered the floor of her conveyance; her clothes, what was
+then called shabby<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> genteel. She carried under her arm a roll of papers or
+a portfolio; she was insolently eyed by the servant who opened the door of
+the house in Portland Place at which she timidly knocked, and
+contemptuously motioned to take a seat in the hall until the drawing room
+was ready for the music lesson to be given to the young lady of the
+family. A hungry looking gentleman, of foreign aspect, and slightly French
+or German accent, also descended from an omnibus in the same quarter; he
+bore in his hand a black case which might be from its appearance a
+sarcophagus for a deceased cat, but which might be identified by more
+experienced observers as containing a fiddle. He was received by the
+servant at the front door not more ceremoniously than the instructress of
+a few hours earlier. This was the proprietor of a little orchestra which
+attended private dances. A few hours after he might be accompanying with
+his fiddle the wind instruments of his troupe, for Thackeray&#8217;s Mrs Timmins
+gave that very night her little dance. If the musician played well, and
+pleased the head footman as well as the mistress of the house, he might as
+a special favour be invited downstairs to help the servants finish the
+cold chicken and the champagne heeltaps when the guests had gone.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the lady who condescends to teach the art of pianoforte execution
+to the young people in a popular London quarter drives up to the house in
+her own victoria and would no more be kept waiting a minute for her
+appointment than if she were a duchess in her own right. The accomplished
+foreigner who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> plays the violin alights from a brougham drawn by a pair of
+thoroughbreds. If he is to be induced to honour a friend in Grosvenor
+Square with his company at dinner, the invitation must be given at least
+three weeks beforehand. The &#8216;master&#8217; must choose his own fellow guests,
+and supervise the menu before it is finally decided on; the dinner itself
+must be so arranged that to a moment it will occupy the time which the
+great man prescribes. The conversation must be so contrived as to
+coruscate with epigram, and to fascinate with anecdotes all warranted to
+be new, lest the diner of the evening should have the slightest touch of
+boredom. If these conditions are not satisfied, this arbiter of taste may
+refuse to sit through the meal. He is the chartered libertine of the
+dining rooms and drawing rooms of the great.</p>
+
+<p>England has always possessed a considerable school of national composers.
+These might have achieved the highest triumphs of genius without acquiring
+a fraction of that social ascendancy for their art which it has gradually
+won. Under the auspices of the Prince Consort first, the patronage of the
+Court was secured for the art of St Cecilia. That day already mentioned on
+which Lady Lyttelton first heard the Queen&#8217;s husband playing on the organ
+at Windsor was an eventful one for the social esteem of music in the
+adopted country of the Royal executant. After this came the Prince&#8217;s
+directorship of the Ancient Concerts, and the arrangement of its
+programmes on special occasions by himself. The club principle during the
+married life of the Queen had in its popular illustration not gone beyond
+infancy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> Otherwise, one of the Royal Family would, as he has since done,
+regularly have handled the conductor&#8217;s baton; while for the special
+amusement of another a series of smoking concerts might as to-day have
+been arranged in Piccadilly palaces.</p>
+
+<p>Music of course has always been a tradition of English Royalty. The Royal
+Academy of Music now domiciled in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, was
+founded in 1822 with the King as patron. It was opened March 24, 1823,
+with a small and precarious attendance of pupils seldom exceeding two or
+three score, even at the date of its receiving the Royal charter, June 23,
+1830. The number of students at Christmas 1896 was 500, all of whom were
+regular in their visits. The Royal College of Music at Kensington Gore was
+first founded as the National Training School in 1875. Its avowed motive
+was to honour the Consort&#8217;s memory. It was due partly to the efforts of
+the Prince of Wales with a Committee of which the then Duke of Edinburgh
+was chairman. He was also a most indefatigable promoter of the whole
+scheme from the very first. Its first Principal was Dr, now Sir Arthur,
+Sullivan. Some years later, again at the Heir Apparent&#8217;s initiative, as a
+result of a meeting held at St James&#8217;s Palace, February 28, 1882, this
+institution was re-formed. It was opened in the building formerly occupied
+by the National Training School by the Prince and Princess of Wales, May
+7, 1883. Of this Sir George Grove was the first director, holding the post
+till Christmas 1894 when he was succeeded by Dr. C. H. H. Parry. The
+Charter of the Royal College was obtained in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> 1883. It has to-day an
+endowment of &pound;130,000 which provides some 60 different scholarships. This,
+too, in its existing shape was opened by the Prince Consort&#8217;s descendants,
+the Prince and Princess of Wales; it had at the Christmas of 1896, 300
+regular pupils. A very important part of the institution consists of the
+Donaldson museum of musical instruments; these were given to the College
+by Mr G. Donaldson in 1894.</p>
+
+<p>The Guildhall School of Music was founded in 1880 by that same Corporation
+which has done more perhaps than any other single body since the Queen&#8217;s
+accession to promote the humanities of life. Its first Principal was Mr
+Weist Hill; he was succeeded by Sir Joseph Barnby, who again in 1896 was
+followed by Mr W. H. Cummings. This Guildhall School is undoubtedly the
+most popular institution of the kind which we possess. Its pupils at the
+Christmas of 1896 were 3,496. The other great metropolitan school of music
+is Trinity College, London. This was incorporated in 1875 under the
+Companies Act. Six years later, in 1881, it was reorganized upon a wider
+basis. The number of pupils at Christmas 1896 shows a steady increase.</p>
+
+<p>These and other institutions less important are only some of the national
+monuments to the progress of the study of music as an art during the last
+two or three decades.</p>
+
+<p>The organization and the educational machinery of music have now, in the
+opinion of those competent judges to whom the writer of these lines is
+indebted, reached a point beyond which further development is neither
+necessary nor desirable. Production and execution<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> leave perhaps little to
+be wished for. Appreciation, however, of musical excellence is not
+universally proportionate to musical activity. Audiences more
+intelligently critical and better trained are apparently the chief
+<i>desiderata</i>, if composers and performers are to rise above mediocrity.
+Instruction in the art now spoken of has, of course, shared in the
+advantages incidental to the transformation of London from an insular into
+a cosmopolitan capital. As a result, the best teachers from all countries
+are available for the London learner.</p>
+
+<p>Nor in this respect does England to-day, as thirty years ago it did,
+compare disadvantageously with Leipsic, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgardt. There
+seems however reason to fear that, like Gwendolen Harleth in <i>Daniel
+Deronda</i> before Klesmer, we fail in that important and indefinable
+quality, style. The best critics complain that, when a student has been
+through the regular course here, and has perhaps become a first rate
+technical musician, he seldom seems to get any further; he never, in other
+words, develops any individuality. To some extent this result follows the
+collective teaching of all academies. The area of level mediocrity is,
+however, it may be feared, larger here than in France or Germany. There is
+more of delicacy and daintiness in the French student; there is more of
+individual expansion and thoughtfulness in the German. Both are trained in
+academies. The quicker intuition and more intelligent appreciation of
+French and German audiences are in the opinion of unprejudiced critics
+attributed to this cause. Hence the expert, if consulted by an English
+student, probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> would advise him to go abroad for a year or two when
+his technical course has been finished in England. Unfortunately the
+advice too often resembles that of a medical man who might prescribe a
+generous diet and a glass of port wine to an invalid labourer, earning
+less than &pound;1 a week.</p>
+
+<p>In respect of education, cheapness and free scholarships seem to have been
+carried at least as far as is conducive to the real interest of learners
+in this country. A reform, favoured by many good judges, is to make
+payment for teaching universal with a few exceptions; then to give to
+students of promise an allowance sufficient to enable them to go abroad
+and complete their education. As it is, some risk is run of gratuitously
+training mediocrities, launching them on professional careers which can
+only land them in disappointment and poverty.</p>
+
+<p>The late Prince Consort, though the most highly placed, is only one of
+several individuals whose personal influence has conspicuously encouraged
+the growth and the gratification of a musical taste more or less
+cultivated. The discussion which agitated English taste in the eighteenth
+century as to the merits of German and other music is summed up in a
+familiar epigram as the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Some say, compared to Bononcini,<br />
+That Mynheer Handel&#8217;s but a ninny;<br />
+Others aver that he to Handel<br />
+Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.</p>
+
+<p>The commanding genius of the great German <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>composer is enough to account
+for the traditional complaint that native genius in England has been
+eclipsed by foreign products. The Elector of Hanover had recognized
+Handel&#8217;s genius before he became George I. of England, but began his reign
+by showing little favour to the composer, who had absented himself without
+leave from his duties at the Electoral Court. Already in Queen Anne&#8217;s
+reign Handel&#8217;s <i>Te Deum</i> had celebrated in St Paul&#8217;s Cathedral the
+conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. It was not till after his <i>Water
+Music</i> had procured his restoration to favour that the new English monarch
+took him back into his service. Gradually, however, till in 1741 it was
+confirmed by the <i>Messiah</i> produced in Dublin and by his operas in London,
+the triumph of the German over the Italian school thus advanced. Neither
+then nor later did it involve neglect of the great English composer of the
+seventeenth century, our own Henry Purcell,<a name='fna_78' id='fna_78' href='#f_78'><small>[78]</small></a> organist at Westminster
+Abbey at eighteen years of age, and author of a greater number of songs,
+anthems, operas, glees and cantatas, at once famous and popular, than
+probably any other musician whom England has produced. Felix Mendelssohn
+of Hamburg, not less <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>precocious than our own Purcell, also at eighteen
+produced an opera. His personal influence in England was scarcely less
+great than that of Handel, and of course tended towards the further
+popularization of Teutonic art: he lived on terms of intimate friendship
+during his different sojourns in this country with English musicians. The
+popular and accomplished pianoforte improvisatore, John Parry, who was
+familiar to the English public of this age from his connection with the
+German-Reed company, 1860-9, the forerunner of the Corney Grain and Arthur
+Cecil of a later day, might almost be called Mendelssohn&#8217;s pupil. By
+Mendelssohn, Parry was first encouraged to adopt music as a profession;
+the present writer well remembers how he heard from John Parry himself the
+account of Mendelssohn&#8217;s listening during half a winter night to the piano
+improvisations devised by the versatile genius of the then young man.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Hall&eacute;, born in Westphalia in 1819, and so just ten years younger
+than Mendelssohn was driven from Paris to London by the Revolution of
+1848, to which England was indebted for such an influx of foreign genius
+of all kinds to her shores. Beethoven, like Handel, first became known in
+Europe through a German Elector, him of Cologne. He died in 1827. Though
+the charm and fame of Beethoven had been steadily growing upon English
+critics and musicians first and upon the general public afterwards, to
+Charles Hall&eacute;<a name='fna_79' id='fna_79' href='#f_79'><small>[79]</small></a> belongs the distinction of having done<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> much towards
+popularizing this great author of classical music with the English public.
+The Musical Union which preceded the Popular Concerts was then directed by
+John Ella, whose programmes included Beethoven&#8217;s sonatas, played by Hall&eacute;
+with great applause.</p>
+
+<p>The English public, if by voluntary culture it had not been disciplined
+into a genuine admiration for Teutonic music, as interpreted by various
+foreign executants, would have been wooed to its love by the educating
+influences of the Hungarian violinist Herr Joachim, deservedly reverenced
+by all circles of English society, ever receiving his homage with the
+dignified modesty of great genius. This director of the Royal Academy of
+Music at Berlin had, before that appointment, received the degree of
+Doctor of Music at Cambridge. The bow with which he elicited entrancing
+strains from his instrument was a social sceptre as well. When George
+Eliot was writing <i>Daniel Deronda</i>, Herr Joachim&#8217;s social and artistic
+ascendancy had just reached its culminating point. A scientific musician
+herself, George Eliot visited those circles where first-rate music was to
+be heard. No writer more artistically found the suggestions of her
+characters in real life. The Herr Joachim whom English society knew is
+reflected so strikingly in the Herr Klesmer of whom the <i>Daniel Deronda</i>
+public reads as to warrant the conjecture that the master before whom
+Gwendolen Harleth trembled had been suggested by the violinist at whose
+feet the aristocracy of birth, beauty, wit, intellect and wealth with
+unfeigned admiration knelt down.</p>
+
+<p>Other individuals deserve a place in the catalogue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> of those who have
+helped on the musical movement of our times. Sir George Grove made a
+substantial addition to the musical wealth of the world by contributing a
+chapter to its musical romance; that which relates his discovery of the
+lost scores of Schubert in a Vienna cupboard. His dictionary of music will
+survive when the honourable record of his Directorship of the Royal
+College of Music may be forgotten. Sir Arthur Sullivan has not only
+illustrated with melodies, that have at once caught the ear of the town,
+the fantastic conceptions of Mr W. S. Gilbert&#8217;s intellect; he has used his
+personal popularity on all levels of social London to diffuse improved
+notions of musical taste. Agencies of the same kind, collective as well as
+individual have not, during the Victorian age, been wanting.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>personnel</i> of upper middle class society in England has been
+perceptibly affected by the entrance into it through the gate of marriage,
+of ladies of German origin, of great taste and accomplishments generally,
+and like all their nation, devoted to music. Hence among other things the
+increased patronage of the Italian Opera, of all high-class concerts in
+public as well as of musical artists in private by that well to do section
+of the Queen&#8217;s subjects which combines the tastes of culture and of birth
+with the resources of trade. Its composition of the veritable materials of
+Paxton&#8217;s Glass House for the Great Exhibition is not the only respect in
+which the Crystal Palace at Sydenham is connected with that enterprise of
+the Prince Consort as a reformer of English taste. To mention only its
+connection with the subject now being specially considered, the Crystal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+Palace has maintained its full orchestra since 1854. These concerts have
+been admittedly during near half a century prime instruments of
+metropolitan and suburban civilization. They have practically
+revolutionized the home life of tens of thousands of the prosperous
+commercial class which fixes its household gods out of earshot of Bow
+Bells. The impulse thus given to the study of the art on a basis wider and
+deeper than anything formerly existing can scarcely be exaggerated. It is
+of itself enough to explain why the number of English students of music in
+the nineties is so vastly larger than it was during any of the preceding
+decades.<a name='fna_80' id='fna_80' href='#f_80'><small>[80]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+<p class="title">TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">English art stimulated and strengthened to a degree second only to
+science by the movements with which, through the Prince Consort, the
+Victorian Court identified itself. Contrast between the social
+consideration of artists now and fifty years ago. From Gandish to
+Gaston Ph&oelig;bus. Progress in the association of art with the
+government of England, and general gain to all concerned in
+consequence. Gradual endowment of art by the State and establishment
+of the existing machinery for teaching art and displaying its triumphs
+to a cultivated public. The work of South Kensington. Success of the
+Academy tested by figures and facts. Reciprocal benefits to art
+workers and art patrons. Foreign recognition of English art. The past,
+present and future of English sculpture.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The popularization and improvement of art in all its manifestations
+followed the 1851 Exhibition and the initiative of the Prince Consort in a
+degree second only to the development of science and music themselves.
+That the Court of Victoria and Albert should have been to the painters of
+a later day what the Court of Charles I. was to Van Dyck could not have
+been expected. The Consort&#8217;s interest and judgment in pictures were
+inferior to his genuine concern for science. The complacency with which he
+regarded the canvases of Winterhalter could not promise much enthusiasm in
+the patronage of English painters. His rescue from disorder and decay of
+the Raphael cartoons,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> long before the Prince&#8217;s day belonging to our
+Court, but by him first properly cared for and arranged, was not a work of
+creation, but was one of artistic development. His were the active mind
+and useful hand that rendered available for national instruction or
+delight the hereditary treasures of Crown and country which before his day
+were not indeed unknown, but were not perhaps properly appreciated in the
+country which possessed them. The rise of a moneyed and fairly cultivated
+class in English society was the chief element in the improvement of the
+social and commercial position of the English painter. These agencies
+happily coincided with the example set by the Prince to his successors of
+assisting at the great artistic gatherings of the year.</p>
+
+<p>Before May 3, 1851, the Crown had not been represented at the Royal
+Academy dinner. It has seldom been unrepresented since. Sir Charles
+Eastlake, in whose election to the Presidency the Queen and Prince had
+been much interested, had not brought oratorical euphuism to the same
+perfection as his successor, Lord Leighton. He was, however, a man of
+cultivated mind, of acceptable presence, and of well-bred speech. His
+proposal of the Prince&#8217;s health was made in words that have to-day an
+historical value. The reply of the Prince blended a philosophic criticism
+less English than German, with an appreciation of our national masters
+which was entirely patriotic. It was, he said, the fate of all
+aristocracies to be assailed habitually from without, sometimes from
+within. The Academy being an aristocracy of the brush, must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> accept the
+position and turn to practical account any hints for improvement which it
+might contain.<a name='fna_81' id='fna_81' href='#f_81'><small>[81]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>These were still the days when art and artists had not migrated from the
+gloomy studios of unfashionable Bloomsbury to the gleaming palaces of
+modish Kensington. Sir Charles Eastlake&#8217;s predecessor had been Sir Martin
+Archer Shee, who, very faintly disguised, appears in Thackeray&#8217;s Mr Smee
+in <i>The Newcomes</i>. Gandish, the unappreciated genius of the palette at
+whose school, on Mr Smee&#8217;s advice Clive Newcome is placed, is not a
+caricature at all of the most serviceable art teacher of that period whose
+real name was Sass and who counted among his pupils John Everett Millais.
+What has taken place since then is that in the smiles of popular favour,
+Thackeray&#8217;s Gandish has blossomed into the Mr Gaston Ph&oelig;bus of Lord
+Beaconsfield&#8217;s <i>Lothair</i>. Colonel Newcome thought it a condescension to
+ask the painter of &#8216;Boadishia&#8217; to dinner. That artist&#8217;s later and
+transformed self would have resented an invitation at short notice as an
+impertinence; he would have bluntly excused himself on the plea of being
+pre-engaged to the Prime Minister,<a name='fna_82' id='fna_82' href='#f_82'><small>[82]</small></a> the Heir Apparent, or to Windsor
+three months ago. The social prejudice, confined to a small section of the
+upper middle class, against the studio which lingered so long and so
+unintelligently in England is easily explained. It is identical in its
+origin with an equally unreasoning and antiquated feeling against
+doctors,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> singers and players. This superstition had disappeared in the
+days of Sir Henry Holland who, half a century ago was a welcome and
+honoured guest at the most exclusive houses; under men like Sir James
+Paget and Sir Richard Quain it has long since ceased even to be a memory.
+In each of these cases money is regarded as passing directly between the
+patronizing public and the employed professional. The purse is opened at
+the door of the theatre, the concert hall, or in the consulting room of
+the physician. That the payment is in the other cases as real though not
+as sensibly direct is ignored. The terms on which Sir Charles Eastlake was
+a visitor at the Victorian Court are those that have marked the subsequent
+relations of his successors with the Crown. The intellectual influences of
+a whole school of intelligent and highly educated critics following as
+nearly as they could the example of Mr Ruskin, has shed a dignity on the
+painter&#8217;s calling that could not have resulted from material prosperity or
+the favour of high place alone.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Edwin Landseer, elected R.A. 1830, it may be said, years before the
+transformation now spoken of, was welcome in any house whose threshold he
+pleased to cross. His was rather the exception which proved the rule, and
+for these reasons; he flourished most just when Court patronage was making
+the Scotch Highlands fashionable; he was the painter of hounds, horses,
+animals themselves so eminently aristocratic that no Englishman with any
+pretensions to social breeding could affect disregard for them, or for
+their reproducer in art without losing caste. Hence it is that while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>
+fifty years since, the Clive Newcomes who took to painting were spoken of
+by their families in a low voice much as if they had taken to drink, the
+painter of repute to-day who chose to receive pupils<a name='fna_83' id='fna_83' href='#f_83'><small>[83]</small></a> would have no
+more difficulty in filling his studio twice over, than a fashionable
+crammer for the army or Civil Service in filling his lecture room. As a
+fact it is not in the private studios of great artists that the Royal
+Academician of the future, unlike the intending exhibitor in the Parisian
+salon, is to-day generally trained. Sass had a rival, or a professional
+descendant, in the father of a clever versifier H. S. Leigh. Since that
+day, English artists have generally learnt their craft in the Royal
+Academy, or the Slade or other schools of England, or in foreign ateliers.
+These have transformed the surface of Victorian England. The same
+organization of art teaching, which is to-day at the disposal of all is
+said to have discouraged the development of individuality. Where genius
+exists, it is not very likely to be strangled by the conventions of a
+public school, nor to be prevented from exchanging State teachers for
+those whom native inspiration prompts it to prefer.</p>
+
+<p>The South Kensington<a name='fna_84' id='fna_84' href='#f_84'><small>[84]</small></a> machinery is not the only artistic growth of the
+Victorian age. The National<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> Gallery had been in existence more than ten
+years before the reign began (since 1824). It was not a popular
+institution until a year later, the architect Wilkins having made the
+design, the present building in Trafalgar Square was opened, April 9,
+1838. The nucleus of the collection was the Angerstein pictures,
+thirty-eight in number, bought by the Government for &pound;57,000. Twenty-seven
+years had still to pass before the Trafalgar Square structure was enlarged
+to its existing size by a parliamentary vote of &pound;50,000. The immediate era
+of the Queen&#8217;s accession was marked by the purchase of a masterpiece of
+Murillo, a landscape by Salvator Rosa, and an important picture by Rubens.
+Still the Gallery lingered below the Imperial dignity of the nation to
+which it belonged. The Vernon bequest enriched it only when the Queen had
+been on the Throne ten years. It was not till after the Crimean War that
+Parliament could attend to artistic claims, and that under the
+Directorship of Sir Charles Eastlake, deservedly trusted by Crown and
+country, the rooms designed by Barry were added to the block which Wilkins
+had shaped.</p>
+
+<p>The institution, now endowed with the paintings that had belonged to Sir
+Robert Peel, began steadily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> to approach towards the dimensions and the
+dignity of an Art Gallery comparable with that of any other capital in the
+world. Nor probably have its perfections or its premises yet reached their
+final limit.</p>
+
+<p>While this was going on in London, the entire provinces were vigorously
+taking their part in the new movement. The death of the Duchess of
+Gloucester in 1857 was not allowed by the Queen&#8217;s representative to
+interfere with his opening in that year the Manchester Art Treasures
+Exhibition, the completeness of which was largely due to the Royal
+encouragement to private owners to send their statues and paintings to the
+show. Thirty years later the Jubilee anniversary of 1887 was observed in
+the same city by a like display of the creations of British genius. Then
+the objects exhibited were the property no longer of the leisured, or a
+patrician class. They belonged also to the new patrons whom, during less
+than half a century, success in manufacture and commerce, accompanied by
+the liberal agencies of travel and education have stimulated to
+competition with the social order whose exclusive appanage art
+encouragement once was. The material proof of art progress is the increase
+of art values. Many instances of these were given in an earlier chapter.
+During his lifetime David Cox was glad to sell his landscapes for &pound;20. Cox
+had formed his genius amid the rural scenes of Hereford. He never liked
+London. After living there fourteen years he settled at Birmingham. Here,
+during his lifetime he had the satisfaction of seeing his masterpiece in
+oil colour bought for &pound;40. Ten years later, when the painter was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> dead, it
+secured &pound;50 in the open market. In the early seventies a Birmingham
+manufacturer, the former partner of Mr Chamberlain gave for it &pound;2,300. In
+the same way De Wint&#8217;s landscapes during his lifetime seldom commanded
+more than &pound;50. To-day they sometimes fetch &pound;1,000, and are reckoned cheap
+at 700 or 800 guineas.</p>
+
+<p>The social consideration, and with it the commercial possibilities, of any
+professional calling have in England always been regulated by its degree
+of connection with the State. The department of practical art established
+at South Kensington with the encouragement of the Prince Consort under the
+Directorship of Mr Henry Cole in 1852 had no sooner expanded into the
+science and art department under the President of the Council instead of
+under the Board of Trade than the social repute of practitioners in all
+branches of decorative art appreciably improved.</p>
+
+<p>About this time, too, Marlborough House, up to that date an asylum for
+exhibited pictures and a receptacle for the Duke of Wellington&#8217;s funeral
+car, suggested itself as a future residence for the Prince of Wales when
+he came to have an establishment of his own. In 1856-7, therefore, the
+House of Commons, without demur, allotted &pound;10,000 for the removal of the
+chaos of artistic treasures from their temporary resting place in Pall
+Mall to their permanent home in South Kensington. Hither, therefore, were
+sent the national purchases made at the sale of the Bernal collection, a
+full account of which has been given in an earlier chapter.</p>
+
+<p>Directly art was in this way officially and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>substantially incorporated by
+the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in
+great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will
+remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the Dickens manuscripts
+and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the
+friend and biographer of Dickens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These
+had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-&agrave;-brac, and
+foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed
+away in the glass-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which,
+studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the &#8217;51
+Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English
+manufacture.</p>
+
+<p>South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears.
+Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which
+institutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at
+discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose,
+but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual
+endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable
+holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom;
+it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both sexes to pass through
+its art and science classes.</p>
+
+<p>This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England
+has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State
+when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth.
+Thus, during the early eighties the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> Treasury paid for a single painting
+from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the
+same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire
+collection of Sir Robert Peel.<a name='fna_85' id='fna_85' href='#f_85'><small>[85]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of
+English art is illustrated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal
+Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices
+itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the &#8216;private&#8217;
+view of the Royal Academy become a f&ecirc;te day of fashionable society;&mdash;a
+promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street
+toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort&#8217;s
+death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly
+to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense
+meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both sexes, art
+fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of
+critical aptitude or profession, and of some slight connection with
+periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the
+earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the
+Queen&#8217;s reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they
+just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000.
+The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of
+391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as
+one might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon
+the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season.
+Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were
+10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen&#8217;s jubilee year of
+1887.</p>
+
+<p>The mutual relations of art and wealth are probably for the most part
+beneficial to each. The painter, during the latter half of the whole
+Victorian age, has been the chief educator of the plutocrat, as Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti shrewdly anticipated must prove the case. If the
+intellectual teaching of the brush were not easily apprehended, there
+would, for the representatives of the new wealth, have been no special
+training in the humanities at all. As it is, the aristocracy of wealth,
+following the creditable example of the aristocracy of birth, in England
+as well as Italy, has secured for itself mental culture not less than
+social distinction by its patronage of the creators of the nation&#8217;s art.
+To that r&ocirc;le it brings the shrewdness already displayed in making its
+fortune. Such a patron may be a generous paymaster; he insists on having
+value for his money; he is quick to detect scamped work, or shortcomings
+in technical detail; he no longer, as he was once fabled to do, buys his
+canvases at so much per square foot any more than he fills his library
+shelves by the yard. That no meritorious artist in Victorian England is
+now likely to live and die so miserably as Haydon is due to the fact that
+the newest wealth finds its natural outlet in the encouragement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> of the
+oldest art. No aggregate of spiritual or intellectual interests has ever
+been firmly established in England without being subject to some great
+organic movement as a test of vitality before its roots struck deep in the
+soil of British minds. Literature experienced many such phases. So did
+science. So also, in the Oxford Anglican movement and in others since
+then, did religion. Before, therefore, the new art was firmly enthroned in
+our midst, it was at once shaken and quickened by that nineteenth century
+revolution known as pre-Raphaelite; about this so much has been written by
+recent experts as to absolve one from the duty of dwelling on it in detail
+here. Art in the hands of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, and other
+men of genius entered upon this ordeal as a sectional and limited pursuit.
+It came forth a new national interest or rather one of European concern as
+well. Without that severe process of discipline, Leighton and Millais, to
+mention only two typical names, would not have taken their place as
+masters of the brush for a continental as well as for an insular public.
+Nor would the fame of the English school first known through the Paris
+Exhibition of 1855, extended by the Paris Exhibition of 1868, have secured
+for English artists representation in all the great galleries of the
+world, and have added to British painters or to their national themes the
+crown of foreign recognition and of cosmopolitan esteem. Later chroniclers
+of the Victorian age may be able to record the same progress in the
+sculptor&#8217;s, as in the painter&#8217;s art. Our climate is not favourable to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>
+out of door triumphs of the plastic art. But those who have examined the
+statue of Outram in Pall Mall; who have gazed upon the effigy of the great
+Duke of Wellington by Alfred Stevens in St Paul&#8217;s; or have noted the
+growing power as well as popularity of Hamo Thornycroft, still a young
+man, cannot doubt that, apart from the successful labours of a naturalized
+but most patriotic foreigner and his school, Sir Edgar Boehm, the English
+chisel is in a fair way of emulating the progress of the English brush.</p>
+
+<p>Commercial prosperity in art, as in other things, moves in cycles. The
+years between 1870 and 1885 were very prosperous to English painters. The
+lean years followed then, and are still being experienced while these
+lines are written. As to the high prices given at Christie&#8217;s and set forth
+elsewhere in this volume, they have been generally for the works of old
+and departed masters. With very few exceptions, the decade between 1886
+and 1896 has witnessed none of those prices for contemporary artists which
+marked the preceding period. This, too, notwithstanding the standard of
+artistic work to-day is infinitely higher than it was; and that the
+paintings which were hung on the line and were the talk of the town thirty
+years ago, would have a very slight chance of being accepted at all
+to-day.<a name='fna_86' id='fna_86' href='#f_86'><small>[86]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+<p class="title">POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Translation into fact of ideals not less than transformations seen in
+the People&#8217;s Palace, Whitechapel, and in the free libraries,
+originated by the Ewart Act, affecting as they do all contemporary
+life. The working of these in town and country. Proved connection
+between popular education and morality; what books free libraries like
+best. Analogous work for upper classes done by Mudie&#8217;s, and by the
+London Library. Their progress traced. Help rendered by these to
+public servants and literary producers. Carlyle, Thackeray, etc.
+Eclectic and educating influences of these shown in detail. The new
+public and the new magazines. General review of influences at work.
+Great services of minor poets and prophets of the period.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Not only transformations, but translations of ideals into fact, mark our
+age. A popular novelist gave a fancy sketch of a palace in which art,
+pleasure, and instruction should meet together to gladden the lives of the
+London poor. Almost as soon as could have been done by the genius of
+Aladdin&#8217;s Lamp, the People&#8217;s Palace shoots up in the Mile End Road.</p>
+
+<p>In 1841 Thomas Carlyle sighed for the day when a &#8216;people&#8217;s library&#8217; should
+be as much a part of every town as Her Majesty&#8217;s jail, or in his own grim
+words&mdash;Her Majesty&#8217;s gallows. The reign was still young when the
+philosopher&#8217;s vision began to take shape and substance. In every centre of
+population from the Tyne to the Thames, from the Thames to the Tamar, a
+place<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> where, without payment, upon no other conditions save those of
+reasonably clean hands, and silence, the working man is as well off for
+newspapers and books as a Bishop at the Athen&aelig;um Club, has changed the
+Victorian landscape. These buildings, comely to look at, comfortable to
+enter, have competed with the later board schools in transforming the
+appearance of London suburb and provincial town. Where Knightsbridge
+merges into Chelsea first, and Fulham afterwards, there, during the early
+days of the reign, desolate fields and miry ways used to stretch their
+unlovely length. After dusk there were few lamps to light; the roads were
+not more safe than Hounslow Heath had been some generations earlier.
+To-day this district is covered by a mass of buildings in red brick or
+stone, of aspect rather more academic than the new quarter of Victorian
+Oxford. Among these are the free libraries, built, partly out of the
+public rates, partly out of private funds. If it chance to be Saturday
+night, hundreds of working men, decently clad, with parcels under their
+arms will be seen passing to and fro near these buildings. They are not
+going to the public house. The packages they carry do not imply a
+negotiation with the pawnbroker. The men are, in fact, returning to the
+library the books which, taken out some days earlier, have given them
+their reading during the week after the day&#8217;s work has been done. Certain
+processes supplementary to these studies have still to be performed. Even
+in our age of improvement, the reference library kept by an artizan at his
+fireside is not extensive. Nothing quickens the intellectual appetite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>
+like its earliest gratification. As our student has travelled through the
+volumes which have occupied him, he has become aware of allusions for the
+full understanding of which fresh information is required. He has,
+therefore, while going along, made notes of points to look up. This,
+therefore, is one of his errands to-night.</p>
+
+<p>No professional visitor to the British Museum sets more systematically to
+work than our day labourer in the Fulham or Pimlico district. Before his
+visit this evening to the place of silence and of books he has, perhaps,
+had recourse to a member of the University Settlement in his
+neighbourhood, or possibly even to his own employer if the employer
+happens to be better read than the employed. The local librarian presently
+to be consulted needs to combine patience and method with something like
+omniscience. The note book is produced by our working man in which the
+points for enquiry have been jotted down. In a few minutes the official
+has placed the researcher on the right track. Before his studies are ended
+that night he will have hunted up facts and figures enough to furnish
+forth a leading article for a journalist, or a speech in Committee for a
+Member of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Not only in the industrial suburbs of the capital, but throughout the
+Kingdom, this is the sort of thing which takes place at least on one
+evening in every week. It is one among the many agencies which, nowadays,
+make the humblest reader so terrible a critic, and which cause a working
+man&#8217;s meeting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> to be not less intolerant of mere rhetoric than the House
+of Commons itself.</p>
+
+<p>Like everything else which during our age has been brought towards
+perfection, the free library movement existed among us in germ from the
+earliest days, before indeed the books themselves were known. When
+Lancashire monasteries had ceased to be gratuitous places of literary
+study, their manuscripts and parchments were housed in the Chetham
+Library, with its old oriel windows at Manchester; in the Guildhall
+Library at London, certainly coeval with Whittington; in the libraries of
+Bristol or Liverpool which compete with London in antiquity, and with
+which the Protector Somerset is said to have made somewhat too free.</p>
+
+<p>The patronymic of the man who was the father of the free library as it is
+known in England to-day is preserved in the second name of Mr Gladstone.
+Mr Ewart belonged to an old Kirkcudbright family. He had been at Eton with
+Dr Pusey and Speaker Denison. In the spring of 1843 he obtained a
+Committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the conditions of
+popular reading throughout the United Kingdom. Disraeli, Monckton Milnes,
+Cardwell, Kershaw, were among the more famous names that the Committee
+included. Less than ten years after this, the Ewart Act, based on the
+Committee report was the law of the land.</p>
+
+<p>In the early autumn of 1852, the new legislation was celebrated in a very
+practical manner by the opening of the free library at Manchester; the
+town which had been the birthplace of the movement.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>Sir John Potter, the father of the present Mr T. B. Potter, took the
+chair. On the platform among the speakers were John Bright, Bulwer Lytton,
+Sir James Stephen, the future Lord Houghton, Dickens and Thackeray;
+Charles Dickens made a speech in his happiest, and therefore incomparable,
+vein, on the Manchester School, an expression then in many mouths. The
+success of the experiment first illustrated on the Irwell was gradual. The
+provinces led the way which at last the capital followed. So late as 1886,
+only two parishes out of the sixty-seven within the metropolitan area had
+adopted the Acts. By August 1891 this number had risen to thirty. Other
+London districts have since followed.<a name='fna_87' id='fna_87' href='#f_87'><small>[87]</small></a> With time the result has been
+more than satisfactory. In the manner already seen it has affected the
+life and appearance of every town in the country, and has certainly
+provided a machinery without which as a supplement the educational
+apparatus of free schools would do little.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, therefore, in any large district, London or provincial, it is the
+exception for the Free Libraries Act not to be operative. That the power
+to read and the taste for reading does not always make good citizens, is
+of course true enough. On the other hand the close connection between
+ignorance and crime is instructively shown by a few historic statistics
+cited by Mr T. Greenwood, in his valuable volume on <i>Public Libraries</i>.
+These figures are to the following effect.</p>
+
+<p>In 1856 the number of young persons committed for indictable offences was
+14,000. In 1866, when the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> State had, by the action of the Privy Council,
+since 1833 assumed educational responsibility, and cheap literature of the
+better sort had, thanks to Charles Knight, and his many public-spirited
+imitators, become general, the number was decreased to 10,000. When School
+Boards were fully at work, there was a yet further reduction to 7,000; and
+this though the population had risen from 19 to 27 millions. Passing to a
+later date, out of 164,000 persons in prison between the years 1880-90,
+60,000 were entirely uneducated. Nor is it less suggestive that since the
+teaching of the people was seriously taken in hand by the State in 1870,
+no new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons
+have been changed into public libraries, or, as in the case of Milbank,
+have been converted into a fine art gallery.</p>
+
+<p>An objection is sometimes raised against the multiplication of free
+libraries on the ground that they promote exclusively the perusal of the
+most worthless fiction among the class least likely to be proof against
+the social dangers of this class of writing. No novel, perhaps, is so
+entirely mischievous as not to be preferable to the occupations from which
+for a few hours, it may withdraw the illiterate reader. In truth however a
+very careful examination of the facts by enquiries made at representative
+free libraries throughout the country justify the statement that novels
+form a stepping stone to books of a more seriously improving kind.</p>
+
+<p>The same statistics show the demand for fiction already to be on the
+decrease. Thus, in the case of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> the Newcastle-on-Tyne library; during a
+recent twelvemonth, of the books issued to readers 65&middot;69 were fiction. The
+next year the proportion was 64&middot;28. A year later it was 61&middot;81. In 1896 the
+figures were 55&middot;22. The latest enquiries show this decline in the demand
+for fiction to be steadily going forward. Further, the category of fiction
+is stretched by free libraries to include not only the coloured paper
+boards containing the latest sensational romance of the day, but all the
+masterpieces of Fielding, nearly all the writings of Defoe, the <i>Arcadia</i>
+of Sir Philip Sidney, the <i>Tristram Shandy</i> of Lawrence Sterne, the <i>Don
+Quixote</i> of Cervantes, and the Dialogues of Lucian.</p>
+
+<p>The remarkably elastic connotation with which the word fiction is thus
+invested, may make one doubt whether a case might not be established even
+for novel reading. As a fact the works most in demand at any typical
+London library, <i>e.g.</i>, that of Chelsea, are not novels at all. Here the
+favourites seem to be Herbert Spencer&#8217;s <i>First Principles</i>, thrice asked
+for on the day this library was visited, his <i>Ecclesiastical
+Institutions</i>, twice asked for. Aristotle&#8217;s <i>Ethics</i>, the works of
+Spinoza, Martineau&#8217;s <i>Types of Ethical Theory</i>, Adam Smith&#8217;s <i>Wealth of
+Nations</i>, J. S. Mill&#8217;s <i>Logic</i>, Professor Sayce&#8217;s <i>Vindications of
+Revealed Religion by the Light of Ancient Monuments</i>, all Sir Charles
+Dilke&#8217;s works of travel, Carlyle, Froude; <i>Cassell&#8217;s Popular Educator</i>,
+Todhunter&#8217;s <i>Euclid</i> are in greater demand than any fictions. However many
+copies of these there might be, none, it is thought, would be often out of
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>It is not only what are called the industrial classes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> whose literary
+resources have been expanded and transformed during the Victorian age.
+Libraries for a different class of readers have of late years increased
+throughout the Kingdom, in the provinces not less than in the capital.
+Mudie&#8217;s is, in the most literal sense of the epithet, a national agency.
+Its headquarters are in London. There is no town or village book club in
+the country, which is not fed from its metropolitan shelves. Mudie&#8217;s
+Library was founded by the late C. E. Mudie, in 1842, two years after the
+St James&#8217;s Square London Library. If light literature were alone in
+demand, this library would not flourish as during more than half a century
+it has done. Without it, many of the candidates for the Indian, the Home
+Civil Services and other such examinations would be unable to get up their
+books. A theologian like Canon Liddon turns new light on old truths. A
+pious and picturesque impressionist like Dean Arthur Stanley presents the
+scenes and incidents of sacred story as he has himself seen or imagined
+them. A Darwin propounds a fresh theory for the origin of life; a Froude
+rehabilitates a Tudor; a Freeman refutes a Froude; a Livingstone explores
+a Dark Continent; a Stanley recovers a reluctant Livingstone or an
+indignant Emin. A Green illustrates the growth of an English people; a
+Lecky supplements the work of a Buckle or makes the eighteenth century
+real as the nineteenth.</p>
+
+<p>Mudie&#8217;s is the channel through which these streams of culture are conveyed
+to the majority of English readers; for, highly educated as the Victorian
+age may be, it is with books that its economies begin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> To buy volumes that
+can be borrowed or hired, is accounted wanton extravagance. A work which
+requires more study, which holds public attention longer than a novel,
+must obviously be most profitable to the circulating librarian. Nor would
+self-interest let him be a distributor of fiction alone or even primarily.</p>
+
+<p>The increase of novel readers as of novel writers is indeed the great
+literary feature of the day. Not less characteristic of the time are the
+new periodicals which have created a fresh public for themselves. The
+sixpenny magazines count their circulation by millions, and are borrowed
+from the library as well as bought by their readers. But it is the
+standard works, as shown by the instances already specified that give to
+Mudie&#8217;s its deserved epithet of &#8216;Select.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Rather more grave in its contents, and didactic in its origin and purpose,
+the London Library, in St James&#8217;s Square has during more than half a
+century been a most productive agent in the culture not less of the whole
+upper middle classes than in the equipment for their tasks of writing men
+and women.<a name='fna_88' id='fna_88' href='#f_88'><small>[88]</small></a> On the Mid-summer Day of 1840, with Lord Eliot in the chair
+there was held at the Freemasons&#8217; Tavern a meeting, the object of which
+was to provide literary workers and others at their homes with those books
+for which they then had to go to the reading room of the British Museum.
+The result was the formation of a Committee<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> of the leading literary
+persons of the period, the drawing up of rules and of a list of
+desiderated books, the acquisition of premises in Pall Mall. Towards the
+end of December in the same year, the new institution was opened in its
+first home in Pall Mall with, on a smaller scale, the same kind of
+accommodations that it possesses to-day in St James&#8217;s Square. As the
+earliest prospectus reminded the public, no less a person than Edward
+Gibbon had first lamented the lack of any lending library befitting the
+dignity of an Imperial capital in London.</p>
+
+<p>When, in the May of 1841, this library was first in working order, its
+stock was some 3,000 volumes. A year later these figures had risen to
+13,000. Since then, at an outlay of some &pound;50,000, its contents have been
+increased to nearly 200,000. Situated in the heart of clubland, the
+Library has done for the education of clubmen, including penmen of every
+degree, all that Mudie&#8217;s can have done for the instruction of families.
+Not that the London Library is without claim to be considered a domestic
+institution. Its reading room is frequented by as many lady journalists of
+the new school verifying references for their articles, as by male writers
+of an older type. There are few households where its books are not to be
+found. Carlyle and Thackeray are only two of the many well-known men who
+have been helped by it in suffusing historic descriptions with local or
+personal colour. It was to ascertain the exact hues of George Washington&#8217;s
+waistcoat<a name='fna_89' id='fna_89' href='#f_89'><small>[89]</small></a> that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> Thackeray consulted the late librarian Robert Harrison
+as to the classical authorities.</p>
+
+<p>Nor are there many writers of recent years in the English tongue, who have
+not been indebted to London Librarians from the days of Cochrane, the
+first of the line, to those of Hagberg Wright, his latest successor,<a name='fna_90' id='fna_90' href='#f_90'><small>[90]</small></a>
+for seasonable hints as to what authorities most usefully to consult.</p>
+
+<p>As has been already seen, in the theory and practice of the culture now
+popularized in England, there is a growing tendency on the part of science
+and art to trench upon the ground formerly occupied by literature. The
+fashionable vocabulary of culture is itself an instance of this. Metaphors
+from the palette, the scalpel, the crucible, the retort, are applied to
+indicate the commonest and oldest literary phenomena. Or we hear of loaded
+epithets, of dynamic diction, of sonatas in sentences, of fugues in
+periods, and of new stratifications in style. Amid all our improvements we
+are a little mixed, and have still to decide where the province of the
+writer ends and that of his brother in some other art begins. This is a
+transient, as it is a transitional phase. It may perhaps confuse posterity
+which will scarcely recognize as the same language the lectures of Sir
+Joshua Reynolds, the orations of Lord Leighton, the art criticisms of
+Steele or Addison in <i>The Spectator</i>, of Walter H. Pater, of J. A.
+Symonds, in <i>The Cornhill Magazine</i>, or one of the monthly Reviews.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>The survey of the agencies now at work upon different social levels, shows
+that even thus the education which comes of reading, competes at some
+disadvantage with the instruction that is the result of lectures in class
+rooms, of demonstrations in scientific &#8216;theatres,&#8217; of days and nights
+spent in museums of sculpture or in galleries of paintings.</p>
+
+<p>During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary
+system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work,
+was dominated by the presence of a few illustrious men, who naturally
+became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives,
+Dickens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the
+weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing,
+especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to
+so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire
+company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by
+Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary
+imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or
+successors. The author of <i>The Newcomes</i> was outlived<a name='fna_91' id='fna_91' href='#f_91'><small>[91]</small></a> by the
+accomplished writer of that series which began with <i>Pelham</i> in 1828 and
+neared its end with <i>The Parisians</i> almost fifty years later.</p>
+
+<p>While the anniversaries of the Queen&#8217;s accession were few in number,
+Lytton by the side of Dickens, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> a popular master of the pen, filled
+something like the place which Thackeray had occupied before him. During
+most of his time, another man of letters belonging like Lytton to the
+titled classes divided with Lytton the social patronage of literary
+beginners. No man of his day did so much as Lytton to help younger men
+with the booksellers, as in his old-fashioned phrase he was apt to call
+the publishers. He had indeed a rival or a colleague in these good offices
+in Lord Stanhope, then Lord Mahon, the historian, as also in Mr Monckton
+Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, the timely friend of Coventry Patmore,
+and the rescuer from great troubles of a forgotten but deserving poet
+David Gray.</p>
+
+<p>When as yet journalism as a profession was not fully organized, and young
+authors still looked first to the pillars of Paternoster Row, an
+introduction to Lord Lytton or to Lord Stanhope was the surest stepping
+stone to print. In this way Antonio Gallenga, then an obscure refugee,
+with associations of the dagger and bowl about him, having won the good
+word of Lytton, found a publisher for his <i>History of Piedmont</i>. This in
+its turn opened to him the office of the <i>Times</i>. Here he made his name
+not only as among the most brilliant, best informed and versatile of
+newspaper writers but, together with William Howard Russell, as a founder
+of that school of graphic newspaper narrative since represented by
+Archibald Forbes, Edward Dicey, B. H. Becker, G. A. Henty, George Augustus
+Sala, and John O&#8217;Shea.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>The development of the press has changed most of the conditions of
+literary life. For very many Englishmen of all classes, the periodical,
+daily, weekly, or monthly, is practically an exclusive synonym for
+literature itself. This fact of course has reacted upon the whole class of
+professional writers. The most commercially successful of men and women of
+letters are, as, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, they have been,
+authors of some novel which hits the taste of the moment, and fixes the
+interest of the town. When George Eliot wedded in her writings the
+artistic to the scientific spirit, she invented a combination unknown till
+then; she opened a gold mine for herself and the more dexterous of her
+disciples. Dickens and Thackeray both realized high prices for the labour
+of their pen. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were not far behind. But
+the men of this class were either original creators of literary types that
+will take their place with the characters of Shakespeare, and Cervantes,
+or else were masters in the manufacture of exciting and dramatic plots.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Lytton knew a little of everything, science included. He was indeed
+not only a marvel of varied productiveness but a consummate student,
+summing up in his own person all the intellectual interests and tendencies
+of his time. During his most industrious period, before he had attained
+Cabinet rank in politics, and before Carlyle&#8217;s deeper studies of Fichte
+and Goethe had familiarized the English public with modes of German
+thought, Bulwer did more than anyone of his day to educate the average
+reader<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> on lines, and in subjects, which now seem commonplace, but of
+which, when the dandy who dashed off <i>Falkland</i>, as Byron dashed off
+<i>Beppo</i>, had matured into the student who travailed with <i>Rienzi</i>,
+Englishmen knew nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The mental inquisitiveness and activity of a newly enlightened generation,
+resolved, like Bacon, to take all learning for its province, finds the
+reflection of some aspect of itself in every page of Bulwer. The polished
+conceits, the recondite illustrations drawn from every sphere of human
+thought or achievement, the similes sometimes as far fetched, and
+obscurely ingenious as those of Sir Piercie Shafton or of Euphues himself,
+suggest at times the inspiration of an universally-informed, and
+precociously-gifted youth who displays his cleverness before it is yet
+quite disciplined, and parades his patchwork learning before it is fully
+digested.</p>
+
+<p>In all these things Bulwer was essentially the product and the mirror of
+the new and eclectically educated Victorian age. He had been a young man
+of great fashion, a good specimen of that social school of which the
+younger Disraeli at his <i>Vivian Grey</i> period was a bad specimen. A dandy
+of the older type through life Lytton remained. Tennyson&#8217;s lines in
+<i>Punch</i> on the padded man who wore the stays, stuck to him throughout life
+as did Thackeray&#8217;s caricatures of Sir Edward Bulwig. People therefore
+insisted on finding affectations in his manner, and insincerities in his
+nature.<a name='fna_92' id='fna_92' href='#f_92'><small>[92]</small></a> He saw his time in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> entirety abroad as well as at home
+more clearly than most of his contemporaries. The reforming zeal and
+humanitarian spirit of his age were not expressed more powerfully, if to
+many persons more intelligibly, by Dickens himself than by Lytton.</p>
+
+<p>All the modern masters of English fiction are in their different ways as
+much the products of that series of movements comprehended in, or grouped
+round, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as Byron himself
+was in England the immediate progeny of that organic upheaval of thought
+and faith. The year of the accession produced Carlyle&#8217;s <i>History of the
+French Revolution</i>. Four years later, the most powerful picture of these
+episodes presented by any writer of fiction was given to the world by
+Bulwer in <i>Zanoni</i>. To the same era of revolutionary influences belonged
+<i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>, in which Dickens not only illustrated after his
+own manner the age of Robespierre, but produced a work not inferior in
+literary art to the <i>Esmond</i> of his great rival. Lytton&#8217;s genius impelled
+him to mysticism, as George Eliot&#8217;s associations inclined her to
+positivism. Both after their own manner dealt with human problems from
+what they respectively thought the scientific point of view. Add to this
+that Lytton remained a student annexing new domains of interest, thought
+and knowledge to the last; that he showed himself the prophet of the new
+and better France in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> <i>The Parisians</i>, as he had been the bard of the new
+England beyond the seas before the curtain fell on the fortunes and the
+friends of Pisistratus Caxton.</p>
+
+<p>Enough is said to vindicate his place as among the most representative
+writers of the age, as well as to explain the recent renascence of his
+writings in France and the growing popularity of his works as attested by
+the fresh editions issuing from the house of Routledge in England.
+Macaulay, though never a newspaper man, is in point of manner, the father
+of the leading article. The terse impressionist style which has much
+superseded the Macaulayan in the press may be referred to George Borrow,
+author of <i>The Bible in Spain</i>, than whom no one has influenced periodical
+writers more beneficially; to Kinglake in his <i>Eothen</i>; to his literary
+disciple, Lawrence Oliphant in <i>Piccadilly</i>; to the late Grenville Murray,
+whose &#8216;Roving Englishman&#8217; in <i>All the Year Round</i> contains the happiest of
+travel sketches, and whose Young Brown in the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i> is a
+miracle of clever writing. Each of these has contributed to make such
+happy writers of concise prose as Jehu, Junior, in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, and
+Violet Fane, now Lady Currie, in her clever and original novel, <i>Sophy</i>.
+Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold complete a
+representative list of educators of popular taste during our age. They
+are, however, heroic instances. Others, with not a tenth of their fame
+have reached at least as far in their influence, and have brought their
+refining mission home to the masses with an intimacy not approached by
+their mightier rivals.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>Emerson&#8217;s writings, his visit to, and lectures in, London in 1847 leavened
+English thought with the same spiritualizing quality which had long since
+penetrated the American mind. For one Briton who was inspired by Emerson,
+hundreds were charmed and humanized by Longfellow first, and by Whittier
+afterwards. If Longfellow&#8217;s simple ballads had never been written, the
+higher offices of poetry, notwithstanding a Tennyson or a Browning, would
+have remained a mystery hidden from the toiling millions of the
+Anglo-Saxon world.</p>
+
+<p>The same gentle and gracious offices have been performed by less known and
+not always respected writers, Martin Tupper of the <i>Proverbial
+Philosophy</i>, and the late Hain Friswell of <i>The Gentle Life</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+<p class="title">NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The newspaper press of all kinds, largely, the penny press,
+exclusively, a Victorian product. Its recent growth reviewed. A
+valuable rival to Parliament because its publicity assures
+parliamentary efficiency. Growth of the cheaper journalism summarized.
+The <i>Daily News</i>, the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, the halfpenny press, morning
+and evening as a special product of the age. The press and party.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&#8216;Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.&#8217; Such, in reference to
+the then editor of the <i>Times</i>, was the remark made a year or two after
+the Victorian age had begun by Lord Lyndhurst, himself an
+ex-journalist,<a name='fna_93' id='fna_93' href='#f_93'><small>[93]</small></a> to Charles Greville, the Diarist. Like opinions by
+equal authorities as to the successors of Barnes have been delivered
+frequently since, but are less known because the memoir-writer has not yet
+stamped them with immortality. No attribute of skill or power belonging to
+Barnes was wanting to Delane. To his weight with the public a
+characteristic tribute was once paid by a shrewd judge of editors as of
+men generally, Lord Beaconsfield. &#8216;I think,&#8217; were that statesman&#8217;s exact
+words, on a social occasion to Lord Granville, &#8216;I had better postpone
+giving you my views of Delane till he is dead.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>On her accession the Queen was congratulated by some 479 newspapers
+representing the collective press of the United Kingdom and its outlying
+islands. Her sixtieth commemoration gives a theme to 2396 journals
+published within the same area.<a name='fna_94' id='fna_94' href='#f_94'><small>[94]</small></a> The English newspaper press which in
+effect began under one Queen, reached its final term of greatness under
+another Queen. 1837 is a landmark in newspaper history, because it was the
+first year in which the public press published the parliamentary division
+lists, and thus made another stride towards equality of influence with the
+legislature. Its effect was to increase the usefulness of Members of
+Parliament, as well as of the press itself. The Long Parliament made
+English freedom, but gagged the press.</p>
+
+<p>In 1712 Harley had taxed newspapers at a penny a sheet, and one shilling
+for each advertisement. Under North and Pitt successively, these taxes
+were raised to prohibitive figures. In 1836 Spring Rice had fixed the
+stamp duty at a penny, so that the first step towards newspaper prosperity
+was made on the eve of the Victorian age. The Victorian press means the
+penny press. That was only possible after the fourteenth year of the
+reign, and the repeal of the paper duty in 1851.</p>
+
+<p>Popular politics are changed as little by newspaper articles as are
+political votes by parliamentary speeches. The press rather organizes
+political opinion. Existing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> convictions are deepened. But the average
+reader chooses his newspaper not because he wants to be converted, but
+because his self love is flattered by seeing his formed ideas reflected in
+its columns. The modern newspaper is therefore a Victorian creation. In
+its best form it belongs to England alone. In no other country is there a
+second <i>Times</i>, as since 1788 the older <i>Universal Register</i> has been
+called; no such epitome of foreign history from day to day; no such
+reflection, in letters to the editor, of English opinion.</p>
+
+<p>So far as the cheap newspaper is due to any one man, it may be connected
+with the name of the first proprietor of the <i>Athen&aelig;um</i>, like its latest,
+a Charles Wentworth Dilke. In the twelfth year of the Victorian age the
+<i>Daily News</i>, to which the short editorship of Charles Dickens gave
+literary distinction rather than commercial success, its proprietors,
+Bright, Cobden, Walmsley, called in Mr Dilke, as the great newspaper
+organizer of his day. He at once reduced the price, though not yet to its
+final penny. In 1865 the proprietary was enlarged by the late Mr S.
+Morley, Mr Labouchere and others, with the intention of turning it into a
+penny paper. That was done. Its success was made by its foreign
+correspondence during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. Meanwhile, the
+<i>Daily Telegraph</i>, started by Colonel Sleigh in 1856, had been acquired,
+enlarged, and improved by the strenuous ancestors of its present owners.
+It at once electrified the town by its original writing of all kinds,
+notably its Paris correspondence. The letters to the <i>Times</i> from the
+Crimea of William Howard Russell, first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> caused the Sebastopol
+enquiry;&mdash;then in 1855 produced the Roebuck motion<a name='fna_95' id='fna_95' href='#f_95'><small>[95]</small></a> and with it the
+fall of the Government of Lord Aberdeen. In this way the whole conception
+of the province of the press was enlarged. Soon there sprung up a new and
+organized profession of the pen. If to-day the political writing of the
+great London dailies be below the mark of that of the two <i>Couriers</i> and
+some later publicists in France, its special and descriptive
+correspondence by a Forbes, a Henty, a W. W. Knollys, a Pearce, a Becker,
+a Conan Doyle, a G. W. Steevens, in point of graphic vigour, of accurate
+and comprehensive swiftness of execution, is superior to anything which
+other periodicals of Europe can show.</p>
+
+<p>The Jubilee Year of 1887 witnessed the completion of a revolution in the
+public press, that had in fact begun a twelvemonth earlier. Hitherto the
+great London broadsheets had either been affected really if not
+professedly to one of the great political parties; or had, as in the case
+of the <i>Times</i>, not less than of the chief weekly journals, made some show
+of impartially criticizing both parties alike. In 1886 the Liberal party
+was rent in twain by the Irish policy of its greatest member. The result
+with the press was to divest political writers of all show of
+independence. Those journals which accepted the great leader&#8217;s view were
+converted into uncompromising champions of the scheme that their opponents
+said would dismember the monarchy. Those, on the other hand, which
+resisted the great statesman&#8217;s plan found themselves by the force of
+events they could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> not control detached from their earlier traditions of
+independence and converted into the enemies of political Liberalism not
+only on one issue, but on all.</p>
+
+<p>From that day newspaper criticism of men and measures has practically
+ceased. With a few able exceptions, signally that of the <i>Daily
+Chronicle</i>, the paramount task of the press in the sixth decade of the
+epoch is to support a combination of groups rallied not under a party
+flag, but an Imperial banner. About the same time another newspaper change
+may be said to have taken place. Hitherto, the anonymous system had been
+fairly preserved. The names of newspaper writers were not known beyond
+their office, or at least beyond Fleet Street. Now, however, English
+journalism was undergoing two distinct and mutually antagonistic
+processes. On the one hand it had by the agency of the great newspapers
+with their enlarged staffs and various departments been organized into a
+liberal profession, attracting specialists of all kinds to its columns. On
+the other hand its pleasures and its profits had gathered a host of camp
+followers who as amateurs vied with the older professionals. Next, persons
+of fashion or of quality took to the proprietorship or editorship of new
+journals, as, till then, they had taken to the owning and management of
+theatres for the benefit of personal friends. In <i>Lothair</i>, someone
+advises the hero to amuse himself with theatre proprietorship &#8216;as being
+the high mode for all swells.&#8217; The paper next enjoyed the same vogue as
+the playhouse.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>The former secrecy now became impracticable. As had long been the case
+with the monthly periodical, the weekly print first and the daily print
+afterwards showed a tendency towards a transformation from an organ of
+collective opinion into a platform for individual display. The new
+editor&#8217;s chief business was not as formerly to point the gun for the
+marksmen of the pen to fire, but to recruit writers with well known names.
+If their signatures were suppressed, the authorship, as it was intended it
+should do, speedily transpired. Fleet Street became a whispering gallery
+of press gossip. Its murmurs were heard throughout the land.</p>
+
+<p>What the sixpenny magazine is to the monthly press that the halfpenny
+newspaper is to the daily. The first daily journal at this price, the
+<i>Echo</i>, after some startling vicissitudes came into the capable hands of
+John Passmore Edwards, a Celt of Cornwall with all the characteristics of
+his race. Morning as well as evening rivals at the same price sprung up
+like mushrooms after rain. <i>Evening News</i> or <i>Star</i> at night, the
+<i>Morning</i>, the <i>Leader</i> are only a few of the fresh notes added to the
+music of the London street vendors. No urchin so ragged that he does not
+proclaim the printed wares of a millionaire <i>in esse</i> or <i>in posse</i>.
+Believers in literature as part of popular education will think it a good
+sign that book reviews, and articles of a kindred sort are features in
+characteristically Victorian newspapers. Signally in the arrangements for
+supply of foreign news, a revolution extending throughout the whole press
+of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> country has been effected by the enterprise of these journals. The
+telegrams on which for its tidings from abroad the public used exclusively
+to depend, have been often superseded by the dispatches of special
+representatives of their journal stationed abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Every journal has now become its own Reuter. Men like Alfred C.
+Harmsworth, being millionaires as well as resourceful journalists, thought
+no more of having their own agents in every capital at the end of a
+telegraphic wire than of arranging a little Arctic expedition on their own
+account. They have thus forced the hand of newspaper proprietors all
+round. The leisurely descriptive writing has gone out. The condensed
+three-line paragraph has come in. The <i>Daily Mail</i> has shown a busy
+generation which reads its papers as it takes its lunch standing at a
+buffet, that the essence of the day&#8217;s news of the world can be read in a
+few odd minutes as easily as the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> were once
+packed into a nutshell.<a name='fna_96' id='fna_96' href='#f_96'><small>[96]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>For this new journalism new men have been needed. In most cases very young
+men; generally fresh from Balliol or Trinity where they have perhaps won
+Fellowships as well as First Classes, but in appearance often not much
+older than a public school sixth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> form boy. Youth is an error which
+unfortunately time too soon corrects.</p>
+
+<p>In ability, in conscientious use of increased power; in education, in
+social position, in all the best guarantees of responsibility, the British
+press has improved immeasurably within the present age. Even now it shows
+signs of perceiving that a certain amount of political impartiality
+towards the great leaders of State and Church renders its praise, its
+censure, and its criticism the more effective because the less mechanical.
+The condition of things which has made so many great newspapers patriotic
+partizans instead of independent guides must in its nature be temporary.
+When it has gone by, and a more normal state of affairs is re-established,
+there will be perhaps no compensating disadvantages to the increasing
+influence with which the Victorian age has endowed and is yet endowing
+what is really a fourth estate.<a name='fna_97' id='fna_97' href='#f_97'><small>[97]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+<p class="title">TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive
+feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court
+through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided
+with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular
+sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new
+nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between
+these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and
+curative medicine also entitled to credit. General course of medical
+progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained
+usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors,
+with particular instances.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Before the Victorian age, there had been no legislation for the purpose of
+helping the helpless, housing the homeless, providing for the health of
+those whose birth-right was the squalor, the starvation, the disease, that
+come from systematic neglect. Here, as in other things, the representative
+of the Crown, transformed from a political power into an agency of social
+good, led the way. The Prince Consort, moved by the condition and by the
+address of the ballast heavers in the East End of London took the
+initiative; the legislature gradually followed. Thus was the principle
+established and acted on that one of the prime duties of the State is to
+those for whom from any other quarter there is no help.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>The last instance of that wholesome truth was the Dilke Commission for the
+better housing of the poor aptly presided over by the Prince Consort&#8217;s
+eldest son in 1885. Exactly forty-five years earlier than this, Colonel
+Slaney&#8217;s<a name='fna_98' id='fna_98' href='#f_98'><small>[98]</small></a> motion in the House of Commons produced an enquiry into the
+health of towns. Local Improvement Acts had been multiplied to the number
+of 500. There was still no proper drainage. The Duke of Buccleuch&#8217;s
+Commission of 1848 led to the Public Health Act of the same year. As the
+cholera invasions of 1853 and of 1865-6 showed, the Local Boards
+established by the Act of 1848 were too permissive in their operations to
+be fully effective. Edwin Chadwick, and Southwood Smith had from the first
+co-operated with the Queen&#8217;s husband. Their activity did not cease when
+the earliest steps to reform had been taken: 1858 witnessed fresh
+improvements.<a name='fna_99' id='fna_99' href='#f_99'><small>[99]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>It was not till 1875 that the confused mass of sanitary laws was
+consolidated. Then the Local Government Board which, with the powers of
+the superseded Poor Law Board, had been established in 1871 was in full
+and in most beneficent work. Still the Commission that last investigated
+the matter, due as it was largely to Lord Shaftesbury, showed many evils
+still to remain. Overcrowding was worse in the West London rookeries than
+it had been in the East. In 1885 the Dilke Commission Act gave fresh power
+to local authorities to destroy unhealthy dwellings.</p>
+
+<p>The machinery which thus exists as the sixth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> decade of our epoch draws to
+its close, is therefore tolerably complete. Guarantees for its promptly
+being put into motion are still wanted. Not only the credit, but the very
+conception of this wholesome function of the State belongs entirely to our
+era, and arises out of the enlarged idea of Royal service which fills the
+modern mind.</p>
+
+<p>Strictly consistent with family tradition is the effort of the Prince of
+Wales to help those who are only one degree more helpless than the
+dwellers in city and suburban alleys and courts in time of need. To free
+the London hospitals of debt will crown the edifice of sick relief that in
+Crimean days the Queen and her husband began.</p>
+
+<p>From the departure of Miss Florence Nightingale<a name='fna_100' id='fna_100' href='#f_100'><small>[100]</small></a> and her trained staff
+for the Crimea in 1854 must be dated the birth of nursing as a polite
+profession. But for that mission of mercy one would hear nothing of the
+contemporary parade of nurses in the height of the London season in the
+grounds of Marlborough House. The fashionable vogue of the vocation may
+sometimes attract modish recruits who have not counted the cost.</p>
+
+<p>Amiable sympathy is not the sole qualification which the lady nurse needs.
+Self-consciousness is as much a disqualification as a shuddering dislike
+of sick room scenes. It is also the attribute that the patient is the most
+quick to observe. Not a few of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> the sick whom the ministering angel of the
+new school desires to relieve may still sigh for the presence by their
+bedside of the displaced Mrs Gamp instead of the young lady in the
+coquettish muslin cap and dainty grey frock who casts complacent glances
+at herself as she passes the mirror, and with an air not quite suited for
+a sick room offers her patient his medicine or his barley water as if she
+were suggesting black coffee, green Chartreuse, and a cigarette after a
+whitebait dinner. These defects will no doubt be mended when the lady
+nurse is more habituated to her calling. Decayed billiard markers, and
+scripture readers who have gone wrong, will not eventually figure so
+largely among the self-sacrificing males who also find their career in
+tending the invalid. The scandals of which the nurse (old style) was
+sometimes the heroine still live in the pages of Dickens. They arose from
+the rumoured hastening of the sick man&#8217;s death by the scriptural practice
+of laying a wet cloth over his mouth. Any scandals with which the nurse
+(new style) might be connected would perhaps come from the desirable
+marriage that she arranges for herself in the sick room or from the
+legacies made to her by grateful patients, but disputed by thankless
+relations. These things, therefore, should be no doubt regarded not as
+slurs upon her disinterestedness, but as tributes to her efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>Inside the hospital the same transformation has been effected as in the
+aspect of the ministering angels themselves. The grave young gentlemen in
+training for the medical profession have nothing about them left of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> the
+lamp breaking, policemen baiting, medical student of Albert Smith. If
+sometimes one reads of the too engrossing attractions for these youths of
+the sylphs who flit to and fro in the wards, the answer is obvious&mdash;&#8216;Evil
+be to him who evil thinks.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Hospital management is the subject not for a few pages in a single book,
+but for a library in itself. One or two not controversial facts may be
+given. Throughout the Victorian age a marked feature in medical charities
+has been the supplementing of the historic hospitals with many new
+dispensaries and establishments for special diseases. If the latest
+hospital endowments are smaller than those originating in an earlier
+century, the explanation is less a decline in eleemosynary purpose or
+power than the development of the value of the property assigned to the
+older foundations.<a name='fna_101' id='fna_101' href='#f_101'><small>[101]</small></a> Thus the revenue of St Bartholomew&#8217;s in the middle
+of the sixteenth century seems to have been only &pound;371 a year. Towards the
+close of the nineteenth century it is &pound;32,000 a year. During our own era
+hospital benefactions approaching a quarter of a million are far from
+unknown. These do not include such special and comparatively recent
+hospitals as that for consumption, with the 40 new dispensaries connected
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>To epitomize the facts; the total of London hospitals or infirmaries with
+wards for the sick amounts to 49. The movement still goes forward. So vast
+is the scale on which these buildings, less houses than towns in
+themselves, were first planned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> that in many of them there is yet room for
+fresh beds. This is only a specimen of what has been, and is being, done
+throughout the kingdom. There thus seems a fresh argument in favour of
+continuing to London itself an institution like St Thomas&#8217;s, Southwark,
+the removal of which to the country was not long since suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Like all gracious works, these places are twice blessed. They relieve
+those who are in need. They humanize those whom prosperity and comfort
+might make callous. Before our age began, no one thought of sending game
+or fruit to the sufferers or convalescents within these places of refuge.
+Now it is the exception for the millionaire not to make the spoils of his
+fashionable battue pay tithe to those for whom such food is often the best
+of physic. The costly flowers that decorate the drawing rooms or dining
+rooms during the season are not discarded as rubbish when the festivity is
+over. They are scrupulously tended so as not to lose their freshness.
+Presently their hues and fragrance will relieve the bleak expanse of
+white-washed wall in those places where our sick are nursed away from
+their own homes.<a name='fna_102' id='fna_102' href='#f_102'><small>[102]</small></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>The contrasts of our age include a marked connection between the
+organization of the healing art and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> the advance of medical science on the
+one hand and the reduction of the death rate on the other. In 1855 the
+mortality of the United Kingdom was 23 per 1,000. In 1875 it was 21 per
+1,000. In 1895 it had fallen to 18 per 1,000. The figures,<a name='fna_103' id='fna_103' href='#f_103'><small>[103]</small></a> and the
+conclusions to which they point, are tributes, not only to medical skill
+in healing disease, but to sanitary reform in preventing it.</p>
+
+<p>Before the Victorian age began the whole population of these Islands
+awaited the periodical onsets of pestilence with the resigned fatalism of
+the Turk, or with the passive submission of latter day London to the
+incubus of snow. The notorious consequences of unhealthy living prompted
+no preventive measures. Divine wrath was believed to express itself in
+deadly epidemics. When that anger was assuaged health would return. Till
+then human remedies could do little. Meanwhile, the truth that Providence
+helps those who help themselves was being scientifically shown. Hence in
+1838, a State enquiry into the whole matter was instituted. In 1848 the
+legislation began which, by promoting cleanliness, at once disarmed
+disease. John Simon proved the propagation of pestilence to proceed by
+impure particles. In 1858-65, on his initiative, the Government
+strengthened the defences of public health. The entrance of foreign
+plagues was stopped at our ports. Three sons of a clever West of England
+doctor named Budd<a name='fna_104' id='fna_104' href='#f_104'><small>[104]</small></a> had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> been trained from their childhood in practical
+medicine by their father. These doctors showed the connection between
+impure water and typhoid fever, as before them Snow had shown between
+cholera and water. When the improvements suggested by these researches
+were adopted health generally benefited. Consumption statistics became
+less alarming every year. Fevers of all kinds were successfully combated.
+Since vaccination had become general, smallpox cases had fallen by at
+least one-half.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the discovery of an&aelig;sthetics, of chloroform by Professor J. Y.
+Simpson of Edinburgh in 1848, of ether in 1846 by Morton and Robinson of
+the United States, at once robbed surgical operations of their terrors,
+and rendered them practicable in cases where till then they could not
+safely be tried. In 1860 came the antiseptic treatment of Sir Joseph,
+since Lord, Lister. Before then, the nervous system had been explored
+successfully by Carpenter.<a name='fna_105' id='fna_105' href='#f_105'><small>[105]</small></a> Instruments for examining by reflected
+lights the hidden parts of the human frame had been invented by several
+English surgeons. Operations for certain internal tumours, that had
+hitherto defied removal, were first performed by C&aelig;sar Hawkins, born 1798,
+brother of the famous Oriel Provost, a pupil of Brodie at St George&#8217;s; and
+more recently by Spencer Wells.</p>
+
+<p>More than a half of the medical discoveries of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> period are English.
+The latest perhaps, certainly not the smallest if the least known, was the
+treatment by the late Sir William Gull of the swellings technically known
+as myx&oelig;dema by an entirely new process, that of supplementing
+deficiences of the thyroid gland with matter taken from animals. The
+throat specialists of Germany found much to learn from the late Morell
+Mackenzie. Not till 1860, was the scheme of medical education perfected in
+its present shape by the College of Physicians, which to-day, under its
+President and two Censors, arranges all examinations; while the Medical
+Association represents the whole profession, bringing its grievances and
+needs before the legislature. The average of ability throughout the
+practitioners of the country is as noticeable as the achievements of its
+scientific pioneers. The treatise on <i>Heredity</i> in disease by Dr Douglas
+Lithgow, on gout and allied complaints by Dr Robson Roose, and on the
+medical uses of electricity by Dr W. S. Hedley, are instances of permanent
+contributions by busy practitioners to the scientific knowledge of their
+daily labours.</p>
+
+<p>The late Dr Quinn, the late Oscar Clayton, are men who have improved the
+status of their calling by their social services and gifts, and have
+helped to extend the authority of the physician over every department of
+life. We have long since shaken off the rule of priests. Some may think we
+have already placed ourselves under a despotism of doctors, who by their
+word can make or mar the reputation of places and climates if not of
+characters and of men;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> and on whom the obligations of professional
+etiquette seem at least equal to their sense of responsibility to the
+public.<a name='fna_106' id='fna_106' href='#f_106'><small>[106]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+<p class="title">TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated
+by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization
+of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of
+Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures
+illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and
+abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant
+and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the
+Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In
+the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly
+critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on
+the new High Church critics, <i>e.g.</i> <i>Lux Mundi</i> and <i>The Sermon on the
+Mount</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>A verger at St Mary&#8217;s Church, Oxford, during the sixties used devoutly to
+thank his Maker that after having heard University sermons for thirty
+years, he still remained a Christian. Conflicts within, attacks without,
+at least as severe as any to which either was exposed during the Georgian
+epoch, have been the lot of the Christianity whose depository is the
+Church of England during the Victorian age. Neither Christian faith, nor
+the Church that is its national expression, has come forth maimed or
+weakened from that ordeal. Modern scepticism scarcely aims at substituting
+for a Divine Being any tangible object of faith. It retires from the
+discussion with the remark that high and invisible things are beyond human
+knowledge. Hence nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span> in agnosticism, however hostile its tendency to,
+need be inconsistent with, Revelation. The mere statement of difficulties
+in the way of belief and of purely abstract alternatives to belief makes
+no proselytes.<a name='fna_107' id='fna_107' href='#f_107'><small>[107]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>Freethinkers of the last century appealed, and were limited, to the rich.
+The secularists who are their successors since 1840 pose as the friends of
+the poor. Neither school can consider itself a power. The Victorian age is
+in fact above all others an age of religious revival. This has been
+largely due to the influence of the Court. From the <i>entourage</i> of the
+later Georges and of William IV. the best of their subjects held aloof.
+Had the year of Revolution come then instead of in 1848, the English
+throne, whose possessor lacked all personal hold of the people, might have
+shared the fate of continental crowns.</p>
+
+<p>The Queen saw nothing of any Court until she presided over a transformed
+Court of her own. Her subjects no sooner knew their fresh ruler than they
+were powerfully impressed by the contrast of her blameless life and
+society to anything of which they had read, heard, or seen. Under such a
+sovereign, a change in the whole spirit of the nation&#8217;s religious life
+naturally followed. Thinking minds had indeed long been in a state of
+spiritual ferment. The Tractarian movement had begun with Keble&#8217;s Assize
+Sermon five years before the Queen&#8217;s accession. Its full results were not
+to be seen till 1846.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>Meanwhile, in the third year of the reign the idea of reviving
+Convocation, which since 1717 had been suspended, of which Burke had said
+that it was without functions save to pay compliments to the king and then
+dissolve, took form; since 1850, that body has met. Unreformed this
+clerical parliament still remains. As in 1864 it declared <i>Essays and
+Reviews</i> heretical, but could not punish the men whom it branded, so,
+to-day, a canon of Convocation, though approved by the Crown, has no
+binding power. But the days when the <i>Times</i>, long since convinced of its
+Erastian errors, could sneer at Convocation as &#8216;a clerical debating
+society with a long name&#8217; are altogether gone by.</p>
+
+<p>Many who are by no means ardent Churchmen, or are outside the Church
+Communion, are interested to know the actual opinion of Convocation on
+social and industrial questions of the hour, as this opinion is expressed
+by educated men who reflect the views of their cloth at least as
+faithfully as the House of Commons reflects the views of the people. Thus,
+during the recent sittings of a single year, Convocation in its two
+provinces with their divisions into lower and upper Houses, has discussed
+and suggested solutions of subjects so varied as sisterhoods and
+deaconesses, betting and gambling, popular education, soldiers&#8217; marriages,
+marriage law amendment Bills, spiritual provision for workhouses, clergy
+discipline Bill, the relations between the Church and State in the
+Colonies. Even in its unreformed condition, this body can scarcely fail to
+be of some use in officially<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> telling Parliament men the opinion of the
+Church, which, on any view of it, is at least a considerable corporation,
+on matters affecting clerical interests or popular morals. In the remote
+event of the Church being disestablished, Convocation is a useful drilling
+ground on which Churchmen of all degrees can be trained to collective
+action.</p>
+
+<p>What are the facts relating to the Church to-day? At the opening of this
+age, the beneficed clergy were often unfit for their posts; they were very
+largely indifferent to their duties. The attacks on the Establishment led
+by the Lord Henley of that day and others, shortly after the 1832 Reform
+Act, were more organized and plausible than anything which has been
+witnessed since. There are, after all, not many things more national in
+England than the Church. Even the differences of the clergy, and the
+professed desire of some among them to be free from State supervision,
+have not lessened the national regard for the Established Faith. The
+attack from within, therefore, seems likely to be weathered not less
+successfully than the attack from without.</p>
+
+<p>The parochial system of the Church&mdash;its clergy resident in every village
+where the squire is often an absentee, has struck its fibres too deep into
+the soil of English life, to be rooted out by any sectarian agitation. The
+best proof that Church endowments do not check, but rather encourage,
+private beneficence is the amount of money donations to the Established
+Church during the present age. Gifts to the Church, whether in the shape
+of lands, tithes, other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> rent charges, stock or cash, represent roughly a
+sum of &pound;5,500,000, yielding a perpetual yearly income of &pound;181,940.</p>
+
+<p>The second of the two Acts establishing the Ecclesiastical Commission is
+of Victorian date. The operations of this body have increased the incomes
+of Church livings by &pound;1,016,775 a year, or by a capital sum of
+&pound;30,599,100; and this during the twelve years ending 1896-97. Queen Anne&#8217;s
+bounty does not, indeed, seem to have been uniformly administered with
+such wisdom. Its funds have sometimes been granted to incumbents to
+enlarge houses, schools, and other buildings beyond the point at which
+there was an assured income for the maintenance of these fabrics. The
+Tithes Commutation Act is not blamed for the periodical return of hard
+times for the clergy. The distress itself is partial, sometimes
+exaggerated. Still, there seems to have been a general reduction of
+incomes in rural districts by 25 per cent. No offertories, which in towns
+greatly help the clergy, can make the country deficiency good. The
+suggestion of repealing the Act which put down pluralities so as to
+concentrate several poor preferments in one incumbent is not likely to be
+acted on. But some relaxation of the Act might be a feasible concession to
+a growing opinion. Rich livings are sometimes the worst served. Some
+re-adjustment of stipends after a new enquiry seems, therefore, likely to
+be proposed.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the purely English aspect of clerical activity in our age. The
+alliance in the foreign enterprise of the Church with the State coincides
+exclusively<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> with the Victorian reign. In 1841 the Colonial Bishopric fund
+was begun. By 1851 the Colonial episcopate was fairly organized. Four
+years after the Queen&#8217;s accession there were 10 Anglican dioceses out of
+England. Sixty years after that accession there are 92.<a name='fna_108' id='fna_108' href='#f_108'><small>[108]</small></a> These sees
+are grouped into provincial Synods. This foreign Church, one in doctrine
+with the Established Church at home, is modified in its agency and
+development to suit the soil to which it is transplanted. The late Sir J.
+R. Seeley, with respect to its calming influences amid jarring faiths, has
+in a familiar passage dwelt on the Christianity of the English Church as a
+reconciling element between the rival creeds of the Eastern world. Add to
+this the organization of episcopal Protestantism of the Anglican type, not
+only in the West Indies and in our Canadian Dominion, but in the United
+States themselves.<a name='fna_109' id='fna_109' href='#f_109'><small>[109]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>A fair idea may thus be formed of the State Church in its character of a
+veritable catholic, not less than a national, power. Improved organization
+does not always argue increased efficiency. The machinery of the Roman
+Empire was never more elaborate than when it was in a state of atrophy.
+Coinciding, however, with the unmistakable signs of spiritual life at home
+and abroad, the domestic resources and the foreign work of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> the national
+religion are tributes alike to the efficacy of the Church as a world-wide
+instrument of righteousness, and to the increased motive power of religion
+during the Victorian age. With the spiritual work that has been done,
+certain names very briefly must be associated. The Oxford Tractarianism
+between 1832-46 is only one of many manifestations of religious life which
+mark that epoch, and which nearly perplexed into infidelity the Oxford
+verger aforesaid. In extreme Evangelicalism outside our Church, the
+followers of Wesley, regardless of their founder&#8217;s injunction not to form
+a separate sect, were perfecting their system when the reign began. In
+1833, an English clergyman at Plymouth, J. L. Darby, left the National
+Church and founded the sect of &#8216;Brethren&#8217; who take their name from the
+Western seaport where he had officiated. Fifteen years later, in 1848,
+Plymouth Brethrenism was itself divided by one of Darby&#8217;s followers, named
+Newton; he created a clique of his own now called by their rival
+religionists, the loose, or open, Brethren. The missionary and literary
+activities of this little sect are really remarkable. In 1843
+Presbyterianism across the Tweed had a schism of its own. The secession of
+Chalmers on the issue of State patronage resulted in the founding of the
+Free Kirk. The religious activity of the epoch has been universal. Among
+the older dissenting bodies, Congregationalists, in point of numbers,
+influence, in national repute of their leaders, perhaps come first. These
+in 1837, numbered 170,000 full members. Now they number nearly 400,000. Of
+the Baptists there were, in 1837, 125,000. Sixty years later<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> they are
+340,000. This increase is due to the single agency of C. H. Spurgeon,
+whose personal influence is not yet fully realized but may be judged from
+the circulation by millions of his posthumous Sermons, as well as by the
+pulpit imitations of him in all Communions, not excepting the high
+Anglican pulpits. Hence of course Nonconformist numbers depending largely
+on individual attractions, are subject to greater fluctuations than in the
+Establishment. Roman Catholics have increased in the large towns of
+England and in the Colonies. In 1837 their priests were less than 1,000.
+Fifty years later they were in round numbers 2,500. Their Churches have
+risen from 600 to 1,350. The activity of British Evangelicalism is farther
+shown by the doubling of the income of the British and Foreign Bible
+Society during the reign, by the cost of a New Testament being ten-pence
+in 1837, a penny in 1897. Similarly the income of the Propagation of the
+Gospel Society is very nearly twice, and of the Church Missionary Society
+almost thrice, as much to-day as it was in the Accession year.</p>
+
+<p>Among Nonconformist bodies, numbers vary according to the eminence of
+individual leaders, rising by bounds with a Spurgeon, diminishing
+temporarily with some of his successors. Similarly, among Anglican
+Communicants numbers fluctuate according to the influence of the leaders
+of the great schools, a Liddon, or a Ryle, a Maurice, a Webb Peploe, or a
+Lefroy. R. W. Dale, of Birmingham, whose work on the Atonement is a
+recognised text book, even among many Anglicans, did as much as A. P.
+Stanley of Westminster, to soften down sectarian differences, and to
+command the respect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> of other Communions. Nor has Dale had any lack of
+worthy successors now living. Unless religion had been ineradicable in the
+national, because in the human, mind, results very different from this
+general increase in the number of all religious Communions, judged by
+whatever test, would have been witnessed.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had the Church recovered from the shock of Newman&#8217;s secession,
+and the agitating effects during two decades of High Church and Low Church
+controversies<a name='fna_110' id='fna_110' href='#f_110'><small>[110]</small></a> when Dr Mansel, then an Oxford tutor and
+professor,<a name='fna_111' id='fna_111' href='#f_111'><small>[111]</small></a> in his ardent, but not wholly discreet zeal, expressed
+views on the relations of the Infinite to the finite which, as F. D.
+Maurice perceived, declaring the Deity to be unknowable by man, might be
+perverted into an apology for agnosticism. That religion did not really
+suffer is due in some degree to Benjamin Jowett. This good and honest
+scholar&#8217;s life was spent in educating young men into useful Christians,
+into serious citizens, and into sincere believers. He claimed liberty; he
+loved truth. He ridiculed with quiet satire the religious nescience and
+despair which Mansel&#8217;s terrific propaganda had been distorted into making
+the vogue. When Dr Temple was made Primate:&mdash;the first and greatest
+tribute was paid to the variety of Oxford ecclesiasticism that would be
+rightly described not as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> the broad, or high, but as the hard Church.
+There could be no more striking instance of the transformation in
+religious ideas witnessed during our age than the fact that the volume to
+which Dr Temple and Mr Jowett both contributed, <i>Essays and Reviews</i>, was
+branded by Convocation as heretical during the sixties, and is discovered
+to be harmless during the nineties.</p>
+
+<p>So qualified a judge on these matters as Mr Stopford Brooke deplores the
+declension of religious liberalism into something indistinguishable from
+unbelief. But as Professor Mansel&#8217;s orthodox zeal for the dignity of his
+faith helped his enemies rather than his friends, so the services rendered
+by his devout successors are not always unmixedly conducive to the old
+faith. The &#8216;higher criticism&#8217; has been a dubious ally of Biblical
+Christianity. <i>Lux Mundi</i> distinguished between the historic and mythic
+elements in the <i>Pentateuch</i>. The gifted editor of that work has more
+recently<a name='fna_112' id='fna_112' href='#f_112'><small>[112]</small></a> applied the same method to the sayings of the Founder of
+Christianity, and has seemed to some to sanction the evaporation into
+proverbs of some Divine utterances.<a name='fna_113' id='fna_113' href='#f_113'><small>[113]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+<p class="title">THE QUEEN&#8217;S SUBJECTS AT PLAY&mdash;ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">The new Court as head of the old society. Social transformations which
+would most strike one revisiting the London West End in 1897. Going to
+Court. Multiplication of clubs in St James&#8217;s and Pall Mall, but
+disappearance of gambling clubs. Socially transforming effects of the
+Parliamentary Committee in 1844. Then and now. &#8216;Play and Pay&#8217; betting
+modified by its recommendations. Necessary connection between horse
+breeding and horse racing. Cricket&mdash;then and now. The new football or
+the old prize ring. Indoor amusements. Transformation, by development,
+of Victorian chess. The men and events which have made it what it is.
+Ladies&#8217; drawing room work. Middle class English ladies the great
+readers nowadays. Fashionable needlework of all kinds from 1837-97.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The transformed society of the Victorian age may be regarded as a new
+combination of old elements. The interests, and the pursuits represented
+in it have always existed. The grouping and the mutual relations are the
+only novelty. Even during the Prince Consort&#8217;s time, the Court had begun
+to be the federal head of the many coloured corporation which, under the
+name of society, has superseded the &#8216;genteel&#8217; or &#8216;polite&#8217; world of earlier
+days. That all liberal professions or worthy pursuits should find their
+natural head among the representatives of the Crown was the central idea
+of the Queen&#8217;s husband. So far as the opportunities of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> short life
+allowed, he translated this notion into practice. It was reserved for his
+eldest son to witness, and himself largely to promote, the full
+realization of Prince Albert&#8217;s purpose. The result is that to-day not only
+diplomacy or soldiership, statemanship or wealth, sends its envoys to a
+transformed Court. There is no sort of human achievement or distinction
+that, directly it has won the approval of the people, lacks the
+recognition, personal or vicarious, of the people&#8217;s rulers.</p>
+
+<p>Each of the callings noticed in the present survey, clerical or lay, sends
+its deputies to Marlborough House or Sandringham in the same way that
+diplomacy and arms are represented at a Royal drawing room or lev&eacute;e. For a
+reflection of the chief currents of thought, of the favourite pursuits of
+the most absorbing interests and influences of Victorian England, the
+historian will have to consult the list of visitors to the Heir Apparent&#8217;s
+house, or read the account of his doings. The Prince Consort was attacked
+by the Tories in 1846 because he listened to Peel&#8217;s speeches on Free Trade
+from the Peers&#8217; Gallery in the Commons. In 1897 the Prince of Wales
+attends daily the State trial of South African celebrities at Westminster,
+and is praised for a fresh proof of his interest in Colonial affairs. No
+artist or author; no sailor, soldier, cricketer or actor, makes his mark
+upon his age without some tribute from a popular Court to prowess that is
+already a household word with the multitude.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in its relations to those aspects of national life in which the
+people itself is most interested, the Court of to-day has been transformed
+into a federal head of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> the entire motley system. If the competition of
+individuals for personal recognition in the highest quarter sometimes
+embitters social life, that is not the Royal patron&#8217;s fault.</p>
+
+<p>Among the changes which would make the fashionable quarter of the town
+most difficult of recognition to-day by one who knew it only in the early
+years of the reign, is the multiplication of joint stock palaces called
+clubs, which are really co-operative homes for poor gentlemen.<a name='fna_114' id='fna_114' href='#f_114'><small>[114]</small></a> The
+absence of the gaming houses of which Crockford&#8217;s was only one among many;
+and the widely representative quality of the ladies and gentlemen whom our
+stranger might notice driving to Court on a presentation day during the
+season is as visible as the disappearance of the West End hells.<a name='fna_115' id='fna_115' href='#f_115'><small>[115]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>In the seventh year after the Queen&#8217;s accession, the House of Commons&#8217;
+Committee on Gambling began its sittings. It was presided over by Lord
+Palmerston. Among the witnesses it examined were men well known in every
+section of London or of national life. Trainers, jockeys, magistrates,
+policemen, all contributed to the remarkable picture of contemporary life
+and manners, contained between the covers of this document.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span>The state of the law as regards gambling was then, as now, obscure.
+Magistrates shrank from giving constables a chance of confirming their
+suspicions as to houses of shy-looking exterior; but generally in the
+streets off St James&#8217;s nearly every third house was a place of play.
+Between Pall Mall and the east side of Leicester Square, some 36 gambling
+houses were proved to exist. At Crockford&#8217;s itself the tables were
+honestly managed. It was the perversion of Crockford&#8217;s example which did
+the harm. Thus, some half dozen years before the Great Exhibition,
+Crockford&#8217;s ceased to exist; its humbler but more mischievous imitators
+were also weeded out. An improved epoch began. Before the twentieth
+anniversary of the Accession, the building at the top of St James&#8217;s Street
+described by Disraeli in the first chapter of <i>Sibyl</i> had become under the
+style of &#8216;The Wellington&#8217; the best restaurant of the kind then, or for
+many years, known to London. Thereafter, indeed, it reverted to a club,
+the &#8216;Argus&#8217; first, and then the &#8216;Devonshire;&#8217; but a gambling club no more.
+The periodical flutter caused by rumoured scandals, is itself evidence of
+the improved standard of social morals. One other result of this
+Enquiry<a name='fna_116' id='fna_116' href='#f_116'><small>[116]</small></a> is probably felt among sporting persons to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Palmerston&#8217;s Committee pronounced against play and pay betting, that
+is, the system under which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> the bet is valid whether the horse runs or
+not. In betting at the post for ready money the bet is off to-day if the
+horse does not start. Not only is the Turf more popular than it ever was
+before. It binds sections of the polite world more closely together than
+they are held by any political or ecclesiastical cement. It is thus a
+social interest of the first importance which a prudent statesman makes a
+point of conciliating not less than he would the clergy, the lawyers, or
+even the licensed victuallers. The constantly increasing encouragement
+given to the Turf by men who have no personal end to serve, and whose
+refinement must be revolted by the aspect of many of its accessories,
+justifies the conclusion that the racecourse is indispensable to the breed
+of horses.</p>
+
+<p>From the Plantagenet and Tudor period the best horses in England were
+raced; they were made better that they might be raced more successfully.
+Hence the wise introduction, for beauty as the crown of strength, of Arab
+blood, especially under Charles II. and onwards. The early excellence of
+stallions followed. The sires of racers begot also English hunters, so
+that the best horses in the hunting field to-day derive their pedigrees on
+one side from the founders of the best racing blood. The general utility
+animal, seen in carriages and cabs, is bred in the same way but has just
+fallen below the hunter level. Thus, without thoroughbred sires, the
+excellence of our horses generally must decline. The expense of breeding
+the best quadrupeds of the stud book is so heavy that without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> the
+stimulus of racing, the stock could scarcely be maintained.</p>
+
+<p>The long distance plates on the Turf dating back to the time of Anne have
+been replaced by the Queen&#8217;s premium stallions, periodically on view at
+Islington, and at the disposal, for a small fee, of horse owners
+throughout the country. These fine animals are almost all the winners of
+races. The necessary expense of racing suggests the usefulness, as in an
+earlier chapter was seen, of the sporting plutocrat to the Turf, and hence
+to the national quadruped generally. Unless the sport gave to its
+followers some sort of social diploma, the wealthy breeders whom the mart
+has furnished to the racecourse, from the earliest of the Rothschilds down
+to the latest of the Hirsches or the Maples, would scarcely have given
+time and money to their own pleasure as well as to the country&#8217;s good.</p>
+
+<p>To pass to the horse in another aspect, the conjectural estimate of packs
+of hounds at the beginning of the hunting season in 1837 was 28. At a
+corresponding date in 1897 the ascertained figures were 61. This does but
+faintly indicate the change undergone by the national sport. Not even John
+Leech&#8217;s pictorial satire in <i>Punch</i> could deter the Cit from the hunting
+field, or discourage him from educating himself into a more than passable
+rider across country. Capel Court has or had a cry of beagles of its own.
+At longer distances from London than the Surrey pastures 15 per cent. of
+the wearers of pink and buckskin wear on ordinary days the glossy uniform<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span>
+of the brokers and jobbers of the House. A little earlier in the year,
+these sportsmen were tramping after partridges by the early September
+twilight that they might be at their business in the City before the West
+End sits down to breakfast. This is a specimen of what goes on throughout
+the kingdom. On the outskirts of all great cities, co-operative shootings
+are as common as co-operative stores.</p>
+
+<p>Other pastimes are too much in daily evidence to need many words or to
+allow the apprehension that the male acceptance of the feminine lawn
+tennis implies any degeneration in the Victorian race of youth. The
+addition of Scotch golf to English games, and the vast improvement as to
+pace, style, and time shown by crews at Henley or on the Metropolitan
+waters in 1897 over 1837 may dispel any fears of a deterioration of
+youthful stamina or of muscular zeal. Whether as regards its own surface
+or the meadows which it waters, the Thames in the South, like the Tyne or
+Mersey in the North, is still a river that feeds the sea of English
+manhood.</p>
+
+<p>As regards cricket, it is impossible to compare ancient or modern players,
+batsmen or bowlers; so entirely have the conditions of the game been
+transformed. The high scoring of the later Victorian days which would have
+amazed earlier players seems due, first, to the vastly improved pitches,
+making as they do, almost any bowling fairly easy; secondly, to the great
+increase of good players, consequent of course upon the evergrowing
+popularity of the game. The first of these facts, the improved pitches,
+explains why the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> difficult shooter that before 1875 was so fatal to
+batsmen at Lord&#8217;s has now become a very rare ball. Although the power of
+the bat seems to-day greater than that of the ball, the ground had no
+sooner become easy and overhand bowling allowed, than the utmost was done
+to equalize the attack and defence. Hence the bowling is much straighter
+than of old; long leg and long stop no longer have a place among the
+fieldmen, and the absence of long leg hitting and fielding makes the game
+less interesting for spectators; still the grounds improve, the scoring
+consequently increases. The feature which has transformed the bowling
+seems to be that now the best bowlers are fast with a break even on a hard
+wicket: whereas formerly they only broke on a sticky wicket. The still
+astounding power of the best bowlers is shown by the havoc they make when
+they get a sticky wicket to bowl on. In fine weather there is no serious
+obstacle to the stupendous scoring; the batting is of a more monotonous
+type than it used to be, and the play therefore less interesting to
+onlookers.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as elsewhere, individual influence has been a transforming power.
+Between 1871 and 1883 when W. G. Grace was at his best, no fast bowler
+could do anything with him. Slow bowling, therefore, was adopted to keep
+down his run getting. As this batsman has taken his place among the
+veterans the old swift style has come into vogue once more. In the opinion
+of the greatest experts of modern cricket, as W. G. Grace is the most
+formidable bat, so Richardson of Surrey first, after him, Spofforth,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> the
+Australian, in his middle career, have been the most difficult bowlers.</p>
+
+<p>The popularity of football, whose vogue is a recent Victorian growth is
+shown by the collection of 50,000 spectators at the Crystal Palace, to
+witness a final tie for the Association Cup. Admissions of 20,000 and
+30,000 are daily events in all great towns; the money thus paid by the
+public has created the professional football player. Hence many questions
+on which authorities differ. The subject has divided the different
+football unions: the northern Rugby clubs having seceded to found a union
+of their own. The feuds among football legislators are thus as varied and
+violent as the forms of muscular ferocity which the game itself allows.
+That these can be minimized by a strenuous and keen referee is probable;
+that when this functionary is slack, professional football resembles the
+revival of the prize ring in disguise is admitted.<a name='fna_117' id='fna_117' href='#f_117'><small>[117]</small></a> Football may seem
+to the mere observer almost to have become a misnomer, when carrying the
+ball is part of the game; when hands, shoulders, chest, fists, are nearly
+as active as legs and feet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span>Among indoor games chess is that which has been transformed the most
+during our age. Here something may be attributed to the example of the
+Prince Consort, who was not, however, an invincible player, but more to
+his youngest son, the lamented Prince Leopold, who did a good deal to
+popularize the game. In point of universal popularity chess will never
+quite rival whist or billiards. It lacks the element of chance in the
+first, and the display of physical skill in the second which must ever
+chiefly fascinate men. The chess player, too, when well matched, uses more
+brain power than the whist player. Each has to keep the judgment
+perpetually alert. But the conventions in chess are left behind when the
+opening has been matured into the mid game, while the conventions of whist
+relieve the whist player continuously during the progress of the rubber.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the whole of this age chess has grown in favour among us. In
+most of our large towns for every chess club existing in 1847, there are
+ten or fifteen in 1897. On the Queen&#8217;s accession English chess players
+still felt the stimulus given to the game in London from 1780-95 by Andr&eacute;
+Fran&ccedil;ois Danican, commonly known as &#8216;Philidor.&#8217; Hence may be dated the
+earliest English chess clubs, and the scientific study of the game. Three
+years before the Victorian age began, a series of matches was played by
+the English Alexander MacDonell and the French Labourdonnais. In 1844, the
+English Howard Staunton defeated the French St Amant in a match which
+decided the championship of the world. This, followed in 1847<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> by the
+publication of Staunton&#8217;s <i>Chessplayer&#8217;s Handbook</i>, brought hundreds more
+to the board.</p>
+
+<p>Another agency in the same direction was the presence in Europe of a young
+American, Paul Morphy. His play was, upon the whole, the finest the world
+has ever seen. He crossed the Atlantic in 1857; at the close of 1858 he
+had beaten every European noteworthy enough to try conclusions with him.
+The effect of these triumphs, won by a youth of twenty-one in the most
+difficult of all games, was electrical. No considerable town in the
+country was without its chess clubs. Nor is the influence more recently
+exercised by J. H. Blackburne less remarkable in its way. His skill in
+playing games without the board, exhibited in all parts of the United
+Kingdom, has raised up many imitators, but scarcely an equal.</p>
+
+<p>With these great players there have come also fresh scientific discoveries
+in the conduct of the game itself; the first of these as to time was the
+Scotch Gambit, partially anticipated indeed by Italian writers in the last
+century, but owing its new name and later vogue to its adoption by the
+Scotch players in the correspondence match between Edinburgh and London,
+1824 to 1826 and subsequently improved upon in 1837. About that latter
+year, too, W. D. Evans, of the Royal Navy, invented the Gambit which now
+bears his name. Stimulated by these British achievements, the Austrian
+players hit upon the Vienna or Queen&#8217;s Knights game which was first made
+famous during the tournament of 1873. In this country, most of these
+advances have been sensibly helped by the movement that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> <i>Illustrated
+London News</i> began in 1842, which the whole press has since followed, of
+publishing chess problems.</p>
+
+<p>An exhibition of feminine needlework justly forms a feature in the
+Commemoration shows of the period. In 1837 the decorative functions of the
+needle were oftener shown by English women of the middle classes than by
+acknowledged fashion leaders. In 1867 it is the middle class ladies who do
+most of the reading and the ultra-fashionable ones who do most of the
+fancy work. What transformations has this latter passed through? In 1857,
+as it had been in 1837, the mode was to work patterns for cushions and
+screens with Berlin wool on canvas. The squareness of the cross stitch was
+fatal to artistic effect; the covering thus decorated went out of fashion
+soon after Rowland&#8217;s Macassar hair oil ceased lavishly to be used, and
+heads no longer gleamed with unguent. The frame work was succeeded by that
+known to the Afghans as &#8216;boning,&#8217; and to Britons as crochet, while chairs
+and sofas still needed some protection from locks not yet wholly
+unanointed. Even the crochet coverlets, tied with little pink ribbons,
+began to disappear when people left their hair to nature. But the artistic
+instinct was slowly helping forward this sort of work.</p>
+
+<p>More popular than crochet had ever been, leather frames for pictures, cut
+out of leaves copied from Nature, or the pinning down of fern leaves on a
+soft cloth or silk began to be; for these Indian ink, used with a fine
+brush made an effective background. Ruskin&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> gospel of following Nature
+had not been preached in vain. Accomplished women like the late Lady
+Marion Alford began to revive, with improvements of her own, the art of
+embroidering flowers, plants, birds and butterflies in wool or silk; while
+the stately arum lilies were used for screens, and gorgeous poppies for
+curtains. Next came a renascence of lace work. Many amateurs produced
+beautiful samples of pillow and point; but the work was trying to the
+eyes, and competed unfairly with the poor professionals of Honiton or
+Nottingham.</p>
+
+<p>The early days of Ritualism popularized the copying of the borders of the
+old painted missals and prettily occupied many drawing rooms. Oil painting
+on pottery, wood, and glass came in during the early South Kensingtonian
+period. All young ladies now were water colour artists, or busied
+themselves with colouring panels and dados on their friend&#8217;s walls. Brass
+work was a later and not very long lived development. It was costly; it
+was noisy; the long suffering male gradually rose up against it. Iron
+work, the torturing into fantastic shapes of ductile strips of metal, was
+a little more enduring; but it required too much accuracy and too many
+instruments ever to be very popular. The beautiful glass painting in
+churches of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford was admired rather than
+reproduced.</p>
+
+<p>Irish cabins supplied a modish industry to English drawing rooms in drawn
+linen work. The principle of this seems to be hem stitching, or unbinding
+work into the spaces left by the drawn threads. Poker work done within the
+outline traced by this simple<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> instrument on a wooden board, is practised
+successfully by ladies of genius who could touch nothing without adorning
+it, but is scarcely to be commended to bunglers or in school rooms.<a name='fna_118' id='fna_118' href='#f_118'><small>[118]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+<p class="title">THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:&mdash;HOME AND COLONIAL</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="hang">Significance of the New Law Court buildings in London. Early efforts
+after law reform in Parliament. No appreciable result till 1841. Slow
+progress and subsequent changes, culminating in the 1869 Commission,
+and the 1873 Judicature Act. The popular consequences of this, and
+general view of our legal system as it affects to-day the Colonies as
+well as the mother country.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Transformation in our Colonial system shown by the latest facts and
+figures. Special usefulness as well as Imperial value of the Colonies
+to England. Social fusion of the mother country and the Colonies
+prefigured by the presence and influence on both sides of the Atlantic
+of the American element in the best society in London. Individual
+influences which have promoted this movement, and are doing the same
+thing for our Colonial cousins, as for our American.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>No architectural change during the age has more affected the perspective
+of Fleet Street and the Strand than the disappearance of Temple Bar and
+its replacement by the griffin which marks its former site, and the
+erection of the Royal Courts of Justice that now flank the central
+thoroughfare. This is the outward and visible sign of a transformation not
+less great, as regards the administration of the law within the new palace
+of justice itself.</p>
+
+<p>The Reform Act of 1832 was followed by various<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span> movements in Parliament in
+the direction of law reform. The proposals and their very slight results
+were solely technical; the public reaped no appreciable benefit so long as
+the separation of the Common Law Courts from the Court of Chancery
+existed, and on different sides of Westminster Hall two legal systems,
+
+often mutually antagonistic, were at work. Ten years after the Accession,
+the monopoly of Serjeants of Law in the old Court of Common Pleas was
+swept away. Still justice was delayed. During the early days of railway
+enterprise, commerce was obstructed, by the postponement, for inadequate
+or vexatious reasons, of the trial of cases arising out of bills of
+exchange on which large sums of money depended, and which, till they were
+decided, blocked commercial enterprise. This may be looked back to now as
+the scholastic era in nineteenth century law administration. The
+categories into which causes and kinds of legal action and pleas, were
+divided, in their pedantic complexity, recalled the tortuous refinements
+of the logical school men upon the comparatively simple predicaments of
+Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>In 1851 a flagrant and inveterate anomaly was removed by the success of
+those law reformers who had long in vain protested against the absurdity
+of disallowing the evidence of persons immediately interested in the suit.
+After this, the movement did not pause till the Commission of 1869 was
+appointed, with the result that in 1873 there passed the Judicature Act
+which has amalgamated conflicting usages<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> into a homogeneous system, and
+produced the long desired fusion between Equity and Law. The ancient
+divisions are perpetuated to-day not in different Courts but in different
+divisions of the same Court. The result briefly stated is that
+notwithstanding the real difference which still exists between Equity and
+Law, and the practical division of the Bar into two branches, Law and
+Equity can to-day be administered by the same Courts and one judge can
+give suitors the same relief as any other judge.</p>
+
+<p>There is now no possibility of a question being decided by one tribunal
+according to Common Law principles, and by another according to the
+principles of Equity. To prevent any chance of confusion it has further
+been enacted that wherever the rules of Equity and Law seem to conflict,
+those of Common Law are to prevail. The principle of a division of labour
+still exists. Every judge, that is, does not transact every sort of
+business. The judges in the Chancery division are still specially charged
+with the execution of trusts and other such matters, even as happened in
+the case of their predecessors fifty years ago. To do justice with as
+little regard as may be to forms and precedents is the visible object of
+the administrators of the law in every department. That professional
+prejudices should have disappeared was not to be expected, and, perhaps,
+not to be desired. But the exclusive etiquette of judges and lawyers is
+not greater than prevails in other professions, among doctors,
+diplomatists, or divines. The plaintiff in person is no more welcome in
+the reformed, than in the unreformed, Courts; nor, in the interests of
+public time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> and of common sense, is it probably to be wished that he
+should be. The two principal and practical defects in the administration
+of English law that still need attention would seem to be&mdash;one, the
+barbarous system which still obtains through the imperfect arrangements of
+the Circuit Courts of keeping untried prisoners unreasonably long in
+prison. Of late cases have been noticed in which persons, proved on trial
+to be innocent, have been detained in prison for weeks or months. The
+second defect is the undue licence allowed to the legal profession of
+protracting the hearing of cases secondary in their importance by the
+accumulation of unnecessary evidence and cross-examination. This has often
+been objected to, but has seldom been firmly controlled by the judges.</p>
+
+<p>The great public benefit conferred by the reforms whose monument is the
+New Law Courts hard by the church of St Clement Danes, may be condensed
+into the remark that whereas from 1837 to 1875 it was an accident whether
+the right party won his case, the presumption in favour of his success in
+1897 is so strong as almost to amount to a certainty.</p>
+
+<p>Of another sort of fusion, that between the two divisions of the legal
+profession, solicitors and barristers, much has been heard. But in Canada
+and some other Colonies some inconvenience and disadvantage are found to
+result from the absence of any distinction between barristers and
+solicitors. Gradually, perhaps, a solution in practice is being arrived
+at. Without mentioning individual names it is the fact that among the men
+who now stand highest, whether at the Bar or on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> Bench, many while
+students at the Inns of Court have perfected themselves in the practical
+details of law by voluntarily attending the offices of great firms of
+solicitors, whether in Westminster or elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>The palace of justice whose opening marked the close of the fourth decade
+of the reign, commemorates, in a fashion of its own, the unity of the
+Empire as well as the late achieved unity of the administration of
+justice.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Queen&#8217;s subjects are nations not only of every creed and of
+every colour, but trained in obedience to every code of law which human
+skill has devised. Since the modern era of our Colonial Empire began in
+1836, the practice has been to continue to those dependencies the laws
+under which they were when they came into being, or when they were first
+acquired by diplomatic cession or military conquest, always provided that
+these pre-existent systems do not contradict the fundamental principles of
+British jurisprudence. Thus, in British Guiana, in the Cape Colony, and in
+Ceylon, the letter and spirit of Roman-Dutch law have been continued under
+English rule. In lower Canada, French forms have become so confused as to
+be impracticable: the laws of this province are to-day identical with
+those in vogue in England at the time of its acquisition in 1763,
+periodically of course improved by modern lights. In the Mauritius, the
+French Code Civile and the French Code de Commerce still exist. It is for
+the sovereign embodying in her own person the unity of the Empire to
+decide through the Privy Council, that is, to-day, through the Judicial<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span>
+Committee in all disputed cases what the particular law of the locality
+may be.</p>
+
+<p>On page 227 of the writer&#8217;s earlier book <i>England</i>, etc., the Colonial as
+well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Privy Council Judicial
+Committee was explained in detail. Since those words were written an
+important step has been taken under an Act passed some years ago by Lord
+Herschell. By this, the Chief Justice of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry de
+Villiers, Chief Justice Sir Henry Strong of Canada, Sir Samuel Way, Chief
+Justice of South Australia, have been added to the Judicial Committee of
+the Privy Council, in order to strengthen that body with special reference
+to the Roman-Dutch, French-Canadian and Australasian law, in legislation
+and practice. Here too, it is well to refer to the recent formation of the
+Society of Comparative Legislation. This body is actively engaged and has
+already done good work in classifying materials throughout the Empire, as
+well as in accumulating a compendium of information which will greatly
+promote the simplicity and uniformity of the laws of the world.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>Some distinct idea must, however, be formed of the concrete reality
+connoted by the familiar expression &#8216;Colonial Empire,&#8217; beginning, as in
+truth for our generation it did, with the founding of the Australasian
+capital called Adelaide, after his Queen, in the last year of William IV.,
+but practically co-extensive in its growth with the reign of his
+successor. The area of the United Kingdom is 121,000 square miles. That of
+its possessions in foreign parts is 8,725,000<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> square miles. In other
+words the mother country is only in extent a seventieth part of the Empire
+of which that mother country is the nucleus.</p>
+
+<p>To put the facts somewhat differently this British Empire, covering some
+9,000,000 square miles, occupies a fifth part of the habitable globe. No
+other world power such as this has been known to past or can be found in
+present history. The British Empire of the Victorian age is five times as
+large as was the Empire of Darius five centuries before the Christian Era
+began. It is four times the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Among
+modern Powers, the Empire of Great Britain is larger by an eighth than
+that of Russia; it contains 230 millions more people. It is sixteen times
+as great as the foreign dominions of France; forty times as great as the
+Empire of Germany. Seven days and nights of continuous travelling are
+required to cross the American Continent. The lands which owe allegiance
+to the monarch of these Islands are three times as extensive as those
+composing the Republican Empire of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>The relative progress, according to the population test, of the mother
+country, and the nationalities, voluntarily incorporated into her
+government, beyond seas will best be judged by the facts and figures of a
+comparatively recent contrast, such as is alone practicable in the case of
+an essentially modern experience. Between 1871, then, and 1881, the
+increase in the inhabitants of the United Kingdom was at the rate of 10
+per cent. In the case of our American Colonies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> it was 19 per cent.; in
+the case of our Australasian it was 42 per cent. The same progress which
+has marked our recent history in other respects than numbers at home, has
+not been wanting with our kin beyond sea. Thus, in respect of education;
+in the single province of Quebec, then fairly typical of our other
+possessions, in 1837 barely one-fourth of the population could read; less
+than one-tenth could make even a pretence at writing. In 1897 there are in
+the same province 4,000 schools, with a total of 200,000 scholars, each of
+whom is periodically certified by examiners to be making gradual progress
+in the prescribed standards, according to age, and qualified individually
+to swell the claim upon the Government grant for efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>As for higher teaching, all our principal Colonies have their
+Universities. In the mother country, corresponding progress since the
+legislation of 1870 was at work was shown by the ability of the framer of
+that measure, the late W. E. Forster, himself well known in the Colonies,
+before his death in 1885, to point to the fact that the school attendance
+from being seven per cent. before his Act was passed had within fifteen
+years&#8217; operation of that measure risen to seventeen per cent. In the
+Australasian Colonies the results are not less striking than in the mother
+country or in the Canadian. In 1837 New South Wales was without a
+constitution as well as without any elementary education machinery of its
+own. Within rather less than half a century the institution of responsible
+government had been followed by an Education Act<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> on the same lines as the
+English Act of 1870, but providing inter-mediate schools as well, with the
+result that the last census in Victoria shows that, of every 10,000
+children of school age, 9,500 could read, and more than 8,500 could write.</p>
+
+<p>These are specimen cases which establish the point that the extension of
+English power is accompanied by the spread of whatever advantages modern
+civilization can bring. As was seen in the preceding chapter, since the
+Colonial Bishoprics movement of 1851, religion has followed everywhere in
+the wake of our Empire. So, too, has education. These are the things which
+distinguish the Colonial methods of Great Britain from those of any other
+country whether in earlier or in contemporary times.</p>
+
+<p>Dependencies, <i>i.e.</i> places necessary for the maintenance of Empire, but
+not suitable for permanent British habitation; Crown Colonies, controlled
+by a Governor, and legislated for by orders in Council, with, as soon as
+the soil is ripe for it, some representative Council on the spot,
+reduplications of the mother country under foreign suns, with
+Constitutions of their own and representative Government after the pattern
+of the United Kingdom; these are the different heads under which the
+Colonial Empire that has grown up in our age may be divided. As this
+Empire is in itself new, so the machinery for its central administration
+in the form in which it now exists is a product of the present reign.
+Evelyn the diarist, writing under date February 28th, 1671, mentions his
+appointment as a member of the Committee of the Privy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> Council, that had
+been established in 1660 for controlling the foreign plantations. This
+Council in 1672 was joined to the Council of Trade, the entire body being
+called the Council of Trade and Plantations. That was reconstituted in
+1695, and again in 1748, when India came under its charge, continuing to
+remain under it until the appointment of the Board of Control in 1784.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of our century, War and Colonies formed the province of a
+single Secretary of State and continued to do so till 1854. The first
+Colonial Secretary holding that office alone was Sir George Grey, followed
+in 1859 by the Duke of Newcastle. This was the Peelite duke whose father
+had founded the Newcastle scholarship at Eton, and who himself accompanied
+the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1859. The Colonies were not the
+department he had desired when Lord Palmerston formed his last Government,
+but he did his work not unsympathetically and bequeathed his post in good
+order to Cardwell. The ablest of the earlier Colonial Secretaries was
+without doubt Lord Grey, son of the Reformer, who held the office in Lord
+John Russell&#8217;s Administration. During the forties, especially in 1849,
+Colonial sensitiveness was wounded by the perpetual motions brought
+forward in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume and others of his party for
+reducing the salary of Colonial Governors,<a name='fna_119' id='fna_119' href='#f_119'><small>[119]</small></a> accompanied as these
+motions were by language not complimentary to the new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> polities. Not
+without party criticism had the office of Parliamentary Under Secretary
+been created in 1810. The same opposition was called forth by the
+appointment of Permanent Under Secretaries, and Legal Advisers to the Home
+Government in 1867, in 1870, 1874, and by the vote for the new Colonial
+offices in Downing Street first occupied in 1876. In 1897 politicians of
+all parties take the same patriotic pride in the Colonial Empire, while an
+ex-Radical leader is that Empire&#8217;s Minister. The increased popularity of
+Colonial in preference to United States emigration is shown by the fact
+that in 1837 35,264 persons went to the Colonies, and some sixty years
+later the number was 52,029.</p>
+
+<p>The pride that the Queen&#8217;s subjects take in the Empire beyond seas,
+created by Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and the honour they derive from it are
+accompanied by the growing interest with which the Colonies are regarded
+by political thinkers who see in their development an anticipation of the
+constitutional movements soon to be witnessed on British soil. The
+Australian legislatures have not only kept pace with, they have stolen a
+march on, the socialistic Radicals of the old country. New Zealand
+generally has led the way. This and three other Colonies, New South Wales,
+Victoria and Tasmania, have adopted Woman&#8217;s Suffrage with the legislative
+freaks which seem to be its sequel. To the action of this franchise<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> is
+attributed the proposal recently made in one of these Parliaments to give
+every domestic servant a statutory holiday once a week. Tasmania, too,
+will not apparently be satisfied till she has secured the Swiss Referendum
+for ending disputes between the two legislative Chambers by submitting the
+single point in issue to the constituencies. Tasmania, also, has made
+several efforts, as yet unsuccessfully, to acclimatise the Hare system of
+proportional representation which is now forgotten in England, save when
+some theorist uses a periodical re-adjustment of our franchise, to revive
+its interest. South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, have also
+attempted, but not as yet carried, the establishment of national banks;
+perilous experiments enough for any new, or for that matter old, country.</p>
+
+<p>Individual effort gave England its Colonies. The same agency&mdash;as embodied
+in a Gibbon Wakefield, who began life by being Secretary to Lord Durham in
+Canada 1838, who, 1839, obtained the annexation and colonization of New
+Zealand, and who in 1849 published <i>The Art of Colonization</i>; in a Sir
+William Molesworth, the pioneer of Colonial self-government; who,
+obtaining from Palmerston the great object of his ambition, the Colonial
+Secretaryship 1853, died shortly afterwards; more recently in the fourth
+Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary (1866-7; 1874-8)&mdash;applied the social
+cement which has joined the new countries with the old in personal rather
+than in merely political relation. Colonial patriotism was also reasonably
+gratified on its intellectual side by Mr Lowe&#8217;s sojourn in New<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> South
+Wales 1843-50, and by Sir Robert G. W. Herbert&#8217;s share in the
+Administration of Queensland before he became Colonial Under Secretary in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>A shrewd Colonial statesman not long since observed that if another flying
+Australian, but a born and bred Colonial horse, were to win the Derby, no
+whisper of separation from the British Crown would ever be heard among the
+most advanced of Colonial democrats. Popular enthusiasm at the Antipodean
+winner of the Blue Ribbon would spread from Epsom Downs throughout the
+kingdom; it would be flashed along every wire or transmitted by every
+cable to the four winds of heaven; the Colonists would cease to complain
+that they, or their products, were not appreciated by the mother country.
+This half serious remark contains more than a grain of truth; it points to
+the fact that the grievance alleged by our kinsman beyond sea against the
+headquarters of their race is sentimental, rather than practical. Pending
+the Derby winner from beyond seas, the less sternly democratic of
+England&#8217;s Colonial cousins have appreciated the peerages bestowed on a few
+of them, and can point to other substantial proofs that they have become a
+power in English society. Thus they have founded clubs in London; they
+possess a party of their own in the House of Commons, and entertain the
+social leaders of the old country at their balls and parties during the
+season in famous restaurants, or at their own homes.</p>
+
+<p>Till the Victorian age was well developed, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span> latter day American
+elements in London fashion were unheard of. To-day these leaven the whole
+of our social life. It is those born under the Stripes and Stars who
+relieve, at a princely rental, English nobles of house property which its
+owners are not occupying, and supply Countesses and Duchesses to the
+English peerage. The great feature of our time has been the concentration
+of our people in the Metropolis. A like gravitation to towns has indeed
+taken place throughout the whole country. Between the eighties and the
+nineties, the increase of the urban population has been 3,016,579; the
+decrease of the rural has been 139,545.<a name='fna_120' id='fna_120' href='#f_120'><small>[120]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>With respect to this movement, as in other matters, London has shown
+itself the true mirror of England. For a proof of this, it would be enough
+to mention the Langham Hotel, and those caravanserais which have followed
+it, down to the latest and most palatial of all, the Hotel Cecil. That the
+capital thus socially re-created has been successfully reorganized as the
+most cosmopolitan and modish centre of fashion for two hemispheres is due
+largely to the agency of American dollars and American arbiters of
+elegance. In the thirties and the sixties the gifted men who were sent to
+represent the United States in the old country, a Washington Irving, and a
+Lothrop Motley, made their Embassies social centres for the most pleasant
+company of the time, attracted famous men from their own country, one of
+whom, the Rev. Cleveland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> Coxe,<a name='fna_121' id='fna_121' href='#f_121'><small>[121]</small></a> formed a lasting link between the two
+chief branches of the Anglo-Saxon Church, most of these Transatlantic
+visitors left behind them brilliant reputations as conversationalists.</p>
+
+<p>More recently a Russell Lowell and a Bayard have adorned this tradition.
+In their day, the American season following hard upon the London season
+proper has become a regular, and to all concerned most profitable,
+observance in the social calendar. The dictatresses of polite life from
+the other side of the Atlantic generally have been educated in Paris, not
+a few of them by the daughter of Emile Souvestre at that institution for
+turning intelligent girls into charming women, Les Ruches, Fontainebleau;
+they always bring with them to their London homes the tastes of citizens
+of the world. These tastes are gratified as successfully on the Thames as
+on the Seine; it is <i>la belle Americaine</i> who has most visibly impressed
+her image on the capital where, since the Second Empire fell, she has
+chiefly delighted to dwell; she decided that English life needed
+enlivening: she has enlivened it and continues to do so effectually. Some
+restlessness is constitutional to her, as also to the Anglo-Indians and
+Colonials who are perennially so much with us; thus largely to please her
+the London season is now subdivided into innumerable parts. It would be
+truer to say some form of that season lasts all the year round.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> The
+constant locomotion from one centre, or from one country seat to another,
+began, as has been already seen, with the Prince Consort. It has not been
+discouraged by later representatives of the Crown. From the day that in
+1860 the Prince of Wales visited the tomb of George Washington, he has
+never lost the American heart. The new London r&eacute;gime exactly suits the
+future peeresses of the old country when they are fresh from New York.</p>
+
+<p>The constant alternations of Hyde Park promenades, not only with suburban
+racecourses, but with long days under summer suns given to Thames-side
+picnics, or with rapid flittings on any opportunity to and fro between
+Mayfair on the one hand, the Boulevard des Italiens, Monte Carlo, or
+Homburg on the other: these innovations have been brought about by the
+American Londoner more than by any other single person. The Colonial
+millionaire or millionairess has not yet been so fully developed as their
+Transatlantic equivalents. But the process is going steadily forward, no
+doubt with similar results to follow.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast between the amount of international friction that was caused
+before the Oregon Boundary dispute, and the Trent difference, between the
+two countries were composed in 1846 and in 1863, respectively, and the
+comparative ease with which the Venezuela Question in our own day was
+settled, suggests the solid international advantages of the arrangement
+under which New York and London have become socially one and the same
+capital, having their pleasures, their lions and lionesses, their
+favourite composers, authors, dramatists and players, in common.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span>The late Mr Samuel Ward, who is as well remembered in London as in New
+York, and who liked to be called the prince of <i>bon vivants</i> at
+Delmonico&#8217;s, the king of the lobby at Washington, was a cultivated little
+old gentleman, of whom it is difficult to conceive as ever having been
+much less, or more, than some seventy-odd years of age. He was known
+throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon world as &#8216;Uncle Sam.&#8217; He had become
+popular in English society soon after the examples of the then Lord
+Hartington and Lord Rosebery included America in the grand tour of every
+educated Briton. He really did something to entitle him to his universal
+sobriquet. He was the founder of a social and literary Anglo-American
+school which has struck its roots deep in the chosen homes of English
+fashion. As Californian gold preceded Australian, so the Transatlantic
+force that has transformed the social England of our day has come before
+the fully organized exercise of a Colonial power of the same sort. But
+every year brings one visibly nearer its final development, with all the
+international advantages which will no doubt accompany that event.<a name='fna_122' id='fna_122' href='#f_122'><small>[122]</small></a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span></p>
+<p class="title">INDEX</p>
+
+
+<p>
+A<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Addresses</span> of Prince Consort on Exhibition of 1851, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Agnew</span>, Mr (now Sir William), sketch of, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gives &pound;10,100 for Gainsborough&#8217;s Duchess of Devonshire, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Alfred</span> Club, the &#8216;Dandies&#8217; Club, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">named after Count Alfred D&#8217;Orsay, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Almack&#8217;s</span>, subscription balls at, at end of 18th century, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">modern suburban subscription balls, imitations of, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">American</span> elements in modern London Society, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">countesses and duchesses, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">embassies and ministers&mdash;Washington Irving and Motley, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Russell Lowell and Bayard, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ladies, their education in Paris, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">restlessness a characteristic feature of, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">An&aelig;sthetics</span>, discovery of, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Simpson&#8217;s use of, at Edinburgh, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Morton and Robinson&#8217;s work in connection with, at New York, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Appetite</span> for higher teaching, universality of, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Aristocracy</span> of birth and wealth, Sir R. Peel&#8217;s attitude towards, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Arkwright</span>, inventor of spinning jenny, founder of two county families, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Army</span>, traditional jealousy of, by House of Commons, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a bequest from the Puritans, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">strength of, reduced by two-thirds immediately after Waterloo, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>personnel</i> of, during Napoleonic Wars, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social position of private soldier in, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">treatment of soldiers in, by Duke of Wellington, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">by Lords Wolseley and Roberts, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">flogging in, not abolished until 1860, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as a profession, now self-supporting, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">except in guards and cavalry, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">retrenchment of pay in, impolitic, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">education of officers in, in 1837, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1897, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">promotions from ranks of, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">average annual number of, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Art</span>, improvement in, since Exhibition of 1851, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">promoted by rise of wealthy and cultivated classes, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in the days of Sir Martin Archer Shee, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Sir Charles Eastlake, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Leighton and Millais, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Artists</span>, old social prejudice against, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">same as against doctors, singers and players, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">alleged reason for, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">foreign education of, in painters&#8217; studios, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">English training at Royal Academy, Slade or other schools, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Athen&aelig;um</span> Club, doors of, opened to Macready and the Keans, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Austin</span>, Charles, his two fortunes made out of railway bills, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Aveland</span>, Lord, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+B<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Bacon</span>, Francis, Lord, fillip given to scientific study by, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Barnes</span>, editor of the <i>Times</i>, &#8216;The most powerful man in the country,&#8217; <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Bath</span>, Marquis of, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield</span>, Earl of, <i>see</i> <a href="#disraeli">Disraeli</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Bedchamber</span> Plot, account of, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Bell</span>, Andrew, founder of Bell&#8217;s scholarships at Cambridge, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first promoter of a scheme for national education, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Board</span> Schools, growth of, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">for elementary instruction, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">playgrounds and gymnasia at, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">for higher grade teaching, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">laboratories and workrooms at, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">improvements in private schools produced by, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Boleyn</span>, Anne, Queen of Henry VIII., descended from Sir Godfrey Boleyn, a Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Brassey</span>, Thomas, railway contractor, sketch of, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">millionaire, before he built his last railway, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Braybrooke</span>, Lord, descended from Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">British</span> Association, steady success of, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">idea of, not of British origin, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">smallness of early meetings of, at Leipsic and Berlin, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">associated with names of Prince Consort and Lord Salisbury, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appeal of Brewster, Herschel and Humphry Davy to Government on behalf of, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">objects of, described at meeting at York, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">meetings of, at Oxford 1831, Cambridge 1832, Edinburgh 1833, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">over 500,000 members of, at the present time, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">British</span> and Foreign Bible Society, <i>see</i> <a href="#missionary">Missionary Societies</a>.<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Brougham</span>, Lord, his work in relation to popularizing science, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Buckingham</span>, Duke of, descended from Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Mayor, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Buildings</span>, Municipal, great improvement in architecture of, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in that of warehouses and shops in towns, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in private houses of suburban London, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+C<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cabinet</span> system, discovered by Sunderland, son-in-law of Marlborough, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">definite triumph of, in 1828, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Carpenter</span>, Doctor, exploration of the nervous system by, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Chadwick</span>, Edwin, his work as a sanitary reformer, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Chartism</span>, formerly an active force, now a name, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">most of the demands of, now matured into law, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Duke of Wellington&#8217;s defence of London against, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Chess</span>, progress of study of, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Prince Leopold as a player of, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">comparison of, with whist and billiards, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stimulus given to game of, by &#8216;Phillidor,&#8217; <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and by Staunton, Paul Morphy and Blackburne, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">invention of gambits at, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Scotch gambit, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Evans&#8217;s gambit, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Vienna or Queen&#8217;s Knights gambit, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">publication of problems on, by <i>Illustrated London News</i>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">imitated by other papers, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Church</span> of England, status of, in 1897, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">national regard for, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">parochial system of, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">benefactions to, during present era, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reduced incomes of livings belonging to, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">notwithstanding work of Ecclesiastical Commission, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of Queen Anne&#8217;s bounty, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">readjustment of incomes of livings needed, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dioceses of, abroad, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clergy of, abroad, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">christianity of, a reconciler of rival creeds, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tributes to world-wide efficacy of doctrines of, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Clubs</span>, beneficial effect of, for adults, in west end of London, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">established in east end by university settlements, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as co-operative homes for poor gentlemen, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">increase of social, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">decrease of gambling clubs, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">working men&#8217;s, combined with gymnasia, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">popularity of, with wives of working men, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mostly federated with Working Men&#8217;s Club and Institute Union, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">democratic sentiments of east end, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cole</span>, Sir Henry, his work at South Kensington, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> emigration, in 1837 and 1897, compared, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> Empire, area of, compared with area of England, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with Persian and Roman Empires, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and with Russia, Germany, France and America, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">progress of, as indicated by increase of populations, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">by advance in education, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">by institution of Colonial Parliaments, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> offices, in Downing Street, completed in 1876, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> party in House of Commons, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> peerages, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> secretary, Sir George Grey, first, in 1854, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">office of, previously held in conjunction with some other office, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonial</span> secretaries, eminent, Duke of Newcastle in 1859, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Cardwell, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonies</span>, social development of, in the past, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">anticipations of, in the future, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Colonists</span>, London clubs devoted to, and their friends, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Radicalism of, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as displayed in Legislatures of New Zealand, New South Wales and Victoria, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Commercial</span> middle class, growth of, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">beginnings of, in the days of the Edwards, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">culminated with Cobden, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not five Conservative members connected with, in 1835, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Commons</span>, House of, composition of, in 1707, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of members of, in 1707, compared with 1879, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">altered manners of members of, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;cockcrowings&#8217; in debates of, on Church Rates, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;disorder&#8217; in, during debates on Mr Gladstone&#8217;s second Irish Bill, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Constituencies</span>, right of appeal to, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">permission to appeal to, given to Sir R. Peel in 1841, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">alternative of immediate or postponed appeal to, placed before the Queen in 1868 by Disraeli, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Contrast</span> between condition of working classes now and twenty years ago, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Convocation</span>, revival of, in 1854, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">declares <i>Essays and Reviews</i> heretical, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reflects, as a clerical parliament, views of church, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">work of, illustrated, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">possible use of, in event of disestablishment, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Corporation</span> Act, introduced by Lord John Russell in 1835, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">two millions of Englishmen affected by, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">abuses prior to passing of, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">London not included in operation of, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons for excluding London from operation of, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Corrupt</span> Practices at Elections Bill, 1883, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Country</span> squire, disappearance of, in country and in Parliament, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">County</span> Councils, election of councillors to, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">co-optation of aldermen from among councillors of, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">term of office in, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">presidents of, county magistrates, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">elections to, by ballot, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">expenses of elections to, defrayed out of county rate, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">jurisdiction of, how far co-ordinate with that of Quarter Sessions, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">does not extend to public house licensing, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mixed committees of old and new magistracy, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">checks and limitations on borrowing powers of, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">controlled in different parts of England by different classes, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">judicial functions of magistrates unaffected by, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">peers as chairmen of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">representatives of, on governing bodies of secondary schools, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">County</span> Councils Act, 1888, principle of, same as that of Corporation Act, 1835, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of administrative counties under, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">electoral divisions of counties under, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">electors, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">municipalities inside County Council area, dealt with by, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Court</span>, The, the federal head of Society. <a href="#Page_408">408</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">central idea of Prince Consort&#8217;s policy, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">illustrations of the working of the idea, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cox</span>, David, his pictures, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prices received by him for, in his lifetime, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prices paid for pictures by, now, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cranborne</span>, Viscount, title from Sir Christopher Gascoigne, Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cricket</span>, growth of, during Victorian era, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">increased power of the bat, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pre-eminent position of W. G. Grace as a batsman, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of Richardson as a bowler, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Crime</span>, statistics of, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">close connection between ignorance and crime, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Crystal</span> Palace, magnificence of orchestra at, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">maintained continuously since 1854, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">concerts, influence and &aelig;sthetic value of, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+D<br />
+<br />
+&#8216;<span class="smcap">Daily</span> Telegraph&#8217; started in 1856 by Colonel Sleigh, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dandies</span>, the toilettes of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Darby</span>, J. L., founder of sect of Plymouth Brethren, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">split among followers of, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Darwin</span>, Charles, publication by, of <i>Origin of Species</i>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">epoch in science created by, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">doctrine of survival of the fittest enunciated by, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">anticipated in point of time by Dr Maillet, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and foreshadowed by Erasmus Darwin and others, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relations of Herbert Spencer and, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">apparent reaction against theories of, setting in, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Death-rate</span>, steady reduction in death-rate, due to progress of physical and surgical science, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">from 23 per million in 1855, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to 21 per million in 1875, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and 18 per million in 1895, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">De Lane</span>, John T., editor of the <i>Times</i>, sketch of, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence and power, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his personality kept in background, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Disraeli&#8217;s remark, &#8216;I had better postpone giving my views of De Lane till he is dead,&#8217; <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Democracy</span>, instinctive, of great English schools, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">modern, confirmed by Lodger Franchise in boroughs by Act of 1867, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">completed by extension to counties in 1884, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Denbigh</span>, Earl of, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Devonshire</span>, the Duke of, and Sunday crowds in Hyde Park, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dilke</span>, C. W., proprietor of <i>Athen&aelig;um</i> newspaper, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">called in to edit <i>Daily News</i> in 1849, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reduces price of paper, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dilke</span> Commission, presided over by Prince of Wales, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">power to destroy unhealthy dwellings, result of, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a consequence of the enlarged idea of royal service, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.</span><br />
+<br /><a name="disraeli" id="disraeli"></a>
+<span class="smcap">Disraeli</span>, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, sketch of, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Young England school of 1846, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">services rendered by the Young England movement, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of the <i>Coningsby</i>, of, on opening of parks, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sends Lord Rowton to visit and report on Clerkenwell outrage, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">impressions made on Lord Rowton by visit, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">District</span> Councils, establishment of, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">seats on, objects of ambition among a certain class, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">jurisdiction of, commensurate with that of rural sanitary authority, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">special business of, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">members of, guardians of the poor, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">female members of, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">chairmen of, become county magistrates, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">assessment, part of duty of, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dixie</span>, Sir Wolston, Lord Mayor of London, ancestor of the peerages of Compton and Northampton, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Donaldson</span> Museum of Musical Instruments at South Kensington, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Duelling</span>, practice of, discussed, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">still in vogue in time of Sir Robert Peel, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">abolition of, attempted by Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">courts of honour suggested as substitutes for, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">amendment of articles of war, April 1844, the first real blow to, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Duels</span>, celebrated, between Canning and Castlereagh, 1809, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wellington and Winchilsea, 1829, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Monro and Fawcett, 1843, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+E<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">East End</span>, homes founded in the, by Oxford and Cambridge, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">St Margaret&#8217;s House in the, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">population of, tact required in dealing with, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">resentment of patronage by, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Eastlake</span>, Sir Charles, President of Royal Academy, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">proposes health of Prince Consort at Royal Academy dinner, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reply of Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Education</span>, Act 1870, W. E. Foster&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">School Boards established by, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compulsory only when voluntary efforts failed, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Act 1880, Mundella&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">made compulsory under, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">made free by Act of 1891, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Education</span> Department, first organisation of, in 1839, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first vice-president of, appointed in 1856, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not concerned with Secondary Education, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Education</span>, National, State responsibility for, ignored till 1833, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Samuel Whitbread earliest promoter of, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">proposes foundation of National Schools for, in 1809, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme of, brought forward by Lord Brougham, 1820, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first grant towards, in 1833, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Melbourne&#8217;s attempt to include Roman Catholics in benefit of grant for, in 1839, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, first promoters of a general and practical scheme for, 1836, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">previously left to be dealt with by Church of England and other religious bodies, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Education</span>, Private, by reading and by lectures, compared, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Eglinton</span>, Earl of, pre-eminence of, in early Victorian era, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Eliot</span>, George, influence of Herbert Spencer on, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and through her on language of literature, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Endowed</span> Schools Act, 1874, objects of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">work accomplished by, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Endowed</span> Schools Commission, now merged in Charity Commission, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Epping</span> Forest, Crown rights over, sold in 1842, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">declared a public pleasure ground, 1882, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Eton</span>, example of social evolution of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not injuriously affected by the &#8216;new rich,&#8217; <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">expenses of education at, not increased, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lessons learnt at, which books cannot teach, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Latin verses, things of the past at, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">honours at Oxford and Cambridge during last forty years, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social discipline of, shared with Harrow, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">successes of, boys direct from school in Civil Service examinations, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Woolwich and Sandhurst, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">public opinion at, favourable to work at school, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">new workshops at, for use of school, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">study of natural science at, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">classics and mathematics not displaced at, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Etonians</span>, distinguished, of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_171">171-3</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the 12th Earl of Derby, the most typical of, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Evolution</span>, the sociological feature of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Exeter</span> School, connection of, with Cambridge University extension system, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Explorations</span>, at Pompeii, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and at Babylon and Nineveh, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effects of, on Roman and Biblical histories, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Exports</span>, English, stationary during early part of century, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rapid increase of, on discoveries of gold, 1848-55, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">value of, for the twenty-five years preceding repeal of the Corn-laws, 1885 millions, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">succeeding repeal, 3031 millions, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">for last twenty-five years, 1871-96, 6290 millions, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+F<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Falkner</span>, J. Pascoe, founder of Melbourne, alive in 1866, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Faraday</span>, and the Prince of Wales, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">laboratory of, at Royal Institution, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Farren</span>, the, family a race of actors, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Percival, at Haymarket Theatre, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">William, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Faucit</span>, Miss Helen, now Lady Martin, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shakesperian impersonations of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">abiding influence exercised by, on the profession, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Ferrier</span>, Dr, his work in connection with the brain, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Fines</span>, in factories, disapproval of, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lists of, compelled to be displayed in buildings, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Fiscal</span> Reforms, effects of, of Cobden, Bright and Peel, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Fitzwilliam</span>, Earl, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Football</span>, popularity of, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a recent growth, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">feuds among players at, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dangers of a referee at modern matches, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Foreigners</span>, resident in England, over 200,000, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of, doubled in twenty years, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">majority of, engaged in business, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and nearly one-half of total number in London, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">European, about 170,000, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">American, about 26,000, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">remainder Asiatics or Africans, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">proportion of males to females among, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">distribution and employments of, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pauperism amongst, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">small proportion of, employed as clerks, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">opinions of, on changes in appearance of English people in twenty years, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Foreign</span> intelligence, no longer dependent on telegrams, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">vast machinery and expenditure for supply of, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">France</span>, industry in, effects of revolution on, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">all classes in, involved in common ruin, as a consequence of revolution, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Free</span> Libraries, establishment of, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">popularity of, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sketches of working-men students at, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin and gradual growth of, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Chetham Library, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Guildhall Library, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Manchester Library, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Ewart Act, and its relation to, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">growth of metropolitan free libraries, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">examination of books most in demand at the, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Fusion</span> of classes, product of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and keynote of our epoch, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a process of levelling up, not down, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+G<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gallows</span>, in public highways until Lord Grey&#8217;s Reform Act, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gambling</span>, committee on, in 1844, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of, hells in 1841, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;Crockfords&#8217; as a, club, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;play and pay,&#8217; abolished <a href="#Page_412">412</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gladstone</span>, W. E., and Sir Robert Peel, comparative popularity of, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme of, for converting consols in 1853, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gold</span>, importation of, from Russian mines, 1837-47, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">discovery of, in California, 1848, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Ballarat, 1850, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gloomy predictions of Chevalier and Cobden as to consequences of discoveries of, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">views of Sir Roderick Murchison as to same, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;Nature&#8217;s Currency Restriction Act,&#8217; <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Sir Archibald Alison as to same, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;Nature&#8217;s Currency Extension Act,&#8217; <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">output of Mexican and Peruvian mines in fifteenth century, &pound;800,000, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Australian diggings in 1850-1, &pound;18,000,000, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fallacious arguments, as to effect of, based on &#8216;grain test,&#8217; <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">demonetization of, in Holland, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advantages of supply of, recognized by Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influx of, into Bank of England, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">decrease of bank rate, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">conversion of &pound;3 per cent. consols, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">interest on Exchequer Bills, 1&#189; per cent. per annum, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Australian cities built by, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gold</span> fields, emigration to, in 1852, 369,000, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">average for five years succeeding discovery of, 250,000 per annum, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">maximum emigration to, in any one year, 500,000, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">costs of living at, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rise of wages here, consequent on rush to, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scarcity of agricultural labour in country, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reduced to 100,000 per annum before 1859, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Goldwin</span> Smith, his fear of result of popularly elected Parliaments, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Golf</span>, revival of, as an English game, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gooch</span>, Sir Daniel, chairman of Great Western Railway, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his fortune not made in railways, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Grammar</span> schools, wasteful geographical distribution of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">well endowed, with insufficient scholars, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cases of, Chudleigh, Ashburton, Totnes and Bovey Tracey in Devon, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Walsingham, Norwich, Ipswich and Bury Saint Edmunds in East Anglia, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ossett and other schools in the north, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suggestions for utilizing decayed, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">instances of beneficial modifications of established, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bath College, excellent work done by, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">amalgamation of Somerset College and Sydney Grammar School, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Charterhouse, successfully removed from London to Godalming, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Archbishop Holgate&#8217;s, removed from Hewsworth to Barnsley, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">policy of maintaining the old, as machinery for Secondary Education, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Grants</span> for educational purposes, growth of, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first grant in 1833 of &pound;20,000, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1857, amounted to &pound;451,000, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1860, exceeded &pound;1,000,000, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1870, were &pound;1,125,000, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Gresham</span>, Sir Thomas, first of the Great Loan negotiators, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Groups</span>, government by, as in France, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as distinguished from government by party, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cycle of, a possibility in store for England, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Grove</span>, Sir George, discovery of lost scores of Schubert, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dictionary of music by, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Grove</span>, Sir William, discoveries with regard to correlation of physical forces, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Guildhall</span> School of Music, founded in 1880, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">3496 pupils at, at Christmas 1896, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+H<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hall&eacute;</span>, Charles, born in Westphalia, 1819, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Beethoven&#8217;s music popularized in England by, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hamley</span>, Sir Edward, sketch of, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his work on the <i>Operations of War</i>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Handel</span>, genius of, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">recognized by George I. when Elector of Hanover, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Te Deum</i> performed at St Paul&#8217;s in Queen Anne&#8217;s reign, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Messiah</i> produced at Dublin in 1741, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Helpless</span>, the, legislative help for, distinctive of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">initiated by Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Henry</span> VIII., privileges of people as enjoyed under Plantagenets, contracted under, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and under Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">practically ceased to exist under the Stuarts, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Henty</span>, joint-founder of Melbourne, alive 1882, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hercomer</span>, Professor, receives pupils into his studio, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Higher</span> Grade Elementary Schools, in effect secondary schools, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sixty, under control of English School Boards, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thirty-nine of the, organized as science schools, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">4606 boys and 2023 girls, students at, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Higher</span> Grade Schools Examination Board, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hospitals</span>, Prince of Wales&#8217;s fund for relief of, from debt, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">transformation in, during Victorian era, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in character of medical students at, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in management and organization of, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revenues of, modern and ancient compared, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">St Bartholomew&#8217;s in 1650 and in 1890, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">special and general, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of, in London, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">game, flowers and other presents for, the fashion and rule, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hounds</span>, packs of, number of, in England in 1837, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of, in England in 1897, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">subscribers to and supporters of, in 1897, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">House</span> of Lords, debates such as formerly took place in House of Commons now confined almost exclusively to, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">composition of, similar to composition of old House of Commons, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">really a representative body, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">socially indistinguishable from Commoners in many ways, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Peers in, created for political and social distinction, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Peerages in, conferred on Lord Carrington, Macaulay, and Tennyson, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">later on, on Lord Armstrong, on widow of W. H. Smith and on Lord Glenesk, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hudson</span>, George, the railway king, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his gorgeous chariot, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his personal appearance, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his house at Albert Gate, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">entertains royalty, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his fall, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hotel life at Calais, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with Beau Brummell, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">born at York, son of a linen draper, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">drives train conveying Queen and Prince Consort to Cambridge, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">member for Sunderland, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Huxley</span>, Professor, and spontaneous generation, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his observations anticipated by Schwann, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hyde</span> Park, the social parade ground of the kingdom, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">originally a royal pleasure ground, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visitors to, in different decades compared, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">bicycles admitted into, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early water drinkers in, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">succeeded by early riders in, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">condition of, between 1840 and 1860, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+I<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Imports</span>, value of, during last twenty-five years, nearly 10,000 millions.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Income-Tax</span>, gradual increase of, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">extended to Ireland, 1855, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Incomes</span>, assessment of, in 1855, 308 millions;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">1875, 571 millions;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">1882, 612 millions.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Indestructibility</span> of matter, ascertained chemically in eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Industries</span>, no increase in staple, during recent years, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">decrease in agricultural, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">new, constantly arising, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Intermediate</span> Education Act, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Ionian</span> physicists, anticipation of modern discoveries by, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Irish</span> Famine, compared with that at Orissa, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on, in connection with Malthusian doctrine, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Irving</span>, Sir Henry, sketch of, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Islington</span> in 1840, still a country suburb, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+J<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Jacob</span> Omnium, nickname of Thackeray&#8217;s friend, Big Higgins, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Jersey</span>, Lady, popularity of, in early Victorian period, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Jews</span>, sufferings of, in England, under Henry III., <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">levies on, Westminster Abbey completed by, in reigns of Richard III. and Henry VII., <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">only twelve families of, in England, in 1633, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">re-establishment of, in England by Cromwell and Charles II., <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Rodrigues and Goldsmids the heads of the, in time of George III., <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Rothschilds originally Frankfort, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">no magistrates or sheriffs before 1837, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Campbell&#8217;s bill for removing this disability of, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Joachim</span>, Herr, popularity of, in England, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">director of Royal Academy of Music, Berlin, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Doctor of Music of Cambridge, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">portrait of, by George Eliot, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Jowett</span>, Benjamin, personal efforts of, to extend first-class education, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">favoured scheme of unattached students at Oxford, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lecture-rooms at Balliol opened to non-collegiate students by, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+K<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Kean</span>, Charles, actor, 1820-68, son of Edmund, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">educated at Eton, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social position of, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Kean</span>, Edmund, Byron&#8217;s eulogy of, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Kemble</span>, frigid classicism of, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Kinglake</span>, A. W., historian of Crimean War, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">last survivor of early Hyde Park equestrians, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+L<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Ladies</span> College, Cheltenham, work of, in East End, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Ladies</span> of the Court, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mistress of the Robes, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ladies of the Bedchamber, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Women of the Bedchamber, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Maids of Honour, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">functions of the several, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Landseer</span>, Sir Edwin, elected R.A., 1830, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social position of, exceptional, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lansdowne</span>, Marquess of, pre-eminence of, in early Victorian days, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Law</span>, administration of, in Colonies, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Roman Dutch Law in Ceylon, Guiana, and at the Cape, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">French forms of, still retained in Canada, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Code Civile continued in Mauritius, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Law</span> Courts, effect of, on Fleet Street and the Strand, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">commemorate the unity of the Empire as well as the unity of administration of justice, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Law</span> reform, small results of, so long as two legal systems at work in Westminster Hall, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">abolition of monopoly of serjeants-at-law, a step in, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">permission to take evidence of persons interested in suit, a further important step in, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appointment of commission to enquire into, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Judicature Act, 1873, result of commission of 1869, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fusion of law and equity by Judicature Act, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">principle of, laid down, that where equity and law conflict equitable doctrines shall prevail, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">room for, in connection with the circuit system, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">benefits of, to general public, summary of, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lawn</span> tennis, subscription clubs for, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">part of revolt of sons and daughters of middle class, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Legion</span> Memorial, The, probably drawn up by Defoe, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">low-water mark of Parliamentary popularity, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Legislation</span>, modern, salutary effect of, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on governors and teachers as well as on the taught, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lister</span>, Lord, his discovery of the antiseptic treatment, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Literary</span> Leaders, of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dickens and Thackeray as, compared, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Lytton, Lord Stanhope and Monkton Milnes as patrons of, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Literature</span> and art, encouraged by Crown from Henry VIII. until Queen Anne, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">neglected by the Hanoverian Kings, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revived encouragement of, by Queen Victoria, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Prince Consort in revival, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Local</span> Councils of Education, proposal to establish, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">functions of proposed, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suggested composition of, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suggested machinery for carrying out, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Local</span> Government Act, 1888, educational functions of County Council under, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Local</span> Government Board, establishment of, 1871, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Local</span> Improvement Acts, number of, prior to 1840, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">London</span>, the pleasure ground of the world, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the influence of Americans in making, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the true mirror of England, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">London</span> City Mission, opinions of missioners of, on East-end progress, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">London</span>, Corporation of, always a popularly elected body, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">commission of 1853 for inquiring into affairs of, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">judicial functions of Lord Mayor and Aldermen preserved to, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">powers of an ordinary Borough Council retained by, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">an example to provincial townships, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">intense feeling of corporate life in, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">impression made by, on foreigners, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">relations of, to London County Council, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">four representatives of, on County Council, chosen by ratepayers, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">charities and hospitalities of, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relation of Commissioners of Sewers to, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">London</span> County Council, differs from other County Councils, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">judicial functions of officers of corporation left untouched by, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">eminent men who have been chairmen of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">London</span> Library, The, foundation and objects of <a href="#Page_370">370</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first started in Pall Mall, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its usefulness and growth, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference between, and Mudie&#8217;s Library, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Longfellow</span>, far-reaching influence of, as a poet, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lord</span>-Mayors of London, number of noble houses founded by, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attributes of, in minds of foreigners, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not merely head officers of a great city, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">territorial estates, schools and other foundations controlled by the, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lord</span>-Mayor&#8217;s day, traditional entertainment of ministers on, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">improvement in demeanour of mob on, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristic of improvement in the masses, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lowe</span>, Robert, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, early educational reformer, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">introduces principle of payment by results, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advice of, to educate our masters, followed, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his sojourn in New South Wales, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lyell</span>, Sir Charles, his work in relation to geology, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of the <i>Principles of Geology</i>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lytton</span>, Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fifteen years in office as a public servant before being raised to the peerage, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+M<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Macaulay</span>, T. B., afterwards Lord, fifteen years in office as a public servant before raised to peerage, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Macready</span>, actor, 1827, 51, born 1793, died 1873, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">favourite with clergy, whom he taught elocution, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social acceptance of, in London, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Magistrates</span>, 1000 elective, since District Councils instituted, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">instances of working men as, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and agricultural labourers as, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and an ex-policeman as, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect upon rural mind of elective element among the, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">powers of borough, since Corporation Act of 1835, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">specially qualified county, elected to County Councils, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Making</span> up parties, modern fashion of, for theatres, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">for dinners or suppers at restaurants, before or after theatres, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mallock</span>, W. H., statistics relating to &#8216;Classes&#8217; and &#8216;Masses,&#8217; <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contribution of railways to prosperity of both, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Malthus</span>, Doctor, doctrines of Malthus, considered generally, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">increase of population during Victorian era considered in connection with, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mandates</span>, popular, at elections, modern doctrine of, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Medical</span> discoveries, English, of Victorian era, large proportion of to whole, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">treatment of myx&oelig;demia by Sir William Gull, one of the latest, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Medical</span> education, scheme of in England, perfected in 1860, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relation of College of Physicians to, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.</span><br />
+<br /><a name="members" id="members"></a>
+<span class="smcap">Members</span> of Parliament, &#8216;English politics to the English youth,&#8217; <a href="#Page_246">246</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">average age of, in 1837, over fifty years, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1897, under forty years, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mendelssohn</span>, Felix, born at Hamburg, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his precocious genius, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence in England, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">patron of John Parry, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Metropolitan</span> &#8216;Board of Works,&#8217; established 1855, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">product of Metropolitan Local Management Act, 1855, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unity of administration for the parishes of London by, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Middle</span> class, modern English, restlessness of, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">result of rapid locomotion and cheap press, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influx of continental ideas among the, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relaxation of orthodoxy of, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">all sections of, enfranchised by Reform Bill of 1832, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Millionaires</span>, Victorian, and their trades, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sheep farmers of Australia, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brassey, the railway contractor, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jones Lloyd, a banker, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hope, a merchant, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bass and Guinness, brewers, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Maple, retail tradesman, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Military</span> education, establishment of council of, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">formation of Aldershot camp for, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Military</span> resources of country, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">comparison of, in 1837 with those of 1897, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">incapacity of, to place 10,000 men in field in 1846, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">inadequacy of reserves of guns and stores, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Militia</span>, practical non-existence of, at Queen&#8217;s accession, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">last ballot for, in 1831, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">strength of in 1895, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Minerals</span>, &pound;29,000,000 worth of, recovered in 1855, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&pound;80,000,000 worth of, recovered in 1895, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mining</span> and steam industries compared, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">results of, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</span><br />
+<br /><a name="missionary" id="missionary"></a>
+<span class="smcap">Missionary</span> societies, activity of, during Victorian era, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">British and Foreign Bible Society, income of, doubled, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Society for Propagation of Gospel, income of, doubled, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Church Missionary Society, income of, trebled, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mixed</span> metaphors, modern, instances of, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">signs of the overlapping of literature by science and art, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Molesworth</span>, Sir William, pioneer of colonial self-government, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Colonial Secretary, in 1853, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mudie&#8217;s</span> Select Library, founded in 1842, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">far-reaching usefulness of, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Music</span>, revolution in, and in taste for, during Queen&#8217;s reign, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the lady teacher of, in 1837, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in 1897, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">patronage of, by Court, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fondness for, a tradition of English royalty, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Royal Academy of, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">triumph of German over Italian school of, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Musical</span> education, in England and on Continent compared, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">encouraged and promoted by Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Musician</span>, the professional, sketch of, in 1837, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in 1897, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+N<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">National</span> character, insularity of, disappearing generally, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cosmopolitanism of, among upper classes, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">imitated by the middle class, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">National</span> debt, gradual reduction of, during Queen&#8217;s reign, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reduced from &pound;821,000,000 after Crimean War, in 1856, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to &pound;652,000,000 in 1896, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">National</span> Gallery, established in 1824, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">present building of, opened in 1838, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Angerstein Collection, the nucleus of, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vernon bequest to, in 1847, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&pound;70,000 paid for Sir Robert Peel&#8217;s collection, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&pound;70,000 paid for &#8216;Ansidei Madonna&#8217; to the Duke of Marlborough, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Navy</span>, training of officers and men of, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reduction of, on conclusion of Napoleonic Wars, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">132 vessels on, list on Queen&#8217;s accession, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">461 vessels on, list at Queen&#8217;s diamond jubilee, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Parliamentary vote for, in 1837, &pound;3,000,000, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1897, &pound;23,000,000, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">establishment of H.M.S. <i>Excellent</i> as gunnery school for, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">manning of the, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the naval reserve of the, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">institution of H.M.S. <i>Britannia</i> for education of midshipmen for, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">introduction of steam into the, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">five paddle-wheel steamers in, at Queen&#8217;s accession, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">condition of, at outbreak of Crimean War, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">recognition of value of, by Kinglake, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of the special value of steam in, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the floating batteries of Crimean War, first ironclads of, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the <i>Warrior</i> first sea-going ironclad of, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">turret and broadside armaments in, of to-day compared, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Needlework</span>, embroidery and lace, as fashionable amusements, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Neighbourhood</span> guilds, the, of New York, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">New</span> educational authority, the want of a, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">must have an elastic operation, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">necessary functions of a, indicated, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">New</span> South Wales, colony of, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">no foreign trade before 1848, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exports from, in 1878 amounted to &pound;13,000,000, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">imports into, in 1878 amounted to &pound;17,000,000, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">valuable coalfields of, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">New</span> York, advantages of intimate social connexion between, and London, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Newspapers</span>, English, number of in 1837, only 479, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of in 1897, 2396, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">heavily taxed by Harley in 1712, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and by North and Pitt afterwards, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">taxation of, lowered by Spring Rice in 1836, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">repeal of paper duty in 1851, and rise of penny, in consequence, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the <i>Echo</i>, the first of the halfpenny, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">increase of halfpenny, of late years, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reviews of books in, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">great improvement in general character of, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">growing tendency of, towards political impartiality, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Newspaper</span> writers, growth of, as a class, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">instances of, Russell, Forbes, Dicey, Sala and others, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">action and reaction of, on the public press, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Macaulay as one of the, father of the leading article style, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">no longer really anonymous, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the recruiting of writers with well-known names for, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the youth of modern, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Newton</span>, Sir Isaac, his discovery of law of gravitation, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Nightingale</span>, Florence, her training in Germany, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the trained nurses who accompanied, in 1854, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on origin of nursing as a profession, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">supercession of the &#8216;Mrs Gamp&#8217; and decayed billiard-markers of former days, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tributes to efficiency of system started by, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Nonconformists</span>, subject to greater numerical fluctuations than established churches, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons for same, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the numbers of the Congregationalists in 1837 and 1897, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the numbers of Baptists in 1837 and 1897, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Novel</span> writers of eminence since Sir Walter Scott, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">commercial successes of, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, as instances of, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli as, compared, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Organization</span>, faculty for, of Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of exhibition of 1851, by Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Overlapping</span> of schools, waste of educational energy caused by, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Oxford</span>, number of unattached students at University of, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">system of control over unattached students at, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">system of teaching the unattached at, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">honours gained at, by the unattached students, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exemplary conduct of unattached at, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">professor of modern history at, formerly an unattached student, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social clubs for undergraduates at, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of social clubs at, on &#8216;union society,&#8217; <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Oxford</span> and Cambridge, middle class examinations, beginnings of, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">still uphold the standard of general culture in England, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+P<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Palmerston</span>, Lord, sketch of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">descent from Sir John Houblon, Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Parish</span> Councils, apparent tendency of, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">female members of, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">subjects of discussion at, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8216;one man one vote&#8217; for, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of, to restore many old manorial rights, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sense of responsibility developed by, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">seldom convened more than once a year, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">differences between, and County Councils decided by the Local Government Board, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">obliged to hold their sittings in the evening, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Parishes</span>, English, prior to 1894, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">State represented by squire in, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Church by vicar in, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the village by the village club in, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">subjects of interest to inhabitants of rural, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">change which has come over, since 1894, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the village meeting halls, modern centres of, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">home rule in, since 1894, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the grouping of, great care taken in, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Parliament</span>, an assembly of business men, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">abhors rhetoric, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">submits to ascendency of great masters of eloquence, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">will not tolerate commonplace speeches, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">local Houses of, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Houses of, burnt in 1834, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">temporary building for the meeting of, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the new Houses of, several years building, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">House of Lords side of, opened after thirteen years, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">House of Commons side, opened after sixteen years, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">peeresses&#8217; gallery in, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ladies&#8217; cage in, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">members of (see <a href="#members">members of Parliament</a>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">types of members, in the past, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">more modern types of, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">acceptance of position of delegates by, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Parliamentary</span>, oratory, change in fashion of, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">classical quotations no longer a feature of, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">business language used in modern, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">proceedings, foreign interest taken in, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hospitality, five o&#8217;clock tea on Terrace, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stage, and theatrical stages, parallel between, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">humorists, a succession of, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">children of the church, a regular supply of, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">obstruction, methods of, practised by Parnell, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">closure, the remedy for obstruction, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Parochial</span> schools, first suggested by S. Whitbread in 1807, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Pauperism</span>, statistics of, in England, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">50 per cent. less in 1897 than in 1857;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">enormous reduction of, in the Midlands, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in Sussex, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reduction in, a direct consequence of Act of 1834, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">less frequent application of workhouse test in cases of, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Peel</span>, Sir Robert, sketch of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his seat on horseback, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">popular respect in which held, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Peerages</span>, modern, conferred on representatives of science and art, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Tennyson as a poet, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Playfair as a physician, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kelvin as a physicist, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lister as a surgeon, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">People&#8217;s</span> Palace, The, a fanciful sketch of Sir Walter Besant, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties of administration in connection with, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Periodicals</span>, magazines and reviews, their popularity, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">used as substitutes for parliamentary speeches, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mutual advantages to publisher and member of Parliament of the use of, as substitutes for speeches, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Phelps</span>, pupil of Macready, his position on stage, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Photography</span>, a production of the Victorian era, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Physical</span> investigations, appliances for, former want of, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">perfection of appliances now, product of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Pictures</span>, prices of, in 1649, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gradual rise in, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">great sums paid by Russian Emperor, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&pound;30,000 realised by sale of the Walpole, in 1842, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&pound;60,000 by sale of the Bernal Collection of, in 1856, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gainsborough&#8217;s picture of the &#8216;Sisters&#8217; sold for &pound;6615 in 1873, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">resold in 1887 for &pound;9975, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Pitt</span>, William, peerages bestowed on wealthy men by, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his theory that &pound;40,000 per annum should command a peerage, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Plutocrat</span>, education of the, by painters, as prophesied by Rossetti, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the prophecy fulfilled, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Poor</span>, ignorance respecting the condition of the, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the brothers Mayhew and the London, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Greenwoods and the casual ward, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leighton, Hicks-Beach and Denison, their work amongst the, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Dilke Commission for inquiry into the housing of, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Poor-Law</span>, under the Act of 1834, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Unions under the Act, called the New Bastilles, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">marked improvement in condition of working class since, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Popular</span>, constituencies organised by Reform Bill of 1832, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">franchises, a few abolished by Bill, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">meetings, displacement of great parliamentary speeches by, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Population</span>, increased, 30 per cent. during last sixty years, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">comparison of, with increased means of subsistence, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Pre-Raphaelite</span>, the, revolution in art, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its effect on English art, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Presbyterianism</span> and the Free Kirk of Scotland, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Press</span>, the, anonymous system of, modified by various agencies, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">enlarged staffs employed on, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">amateurs and others, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">proprietorship of the newspaper, a fashion, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a reflex of English thought and life, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reptile of Germany, unknown in England, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">connection of leading men with special portions of, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">competition of periodicals with the newspaper, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">result of Gladstone&#8217;s Irish policy on the, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">political independence of, affected by that policy, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Preston</span>, strike at, the first great struggle between labour and capital, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prince</span> Consort, sagacity of, early discovered, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cultivation of artistic sense in English manufactures, due to, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, in shaping monarchy of to-day, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sets example of royal sympathy with extra political activities of daily life, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early training of, in view of his possible future home, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reforms the domestic economy of the palace, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attacks on, in clubs and drawing-rooms, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as well as in the inferior press, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">institutes office of master of the household, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">promotion of science and art by, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">skill of the, as an organist, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first public speech of, on the slave trade in 1840, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revives the taste for classical music, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">initiates royal platform speeches on non-political matters, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Sir Robert Peel on the, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sir Charles Eastlake and the, friendship of, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visits of Queen and, to Sir Robert Peel, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to Louis Philippe, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Leeds, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">elected chancellor of the University of Cambridge, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">declines the post of commander-in-chief, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suggestions of, for a system of national defence, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">acts as director of Ancient Concerts, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rescues the Raphael cartoons from decay, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">efforts of, to make Court the centre of literary, scientific and artistic efforts, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prince</span> of Wales, ubiquity of, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">untiring energy of, derived from his father, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visit of, to tomb of George Washington in 1860, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prisons</span>, no new, built since 1870, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">several, converted into public libraries, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">one of the, now the site of a fine art gallery, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Private</span> theatricals, local clubs for, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Privy</span> Council, judicial committee of, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">functions of, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">constitutional modifications of, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Privy</span> Purse, succession of able men who have acted as, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">distinction between, and Privy Seal, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Problem</span>, the educational, awaiting solution, Higher grade schools, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Public</span> Health Act, 1875, embodiment of efforts of individuals extending over forty years, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Public</span> Schools, increased numbers at, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, Cheltenham and others;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">products of Victorian era, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Public</span> School Act, 1868, effect of, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8216;<span class="smcap">Punch</span>,&#8217; Staffordshire miner, as delineated by, no longer true, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Purcell</span>, Henry, born 1675, <a href="#Page_344">344</a> (note);<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">organist at Westminster when eighteen years old, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prolific composer, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">German unintentional compliment to, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Q<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Quaker</span> School at Ackworth, specially complimented by the Education Commission, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Quarter</span> Sessions, sketch of county town during, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">before Corporation Act and afterwards, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Queen</span> Elizabeth, comparison of, with Queen Victoria, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+R<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Racehorse</span>, the, indispensable to breed of horses, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">antiquity of, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">introduction of Arab blood into, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social diploma to breeders of, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Railway</span>, the Manchester and Liverpool, death of Huskisson on, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pays ten per cent. dividend in 1836, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Queen did not travel by, until 1842, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">1800 miles of, open in England in 1843, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">enterprise, reaction in, in 1846, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Railways</span>, capital invested in, in 1850, &pound;230,000,000, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1894, &pound;985,000,000, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">receipts of, in 1855, &pound;21,000,000, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1895, &pound;84,000,000, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">how far, have enriched the landowners, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">wealth derived from, compared with that from other sources, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">nationalisation of, objections to, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">State control of, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">England and America, the two exceptions to, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Reaction</span>, signs of, against educational enthusiasm, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">grounds of, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Reading</span> School, connection of, with Oxford University extension system, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Religious</span> education, struggle over, sketch of the, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Religious</span> thought, various phases of, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gratitude of Oxford verger for remaining a Christian, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">modern scepticism and, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Court on, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tractarian movement as a phase of, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">agnosticism as a phase of, fillip given to, by Dr Mansel, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">progress of, stayed by Benjamin Jowett, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the &#8216;hard&#8217; church, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dr Temple as representative of, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lux Mundi</i>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Roman</span> Catholicism, increase of, in large towns, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in colonies, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">increase of numbers of priests and churches, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rothschild</span>, Lionel, issues Irish famine loan, 1847, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lends &pound;16,000,000 to English Government in 1854, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advances &pound;4,000,000 for purchase of Suez Canal shares, 1876, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">elected to Parliament as member for London, 1847, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unable to take his seat until 1866, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hospitalities at Gunnersbury, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of, in 1879, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rothschild</span>, Mayer A., of Frankfort, founder of the family in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">known as the Cr&oelig;sus of Europe, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rothschild</span>, Nathan Mayer, arrives in England at end of the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">buys bills on English Government during Napoleonic Wars, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">transmits funds to English forces in Peninsula, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">wrongly said to have watched the Battle of Waterloo, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">story of his agent at Ghent, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early news of victory received by him from Ghent, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">causes dividends and interest on foreign stocks and loans to be paid in London, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lends &pound;12,000,000 to the English Government in 1829, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">buys Gunnersbury, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of Mayer Amschel in 1836, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rothschilds</span>, the foreign loans of the firm, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">connection of the, with Egypt, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">monthly advances by the, to Egyptian Government, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">take security of private letter of English Foreign Secretary, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">charitable generosity of the, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">patrons of sport, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of art, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">loyalty of the, to England, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of the, on Judaism generally, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rowing</span>, the, of 1837 and 1897 compared, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Royal</span> Academy of Music, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">foundation of, in 1822, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">original site of, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">charter granted to, 1830, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of students at, in 1837, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in 1897, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Royal</span> Academy of Painting, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Crown represented at dinner of, for the first time in 1851, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">speech of Sir Charles Eastlake at, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and reply of the Prince Consort, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visitors to Exhibition of, in 1837, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in 1897, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Royal</span> College of Music, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">founded in 1875 as a training school, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reformed in 1882, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">charter granted to, in 1883, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">present endowment of, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scholarships at, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">opened by H. R. H. Princess of Wales, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Royal</span> Society, Queen&#8217;s signature in register of, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rural</span> population, decrease in, during last twenty years, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+S<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Sanitary</span> reform, reduction in death-rate due to, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">work of John Simon in connection with, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of the Budds and Dr Snow, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Savings</span> banks, deposits in, doubled in ten years ending 1896, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">School</span> Board, instances of successful, boys, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at universities and in Civil Service examinations, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of girls, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Girton College and elsewhere, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">School</span> Board children, increase in number of, under the Free Education Act, 1891, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">numbers of, for five years preceding Act, 269,903, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">for five years succeeding Act, 521,860, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Science</span> and art, slowness of State recognition of, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Science</span> and Art Department, grants made by, to schools, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Scientific</span> Corps, the, engineers and artillery, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">recent recognition of rights of, in army, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Sculptors</span>, Alfred Stevens, effigy of Wellington by, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hamo Thornycroft and Sir E. Boehm, works of, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">growing popularity of English, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Sculpture</span>, our climate not favourable to exhibitions of, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">progress of, in England, notwithstanding, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Seaside</span> resorts, imitation of continental examples at, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Secondary</span> schools, estimated proportion of population educated at, does not exceed 2.5 per 1000, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">proportion very variable, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">from 1.1 per 1000 in Lancashire, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to 13.5 in Bedfordshire, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">private, efficient service rendered to education by, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">plea for State help to private, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of the great city companies, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">especially those of the drapers&#8217;, the goldsmiths&#8217; and the grocers&#8217;, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Skating</span> rinks, shock to old-fashioned ideas caused by, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first revolt of sons and daughters of middle class illustrated at, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Slaney</span>, Colonel, motion by, for enquiry into health of towns, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Smaller</span> endowed schools, old practice of farming out, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">evil effects of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">vigorous dealing of corporations with the practice, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">closing of, recommended by the commissioners, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Society</span>, still a close corporation, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">but more and more subject to external influences, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">recruited from alien elements, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal standard of, unaltered, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Society</span> of comparative legislation, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Somerset</span>, Duchess of, the Queen of Beauty at Eglinton tournament, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">South</span> America, English loans to Republics of, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">South</span> Kensington, the whole of, market gardens in 1840, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between the, of 1840 and that of 1890, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">labours of Prince Consort in connection with, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">entirely the growth of the Victorian era, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">an artistic &#8216;Mecca,&#8217; <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Department of Practical Art at, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">under control of Board of Trade, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Department of Science and Art at, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">under control of President of the Council, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marlborough House Collection, removed to, in 1856, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Forster bequest of Dickens&#8217;s manuscripts to, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">institutions affiliated to, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">30,000 pupils annually pass through the Science and Art Department at, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Sovereign</span>, constitutional influence of, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">increased since days of absolute monarchy, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">surrender of political initiative by, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compensated by increase of social ascendancy of, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">technical right of, to nominate and dismiss ministers, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exercise of that prerogative in 1834 by William IV., <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the permanent head of a department of the State, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">view of Prince Consort, as to Sovereign&#8217;s position, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">self-effacement of, impossible under Parliamentary Governments, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the sole guarantee for continuity of policy, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of Sovereign to judge which party in state can best carry on the government of the country, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Steam</span>, transformation of country by, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Stephenson</span>, George, his invention at first decried, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sums up relations between the railways and the country, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Sullivan</span>, Sir Arthur, his work and public services, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Sunday</span> Schools, started by Robert Raikes late in eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Surgeons</span>, work of eminent, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exemplified by C&aelig;sar Hawkins, Benjamin Brodie and Spencer Wells, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+T<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Tait</span>, Archbishop and family, riders in Hyde Park, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Teachers</span>, profession of, no proper representation of, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">assistant, in secondary schools, underpaid, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Technical</span> Education Act, 1890, for teaching handicrafts, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">grants authorised to be made by, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Terry</span>, the family, a family of actors and actresses, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kate (Mrs Arthur Lewis), peerless in melodrama, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ellen, as a comedian, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span><span class="smcap">Thackeray</span>, W. M., distinguished figure in Hyde Park, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Thames</span>, shocking condition of, between 1804 and 1866, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Theatre</span>, The, position of, in early Victorian times, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advice of Matthew Arnold, to organize, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Macready, first organizer of, 1827 to 1851, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties experienced by him in attempt, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dulness of, long after it became respectable, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lord Lytton&#8217;s <i>Money</i>, dramatized for, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robertson&#8217;s <i>Society</i> produced at Prince of Wales&#8217;s, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revival of popularity of, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">caused by production of Robertson&#8217;s plays, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lyceum, under Bateman, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Miss Bateman as Leah at, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first appearance of H. Irving at, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">opinions expressed by George Lewes and George Eliot on Irving at, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">result of influx of strangers into London, on Victorian, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the suburban, of recent times, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">status of, raised by succession of high-class actors, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Tollemache</span>, Lord, of Peckforton, sketch of, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the harness and trappings of his team, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Trollope</span>, Anthony, sketch of, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his sturdy cob, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+U<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Universities</span>, advice to settlers in East End, from, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">extension lectures of, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oxford and Cambridge brought to people&#8217;s doors by, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revolution in domestic life at the, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">less noticeable at Oxford than at Cambridge, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unattached or non-collegiate students at, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a return to medi&aelig;val usage, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">comparative cost of education to unattached students at, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fellows and tutors of colleges at the, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">altered habits and duties of fellows and tutors, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">alteration due to extension lectures and similar causes, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scope of, extension lectures, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">synopsis of course, distributed beforehand, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">local schools and colleges in communication with, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">University</span> settlement in East End of London, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clubs for adults encouraged by, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dominant idea of, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">multifarious duties of a settler in, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Urban</span> population, increase of, during last twenty years, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+V<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Vanderbilt</span>, Commodore, sells fleet of ships to buy railway shares, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Victoria</span>, colony of, indebted mainly to gold for its progress, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gold raised in, between 1851 and 1859, 89 millions, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">imports rose to &pound;30 per head of population, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exports to &pound;56 per head of population, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Victorian</span> squire, often a self-made man, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">seldom violates old traditions, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life of, at hall or manor, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not very different from his predecessor, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">supports the subscription pack, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">breeds shorthorns, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and becomes a judge of cattle, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Volunteers</span>, instructions to Lords-Lieutenant in 1859 to raise, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Prince Consort&#8217;s influence in securing issue of, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first review of, in Hyde Park, 23d June 1860, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">number of, in 1860, 119,000, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1886, 226,752, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">800,000 men, still of military age, in Great Britain, have been, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+W<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Wages</span>, increase of, of working classes, in Victorian era, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Wakefield</span>, Gibbon, sketch of his career, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Art of Colonization</i>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Ward</span>, Samuel, sketch of, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">nicknamed &#8216;Uncle Sam,&#8217; <a href="#Page_438">438</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">founds a social and literary Anglo-American school, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Warwick</span>, Earl of, descended from Sir Samuel Dashwood, vintner, a Lord Mayor of London, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Watkin</span>, Sir Edward, exceptional position of, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Wealth</span>, aristocracy of, unknown before 1851, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Wellington</span>, Duke of, personal sketch of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">popular respect shown to, at all times, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Whewell</span>, Dr, historian of the Inductive Sciences, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Windsor</span>, compared with Weimar, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Working</span> Men&#8217;s Club, established at Lancaster in 1860, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Institute Union, functions of, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">founded by Lords Brougham and Lyttleton, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Working</span> Men&#8217;s College, Great Ormond Street, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">founded by Maurice and Thomas Hughes, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Y<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Youth</span>, change in figure and appearance of English, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">improved expression on countenances of, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">taller and better set up, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">women as well as men, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lofty stature and Junonian majesty of modern English feminine, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Colston &amp; Coy., Limited. Printers, Edinburgh.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><strong>Footnotes:</strong></p>
+
+<p><a name='f_1' id='f_1' href='#fna_1'>[1]</a> Edited by Dr Ernst Regel&mdash;Berlin, 1894.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_2' id='f_2' href='#fna_2'>[2]</a> The grandfather of the fifth Marquess. As Lord Henry Petty, he had so
+long since as 1806 been Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1848 he was
+President of the Council, and led the peers in the Russell Government.
+Died 1863.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_3' id='f_3' href='#fna_3'>[3]</a> But much of the Forest being saved by the Common rights had not at any
+time been enclosed.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_4' id='f_4' href='#fna_4'>[4]</a> <i>The Age of Gold</i>, vol. i. p. 37.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_5' id='f_5' href='#fna_5'>[5]</a> While these lines are being prepared for the press there appears in a
+London newspaper a statement of the prices current at the Western
+Australia gold fields in the summer of 1896. They may be compared with the
+figures given in the text and are as follows:&mdash;Tea 3s., flour 10d., sugar
+1s., bacon 3s., beef and mutton 4d. to 8d., cheese 2s. 6d., coffee 3s.,
+tobacco 8s., and preserved potatoes 1s. 9d. per lb.; milk (condensed) 1s.
+9d. per tin; flour 20s. per 50 lbs.; and eggs 10s. a dozen; but the cost
+of living generally, as compared with earnings, is low. On the Ashburton
+River gold fields mutton is 4d., beef 6d., flour 10d., tea 3s., sugar 9d.
+to 1s., preserved potatoes 1s. 6d., salt 1s., rice 1s., and oatmeal 1s.
+3d. per lb. On the Yilgarn gold fields meat is 9d. to 1s. a lb., flour
+10s. to 30s. per 50 lb. bag, tea 3s. 6d. a lb., and other provisions are
+equally scarce and dear. At Coolgardie, to the east of Yilgarn, flour
+costs &pound;3 per 200 lbs., bread 1s. per 1&#189; lb. loaf, butter 2s. 3d. per
+lb., potatoes 6d. per lb., sugar 8d. per lb., tinned milk 1s. 3d. per lb.,
+bacon 1s. 9d. per lb., salt 6d. per lb., and board and lodgings &pound;3 to &pound;7 a
+week. On the Murchison gold fields in the North, the prices per lb. are:
+Flour 8d., sugar 8d., tea 3s. 6d., tobacco 6d., fish 1s. 6d., mutton 8d.,
+beef 8d., butter 3s., and tinned meats 1s. 3d.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_6' id='f_6' href='#fna_6'>[6]</a> Still more than this was given to get men on the home voyage from
+Melbourne.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_7' id='f_7' href='#fna_7'>[7]</a> See <i>Our Railways</i>. By John Pendleton. Cassell &amp; Co.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_8' id='f_8' href='#fna_8'>[8]</a> Brought down to 1897 instead of 1881, these <i>mutatis mutandis</i> figures
+are derived from Mr Mallock&#8217;s most useful book.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_9' id='f_9' href='#fna_9'>[9]</a> In the West of England, with which the writer is specially acquainted,
+this is generally the case.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_10' id='f_10' href='#fna_10'>[10]</a> These figures are taken from &#8216;Art Sales,&#8217; by George Redford,
+privately printed, 1882.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_11' id='f_11' href='#fna_11'>[11]</a> Now Sir William Agnew.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_12' id='f_12' href='#fna_12'>[12]</a> All the details of art prices given in this chapter are derived from
+Mr G. Redford&#8217;s authentic record of art sales, first privately printed in
+1888. For other information the writer is indebted to the late Sir J. E.
+Millais, P.R.A.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_13' id='f_13' href='#fna_13'>[13]</a> See Picciotto&#8217;s Anglo-Jewish History for all these early facts about
+the Jews.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_14' id='f_14' href='#fna_14'>[14]</a> The idea of the Exhibition being &#8216;universal&#8217; was not that of the
+Prince, but of the Committee of the Society of Arts. It was first
+suggested in fact by Mr Thomas Winkworth.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_15' id='f_15' href='#fna_15'>[15]</a> Most of the time he was at Ghent. His stay there is known in French
+history as <i>La cour de Gand</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_16' id='f_16' href='#fna_16'>[16]</a> These anecdotes are given from Mr Reeves&#8217; volume already mentioned.
+They are suggestive of incident if not uniformly accurate in fact. The
+correction of the Waterloo incident given above commended itself to some
+among Baron Lionel&#8217;s friends who would be likely to know.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_17' id='f_17' href='#fna_17'>[17]</a> While Lord Palmerston has become a historical name, Lord
+Beaconsfield&#8217;s precedents are daily, alike by friends and foes, cited as
+living forces.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_18' id='f_18' href='#fna_18'>[18]</a> See <i>Quarterly Review</i>, July, 1896.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_19' id='f_19' href='#fna_19'>[19]</a> This anecdote was often told by Lord Shaftesbury.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_20' id='f_20' href='#fna_20'>[20]</a> Not, however, the most appreciated by his master.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_21' id='f_21' href='#fna_21'>[21]</a> Now of course Battersea Park.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_22' id='f_22' href='#fna_22'>[22]</a> Who, to the regret of all who knew his abilities, died February 1897,
+having exercised influence rather than achieved distinction.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_23' id='f_23' href='#fna_23'>[23]</a> While he yet lives, his enduring monuments are his blocks of working
+men&#8217;s dwellings in the King&#8217;s Cross district and elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_24' id='f_24' href='#fna_24'>[24]</a> The guarantees against undue delegation are stringent and successful.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_25' id='f_25' href='#fna_25'>[25]</a> Opinions vary as to the workability of this clause in the shape in
+which it left the Lords.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_26' id='f_26' href='#fna_26'>[26]</a> <i>E.g.</i> In a typical Surrey village, where there are no
+Nonconformists, the Chairman is the Vicar, but of 38 Gloucestershire
+parishes, where dissenters abound, only in two or three.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_27' id='f_27' href='#fna_27'>[27]</a> Urban District Councils have taken the place of Local Boards; they
+are in fact town councils of those districts which are not incorporated
+into municipalities.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_28' id='f_28' href='#fna_28'>[28]</a> Molesworth&#8217;s <i>History of England</i>, vol. i. p. 19.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_29' id='f_29' href='#fna_29'>[29]</a> As a fact, the County chairman is most likely a J.P. already.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_30' id='f_30' href='#fna_30'>[30]</a> For valuable facts and figures, bringing this chapter down to the
+latest date the writer is indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin and his staff at
+the Local Government Board, as for much other useful help to Sir Henry
+Fowler, Sir Charles Dilke, the Rev. Charles Cox, D.D., and to Mr G. W. E.
+Russell.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_31' id='f_31' href='#fna_31'>[31]</a> In addition to Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Henry Fowler and others already
+mentioned, the writer is indebted for invaluable help in the preparation
+of facts and the revision of proofs in this portion of the book to Mr W.
+J. Soulsby the accomplished private secretary to a succession of Lord
+Mayors of London.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_32' id='f_32' href='#fna_32'>[32]</a> An account of the University Settlements in East London. Edited by
+John M. Knapp, Oxford House, Bethnal Green. Rivington, Percival &amp; Co.
+1895.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_33' id='f_33' href='#fna_33'>[33]</a> <i>England: Its People, Polity and Pursuits.</i> 2 vols. Cassell &amp; Co. 1
+vol. Chapman &amp; Hall.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_34' id='f_34' href='#fna_34'>[34]</a> This usage varies under different Administrations and at different
+epochs. Mr Forster [1870] was an actual Education Minister. His Liberal
+successors have been so since; his Conservative successors only in a
+qualified sense.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_35' id='f_35' href='#fna_35'>[35]</a> See Report of the Secondary Education Commission, vol. i. <i>passim</i>,
+but especially, pp. 44, and seq.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_36' id='f_36' href='#fna_36'>[36]</a> These have produced not a few famous men even in this generation:
+Thus Bishop Stortford shares with Oriel, Oxford the honour of educating Mr
+Cecil Rhodes.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_37' id='f_37' href='#fna_37'>[37]</a> As the writer has a personal reason for knowing, this is the year in
+which the amalgamation first took a definite shape, though it was not
+perhaps fully carried out till a little later.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_38' id='f_38' href='#fna_38'>[38]</a> This point was dwelt upon strongly in the letters of London
+correspondents to the French press at the time of the 1887 Jubilee.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_39' id='f_39' href='#fna_39'>[39]</a> Recent legislation providing for the information of the working
+classes on this point, by the display of lists in factories, has not given
+entire satisfaction to the persons interested.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_40' id='f_40' href='#fna_40'>[40]</a> The statistics showing the new rungs in the educational ladder in
+this chapter have been supplied to the writer by Mr G. H. Croad of the
+London School Board, by other gentlemen in like positions and by private
+friends in the Education Department. Thanks are also due to Sir John
+Gorst, and to Mr Mundella for the kind trouble they have taken in checking
+the facts of the narrative portion, and for making valuable suggestions.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_41' id='f_41' href='#fna_41'>[41]</a> This, during the youth of the late Rev W. G. Cookesley was said by
+that authority to be, not hyperbole, but historical fact.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_42' id='f_42' href='#fna_42'>[42]</a> This title has been denied to the King here named, but Waynflete,
+also an Eton benefactor as well as official, was himself transferred by
+Henry from Winchester to Eton, becoming Headmaster and Provost
+successively.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_43' id='f_43' href='#fna_43'>[43]</a> For the facts and figures in this chapter showing the relations of
+the old public schools to the new educational tests, as for the facts of
+Eton expenditure, the writer is indebted to the Rev. Edmond Warre, D.D.,
+the Headmaster, who has placed at his disposal all the necessary data.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_44' id='f_44' href='#fna_44'>[44]</a> See <i>Eothen</i>, edn. 1896&mdash;Blackwood, p. 7.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_45' id='f_45' href='#fna_45'>[45]</a> Now in vogue at nearly all the pleasure towns in southern England.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_46' id='f_46' href='#fna_46'>[46]</a> The name of Frank as well as of Charles Mathews was often on the
+bills of this theatre during the sixties.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_47' id='f_47' href='#fna_47'>[47]</a> Census of England and Wales, 1891. Vol. iv. General Report, pp. 64
+and fg.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_48' id='f_48' href='#fna_48'>[48]</a> For a valuable dissertation, to which the present writer is much
+indebted on this subject, see A. J. Ogilvy&mdash;<i>Westminster Review</i>, 1891.
+Vol. 136, pp. 289 to 297.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_49' id='f_49' href='#fna_49'>[49]</a> W. Cunningham on the Malthusian theory&mdash;<i>Macmillan&#8217;s Magazine</i>, Dec.
+1883.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_50' id='f_50' href='#fna_50'>[50]</a> In addition to the published official statistics from which the above
+facts and figures are taken, the writer is indebted to the
+Registrar-General for much useful information, and to Mr G. Shaw-Lefevre
+for further friendly help.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_51' id='f_51' href='#fna_51'>[51]</a> See Molesworth&#8217;s <i>History of England</i>. Vol. i. p. 90 and fg.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_52' id='f_52' href='#fna_52'>[52]</a> Commons Journal, xci. 319.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_53' id='f_53' href='#fna_53'>[53]</a> In the Upper House, there is perhaps no one to whom the classics are
+more familiar as literature than Lord Morley.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_54' id='f_54' href='#fna_54'>[54]</a> For nearly all the details as to the structural arrangements of the
+two Houses of Parliament, and to the particulars of what may be called
+their social life, the writer desires to express his grateful
+acknowledgments to Mr Archibald Milman, C.B., a Clerk of the House of
+Commons. On other parliamentary points, he is not less indebted to Sir
+Charles Dilke, and to many more Members of Parliament, only a few of whom
+now survive.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_55' id='f_55' href='#fna_55'>[55]</a> See the following extract from the <i>Daily News</i>, Dec. 16, 1896:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr Gladstone on Parliamentary Changes.</span>&mdash;Mr Gladstone having read an
+article in the <i>Westminster Review</i> entitled &#8216;The Old M.P. and the New,&#8217;
+by George A. B. Dewar, writes that, speaking from recollection, he thinks
+there were not five members of the Conservative party in 1835 who sat in
+the House of Commons by reason of their connection with trade or industry.
+He describes the change which has come about in the composition of the
+party since then as &#8216;simply marvellous.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_56' id='f_56' href='#fna_56'>[56]</a> &#8216;It is the Queen&#8217;s doing,&#8217; is the statement of the newspapers of that
+year; but seems to apply not to the dismissal of Lord Grey, but of Lord
+Melbourne who had followed him.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_57' id='f_57' href='#fna_57'>[57]</a> The reference to Lord Palmerston and the <i>Morning Post</i> is
+historical.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_58' id='f_58' href='#fna_58'>[58]</a> It might be argued of course with much plausibility that this order
+of things has begun long since, and that, the verbal distinction
+notwithstanding, government by party has always, from another point of
+view been government by groups.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_59' id='f_59' href='#fna_59'>[59]</a> This (1701) followed the Kentish petition to the Commons protesting
+against distrust of the King, and desiring that the addresses of the loyal
+petitioners might be turned into Bills of Supply.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_60' id='f_60' href='#fna_60'>[60]</a> Sir Theodore Martin&#8217;s &#8216;Life,&#8217; chapter i. These references are in all
+cases to the People&#8217;s Edition.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_61' id='f_61' href='#fna_61'>[61]</a> &#8216;Life,&#8217; p. 11.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_62' id='f_62' href='#fna_62'>[62]</a> Before Prince Albert&#8217;s reforms, the jurisdiction of the Palace
+interior was divided between the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Steward.
+The Lord Chamberlain was responsible for providing the lamps, the Lord
+Steward for lighting them; before a pane of glass or cupboard could be
+repaired, months sometimes passed; all external repairs were in the hands
+of the Woods and Forests, on which it therefore depended how much daylight
+should be admitted through the windows. More than two-thirds of the indoor
+servants seemed without control, coming in, going out, when, and with whom
+they chose.&mdash;&#8216;Life,&#8217; pp. 26-27.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_63' id='f_63' href='#fna_63'>[63]</a> &#8216;Life,&#8217; p. 21.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_64' id='f_64' href='#fna_64'>[64]</a> &#8216;Life,&#8217; p. 21.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_65' id='f_65' href='#fna_65'>[65]</a> Not, as was long said, Mr Disraeli, but Mr Disraeli&#8217;s then titular
+leader, Lord George Bentinck.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_66' id='f_66' href='#fna_66'>[66]</a> At this interval, traditions as to the merits of the quarrel may
+differ. The account here given is from the most authentic source
+existing.&mdash;Martin&#8217;s &#8216;Life,&#8217; p, 29.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_67' id='f_67' href='#fna_67'>[67]</a> This opinion used to be expressed very strongly by Lord Raglan who
+commanded in the Crimea. It was shared by the French military experts of
+the day.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_68' id='f_68' href='#fna_68'>[68]</a> The figures in the earlier estimate are taken from the <i>Imperial
+Federation Journal</i>, June 1886: Those of the later date are supplied by
+the Army Estimates, and by the courtesy of Lord Lansdowne and his
+colleagues at the War Office.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_69' id='f_69' href='#fna_69'>[69]</a> This (<i>i.e.</i> distribution of honours according to property) seems
+from <i>Ethics</i>, Book viii. ch. 10, the exact meaning of the convenient
+compound.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_70' id='f_70' href='#fna_70'>[70]</a> For the chief facts in these remarks on the army, where they are not
+directly drawn from the Blue Books, or as above specified from the
+Imperial Federation Journal, the writer is indebted, and would express his
+thanks, to Lord Lansdowne, Secretary of State for War; to Field Marshal
+Lord Wolseley, and to his old and distinguished friend General Sir Henry
+Brackenbury.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_71' id='f_71' href='#fna_71'>[71]</a> Quoted by Captain Eardley Wilmot in <i>The Development of Navies</i>, p. 1.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_72' id='f_72' href='#fna_72'>[72]</a> <i>The Development of Navies</i>, p. 12.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_73' id='f_73' href='#fna_73'>[73]</a> P. 27.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_74' id='f_74' href='#fna_74'>[74]</a> The &#8216;Warrior,&#8217; at this time standing by herself, was a vessel of
+9,210 tons. Thirty-five years later the advance made in our ideas of
+dimension and power may be judged from the fact that on Jan. 31, 1895, the
+&#8216;Majestic&#8217; was launched. Her tonnage was 14,900, an increase of 5,690 on
+her predecessor. Unlike the &#8216;Warrior&#8217; of an earlier date, the &#8216;Majestic&#8217;
+was only one of several, the building of which began at the end of 1894,
+the last parliamentary record of which reaches to the spring of 1896.
+Briefly to summarize the results that emphasize the contrasts between the
+two epochs, the average size of vessels built at the present time
+approaches thrice that of twenty years ago. Then too, steel was not used
+for ship building; now it is gradually supplanting iron. Of late there
+have been more ships built than formerly on a less colossal scale. The
+result is partially due to the dimensions of the Suez Canal whose depth is
+not equal to an ironclad of the first magnitude. Time, apparently, is
+still needed to show if our seamen can develop a skill as great in
+handling these iron leviathans as in controlling those wooden craft, their
+management of which was the admiration of the world.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_75' id='f_75' href='#fna_75'>[75]</a> Apart from the parliamentary papers bearing on the navy, Captain
+Eardley Wilmot&#8217;s <i>The Development of Navies</i> is the literary authority
+that has been found most useful in preparing this chapter. The writer is
+however, chiefly indebted to the details with which he has been kindly and
+copiously supplied by the present First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr Goschen
+and his staff, especially Lord Encombe.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_76' id='f_76' href='#fna_76'>[76]</a> In the nineteenth century, on a much smaller scale, exhibitions had
+been held in Paris 1801, 1806, 1836, 1849, as well as in Belgium, Germany
+and Spain. The true precursor of the &#8217;51 Exhibition has been discovered by
+Mr Molesworth (History ii. p. 363) in the Covent Garden Free Trade Bazaar
+1846.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_77' id='f_77' href='#fna_77'>[77]</a> Macaulay&#8217;s House of Commons speeches in the 1832 Reform Bill debates
+are famous. When he was best known as a writer, he had been Secretary at
+War (1839) and Paymaster General (1846). Lytton at the zenith of his
+literary fame had been Colonial Secretary under Lord Derby in 1858, before
+he was made a peer in 1866.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_78' id='f_78' href='#fna_78'>[78]</a> The vitality of Purcell&#8217;s fame at the 200th anniversary of his death
+was attested by the celebrations of 1895. Since then a very remarkable
+tribute to his greatness has been given accidentally in an unexpected
+quarter. The great German classical authority, the Bach Gesellschaft (vol.
+xlii. p. 250) prints as a doubtful work of Bach, Purcell&#8217;s Toccata in A
+which is given in the Harpsichord and Organ volume of the Purcell Society
+(p. 42). That a work of Purcell&#8217;s should have been mistaken for one of the
+very greatest organ writer&#8217;s who has ever lived, and that by Bach&#8217;s own
+jealous countrymen, is a panegyric more significant than words on our own
+great national composer.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_79' id='f_79' href='#fna_79'>[79]</a> <i>Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hall&eacute;</i> (Smith, Elder &amp; Co.)
+illustrates with interesting detail the service rendered to Beethoven by
+this great exponent of his genius.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_80' id='f_80' href='#fna_80'>[80]</a> For the facts and figures contained in this survey of our musical
+state, the writer desires to express his special obligations to Sir George
+Grove, and to Sir Arthur Sullivan, both private friends of many years
+standing.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_81' id='f_81' href='#fna_81'>[81]</a> Martin&#8217;s &#8216;Life,&#8217; People&#8217;s Edition, part ii. p. 63.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_82' id='f_82' href='#fna_82'>[82]</a> The habit of inviting other than parliamentary guests, men famous in
+art or science, to the State dinners on the eve of the session began with
+Mr Gladstone, and after him Mr Disraeli.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_83' id='f_83' href='#fna_83'>[83]</a> A class chiefly, if not exclusively, represented by, to his honour be
+it said, Professor Herkomer.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_84' id='f_84' href='#fna_84'>[84]</a> While these pages are passing through the press, the French critic,
+M. Yriarte, writing in the <i>Times</i>, gives the following interesting
+testimony to the world-wide value of this British centre of humanity and
+culture:&mdash;To-day for all of us foreigners South Kensington is a Mecca.
+England there possesses the entire art of Europe and the East, their
+spiritual manifestations under all forms, and Europe has been swept into
+the stream in imitation of England. Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Nuremberg,
+Basle, Madrid, St Petersburg, Moscow, the large towns of America itself
+have now their South Kensingtons; but in the original one of England still
+unfinished, where the splendour of the start (excessive, as it seems to
+me) contrasts with the inertia of the last fifteen years, the
+inconceivable treasures are becoming so much heaped up as to be a
+veritable obstacle to study. How is it possible to study this
+extraordinary series of textiles of all times and countries, ranged one
+upon another, overlapping and hiding one another, without proper
+perspective and proper light?</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_85' id='f_85' href='#fna_85'>[85]</a> &pound;70,000, to which the Duke of Marlborough reduced the &pound;100,000 which
+he originally asked.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_86' id='f_86' href='#fna_86'>[86]</a> For the information embodied in this chapter, the writer is under
+many obligations to the late Sir John E. Millais, to the late Sir Philip
+Cunliffe Owen, long Director at South Kensington, and Mr F. A. Eaton, the
+present Secretary to the Royal Academy.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_87' id='f_87' href='#fna_87'>[87]</a> Greenwood, p. 291.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_88' id='f_88' href='#fna_88'>[88]</a> Thackeray, when writing <i>The Virginians</i>, Carlyle, in the preparation
+of all his later works, are authentic and only the more illustrious
+instances which could be given.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_89' id='f_89' href='#fna_89'>[89]</a> Such was the precise garment mentioned by Mr Harrison when he told
+the story to the present writer.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_90' id='f_90' href='#fna_90'>[90]</a> To whom, while at work on portions of this book at a distance from
+London, the present writer owes much courteous help.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_91' id='f_91' href='#fna_91'>[91]</a> By exactly ten years, Thackeray dying 1863, Lytton 1873. The
+increased interest in Dickens is shown by Messrs Chapman &amp; Hall&#8217;s latest
+editions, the revived interest in Lytton by Messrs Routledge&#8217;s new
+ventures.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_92' id='f_92' href='#fna_92'>[92]</a> Personally, Lord Lytton was more correctly appreciated in Paris where
+in his last years he much lived. His unfailing presence of mind in
+physical difficulties or dangers compelled the admiration of all who knew
+him. A Colonial Secretary himself, he first showed, in the closing
+chapters of <i>The Caxtons</i>, that sense of the greatness of our Colonial
+empire, to-day a commonplace but unknown up to then.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_93' id='f_93' href='#fna_93'>[93]</a> John Copley, afterwards Lord Lyndhurst, and John Campbell, afterwards
+Lord Campbell, during their student days at the Bar, both wrote for the
+London papers, chiefly theatrical critiques.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_94' id='f_94' href='#fna_94'>[94]</a> These figures for the later date are taken direct from Mitchell&#8217;s
+Newspaper Press Directory 1897; for the earlier from a note by Mr Garnett
+in Mr Ward&#8217;s <i>Reign of Queen Victoria</i>; Mr Garnett&#8217;s statistics being
+apparently derived from an article contributed probably by Albany Fonblanc
+to an early number of the <i>Westminster Review</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_95' id='f_95' href='#fna_95'>[95]</a> Carried in the January of 1855 a majority of 157 (305 to 148).</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_96' id='f_96' href='#fna_96'>[96]</a> Successes of a new sort have been made. The penny newspapers had paid
+by their advertisements; when the price of the paper on which they were
+printed exceeded a certain figure, circulation beyond the amount necessary
+to maintain advertisements was not therefore in itself a paramount object.
+The new halfpenny sheets realized on every copy sold a profit larger even
+proportionately than the penny papers had ever made on their copies,
+advertisements of course excepted.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_97' id='f_97' href='#fna_97'>[97]</a> For the commercial details of newspaper enterprise, the reader is
+referred to the author&#8217;s earlier work <i>England</i>, etc., where he duly
+acknowledged his obligations to his editorial chief and personal friend,
+Mr W. H. Mudford, of the <i>Standard</i>; for the fresh facts and figures here
+given the writer is indebted to Sir Charles Dilke, to Mr H. Labouchere, to
+an article on <i>Halfpenny Papers</i> by Mr F. A. McKenzie in the <i>Windsor
+Magazine</i> for January 1897, and above all to Mitchell&#8217;s invaluable
+<i>Newspaper Press Directory</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_98' id='f_98' href='#fna_98'>[98]</a> M.P. for Shrewsbury since 1832.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_99' id='f_99' href='#fna_99'>[99]</a> Each reform was followed by a fresh diminution in the death rate.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_100' id='f_100' href='#fna_100'>[100]</a> This lady, in addition to her natural gift of organization, had been
+trained at the Prussian hospital of Kaisersworth. Accompanied by her
+friends, Mr and Mrs Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall, and 37 nurses, she
+reached Scutari November 5, just in time to tend the wounded after
+Balaclava.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_101' id='f_101' href='#fna_101'>[101]</a> Sampson Low&#8217;s <i>Charities of London</i>, p. 2.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_102' id='f_102' href='#fna_102'>[102]</a> The statistics illustrative of this subject have been derived
+exclusively from Mr Sampson Low&#8217;s <i>Charities of London</i>, at the places
+already indicated in the footnotes. For the other facts to complete the
+little picture, the writer is indebted to friends who have made this
+subject their special study, such as Lady Priestley, or reluctantly to his
+own personal experience.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_103' id='f_103' href='#fna_103'>[103]</a> For these statistics, some of them perhaps now given for the first
+time the writer is beholden to Sir Brydges Henniker, Registrar General.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_104' id='f_104' href='#fna_104'>[104]</a> This most gifted family came originally from Plymouth or its
+neighbourhood, sending representatives to Bath, Bristol and Barnstaple.
+The Barnstaple Budd, universally respected, died 1896.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_105' id='f_105' href='#fna_105'>[105]</a> Dr Ferrier&#8217;s work on the brain, mapping it out according to its
+functions, appeared 1876 and also perhaps marks an epoch.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_106' id='f_106' href='#fna_106'>[106]</a> Shortly before his death, the late Sir Andrew Clark assured the
+present writer that his remarks in his earlier work, <i>England</i>, on the
+medical profession were accurate in all respects and applicable to the
+existing state of things. For the purpose of the present volume when the
+writer was first contemplating it, and was in occasional correspondence
+with Sir Andrew, the great physician kindly made a few fresh hints. These,
+with the information of Sir William and Lady Priestley, have been
+indispensable to the writer throughout.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_107' id='f_107' href='#fna_107'>[107]</a> Evidence in support of this has been collected by the writer
+throughout the manufacturing districts, an important fact being that where
+secularism was most organized, there well-to-do mechanics and artizans are
+Communicants, and often Sunday School teachers as well.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_108' id='f_108' href='#fna_108'>[108]</a> The Ramsden Sermon, preached before Oxford University June 12, 1892,
+pp. 10, 11.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_109' id='f_109' href='#fna_109'>[109]</a> These Bishoprics, 75 in America, 4 in other countries, that is 79 in
+all, control (1897) 4,666 clergy; among the church goers 622,194 are
+Communicants. The total of Anglican clergy in foreign parts, at the period
+of the Queen&#8217;s accession, excluding Bishops, was 897. In 1850 it was
+1,193. To-day (1897) it is 4,312. Roughly, therefore, the increase has
+been 300 per cent.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_110' id='f_110' href='#fna_110'>[110]</a> The most noticeable being the Gorham dispute about <i>Baptismal
+Regeneration</i> 1850, which issued in defining the Evangelical status, as in
+1847 Hampden&#8217;s bishopric had secured the broad Church position. In 1871
+the Frome case secured the highest doctrines on the Eucharist. These three
+decisions practically constitute the Charters of the three chief parties
+in the National Church.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_111' id='f_111' href='#fna_111'>[111]</a> Not Dean of St Paul&#8217;s till 1869.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_112' id='f_112' href='#fna_112'>[112]</a> <i>The Sermon on the Mount</i>, 1897.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_113' id='f_113' href='#fna_113'>[113]</a> For the information as to the Church of England embodied in this
+chapter, the writer&#8217;s thanks are sincerely tendered to the Rev. H. W.
+Tucker of the S.P.G. Society; to the Rev. J. C. Cox, D.D., Holdenby, North
+Hants; to the Rev. A. L. Foulkes, Steventon, Berks; and to Mr G. W. E.
+Russell. No official statistics of the numbers in the different Churches
+exist. The basis of the estimate given is supplied by the statistics of
+the <i>Federation League Journal</i>, June, 1886.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_114' id='f_114' href='#fna_114'>[114]</a> This is not the conventional idea of clubs. Thackeray, who knew
+club-life well, first illustrated this view. An examination of the tariff
+and general charges at the professional clubs in Pall Mall or St James&#8217;s
+would show the absolute truth of the description.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_115' id='f_115' href='#fna_115'>[115]</a> The Honourable Mr Algernon Bourke has a more than amateur experience
+of modern clubs. While these pages are passing through the press, he gives
+it as his opinion that nowadays there is practically no play in clubs. All
+who know anything of the subject would confirm the general truth of that
+statement.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_116' id='f_116' href='#fna_116'>[116]</a> See <i>passim</i> the evidence taken before this Committee printed in the
+1844 Parliamentary Blue Books.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_117' id='f_117' href='#fna_117'>[117]</a> The reluctance of referees to interfere is natural and pardonable in
+view of the fashionable brutality not only of the players but the
+spectators. A proof of this may be found in a typical instance reported in
+a daily paper:&mdash;<span class="smcap">A Football Referee assaulted.</span>&mdash;A disgraceful scene was
+witnessed at Lincoln last night after the close of the League match
+between Lincoln City and Newton Heath. The decisions of the referee (Mr
+Fox, of Sheffield) gave great dissatisfaction to the crowd, and the
+hostile demonstration commenced when he awarded the Heathens two penalty
+kicks in quick succession. After the match he had to seek shelter in the
+secretary&#8217;s office for some time, and when he did leave the ground he was
+badly assaulted by several roughs. The windows of a cab in which he drove
+to his hotel were completely smashed.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_118' id='f_118' href='#fna_118'>[118]</a> In the diverse materials for this chapter, the writer has been
+helped greatly by the volume on the Turf in the Badminton Series, but in
+all which has to do with horses by the Earl of Dunraven, by Lord
+Ribblesdale, by Mr Leopold de Rothschild; in all that relates to cricket
+and football by the Hon. and Rev. E. Lyttelton, Headmaster of Haileybury
+College, and in the football facts by one of Mr Lyttelton&#8217;s Haileybury
+colleagues. His chess facts have been given him by a great West of England
+authority in the game, H. Maxwell Prideaux. For his knowledge of ladies&#8217;
+work he is indebted, as in <i>England</i> he was, to Miss F. S. Hollings.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_119' id='f_119' href='#fna_119'>[119]</a> The motion in 1849 for the Sierra Leone reduction was, as Hansard
+shows, only one of a series of such proposals. Hume&#8217;s views on the
+Colonies were much those which Mill had set forth in his famous
+Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica article. Mill may have been against Colonial
+expansion, but not against Colonial retention.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_120' id='f_120' href='#fna_120'>[120]</a> On this subject see the very interesting and accurate statistics
+compiled by Mr F. Leveson Gower, and published by the Cobden Club.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_121' id='f_121' href='#fna_121'>[121]</a> A. Cleveland Coxe, then Rector of Grace Church, Baltimore, published
+his <i>Impressions of England</i>, 1856. His Ballads and Carols, ecclesiastical
+or religious, especially one entitled <i>In Dreamland</i>, abound in graceful
+fancy, and have had a popularity among English and American Anglicans
+approaching that of <i>The Christian Year</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_122' id='f_122' href='#fna_122'>[122]</a> For the facts relating to the administration of law, the writer is
+indebted to Sir Edward Clarke, and to the Master John MacDonell, of the
+High Court of Justice. The facts and figures with respect to the Colonies
+have been drawn from official sources as well as from the very valuable
+<i>Imperial Federation League Journal</i> for June 1886. He is further
+personally beholden for the local colour inparted to his Colonial
+descriptions by the private information of Sir Robert G. W. Herbert, Sir
+Julius Vogel, Mr John Bramston, and other Colonial officials. The
+privately printed papers of the fourth Lord Carnarvon distributed among
+his personal friends (1897), opportunely confirm and illustrate the views
+here given of the Colonial past, present, and future.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age,
+by T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Social Transformations of the Victorian Age
+       A Survey of Court and Country
+
+
+Author: T. H. S. (Thomas Hay Sweet) Escott
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 27, 2012  [eBook #39001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE
+VICTORIAN AGE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
+Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031472768
+
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE
+
+A Survey of Court and Country
+
+by
+
+T. H. S. ESCOTT
+
+_Author of 'England, its People, Polity
+and Pursuits,' &c., &c._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+153-157 Fifth Avenue
+1897
+
+
+
+
+_PREFACE_
+
+
+It may be well very briefly to explain the relation in which the present
+work stands to a survey, not a history, of modern England undertaken by
+the same author some years ago. That earlier work was originally published
+by Messrs Cassell and Co. in two volumes. It was reprinted, first by them,
+secondly by Messrs Chapman and Hall, in a single volume. Into that
+re-issue of his _England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits_ (the labour of
+revision being much lightened by the obliging help of Mr Francis
+Drummond), the author introduced certain references to social or
+legislative changes effected since the original edition of the work
+appeared. Without organic disturbance of its plan, and risk of consequent
+confusion to the reader, it would have been impossible to bring down that
+book to the year 1897. The writer does not in the following pages
+pre-suppose any knowledge of his former book on the part of the readers of
+his present one. He has, however, held himself absolved from the duty of
+repeating in this book minute accounts of institutions fully described in
+its predecessor. Such repetition seemed the more undesirable because the
+earlier book is still in wide circulation here; while it has been
+translated into several European languages, and has been adopted as a text
+book in the higher grade State schools of Germany,[1] and of other
+countries. The method of workmanship adopted in _Social Transformations of
+the Victorian Age_ is identical with that pursued in the case of _England,
+Etc._
+
+This new book being, like its predecessor, not a history, but a series of
+different views from a common standpoint, the sketches of national life
+and character as well as of national institutions at work, have in all
+cases been made from personal observation; supplemented by the assistance
+of the highest experts in their different departments to whom the writer
+had access. Often, he is glad to say, the same private friends who helped
+him in the seventies have been able to renew that help in the nineties.
+Thus, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Robert Herbert, Mr Mundella, Mr Archibald
+Milman of the House of Commons, and Mr Albert Pell have generally and
+specifically repeated the assistance lent to him twenty years earlier. In
+most cases it is hoped the assistance given has been acknowledged in its
+proper place. In many cases the advantages of this service extend beyond
+any particular passage. In all which relates to the new schemes of local
+government the writer is particularly indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin or
+members of his staff; to Sir Henry Fowler; to Sir Charles Dilke; to the
+Rev. J. Charles Cox, LL.D., of Holdenby, as in ecclesiastical matters to
+the Rev. A. L. Foulkes of Steventon, and to the Rev. H. W. Tucker, D.D.,
+of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In references to
+certain phases of social history, especially about the early railway
+period, he has learned much from Lord Carlingford, Mr Markham Spofforth,
+Mr J. C. Parkinson, and from Sir W. H. Russell. And finally he would
+specially thank several gentlemen of the Education Department, as well as
+the Vice-President himself, Sir John Gorst. It is hoped that, as in the
+case of the writer's _England_, so in that of his new book, the
+collaboration of those who are, in their different provinces, experts, has
+ensured a more uniform accuracy than in a volume dealing with such a
+variety of subjects would otherwise have been attainable.
+
+T. H. S. E.
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+  CHAPTER I
+
+    TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED,                      1
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+    THE NEW WEALTH,                                                 13
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+    TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM,                                        27
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+    THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS,               39
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+    THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST,                                     53
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+    SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND,      67
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+    THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES,                                77
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+    THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES,                                92
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+    COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION,                              103
+
+  CHAPTER X
+
+    THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS
+    OF 'SIBYL,'                                                    115
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+
+    FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS,                   132
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+
+    THE LADDER OF EDUCATION,                                       151
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+
+    THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE,                168
+
+  CHAPTER XIV
+
+    THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE,                                  179
+
+  CHAPTER XV
+
+    FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW,                          193
+
+  CHAPTER XVI
+
+    'THE PLAY'S THE THING,'                                        206
+
+  CHAPTER XVII
+
+    THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING
+    MILLIONS,                                                      220
+
+  CHAPTER XVIII
+
+    THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL
+    PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA,                                 238
+
+  CHAPTER XIX
+
+    CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS,                                    259
+
+  CHAPTER XX
+
+    ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE,                                     274
+
+  CHAPTER XXI
+
+    CROWN AND SWORD,                                               290
+
+  CHAPTER XXII
+
+    FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES,                         311
+
+  CHAPTER XXIII
+
+    TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE,                          320
+
+  CHAPTER XXIV
+
+    CECILIA'S TRIUMPHS,                                            337
+
+  CHAPTER XXV
+
+    TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART,                              349
+
+  CHAPTER XXVI
+
+    POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE,                               362
+
+  CHAPTER XXVII
+
+    NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES,                         380
+
+  CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+    TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE,                               388
+
+  CHAPTER XXIX
+
+    TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT,                          398
+
+  CHAPTER XXX
+
+    THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY,             408
+
+  CHAPTER XXXI
+
+    THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND
+    COLONIAL,                                                      422
+
+  INDEX                                                            439
+
+
+
+
+Social Transformations
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED
+
+    Difference between English society in the earlier and later years of
+    the Queen's reign illustrated from the composition of Hyde Park
+    crowds, first, when the Park was a playground for the Royal children,
+    and a parade ground for social celebrities, secondly, as it has become
+    since. Different generations of Victorian Royalty. Great noblemen,
+    Lord Lansdowne, Lord Eglinton, Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Shaftesbury, The
+    Duke of Wellington. Statesmen, Earl Grey, Sir Robert Peel. Other
+    celebrities, social, or intellectual, or literary. The dandies, some
+    of them sketched by Thackeray, Morgan O'Connell, the original of 'The
+    O'Mulligan,' Alfred Montgomery, Alexis Soyer, Lord Adolphus
+    Fitzclarence, 1848-51. Tall forms of Thackeray and Jacob Omnium
+    overtopping the crowd. The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, on
+    horseback. The absence in later days of eminent individuals like
+    these; the old editor and the new. A. W. Kinglake among the last
+    riders in Hyde Park of veterans who write. Commerce in the Park and in
+    society represented by 'King' Hudson before and after his fall. Lord
+    Tollemache, of Peckforton, the last of great nobles familiar to
+    English crowds.
+
+
+As it is to-day, so, during the earlier years of the present reign, both
+before and after the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park was the social
+parade ground, not only of the capital, but of the Kingdom. Then, as now,
+its human panorama was the representative reflection of the social
+conditions not less than of the typical personages of the era.
+
+Throughout the later forties or the fifties, the loungers from the
+provinces were certainly not less numerous in Hyde Park than to-day.
+Foreign visitors were beginning to be a feature in the Metropolitan
+summer. But the scale on which the London season half a century ago was
+observed was so small as to resemble but faintly its successors known to
+the present generation. Society scarcely exceeded the dimensions of a
+family party. Hyde Park itself seemed a Royal pleasure ground first, a
+popular resort afterwards, to which strangers were, as to the Park at
+Windsor, admitted by favour of the first Constitutional Sovereign, to
+behold the pastimes of the rising generations of Royalty. The little boy
+and girl, steering their ponies through the maze of carriages, horses, or
+pedestrians, were the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. Observers
+noted with appreciative criticism the progress made from day to day by the
+young riders. Other of the Queen's descendants of age still more tender,
+followed with their parents in an open carriage, the exact build of which
+had been introduced by the Prince Consort, and were manifestly being
+instructed by their father or mother in the art of acknowledging
+gracefully the respectful salutations of spectators.
+
+The company crowding the Park, and most familiar to London onlookers
+differed from the crowds of succeeding decades, first, in the monotony of
+its composition, secondly, in the commanding ascendancy of some among the
+individuals whom it numbered. This was a kind of feudal age in our social
+development. The monarch was surrounded by subjects, the splendour of
+whose station, or the lustre of whose endowments caused them to shine
+forth in their exalted firmament, with a light of their own not reflected
+by, though comparable with, that of Royalty itself. Two noblemen, during
+the first quarter of a century of the Queen's reign, one Scotch, the other
+English, seemed to eclipse the rest of the peerage. The Earl of Eglinton,
+of the period now referred to, was famous, even among Englishmen, from the
+tournament held some years earlier in 1839 at Eglinton Castle, and
+described by Mr Disraeli in his last novel, _Endymion_. The lady who had
+been the Queen of Beauty upon the occasion, the Duchess of Somerset, was
+then a synonym for all which women envy or men admire. When she appeared
+in Hyde Park, the crowd gazed at her carriage with the awed admiration
+that they bestowed on those born to thrones. North of the Tweed, Lord
+Eglinton summed up to his adoring countrymen, in his own person, all the
+influence, the dignity, the splendour, the power, and all the other
+attributes of greatness with which the principle of birth could be
+endowed. What Lord Eglinton was in Scotland, or to the natives of Scotland
+in London, Lord Lansdowne[2] had long been to all classes of Englishmen,
+not more in his native county than in London. Here, during the earlier
+Victorian seasons, he was conspicuous in Hyde Park, generally by his
+perfect demeanour of high breeding, specially by this blue coat and
+voluminous white neck investment. After him, slowly riding on a horse
+whose familiarity can best be expressed to readers of to-day by comparing
+it with that sometime attained by the white cob of Mr Lowe, Lord
+Sherbrooke, there appeared, in the blue coat and white trousers of the old
+regime, the figure before whom all heads instinctively uncovered, the
+great Duke of Wellington. On horseback, also, were two other men, second
+only in eminence to the Duke himself, Lord Palmerston, and Sir Robert
+Peel. The first still wore his years lightly and was as much at home in
+the saddle as in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel, still a remarkably
+handsome man, had the enthusiasm of the equestrian. Those who can recall
+the loose connection between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the steed which
+he bestrode, can form an idea of the 'seat' of the great Sir Robert.
+
+Next to the representatives of the reigning family and to the statesmen
+who were the props of the young Queen's throne, the attention of the Hyde
+Park crowd was fixed upon a little group of gentlemen, remarkable for the
+perfection of their toilettes, and for the special attention manifestly
+bestowed upon their hair, not as to-day cut down to the scalp, but falling
+gracefully over the white collar. These were the dandies. The last of the
+tribe has not long passed away. But as a race they have left no
+successors. The late Mr Alfred Montgomery had for his associates Count
+Alfred D'Orsay, whose Christian name was perpetuated by a dandies' club.
+'The Alfred' flourished in Albemarle Street till a decade or two since.
+Its founder survived till the nineties, Alexis Soyer, high priest of the
+mysteries of the fine art of cookery as well as the original of
+Thackeray's 'Mirobolant' in _Pendennis_. Others who sat for their
+portraits to the novelist were well known in the fashionable section of
+the Hyde Park crowd. Morgan John O'Connell, a leader of dandies, was of
+course there. There, too, was that other O'Connell, known by his friends
+as Lord Kilmarlcock, from whom Thackeray never denied that he had taken
+the traits of The O'Mulligan. Possibly, too, there might have been seen
+here Mr Arcedeckne, whom the same novelist has immortalised in 'Harry
+Foker,' and who thus early in the Victorian era prefigured the social
+friendship since grown more common between the gentlemen who live to
+labour, and their comrades who live to enjoy. Still more noticeable among
+the Hyde Park loungers on foot, standing not far from D'Orsay and
+Montgomery were the two inseparables, the then Sir George Wombwell and
+Lord Adolphus, better known as 'Dolly,' Fitzclarence, the latter curiously
+like Lawrence's picture of George IV.
+
+The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, scarcely less powerful in the
+social and political system than in his own office, would have been
+mistaken, by those who did not know him personally, for the plain country
+gentleman whose life he liked to lead. His square, neatly compacted
+figure, with cleanly shaven upper lip, and penetrating, but pleasant,
+expression of eyes, was among the last to enter and to leave the Park. Not
+less well known to most Londoners and to many provincials were two of Mr
+Delane's literary friends, though not both of them wrote for his paper.
+One of these was Thackeray, towering above all the smaller men. The other
+was tall Thackeray's taller friend known to his contemporaries as 'Big'
+Higgins, still better known to the public at large as Jacob Omnium. The
+two were generally to be found together. The eyes of all passengers were
+strained, and their tongues silenced as these two tall lumbering figures
+manoeuvred slowly up or down the Row; not so much ridden in then as it was
+afterwards.
+
+But neither the intellectual workers, nor the social butterflies attracted
+more attention than a middle-aged, rather over-dressed lady in a very
+gorgeous carriage, which might have become a Lord Mayor, and a big, heavy
+man, with drab-coloured, wiry hair, who sometimes sat beside her. The
+chariot and its occupants seemed to interest the country visitors in the
+Park more than did the distinguished persons already mentioned. The
+gentleman was George Hudson, the 'railway King,' who had not only made a
+fortune himself, but had been the cause of many others rolling in wealth
+scarcely less than his own. Within a few years he was still visible in the
+same enclosure, not, however, in the gaudy equipage, but as a pedestrian.
+The crash, in fact, had come. King Hudson had fallen on evil days. But
+having dragged none down in his descent, nor disclosed any secrets of the
+prison house, he kept friends who helped him in his adversity. The house
+at Knightsbridge, which is now the French Embassy, knew of course Hudson
+no more. Its fashionable assemblages since it became a diplomatic
+residence cannot have been more brilliant than those which met there when
+Hudson was its master. Nor, indeed, has its social splendour since been
+eclipsed by any of those more recent hosts whom commercial success has
+incorporated among the sons and daughters of fashion. Hudson's dinner
+table, or Mrs Hudson's reception room, were graced, habitually by the
+great Duke of Wellington, by the Duke of Cambridge, and occasionally by
+other Princes of the blood Royal. Nor, during his decline, did Hudson fail
+to carry himself with good humour, and even dignity. His simple, harmless,
+almost pathetic vanity had perhaps combined with his shrewd Yorkshire
+common sense to support him under his adversities. A sum which realised
+L600 a year had been subscribed for him, the trustees of his annuity being
+Sir George Elliot, and Mr Hugh Taylor. His wife and his sons were alive.
+But he preferred living in a solitary lodging in London. His freedom from
+all anxiety made this season of eclipse, he protested, the happiest time
+of his life. A courteous recognition from the great Lord Grey in the Park,
+or the kindly concession to him of the chair which he had occupied, in
+other years, in the smoking room of the Carlton, shed something more than
+a transitory gleam of comfort upon his darkened fortunes, and were recited
+by the old man with his north country burr to the friends with whom, to
+the last, he used to dine. Like another fallen star of a different system,
+in an earlier age, Beau Brummell, Hudson passed several years of his
+eclipse at a hotel in Calais, where he was visited by more friends than
+had ever looked in upon the great dandy of the Georgian epoch during the
+twilight hours of his life.
+
+Such, then, were the chief among the more representative figures to be met
+with on the brightest and most varied of the social parade grounds of the
+capital during the earlier years of the Victorian epoch.
+
+No single element conspicuous in the Hyde Park of the later years of the
+Victorian era was absent from that earlier crowd at whose composition we
+have glanced. The social prominence of English plutocracy whether
+represented by the great money brokers, whom, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic,
+Piccadilly has always known, or by Yorkshire Hudson, whom it knew fitfully
+during the short spell of his splendour, has been, from Elizabethan or
+still earlier times, a feature and a force in the social economy of the
+town. That which, seen between the Magazine and Apsley House, would have
+most surprised Hyde Park loungers in the early Victorian days, had they
+been able to lift the curtain of the future, is not the fact of the best
+coaches of the Four in Hand Club being owned by men whose names have no
+English sound, and whose taste for horseflesh is not hereditary; but
+rather the vogue now attained by prevailing bicycles. Even here, perhaps,
+one ought rather to recognize the reintroduction of a fashion whose idea
+is as old as the hobby horse itself than a mode as indisputably modern as
+the safety wheel or the pneumatic tyre.
+
+The Princes and Princesses who once rode their ponies between Albert and
+Stanhope Gates are now bearing a part in the government of Empires, but
+are seldom for long unrepresented in the moving and glittering throng.
+The 'city' in the Row is not a novelty. The Church began with Archbishop
+Tait to be more prominently represented than was ever known before. The
+most emancipated of bygone occupants of Lambeth would scarcely have looked
+forward to the time when a cavalcade composed of archiepiscopal children,
+led by a Primate himself in the van, with his Chaplain bringing up the
+rear, would canter to and fro along the Row. Hyde Park is not to-day
+visited by early water drinkers who believe in the virtues of the probably
+forgotten spring in Kensington Gardens hard by. But not many hours after
+dawn, the novelty, as to early Victorian observers it would have seemed,
+may be witnessed of ladies and gentlemen issuing in bands from their
+Tyburnian or Kensingtonian homes to gain an appetite for breakfast, and a
+store of fresh air for the day's confinement, by making at least once the
+circuit of the Park while the roads are at their emptiest, and the
+dewdrops still glisten on the flowers.
+
+Something else than the extended popularity of London's most serviceable
+'lung' is suggested by the contrast between Hyde Park as it is now, and as
+it was three or four decades since. The dandies are not the only feature
+in the social landscape one looks for in vain. The commanding
+personalities of individuals of either sex which seemed common on every
+social plane thirty or forty years since have largely disappeared now. The
+levelling influences of a democratic epoch have reduced to a uniformity of
+unheroic proportions those who represent in our public places the
+interests, the occupations, the achievements, or the society of their day.
+It is called a prosaic age. It is certainly, as compared with its
+predecessors, a lilliputian one. At the very zenith of his power, Mr
+Gladstone in the streets or parks of London, never fixed the attention of
+the crowd to the same degree as his political master, the great Sir Robert
+Peel. The adroit, accomplished, and singularly successful soldier, who,
+since the Duke of Cambridge's retirement, has been Commander-in-Chief,
+resembles the Duke of Wellington in stature. Neither Lord Wolseley, nor
+any of his contemporaries, compels as yet from street crowds the mute
+veneration and awe which the simple fact of his unrivalled pre-eminence as
+a subject secured for the Duke of Wellington whenever he set foot in
+Piccadilly, or turned his horse's head in the direction of the Horse
+Guards down Constitution Hill.
+
+Outside the Royal Family there is no great lady who like an earlier Lady
+Jersey is greeted as a queen by crowds to which she can only be a name. In
+the same way, the average of efficiency in journalism was never so high as
+at present, nor the editing as well as the writing and compiling of
+newspapers ever more competently performed. The editor, however, of the
+stamp of John Thaddeus Delane does not, nor by the circumstances of the
+time could, any longer exist. The responsible head of a great newspaper
+office has necessarily become less a creator of public opinion, less even
+of an interpreter, which Delane signally was, of middle class English
+thought, than the custodian of a commercial interest, the vicegerent of a
+proprietor who regards the journal, first, as a great organ of public
+opinion; secondly, as the instrument for achieving his own patriotic
+purposes in his own way. While Delane was yet living, the able conductor
+of another great daily journal was ambitious to fill a place like Delane's
+in the social and political system. It was a sad mistake. In journalism,
+more than anywhere else, as this gentleman ought to have known, given the
+requisite capacity which he undoubtedly had, a man may exercise almost any
+power he likes on condition that he himself remains in the background, and
+neither in jest nor earnest magnifies his apostleship too much. The
+consequence was, in the particular case now spoken of, that after some
+years of patient forbearance on the owner's part, his solicitor waited on
+the editor one fine morning at his country house, and curtly handed the
+gentleman, who thought himself indispensable, a formal note of dismissal.
+Stories were told of occasional collision even between Mr Delane and the
+proprietary of the great newspaper. These were for the most part doubtless
+apocryphal. The one thing which observers knew for certain was that when
+the commercial master of the newspaper appeared during the evening in the
+same room as its literary controller, Mr Delane generally found that he
+had an engagement at his office. Some years after the date at which Hyde
+Park retrospectively has been presented, the best, if not the only, well
+known man of letters to be observed on horseback was A. W. Kinglake, the
+historian of the Crimean war. When he passed away there was left
+stout-hearted, short-tempered Anthony Trollope, who, up to the time of
+his fatal seizure, pounded his sturdy cob so many times round the
+enclosure between Cumberland and Albert Gates, just as a few hours earlier
+in his study, whether in or out of the vein, he had completed a fixed
+number of words of his new novel. These knights of the pen are followed
+(1897) by Frederic Harrison, Leslie Stephen and W. S. Lilly. The last
+quarter of a century in London finds us with many adequate representatives
+of national industry and achievement. The hero who in any department sums
+up the exploits and the tendencies of his age will with difficulty be
+found. The fact that it is the day of great successes does not prevent its
+being comparatively the age of small men. So long as the veteran Lord
+Tollemache, of Peckforton, survived to drive his team in its harness of
+untanned leather from Marlborough Gate to Portman Square, the peerage in
+its social aspect did not lack one whom Carlyle would have admitted to be
+in his way a hero. Since 1890, when Lord Tollemache died, Burke and
+Debrett contain no name whose owner is the cynosure of the holiday crowd
+in at all the same degree as that last survivor of those noblemen whose
+figures at an earlier period of this reign were as well known to the
+popular eye as their position or eccentricity was celebrated in popular
+talk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE NEW WEALTH
+
+    Commercial plutocracy not seen in England for the first time under
+    Queen Victoria, but dates from Queen Elizabeth or earlier. Wealth,
+    birth, intellect, often united in England. City traders being Lord
+    Mayors who from 1452 onwards have founded noble houses. The chief
+    elements in the new nineteenth century wealth considered. Gold
+    discoveries in California 1848, in Australia 1850. Their transforming
+    influences at home and abroad. Expert opinions of the period on the
+    consequences and the durability of the new gold. Different views and
+    calculations of Sir Archibald Alison, Sir Roderick Murchison,
+    Chevalier and Cobden. A new civilization resting on gold. Australian
+    millionaire farmers preceded millionaire gold diggers. Effects of new
+    gold upon circulating and fixed wealth of England tested by property
+    assessments.
+
+
+'I respect the aristocracy of birth and of intellect. I do not respect the
+aristocracy of wealth.' The remark is attributed to the great, or second,
+Sir Robert Peel. It proceeds upon a confused view of the social principles
+indicated by the words. It comes, somewhat inappropriately, from the
+political successor of the William Pitt who bestowed more peerages upon
+the possessors of mere wealth than any Minister before his time had done.
+The distinction drawn by Sir Robert Peel between the different
+aristocracies of England involves some misconceptions of social history.
+In Austria there existed during the last century, there perhaps survives
+faintly to this day, an antagonism between the principles of birth and of
+wealth such as England has never known. With more than conventional
+fitness is the Premier of the day, whether peer or commoner, the guest on
+each 9th of November of the First Magistrate of London City. Within five
+centuries, at least fourteen noble houses have been founded by ten Lord
+Mayors.
+
+In 1452 Sir Godfrey Feilding, mercer, was the Lord Mayor from whom the
+Earls of Denbigh descend. Five years later another trader, Sir Godfrey
+Boleine sat in the chair of Whittington. One of his lineage, a generation
+or two later, as Earl of Wiltshire, gave Henry VIII. his second wife, and
+England her first Protestant Queen. Some ninety years thereafter, Lord
+Mayor Sir John Gresham, grocer, supplied from his numerous family a Duke
+of Buckingham, and a Lord Braybrooke. In 1557 Sir Thomas Cooke, draper,
+was installed in the Mansion House. To his descendants at least two
+patents of nobility were granted, the peerages of Salisbury and of
+Fitzwilliam. In 1570 a clothworker, Sir Rowland Heyward, became chief of
+the City Corporation. He was the ancestor of the Marquises of Bath.
+Fifteen years subsequently to this date, Sir Wolston Dixie, of the
+Skinners Company, was at once the Sovereign of the City and the forerunner
+of the peers bearing the titles of Compton or of Northampton. During the
+earliest years of the seventeenth century there reigned to the East of
+Temple Bar Sir John Houblon, a grocer. His descendants were to number
+amongst them the Irish Viscounts who in the fulness of time gave to Queen
+Victoria in Lord Palmerston the most popular and powerful Premier during
+the first half of her reign. Within another hundred years Lord Mayor Sir
+Samuel Dashwood, vintner, became a progenitor of future nobles only less
+prolific than his sixteenth century predecessor, Sir Thomas Cooke. Those
+who sprang from him obtained in due course the peerages of Warwick and
+Brooke. When in 1711, as Tory Ministers, Harley and Bolingbroke dined at
+the Guildhall, they were entertained by Sir Gilbert Heathcote whose
+posterity was ennobled by the styles of Aveland and Donne. One of Lord
+Salisbury's Christian names, and his second title, that of Viscount
+Cranborne, perpetuate the memory of the Sir Christopher Gascoigne who was
+Lord Mayor of London during the first Ministry of Henry Pelham, in 1753.
+
+These instances serve circumstantially to remind us that the titled, like
+the untitled aristocracy of the country has always represented, as it
+represents to-day, in nearly equal proportions industry and intelligence
+in enterprise, perhaps even more than antiquity of descent. The dramatic
+circumstances of his rise and of his fall; the extent to which the latest
+developments of science, adventure and speculation were embodied in the
+person and in the career of the York linendraper's son, make George
+Hudson, the 'railway King' specially conspicuous amongst those on whom
+shrewdness and opportunity conferred material success. But the type is not
+merely as old as the present century. It has existed as long as English
+civilization itself.
+
+When Queen Victoria came to the throne, there was little in the signs of
+the times to betoken as near at hand the national prosperity which was
+firmly established before she had been seated on her throne five and
+twenty years. National depression followed the exhaustion of English
+energy and finance which had been caused by the struggle with France. Long
+after the heavy war taxation had ended with Waterloo, and the conqueror of
+Waterloo had as ruler of the State reduced army expenses to an
+unexpectedly low figure, the national fortunes were at an alarmingly low
+ebb. Sinecures had been nearly abolished. A further saving of expense had
+been expected by the partial or practical disbandment of the Yeomanry. But
+between 1815 and 1845 the series of bad years was broken only in 1822-5.
+Even then, English enthusiasm at the liberation of South America from
+Spanish rule was followed by reaction consequent upon the sinking of
+British millions in loans to the Spanish Republics of the New World.
+During the first decade of the Victorian epoch, better harvests coincided
+with the importation of gold in small quantities from the Ural mines. The
+railway enthusiasm provided fresh employment for the working classes. More
+even than by gold and railways was done by the fiscal reforms due to
+Cobden, Bright, Peel, Villiers and Gladstone to give impetus to trade, and
+commerce, and to make England the market of the world. Hence the origin
+and multiplication of English millionaires. The country was thus
+gladdened by fitful gleams of a long unknown prosperity. But budgets
+continued to be bad, and Whig finance was in chronic disrepute. During no
+small part of a century, English exports had remained almost stationary at
+L51,000,000 a year. The distress was aggravated by the cotton spinning
+failures of 1842-3. On the eve of these the Burnley guardians told the
+Home Secretary of the inadequacy of their funds for the relief of local
+necessities. So gloomy indeed seemed the national fortune, that the
+Government of the day sold the Crown rights over Epping Forest. Nor as a
+fact was it till the forty-fifth year of the Queen's reign that in 1882,
+this historic pleasure ground presented those scenes with which it is
+chiefly identified to-day.[3]
+
+The first of the most striking transformations of the Victorian era took
+place in the eleventh year of the Queen's reign and continued during two
+or three years thereafter. The gold discoveries in California began in
+1848. They differed from those which had preceded them elsewhere on
+American soil in the circumstance that the new treasures were distributed
+among the entire population, and were not confined to a small band of
+despotic aliens, as had happened under the sway of the Spanish chiefs and
+the Incas of Peru. In 1850-1 the same precious metal as three years
+earlier had been yielded to diggers on the Californian slopes and on the
+banks of the Sacramento River was found to exist in the alluvial plains of
+Ballarat in our own Australian colonies. The practical value of these new
+sources of wealth was variously regarded by political critics and
+scientific economists. The French Chevalier, and our own Cobden predicted
+as a result of the new gold supplies a fall in the value of money, a
+revolution in property, the doubling of wages and prices and the
+impoverishment of capitalists. Others foretold the speedy exhaustion of
+the new gold mines. That view was sanctioned by the expert authority of
+the famous geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, who spoke of the limits of
+the recently discovered gold as 'Nature's Currency Restriction Act.' Sir
+Archibald Alison, not an incautious person, and certainly no friend to
+innovation, elaborately supported a contrary opinion. He engaged in a
+series of minute calculations for the purpose of showing that the gold
+supply now available could not be used up within four centuries. When the
+alluvial soil was drained of its precious deposits, there would, as Alison
+argued, remain the parent rocks, the cost of working which seemed likely
+to diminish and not to increase with time. Nor was this authority less
+sanguine as to the beneficent effects upon all classes and interests of
+the new gold. Commerce, he argued, would be promoted at every turn. With
+increasing production there would be fresh employment, a practical
+decrease in taxation, and generally in the payments made by the poorer
+classes to the rich. Before the Australian discoveries of 1850, scarcity
+of gold had, as Alison contended, raised the value of money, and
+emphasized the difference between the rich and the poor. The Currency
+Restriction Act had been passed in 1844. 'Nature's Grand Currency
+Extension Act' was the name given by the historian to the fresh sources of
+wealth revealed in Bendigo and Ballarat. The facts and figures were
+something to the following effect. The discoveries of 1850-1 had added
+sixteen or eighteen millions to the world's money in comparison with the
+eight or ten millions which in the fifteenth century and onwards had been
+provided by Mexico and Peru. On the other hand the economist Chevalier
+anticipated that, as a consequence of the new gold, money in ten years
+would fall by one half. 'In 1800,' so ran the argument of this economist,
+'the annual addition to the gold of Christendom was barely two and a half
+millions. In 1848 it amounted to thirty-eight millions. In 1858 the total
+was a hundred and ninety millions. Hence,' he insisted, 'between 1858 and
+1868 the additions to the world's available stock of the precious metal
+would be at least as much as the aggregate of additions during the three
+preceding centuries, that is four hundred millions sterling.' The stages
+in this induction may be thus briefly epitomized. During the three and a
+half centuries since the voyages of Columbus and of Cabot opened the New
+World to the Old, two thousand millions sterling had been added to the
+gold and silver of our planet. The hectolitre of wheat before A.D. 1492
+cost in Paris from 2s. 6d. to 2s. 9d. Between 1848-58 it cost 16s. 8d. In
+other words if the usual grain test be applied, money had fallen during
+three and a half centuries to nearly one-sixth of its original value. It
+was upon calculations like these as well as upon certain other
+considerations that Chevalier based his argument that the fresh influx of
+gold would make money fall again by three-fourths of its value. This was
+in effect to say that to procure the same amount of subsistence as
+hitherto four times as much gold would be required. Cobden's anticipations
+were to the same effect. So general was the belief of an impeding
+depreciation of gold and appreciation of silver that Holland actually
+demonetized gold and adopted silver as its standard money. All these fears
+were doomed to disappointment. The hopes were more than realized. The
+third quarter of our present century has proved the most prosperous which
+modern Europe or the world has ever known. A careful and voluminous writer
+on this subject, the late R. H. Patterson[4] attributes this
+miscalculation to the 'famous currency principle' which grew up after the
+great war.
+
+The agencies that have changed the material basis underlying the structure
+of English society were thus fairly now in operation. They were
+supplemented by other circumstances all tending to produce the same
+result. Chief among these was the fact of the English coal supply
+surpassing that of other countries in its abundance and its universal
+distribution by land and sea. The character and the progress of the
+Victorian era are due in no small degree to the sagacity and shrewdness of
+the Prince Consort. He was now the first to recognize that the time had
+come when the cultivation of the artistic sense was alone needed to make
+the English workman the best in that world of which from the days of
+Chatham onwards, his country had been pre-eminently the workshop. French
+industry had not even yet recovered from the blow dealt to it by the
+revolution of the last century. That effacement of an earlier regime had
+differed in important particulars from all analogous movements in earlier
+ages. The havoc, the massacres, the proscriptions and confiscations of
+ancient Rome during her passage from a Republic to an Empire, had
+seriously affected the highest classes alone. The substitution for the
+French monarchy of a Robespierre first, of a Napoleon afterwards, had
+involved all orders in a common ruin. The Queen's husband made it the
+business of his life to insure the maintenance of the advantage which
+history itself had thus given to English industry and manufacture, and
+which the fresh supply of the precious metal directly favoured.
+
+The universal attraction to Englishmen of the Australian gold fields may
+be summarized in a very few facts and figures. In 1852 the English
+emigrants to the treasure stores of the Antipodes were 369,000; a larger
+number, that is, than was represented by the increase of the Queen's
+subjects at home through the excess of births over deaths. Our population
+in fact stood still in order that Australia, like California, might be
+peopled. During the four or five years of the gold fever under the
+Southern Cross, we sent out 1,356,000; more, in other words, than the
+whole population of Scotland at the time of the Union. The annual average
+of English emigrants was thus a trifle over a quarter of a million.
+Somewhat later, the collapse of the railway mania in England and the
+potato famine in Ireland, swelled the average total of this annual exodus
+to nearly half a million.
+
+Other results of the influx of gold during the second Victorian decade
+remain to be epitomized. The precious metal in the Bank of England, from
+less than eight millions in 1847, increased to twenty-two millions in
+1853. The Bank rate during the whole decade was two per cent. The growth
+of trade was suddenly but steadily promoted. During 1853, twenty millions
+more of gold money than within any preceding twelvemonth changed hands
+among the public. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that a belief in
+the permanence of the low interest rate just mentioned caused Mr
+Gladstone, when Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1853, to bring
+forward a scheme for the conversion of a portion of the three per cent.
+Consols, into Consols bearing a lower rate of interest, and that the
+interest on Exchequer Bills was a penny a day or one and a half per cent,
+per annum. The harvests of 1853-4 in England had been bad. The fresh
+purchases by the gold mine countries of English goods fully compensated us
+for the loss from this cause. The value of that custom may be judged from
+the figures which show the cost of life at the gold mines. In the early
+fifties flour rose to four times, meat to five times their usual value. An
+egg or a pill cost a dollar each.[5] For a miner in tolerable luck L2 were
+not an exceptional day's earnings. Nor between the years 1849-55 and
+onwards were the effects of the gold discoveries on foreign and domestic
+trade less noticeable. Within a single period of twelve months, the value
+of our exports increased by one-fourth. Most of these were required by
+consumers in California or in Australia as the case might be. The rise of
+wages owing to the rush to the gold fields amounted in 1851-2 nowhere to
+less than twenty per cent.; in some trades it was twenty-five per cent. In
+London the price of bricks was increased by fifty per cent. Liverpool,
+Manchester, Birmingham shared the general prosperity. Agricultural labour
+was not paid at a rate proportionate to its scarcity. The extent of that
+scarcity may be judged from Sir Morton Peto's suggestion that the Militia
+should be called in to complete the operations of harvesting which were
+interrupted by the inducements offered by contractors to navvies at wages
+varying between four shillings and threepence, and four shillings and
+sixpence a day. Thus the competition of the gold fields industry was
+directly instrumental, not only in increasing trade, and therefore
+production and wealth in the mother country, but in improving the
+condition of the industrial classes at home.
+
+This rise in wages was not however a pure gain. Before the end of 1855
+prices had increased by nearly one-half. The Preston strike of 1853-4
+opened that campaign between industry and capital which has been paid for
+by the representatives of both with so serious a deduction from their
+profits. Before the Preston strike, the unions had been mainly political
+organizations; thereafter they became industrial. Meanwhile on the other
+side of separating oceans new Englands were being created with incredible
+rapidity by the new gold. Already indeed Her Majesty's subjects, without
+leaving their native land knew something of the Eldorado which Australia
+constituted even before the treasures of Ballarat and Bendigo had been
+unearthed. While as yet the nugget was a prize of the future, fortunes
+were realized by the shearing of flocks. Long before the 1851 Exhibition
+the Australian millionaire, returned to his native land, had become
+familiar to Victorian London. He did not yet often live in Grosvenor
+Square. He was to be found frequently in the best houses of the scarcely
+less palatial Westbourne Terrace or at a later date in Rutland Gate. The
+gold which enriched England created Australia, whose capitals can scarcely
+be said to have existed before the thirteenth or fourteenth year of the
+present reign. Gold gave to Victoria civilization and government. It
+built Melbourne. The same omnipotent agency changed New South Wales from a
+sparsely-inhabited tract to a populous and prosperous State. The extreme
+youth, as national life is computed, of Australia will perhaps best be
+realized when it is remembered that the founder of Melbourne, John Pascoe
+Falkner was yet alive, and welcomed to his capital the Duke of Edinburgh
+on the occasion of his visit to the Antipodes in 1860; and that Henty,
+Falkner's associate and senior, survived at least to 1882.
+
+In no department of industry were the immediate profits of Australian gold
+more appreciable than in our transoceanic mercantile marine. During the
+fifties European emigrants crowded every ship. Seamen's wages leapt up by
+a bound to L4 a month.[6] Between 1851 and 1859 the annual rate of
+emigrants was a hundred thousand. The gold raised during this period in
+Victoria fell little short of eighty nine millions. Imports rose to thirty
+pounds per head of the Victoria population, exports rose to fifty-six
+pounds per head. Previously to 1851 New South Wales could not be said to
+possess a foreign trade. In less than thirty years, by 1878, this commerce
+was reckoned annually by thirteen millions of exports, fifteen millions of
+imports. In New South Wales, too, the gold excitement was followed
+immediately by prosperity in coal fields which yielded not less than a
+million sterling. These are the circumstances that, rather than any
+domestic speculations or industries, explain the growth of the London
+plutocracy which has been so prominent a feature of the era now under
+consideration. Under Queen Elizabeth and the Cecils, fortunes made by
+lucky ventures in American and Indian trade were conspicuous. Under the
+Georges, after the victories of our great Admirals Howe, Jervis, Anson,
+foreign wealth was poured into England continuously long before large
+revenues were realized by the development of our mineral wealth. It has
+been already said that during some time after the Queen's accession there
+prevailed general distress chequered by the influx of gold from Russia and
+by the beginnings of railway enterprise. From the earliest fifties a
+change for the better set in, with what results the income tax returns
+will show. The impost was extended to Ireland in 1855. In that year the
+assessed incomes were three hundred and eight millions. Ten years later
+the amount was three hundred and ninety-six millions. After another decade
+it was five hundred and seventy-one millions. In the financial year 1882-3
+the figures were L612,836,058.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM
+
+    All projects of increased speed in locomotion denounced when first
+    proposed. Sir Henry Herbert, M.P., in seventeenth century, on journeys
+    between Edinburgh and London in a fortnight. Parliament on railways.
+    Lord Clanricarde, Colonel Sibthorp, etc. George Hudson, the railway
+    King. Charles Guernsey, the original of Thackeray's 'de la Pluche.'
+    Progress and sequel of the railway fever of 1846. The Queen's first
+    railway journey. Hudson and his fall. Comparison between mines and
+    railways as sources of national wealth. Mr W. H. Mallock's
+    demonstration that the working classes of the United Kingdom have
+    increased in wealth more noticeably even than the upper classes.
+
+
+The truth of Mr Disraeli's humorous description, in his Edinburgh speech
+of 1868, of boots at the Blue Boar agreeing with the chambermaid at the
+rival Red Lion about the folly and iniquity of railways, appears to be
+rooted in the constitution of human nature. All readers are familiar with
+the picture of the English traveller, drawn by Mr Apperley in his famous
+_Quarterly_ article, _The Road_. This imaginary passenger had gone to
+sleep in the days when public conveyances could not be counted on to
+perform more than some half dozen miles an hour. He awakes in the era of
+the lightning coaches and quicksilver mails timed to perform twice that
+distance within the sixty minutes. If, as archaeologists say, a certain
+Ericthonius of Athens[7] invented some fifteen centuries B.C. the first
+chariot of which authentic record exists, he, too, was perhaps regarded as
+an enemy rather than as a benefactor by some among his amazed
+contemporaries. More than 3,000 years after the Attic revolutionary an
+English Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Herbert, said that a man who
+proposed to travel to and fro between Scotland and England within seven
+days each way would be voted fit for Bedlam.
+
+By 1843, thirteen years, that is, after the historic steam locomotive
+between Manchester and Liverpool which caused the death of Mr Huskisson,
+the great railway systems of England existed in a form more or less
+complete. Eighteen hundred miles in all were open for traffic. Parliament
+had authorized the expenditure on them of seventy million pounds. Sixty
+million pounds had been so spent already. An average of three hundred
+thousand passengers was carried weekly. Neither by the opinion of
+parliament nor of the public were railways regarded with unequivocal
+favour, or even at all times with toleration. Colonel Sibthorp could say
+in the House of Commons that he considered all railways as public frauds
+and private robberies. Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord Lansdowne, the Duke of
+Wellington, Lord Clanricarde, all spoke of George Stephenson's invention
+in the same contemptuous tones. The _Morning Post_ in February 1842 dwelt
+with satisfaction on the fact that 'the Queen never travels by railway;'
+while Prince Albert who did sometimes patronize the train between Windsor
+and London was obliged only too often to protest: 'Not quite so fast, Mr
+Conductor, if you please!' Within four months of the _Morning Post's_
+announcement, the _Railway Times_ was able to record that Her Majesty made
+her first trip on the Great Western. A few months later the Royal
+passenger accomplished the distance between Southampton and Vauxhall in
+less than two hours without a hitch. Five years subsequently the Queen and
+Prince Consort journeyed to Cambridge for the installation of His Royal
+Highness as Chancellor in a train driven, as Her Majesty records, by
+George Hudson, the railway King. Between 1836 and 1846 the English mind
+was fairly reconciled to the new method of transit. The day had finally
+gone by when, as they had done a little previously, a firm of London
+solicitors could refuse the business of the Brighton line on the plea that
+coaches would drive off the trains in a month. From 1836 and onward the
+Liverpool and Manchester, the London and Birmingham, and the North Midland
+lines were all paying ten per cent. During 1846, the year of the railway
+mania, 440 railway Bills passed authorizing the construction of 8,470
+miles and the raising of L180,138,901.
+
+This was the zenith of the shortlived splendour of George Hudson, the
+railway King. He has been seen already in these pages, amid the Hyde Park
+crowd in the early forties, resting his large heavy person in his wife's
+chariot. The man himself had first become known on the City Board of
+Health in York. Afterwards he was elected Mayor of his native town. In
+that capacity he made the acquaintance of George Stephenson. In 1845 the
+son of the York linendraper, now a power in the railway world was returned
+to the House of Commons as Member for Sunderland. His parliamentary career
+is alone, if at all, remembered to-day by the frequent encounters on the
+floor of the House between himself and Mr Bernal Osborne. Diverting
+memories of these were often recalled for the benefit of his friends by
+Hudson's antagonist, with the generous admission of the raconteur that he
+had, in the ex-King, usually found his match, if not in humorous retort
+and thrust, yet in substantial argument. Two years after the 'King' drove
+the engine which took the Queen and her Consort to Cambridge, suspicions
+of Hudson's motive and conduct took (April 19, 1849) a definite shape. The
+shareholders of the Midland demanded a Committee of Inquiry. The
+incriminated Chairman resigned his post, and quietly accepted his
+permanent eclipse. It was noticed to his credit at the time, and has not
+since been denied, that he made no efforts at self exculpation, disclosed
+no names or confidential transactions, and thus refused, as unquestionably
+it was in his power to do, to associate persons of the highest
+consideration with himself in his fall. Hudson was only the type of a
+class whose members were invested by the railway passion of the period
+with brief splendour and unsubstantial prosperity. In the Upper House,
+Lord Clanricarde mentioned how Charles Guernsey, a broker's clerk, had
+subscribed fifty-two thousand pounds for shares in the London and York
+line. This was the undoubted original of Thackeray's 'de la Pluche.' The
+total of his gains appears to have amounted to thirty thousand pounds.
+The essential facts of the sequel with very little of fictitious
+amplification are given by the novelist.
+
+A reaction, as has been seen, followed the morbid enterprise of 1846. Its
+results, however, have endured to the present hour. In 1845 the United
+Kingdom possessed only two thousand four hundred miles of iron way. The
+capital invested upon these was only eighty-eight millions. Before 1850,
+the capital had increased to two hundred and thirty millions. To-day the
+aggregate miles of the railways of the United Kingdom are little, if at
+all short, of twenty thousand. The expenditure has been six hundred and
+thirty millions. The gross annual income is sixty millions. In order to
+appreciate with approximate accuracy the part played by the steam
+locomotive in the creation of nineteenth century wealth in England, or to
+define with practical distinctness that familiar term 'the railway
+interest;' it is necessary to examine this matter more in detail. In 1855
+the total of capital represented by the United Kingdom railways was
+L297,584,709. In 1894, the latest date to which the Board of Trade returns
+are published, the total was L985,387,855. After forty years, therefore,
+the railway investments of these Islands had increased by L687,803,146.
+
+Another chief source of national wealth and industrial employment during
+this reign has been provided by mining enterprise. In respect of the money
+value of each, what are the relations which the yield of subterranean
+labour has borne to the enterprises of steam upon the surface of the
+earth? In 1855 the value of all the minerals brought to the light of day
+is expressed by the figures L29,579,001. The figures referring to railways
+for the same year were, it will be remembered, seen to be L21,507,599.
+This comparison between the two shows therefore that in 1855 the mines
+exceeded the railways in value in round numbers, by eight million pounds.
+The exact figures of the excess were L8,071,402. Forty years later this
+balance is more than redressed. In 1894 the total of mineral wealth was
+L80,900,453. The entire railway receipts were L84,310,831. In other words,
+the surface opulence of the United Kingdom had not only made good its
+inferiority to the subterranean wealth, but had advanced beyond that
+rival, in round numbers, by three and a half million pounds. The exact
+figures were L3,410,378.
+
+The interesting analysis of the resources of the different orders of the
+community contained in Mr W. H. Mallock's 'Classes and Masses' supplies
+tolerably conclusive evidence that the results of mining and railway
+enterprise have been distributed not very unequally between the rich and
+the poor, or, as Mr Mallock rather puts it, between income tax payers on
+L1,000 or upwards a year and those who, earning less than L150 a year, pay
+no income tax at all. His estimate is that the population of England
+contains seven hundred thousand families, equal to a total of three
+million souls, 'with means of subsistence, insufficient, barely
+sufficient, or precarious.' Although these figures represent the entire
+population at the Norman conquest, Mr Mallock is able to show that
+relatively to all inhabiting this realm the necessitous class has
+decreased, not increased. In the seventeenth century, one-third of the
+dwellers in Sheffield, then (1615) as to-day a great manufacturing centre,
+were dependent on charity. Thirteen years after the Queen's accession
+(_i.e._ 1850), out of every two hundred of our population nine were
+paupers. In 1882 the proportion of pauperism was only five. Between 1850
+and 1897 the population has increased from twenty-eight millions to
+thirty-eight millions. The income-tax payers have increased from one
+million and a half to nearly eight millions.[8] Incomes between L150 and
+L1,000 have increased from three hundred thousand to nine hundred and
+ninety thousand. Incomes above L1,000 have increased from twenty-four
+thousand to sixty thousand; or, as this authority finds it more convenient
+to put it, the middle class has grown by six hundred and ninety thousand.
+The rich have been re-inforced by only thirty-six thousand. On the other
+hand Mr Mallock is able to dispose of the fallacy that during the present
+reign the very richest class have grown richer still. In 1850 the incomes
+of fifty thousand pounds and upwards were seventy-two thousand; in 1897
+they are nearer a hundred thousand; thus while the fairly well-to-do
+middle classes have increased by hundreds of thousands, the professional
+plutocrats measure their increase only by a few simple thousands. Briefly
+summarized, the arithmetical argument of Mr Mallock is as follows. In
+1800 the whole wealth of the country was two hundred and forty million
+pounds. Of that amount the workers took one hundred and eleven million
+pounds, leaving for the middle classes and the rich one hundred and thirty
+million pounds. Three quarters of a century later, or more exactly in
+1881, Mr Mallock's latest date, making his argument still more applicable
+to 1897, the total of national wealth was one thousand three hundred
+millions. Of this the workers had six hundred and sixty millions. The
+working classes had thus, from being twenty millions behind the rich at
+the opening of the century, advanced twenty millions beyond the rich
+towards its close. From these figures, the inference is fair, and indeed
+irresistible, that railways like other inventions have contributed to the
+material prosperity of all classes equally, and have not enriched the
+capitalists alone.
+
+Notwithstanding George Hudson, who has become merely a memory, or Charles
+Guernsey, the stockbroker's clerk who was his lowly imitator, the railway
+plutocracy would seem to be a phrase more full of sound than of practical
+meaning. If to this remark the name of Vanderbilt be objected, the true
+facts of the case rather confirm than disprove the present remark.
+'Commodore' Vanderbilt was a rich man before he ever owned a railway
+share. He sold a fleet of steamers to purchase control of the New York
+Central Railway. Had he invested the capital realized by this preliminary
+transaction in any of the industries of his nation, such as the tinning of
+beef from a cattle ranche in California, or the curing of bacon at
+Chicago, he might have made the same or an even larger fortune. Railway
+diplomacy was only the accidental employment of Mr Vanderbilt's
+extraordinary genius for creative finance. The same talents exercised upon
+any other material, or expended in any other career could scarcely fail to
+have commanded same results. In another department of the industry
+afforded to intellect by the steam locomotive, Charles Austin made two
+fortunes out of railway Bills. His abilities as an advocate were probably
+unequalled among the generation to which he belonged. Since Austin's day
+lawyers of the same, or something like the same capacity have amassed
+wealth not inferior to Austin's out of electric patents practice, or in
+other branches of law which have been specially in request at the moment.
+While the railway fever of the forties was at its height, a little man
+with an intellectual head covered by a proverbially shabby hat might often
+of an afternoon have been seen walking down Parliament Street. He never
+failed to bestow a copper upon the crossing sweeper at the point where the
+Home Office stands to-day. Formerly the contractor usually lavished on the
+man a four-penny bit. But times were bad. The vail was reduced to a
+quarter of that amount. The donor humorously anticipated the day when he
+might be glad of a reversionary interest to the broom and shovel employed
+outside the Horse Guards. That calamity, which of course never seriously
+threatened, was averted. The little gentleman with the ostentatiously
+neglected head-gear, Thomas Brassey, was a millionaire long before he
+built his last railway. But his contemporary, Thomas Cubitt, made the same
+fortune out of building Belgravia. Railways have also often enriched the
+landowners through whose estates the lines have run. So high an authority
+as Mr Samuel Laing holds that the owners of the soil have been over
+compensated by the companies generally for the acquisition of their land.
+To this, however, the country gentlemen would reply that in countless
+instances they have received no more than the agricultural value for their
+acres.[9] Certainly the profits of this class from railways have not
+exceeded the gains which have accrued from the selling or leasing of other
+property for building purposes. The railway interest, then, as a phrase
+scarcely points to the existence of railway shareholders as a caste or
+even a separate class. Railway shares, as the statistics above quoted
+show, are distributed in fairly equal proportions through all classes of
+the community. The learned professions, especially the Church, are
+represented as well as the State or capital in these proprietorial bodies.
+In the great majority of instances, the separate sums held are small.
+Thus, ten years ago, the London and North Western Railway with its ninety
+millions of capital had about thirty thousand debenture and stock holders.
+Three thousand pounds scarcely represent what could be regarded as a
+plutocratic investment. As for the men who were the early captains of
+railway industry, they none of them secured more than modest competences.
+Vignoles, Stephenson, Brunel, Hackworth, Allport, Cawkwell, Grierson; none
+of these founded, none of their descendants are likely to found,
+territorial families. Sir Daniel Gooch, so long the chairman of the Great
+Western, left six hundred thousand pounds to his posterity. The greater
+portion of this sum was made, not in railways, but in coal and in
+telegraphs. Sir Edward Watkin, who is still with us, and to whose
+enterprise neither the mountain precipice nor the realm of air is
+inaccessible, has perhaps been not less prospered. It would not however be
+easy to multiply instances of railway opulence like these.
+
+On the other hand Arkwright of the spinning jenny has founded two rich
+county families. His rival, Hargreaves, established another. The true
+conclusion on this subject seems to be that the wealth invested in our
+railways is only one, if the most conspicuous manifestation of the wealth
+of the community. No better summary of the facts could be found than the
+shrewd phrase into which George Stephenson condensed the whole subject.
+'The country made the railways, and in return the railways made the
+country.' The prosperity of the manufacturing classes which has coincided
+with the Victorian era provided the money that built the railways. In
+return the early development of our railway system enabled us to get so
+far in advance of Continental nations as merchants and manufacturers that
+our rivals have not yet caught us up, and perhaps never will.
+
+The future development of the English railway system may be a tempting and
+instructive topic for speculative experts, but is not for a general
+survey, such as the present. The issues between traders and framers of
+railway rates for the carriage of merchandise are periodically expressed
+in the demand for the acquisition of the iron roads, like the telegraphic
+wires, by the State. The mighty sections of the Anglo-Saxon race on either
+side of the Atlantic present the two great exceptions to the State
+proprietorship or State control of the public locomotives. Seeing that
+half the railway mileage and capital of the world belongs to the United
+Kingdom and to the United States, these exceptions are themselves of
+considerable importance. The incorporation of the railway systems of the
+United Kingdom into the national service would, it has been calculated,
+involve the doubling of the annual Budget, and an addition to the
+permanent Civil Service of five per cent, of our male population. If this
+estimate be correct, it seems likely that a Minister of the Crown will
+think even more than thrice before he seriously proposes the assumption of
+such a responsibility by himself and his colleagues.
+
+    Apart from his general obligations to the work on Railways (2 vols.
+    Cassell & Company, 1894, by Mr John Pendleton), the writer expresses
+    his grateful acknowledgment for valuable help in this portion of his
+    work privately received from Mr Acworth, the great authority on modern
+    railways throughout the world, and from Mr A. J. Wilson, the eminent
+    writer on financial and commercial topics.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
+
+    Contrast between the London of the forties and the London of to-day.
+    Gas and steam chiefly mark the century. City traders still living at
+    Islington. The theatre not yet an institution. The parks still uncared
+    for. Thames pollutions still recall Dickens' description of Quilp's
+    home. The future South Kensington cabbage beds or waste ground.
+    Absence of enormous fortunes outside commercial millionaires. Evidence
+    of increasing national prosperity afforded by statistics of picture
+    sales. The growth of these sales from Charles I. till to-day. The
+    Beckford, the Horace Walpole and other sales. Gradual rise in value of
+    great masters. Memorable sales and personages at Christie's.
+    Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire episode.
+
+
+The chief resemblance between the London which Queen Victoria first knew,
+and the capital as it was seen by her subjects on her jubilee anniversary
+in 1887, is the appearance of the steam locomotive at the railway termini
+and upon the waters of the Thames. Passing to more permanent
+characteristics, only the great national buildings would enable those
+present at Her Majesty's coronation to identify the pre-Exhibition
+Metropolis with the capital of to-day. Even Hyde Park, that, as has been
+seen, was then, as now, the recreation ground of polite London, presented
+an aspect very different from its appearance on the approach of the
+sixtieth commemoration of the commencement of the reign. Like all the
+other Royal enclosures, the Hyde Park of the forties or fifties was
+decorated by no flower beds and was in other respects habitually ill-kept.
+General sanitation had yet to reach its infancy. The Thames remained
+almost as unwholesome and repulsive a stream as at an earlier epoch the
+Fleet Ditch had been. Dickens' description in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ of
+'Quilp's' haunts was a sketch from life equally graphic and accurate of
+the condition of the river's shore between London Bridge and the Strand.
+The site of the river embankments of to-day swarmed at low water with
+mudlarks gathering fragments of coal and other refuse which had dropped
+from the wharves that lined the banks on both sides of the river. If the
+ladies who to-day take tea on the Terrace of the House of Commons had
+exposed themselves so persistently on the spot where that structure now
+stands, instead of catching a catarrh, they might have feared a
+pestilence. Even in the course of the short suburban drives made by the
+coaches of the Four-in-Hand Club after their meet at the Magazine, the
+ladies who to-day occupy the box seat would have run the risk of being
+shocked by the sight of corpses hanging on the gallows. Lord Grey's Reform
+Act had been added to the Statute Book before this relic of barbarism
+disappeared. The midlands were busy with preparations for the first appeal
+to genuine constituencies when certain electoral canvassers, merrily
+pursuing their work outside Leicester were horror-stricken amidst their
+fun by the sight of a lifeless form fashionably dressed in blue coat and
+gilt buttons swinging to and fro on a gallows tree by the roadway. The
+body was that of a young master printer, who had been hung for a
+particularly abominable murder. More decent times happily were near. This,
+which many men now living can remember, was the last gibbet that ever
+disgraced the Queen's highway. The city workers when they did not dwell
+above their offices, lived for the most part at Islington, still a country
+suburb, or took the bus or coach to and fro between the more rural
+Tottenham or Highgate and their counting room or shop. The ground which is
+to-day covered by the mansions, the hotels, and the flower beds of South
+Kensington was then either used as cabbage gardens, nursery grounds, and
+riding schools, or was given up to the loafers and ruffians of the
+streets, who chose the forenoon of Sunday as the time for settling their
+differences with their fists.
+
+As a popular institution the theatre was practically unknown to the early
+Victorian era. The old patent houses were supported precariously. Their
+rivals of more recent date were on the chronic verge of bankruptcy. Night
+after night popular actors and actresses performed to empty benches.
+Pleasure seekers from the West were more likely to make up a party to see
+a man hanged than to make up a party for the play.
+
+The new millionaires came in with the new gold. At this earlier date, the
+men who had realized great fortunes in business, who did not belong on the
+one hand to the wealthy territorial noblesse, or to the financial
+plutocracy on the other might be counted on the fingers of a single hand.
+The Rothschilds had been settled among us for a century. Their opulence
+had passed into a proverb. Other names belonging to the millionaire
+category were Arkwright, Strutt, Jones Lloyd, better known to the present
+generation as Lord Overstone, and Hope. The forerunners of that
+aristocracy of wealth which sways society to-day, of the Guests, the
+Crawshays in the iron trade, had not yet appeared. Half a century had
+passed since the second Pitt had declared that 'every man with forty
+thousand a year had a right to a peerage.' The Listers, the Holdens, and
+others were already prosperous manufacturers in the Bradford district. The
+brewing interest already knew its Basses and its Guinnesses. The peerages
+and the baronetcies with which these families have since been decorated
+were reserved for a much later stage of the reign. Even the uncrowned
+kings of the Australian or Californian gold mines had no subjects in
+London till the World's Show of 1851 had passed into history. The gradual
+advancement of the great retail traders typified by the name Peter
+Robinson, or Maple, to a corresponding dignity on a different level did
+not take place till our own decade. The social polish and refinement which
+are the attributes of the new wealth to-day, had not half a century since
+become dreams of fancy. Rude plenty and coarse splendour characterized the
+entertainments and the dwellings of the early Victorian plutocracy, as
+they had marked the hospitality of our Saxon or Norman ancestors. It is a
+commonplace of conversation to say that none can foretell where the
+movement which during the last half century has set in with all classes is
+to stop. Not only the wages of the working classes, but the payments of
+professional and every kind of skilled industry have increased at a rate
+predicted to be impossible; but every shilling buys from thirty to fifty
+per cent. more than formerly of the necessaries and comforts of life. The
+Prince Consort, as has been already said, did more than any other
+individual of his day to quicken English workmanship with the artistic
+sense. The task that waits for accomplishment now is seemingly to develop
+intelligence and thrift in the masses. If this work be carried to the
+point which may be expected from the progress made during the last half
+century, the conditions of the national life in England cannot fail to
+improve more rapidly than anywhere else in the world.
+
+The new municipal buildings which have risen in all the great towns of the
+kingdom during the last four or five decades; the warehouses, offices, and
+shops that, if seen in Venice, would be admired for the artistic splendour
+of their exteriors, but which pass unnoticed on the Thames, the Mersey,
+and the Irwell; these are some among the outward and visible signs of the
+progressive prosperity of all classes of the community, since the
+treasures of Australia and California first were poured into England, and
+since the Serbonian bog of Chat Moss was turned into a safe and solid
+track for the steam engine. Other indications, not less conclusive and
+perhaps more picturesque, of the same truth are the decoration of the
+outskirts of every town with private villas set in landscape gardens which
+half a century ago would have seemed worthy of Chatsworth, and with public
+parks not less cared for than Royal pleasure grounds, the acquisitions of
+corporate enterprise, or the gifts of individual munificence. The hard
+facts and figures which have accumulated since in 1846 the British ports
+were opened to the merchandise of all nations explain in detail the
+transformation that has been witnessed. During the quarter of a century
+before the repeal of the Corn Laws, the total value of English exports, of
+products, of manufactures was one thousand and eighty-five millions.
+During the twenty-five years that followed the repeal, the value was three
+thousand and thirty-one millions; in other words, an increase of nearly
+two hundred per cent. The second quarter of a century since Free Trade,
+that is from 1871-1896 has raised the total value of our exports to six
+thousand two hundred and ninety-nine millions; and this in the face of the
+great and continuous fall of prices during recent years. Our import trade
+has expanded even in greater proportion. The total value of imports of
+merchandise during the years between 1871-1895 was nine thousand seven
+hundred and sixty-three millions. These figures do not exhaust the
+national profits of Free Trade. Our increased business with the great
+markets of the world abroad has meant a vast extension of employment among
+the masses at home. There is not only more work to be done. It is paid for
+at a higher rate than was ever known. Articles of necessity, not more than
+of luxury never before known in industrial households, are to-day common
+beneath the workman's roof. With comfort, sobriety, and thrift, which are
+indeed the parents of comfort, have increased too. The Chancellor of the
+Exchequer in his last Budget stated that within ten years the deposits of
+the savings banks have more than doubled. The evidence furnished by
+statistics of pauperism is not less significant. In the spring of 1896
+poor relief was given to 739,021 as compared with 897,370 in 1857. And
+this although the population had grown in forty years from nineteen
+millions to over thirty millions. In 1857 the ratio of paupers to
+inhabitants was more than 47 in 1,000. In 1896 the ratio is 24 in 1,000.
+
+The proof of national prosperity afforded by the income-tax returns was
+given at length in the preceding chapter. Entirely to exhaust the
+statistical evidence available for the propositions now advanced there may
+be cited the figures connected with the National Debt. This is being paid
+off out of the successive surpluses of annual revenue over expenditure. In
+1856 after the Crimean War, the Debt stood at eight hundred and
+twenty-nine millions, or about L29, 12s. per head of the population. In
+1895 it had been reduced to six hundred and sixty millions, or about L17,
+6s. per head of the population. The amount of the Debt in March 1896 was
+six hundred and fifty-two millions. Thus, in the last thirteen years, the
+money responsibilities of the nation have been reduced by one hundred
+millions. Enthusiasts for Richard Cobden's memory have therefore some
+reason for declaring that since the measure which the genius of himself
+and John Bright conceived, and the statesmanlike energy of Mr Villiers
+promoted, was written on the Statute Book, a new England has been created.
+Nor has anyone seriously denied the connection during the regime of
+Protection between wheat at from 53s. to 112s. a quarter and the
+intolerable distress of the working classes in town and country expressed
+in ricks blazing and Riot Acts read. With the first relaxation in the
+Protective Tariff, some improvement began. It continued very gradually but
+certainly till at last the new prosperity as shown by the figures and
+facts already cited was fairly established.
+
+The prices commanded by famous pictures at the great art sales of the
+present and preceding periods have not uniformly attested the correctness
+of the popular criticism. They have, however, at all times afforded a
+practical criterion of the growing wealth of the country, and above all of
+the standard of expenditure current among the educated classes; seen in
+this light, the figures are not irrelevant to the present purpose. Picture
+sales have been a feature in the social and artistic life of England
+during more than two centuries. In 1649, by order of the Parliament, the
+collection of Charles I., the most discriminating and perhaps the greatest
+of Royal patrons of art, was offered to public competition. It realized a
+trifle less than fifty thousand pounds, probably not half of what it cost
+its original owner, who is said to have paid for the 'Mantua' pictures
+alone eighty thousand pounds. At a later sale, however, many of these
+paintings found purchasers at from L500 to L800 apiece. Thus, even in
+these early days, was the coming rise in artistic values faintly
+foreshadowed. But no continuous increase was yet noticeable. Not quite a
+century after this, Harley, Lord Oxford's celebrated collection was
+dispersed. The polite education of the well-to-do classes had then made
+considerable advances. The first of the Indian Nabobs had returned home
+with the spoils of the Pagoda Tree in his pocket to end his days in the
+coffee houses of St James's. The commercial classes were generally
+prosperous. Many Sir Vistos, complying with the whisper of the familiar
+demon 'had a taste.' The conditions of the time were therefore not
+unfavourable for prices conspicuously higher than had been given for the
+Stuart collection. Nevertheless, the interest aroused by the Oxford sale
+was so languid, art fanciers were so little enterprising, that the highest
+price recorded on this occasion was eighty-nine pounds, five shillings for
+the 'Jacob and Laban' of Sebastian Bourdon. The Italian masters commanded
+on an average only five guineas apiece. A superb specimen of Claude
+Lorraine encouraged no bidder beyond twenty-seven pounds, six shillings.
+Holbein's since famous portrait of the Duchess of Suffolk went for fifteen
+pounds, four shillings and sixpence. Rembrandts scarcely found purchasers
+at twelve guineas or even six. Pictures then supposed to be by Michael
+Angelo could be had for a few pounds. The highest price paid at the Oxford
+sale, the only one running into three figures was one hundred and
+seventy-five pounds, five shillings, for Van Dyck's 'Sir Kenelm Digby and
+family.' On the other hand, a second Van Dyck of unrecorded title went for
+five pounds, fifteen shillings. This was the period in which Hogarth's
+masterpieces were bought for prices ranging between a maximum of
+eighty-eight pounds and a minimum of twenty-seven pounds. This
+depreciation did not continue long. Soon after the Oxford sale of 1741,
+the paintings by which Hogarth is best known were readily purchased at a
+thousand pounds apiece. Even, however, after the nineteenth century had
+opened, no sudden rise in art values took place. In 1823, at Beckford's
+Fonthill sale, the principal treasures only realized an average of
+thirty-one pounds each, the whole collection of pictures, four hundred and
+twenty-four in number, produced thirteen thousand two hundred and
+forty-nine pounds, fifteen shillings. In the year before the great
+Exhibition at the King of Holland's sale, a 'Holy Family' attributed to
+Raphael found no bidder beyond two hundred and fifty pounds.[10] A
+European sensation was created by the agent of the Russian Emperor giving
+on this occasion, three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three pounds
+for a chef d'oeuvre of Leonardo da Vinci. But the 'Trinity' by Rubens was
+not considered specially cheap at six hundred and fifty-eight pounds.
+Famous portraits by Dutch masters at three hundred and thirty pounds each
+were looked upon as extravagant. The characteristic profusion of the
+famous Marquis of Hertford in paying fourteen thousand pounds for some ten
+or twenty pictures furnished during some weeks the talk to the town. In
+another quarter of a century, in 1876, at the Bredel sale, the 'Enamoured
+Cavalier' by an artist not of the highest distinction, realized a price
+almost unprecedented then, but often repeated and increased since, of four
+thousand, three hundred pounds. That the upward movement of prices, to
+culminate some time later as will presently be seen in a memorable
+transaction of the saleroom, had fairly started twenty years ago, is
+evident from the details of the present retrospect. That the new
+development was at that date in its infancy may be inferred from the fact
+that at the Albert Levy sale in 1876 a landscape by Gainsborough which has
+since changed hands for thousands secured only a few shillings over three
+hundred and sixty-seven pounds. Eight years later at the Quilter sale of
+1884, the enhanced value of foreign masters formed a much more conspicuous
+testimony to the growing affluence of the classes which supply the
+virtuosi of these later days. On that occasion the 'Heidelberg' of Turner
+was after a keen competition knocked down for not much less than two
+thousand pounds. The same artist's 'Zurich' in the same year went for
+twelve hundred and sixty pounds, nearly twice as much as it had secured
+only a decade earlier. Incidentally for those to whom such facts and
+figures are interesting on artistic, and not social, grounds, the
+conclusion from such an analysis as has now been attempted seems to be
+that since the Strawberry Hill sale and later the Bernal sale, the best
+works have continuously and conspicuously increased in value, but that,
+especially in the case of later Italian painters, Guido, etc., pictures of
+moderate merit have become a drug in the market. If Sir Robert Walpole was
+the first of modern parliamentarians, his son was equally the eighteenth
+century founder of the existing race of art connoisseurs. During the April
+and May of 1842, the collection of the toy villa whose Gothic pinnacles
+overlook the Thames yielded in round numbers thirty thousand pounds. After
+an interval of fourteen years the treasures of Ralph Bernal, whose death
+deprived the House of Commons of a Chairman of Committees as that of his
+son was afterwards to eclipse its gaiety, formed the event of the season
+of 1856. In the course of a thirty-one days' sale the total realized was
+twice that of the Walpole sale, in other words more than sixty thousand
+pounds.
+
+These figures seem insignificant when contrasted with the heroic prices of
+our own epoch. Of these only a few and not the highest have yet been
+glanced at. Compare with the modest totals just mentioned the competition
+and the sums of money, both without precedent, expended in Christie's
+salerooms during the seventies and eighties of the century. The rostrum
+mounted by the auctioneer may be, as is said, identical with that used in
+the earliest days of the house a century ago. It is the only visible link
+with the past still remaining. The quality of the crowd of buyers is not
+more changed than the prices which they are prepared to give; or the
+national opulence which these prices indicate. In those earlier days the
+salerooms were in Pall Mall instead of King Street, St James's. These
+premises were only vacated, as many now living can remember to clear the
+way for the still youthful Royal Academy before it had, on its journey to
+Burlington House, reached the stage of Trafalgar Square. The keen Celtic
+face of Doyle, director of the Irish National Gallery; the strikingly
+handsome and Venetian profile of Sir Frederick Leighton; the delicately
+chiselled and thoughtful features of Woolner, more than creditable as a
+sculptor, far more than merely graceful as a poet; these among the company
+of possible buyers represented the professionally expert element. The
+late Sir William Gregory with his fine brow and leonine head, whose
+many-sided culture suggests the complete man of the Herbert of Cherbury
+type whom our ancestors worshipped; another Irishman on whom a picture
+acts as a magnet on steel, Lord Powerscourt; among Scots Lord Rosebery;
+the Duke of St Albans whose physiognomy in those days recalled his Stuart
+ancestry; the interested and intelligent presence of a representative of
+that exotic wealth which has encouraged English industry and art so much,
+Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild; these are among the best known members of
+the general circle. Nor should there be omitted the form of a tradesman
+whose position next to the auctioneer, and whose telegram and account book
+in hand proclaim his occupation. This is Mr Agnew, pre-eminently a
+creation of the new wealth of the Victorian epoch, as well as the promoter
+of not a few artists' prosperity. To-day the enterprising trader is to
+prove himself the idol of the saleroom by paying the largest sum ever
+known to have been given for a single painting. And that in opposition to
+the peer of the longest purse of the day, the late Lord Dudley. That noble
+connoisseur by his bid of ten thousand guineas seems at first to have
+secured for Park Lane Gainsborough's portrait of the Duchess of
+Devonshire, who won by her kiss the Westminster election for Charles Fox.
+Just as the hammer of fate is about to descend, the dealer intimates an
+advance. Amid applause, such as salutes the Derby winner on Epsom Downs,
+Mr Agnew[11] is declared the possessor of the incomparable canvas for the
+price, as yet unheard in any saleroom, of ten thousand one hundred
+guineas. Three years before this, in 1873, 'The Sisters,' also by
+Gainsborough, had brought six thousand, six hundred and fifteen pounds.
+Fourteen years after its first sale, in 1887, the same painting realized
+nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five pounds. Recent changes in the
+law of entail have undoubtedly tended to promote these unprecedented
+prices. The chief cause, however, is the general augmentation of wealth
+and the more lavish scale and ideas of expenditure that have penetrated
+all classes of the community.[12]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST
+
+    Specific instances of the fusion with native elements of the owners of
+    foreign wealth, especially in the case of the Jews. Growth in England
+    from early days of Hebrew plutocracy. Different views as to number of
+    Jew families, the names of these as preserved by Jewish writers.
+    Westminster Abbey under Richard III. and Henry VII. completed with Jew
+    money. Later settlements of Jews in England date from Charles II.
+    Under George III. the prosperity of the Goldsmids foreshadows the
+    future power of the Rothschilds. Early beginnings of the Rothschilds,
+    on the Continent and in England. Rothschild and Waterloo; Rothschild
+    and the Bank of England. Services of the family to the English State.
+    Their method of using their wealth under Baron Lionel and his
+    successors. Their example to others of their race and their work
+    amongst their own people.
+
+
+The close assimilation of the newer elements of English life to the older;
+the gradual but unchecked identification in pursuits, habits, culture and
+tastes of the aristocracy of wealth with that of birth have been already
+mentioned. More detailed illustration of these distinctive movements of
+the Victorian era are necessary to enable us to form an adequate idea of
+the personal and enduring influence exercised upon the society of England
+by those who since their national dispersion, have in all countries
+illustrated in themselves the chief developments and agencies of wealth.
+From the popular expressions sometimes employed about the Jews in England
+to-day, one might suppose they had become considerable among us only
+during the Victorian epoch. Few people, as they look at Westminster Abbey,
+remember that this monument of the national Christianity which the piety
+of Edward the Confessor began was completed under Richard III. and Henry
+VII. with money levied from the Jews.[13] Under Henry III. the sufferings
+of the chosen race in England had been severe. Thereafter, a gradual but
+progressive improvement in their position took place. But so late as 1633,
+according to a Hebrew authority named Haham, quoted in the _Anglia
+Judaica_, astounding though the statement sounds, there were only twelve
+Jewish families in this country. The distinction of re-establishing the
+race on British soil has been claimed for the protectorate of Cromwell. It
+really belongs to Charles II., and actually occurred during the first few
+years after the Restoration. One of the comparatively few Anglo-Jewish
+conversions to Christianity took place about this time. Close to the
+Abbey, which his ancestors' wealth had completed, in the church of St
+Margaret's, Westminster, an Israelite physician, Speranza Collins, abjured
+the faith of his fathers, and was formally received into the Anglican
+Communion by Dr Warmester, Dean of Westminster. By the time that the house
+of Brunswick was established on the throne, the fabric of Anglo-Jewish
+plutocracy had well nigh built itself up. The great natural philosopher
+Emmanuel Da Costa, whom the Italian Jews of the eighteenth century
+furnished to England, compiled a list by name of all his countrymen living
+under the sovereignty of George III. In this list there are no
+Rothschilds. The patronymics of most frequent occurrence are Rodrigues,
+and Goldsmid. This latter seems to have been the Semitic family which,
+under the third George, occupied the position most closely analogous to
+that filled by the house of Rothschild under Queen Victoria. The country
+houses in the Sheen and Richmond district with their deer parks and
+vineries owned by Abraham and Jacob Goldsmid, foreshadowed distinctly the
+later beauties in the same region of Gunnersbury, if not of the more
+distant Mentmore.
+
+At the close of the eighteenth century, the Frankfort Rothschilds, the
+friends and bankers of the Prince of Hesse-Cassell, were a power in
+Germany only second to that of the Empire. The capital on the Main had
+from the days of Charlemagne been a trading centre. During the sixteenth
+century, its fairs caused the place to be the market of the world, and
+three hundred years later may have given to the Prince Consort[14] the
+first idea of the great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Long before Mayer Amschel
+Rothschild, the founder of the firm died, the prices of Frankfort were
+being studied as closely as those of Antwerp or Rotterdam. The third
+brother of Anselm Mayer, who controlled till 1855 the Frankfort branch,
+was evidently the first great financial genius of his family. His
+enterprise and judgment made him the Croesus of Europe. They also at a
+critical point in his career prompted him to save from ruin more than one
+Paris bank reeling under the effects of North American insolvencies. At
+the close of the last century, the English business of the Rothschilds was
+transacted by the firm of Van Notten. A dispute with a Lancashire
+manufacturer on whom Germany and Austria depended for their cotton goods,
+sent Nathan Mayer Rothschild from Frankfort to England. In this way the
+English house came into existence, and the necessity for foreign agents
+outside the family ceased. The Napoleonic wars, as is well known, largely
+contributed in their successive incidents to the earlier fortunes of the
+family. Already the first Rothschild had speculated largely in the bills
+on the English Government given by the Duke of Wellington for the support
+of the British troops. Settled in London he provided the channels for the
+regular transmission of funds to the forces in the Peninsula. Early in
+1800, he was the first man on the London Stock Exchange. His agents
+followed in the train of every regiment. His couriers in their specially
+chartered ships were on every sea. Rothschild himself, unseen by others,
+watched the Battle of Waterloo. He crossed the Channel in a fishing boat,
+and arrived in London, to find it full of rumours of the English defeat.
+Casually appearing on the Stock Exchange, he received the condolences of
+the City on his ruin. Only he himself knew what his investments were.
+Instead of being ruined, he had added a million to the family wealth. Such
+at least is the conventional account. The foregoing details are in
+substance taken from an entertaining volume by John Reeves on _The
+Rothschilds_, published by Messrs Sampson Low.
+
+The present writer has, however, some reason to question the accuracy of
+the tradition of a Rothschild secretly watching the great battle. The
+account that Baron Lionel's friends generally gave is as follows. During
+the great Corsican's usurpation of the First Magistrateship in the French
+State, the lawful possessor of the Throne, Louis XVIII. was living in
+retirement in Belgium.[15] The Rothschilds, on the early morrow of the
+decisive battle, sent a courier to the King's villa near Ghent, to gather
+from the reception of the news by His Majesty how the fortune of the day
+had gone. The King's sitting room was on the ground floor with windows
+looking on the garden. In that enclosure the Rothschild emissary took up
+his station, so that, himself unseen, he could observe what passed on the
+other side of the windows. Presently a rider, fresh from his horse, still
+booted, spurred, and mud splashed, entered the chamber, made a low
+obeisance to its dethroned occupant, who, on his part, graciously extended
+his fingers which the messenger gently touched with his lips. Hence the
+outside spectator inferred Napoleon's defeat, and proceeded at once to his
+principals in London. As an English financier this is the Rothschild who
+popularized foreign stocks and loans in this country by causing the
+interest and dividends to be paid in London, instead of, as heretofore,
+abroad. Four years after Waterloo, he first identified himself closely
+with the English Government by undertaking a loan of twelve millions. His
+profit on the transaction was one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. With
+this sum he bought Gunnersbury, formerly the home of Amelia, aunt of
+George III., which had since passed into the hands of a private citizen
+named Copland. The Rothschilds naturally and honourably took their place
+among the lords of the soil in their adopted country. He who is now spoken
+of encountered, perhaps provoked, much opposition from rival financiers,
+and more than once measured swords with the Bank of England which had
+hesitated about technicalities of discount. Shortly after this the New
+Court potentate called at the Bank bringing with him a sum of twenty-one
+thousand pounds in L5 notes,[16] each deposited in a separate bag. Seven
+hours were occupied in changing this paper into gold. For the time the
+general business of the establishment was arrested. The strategy succeeded
+completely. The next day it was announced that in future the Rothschild
+bills would be taken as the Banks'.
+
+In the July of 1836 a pigeon fluttered in through the open window of the
+New Court counting house. The bird had travelled from Frankfort; it
+brought the news of the death in his native town of the great head of the
+firm. Many religious ceremonies of the Hebrew race have, during these
+last few years, been converted into great functions of modish society. The
+ceremonial series began when the body of the first great Rothschild known
+to England, in the presence of the whole Corps Diplomatique attached to
+the Court of St James's, was committed to the earth in the East End
+cemetery of his race. With that event the latter day history of the
+Rothschilds begins. Henceforward the business was to be conducted by
+Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild's four sons in England, together with their
+uncles abroad. Of these sons Nathaniel settled in France, Lionel, Nathan
+Mayer and Anthony managed the English firm. Under the regime of Baron
+Lionel Rothschild whom many now living remember well, the first great act
+of association with the English Government was in 1847 the Irish Famine
+Loan, supplemented as it was by munificent subscriptions for the relief of
+the distress which the failure of the potato crop had caused. Seven years
+later Baron Lionel carried out the sixteen millions loan for the English
+Government. The transaction for which the Lionel administration is best
+remembered by the present generation is the advance for the purchase of
+the Suez Canal shares in 1876. The announcement of that negotiation by the
+Prime Minister of the day in conjunction with his compatriots in the City,
+came as a surprise to the English people at large. It has, however, on the
+highest authority since transpired that when in 1874 Mr Disraeli took
+office, he had already decided upon acquiring for England a preponderating
+interest in the international waterway. Nor is it impertinent to assume
+that during the Sunday visits which the statesman, as Mr Disraeli and as
+Lord Beaconsfield, paid to the suburban home of Baron Lionel, this scheme
+may sometimes have been discussed. Four millions was the sum advanced by
+New Court, one hundred thousand pounds represented the total of the
+Rothschild 2-1/2 per cent. profit.
+
+By this time Baron Lionel had been in possession of a seat in the House of
+Commons some ten years, won though that seat had been only after a
+prolonged struggle. At the beginning of the century no Jew magistrate or
+sheriff existed. In 1837, Sir David Salomons became sheriff of London and
+Middlesex, but the true faith of a Christian test prevented him from
+serving. Eventually, to oblige the City, Lord Chancellor Campbell
+introduced a Bill removing this disability. Parliament, however, was still
+closed against the Jew. Ten years later Lionel Rothschild, with Lord John
+Russell, was elected M.P. for London. The Jewish Parliamentary Relief
+Bill, supported by Mr Disraeli as well as Mr Gladstone, passed the House
+of Commons, to be thrown out in the Lords. In 1850 another measure shared
+the same fate. The sixth decade of this century had come before the first
+Rothschild took his place on the green leather benches. Mr Disraeli's last
+novel, _Endymion_, as rich as any of its predecessors in personal
+portraits, contains in the character of Mr Neuchatel, the banker, the most
+graphic pen and ink sketch of the financier now mentioned. In the grounds
+of Gunnersbury, statesmen of both parties, diplomatists from every Court,
+foreigners of every grade of distinction met each other. Here Mr Disraeli
+chatted amicably with Lord Palmerston, the turbulence of whose foreign
+policy he was fresh from denouncing in the House of Commons. Hither Louis
+Napoleon, when an exile in London, drove in his friend Count Alfred
+D'Orsay's cabriolet. Here the veteran Lord Lyndhurst instructed in habits
+of English thought his aptest pupil, then a showy but still obscure
+politician soon to become the pillar of the Tory party. It was by Baron
+Lionel that the Rothschild hospitalities were begun on the scale on which
+they have since continued. First came the marriage of Baron Lionel's
+eldest daughter, Leonora, to her relative, Alphonse Rothschild. Persigny,
+then French Ambassador in London, made a speech which the Paris Academy
+recognized as classical in its perfection. Mr Disraeli, always
+pre-eminently happy on these occasions, delighted host, hostess, and
+guests by a coruscation of glittering antitheses, and flashing epigrams in
+affectionate honour of the bride and bridegroom. The ex-Lord Chancellor,
+Lord Lyndhurst himself, in whose honour the Baroness Mayer had given a
+fete a few days earlier at Mentmore, said a few words so happy in their
+arrangement, so dignified in their cadence that they were subsequently set
+to candidates for the Newcastle medal at Eton to translate into Attic
+prose.
+
+Not twenty years have passed since, on Baron Lionel's death in 1879, the
+fortunes of the house have been controlled by the Lord Rothschild of
+to-day with his brothers Alfred and Leopold as his partners. The loans for
+the Hungarian, Brazilian, and Chilian Governments are only a portion of
+the New Court enterprises since 1879. In the eyes of England and of
+Europe, their most important undertaking has been in relation with Egypt.
+In 1885, at the moment that the Western powers were at diplomatic feud
+with each other about the land of the Pharoahs, Egypt itself drew more and
+more near to complete bankruptcy. The calamity was only averted by monthly
+advances from the Messrs Rothschild upon no legal security, but on the
+strength of a private note from the late Foreign Secretary, Lord
+Granville. This is the testimony of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach speaking as
+Chancellor of the Exchequer after he had succeeded Mr Gladstone in 1885.
+The nine millions loan issued in that year was, of course, highly
+successful for its negotiators. But this good fortune had been preceded by
+an anxious season of protracted risk encountered with unfailing public
+spirit.
+
+The Semitic capitalists of the century have been compared to a foreign
+garrison quartered in every European country, never completely fused with
+the native population, always separated from the national life, and
+potentially hostile to the domestic interests of the land which it
+occupies. In the case of the financial family whose connection with
+Victorian England has now been summarized this description is not borne
+out by the facts. Their activity as financiers and generosity as citizens
+during calamitous seasons like the Irish famine, are only specimens of the
+services rendered by the Rothschilds to their adopted country. No
+exceptional distress comes upon any portion of the United Kingdom without
+eliciting a letter of womanly sympathy from the Queen, and the opening of
+a subscription list in the City. At the head of this list the name of the
+New Court firm is tolerably sure to be seen. Members of a race whose
+history is like that of the Jews one of razzias, confiscations,
+disqualifications, patiently borne and slowly overcome, can scarcely be
+expected to betray no consciousness of these antecedents in their habit
+and speech. The bearing of the Jew, whatever pinnacle of greatness he may
+have climbed, is traditionally the bearing of a man on the defensive,
+prepared, if he sees an opening, to anticipate the necessity of resentment
+by showing his ability to repel offence. Those who, whether by individual
+experience or by ethnic tradition, have been schooled in experiences like
+these, are not likely to show morbid delicacy in their deportment towards
+others. The mart and the bourse to which the Jews have been driven are
+defective schools of social culture. Asiatic plutocrats are sure,
+therefore, wherever they may be settled, to provoke enemies in the very
+act of creating clients and dependents. The English Rothschilds of every
+generation have found opportunities of performing private not less than
+public kindnesses. In spite of, or rather perhaps because of this, they
+have wounded many susceptibilities, for there may be an insolence of
+neediness not less than of wealth. Fairness, however, requires the
+admission that the successive representatives of the great Semitic house
+in respect of the performance of the duties of citizenship as well as in
+the wise, not less than the beneficent use of wealth, have set an example
+to the fellow countrymen of their adoption in general, and to their
+financial rivals in particular. The employment of great wealth in
+accordance with the principles of magnificence and of taste was esteemed
+so highly by the cultivated Greeks of old as to receive from Aristotle a
+concrete illustration in his category of virtuous characters. The same
+tradition was preserved and exemplified in those republics of mediaeval
+Italy that wore the closest resemblances to the older democracies of
+Hellas which history records. It was not unknown in England at that period
+when London was to the Englishman what Florence had been to the Florentine
+under the Medici, or, at an earlier age, what the City of the Violet Crown
+had been to the contemporary of Pericles. A similar sense of the public
+usefulness and patriotic obligations of great wealth animated the citizens
+of London under our own Edwards, and had previously found many modes of
+effective expression under Elizabeth. Those were 'the gorgeous days' in
+which the trader of one of the great chartered companies in the Indies or
+across the Atlantic, having made some exceptionally successful venture, on
+returning safely to his native land, and to the township which had been
+his cradle, was wont to testify his gratitude to Providence by
+embellishing the place of his birth with buildings or gardens, with
+galleries or terraces, many of which, as in the case of the gifts of Sir
+Thomas Gresham, the first of the great loan negotiators, endure to this
+day, not only in the college which bears his name, but in the Royal
+Exchange. By no family, not of English birth; by few Englishmen
+themselves, either under Queen Victoria or her predecessors, have the
+public and national responsibilities imposed by financial success, or by
+hereditary millions, on their possessors been recognized so frankly, or
+been illustrated with so happy and impressive a blend of splendour and
+propriety, as by the descendents of the bankers of the Princes of
+Hesse-Cassel who in the first days of this century issuing from their
+natal judengasse at Frankfort established themselves in England, and at
+the same time, or shortly thereafter, fixed their emporia in the great
+Continental capitals as well.
+
+Whatever their natural pride in the creative power of their wealth, no one
+can lay it to the charge of the Rothschilds that in the use of this
+instrument they have lost sight of their duties to the land of their
+adoption. In any faithfully written chronicle of English art or sport
+since both were organized among us on their present plan, the name of this
+family must fill no small space. Their services to the breed of horses may
+be surmised from the popularity of Baron Lionel Rothschild's success in
+the race for the Derby with Favonius in 1871, as well as from the
+popularity which his son has since won in the same pastime. Their private
+houses are museums of art which have encouraged English not less than
+Continental talent, and which are open to every visitor who is interested
+in their contents. Since the Rothschilds were settled in Piccadilly and
+Mayfair, many others of their race have made a position in the polite life
+of the capital and of the country. That each of these, to mention only
+Murrietas, Oppenheims, Bischoffsheims, have fixed the ends and regulated
+the scale of their expenditure with a regard for refinement as well as
+pomp, and that the more prominent members of a no longer despised race
+have been incorporated thoroughly into the ranks of the native gentry, is
+due largely to the personal initiative and influence of the New Court
+dynasty. Nor is it merely their wealth and the influence which money has
+brought that have placed the Rothschilds at the head of Semitic settlers
+in England. Their loyalty to their nation has never been eclipsed by other
+interests. They have not only endowed hospitals and built synagogues. They
+have always exerted a pacific and unifying influence upon the various and
+sometimes mutually conflicting Hebraic factions; at one time they have
+reconciled to each other different schools of Teutonic Judaism. At another
+they have performed the same good office for Israelite communities outside
+their own Teutonic pale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND
+
+    Private and individual efforts which have quickened the sense of
+    citizenship in England and bridged the gulf between rich and poor.
+    Historic and abiding influences of the Young England movement of 1846.
+    How it facilitated the Factory Acts and prompted private owners to
+    open their parks to the public. Temple Gardens and Lincoln's Inn.
+    Effect produced by the brothers Mayhew with their _London Labour_ and
+    _London Poor_ during the fifties, and also by certain articles in the
+    _Times_ and _Quarterly Review_. Lord Shaftesbury, the Poor Man's Peer.
+    Origin of Public School and University settlements in great towns.
+    Edward Denison and his friends before Arnold Toynbee. Individual
+    example acting on public or corporate owners. Educate the public and
+    actuate legislation when the time is ripe for it. Sir Erasmus Wilson's
+    gift of Cleopatra's Needle preceded beautification of Thames
+    Embankment.
+
+
+The practical sense of citizenship by which, in the preceding chapter, the
+Jewish community in England has been seen to be animated is among native
+Englishmen themselves pre-eminently the development of the Victorian era.
+Its manifestation in the capital was preceded by its active display in the
+provinces. Few individuals of our epoch have more appreciably and
+definitely impressed the image of their genius on the social history of
+their age, than Benjamin Disraeli, first, and only, Earl of Beaconsfield.
+This is not the occasion on which to examine his position in, and
+services to, the public life of the period, as well as his place in the
+inner economy of the polite world. In the social movement of the
+industrial classes of the community, especially in their relations with
+their more highly placed neighbours, the work done by this remarkable man
+is not less conspicuous than it is seemingly enduring.[17] The political
+school which, at the outset of his career his genius created, that of
+Young England in the ninth year of the present reign, did not last long as
+a political organization. It was never intended to do so. Of the little
+coterie whose inspiring literature is contained in the trilogy of romance
+that is constituted by _Coningsby_, _Sibyl_, and _Tancred_, the sole
+survivor is the Duke of Rutland. Even he, perhaps, is better known to many
+readers as Lord John Manners. He was first introduced to the general
+public by the style of 'Lord Henry Sidney' in his friend's earliest novel.
+With pardonable pride in a letter incorporated by the editor of the
+_Quarterly Review_ in an article on _Sibyl_,[18] the Duke of Rutland
+points back to the undoubted service which the sentiment generated by the
+Young Englanders rendered to Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, and to Mr
+Oastler in their gradually successful efforts to pass the First Factory
+Act as well as generally to soften, perhaps even to sweeten the daily lot
+of the suffering, the defenceless, and the poor. At that time, the humane
+and religious fervour of Lord John Russell had not yet leavened, as it
+soon afterwards did, aristocratic Whiggism. Mr Gladstone's spiritualizing
+touch was still to be laid upon the party that he was yet to join. The
+scientific economists of the school of Peel, comprising as they did Cobden
+and Bright, were the enemies of the movement. Even the pioneer of that
+movement, who afterwards nobly vindicated his claim to the title of the
+Poor Man's Peer, was indignantly asked what he, Lord Shaftesbury, had been
+doing, when Lord Ashley was fighting for the Ten Hours Bill of 1844.[19]
+
+His virtuous indignation obscured this critic's view of the fact that the
+peer he praised was identical with the peer he denounced.
+
+If this were the context in which to illustrate the political permanence
+of the Young England agency, it would be enough to point to the
+perpetuation in the knights, dames, and chancellors of the Primrose
+League, of the sensibility to picturesque or semi-feudal effects which
+inspired Disraeli and his friends in their manipulation of Conservative
+sentiment. These qualities, at an interval of just half a century, were to
+reappear in Disraeli's aptest[20] pupil, Lord Randolph Churchill. As a
+social and unpolitical testimony to the quickening power of the new
+England propaganda, when its promulgation was an affair of yesterday, it
+may be mentioned that at the Queen's accession, as for many years
+thereafter, it was comparatively an unknown thing for the private parks
+surrounding gentlemen's houses in the provinces to be used as people's
+pleasure grounds. Show places on such a scale as Blenheim or Chatsworth
+existed then as they exist to-day. Even in the case of the former of
+these, in prae-_Coningsby_ or ante-Victorian days, it is not likely to have
+occurred to a Duke of Marlborough, as it did occur to the seventh
+successor of John Churchill, being the eighth Duke, to engage a special
+train to convey several thousands of East End children from their native
+courts and alleys to the undulating woodlands of his Oxfordshire park.
+Within a few years of the appearance of _Coningsby_, Eaton was only one of
+the great parks which, so long as certain reasonable restrictions were
+observed, became not less free to town or country labourers with their
+wives and children than Kensington Gardens, or, as what till our age was
+called Battersea Fields.[21] Royal patronage had not been withheld from
+the movement. The memories of the present generation stop short of a time
+when Windsor Park, together with the gardens and terraces of the Castle,
+was inaccessible to excursionists by the Great Western Railway to view the
+natural panorama bright with all the beauties of 'blossom week,' or to
+hear the band on the slopes play the favourite pieces of the Queen. The
+capital was not yet fully abreast with this piece of social progress. Long
+after the gardens and the general maintenance of the public parks endowed
+them with fresh attractions, the private pleasure grounds of corporate
+owners were closed. The new philanthropic reforms were introduced here by
+the noble structure of the Thames Embankment. The Temple Gardens had,
+indeed, long been open. The flower beds and their careful tending were
+still to come. The Benchers of Lincoln's Inn were more exclusive. The new
+buildings, as they are called, flanking this enclosure, date from 1845.
+The Lincoln's Inn Fields' theatre had disappeared in 1848. Nearly half a
+century was still to elapse before the leafy paradise in the heart of this
+austere kingdom of Chancery law was to ring with childish voices from the
+courts and alleys which abut on Chancery Lane.
+
+Within fifty years of the Queen's accession, the personal example of that
+Lord Shaftesbury whose name has been mentioned already was to bear rich
+fruit. In the _Times_ newspaper during the earlier sixties, there appeared
+a leading article on the subject of the homeless poor of London. It was
+equally noticeable for the humanity which inspired it, and for its
+vigorous and graphic expression. Not long before this, an interest, then
+entirely new, had been imparted to the grim subject by an essay in the
+_Quarterly Review_ based on the then comparatively recent volumes about
+London labour and the London poor by the brothers Mayhew. A host of
+writers have treated this subject subsequently. Many of them,
+conspicuously the late Thomas Archer, with a thoroughness and freshness of
+knowledge scarcely inferior to that with which it had been approached by
+the Mayhews. But in their hands the topic was absolutely new. Without
+hyperbole, in literal truth, the West End was then not only ignorant of
+how the East End lived, but with very rare individual exceptions, entirely
+indifferent to the mingled squalor and tragedy of that existence. Horace
+Mayhew survived to a vigorous and remarkably handsome old age, dying only
+a few years ago. His work on the deeper depths of London poverty was the
+one effort of his life. All his energies were thrown into it. The work
+when finished, if it did not exhaust him, left him so depressed by the
+misery which he had been investigating that he had no mind to return to
+the lighter departments of periodical letters wherein his career
+commenced, and his earlier reputation was made. A long period of social
+indifference and legislative lethargy as to the condition of the very poor
+in the capital and in other great towns now ensued. In 1865, the first
+editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, Frederick Greenwood, conceived the idea
+of commissioning his brother James, a well known writer on social
+subjects, to pass a night in the casual ward of a workhouse, rumours of
+abuses in the management of which were then attracting attention. About a
+year after this, a winter of exceptional severity afflicted the poorest
+portions of London, near the Docks and elsewhere, with the combined
+calamities of lack of labour, and as a consequence with famine,
+firelessness, and pestilence. Three friends, each of them then young men,
+all Conservatives by conviction and all under the influence of the
+philanthropic teaching of Disraeli's novels, were in the habit of
+frequently meeting with a view of maturing some scheme for the relief of
+that destitution at the East End, with which existing agencies of help had
+proved themselves impotent to deal. One of these belonged to a well known
+Shropshire family, Baldwyn Leighton.[22] Another, Sir Michael
+Hicks-Beach, has since become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The third was a
+son of a former Bishop of Salisbury. Edward Denison was equally quick to
+master the dominant facts in a social situation, and to take the action
+that seemed the best thereupon. Within a few days, he decided that the
+first step towards remedying the evils recorded morning after morning in
+the newspapers must be personal acquaintance with their magnitude, and
+their origin, as well as with the habits and homes of the distressed
+masses. Denison, therefore, established himself in a small house in
+Whitechapel, the very heart of the necessitous district.
+
+Since then, the example thus set has been followed frequently. Denison of
+course was sometimes visited in his East End lodging by his West End
+friends. These returned, bringing with them a more vivid sense of the
+industrial suffering just outside the doors of the polite world than
+literary descriptions, however graphic, could convey to the perfunctory
+reader of the morning paper. Other incidents were to prove unexpectedly
+instrumental in deepening the interest of well-to-do Londoners in their
+destitute neighbours. Within a year or two of Denison's mission, the
+Fenian outrage at Clerkenwell Prison not only robbed many poor families of
+their breadwinners, but left them literally homeless. Disraeli, at that
+time Prime Minister, sent down his private secretary to distribute alms
+among the victims of the explosion. Mr Montague Corry, since Lord
+Rowton,[23] saw sad and strange sights during this charitable errand. His
+recital of these experiences was followed by liberal subscriptions to the
+sufferers from Pall Mall and Mayfair. From that day to this, not only has
+the stream of charity flowed less sluggishly; there has been also awakened
+a new personal and intelligent interest in the condition of the most
+squalid of poverty's perennial children. That feeling has not evaporated
+in charitable doles. Substantial funds have been organized by private or
+corporate munificence for improving the dwellings of the poor and for
+practically testifying the neighbourly solicitude of more fortunate
+citizens.
+
+The demoralizing effects of public executions were exposed by Thackeray.
+His essay, 'Going to see a man hung' gave shape, and eventually success to
+the movement for the hanging of criminals within, and not outside, the
+prison walls. So, at an earlier day, Dickens, who of all our greatest
+writers was the first to interest the public in the waifs and strays in
+the London streets, had initiated in _Oliver Twist_ a social demand for
+workhouse reform. The best causes are liable to abuse and caricature.
+There have been moments when, since the Mayhews wrote, sympathy with the
+lot of the London poor has seemed in danger of becoming overdone, or being
+degraded into a fad, a craze, a fashionable hobby, and thus of ceasing to
+be an actuating conviction. The modish popularity of 'slumming' as it used
+a few years ago to be called had of course its absurd aspects, but was,
+nevertheless, not an unhealthy sign. It could be compared to the froth
+upon the surface which concealed, and did not necessarily weaken, the
+stimulating and strengthening qualities below. Whether this philanthropic
+curiosity was displayed in town or country, the social truth of which it
+constituted evidence was that the commercial spirit and its harsher
+influences, not unfortunately uncommon among the upper classes in the
+early days of the new poor law, were becoming obsolete, and that the class
+fusion born of class sympathy to which De Tocqueville has attributed our
+later freedom from organic revolutions was in steady process of evolution.
+Edward Denison came first of all, and could only see with the eye of faith
+the fruits which his example was to bear in the beneficent experiment of
+Arnold Toynbee and in the People's Palace. So it has continued, till
+to-day the University and public school settlements in the East End of
+London and in other great cities are institutions not less deeply rooted
+than the parochial system itself. The kindly work is not confined to a
+single sex. St Margaret's House, Bethnal Green, the ladies' branch of the
+Oxford agency, presided over by Mrs Burrows, is as firmly established as
+the homes founded by Trinity or Christ Church in the same neighbourhood.
+Throughout the English speaking world, the same beneficent inspiration
+seems to have been almost simultaneously operative. One hears of analogous
+enterprises in the great cities of Australia and in the United States. The
+American movement even claims seniority over the English. Andover House,
+Boston, was in full working order before the cognate agencies in our own
+capital were complete. The devotion of Trade Unionists to their Union has
+been employed as a figure to illustrate the mutual loyalty to a great and
+good idea of those brought up in the same College or University or public
+school. This reciprocal enthusiasm has now been active and productive long
+enough to entitle it to the praise of solidity and permanence. The public
+and legal provisions for quickening the sense of citizenship in town and
+country will presently be examined in detail. That which seems important
+to bear in mind is that the legislature did not interpose its machinery
+until the private agencies, social or moral, already recapitulated, had
+done their work. Even the improvement in the open spaces of the capital
+which is so marked a feature in metropolitan progress during the last few
+decades, has been helped or encouraged largely by private initiative. The
+late Mr Matthew Arnold recognized as a graceful and original act of public
+service, the transport of Cleopatra's Needle from Alexandria to London at
+the cost of Sir Erasmus Wilson. Before the obelisk was established on the
+Thames Embankment the municipal authorities had prepared a home for it and
+converted into daintily kept pleasure grounds the little enclosures by the
+side of the riverain promenade.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES
+
+    Reflection of the Estates of the Realm in the old divisions of rural
+    life in England. Modifications in the system introduced by recent
+    changes in local government. The English village as it now is. The
+    public house as a place of resort largely displaced by the parish
+    meeting room. The quickened sense of civic life shown in the speech
+    and bearing of the villagers. The exact functions of the Parish
+    Council, or Meeting. Relations between Parish and District Councils.
+    Retrospect of English Poor Law system. Greater popularity of the
+    District Councils. Other duties than of Poor Law Guardians discharged
+    by District Councils. Clergy and Squires. How affected. District
+    Board's composition. Its relations with magistrates, and popular
+    feeling.
+
+
+Before 1894, English parishes in rural districts possessed, as they still
+do, three centres of local life. The State was represented by the squire,
+or chief landowner, often, as may still be the case, an absentee. The
+Rectory, or Vicarage, with the neighbouring church was the geographical
+depository of spiritual power. The village inn, or public house, was the
+place of popular meeting, and with its adjoining skittle-alley was the
+source of popular amusement. Here the gossip of the neighbourhood was
+discussed, or the local newspaper read. London journals did not, and do
+not, often enter remote neighbourhoods in the provinces. The doings of the
+Imperial Parliament, or the Concert of the European Powers were, as they
+remain, of little interest to the rural tillers of the soil in comparison
+with the wages paid by the farmers in the district, the supervision, or
+the lack of it, exercised by lords of the land over the cottages of the
+poor. Nothing more struck the stranger who wished to acquire information
+as to the daily lot of the rural population, and as to opportunities for
+their improvement, than the prevailing ignorance or indifference about the
+facts of their daily life. It was not exactly Christian acquiescence in
+chronic want and squalor as a Divine dispensation. It was rather an
+unreasoning suspicion as to the motives of the enquirer, and as to the
+consequences to themselves of the answers given, which, if it did not seal
+the villagers' lips, restricted their replies to inarticulate grunts or
+evasive generalities.
+
+Within the fifth decade of the present reign, all this has either changed
+entirely or has been appreciably modified. The public house, or inn,
+stands indeed where it stood. The tap is no longer the parish club room.
+Even the skittle-alley has lost many of its attractions. The authority of
+the Manor House has been divested of the superstitious sanctions with
+which it was once clothed. The squire and the parson are regarded as
+well-meaning persons with a good deal of human nature, after all, about
+them. As for the geographical centre of village existence, it is no longer
+the roof tree of the publican, but the village meeting hall. This, in the
+majority of cases, would never have existed but for the initiative of the
+clergyman. He it is who with no parliamentary sessions to attend during
+half the year, with no town house always ready to receive him, passes most
+of his time among his own people; and thus combines in his own person,
+very often, the two separate principles of Church and State. This village
+assembly room is furnished with the chief county and market town
+newspapers. It is without carpets or draperies, and does not consequently
+retain tobacco smoke. If, therefore, the villager likes a dry pipe while
+he reads, or chats, it may at stated hours be allowed him. Gradually,
+therefore, he has grown to regard the place as his betters regard the
+House of Commons, as the best club of which he knows. The publican may
+suffer, but all other members of the little community have gained.
+
+At the present moment, the manner and the countenances of the rural
+company, apart from the subjects of their more than usually animated
+conversation, indicate a season of exceptional importance. The truth is,
+that an election for the village parliament is imminent. Whether the name
+be parish council or parish meeting, the reality is the same. That reality
+since Sir Henry Fowler's amendment in 1894 practically implies Home Rule
+for every parish in rural England. The franchise is in effect universal.
+Without regard to income or place of domicile every parishioner whose name
+occurs in the local government or parliamentary register has a vote, and
+is in addition entitled to attend the parish parliament. So systematic is
+the preservation of the separate individuality of every village, that
+where the number of inhabitants is below[24] 300, and the gathering is
+called a meeting, not a council; no association of that particular village
+with others is allowed to supersede the separate meeting. The executive
+body is thus always the parish meeting. The grouping order necessary for
+the amalgamation of parishes for council purposes is never given without
+the closest scrutiny by the County Council first, or confirmed by the
+Imperial authority in London afterwards. In no case is the parish meeting
+dispensed with. Amongst the groups we have seen discussing their affairs,
+one might have noticed women as well as men; for though by the decision of
+the Court of Appeal in the case of Drax _v._ Ffook, women can vote as
+occupiers and not as owners, they are, whether spinsters or wives,
+eligible to be parish councillors. Should the parish be without a village
+hall, the schoolroom is the usual place of assembly. The one spot
+peremptorily forbidden by the law is the public house; unless no other
+rendezvous be procurable for love or money. It is still too early to
+pronounce definitely as to the permanent effect of these institutions. The
+general tendency has perhaps been towards the falsification alike of the
+extreme hopes and fears which they first raised. Their jurisdiction
+includes all the functions of the old vestries and their officers,
+together with other novel and more drastic prerogatives. The discussions
+are often limited to dull details of mechanical routine, but are
+sometimes, as to-day, sufficiently animated. In the typical parish (a
+generalization from actual experience), the question of opening or closing
+footpaths across fields chances closely to divide parochial opinion. A
+little time ago, the vexed problem was the limits of a village green
+which had been so much diminished by encroachments as to cease almost to
+exist. Another issue that a little while hence will furnish material for
+debates not less vivacious is that of allotments for cottagers. Here as in
+the other cases, there is a strong faction on either side. A heavy
+parochial whip has been sent out by the two sets of leaders. If the matter
+is decided in the affirmative, and the allotment or village green
+extension, as the case may be, is carried, a measure of expropriation may
+follow, should the County Council, as superior body, sanction the scheme,
+and should the Local Government Board, after hearing the case of the
+dissidents, confirm the parochial proposals. As a check to parochial
+extravagance, the money to be advanced by the central authority is not to
+exceed one-half the value of the local rates. Inheriting the power of the
+vestries which they displaced, the bodies now mentioned have in their
+hands the appointment of overseers of the poor. 'One man, one vote'[25] is
+the universal principle. The employers of labour, that is the farmers, are
+consequently liable to be placed in the minority by their servants. Hence
+proceeded the assertion that the signal withdrawal of the farmers from the
+Liberal party, as being morally responsible for the measure, largely
+brought about the crushing defeat of the Gladstonians at the general
+election of 1895. If the farmers were animated by any such resentment
+towards the party which they identified with the real authorship of the
+Act, the feeling has already to a great extent passed away. What remains
+of it will no doubt evaporate as eventually sentimental grievances of this
+kind seldom fail in England to do. Impartial evidence, gathered at first
+hand, does indeed show that the increased mutual knowledge generated
+between farmers and their hands in the parish meeting room has resulted in
+an actual improvement of the relations between the two classes. All the
+national processes which legislative change sets in motion have worked
+slowly in England. It was not till the third or fourth appeal to the
+constituencies under Household Franchise was made that the permanent
+results of the peaceful revolution in 1868 could be computed with even
+approximate accuracy. The final consequences of the extension of the
+franchise to counties by the Liberals in 1884 have not yet declared
+themselves. It would, therefore, be premature as yet to make any definite
+deductions, social or political, as to the working of a system which has
+been operative only since 1894.
+
+One thing more about them may, however, be said. As in the case of the
+farmers where, with a fair measure of conciliation and tact, the occupiers
+of the soil find their official intercourse with its tillers unexpectedly
+harmonious, so as regards the relations between the villagers and the
+clergyman, in the position of the latter as the spiritual, and often
+inevitably to a great degree the temporal, head of the community. Briefly
+stated, the effect of the Parish Meeting, or Parish Council, is to restore
+to the villagers certain of the rights which, in the old Manor Courts,
+they had possessed. Where the clergyman combines with the practical sense
+of an educated man a freedom from a suspicious antipathy to the civic
+activities of his flock, there is not only no jealousy of the parson's
+intervention in the deliberations of the parish hall; but the experience
+which he is likely to bring to the work is welcomed by the councillors as
+a valuable aid to their discussions. If, when standing for a seat on the
+council, the rector issues an address savouring of dictatorial
+self-assertion; if from his pulpit he prescribes a plan for the conduct of
+these elections; the reverend gentleman may find himself at the bottom of
+the poll. When, however, he deals with his parishioners on the assumption
+of their equality in all non-religious matters with himself, he disarms or
+prevents jealousy. He has a fair chance of being chosen by acclamation to
+the president's chair at the little Board.[26] Parish Councils have for
+the first time in the rural history of England developed a sense of
+responsibility among those to whom a decade ago the idea of rural
+citizenship, with obligations as well as rights, was unintelligible. They
+have, therefore, impressed the minds of those concerned in them with some
+sense of power. Thus far, no tendency has been displayed to use that power
+in a revolutionary fashion. A body which, like the average parish
+parliament, numbers from five to eleven, is not likely to prove a
+tempestuously democratic, or violently revolutionary assemblage. Finally,
+though, on the requisition of three members to the chairman the council
+may be convened at any time, its actual convention is never brought about
+more than thrice, and seldom more than once in a twelvemonth. Not the
+least good which this institution carries with it in most neighbourhoods
+is its creation of wider, less mean, more liberal interests in daily life,
+and with these interests, subjects of conversation for the village
+community more generous than private affairs of individual
+households;--what Hodge, the ditcher, does so late at night in the
+neighbourhood of the squire's game preserves; how much money the
+carpenter's wife paid for her new bonnet; or how her daughters afford so
+gaudy a display of Sunday finery. That the new machinery has thus far
+worked with less friction than might have been expected may be inferred
+from the statistics courteously forwarded to the present writer from the
+Local Government Board under date August 7th 1896. As has been said
+already, the Imperial authority at Whitehall acts as arbitrator in all
+cases of difference between the popular Parish Councils and the more
+exclusive County Councils as to the acquisition of land for allotments. At
+the time now mentioned, it was the calculation of the President of the
+Local Government Board that four cases had occurred of appeals by Parish
+Councils against the refusal of the County Council to make the allotment
+order; and that in fourteen cases in which orders have been made by County
+Councils, eight protests against them have reached the Local Government
+Board from persons immediately interested.
+
+Ascending from the lowest deliberative unit in the new scheme of local
+self government one passes from the Parish Council to the District
+Council. If it can be questioned whether the average villager as yet fully
+appreciates the gift of power made to him by the legislature in 1894, no
+such doubt can exist as to those bodies that are a little higher in the
+deliberative scale, the District Councils. The local parliament in the
+parish hall may sometimes be unattended by a single cottager. The District
+Council, if it be not as yet popular, is at least never neglected. Seats
+on it were from the first objects of local ambition. This is only what
+might have been expected in an age, a marked feature of which is the
+quickened interest of all sections of the community in whatever affects
+the health or comfort of the labouring classes. The District Council, as
+its name implies, has a more than parochial dignity. Its jurisdiction is
+practically commensurate with the sphere of the old Rural Sanitary
+Authority. The relief of pauperism however, forms a first and special care
+of this body, the members of which are also the Guardians of the Poor. Its
+place of assembly is the chief small town of the neighbourhood; not indeed
+the County town, but generally a convenient town where there happens to be
+a railway station. The District Council has already contracted certain
+associations of local fashion. The ladies of the country side have entered
+warmly into its business, and often constitute a majority of its most
+active members. There is, of course, the complaint of impulsiveness
+brought against the District Councillors. Thus the domestic idea is
+regarded by them with more respect than it secured from their
+predecessors, the Boards of Guardians. Guardians were elected by the
+plural vote of the larger ratepayers. They had, moreover, to satisfy a
+property qualification in their own persons. District Councils in theory
+know nothing of, and in practice are affected little by, such conditions.
+The ex-officio magistrate, without which no Board of Guardians was
+complete, is systematically absent from the new District bodies. The
+_personnel_ of the new Councils, which occupy a place midway between the
+Parish and the County assemblies, presents a notable contrast to that of
+the superseded Boards of Guardians. County magistrates are not, in virtue
+of that office, ordinary members of these bodies, which are almost solely
+elective. The dignity of the body, however, is well maintained. The
+chairman of the District Council becomes, in consequence of that position,
+a County magistrate with powers as plenary as if he were the nominee of
+the Lord Lieutenant. Sometimes, of course, the chairmen of the District
+bodies are already magistrates. That is, however, the exception. There now
+exist in the United Kingdom about a thousand elective magistrates, being
+chairmen of District Councils. By far the greater part of these are new to
+their legal responsibilities. A few are working men. One District Council
+in Northamptonshire is presided over by the master of a small railway
+station on the Midland line. Another has for its chairman an agricultural
+labourer; a third is controlled by an ex-policeman; a fourth by one who
+supports himself on the cultivation of sixteen acres of land. The effect
+of popular election is not limited to the discharge of those duties
+connected with pauperism and sanitation that are the primary concern of
+the District bodies. Assessment committees, and school attendance
+committees are both drawn from the District Councils. The latter of these,
+it is generally admitted, have done their work better since they ceased to
+be composed exclusively of employers of labour, and since they have become
+representative of industry as well.[27]
+
+The Poor Law, which has been in force during the whole of the Victorian
+era, was, as scarcely needs to be said, among the earliest achievements of
+the Reformed Parliament. Bitter and prolonged as was the resistance to
+portioning out the country afresh for the relief of pauperism instead of
+congregating the poor of each parish in their own workhouse, the
+beneficent results of the change have long since been universally
+admitted. 'The new Bastilles' was the name first given to the unions which
+the Act of 1834 created, by the opponents of the Bill, with a view to
+excite popular feeling against it. Only the most hardened paupers, who
+objected on principle to industry of any kind, complained of the modicum
+of labour exacted from the occupants of the new workhouses. Even these
+shirkers have become reconciled to some sort of industry. The improvement
+in the habits of the whole working class was conspicuous and immediate.
+Thus, as in his History of the period, Mr Molesworth points out,[28] in
+four unions of the Midlands, there were in 1834, 954 able-bodied paupers.
+In June 1836 there were only 5. All the rest were in regular work. In the
+county of Sussex, the most inveterately pauperized in England, there were
+in 1834, 6,160 paupers. The Act had not been in operation two years before
+this total was reduced to 124. By 1836 the Act had become operative in
+twenty-two counties. The average of the reduction of the rates in these
+was 43-1/2 per cent. The Commissioners of Enquiry, on whose report the new
+legislation was based, predicted that the application of their principles
+would restore and improve industry, would create or confirm habits of
+thrift, would increase the demand for labour as well as the wages of the
+labourer, and generally would promote the welfare of those who lived by
+manual toil. The Queen had not ascended her throne when the erewhile
+opponents of the Measure confessed that these anticipations were already
+fulfilled. It was not to be expected that bodies so essentially different
+from the old Boards of Guardians as the District Councils are would
+administer the Poor Law in the same spirit or on the same principles as
+their predecessors. Few socio-economical questions of the day have
+provoked controversy so bitter, or divided skilled and conscientious
+partizans into such mutually envenomed factions as the conditions on which
+relief from the rates should be granted to the necessitous poor. The
+uncompromising advocates of the workhouse test system, compulsory
+residence, that is, within the workhouse walls, maintain that in this way
+only can systematic pauperization be avoided, and that so alone will the
+not uniformly industrious poor realize the stigma of coming upon the
+rates. On the other hand, it may be argued that in innumerable cases
+timely charity from the common fund will prevent the utter break up of a
+needy, but not necessarily indolent home. Paupers, it may be said, who
+will not work, and who are, therefore, not proper objects of compassion,
+are never kept by any sense of pride or shame from taking up their
+quarters in the local union. Thus, may it not be false economy to make
+absolute destitution and homelessness a preliminary condition of parochial
+help? On these points, those who differ will never agree. What it is now
+relevant to point out, is that the administrative methods of the new
+Councillors have very generally shown a reaction from the more stringent,
+and less sympathetic policy of the old Boards of Guardians. Thus, the
+workhouse test is far less often than formerly made the condition of poor
+relief.
+
+Organization in every department of activity or interest is the most
+conspicuous movement of the last quarter of this century. Some years must
+yet elapse before we know the exact point to which the legislation now
+reviewed has disciplined and stimulated the inhabitants of rural England.
+The object of the controllers of the vestries that the Parish Meetings
+have superseded was to keep village administration in the hands of a
+privileged and comparatively leisured minority. Hence it was not unusual
+to fix the hour for the vestry meeting at 9 a.m.; when of course the male
+population would be at work in the fields. Under the Act of 1894 the
+Parish Councillors are bound to hold their sittings in the evening after
+the day's work is done. From a historical point of view this legislation
+cannot be charged with being revolutionary. The powers which the new
+bodies have assumed in checking encroachments upon common land and other
+like offences are indeed considerable. That prerogative is not an
+innovation. It is rather a revival of the authority which in the old Manor
+Courts, presided over by the steward of the Manor lord, the freeholders
+could exercise. Beyond question, the most far-reaching and important
+change introduced into country life by the new machinery is the infusion
+of the elective element into the nominated magistracy. This has not yet
+received the attention it deserves. Under the earlier regime, as has been
+said, certain guardians had a seat at the Union Board because they were
+magistrates. Under the existing dispensation certain Justices of the Peace
+owe their place on the magisterial Bench to the fact of their performing
+the duties of District Councillors and Guardians of the Poor. The
+relations between the two positions are thus exactly inverted. That the
+tendency of this change is to soothe the suspicions once widely prevalent
+as to the principles on which Justices' justice was administered does not
+seem disputable. It has also positively increased the respect in the rural
+mind for the law itself as the expression of wisdom and equity. The
+cordiality with which the older magistrates, nominated to the Bench by the
+Lord Lieutenant, have generally welcomed their popularly chosen colleagues
+has undoubtedly strengthened this wholesome sentiment. Finally, the same
+career in the local polity as of old remains practically open to men
+serving on the Commission of Peace. Where the old J.P. Guardian was a man
+who did good work on the Union Board, he seldom now is debarred from doing
+it still. Even when he is locally unpopular, a well-earned reputation of
+ability or aptitude for affairs is pretty sure to bear down purely
+personal objections and secure his return to the District Board; a
+tolerably conclusive proof of the fitness of the parochial constituencies
+for the measure of autonomy which they have received.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES
+
+    General effect of the legislation of 1888 on the English County
+    system. Some analogy between the principles of corporation reform
+    (1835) and County administration reform (1888). But the earlier act
+    did not touch, as the later did, the power of magistrates in Quarter
+    Sessions. Social circumstances, _e.g._: the growth of an educated and
+    leisured class of residents in country towns which have made the time
+    ripe for the new legislation, and distributed throughout England a new
+    class of capable local administrators. Contrast between County town
+    life before and since the establishment of County Councils. Social
+    pictures of county supremacy on Sessions days in the old era at hotels
+    and shops. County self government has not destroyed the old County
+    traditions nor deprived the old administrators of their former career.
+    Exact functions of County Councils, and points of administrative
+    communion between them and the old magistrates. Local idiosyncrasies
+    of these Councils, North and South.
+
+
+The legislation of 1888 has influenced the entire scheme of life in
+provincial England. The social prestige of the County system, centred in
+the extra-judicial power of the magistrates at Quarter Sessions, had not
+been affected prejudicially by the Corporation Reform Act with which, two
+years before the Queen's accession, the Whig Ministers in the newly
+reformed Parliament supplemented the Poor Law changes. The principle
+underlying the County Council Act of 1888, and before that the Corporation
+Act of 1835 was the same. Both marked a return to a more ancient but a
+less exclusive system rather than a sudden introduction of a new. Like the
+monarchy itself, the borough corporations were in their beginnings
+genuinely popular. As in the case of the Throne, so in that of the
+provincial polities; it was the Tudor sovereigns who narrowed and
+enervated the privileges of their subjects. Under the Plantagenets and
+throughout the Middle Ages, the corporations were elected by popular
+constituencies, the freemen of the town. Contracted in their scope under
+Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, these charters of urban freedom were, under the
+Stuarts, so remodelled as to transfer from the burgesses to the Crown the
+appointment of municipal officers. Municipal liberty having passed away
+first, municipal purity gradually followed. The abuses in civic life had
+at last equalled the corruptions which reduced parliamentary elections to
+a farce. Within a year of Lord Grey's Reform Act, the urban scandals
+became too gross to be ignored longer by a comparatively purified House of
+Commons. As in the case of the procedure with reference to the Poor Law,
+so in the business of municipal reform a Commission was appointed to
+investigate the corporations of the United Kingdom. The national
+enthusiasm for the men who had carried electoral reform against the House
+of Lords, against the Duke of Wellington and against the King was soon
+followed by a Tory reaction. In the hope of regaining for his party some
+of the popularity which it had lost, Lord John Russell in the summer of
+1835 submitted the new measure to the House of Commons. Two millions of
+Englishmen were affected by the scheme. The then existing municipal
+bodies had been shown as little to represent the property, the
+intelligence, even the population of the towns as the unreformed
+Legislature had reflected the convictions and desires of the Kingdom.
+Charitable funds, bequeathed by former benefactors for the impartial
+relief of local want, had by the abuses of years, been diverted wholly
+from their original purpose. They were dispensed habitually to the
+political friends of the men who had for the time the upper hand in the
+affairs of the borough. These moneys seldom mitigated any honest distress;
+they were squandered in the periodical junketings of the authorities of
+the township, with the political partizans who were their fellow feasters.
+Two novelists of our time have drawn famous pictures of the same great
+nobleman. The original of Disraeli's 'Lord Monmouth' in _Coningsby_ was
+the Marquis of Hertford, whose henchman, the 'Mr Rigby' of the novel, was
+the John Wilson Croker of real life. Thackeray's 'Marquis of Steyne' in
+_Vanity Fair_ was the other literary likeness of the same titled original.
+In real life the Marquis of Hertford, as 'an honest burgess,' was a chief
+member of the Council of Oxford city. The Right Honourable John Wilson
+Croker, his lordship's steward, and his confidant in all things were the
+chief associates of this eminent noble in the control of the municipality
+of the University town. The Corporation Act of 1835 swept away these
+scandals, and made municipal government a fairly popular reality.
+Thenceforward in all corporate boroughs, the Town Council was chosen by
+resident inhabitants rated to the relief of the poor. Since 1835 the
+power of the magistrates in boroughs is exercised by the borough bench
+with an appeal to Quarter Sessions, that is, to the County. The measure
+did not a little towards re-establishing the popular privileges which had
+existed before the Tudor encroachments. London was not included in the
+Act. With that exception, all English towns on the Queen's accession had
+for two years been in the enjoyment of self-rule. Cobden is one of the
+many opponents of caste exclusiveness who have testified to the purity and
+efficiency of the unpaid magistracy in their functions of County
+administrators. These persons were of course never responsible to any
+constituent body. They satisfied the property qualification by the
+possession of L300 in land, or by the receipt of an income of L100 a year.
+Notwithstanding the thoroughness of the work done by them on the Quarter
+Sessions committees for regulating extra-judicial business, they
+represented no interest except that of the party enjoying political power,
+the supreme embodiment of which was the Lord Lieutenant of the County.
+
+Meanwhile, there had been great changes in the composition of the
+residents at, or in the neighbourhood of the chief provincial towns of
+England. The close of the Crimean War reinforced the class now mentioned
+by the addition of educated, but not generally wealthy, men, who desired
+peacefully to spend the residue of their days in districts with which
+family ties made them familiar or which conveniences of sport or education
+rendered attractive. The absorbing powers of the capital have
+progressively increased during recent decades. Opulence and fashion have
+swollen the great public schools of the country to unmanageable
+dimensions. Still, to a large percentage of English parents in the upper
+middle class, Eton and Harrow are not the only two possible schools of the
+realm; life may be lived as pleasantly, and more economically, in
+provincial centres like Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, or Cheltenham as within
+the metropolitan radius. Schools, not less than hotels, have become
+matters of joint stock enterprise, and of federal proprietorship. The
+excellent places of teaching which abound in such towns as those just
+mentioned are pre-eminently a product of the Victorian era. Thus it has
+come to pass that, at innumerable spots throughout provincial England,
+during recent years there have settled families, not pretending to
+historic antiquity or distinction, but still agreeably supplementing the
+social resources of the County district. Many, perhaps most of these
+newcomers have served the Queen in peace or war, abroad as well as at
+home, and are thus likely to have acquired administrative experience of
+different sorts. These are just the people qualified to relieve their
+older neighbours, the local squirarchy, in their administrative work. If
+the machinery for establishing County Councils had been created in the era
+of the Corporation Reform Act, or during the first half of the present
+reign, it would have been premature, would at least comparatively have
+failed, instead of proving, as it has done, a signal success. How this
+institution works will best be judged by contrasting certain phases of
+County town life to-day and in the pre-County Council epoch. To visit
+such a town on a day when the magistrates were sitting at Quarter Sessions
+was like making an excursion into feudalism. One used to alight at the
+stable yard of the chief hotel to find no room for one's horse. The
+County's steeds had possession of the best stalls. They could not of
+course be displaced by, or consort with, the quadrupeds of less
+considerable riders. Inside the building, the same tale was retold and on
+every storey illustrated afresh. The apartment normally the coffee room
+was consecrated to the exclusive use of a select party of County justices
+who were still at luncheon. The drawing room on the first floor was in the
+occupation of the women kind of their relatives who were just about to
+refresh themselves after shopping with a cup of tea. The member of the
+general public who entered the chief shops of the place on the day devoted
+to County customers found himself and his patronage at a discount. The
+tradesman, in civil terms, profoundly regretted his inability to attend to
+the chance comer until he had satisfied the needs of the County justices'
+ladies who were expecting every moment to be called for by their lords
+from the Sessions House.
+
+Socially, not less than geographically, the County continues to exist. The
+wives and daughters of the country gentlemen who are County J.Ps. set the
+fashion in their neighbourhood and are still regarded as moulded out of a
+clay slightly superior to that of which their neighbours consist. But as
+an object of fetish worship the County has in most districts disappeared.
+The chief linen draper in the town, as he watches the County ladies, in
+their dilatory fashion, toy with one fabric after another, can scarcely
+suppress a look of impatience on his well disciplined face. He happens to
+be, not less than the father and husband of these ladies, himself a member
+of the new County parliament. He is exercised by a fear lest the special
+committee of the body on which he is serving should have decided the
+question of certain alterations in the approach to the local capital in
+which he is interested, before he has had time to get to the place of
+meeting. Unconsciously, perhaps, his manner towards the lady relatives of
+his council-colleague, the squire and magistrate, has lost something of
+its old deference. Still, the foundations of the social system remain the
+same. The fusion between classes of which the County Council is the
+expression rather than the cause has not brought us appreciably nearer the
+revolution and the Red Republic than had been done by the earlier
+parliamentary reforms. Here, as in the case of the District bodies, the
+law of the survival of the fittest is unrepealed, amid the administrative
+changes of the hour. County magistrates who are specially qualified for
+County administration are elected to the new Councils in numbers
+sufficient to leaven these bodies. The service that they performed on the
+committees of the old Sessions is still discharged by them on the Boards
+that are of more recent growth. The venue of their exertions is changed.
+The opportunity of their labour remains the same. Probably the association
+of County gentry with country town traders widens the view of the
+squires, acts as an incentive to greater energy, and is actually
+productive of better work. Certainly, since this machinery has been in
+operation the intellectual resources of the chief centres of population
+within the jurisdiction of the County Council have been improved. New art
+and science museums have come into existence. The people's parks, which
+were already known in country towns, are better kept. New reading rooms
+and libraries have opened their doors.
+
+During the rather more than half a century that elapsed between the
+Corporations Act of 1835, and the Local Government Act of 1888, the chief
+reforms effected were in the province of sanitary administration, were
+mainly due to the efforts of individuals, such as Mr Stansfeld in 1872,
+and were generally incorporated in the Public Health Act of 1875. These
+sanitary measures contained the principle on which the area of the United
+Kingdom was finally redistributed. For the purposes of County Councils,
+England is mapped out into sixty-one administrative counties. Each of the
+electoral divisions of which the County consists has a Councillor of its
+own. The electors are practically almost identical with the parliamentary
+constituencies. In the case of municipalities inside the County area, the
+Local Government Board decides the share of representation to which it is
+entitled, and allots to it on the Council one or more members, as the case
+may be. In addition to the councillors created by purely popular election,
+a certain number of aldermen, not to exceed one-fourth of the whole body
+are chosen by co-optation among the Councillors themselves. The term of
+Council office is three years. The chairman, however, who is not forbidden
+to receive a salary, holds his place only for one year. Like the District
+chairman, the County president too, without satisfying any pecuniary
+qualification, becomes, by virtue of his office, a County magistrate.[29]
+Like the Council electors, the chairman and the six co-opted aldermen are
+subject only to the condition of having the County vote. As in
+parliamentary elections so in County elections, the polling is by ballot.
+The incidental expenses, however, which are strictly regulated by the
+number of the constituency, are defrayed, not by the candidate or his
+friends as in parliamentary competitions, but out of a County fund. The
+prerogatives of magistrates in whatever appertains to the licensing of
+public houses, and exercised in Quarter and Special Sessions, are
+untouched by the new bodies. With that exception, the functions of Quarter
+Sessions are superseded practically by the Councils. As a consequence, the
+sessional attendances of the magistrates have largely fallen off; though
+there still exist many opportunities for joint action between the new
+Councils and the old Sessions. For instance, the County police is
+controlled by a committee whose members are selected from the old
+magistrates and the new Councillors. Again, when the object is to acquire
+fresh land for popular use; to open or endow local museums or libraries,
+to establish emigration funds to the Colonies or elsewhere, united action
+between the two bodies is usual, but not compulsory.
+
+It has been seen already that the Local Government Board at Whitehall
+looks for the endorsement by the County Council of the Parish Council's
+proposal to acquire land for allotments and, with that purpose, to obtain
+loans from the State purse. Similarly, the borrowing powers for less local
+objects of the Councils are definitely limited. The consent of the
+Imperial authority is needed to enable the Council to borrow for permanent
+works or to issue County stock. The Council's annual Budget is closely
+criticized not only in debate by the Councillors themselves, but by the
+Local Government Board. The property rated to the County Rate which is the
+security for all loans is inspected periodically by Imperial officers. The
+accounts are examined by Imperial auditors. Meanwhile, it may be
+conjectured justly that the considerable remnant of country gentlemen of
+the old school, that is, the nominated magistrates, who have seats on the
+new Councils, secure a salutary continuity of administration and
+expenditure between the new regime and that which preceded it. There is,
+of course, far more of local variety and of adaptability to the needs of
+special neighbourhoods in the composition of the Councils than it was ever
+possible there should be in the _personnel_ of the Quarter Session
+administrators. This fact would alone make it unsafe, as may be seen by
+one or two instances, to generalize about these bodies. If in the
+Midlands, in the Metropolitan shires, and in the South Western counties,
+power remains to a great extent in the hands of the old order, and only
+the tenant farmers on a large scale have influence on the Councils, the
+experience of the northern mining districts and of Wales is very
+different. Throughout the Principality, as well as on the Gloucester and
+Monmouth frontier, the small farmers, who are Nonconformists to a man,
+find themselves, for the first time in their lives, a decisive power in
+their neighbourhood. The same is the case in Durham. Here the colliers,
+also for the most part Nonconformists, containing among them many of the
+finest, most upright, and manly specimens of the English race, practically
+dominate the Council of the Northern shire.[30]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION
+
+    Reasons why London was not included in the Corporation Reform Act of
+    1835. Popular character of its municipal government contrasts with
+    Royal encroachments of various periods. Various schemes and
+    commissions of City reform since the Queen's accession. 1853
+    Commission alone produced practical result in the establishment in
+    1855 of Metropolitan Board of Works. Relations between this Board and
+    the City. In 1888 Board of Works superseded by London County Council.
+    Exact relations between London County Council and the City
+    Corporation. National and Imperial uses of Lord Mayor illustrated.
+    Possible changes of the future. Class fusion illustrated by titled
+    Mayors and other provincial usages.
+
+
+The London County Council, which has little in common with the bodies
+already examined except the name, has been reserved to a chapter dealing
+chiefly, like the present, with the polity of the capital. For the
+exclusion of London from the Corporation Act of 1835, sufficient reasons,
+whether of principle or procedure, may be assigned. To the former category
+belongs the fact that the City Corporation, even during the encroachments
+of the Tudors and the Stuarts, had, unlike other towns, maintained its
+original liberties. It was, amid all its vicissitudes, not, as were the
+corporations described above, a self chosen, but a popularly elected,
+body. Secondly, the Corporation Commissioners did not think that a period
+within three years of Lord Grey's Reform Act, before the ground swell of
+the excitement, caused by that measure, had subsided, was suitable for
+deciding complex and far-reaching issues like those presented by the civic
+system grouped round Guildhall. At the same time the Commissioners
+expressly recorded their opinion that the magnitude of the problem ought
+not indefinitely to postpone an attempt at its solution and that the
+difference between the administrative problems of the provinces and the
+capital was one chiefly of degree. In their separate report of 1837 the
+Commissioners confined their observations on municipal London to cautious
+negatives. The suggestion of creating a congeries of Metropolitan
+municipalities had even then been made, as it has often been renewed
+since. This proposal was officially condemned on the ground that it would
+only remove an anomaly by provoking an abuse. At the same time, certain
+functions of local administration were specified which, within the
+Metropolitan area would be performed most efficiently and economically
+under the control of a single authority. In 1853 a special Commission
+enquiring into the affairs of the City Corporation, among various, but not
+very definite proposals, hinted that the seven parliamentary boroughs, of
+which London then consisted, might supply the machinery for a heptarchy of
+municipalities administratively associated in a central Board of Works.
+That body was to be composed of persons chosen by the different boroughs
+of the capital. No active steps were taken towards the heptarchical
+subdivision of the capital. But in 1855 the Metropolis Local Management
+Act was introduced by Sir Benjamin Hall. The result was the Metropolitan
+Board of Works, which remained an active power until it was superseded by
+or incorporated in the London County Council of 1888. All the then
+existing parishes and vestries of London sent members elected by the
+vestries to this central body. The Board of Works supplied the long
+desiderated unity of administration. If during its thirty-three years of
+rule it made many enemies, it also effected great improvements. In 1884
+the Administration of Mr Gladstone produced a fresh measure of London
+reform. The chief feature of this was the absorption by the City of the
+powers of the Metropolitan Board, and the redistribution of parochial
+functions concentrated upon the City Corporation but now to be divided
+among new local bodies. This proposal proved equally unacceptable to the
+City which was already overburdened, and to the parochial bodies which
+were soon to be superseded. It had, however, advanced the question a
+perceptible degree; had renewed popular interest in London reform, and
+helped to create the public opinion which, four years later, in 1888,
+enabled the Cabinet of the day to include London in the Bill for
+establishing County Councils throughout the kingdom.
+
+In the provinces, as has been seen, the County Councils practically have
+taken over the civil and administrative duties of magistrates formerly
+exercised at Quarter Sessions, but have in no way touched the judicial
+functions of these gentlemen as representatives of the Queen's justice.
+In the same way, the London County Council has left absolutely unimpaired
+the judicial power of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen organized in their
+various courts to execute and administer the civil and criminal law
+according to the historic traditions of the capital. The Common Council of
+London City has, therefore, to-day the powers which belong to an ordinary
+borough council. Outside the City limits, the London County Council with
+respect to drainage, sanitary arrangements generally, new streets and
+local improvements of all kinds, in courteous, rather than compulsory,
+concert with the City discharges the functions of the former Board of
+Works, or of a County Council in the provinces.
+
+That this friendly association between the two Metropolitan bodies, the
+old and the new, should be practicable is what a knowledge of the past
+would lead one to expect. In civic affairs London has always been an
+encouragement and example to provincial townships. The magnitude of its
+area, the preoccupation of its inhabitants with the complex interests and
+exhausting activities of their daily life render London, as Cobden and
+others have always discovered, an impracticable headquarters for political
+agitation. But long before our great provincial centres had been possessed
+with that intense feeling of corporate life which is now the boast of
+Manchester or Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, or Leeds, the traders who
+did their business under the shadow of Guildhall were united by a
+citizenship scarcely less stimulating and constraining than that of the
+little Republics of old Greece. One, and each of them, they took a
+patriotic pride in the material perfection to which the conveniences or
+comforts of their existence had been brought. Thus, as Lancashire has seen
+with exultation the reflection of its collective life in the great cities
+on the Irwell, or the Mersey, the entire Kingdom and Empire have always
+recognized the symbol of their unity as well as of their greatness in the
+prosperity or in the institutions of London City. Nor does anything more
+impress the mind of our foreign neighbours or our Colonial fellow-citizens
+than the response to appeals for help in the day of distress which issue
+from the Mansion House as from the heart of the English race. It is thus
+no exaggeration to say that the past records and contemporary services of
+London have proved of some moral use in promoting the success of the very
+latest municipal reforms. That a final stage in the evolution of London
+government has yet been reached no one believes, least of all the men who
+completed the preliminaries for the formation of the London County
+Council. The Commissioners of 1886-7 have themselves pointed out the
+anomaly of applying to London, even though it be called a County, that
+form of administration which is primarily intended for provincial shires
+necessarily identified not with commerce and trade, but with rural
+pursuits and interests. The City Corporation and the London County Council
+will both be relieved when the existing period of transition with its
+occasional friction and confusion is terminated. The relations between the
+two bodies must necessarily be mutually those of armed vigilance rather
+than of cordial alliance. What is known as the Unification Commission
+was, it must be remembered, appointed at the instance of the London County
+Council. The chief points of the proposal thus made was as earlier
+paragraphs have shown practically to merge the City in some new municipal
+body to the East of Temple Bar. As matters are, while the Lord Mayor and
+Aldermen are not County Councillors of London, the City of London has four
+representatives on the Council. These, however, are not the nominees of
+the Corporation, but are chosen by the ordinary civic constituency, the
+ratepayers. As a matter of fact, though by a coincidence, of the four
+present representatives on the Council of the City, one is an Alderman,
+and another a common Councilman. But they were not chosen in these
+capacities. As little therefore as the vestries or as the local boards is
+the Corporation directly represented in the London County Council, which
+was created by the Act of 1888. When, in addition to its hospitable and
+charitable functions, the services rendered by the City to the cause of
+national education are remembered; when it is considered that nearly all
+the great Guilds help by exhibitions to support poor students at the
+Universities, and that they also make regular and liberal contributions to
+the Science and Art department at South Kensington as well as to the
+Finsbury Institute for the technical training of mechanics and artizans,
+the extreme unwisdom of any scheme of London reform which shall, by
+wounding the pride, discourage the generosity of the historic interests
+now mentioned, becomes self-evident.
+
+However cordial at the different points where they are brought into
+contact the relations may be between the old Corporation and the new
+Council, it is seemingly agreed on all sides that the true method for
+administering that vast and not yet finally circumscribed area inhabited
+by what De Quincey once called 'the nation of London,' has still to be
+devised. The suggestions for future reform are innumerable in quantity and
+Protean in character. Whether the existing areas of separate control
+inside or outside the City gates should be maintained; whether they could
+be replaced conveniently by five or ten, by six or fourteen, separate
+municipalities; these are the problems that, as in the past, so in the
+future, seem likely long to divide the minds of Metropolitan reformers.
+The City Corporation has already divested itself, _e.g._ in its relations
+with the Commissioners of Sewers, of certain functions which normally
+belong to a town council. Hence, it has been suggested that this process
+might be continued till the Lord Mayor and Aldermen practically merged
+themselves in the existing County Council of the capital. In that event,
+the administrative jurisdiction of the County Council, instead of stopping
+abruptly at Temple Bar, as it now does, would stretch from the Strand to
+the Guildhall. From thence it would radiate throughout the region
+generally spoken of as the City. There does not seem much likelihood of
+the fulfilment of this contingency. Such a scheme could not work well
+unless it were embraced with practical unanimity by those whom it
+immediately concerned. The Lord Mayor of London, and the authorities
+gathered round him, naturally regard with jealousy even the apparent
+infringement of their historic prerogatives and immemorial dignities. Nor
+in the interests, not of the City alone, but of the nation at large is it
+desirable that anything should be done which might actually impair the
+prestige, or even sentimentally wound the vanity of the exceedingly
+useful, and uniformly patriotic and generous men who are installed by
+annual succession in the Mansion House. The lofty attributes with which
+the French press and stage have invested the Lord Mayor are not entirely
+caricature. They indicate corresponding realities. The Lord Mayor has
+always been and remains to-day far more than the local head of a great
+municipality. In all parts of the Three Kingdoms, he, with his colleagues,
+controls territorial estates equal in extent, and far more than equal in
+revenue to a Continental Duchy. The Guildhall, with its library and
+museum; the Mansion House; schools and institutions like the City of
+London School, Ward's City of London School for Girls, the Guildhall
+School of Music; these are only a few of the foundations that are
+naturally presided over by the Lord Mayor. They all exist, not so much for
+the glory of the City, as for the service of the community. Possibly it
+might be useful to classify the complicated functions of the Sovereign of
+the City. It would then be seen how far the principle of devolution could
+be applied to his various attributes in their daily exercise. There are
+those who have imagined that within the empire of the Lord Mayor of the
+future there might be created subordinate municipalities which would act
+as local committees under his central control.
+
+Few better proofs of the general intelligence and efficiency of the County
+Councils could be given than the wisdom with which they have discharged an
+educational duty of the first importance imposed upon them by a new
+parliamentary statute. The Customs and Excise Act of 1890 placed certain
+funds for the development of technical instruction at the disposal of the
+Councils. That duty in the opinion of the critics at Whitehall was
+performed so efficiently as to suggest the formation of committees from
+the Councils to ascertain local needs of technical training as well as
+practically to control, in the place of School Boards, the elementary
+education of the Kingdom. The Measure wherein that proposal was embodied,
+the Education Bill of 1896, has been withdrawn. The tribute to the
+capacity of the Councils remains. The educational functions with which it
+was suggested to charge these bodies, will without doubt, some day be
+performed by them.
+
+The wholesome fusion of classes promoted in the country villages and towns
+by recent local government reforms has been already noticed. The same
+tendency has been pleasantly illustrated at other points in the social
+scale. The legislation of 1888 neither diminished the prestige nor
+trenched upon the province of the Imperial Parliament. The only point at
+which it can be said to have touched that body was the process connected
+with the acquirement of land for public purposes by Parish Councils. Here,
+it will be remembered; if the order, decided on by a majority of the
+Parish Councillors, is ratified by the County Council; if, after that, it
+passes the ordeal of the Local Government Board; then the Whitehall
+department issues its sanction for the purchase of the land in question.
+That order has forthwith the validity of an Act of Parliament, without
+having gone through the different stages incidental to legislation at
+Westminster.
+
+Meanwhile, hereditary legislators have to a considerable extent
+practically interested themselves in, and placed their experience at the
+disposal of, the County Councils; just as, with regard to Parish Councils,
+the clergy and gentry have been seen assisting at the deliberations of
+their tenants or their flock. The first chairman of the County Council of
+London, Lord Rosebery, only abdicated that office to become Prime
+Minister. Among his successors were the former permanent head of the Board
+of Trade, Lord Farrer, the Vice-President, Sir J. Hutton and Sir Arthur
+Arnold. The same process of social amalgamation has been witnessed in the
+provinces not less signally than in the capital. The premier peer of
+England, the Duke of Norfolk, has been Mayor of Sheffield. Lord Derby has
+filled the same office at Liverpool. Lord Windsor, in succession to Lord
+Bute, has been Mayor of Cardiff. Lord Beauchamp has presided over the
+Corporation of Worcester. Lord Hothfield, one of the largest landowners in
+Westmorland, has been Mayor of Appleby. Lord Lonsdale has been Mayor of
+Whitehaven, Lord Zetland has held the same position at Richmond. Lords
+Dudley, Ripon, Warwick, and Crewe, have presided each of them over the
+Corporations of the towns from which respectively they derive their
+titles. If this be a reversion to an earlier usage of the aristocracy in
+England, the precedent had been almost forgotten before the practice was
+revived. The analogy that to most persons will more readily have suggested
+itself is rather that of the cities of mediaeval Italy; when the commercial
+community of Genoa was presided over by a lineal descendant of the Doges;
+when a Doria was at the head of the municipality of Rome; when Milan and
+the Lombard capitals, which first instructed England in arts of luxury and
+in modes of splendour, were controlled by Magistrates whose pedigrees
+might have stretched back beyond the Empire to the classical Republic. If
+the civic association of the titular nobility with the new democracy of
+England were not popular it could not exist; and titled Mayors would cease
+to be returned by popular constituencies. If on the other hand the
+municipal compliments failed to bring with them to their recipients an
+opportunity of usefulness as well as a sense of honour, they would not be
+accepted. The plain historical truth is that the patrician landowners of
+England have recognized the opportunity of removing the remnant of
+traditional estrangement between themselves and the masses of their
+countrymen of which so much was heard during the years immediately
+following the new Poor Law of half a century since. Of that sentiment,
+little known except by hearsay to the present generation, the most vivid,
+and not the least trustworthy record is still to be found in a fiction
+already mentioned in these pages, Mr Disraeli's _Sibyl_. Nothing but
+reciprocal good can come of these relations between the classes and the
+masses, to apply to them the distinguishing terms used by Mr Gladstone.
+An apprenticeship to the routine work of municipal affairs in view of the
+changed subject matter of the questions of the day is more likely to prove
+practically serviceable for those born into the condition of hereditary
+statesmen than a course of diplomatic lounging in the Courts and
+Chanceries of the world, or even than the grand tour which now extends
+from Calcutta in one direction to Chicago in another. The class fusion
+that is so signally the social product of the present reign has culminated
+in the conditions which, in the fulness of time, legislation has rather
+recognized than produced. Long before provincial self government was
+established upon the lines indicated by the Acts of 1888 and 1894, the
+spirit which in 1867 prompted Edward Denison to take up his dwelling in
+Whitechapel had been exemplified by philanthropists of both sexes in
+London and elsewhere. The sister of Mr Chamberlain is one of several
+ladies at Birmingham who systematically co-operated for purposes of house
+to house visiting in the poorest quarters of the town that they might
+practically instruct the wives and daughters of working men in the arts of
+domestic management, and in the possibility of keeping the humblest homes
+happy, healthy, comfortable and clean. Similar organizations have done a
+like work in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and no doubt in all
+our great centres of population.[31]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS OF 'SIBYL'
+
+    Exterior of a University settlement in the East End. The scene in the
+    street. Various functions of the University settlers within. General
+    supervision of health arrangements; putting the law in motion to that
+    end. Conciliation between masters and men. The higher culture for East
+    End pupils. Coaching a Bethnal Green four. Earlier efforts in this
+    direction. S.W. slum boys in Belgravian drawing rooms. The young lady
+    and the ubiquitous jockey. The settlements and clubs of to-day at the
+    East End of London foreshadowed by earlier organizations in the
+    provinces by the agencies of the Christian socialists; the working
+    man's colleges, etc. The inside life of settlements and clubs to-day.
+    Schools of character to all concerned. General analogy between West
+    End and East End clubs. Some details of the good work done for, and
+    by, both sexes, young and old. A City missioner's testimony. Then and
+    now in the East End. A. Toynbee; T. H. Green and this movement. Rules
+    suggested by personal experience for the conduct of this intercourse
+    between different classes.
+
+
+In a street broad and clean, as many of those at the extreme East End of
+London are, but still in the heart of an unmistakably poor, often a
+squalid quarter, is a house which, resembling its fellows in architecture,
+presents even as to its exterior the appearance of being inhabited by
+persons of a better sort. On the pavement outside groups of men, women and
+boys are waiting for admission. The door is opened presently, not by a
+servant of either sex, but by a person, evidently a gentleman, in the
+prime of early and athletic manhood. The men and women are introduced into
+a room on the ground floor. Their host hears perhaps of a fever having
+broken out not a hundred yards off; of a home distrained upon for unpaid
+rent by an impatient landlord, or gutted of its furniture by the broker's
+man, of a local inspector's failure to order the demolition of dwellings
+unfit for human habitation, of a strike imminent near the Docks, and
+likely in its results to leave tens of households without clothing or
+food. If this be the tale poured into the ears of the young Oxford or
+Cambridge graduate, he at once hurries off to see whether his personal
+influence, strengthened as it is by some years of varied local experience,
+cannot move the landlord to give his tenants one more chance; or whether
+the tact, that is not likely to grow rusty from lack of practice, cannot
+promote a compromise between masters and men; or whether the knowledge of
+municipal law, acquired by many months of careful reading, with the help
+of local illustrations, cannot be so brought to bear upon the parochial
+officer as to induce him duly to execute the letter of the Sanitary
+Statute.
+
+If none of these things have to be done the lads may be called into the
+chamber which serves the resident for the purpose of study and pupil-room.
+It is, in fact, just such another den as very likely may have been
+occupied by our graduate a couple of years ago when he was an Eton master
+and saw his private pupils at his quarters in Keate's Lane. It by no means
+follows that the subject of his conversation with these East End lads is
+primarily scholastic or strictly educational. The University resident at
+the East End has brought with him the taste for athletics of all kinds
+which he acquired on the Isis or the Cam. He devotes as much time to
+teaching his East End pupils cricket or oarsmanship as to awakening and
+satisfying their interest in learning or letters. He and his party are
+therefore very likely to be seen taking the omnibus or rail if the
+afternoon be fine, to Putney or Hammersmith, where the spectators on the
+bank will soon be cheering a Bethnal Green four practising starts with a
+Leander or a University crew.
+
+The building of whose interior a glance has been given is probably the
+hired house in which two or three members of the Academic or Public School
+settlement live. It may be one of the many clubs for adults, for boys or
+girls, which to-day are scarcely less common in the purlieus of Poplar
+than are clubs of a different sort in St James's or Pall Mall. These
+institutions are among the chief instruments of civilization on which the
+new settlers rely. No one now doubts the service to the manners and the
+morals of the upper classes rendered by the joint-stock caravanserais of
+the West End. Three bottle men, as readers of Thackeray may see for
+themselves, lasted throughout the epoch of coffee houses. They very
+generally disappeared with the replacement of coffee houses by clubs, and
+with the early adjournment from the dinner table to the smoking room. A
+club-man in his cups was found to be a nuisance. A new public opinion was
+created against an old vice. Protracted potations rapidly became, as
+Hamlet desired, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, till a
+toper in St James's became as rare as a bishop in a billiard room. An
+analogous reform in the East End as in the West has been worked by a like
+agency. The fittings and the environments of the institution differ in the
+two regions. Their moral influence is identical in both. In this matter,
+too, as in so many other modes of social improvement, the Metropolis
+followed the lead of the provinces. East End clubs, in contradistinction
+to boozing-dens, existed indeed long before University settlements were
+known, or before Edward Denison's first visit to Whitechapel was paid; but
+not before at Lancaster in 1860, the Working Men's Mutual Improvement and
+Recreation Society had flourished for some little time. In like manner,
+the University settlements now spoken of, had been preceded by the
+organized efforts of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, and other
+representatives of what was then called Christian socialism, to establish
+by the college for working men in Great Ormond Street a living connection
+between University influence and industrial well being. Even working men's
+colleges had existed in the country before F. D. Maurice made his London
+experiment. Sheffield witnessed the first of these during the early
+fifties. Oxford and Cambridge towns were not long behind. Thus the
+promoters of academic settlements were not without the benefit of the
+experience of their earlier predecessors as well as of the public spirited
+association of their contemporaries. The Working Men's Club and Institute
+Union had been founded in 1862 by Lord Brougham and Lord Lyttelton. Much
+of the machinery, as well as a nucleus, for the endeavours of the
+settlers of a latter day was ready to their hands before they began their
+work. But the idea of the combination of gymnasium with club, and of the
+subordination of the roughest kind of physical exercise to the ends of
+social culture had not been illustrated on any extensive scale before
+institutions like the Repton or the Oxford House clubs were controlled by
+men who took this way of doing honour to the name of their University or
+their school.
+
+Before this, ladies living in Belgravia, revering the memory and example
+of Maurice, were in the habit of inviting to their drawing rooms from the
+alleys and by-ways in which the fashionable district abounds poor boys who
+could not be tempted, even with the bait of magic lanterns, to the night
+school. The work was found to be rather too exacting. The chivalry of
+street boyhood did not, as might have been foreseen, prevent the urchins
+from gratifying their sense of fun at her expense in the drawing room of
+the amateur teacher. The joke of giving, as their names, those of the
+famous jockeys of the hour, Fordham, Archer, Cannon, as the case may be,
+proved too good to be resisted. Gravity, once disturbed, could not be
+restored. The pupils could do nothing but laugh at each other's fun. Their
+would-be instructress had to acquiesce in their removal when the servant
+came to clear away the tea things. A public feeling in favour of order and
+even cleanliness has long since been generated in the boys' clubs
+controlled by the University settlers. First the prejudice against collars
+as an article of attire goes out; then a feeling in favour of washed hands
+sets in. In the recreation rooms upstairs boxing gloves are provided as a
+safety valve for the escape of the superfluous humours of Arab animalism.
+Then by slow degrees comes the hour when bagatelle boards may be
+introduced without danger of their being used for the breaking of heads,
+or of the bagatelle cues being employed for the perforation of the
+lath-and-plaster walls instead of for the propulsion of the ivory balls.
+
+The parents are provided with the same sort of accommodation as their
+children. The adult clubs are chiefly of two kinds. In some, the first
+purpose is political. In that case the society becomes an agency for the
+propagation of Radical ideas, and probably an outwork of Trades-Unionism.
+But from many of these foundations politics, which are generally
+synonymous with advanced Liberalism, are excluded. In the majority, if not
+in all, of the non-political clubs, intoxicating drinks, though under
+conditions they were sanctioned by the early founders, are by common
+agreement, prohibited also. The popularity of these clubs with the wives
+of their habitues is a sufficient proof of the sobering tendency of the
+new resorts. In all cases, the women gain scarcely less advantage from
+them than the men. Each club is an organization for social entertainments
+and hospitalities to which members are free to bring all their women-kind.
+
+The dominant idea of the University settlement to which these clubs are
+subsidiary, is to give the poorest and most densely populated working
+class districts the benefit of a resident gentry such as, in the clergyman
+or the squire, is generally commanded in rural parishes. The local
+separation between employer and employed; the fact that the workers do
+not, as they used to do, dwell to-day within sight of their masters, but
+are segregated into colonies of their own in another quarter of the
+capital, and have no access to persons better informed than themselves in
+the troubles and perplexities, big or small, of everyday existence, first
+prompted those who realized the perils of this situation, to make, as far
+as might be, common lot with their less fortunate fellow creatures. In New
+York, where these societies seem to have been known longer than in
+England, the phrase employed is Neighbourhood Guild. To obtain the local
+knowledge which can alone enable the most wise or charitable to give
+effective help, habitual residence under conditions and in neighbourhoods
+identical with the class to be benefited is absolutely necessary. The
+University settler becomes in fact a sort of Delphic Oracle, consulted on
+all embarrassing contingencies by the entire neighbourhood. To vary the
+simile, the enquiries made of him are not less various than the questions
+which the editor of a popular print undertakes to answer in his
+Correspondence column. The doubts and complications arising out of the law
+of landlord and tenant, especially out of that enigmatic being, the
+compound householder who so long obstructed the path of Household
+Franchise, require a practical knowledge of often abstruse legal points
+and sometimes compel resort to a professional solicitor. The precise steps
+necessary to put in motion the Statute for the removal of hopelessly
+insanitary dwellings are not likely to be within the knowledge of the
+dwellers by the Docks. These are only a few of the knots which for the
+instruction of those he has chosen for neighbours, the University settler
+must be prepared to untie. And this is only one of the duties which he
+actually performs. He not only takes part in the municipal government of
+his neighbourhood; he helps others to take part in it, too. Already he has
+himself sat on School Boards and trained grown-up pupils to fill his
+place.
+
+Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University
+settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of
+the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy
+the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that
+are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies'
+College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public
+schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in
+hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works
+of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor
+mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the
+conventional 'day in the country,' but a sojourn of weeks, or even months,
+in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant
+uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought
+to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham
+ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of
+the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few
+hours' journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little
+charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their
+homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were
+first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes
+may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic
+lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas
+tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general,
+though not uncontrolled, romp.
+
+Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers
+aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than
+indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated
+to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent
+part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said,
+decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be
+forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over
+all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any
+breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average
+standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving.
+Generally and individually the club members have realized that their
+material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and
+in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach
+of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship.
+Such a conviction indicates the progress made towards the creation of a
+healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would
+have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any
+sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even
+destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their
+brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin
+East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End
+has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced
+them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their
+dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled:
+_The Universities and the Social Problem_[32] do indeed include some
+rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy
+in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to
+Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of
+pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did
+not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might
+have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the
+baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of
+putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose
+of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or General Booth, who
+both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that
+poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original
+sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on
+fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into
+habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas
+of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of
+gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People's Palace, for
+some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact,
+were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young
+patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick
+slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much
+above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social
+deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the
+superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the
+Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable
+advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar
+and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less
+outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know
+unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service
+which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The
+work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather
+than aesthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the
+neighbourhoods they visit. Their opinion of the practical results of the
+agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a
+missioner to the present writer: 'It marks an epoch in East End
+civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have
+despaired.'
+
+The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men's
+Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is
+no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious
+it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist,
+should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie's subscribers, or
+should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the
+British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the
+union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by
+the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with
+wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers'
+Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to
+which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves
+have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more
+highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclopaedias like Mr Augustus Hare
+or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to 'take walks' with them.
+Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct
+them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are
+the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the
+student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The
+biographies of the statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic
+vicissitudes of the Republics of mediaeval Italy, even the philosophy as
+well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after
+a day's manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate
+returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to
+be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago,
+or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship,
+as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate
+benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold
+Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral
+philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the
+disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present
+to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it
+had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato,
+or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most
+valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of
+his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a
+prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local
+bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught
+more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford
+settlers at the East End have improved upon Green's example, with much of
+his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the
+East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present
+writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating
+to that part of unfashionable London.[33] Thanks mainly to the influence
+and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements
+in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households
+had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social
+results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the
+writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the
+later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of
+course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social
+disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the
+increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and
+drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those
+purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still
+incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been
+examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous.
+The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers
+is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district,
+whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the
+settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his
+joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training
+that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of
+which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a
+founder. The assistance of those in such a position as the University
+settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. 'We always
+need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford
+Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can
+keep things going pretty well for ourselves.' Such is the common remark of
+the settler's friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt.
+The University settler and his friends in his own station are not,
+however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society
+is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the
+atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If
+the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or
+profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the
+same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde
+Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a
+suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after
+edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own
+equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at
+the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require,
+not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people
+need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction,
+whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man,
+but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who
+are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the
+field against the heaviest odds, are perfectly manageable. The most
+aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of
+fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among
+their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their
+bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity
+they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the
+courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ
+from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these
+ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a
+single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who
+consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty
+begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No
+section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate
+order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class.
+The genuine working man in the working man's club causes none of those
+embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that
+of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of
+Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to
+be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden
+rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense
+on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position,
+let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any
+conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above
+all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the
+manual overture will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing
+that the maker 'has no false pride.' A greater mistake there could not be,
+as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith
+in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother's footman on
+receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him
+who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure
+and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison's and of
+Arnold Toynbee's influence for good with their inferiors was that they not
+only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own
+work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them
+and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the
+gulf separating 'the two nations' of the English people.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS
+
+    State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the
+    Queen's accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the
+    people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel
+    Whitbread's faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster's Education Act.
+    Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and
+    Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department
+    completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or
+    Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and
+    the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the
+    Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891.
+    Elementary education now organized. External change in the English
+    landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently
+    made towards this.
+
+
+Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national
+activity the special features of English life during the last half of this
+century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational
+arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly,
+with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady
+progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within
+measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English
+boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the
+highest teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which
+merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career
+open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than
+half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State
+practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching
+purposes a grant of L20,000. The sum with annual increments was
+thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in
+Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the
+Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a
+twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of
+organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and
+the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just
+named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George's Channel never
+neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on
+the eve of the Queen's accession, thousands of working men and women owed
+practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the
+close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In
+the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of
+the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English
+clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell
+Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a
+scheme of instruction for the whole English people.
+
+Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833, Parliament fitfully
+recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the
+son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E.
+Forster's reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal
+of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the
+earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in
+the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to
+enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself
+brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The
+project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry
+which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we
+have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the L7,000,000 now
+spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for
+that purpose of, L20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we
+have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an
+interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne's Administration excited
+much obloquy, and raised the 'No Popery' cry against them, by allowing a
+share in a grant, now increased to L30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The
+House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of
+religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a
+majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with
+certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto,
+the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first
+time an Education Department was organized under the Lord President of
+the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was
+appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston's long term of office, in 1857,
+the Education grant rose to L451,000. It became more expressly understood
+that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in
+the Vice-President.[34] With the steady increase of the annual grant, its
+province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle
+of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer
+limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had
+been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence.
+Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The
+quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in
+proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was
+more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the
+efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the
+Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education
+reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment
+by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in
+schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The
+teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase
+in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education Vote amounted to
+one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe's drastic, if
+indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that
+sum.
+
+No fundamental change took place till the Education Act of 1870, always
+associated as that will be with the name of W. E. Forster. Dealt with as
+to its provisions, its working and its results, in elaborate detail in the
+author's preceding work, _England_, the Measure now rather more than a
+quarter of a century old will here be summarized sufficiently by reminding
+the reader that this legislation empowered the election of School Boards
+throughout the Kingdom, but maintained the system of voluntary
+subscriptions, and only compelled the institution of School Boards where
+voluntary effort had failed, and in the Time Table Conscience Clause
+provided a security for individual liberty. Mr Mundella's Act of 1880 made
+education absolutely compulsory throughout England and Wales, whereas
+before then the power of compulsion was left to the local authorities. In
+all State-aided schools, religion was to be taught either at the beginning
+or end of school hours, so that, without disturbance to the general
+curriculum individual children could be withdrawn from the sacred lesson
+at their parents' will, without incurring any disability on that account.
+These provisions met with the usual fate of legislative compromises. They
+deeply offended many sections. They entirely pleased none. The battle
+between religious and irreligious training, between what have been called
+the National and the Denominational systems was not decided in 1870. It
+has been fought over again more than once since then. It remains unsettled
+to this day.
+
+During the whole of that decade, the Education Acts were supplemented with
+detailed legislation of a consolidating or modifying kind. No organic
+change took place till in 1891, the Government of Lord Salisbury adopted
+the first of the three Fs, long since propounded by Mr Chamberlain, and by
+abolishing the School pence which scarcely repaid the trouble of their
+collection, made elementary education as free to all children in the land,
+as by the law of 1870 it had practically become compulsory. The proposal
+to free the schools was not universally popular with the party to whose
+lot it fell to execute that policy. So, notwithstanding its exclusive
+traditions, that party had, under Mr Disraeli a quarter of a century
+earlier by its Household Suffrage Bill, recognized and established the
+English democracy. The plea on which those who had begun by resisting free
+schools finally accepted them was the expediency of accepting the
+inevitable first, and secondly the practical wisdom of obtaining credit
+for Conservatism by doing well and wisely that which at some future time
+the opposite party would have ingratiated themselves with the masses by
+doing badly. The results of free education were speedily visible in the
+increase of the children educated throughout the land. The increase of
+children in schools during the five years preceding the Free Education Act
+of 1891 had been 269,903. During the quinquennial period after the Act the
+increase was 421,860, or, in round numbers, just double. The first rung
+in the educational ladder for the benefit of all classes of the Kingdom
+had been fixed firmly by the Act of 1870. It was not, nor was ever,
+regarded by its authors as a complete Measure. It provided no regular
+system of higher grade schools intermediary between the most elementary
+teaching, and the more liberal culture of the grammar schools. The only
+supplement that it received from the Government under which it had become
+law was the Endowed Schools Act of 1874 for re-arranging the funds and
+remodelling the curricula in secondary endowed schools throughout the
+country. Private effort and local enterprise usefully came in where Mr
+Foster's Education Act had stopped short. In various parts of England, and
+especially in the great northern counties of Lancashire, Durham and York,
+School Boards, fortunate enough to possess controlling spirits of
+exceptional enlightenment, exercised their legal power to establish
+schools of a higher kind specially for the teaching of science or art, and
+generally for the tincture of the youthful mind with a more generous
+training. Such schools received additional grants from the Science and Art
+Department at South Kensington.
+
+In this way the 1870 Act at once partially enabled the child of the
+poorest parents to mount through the elementary schools, to the secondary
+schools of the Kingdom and thence to those seats of learning at which the
+picked youth of the country enjoy the choicest opportunities of mental
+culture, or are qualified for the highest posts in after life to which
+English ambition can aspire. The problem now to be solved, which is in
+actual process of solution and of which a few years more may probably
+dispose, is the completion of the national ladder of learning by a more
+thorough organization of the agencies for advanced knowledge throughout
+the country, and for the passage of the pupil from schools of the lowest,
+to schools of the higher grade. Just as, during recent years of the
+present reign, successive Reform Bills have increasingly nationalized the
+legislative Chambers at Westminster; so the tendency and the result of the
+transformations undergone by the great public schools and by the
+Universities, that they feed, is to draw more closely together the bonds
+uniting these institutions with the nation as a whole, to widen their
+curriculum, to infuse a popular element into their governing bodies, and
+to make them not merely the instructors, but the representatives of the
+intellectual interest of the land. By remodelling the governing bodies of
+Eton, Winchester and Harrow, the Public Schools Act of 1868 appreciably
+quickened and deepened the sense of public responsibility inherent in
+these corporations. Nearly thirty years' experience of the Endowed Schools
+Act justifies the statement that the work accomplished for the grammar
+schools of the country is analogous to the results which the earlier
+legislation has yielded in the case of the more famous seats of youthful
+study.[35] A wholesome spirit of competition now animates the governors of
+these old if often still obscure endowments,[36] and daily causes fresh
+usefulness to be extracted from money resources, long suffered to remain
+idle. Later legislation, whose general aspects have already received
+attention in these pages, has conspired to deepen the sense of obligation,
+and to stimulate to efforts, most salutary for the taught, alike the
+governors of and the teachers in the schools.
+
+Shortly after the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, important
+functions, educational and financial, were given to the new County
+Councils. The grammar schools were quick to perceive a new opportunity. In
+1889, thirteen representatives of the Councils, in some cases at the
+instance of their older colleagues, received seats on the governing bodies
+of the Secondary Schools. The corporations thus reformed have already
+begun vigorously to deal with an abuse inveterate in their smaller
+schools. Where the value of the endowment, from charges on the property of
+which it consists or from a fall in the value of land, has fluctuated the
+governors have been in the habit of farming out the school to the
+headmaster. They have, that is, assigned to him the income of the trust,
+and such fees as he can charge. In return, the pedagogue takes upon
+himself the charges of working the school, and of the teaching of a fixed
+number of free boys. The tendency of this arrangement is, of course, to
+repeat in the present day the experiences of Do-the-boys Hall under Mr
+Squeers in _Nicholas Nickleby_. The headmaster has upon him the burden
+not only of his educational work, but of the solvency of his daily
+business. His own stipend is too small to admit of his paying competent
+assistants. He becomes a pensioner on the caprice of well-to-do parents,
+and the instrument of their not generally very enterprising will, or of
+their too enlightened pleasure. The only chance for the small secondary
+schools thus circumstanced is their rescue by some of the more
+public-spirited and opulent of the governors. But this relief is
+forthcoming so rarely that the Commissioners generally recommend the
+closing of all schools existing under these conditions and the application
+of their endowments to purposes less obviously foredoomed to failure.
+Other instances of the waste of existing resources for secondary education
+are even more frequent and not less serious. Grammar schools of competent
+calibre are often geographically crowded so close together as to obstruct
+and paralyse their mutual efforts. Thus in South Devon there is at
+Chudleigh a grammar school of considerable repute. Within a radius of
+sixteen miles, _e.g._ at Ashburton, Totnes, and Bovey Tracey, there are
+similar schools capable of good work, but lacking a population of parents
+and children to fill their empty benches. A like experience has often
+occurred in the case of establishments which, not being endowed grammar
+schools have not come under the notice of the Commissioners. Bath, for
+instance, has long possessed more educational opportunities than most
+other cities in the West of England. The oldest of her proprietary
+colleges, that in the district known as 'Grosvenor,' to some extent became
+merged in the less ancient Sydney College. That in due time produced a
+successful offshoot, the Somerset College. These two latter institutions
+during some time were healthily stimulated by mutual competition. At last
+the rivalry became profitable only to the prestige and numbers of the
+secondary schools that, managed on the same principles, had come into
+existence first at Cheltenham, then afterwards on the Clifton downs, near
+Bristol. In 1885,[37] the Somerset and Sydney Colleges were amalgamated
+under a single headmastership by the title of the Bath College. This
+to-day is doing an excellent work. But it is the North and East of England
+where by the needless reduplication or ill-advised contiguity of schools
+of the same grade the most flagrant breaches are committed against the
+first laws of educational economy. Thus, in the West Riding, the grammar
+school of Ossett has a fair endowment but practically no scholars. Again,
+Walsingham in Norfolk, with less than 1,000 inhabitants, possesses a
+substantially endowed school, the boys attending which had decreased from
+32 in 1884 to 11 in 1894. Not far off at Ipswich, Norwich, and Bury St
+Edmunds, are establishments of historic fame, and of present competence.
+As an alternative to the continued waste of such opportunities, and to
+promote the local completion of the educational ladder indicated in the
+beginning of this chapter, the Commissioners suggest that the Walsingham
+school should be transferred bodily to Fakenham, a prosperous and not
+distant town, or that the Walsingham funds should be converted into
+scholarships and exhibitions to be held at other places of education
+within the County. There are other small grammar schools which, while just
+paying their way, have evidently no considerable career before them. Here
+the spirit of commercial impatience is apt to suggest the conversion of
+these places of teaching into elementary schools of the better sort. But
+the places now spoken of often have honourable traditions, and resemble
+families that, through no fault of their members, have, by misfortune,
+come down in the world. Local patriotism dwells fondly on the creditable
+past of such institutions, and would be wounded by their irrecoverable
+degradation. Surely, therefore, these schools might have the chance of
+retrieving their position. That, in effect, is what the Commissioners say.
+Assign to the decayed grammar schools their exact place in a reorganized
+system of secondary education. On condition of their adapting themselves
+to the place thus appointed to them, assist them out of the public funds
+to regain full effectiveness, and, together with that, to renew their past
+prosperity.
+
+Within the last few years an illustrious proof has been given that a great
+school is not necessarily so sensitive a plant as to depend for its
+life-blood and vigour on the essential qualities of the soil wherein its
+founders first fixed its roots. 'The Grey Friars' of Thackeray's novels,
+the Charter House school, which, in R. C. Jebb, now Professor of Greek in,
+as well as M.P. for, Cambridge University, has produced probably the first
+scholar of the latter half of this century, has been removed recently to
+the great advantage of the physical health and literary industry of its
+scholars from its ancient home in London city to the rural neighbourhood
+of Godalming town. A precedent for the same policy in less famous
+instances, exists. At Hewsworth, in the West Riding, Archbishop Holgate's
+grammar school has been closed from lack of pupils. Its endowment was
+merged in that of the grammar school at Barnsley, a town of some 36,000
+inhabitants, midway between Sheffield and Wakefield. Within half a dozen
+years, the Barnsley school, thus reinforced, had achieved prosperity, and
+had adopted the chief recommendations for effective teaching made by the
+Commissioners. One thing is at least clear. If liberal education, the
+process, that is, of the development of the whole intellectual nature,
+without immediate reference to the supply of material needs, is not to
+become a mere tradition; if, in other words, literary culture be worth
+preserving as an instrument for training the mind, the cry for merging the
+grammar schools in agencies of specialist and technical teaching must not
+be adopted without consideration. The highest experts in this matter agree
+that the scientific and technical instruction, which is visibly a paying
+investment, runs in these days no risk of neglect, but that there does
+exist a danger of the first aims and the true methods of intellectual
+training being ignored. Even thus, fairly equipped as England is with the
+machinery for secondary teaching of the scientific sort; still better
+furnished as she might be with a more economical administration of
+existing resources, fresh provision must be made on a liberal scale before
+the national appliances are complete. The Commissioners have estimated in
+those counties to which they have paid special attention the number of
+boys or girls educated at secondary schools at 21,878 or 2.5 per 1,000 of
+the population. As might be expected, the local inequalities revealed by
+this analysis are very great. Thus, in Bedford, because of the great
+Harpur endowments of that small county, the proportion per 1,000 is 13.5.
+In Lancashire the population has altogether out-grown the secondary
+endowments available: the proportion per 1,000 is only 11. In Yorkshire it
+is only 2.1. In Warwickshire, notwithstanding the splendid foundations of
+Edward VI. at Birmingham, and the wealthy and famous schools of Warwick
+and Coventry the proportion remains as low as 5.2.
+
+While these aspects of latter day education are being considered, the
+honourable connection of the new Local Government bodies with schools must
+not be ignored. Liverpool, like South Lancashire generally, is not ill
+supplied with agencies for secondary or technical instruction. The means
+of the capital and of the county would both be inadequate but for the very
+liberal contributions made by the County and City Councils to the schools
+owned by religious and secular proprietors for boys and girls. The
+companies thus spoken of are enabled by the Councils to carry on more than
+one particular school at a loss, even though the deficiency be not made
+good by the profit on other schools of the group. In view of the fact
+stated above that a great educational pioneer of this century, Joseph
+Lancaster, was a Quaker, it is interesting to know that the most recent
+Education Commission selects for special compliment the Ackworth Friends
+School, open to members of the Society from all parts of the world, in the
+West Riding of Yorkshire. The more searchingly the enquiry is made, the
+more distinctly there emerges the fact that private venture schools
+created by voluntary effort, conducted by individual enterprise, render
+the most effective service to secondary education. These institutions open
+their doors for public examination. They cannot, therefore, be unworthy of
+State help. Their headmasters and their chief assistants generally are
+University graduates, and were often trained at one of the older public
+schools. A fresh rung in the ladder of educational ascent will have been
+made when these schools, 30 per cent. of whose teachers are University
+graduates, receive official registration as well as whatever material
+assistance State recognition can confer. State organization of national
+teaching primary or secondary by means of official examination and by
+grants of money proportioned to the proficiency established by these
+ordeals, is, as we have seen, and as it must always be remembered, not
+more than half a century old, and in a national sense, scarcely therefore
+passed beyond its infancy. The progress indicated in the preceding remarks
+justifies the expectation that before very long the edifice will be
+crowned with a completeness worthy of the strength with which the
+foundations have been laid, and more than one storey of the fabric has
+been already reared.
+
+Other agencies now fairly at work in this enterprise remain to be
+mentioned. Before the Universities had sent their resident representatives
+to the East End of London, and to the slums of other great cities, they
+had actively identified themselves with the encouragement and the testing
+of secondary teaching throughout the land. The Oxford and Cambridge middle
+class examinations began to be held during the early sixties in the chief
+towns of provincial England. Very soon afterwards, there were organized
+successively the Higher Schools Examination Board, conducted by the two
+Universities, and the University Extension Lectures which presently will
+be examined here with some detail.
+
+But by this time the fresh appliances for elementary and secondary
+education, both directly or indirectly growing out of the legislation of
+1870, had changed the physical, not less than the intellectual, aspect of
+the whole country. In the city as in the suburbs, in the provinces not
+less than in the metropolis, the whole landscape was thickly dotted with
+new piles of buildings, in all cases constructed with marked regard to
+convenience and health, substantial always, in some cases really handsome.
+These were the new Board Schools, some for the most elementary instruction
+of the rising generation, some for higher grade teaching, or for imparting
+to older children the rudiments of scientific and technical knowledge. In
+the former case the buildings were surrounded with gravel playgrounds,
+furnished with swings, parallel bars, and other gymnastic appliances, all
+used under the direction of an expert teacher, who alternately with the
+drill sergeant came on duty during play hours. The structures annexed to
+the actual class-rooms of more advanced pupils were furnished within as
+laboratories and work rooms. Here the pupils were apprenticed to the
+initial duties of the chemist, the gasfitter, the electrician, or of any
+other vocation they were destined in after life to follow. One result of
+this new start in the State schools was the stimulus of a competition that
+produced a perceptible increase of efficiency in the private schools not
+necessarily identified with any religious denominations. These private
+schools still exist; and by the greater elasticity of their system, and
+special opportunity of encouraging individual originality in the learners
+they are the salutary and indispensable adjuncts of the State
+institutions. The generally superannuated and often inefficient dominie,
+alternating between slumber over the text book from which he was supposed
+to teach, and unprovoked aggressions with his cane upon the knuckles or
+any other available part of the persons of his nearest pupils, is now
+replaced by a master in the prime of life and energy, who, if not a
+graduate in a University, has the certificate from one of the many
+examining bodies which attest his fitness for the place. Almost
+imperceptibly to-day, the elementary school matures into the secondary
+school. Nor is the development always indicated by a change of name, for
+higher grade elementary schools, to employ their official title, in which,
+after all his Standards have been passed, the Board School boy, between 15
+and 17 years old is placed, are in effect not less of secondary schools in
+their way than Cheltenham or Westminster. Controlled indeed by the School
+Boards, they prepare their pupils for matriculation at the London or other
+Universities, or for entrance upon professional life. Thus, in 1894,
+exclusive of the capital, the English School Boards controlled no fewer
+than sixty establishments of this higher type. Of that number thirty-nine
+were organized science schools. The fabric of the buildings had been
+provided out of the rates. The cost of the superior teaching was defrayed
+by private munificence, or by the State grants conferred by the Science
+and Art Department which, in South Kensington began as, and still is, a
+portion of the Department in Whitehall. The number of boys and girls,
+according to the latest statistics, educated in these superior Board
+Schools is 4,606 boys, 2,023 girls. Outside London, the great majority of
+the institutions now spoken of are in the Northern, the Midland and the
+Eastern counties. Advantage to all concerned might be expected to accrue
+could these higher Board Schools be managed, if not in active concert, yet
+with the practical approval, and pecuniary encouragement, of the County
+Councils. When, therefore, by the withdrawn Bill of 1896, it was proposed
+to invest County Councils with educational powers, but not, save in rural
+districts, to displace School Boards, the new duties contemplated for
+those Councils were not those for which they entirely lacked preparation.
+In addition to all this, the great City Guilds, notably the Drapers,
+Grocers, and Goldsmiths provide for secondary teaching not only in London,
+but wherever their property lies, a machinery of proved effectiveness. The
+more recent Intermediate Education Act fills in Wales the interval between
+the schoolroom and the workroom; its precedent is sure to be followed
+elsewhere. The means, therefore, of technical training accessible to the
+very humblest classes of the community, cannot be described as inadequate.
+While the tendency thus is for places of secondary teaching to become
+training grounds for special, technical, or professional instruction, it
+is satisfactory that Oxford and Cambridge should hold before the eyes of
+the country the standard of the more general culture which is identical
+with real education, and should bring to the very doors of the humblest
+homes throughout the country the effective and inexpensive agencies for
+securing this teaching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE LADDER OF EDUCATION
+
+    Mr Lowe's advice thirty years ago now fairly fulfilled. Individual
+    influence co-operating with the State reforms the true secret of
+    recent educational advance. Animating effect felt throughout the
+    country of Benjamin Jowett's educational example at Oxford. The
+    practical and concrete test of the helpfulness of the educational
+    ladder to the entire community applied in detail. Instances of Board
+    School boys, and of sons of day labourers who have risen to
+    distinction with the help of the new educational agencies. Experiences
+    of the Clerk of the London School Board and others. Missing rungs
+    still to be supplied to the ladder by reorganization or slight
+    enlargement of existing resources. Need of reorganizing the teaching
+    profession by new local and central councils. Dangers besetting the
+    present movement illustrated.
+
+
+The theory, and, in outline, the practice, of the educational reforms
+reserved for the most recent years of the present reign have now been
+explained with as much fulness as the scheme of this work permits. It
+remains concretely, if of necessity briefly, to answer the question: What
+actually has been done? No Blue Books, or other educational statistics are
+necessary to convince one of the reality and magnitude of the enterprise
+already accomplished. 'Let us educate our masters,' was the advice of Mr
+Lowe when, in the House of Commons, he bewailed so brilliantly and
+bitterly the era of the new democracy begun by the legislation of 1867-8.
+The advice has been followed. A new generation has sprung up, which is
+demonstrably better educated and more humanized than any of its
+predecessors. The diminution of pauperism and crime; the gradual
+disappearance from London and from other great towns of the uncontrollably
+rough element among the street observers of public holidays; the growing
+competition among the industrial classes of museums or picture galleries
+with drinking bars on Sundays and on popular feasts; these are the more
+superficial signs of the progress already made and still going forward.
+Intelligent foreigners,[38] the very men who are said to anticipate the
+judgments of posterity, declare that within the last twenty years the
+physiognomical type of the London street loungers and loafers has visibly
+improved; that the look of the vulture which was habitual on faces pinched
+by hunger, and puffy or pallid with debauchery, is no longer the
+dominating expression of feature; that the rapacious arabs of the pavement
+who were formerly ready to devour the new comer outside Charing Cross or
+Victoria railway stations, where they have not disappeared, have become
+orderly, intelligent, and not altogether the reverse of polite. It
+requires perhaps an Englishman to appreciate at their true worth, the more
+delicate gradations of this improvement as it is illustrated elsewhere. Go
+into the pit or gallery of a London theatre, on the Surrey side or in
+Hoxton. In look, in manner, and in the kind of conversation between the
+acts, the play-goers have changed. If there were ever any danger of an
+orange or ginger-beer bottle descending from the gallery to the pit, the
+peril is now obsolete. Should the situation be Shoreditch or the City
+Road, the strains of the orchestra intermittently may be accompanied by
+voices joining in the chorus with original variations. But the melodies,
+however irregular, only express an honest holiday enthusiasm. Schools
+elementary, whether of the first or second grade, secondary, technical or
+scientific, explain much of this new improvement in the facial
+characteristics and at all public places in the general deportment of the
+humblest of Her Majesty's subjects. But they do not account for the entire
+change. Something like twenty years ago, when a work named _England_ was
+in preparation its author by personal inspection of the localities
+mentioned, ascertained that the latest reports on the truck system as in
+some parts of Staffordshire it continued to exist, and of the agricultural
+gangs in more northern counties, faithfully depicted the social condition
+of great masses of the mining and rural population. The same local
+examination to-day presents a cheering contrast to the writer's earlier
+and depressing experiences. In every town and village of the United
+Kingdom it is now easier than was ever known before for the very poorest
+to live in a cleanly, a godly, sometimes even in a comfortable fashion.
+All the necessaries, most of the superfluities, of existence are to-day
+unprecedentedly cheap. Wages have risen all round, till a pound a week has
+become the normal pay of unskilled adult labour in the town, and about
+twelve shillings in the country. Some conspicuous evils in our industrial
+system have indeed yet to be removed. The fines and deductions[39] to
+which, often without just cause, the earnings of factory hands are
+subjected, have been denounced with just severity, though in moderate
+language, on platforms and in print, by Sir Charles Dilke. On this side of
+the Millennium finality in social legislation will prove, it is to be
+feared, not less difficult than in political matters Lord John Russell
+found, to his disappointment, was the case. The advance of civilization
+itself creates new social conditions which call in their turn for
+periodical legislation. Till the resources of all classes are equalized,
+there must be some who cannot protect themselves, on whose behalf the
+legislature must interpose.
+
+That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as
+well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades
+since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be
+impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class,
+would no longer be represented, even by _Punch_, as proposing to 'heave
+half a brick' at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As
+for setting the bull-pup at the parson's little boy, the suggestion is
+less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous
+undergraduate, the son of the collier's employer who is home for his
+College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of
+Devonshire is not a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the
+frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park
+round the Reformers' Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies' Mile as
+being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That
+implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the
+discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of
+the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord
+Mayor's Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the
+Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal.
+The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the
+world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken.
+As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in
+comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk
+hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a
+new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban
+railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their
+Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a
+welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults
+who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school
+days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries;
+the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share
+with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a
+new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but
+wholesomely controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as
+that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.
+
+Before considering the provisions necessary to complete the educational
+ladder, it will be well from specific instances to see what the facilities
+already established have done towards promoting the ascent from the Board
+School to the University. The following instances now published for the
+first time, are supplied by the courtesy of the Clerk of the London School
+Board. In 1879 a boy whose first learning was gained at a primary London
+Board School, obtained on entering a secondary school the Carpenters'
+Foundation Scholarship, together with the Conquest gold medal. Shortly
+afterwards he became captain of the City of London School. Proceeding
+thence to Cambridge, he won a Foundation Scholarship at Trinity;
+eventually was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, became
+next a Fellow of Trinity; and subsequently held a high position in the
+Board of Trade. Another lad of equally humble birth in 1880 got a
+mathematical scholarship at Queen's College, Cambridge, was among the
+Senior Optimes in the Tripos and in 1886 was appointed a mathematical
+master at one of the great public schools. In 1881, another Board School
+boy, having received the Greek and Latin certificate from the Universities
+Examining Board won a classical scholarship at St John's, Oxford, and
+afterwards a First Class in Classical Moderations. A little later he was
+placed fourth in the First Class of Civil Service candidates. He has since
+developed into a useful official of the Local Government Board. Another
+boy of like antecedents won a scholarship at St John's College,
+Cambridge; subsequently came out first class in one division, second
+class in another division, of the Theological Tripos; carried off the
+Jeremie Septuagint prize, open to the whole University, and afterwards
+became a successful parish clergyman. Other distinctions won by candidates
+of the same category are a scholarship at the City of London School; in
+1883 a first place in the competition for vacancies in the India Office;
+in another case, and with the other sex, in 1885, the fifth place in the
+London Matriculation test, the Gilchrist and Reid scholarships, and later
+First Class Academic Honours for English. This instance is the more
+memorable because it is the earliest distinction of the sort won by a
+Board School girl. Since then the same young woman has become an assistant
+teacher at the Ladies' College in Jersey. This example has often been
+repeated since. Three or four of the prize winners at Girton College
+during the later eighties were London Board School girls. The well-known
+senior curate of St Saviour's, Everton, Liverpool, a High Honours
+Cambridge graduate, had been a Board School boy. His colleague had been
+enabled by a Fishmongers' scholarship to enter at Sidney Sussex College at
+Cambridge. In the summer of 1880, F. J. Wild was the first London Board
+School boy who went to Balliol. Nine years afterwards, this lad entered
+the Indian Civil Service, and became Assistant Magistrate and Deputy
+Collector in the North-West Provinces. 'Bachelor of Science, Bedford
+College, first division, 1891;' 'Recommended by Wesleyan Conference for
+training in their theological institutes and for the Home ministry;'
+'Teacher at Diocesan Training College;' these are comparatively common
+entries in the catalogue of Board School honours for this decade. In or
+since 1893, there have been some half dozen cases of Board School boys
+taking College and University Honours at Oxford as well as good places in
+the Indian Civil Service competition. The experience of the London Board
+Schools is not unlike that of similar institutions in the provinces. A
+decennial calendar after the Oxford precedent of distinctions academic or
+professional won by Board School pupils is a volume which it would really
+be worth while to prepare, and materials for which are accumulating on all
+sides. Pending the completion of the ladder for ascent in the normal way
+from the Board School to the University, private encouragement supplies
+many of the missing rungs. Thus, the vicar of a Herefordshire village
+noticed the quickness of his gardener's son; helped him to enter the
+Hereford County School. From this the lad got a scholarship to Malvern
+College. Afterwards, one of the first Board School boys who won that
+honour, he carried off the entrance blue ribbon of a Balliol scholarship.
+In due course the gardener's boy took a first class in Classical
+Moderations, and a first class also in Classical Greats.
+
+Typical instances have now been cited sufficient in number and variety to
+show that, as seems to be the general opinion of the last Education
+Commission, notwithstanding incompletenesses and imperfections here and
+there, enough has already been done to enable every clever boy in whatever
+station he is born by his own industry and volition to secure the same
+opportunities of cultivating his gifts as the nobleman's son who wins the
+Newcastle medal at Eton. The personal effort and initiative of the late
+Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, did more perhaps than has been done by
+any other individual to promote this work. Under him the College of
+Wycliffe not only maintained the prestige which it had acquired in the
+days of Dr Jenkyns, and which was greatly increased by the successor of
+Jenkyns, Robert Scott, but became at once the patron and the pattern of
+minor places of education throughout the country. Provided they showed
+ability and industry, the day labourer's and the artizan's son were
+welcomed from the provincial grammar school as warmly at Balliol as the
+Sixth Form boy from Harrow or Eton. The connection between secondary
+schools of all grades in the provinces and the University on the Isis had
+already been promoted by the agency of local examinations; it was rendered
+more intimate by the Socratic interest which Jowett took in the
+intellectual welfare of the rawest lad from the country if only he showed
+the slightest sign of mental promise. Jowett's stimulating sense of
+citizenship was felt during his life in the remotest corners of the
+country. Its animating influences have survived his death; they still
+operate as an inspiring force wherever the domains of municipal and
+educational life converge. This good man and patriotic citizen did not
+live to witness the active assumption of educational responsibilities by
+the County and Borough Councils from which, not vainly, he hoped great
+things. An educational system in thorough touch with Oxford and Cambridge
+on the one hand and on the other hand with primary village schools; this
+was the ideal that Jowett, Lake and Stanley advocated to the earlier
+School Enquiry Commissions. Jowett lived long enough to see in the case of
+several great provincial grammar schools, notably that of Bradford, his
+ambition fulfilled.
+
+In many, if not in most districts, the new provincial Councils have now
+added as many rungs to the educational ladder as could fairly be expected.
+The wants which still await fulfilment are definite. They ought not to
+prove very difficult to supply. Local endowments supplemented by a
+moderate amount of State help, will, if wisely directed, provide the
+larger facilities still needed for the promotion of higher grade
+elementary school pupils to grammar schools. In order that there may be no
+further waste either of the money or of the machinery for national
+education, a drastic scheme of reorganization seems to be a cardinal
+necessity. Secondary education is a phrase too mechanically interpreted as
+a synonym for technical or scientific education. If the Statutes be
+interpreted literally, the County Councils are empowered only to levy a
+rate for a higher school grant when the teaching which that grant defrays
+is to enable a boy or girl to learn the elements of some remunerative
+handicraft, and is thus expressly sanctioned by the Technical Education
+Act of 1890. If the Councils have gone beyond this, and pecuniarily
+ministered to the needs of a more generous culture, they have acted, so to
+speak, at their own peril, or that action has been rendered possible by
+the private liberality of their more opulent members. In addition to this
+need of a new definition of the ambiguous epithet and substantive employed
+so often in the foregoing text, a new educational authority which can
+officially survey every department of the entire field of teaching has
+become indispensable. Centralized at Whitehall this authority will to some
+extent inevitably be. Its operation, however, must be highly elastic. The
+conditions of its control must be adaptable to the infinitely varying
+conditions, social, geographical, material, sentimental, of the United
+Kingdom. The most recent enquiries show that there is much less
+dissipation of educational energy by the mutual overlapping of schools
+than might be expected. The single instance of this sort to which
+attention has been directed by the last Commission is that of Bolton,
+where there exists an unprofitable competition between the grammar school
+and the Church Institute Boys' School. Elsewhere, however, as at Leeds and
+other great towns of the North, Mechanics' Institute Schools, Higher Grade
+Board Schools, trench respectively on each other's province, though each
+of them, by slightly varying its curriculum, does good work and is in
+great local demand. The explanation of the latter fact is the universality
+of the appetite for higher teaching created in the large centres of the
+English population. The most frequent, and with proper care the most
+easily remediable form of overlapping occurs when the higher divisions of
+a lower grade school retain pupils already ripe for a higher grade school.
+What are the exact limits to be placed respectively to the provinces of
+elementary schools of both grades? and what to the grammar schools on the
+one hand, or the University schools on the other with which the
+rudimentary institutions ought closely and cordially to co-operate? these
+are problems with which, in the fifty-ninth year of Her Majesty's reign,
+there does not exist any single authority competent to deal. The confusion
+between the jurisdiction of the educational bodies now in being is
+comparable with that which existed in the relations of the various
+administrative authorities and areas in the case of local government
+before these functions were comparatively simplified by the legislation of
+1874 and of 1888. The Education Department in London has no concern with
+secondary schools save so far as some of these are inextricably
+intermingled in their operations with the finance or the teaching of
+primary schools. The Charity Commission wherein the Endowed Schools
+Commission is now merged, can only take cognizance of the agencies for
+higher teaching for a special purpose and from a single point of view.
+This loose and very partially effective machinery of control has since
+1890 received a new element of complexity from the educational power
+vested with such happy results as it has been in the County Councils. The
+educational branch of the Privy Council office in London has long
+attracted to it young men of industry and talents from the Universities as
+well as of considerable administrative ability developed at a later date
+by official experience.
+
+Meanwhile the profession of the teacher becomes more highly organized each
+year. The value of its material interests is constantly increasing. It
+still remains without any direct representation in the official world
+comparable with that which is secured to the civil and military services
+by the Council of the Secretary of State for India. The headmasters'
+annual conference has during the last few years supplied a useful medium
+for the interchange of opinions and experiences between the recognized
+chiefs of their vocation. The College of Preceptors has its occasional
+meetings. Certificated assistant teachers have formed themselves into a
+loosely coherent body of their own. None of these can, except in an
+indirect way, place their practical experience at the disposal of the
+central authority whose consent is necessary for any organic change in the
+teaching subjects of schools that receive a public endowment. In the case
+of schools whose speciality is a sound commercial education, proofs of
+late have multiplied that the object of this training may often be more
+faithfully accomplished, to say nothing of the intellectual gain to the
+learner if the boy who is going to stand behind a counter, and may
+sometimes be called upon to write a business letter for his employer, is
+instructed in something beyond the arts of summing and penmanship. Many
+boys of the humblest birth show a remarkable aptitude for applied logic
+and political economy when the elements of physical science fail entirely
+to attract their minds. The educational council which might be auxiliary
+to the Vice-President of the Council will perhaps number amongst its
+members men who, from their own practical knowledge, can give sound advice
+in cases where the teacher ought to be entrusted with the power of
+adapting the education, not merely in a general way to the vocation that
+is hereafter to engage the learner, but to the idiosyncrasies of the
+pupil as well. The stipends of assistants in secondary schools are often
+unwisely and wastefully low. Men and women who work so hard as these
+persons do are entitled to the assurance that their emoluments will be
+regulated by the consideration that comes of knowledge as well as the
+severer equities of commerce.
+
+The first thing, therefore, as all who on this matter speak from
+experience agree, is to establish local councils for educational purposes
+which by the prevention of confusion and overlapping between schools of
+different grades, will directly promote the economy of educational force
+not less than of expenditure. As for the central authority which the
+interests alike of teachers, of taught, of children and parents, of the
+State, and of its subjects demand, substantial unanimity as to the
+composition of that body exists among those who are most qualified to give
+an opinion. Generally it is suggested that the new Council might be shaped
+after the model of the Indian Council. To come to particulars, there would
+be, in the first instance, a certain number of Crown nominees; secondly,
+the Universities, perhaps the great public schools or other public
+educational bodies, would be asked to select representatives of their own.
+Another element in the new central authority would be experienced members
+of the teaching professions. These might be chosen partly by the
+headmasters in conference, but to some extent by the assistant teachers
+employed in every variety of public schools from the highest to the
+lowest. It would seem on the whole advisable to select the teachers'
+members by the direct vote of the class immediately concerned. The
+machinery for doing so would not be difficult. Voting papers, as in the
+case of London University in the choice of appointments to the Senate, or
+of professional representatives on the Medical Council, would be employed.
+In this way, every registered teacher would have a voice in regulating the
+details and rewards of his profession to the great increase, as cannot be
+doubted, of its _esprit de corps_. In the case of elections to the local
+authority for preventing waste and confusion between local schools an
+analogous method might be employed. The registered teachers, that is,
+would in each neighbourhood choose their proportion of the members of the
+local educational body.
+
+Signs are sometimes visible of a reaction from the enthusiasm for
+educational progress that has engaged the national energies during the
+last half century. There is a danger, one is told, of educating boys or
+girls beyond their capacities, and above their station. The increased
+competition for the positions of governess and clerk, means misery and
+ruin to many of the candidates who would be more suitably, comfortably,
+and far more remuneratively employed in domestic service, or in manual
+labour according to their sex. The virtues of humility and respect for
+superiors are said to be crushed out in the scramble for knowledge that
+may enable its possessors to better themselves. Servant maids, one is
+told, no longer confine their demands to permission to wear a fringe, but
+stipulate for a pianoforte in the basement, or a bicycle with which to
+take their airing on their Sundays out. That upon the humbler levels of
+the community the progress from ignorance to education should be
+accompanied by real or apparent disturbances of the personal relations
+between classes was to have been expected. Seasons of transition such as
+the present always generate a certain amount of personal friction or of
+social displacement. Those just being emancipated from the illiteracy or
+semi-barbarism which have been the traditions of centuries have not yet
+overcome the agitating strangeness of their new and improved condition.
+Those above them in the social scale have not yet been able to decide
+whether to conciliate their educated inferiors as possible friends, or to
+stand on their guard against them as actual enemies. As the situation
+becomes more familiar, it will prove less strained. Common sense as a
+supplement to their zeal, seems the chief want of the educational
+reformers, official or private, of the day. The tendency is to postpone
+the development of intelligence to the acquisition of knowledge. The
+masters whom we are now educating are not in the habit of using their
+minds for the mere pleasure of intellectual exertion. Hence they often
+give an impression of being far less intelligent than they really are. The
+correct use of common words in the mother tongue ought orally, not out of
+any lesson book, to be taught all boys and girls. The difficulty
+experienced by the persons now spoken of in clearly answering a simple
+question is often insurmountable. The tendency is, not to digest the query
+as a whole, but to catch some word used in it and then to make a remark
+suggested by the association of the sound of the syllables, and so
+practically to evade the question put. The cheap diffusion of newspapers
+and magazines confirms rather than corrects these failures to concentrate
+the mind in the casual talk of everyday life. It is not beneath the
+dignity of the State educator to deal with the defect.[40]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE
+
+    Social importance of Eton, Harrow, and other great schools, as
+    representing the social evolution of the epoch. The conventional
+    mistake that the new wealth has been injurious to the social tone or
+    scholarly studies of public schools. In the case of Eton the historic
+    details and educational statistics prove the falseness of the
+    statement. Progress of the school shown by success in the new as well
+    as old examinations during the incriminated period of the last forty
+    years. New social elements have increased the value but not the
+    expense of Eton. The fourteenth Earl of Derby as a typical Eton
+    product.
+
+
+The whole region of public elementary and secondary education, whose
+improvement is so conspicuous an incident in the recent domestic or social
+annals of the time, has now been indicated at sufficient length and
+minutely enough to convey an accurate notion of the facts. One may,
+therefore, pass to those educational levels which stand a little higher,
+and up to which recent reforms of popular education are, as has been seen,
+gradually assisting the progress of Board School children. The
+sociological feature of the present reign has already been described in
+these pages as a process less of revolution, than of evolution; of the
+natural incorporation of new elements into an old fabric, of the
+harmonious assimilation on the part of a polity that is the growth of
+centuries, of the ideas and types that are the products of to-day. These
+processes can nowhere be witnessed more crucially in operation than at
+those little worlds, the great public schools such as Eton and Harrow,
+which, as they have ever been, are the faithful microcosms of the great
+worlds that lie beyond them. Many of the accounts of Eton which
+periodically find their way into print seem inspirations from Baron
+Munchausen. The school that during centuries has been the special training
+ground for the country gentlemen of England, which was once to such an
+extent the nursery of future lords spiritual and temporal as to enable Dr
+Keate to include among his titles to respect the fact of his having
+flogged in their youth the whole Bench of Bishops,[41] is conventionally
+represented as corrupted at its heart by the predominating influence of
+the sons of the 'new rich' on its classic soil. The parent who wishes his
+son to be at the school where his sire, and his sires before him, had
+been, is disgusted by reading romantic accounts of the bank balances in
+Windsor town kept for their boys by the plutocrats, Saxon or Semitic, of
+the City. It may, therefore, be said authoritatively that thus far
+research has failed to bring to light a single instance of the new rich
+Etonian who possesses during his school days a banking account of his own.
+Now, not less than formerly, the lad who returns to his tutor's or his
+dame's with a L5 note in his pocket is looked upon by his comrades as in
+luck.
+
+Forty years ago, when a Public School Commission was making its enquiry,
+the cry of the commercial Croesus swamping the country squire was first
+raised. The most practical proof of its hollowness is that the expenses of
+Eton, if still prohibitive to many parents, have not increased of recent
+years. What has rather happened is that the school outlay has been
+remodelled. The charges are to-day inclusive. If comparatively fresh items
+figure in the school accounts, the incidental outlay on casual
+subscriptions and a long catalogue of extras is now superseded. The real
+cost of Eton and of other schools like it is what the individual boy
+chooses, or what his friends allow. The expensive habits of the Etonian
+are more a domestic, than a scholastic, growth. No advocate of the
+_nouveau riche_ theory has ever asserted that the scale of living in the
+clubs of Pall Mall has become insufferably profuse since gentlemen
+enriched by commerce, prone, like Mr Mantalini, to despise details of
+petty cash, have been made free of these establishments. There is not, nor
+has there ever been, the slightest danger of the Etonian or Harrovian of
+the old aristocratic order being corrupted by plutocratic schoolfellows.
+The son of Sir Gorgius Midas in real life proves to be a quiet, sensible
+lad, with a just and shrewd sense of the value of money, and perhaps less
+likely to waste his father's substance in the 'sock shops' under the
+shadow of Windsor Castle than his form comrade, the son of the squire whom
+Sir Gorgius could buy up half a dozen times over. At other places than
+the great public schools of England, a studious boy may find himself more
+in the way of amassing knowledge. Nowhere will he learn so many lessons
+useful for the daily conduct of life, which books do not impart. Nowhere
+will he have such opportunities for the acquisition, the development and
+the display of practical common sense. So far back as the later fifties of
+this century, an Eton master, the late Mr Durnford, the respected father
+of him who still represents the same family on the Eton staff, alluding to
+the decline in the manufacture of Longs and Shorts in pious Henry's
+shades, could say: 'Latin verses are with us things of the past.' There
+is, however, no reason, as the list of Eton honours at Oxford or Cambridge
+will show, for imputing to Eton any decline in the essentials of classical
+scholarship. Since the new wealth is supposed to have contaminated the
+standard of plain living and high thinking among the old gentry, in 1851,
+the famous son of a famous father, a name venerable in the Law Courts and
+on the Thames, J. W. Chitty, an old Etonian, won at Oxford a first class
+Vinerian Scholarship, followed by a Fellowship at Exeter. About the same
+time R. G. W. Herbert the late Permanent Head of the Colonial Office
+carried off, as a scholar of Balliol, the Hertford and the Ireland, and a
+Fellowship at All Souls. The late Lord Carnarvon was not so infected by
+the plutocratic idleness of Eton as to miss when at Christ Church the
+highest honours of the Classical Schools.
+
+Three years later when according to the conventional view the 'rich
+vulgarians,' as the Mrs Major Pompley of _My Novel_ calls them, must have
+entirely crowded out the sons of squires as well as the humanities
+themselves, another country gentleman's son, the late Edward Herbert who
+died at Marathon in 1870, had as his brother scholar at Balliol, also from
+Eton, another son of a Western squire, Edmond Warre, to-day Headmaster of
+his old school. In the same year the son of a 'squarson' to employ Sidney
+Smith's useful term, also an Etonian, Henry Barter of Merton, the evil
+associations of plutocracy notwithstanding, won the highest mathematical
+together with second class classical honours at Oxford, and was only just
+beaten by the present Bishop of Hereford, for the University Scholarship
+in mathematics. This list of instances belongs to the era (the fifties)
+when the corruptions of the new wealth were most rampant at Eton, seems to
+refute the mechanical charge; that list may be closed with the name of a
+country gentleman's son, since then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Michael
+Hicks-Beach, who, Eton and Christ Church notwithstanding, took a first
+class in the Modern History schools in 1858. About the same time the
+member of a Liverpool mercantile family, the son of a great statesman, W.
+H. Gladstone, had not at Eton so unlearned all he had been taught
+elsewhere as to be prevented from winning a studentship at Christ Church.
+His contemporary at Eton, A. C. Swinburne, the poet, won at Oxford the
+Taylor scholarship for modern languages about the same time. The catalogue
+might be extended indefinitely. The representative names likely to convey
+the fullest idea to the general reader have now been mentioned. A further
+selection of patronymics would confuse rather than instruct or interest.
+It will be enough to say that in or since the sixties down to 1896, of the
+highest honours in the Schools or in the Colleges at Oxford 400 were
+obtained by the sons of country gentlemen who, notwithstanding the new
+wealth had like their fathers before them been sent to Eton and who were
+not apparently quite demoralized by that ordeal. At Cambridge the total of
+Academic distinctions won by Etonians of the same grade as at Oxford, is
+as might have been expected higher, and amounts in round numbers to 550. A
+competent judge in these matters, speaking with no personal prejudice in
+favour of the school of Henry VI.[42] or of its Cambridge sister King's
+College, but with much experience of classical examinations, J. Y.
+Sargent, told the present writer not long ago, that Eton was the one
+school in England whose boys could write tolerable Greek prose.
+
+Any social change that may have come over the place since the introduction
+of the new wealth into the country would seem to be very different in fact
+from that described by fiction. The presence of a large number of boys
+whose parents derive their income from no hereditary acres and whose
+domestic associations are therefore different from those of the country
+gentleman's son has indeed produced an effect, but one which is the very
+opposite of its current misrepresentation. Before the Victorian era
+opened, well-to-do commercial fathers were, as readers of _Coningsby_ will
+remember, in the habit of sending their sons to the seat of education most
+in vogue with the titled and untitled patricians of the realm. Such
+influence as these have had has proved notoriously healthful to the whole
+school community. The newcomers have with scarcely an exception been
+trained from childhood to an adequate appreciation of the value of money
+and are the last boys in the world to be permitted to squander it for mere
+show. Before their advent to the place, Eton might have been charged with
+narrowness or partiality in the composition of its life; congenial enough
+as the training ground of peers, opulent commoners, diplomatists, and
+other destined dignitaries of State or Church, but less salutary for lads
+who had their own way to make in the world, and who while doing so, must
+expect to come into collision with the men of the City, the office, and
+the shop. The genius of every great English school is essentially
+democratic. Boys are valued by their fellows not for what they have, but
+for what in themselves they are; not for the antiquity of their family
+descent, nor for the depth of their father's purse. The boy who dazzled
+his mates with the glitter of sovereigns fresh from the Mint would be
+suppressed as promptly by the public opinion of the place as the toady or
+the parasite. To-day no English lad is so little likely idly to waste his
+parents' cash as the young Etonian.
+
+There is no school which so far as social discipline is concerned better
+enables its boys to dispense with the University and yet lose so little
+by not going there, or which turns out its boys such ready-made little men
+of the world as the foundation of Henry VI. That this is to-day the
+special attribute of Eton, possessed by it in common perhaps with Harrow,
+is due to the circumstance of its having become representative of the
+entire life, commercial, not less than squirearchical or patrician, urban
+not less than rural, of the whole country. The truth is that the _nouveau
+riche_, as he is represented by the popular imagination, is the product of
+romance, or the creation of the stage. The antagonism between the socially
+emancipated of yesterday and the descendants of houses which had become
+considerable before constitutional government in England was known is
+imaginary and in direct contradiction of the experiences of daily life.
+The son of the new man of one generation as to his tastes, his prejudices,
+his politics, his pursuits, the performance of his duties, the choice of
+his pleasures, becomes, in the next, socially indistinguishable from the
+scion of the oldest nobility. On all points he has unconsciously, as is
+the way with the imitative race of boys, modelled himself after the
+pattern of those country gentlemen, divines, civilians, soldiers, and
+sailors, who are for the most part the reverse of plutocratic, and whose
+sons have been brought up at home under conditions which would make them
+physically intolerant of the bad taste that may be defined as a missing of
+the due proportion of relative things. The Lancashire trader's son who at
+school finds himself next in form to the boy of ancient family is quick to
+imbibe the social traditions and intuitions with which the atmosphere is
+charged. He has been sent to school to make acquaintances perhaps as well
+as to learn; but certainly not to dazzle his schoolfellows by the glitter
+of his father's gold. If the Manchester lad possesses more pocket money
+than some of those in his 'house,' he is pretty certain also to set them a
+wise example in the careful spending of it. The truth is that with the
+whole system of public examinations and with literary competitions
+narrowing the entrance to all kinds of professional life, the genius of
+the place at the great public schools has undergone the same modifications
+as at the Universities. The schoolboy who has obtained his exeat for a few
+days as he bounds off to the station to catch his train, may be thought to
+have left all care behind him. Enjoyment, however, is very probably not
+the reason of his visit to his friends in London.
+
+Sandhurst or Woolwich examinations, competitions for the home or foreign
+service at Burlington House are quite as likely to be the object in view
+as the visit to the dentist by day or to the theatre by night. This early
+acquaintance with the responsibilities of life exerts a sobering influence
+on the most constitutionally volatile of Eton or Harrow striplings. The
+lad whose path of pleasure is darkened by the shadow of the ubiquitous
+examiner loses prematurely the juvenile appetite for veal and ham pies,
+jam tarts, ginger beer, even for cocoanut paste. When there are not
+examinations at a distance, the ingenuity of Oxford and Cambridge provides
+the machinery for them hard by the Playing Fields on the Thames or Byron's
+Tree at Harrow on the Hill. 'Posing' in some form goes on all the year
+round. It has become in effect obligatory on the public school boy to
+obtain before going up to the University the certificate which frees him
+from the Littlego examination, or which if he enters on other careers,
+secures him an analogous dispensation.
+
+The higher certificates in the University examinations are not easy to
+obtain. They uniformly indicate a high standard of proficiency. The
+success of Eton in these ordeals has been steadily progressive during the
+last twenty years. From 39 in 1875 the Eton candidates had risen to 88 in
+1896. The total of certificates and distinctions won by these, an
+aggregate of 1,413 candidates, was, during this period of twenty years,
+1,516. Meanwhile the number of Eton boys who, without passing through an
+intermediary stage at the professional crammers, take good places direct
+from their school in the Indian and Home Civil Service competitions has
+increased during the last few years by something like 10 per cent. The
+Eton 'Army' class is also doing well. The number of boys proceeding to
+Sandhurst and even to Woolwich straight from school as others proceed
+straight to the University increases annually. These statistics go some
+way towards disproving the conventional reproach made largely by ignorance
+against the most representative of English public schools of being
+socially and economically demoralized, or intellectually sunk in indolence
+by the malignant influences of the new wealth. If there were any truth in
+such an accusation, the maintenance of the traditional standard of
+scholarly excellence in exceptional cases would not be combined, as
+to-day it is, with the visibly demonstrated improvement in the work of the
+rank and file of the boys. The truth is, that at all our great schools,
+Eton like the rest, the new elements among the boys have tended to produce
+a wholesome change in the public opinion of the place distinctly
+favourable to a higher average of school industry. The ideal Etonian of
+history is, and seems likely long to continue, the fourteenth Earl of
+Derby, translator of the _Iliad_, and perhaps the most brilliant
+parliamentary debater of the century. 'He saps like Gladstone, and he
+fights like Spring.' So runs Lord Lytton's spirited and familiar line
+concerning this most typical of Eton worthies. No one would have welcomed
+more warmly than he the statistical evidence here given that under its
+latest Headmaster, the study of the new ologies, and the manual mechanics
+practised in the Eton workshops which Dr. Warre has established have not
+ousted the older humanities from their place, and that, the new wealth
+notwithstanding, it has ceased to be a reproach against any boy at the old
+school that he is a sap.[43]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE
+
+    Changes in the social life of Oxford and Cambridge visible on the
+    surface since 1860. Social differences between Oxford and Cambridge as
+    places of residence. General results of the unattached student system
+    established in 1868. The idea of the University as distinct from the
+    colleges, socially prominent in earlier days, has acquired new
+    prominence since. The admission of non-collegiate students.
+    Vicissitudes in the popularity of the Union as a social club and as a
+    debating society. Its earlier distinction repeated in later years. The
+    unattached students' scheme in its practical details and working.
+    Academic successes of students, especially in Theology. The Extension
+    Lectures scheme, personal details and general results.
+
+
+Under the new and quickening influences imported into the second half of
+the present century, the changes in the conditions of social life are more
+visible at the two great Universities than at the public schools. The
+public school boy has been seen hastening to the railway station that he
+may catch the train which is to convey him from the place of industry, not
+to the old holiday fields, but to a fresh seat of studious exertion. In
+like manner, a fair proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates now pass
+the greater portion of their lives in hurrying to catch trains from their
+academic termini to scenes of provincial activity. The commercial
+traveller of the old order as Dickens described him was not more
+incessantly on the road than the Oxford or Cambridge Extension lecturer.
+He, like the movement he represents, is the product of the age that has
+given us Bradshaw. Oxford and Cambridge have in fact been brought to the
+doors of those who cannot themselves go to Cambridge or Oxford. Nor is the
+new element, among those who have taken their degree, the only change that
+has been witnessed in the _personnel_ of the place. Enough has been
+written about the domestic revolution which has transformed what till the
+later sixties, had continued a cloister into a flourishing provincial
+centre of family life; about the nursemaids with perambulators in the
+parks, the children trundling their hoops along Addison's Walk, or playing
+ball under the statelier avenue which fringes the Christ Church meadows.
+In reality this feature in the social polity of Oxford, however
+interesting or striking, has never marked so visible a contrast to the
+preceding epoch as it may have done at Cambridge. The capital on the Isis
+has always been a considerable county town. From a time to the contrary of
+which memory does not run, Oxford has had extra-academical attractions of
+its own for persons without any interest in its studies. It has always
+been a hunting, steeplechasing, and generally a sporting centre. Its
+neighbourhood is probably more picturesque than that of its sister on the
+Cam. Like other midland counties, its environments have never been without
+more manor houses and country gentlemen's residences than is the case with
+the academic section of East Anglia. As far back, therefore, as the later
+fifties certainly, and it may be much further, social Oxford possessed an
+existence not less distinct from, or independent of, academic Oxford, than
+Windsor, Harrow on the Hill, Rugby, Cheltenham, or Marlborough possess a
+social machinery of their own apart from the schools which are a feature
+in their respective neighbourhoods.
+
+What will really strike the eye of one revisiting Oxford after a long
+interval is less the signs of the latest developments of domestic life
+than the appearance of greater youthfulness in the undergraduates. Where
+this juvenility is real, and not the illusion of the spectator's own
+advancing years, it is largely to be explained by the order of students
+new since 1868. Not without much opposition or till after long resistance,
+the Oxford statutes in that year relaxed the most exclusive condition
+written on their page by the disciplinarian severity of Archbishop Laud. A
+return to the mediaeval usage was sanctioned. Once more it became possible,
+after a lapse of three centuries, for young men to go to the University
+without going to college. The Vice-Chancellor matriculated students
+furnished with credentials of respectability, and with enough of learning
+to satisfy the masters of the schools. Provided, in other words, they had
+a fair prospect of passing Responsions, which do not constitute one of the
+public examinations, but mark the survival of the old entrance ordeal
+prescribed in the days when the University was everything and the Colleges
+comparatively nothing. If he were not legally of age, the formal consent
+to his life in lodgings of his parents or guardians was further required
+from the non-ascript undergraduate, as well as a general testimonial to
+the probability of his deriving educational benefit from his new
+opportunities. Littlego might be excused by the delegates in the case of
+students not intending to proceed to their degree, but only to study
+systematically some special subject. In the place, however, of the
+'Smalls' testamur, or its equivalent, the special student was tested
+closely as to his aptitudes for the subject of study he professed.
+
+The total yearly cost, all entrance fees included, of the non-collegiate
+youth would average between L50 and L60, instead of thrice that sum, not
+perhaps an exaggerated estimate, for his collegiate brother. L10 covers
+handsomely all the initial outlay. The period of residence required for
+the degree is twelve terms. These must be kept in what is called 'full
+term' which is rather later than the almanac term, and also in a duly
+licensed lodging house. In exceptional cases these conditions may be
+dispensed with. In no case will the undergraduate who has no porter's
+lodge to pass before he 'knocks in' at night find more liberty than the
+intramural student. His landlord or landlady in the town may perhaps
+promise not to communicate some irregularity to the authorities. But so
+surely as the unattached commits the smallest breach of academic
+discipline, sooner or later it will reach the official ear; he will find
+himself a marked man.
+
+Men who are now middle aged, or even elderly, looking back to their
+college days will recollect that there prevailed an invisible system of
+surveillance, and even espionage, much more close and real than it was at
+all pleasant in the days of one's youth to admit. That supervision has
+now become more subtle, ubiquitous and unavoidable, till at last the
+unattached freshman realizes that wherever he may be, he lives and moves
+in a whispering gallery, as much as if he were a famous figure, in the
+heart of London society and of the London season.
+
+The practical success of this innovation was immediate. It has been
+tolerably complete. Within thirty years of its introduction, that is on
+the 1st of January 1896, the University books showed the existence of 480
+graduate or undergraduate non-collegiates. Of these 245 were at the date
+mentioned _in statu pupillari_. The authorities to which these students
+are immediately subject are the Vice-Chancellor, the two Proctors, a
+Censor who stands in the relation of College tutor to the whole body; two
+other tutors associated with him who give advice on all subjects, and
+seven delegates, being members of Convocation. The Censor is the head of
+the whole unattached system; to him intending students should apply for
+all practical information. The teaching available for the University
+alumni now mentioned is at least as effective and wide as any of the
+colleges can offer.
+
+At the instance of Mr Jowett, a great friend of the scheme, other colleges
+than Balliol soon opened their lecture rooms to non-collegiate guests. The
+Honour tutors especially allocated to the unattached, include
+distinguished Fellows of Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln, Magdalen,
+University College, Wadham and Worcester, as well as famous theologians
+from Keble, or a non-collegiate M.A. not less accomplished than the
+present Professor of Modern History, Mr York Powell of Christ Church. The
+extent to which the young men thus provided for have profited by their
+opportunities, may be judged from the following epitome of examinational
+statistics. Two first classes in Classical Moderations, 2 also in
+Mathematical; 13 seconds in Classical Moderations; 39 third classes in the
+same examination; 7 Mathematical thirds in Moderations; these represent
+the distinctions gained in the older Honour Schools by the students who as
+an institution have not yet completed their third decade. Although thus
+far they do not seem to have done very brilliantly in the Philosophy and
+History Schools, they have won a first class in Jurisprudence, 2 in Modern
+History, 12 in Theology, 3 in Natural Science, one in Oriental Studies, as
+well as some dozen places in these studies below the coveted level of
+_classis prima_. The Bachelor of Civil Law examination is known to be one
+of the hardest on the Isis. In this the unattached may be credited with
+one first class, one second, as well as one third and one fourth. During
+the period now spoken of, several University prizes have been carried off
+by the new comers. Thus a non-collegiate candidate has won the Denyer and
+Johnson scholarship in Theology four times, the Pusey and Ellerton
+scholarship (Hebrew) the same number, as also the Senior and Junior
+Kennicott (also Hebrew). The Davis scholarship in Chinese was for the
+fifth time won a few years ago by an unattached, and for the second time
+the Taylorian scholarship in Modern Languages. Among older and better
+known distinctions open to all comers, the Arnold Historical essay has
+been won by an unattached; the Chancellor's English essay, and the
+Ellerton essay have been won twice. While it will thus be seen that the
+new students have acquitted themselves specially well in Theology, they
+have in twenty-four cases gained open scholarships, and in three cases
+open Fellowships. The Bowden Sanskrit, the Burdett-Coutts scholarships
+also figure among their list of honours. In the Pass schools 310, a
+proportion of 72 per cent., have satisfied the examiners. As an instance
+of their being on their entrance up to the scholastic level of the average
+public school boy, 30 or 40 unattached have elected to pass Responsions
+before matriculation and have done so without any difficulty.
+
+The general conduct of the new undergraduates, who, some prophets had
+predicted, would demoralize the University by their rowdy example, has
+been with scarcely an exception, exemplary. Only one disciplinary case, to
+employ the euphemism of the last official report, seems to have occurred.
+With the enterprising alacrity which to their own credit, to the good of
+their colleges, to the benefit of the whole University, the
+representatives of the different societies on the Isis display in
+attracting special talent to the foundations in which they are
+respectively interested, some absorption of the unattached into the
+colleges was inevitable. It has, however, been less than one might have
+expected. The average of these migrations does not vary much, and seems to
+proceed at the rate of between 20 and 25 per year. Nor, apparently, does
+there exist any dissatisfaction among the non-collegiates with their own
+position in the City of Colleges. Thus when they migrate to a college, the
+attraction is generally found to be the exceptional facilities for
+instruction in a special study, _e.g._ Natural Science or History,
+afforded by the foundation in question. As, by implication, has been
+already stated, Mr J. A. Froude's successor in the Chair of Modern History
+was, throughout the greater portion of his career, a non-collegiate.
+Together with the present Recorder of Londonderry, Professor York Powell
+was one of the first batch of unattached students in 1868. Superior
+conveniences for the studies respectively to their taste, rather than
+economy, were the motives which sent the future Professor and the future
+Irish lawyer, Mr T. G. Overend, to the University and not to college. Mr
+Powell took his degree as a member of Christ Church; Judge Overend was
+unattached to the last. Both obtained high Honours in the Schools. The
+after success of each began directly they left the University. Having been
+called to the Irish Bar in 1874, Mr Overend was in 1885 the leader of his
+circuit as well as a Queen's Counsel. His health alone caused him to give
+up his practice and take a County Court judgeship.
+
+Thus far the unattached graduates in residence never at any given time
+seem to have exceeded 50. Their rivalry with the colleges is, therefore,
+in point of numbers not very formidable. Nor do they seem appreciably to
+have affected the social or intellectual life of the place. Like the great
+public schools the two Universities are to the present generation what
+they were to its predecessors. Athletic accomplishments have declined as
+little as general scholarship. The pastimes, however, are conducted far
+more economically than was once the case. Instances of young men being
+hampered during their professional struggles by the evil legacy of
+University debts have decreased so steadily as to justify the hope of
+their ultimate and entire disappearance. Thus the Oxford undergraduate as
+Leech used to depict him, or as Thackeray in _Pendennis_ drew the typical
+pupil of both Universities; throwing away his father's money at the end of
+the term in London in exaggerated tips to hotel waiters and cabmen, is
+to-day as much of an anachronism as the Etonian in his teens who has not
+learnt that if care is taken of the shillings, the pounds will take care
+of themselves. In one particular, though perhaps accidentally, the
+non-collegiate undergraduate as an institution has coincided an
+interesting modification of the social conditions of Oxford life. Early in
+the present century, the conception of an academic as distinct from and
+independent of a collegiate polity was more present to the undergraduate
+of that epoch than it was to his successors half a century or so later.
+This fact is one among the explanations of the popularity of the
+University Union Debating Club during the student days of Mr Gladstone as
+well as of the comparative disfavour into which it had fallen during the
+student days of, for example, Lord Randolph Churchill. There appear,
+however, periodically to take place reactions in favour of the nursery
+ground of future orators. Mr Asquith, already of Cabinet rank, to whom
+probabilities, as well as Lord Rosebery's words, point as a coming leader
+of the House of Commons, belonged to a slightly older generation than
+Churchill. Before he took his degree in 1863, he had established the same
+sort of reputation for himself in the Union as had been won two or three
+generations earlier by Mr Gladstone, and as seventeen years afterwards
+was to be won in the same arena by Mr G. N. Curzon, in 1897 Foreign Under
+Secretary.
+
+During the later sixties, there came into existence, as further
+developments of what was practically a collegiate example, social clubs
+for undergraduates. These, in effect, though not in theory, were generally
+recruited from a few colleges. Such societies have doubtless not lost
+their earlier popularity. They have witnessed a fresh access of favour to
+the University Union Club. They have perhaps helped themselves to
+contribute to it by causing the Union, in the supply of creature comforts,
+to compete with the collegiate lounges. A room for the reading of novels
+had been regarded as a dangerous innovation at the Union before 1865. It
+was not till after that year that a smoking room was sanctioned, or the
+refreshments of tea or coffee supplied. That in the future as in the past
+the chief work of the Universities will be done through the agency of the
+colleges is no doubt not less true than that at Eton, like Harrow, the
+tutorial system will co-exist with the most liberal and sweeping
+innovations which may be introduced. The colleges depend for their success
+on the same conditions as the non-collegiate delegacies. In prosperous
+seasons when trade is good and money plenty, there will be few vacant
+rooms either inside the college walls or outside in the licensed lodging
+houses. When times are bad, the list diminishes. Thus in the October term
+of 1896, 621 freshmen entered the colleges as compared with 734 in the
+preceding twelvemonths; Christ Church had only increased by 11; Worcester
+doubled its numbers; at the same time Magdalen, always a popular college
+with the public, had fallen from 53 to 40, Balliol from 49 to 36, Lincoln
+from 24 to 17. As for the non-collegiates, there was not only no increase
+but an actual diminution; the figures here were less by 11 than in the
+preceding twelvemonth.
+
+The great contrast which in comparing it with its normal condition two or
+three decades ago would be noticed by the Oxonian who revisits Oxford
+to-day is the change from an habitually stationary to a visibly locomotive
+population on the part of those who formerly seldom left their college
+rooms. Down the chief streets of the towns on the Isis and the Cam
+respectively, even at the very height of term time, there is a constant
+succession of cabs conveying young men in the prime of life to the railway
+termini. These are the fellows and tutors of the different colleges whose
+predecessors seldom or never used to leave their University during term,
+save when college business took them for a few hours to their lawyers in
+Lincoln's Inn, or to the college estate bailiffs and stewards in the
+country. Such are not the missions that explain this increase of railway
+bound traffic when as yet no vacation is in sight. Those now spoken of as
+hurrying off to some provincial spot are well known in their University
+and a few hours hence will be warmly welcomed at their provincial
+destinations as Extension Lecturers on subjects of popular interest. What
+has happened is this. Certain enlightened inhabitants of both sexes in
+some district of manufacturing Lancashire or in agricultural Devon have
+been struck with the state of ignorance in which their school course has
+left many young men and women. At the same time they have noticed
+indications of a wish with those of maturer years to make up for early
+neglect by later application to branches of study of all kinds. Books
+alone have failed to supply the want. Intelligent and profitable reading
+is a scientific habit properly to be acquired only by those who have been
+drilled into it and who have already some general acquaintance with the
+topics treated in the written page.
+
+The County Council, as we have repeatedly seen, discharges already some of
+the functions and dispenses some of the funds of an Educational
+Department. Very possibly private munificence accompanies if it does not
+prompt this corporate enterprise. The next step is to communicate with the
+University Extension Lecture agency at whichever University, Oxford,
+Cambridge, London, or Victoria, according to the preference displayed.
+After the expenses have been guaranteed, the lecturer appears. To enable
+his hearers intelligently to grasp his plan of discourse, the discourse
+itself is prefaced by the distributions of a synopsis, which is in its way
+a work of literary art, whose readers, without any other help than its
+perusal may gather something more than a mere foretaste of the ground to
+be covered, or of the instruction to be conveyed. Such a syllabus as that
+of the Oxford lectures by Mr Shaw or Mr Marriott on different periods of
+English or French history, like the Reformation of 1529, the Revolution of
+1689, or the age of Louis XIV. at once assists the working men for whom
+they were planned, and serves as a model for the taking of notes. Each
+lecture of every course of twelve is followed by a class during which the
+lecturer is in the Scotch term heckled by his audience. Essays are set,
+looked over, and returned to the writers with marginal corrections. At the
+end of each course an examination of both sexes is held, and certificates
+of merit are granted. The sons and daughters of the local gentry, day
+labourers in factory, field, office, or shop figure in nearly equal
+numbers among the students, the women being slightly the more numerous,
+and acquit themselves equally well in the examinations.
+
+The system has only attained to its present completeness within the last
+few years. The idea of it had occurred to Oxford reformers so far back as
+1850 when residents and non-residents alike were asking how the
+educational machinery on the Isis or the Cam could be made more available
+for all classes of their fellow subjects. The Oxford Hebdomadal Board was
+addressed on the subject, the names of Lord Ashley, Mr Gladstone, Lord
+Sandon being among the signatories.
+
+The great Dr Pusey, whose mind was as truly liberal as his Churchmanship
+was high, had been struck recently by the number of great Anglican divines
+who were the sons of small tradesmen. It was for Oxford to revive the
+example of the ancient monks of Durham, and to devise means for bringing
+the University within the reach of the poorest in the land. Another member
+of Christ Church whose pointed features, dark complexion, saturnine habit
+and rare scholarship will be recalled by many readers of these lines, Mr
+Osborne Gordon, joined with Professor Hussey in impressing by almost daily
+protests this popular duty on his too exclusive Alma Mater. At this time
+religious tests existed in all their historic severity. There was no
+matriculation without signing the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Common
+Prayer Book, and no degree till after a like process with reference to the
+Three Articles of the Thirty-Sixth Canon.
+
+These facts account for the then dominant Liberalism of educated opinion
+inside and outside the University. Had tests ceased to exist when they
+were abolished in Ireland, as both Canning and Sir Robert Peel at one time
+or another had suggested, it is scarcely speculation to say that the
+demand which in 1868 brought about the unattached system and, after
+another decade or so, the Extension Lecture system, might not have
+organized itself with such drastic results. The non-collegiates might have
+come into existence while as yet the Great Western Railway approached the
+Cherwell no nearer than Didcot. The Extension Lecture machinery was not
+less dependent upon the propulsive power of steam than the iron engine of
+Stephenson itself. To-day Bradshaw's Guide is as indispensable a part of
+the lecturer's equipment as his manuscript notes. Here, as at other points
+in our secondary education, more organization and more endowments are
+required. There should be more inducements to young and competent
+graduates who have the knack of imparting their own knowledge to large or
+small classes to take up this work as a career, not as an occasional
+auxiliary to other occupations. The Extension centres also need to be
+supplemented more largely with local colleges such as that for which
+Reading is indebted to Oxford and Exeter to Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW
+
+    The concrete personal result of the civic, social, and educational
+    processes already described is now to be examined. The personal
+    contrast between the new generation of young men and women of the
+    middle class, most likely to strike an Englishman returned to London
+    after long absence. Sex emancipation. The typical physique of both
+    sexes has been visibly modified, amongst other agencies by bicycle
+    practice. The stately maiden or matron of the period was unknown to
+    John Leech; has been drawn faithfully by Du Maurier. Some social
+    ideals are unchanged, but older middle class ideals have passed out of
+    date.
+
+
+In the foregoing chapters a general view has been given of the social
+conditions under which, modified it may be by the influences of his
+historic past, the character of the average middle class Englishman of the
+Victorian epoch is formed. What is the personal result, the concrete
+individual product of these forces? The epithet 'middle class' is employed
+in deference to traditional wont, but is in great measure misleading
+because the tendency of the age, the uniformity of the social and
+educational discipline through which most Englishmen pass tends
+increasingly to obliterate distinctions of conventional grade, and in
+tastes, pursuits, prejudices, to assimilate all to a single type. 'They
+look upon you as we do upon a December fall of snow; as a seasonable,
+unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, sent for some good purpose, to
+be revealed hereafter.' The restlessness which in the British visitor
+puzzled the Mussulman when _Eothen_ was written as a national quality has
+of late increased among us.[44]
+
+From those who represent Royalty to those who represent manual labour for
+daily bread, an impatient restlessness is socially a note of the period
+which has perfected steam locomotion by sea or land, and by the electric
+telegraph has almost annihilated time. The cheap press, with its
+ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and
+occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated
+Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation,
+into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the
+world, ever on the lookout for new excitements, habitually demanding
+social pleasure in fresh forms. The insularity of the national character
+has to some extent disappeared in the tide of new ideas, and novel modes
+of life that from Continental sources are perpetually overflowing into our
+land. The Universities, as shown in a preceding chapter, have been brought
+to the door of the labourer at his bench, to the shop assistant at his
+counter, to the clerk at his desk. If this does not always imply an
+universal access of real education, no one who knows the England of to-day
+can doubt that it never fails to mean the multiplication of all kinds of
+knowledge, or to generate the social aspirations, and the thirst for that
+kind of self-improvement, real or imaginary, which is accompanied by a
+growing demand for social existence of an animated kind, for a daily life
+less insular in its organization and less restricted to the domestic
+hearth. Some prejudices, as was natural among a conservative people, were
+on its first introduction excited against the new order of things.
+
+Late in the seventies of our century the social craze of what was called
+'rinkomania' set in. Any available buildings were laid down with floors
+more or less lubricated, on which the sons and daughters of the various
+sections of the great middle class, shod with a peculiar adaptation of
+wheels, slipped about, and called it skating. These resorts were no doubt
+admirably conducted. Acquaintances made at them were probably blameless.
+They often perhaps ended in blissful and desirable marriage. But not
+without a shock to her sense of maternal propriety did the English matron
+of old-fashioned ideas see, or hear of, her daughter being twirled round
+in the arms of some youth just introduced, or perhaps without even the
+preliminary of that easy form. The young woman could cite plausible
+precedent for the process. The most fond and nervous of mothers suffered
+her fears to be allayed. No evil, and it may be hoped some good, to mind
+and body, came perhaps from these experiences.
+
+It was, nevertheless, an innovation on the usage of generations to which
+bygone ancestors and ancestresses would not readily have reconciled
+themselves. In plain words it signified the revolt of the sons and
+daughters of the middle class against their exclusion from modes of social
+enjoyment that to their contemporaries slightly above them in the social
+scale had long been allowed. They had read of the subscription balls
+planned by the astute Scot, John Almack, at Willis's Rooms, in the last
+quarter of the eighteenth century. More recently they had seen accounts of
+subscription dances in what were then aristocratic watering places like
+Scarborough, or of the more cosmopolitan revels where chaperons were
+largely dispensed with by their well-born charges at Baden-Baden and
+Homburg. What claim did the accident of birth constitute to a monopoly of
+the more stirring and less exclusive forms of pleasure? Thus it came to
+pass that the pastime which followed the generally patrician Almacks at
+the interval of a century from being a romp of children became the mildly
+gymnastic function of youths and maidens of maturer years.
+
+The next stage in this progress is marked by the popularity of the
+lawn-tennis ground. The private gardens of urban or suburban villadom were
+soon too small for the wielders of the racquet. The common enclosure of
+the crescent, the square, or the 'Gardens,' was coveted one day by the
+players. It was possessed the next. After this, the transition to
+lawn-tennis subscription clubs, with public grounds, and championship
+matches open to all comers was easy and natural. The parlour of home soon
+dwindled into an insignificant spot to the overgrown boys and girls
+engaged in 'All England' tournaments of their own.
+
+Meanwhile, the gentlemen and ladies who called themselves society, and to
+whom a portion of the newspaper press was set apart, were indulging more
+enterprising tastes still, in a manner duly recorded by their daily and
+weekly journals. The rage for 'making up a party' for everything;
+researches into the London slums, or visits to the French play, came in;
+superstitious veneration for the ceremonial etiquette of a past day went
+out. The mere expedition to the theatre was scarcely stirring enough
+without the preliminary dinner or the subsequent supper at the modish
+restaurants which cause certain quarters of London metaphorically to abut
+on the Boulevard des Italiens or on the Palais Royal. They who now from
+afar imitated this glittering example had not, it is true, like their
+betters, any 'smart' sets of their own.
+
+That was no reason why the favourites of fortune should have all the fun
+to themselves. The daughters of the professional class and of those below
+them in the social scale were as well educated, as intelligent, as
+personally presentable, as those whom a partial chance had made
+conventionally their superiors. Why should the persons born with the
+proverbial gold spoon in their mouths alone be emancipated? Friskiness was
+an attribute not confined to the born inheritors of that which called
+itself society.
+
+Thus the laws of middle class orthodoxy were subjected to a process of
+general relaxation like to what, rightly or wrongly, was fancied to have
+taken place in more exalted circles. Clubs for private theatricals
+followed the subscription dances, in suburban town halls. Bayswater
+wanderers or South Kensington shooting stars reproduced some theatrical
+favourite from the repertory of the Prince of Wales's or the Gaiety on the
+amateur boards of Westbourne Grove, Brompton, or Chelsea. In all things
+the accredited exemplars of the latest and most cosmopolitan mode were
+followed by the younger generation of the classes that conventionally were
+still regarded as strongholds of the ethical severity which Puritan
+ancestors handed down. The development was of course inevitable. In the
+long run it will not be found to have done any harm. But incidentally it
+has involved a considerable modification of the old ideas and habits of
+many hundreds among Her Majesty's subjects whose special attribute was
+once supposed to be, in Froissart's phrase, 'to take their pleasures
+sadly.' Lord's Cricket Ground on an Eton and Harrow match day; the Hyde
+Park Magazine as the meeting point of the Four-in-Hand Club; any one of
+some half-dozen eating houses bordering on Bond Street, frequented under a
+Gallic title by the home-staying Briton; these have ceased to be the
+appanage of Belgravia or Mayfair alone; the crowd which resorts to them is
+quite as representative of the newest interests as of the oldest acres.
+
+In theory and in practice 'society' considers itself, and to some extent
+is still, a close corporation. It is bordered by a fringe not always
+easily to be distinguished from the holy fabric itself. Its doings are
+more and more moved by influences originating outside its own limits. If
+this were not so Lord Beaconsfield would not have been able truthfully to
+say in his last novel _Endymion_ that London which during the earlier days
+of the Queen's reign was a very dull place had now become a most amusing
+one. No one knew the capital better or during his later years had tasted
+of its lighter pleasures more discriminatingly than the critic who made
+this remark.
+
+As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of
+the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so
+English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power
+of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively
+recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those
+with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews
+its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old
+and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is
+unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.
+
+In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the
+present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen's
+Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house
+wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation
+of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and
+might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror.
+As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new regime has
+involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth
+is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower
+charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to
+leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer
+succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly
+without tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial
+magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres.
+Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical
+indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be
+unlet; his sons' bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in
+marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the
+old Hall at his 'rent dinner,' the squire, one of a long race of squires,
+has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton,
+Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of
+education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since
+Lord Cairns' Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the
+earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection
+with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed
+into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county
+town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill
+owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life
+lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new
+proprietors violates few of the old traditions.
+
+The squire of to-day, who was the banker, solicitor, or brewer of
+yesterday, reproduces very successfully the existence of the more ancient
+predecessors whom events have caused him to expropriate. His son is at the
+same school, at the same college, or in the same regiment as the son of
+his predecessor; his daughters are not less fond than the daughters of his
+predecessor of riding to the meet, or of driving in state to the county
+ball. He himself is more diligent in the business of quarter sessions,
+transferred to County Council, than the squire before him was; his wife is
+not likely to neglect the duties of the parish Lady Bountiful; her poultry
+yard may be decimated by Reynard; her husband refuses on that account to
+connive at the enormity of shooting a fox. Rather will he take a pride in
+being able to boast that when there is a meet on his property, the coverts
+are never drawn blank. In due time he may accede to the mastership of the
+subscription pack which more liberally than his predecessor he supports.
+The last squire was a judge of horses and cattle at the County Show; the
+new squire will doubtless in due course fill that position; meanwhile,
+though he may have been born in a warehouse and bred at a desk, his taste
+for shorthorn breeding is worthy of an exclusively territorial lineage; he
+himself plays as well as dresses the part to perfection, and might be
+matched for tramping across stubble or plough and bringing down partridges
+against the least commercial of the squirearchy.
+
+This is only typical of what during many years has been taking place among
+all classes. A discreetly generous administration of the Poor Law operates
+in the long run as an insurance payment against revolution. The fusion of
+classes not less than the organization of professions or enterprise is the
+keynote of our epoch. The process has, without an exception, been one of
+levelling up, not down. The classes called indifferently higher, or older,
+have proved to possess an unexpected aptitude for communicating the
+tastes, the pursuits, the habits, the very instincts, which have descended
+to them from their forefathers, to the newcomers that the distribution of
+wealth, the opportunities of industry, the innumerable vicissitudes of
+life, have incorporated gradually into themselves. Thus it has come to
+pass that society in England, in itself the most miscellaneous of all
+conceivable composites, is saturated throughout and cemented as to its
+different parts by a real homogeneity. The method of attainment has
+varied, will continue to vary infinitely; the ideal standard remains
+uniform. In most country districts, the notable exceptions being the
+mining regions of the North, or the aggressively Nonconformist portions of
+Wales, the old J.Ps. where their qualities entitle them to do so, have as
+a preceding chapter has shown held their own against their new colleagues
+on the County Councils. The achievement finds its exact counterpart in the
+broader and more purely social processes just described.
+
+That which has been called the restless, the aspiring, self-assertive,
+inquisitive spirit of the age is not confined in its manifestations to any
+section of the community, urban or rural, territorial or commercial, of
+gentle or ungentle birth. It has been accompanied by a distinct change in
+the figure and in the general appearance of the English youth of both
+sexes. Suppose an Englishman who had left his country at an early period
+of the present reign, and who, having made his fortune in the Colonies,
+had returned to pass the residue of his days in his native land. What are
+the changes that would most impress his mind? It cannot be doubted that
+foremost among these would be the visible obliteration of the conventional
+distinction between the aristocracies of birth and money, the oligarchies
+of manufacture and of land. As from the window of his club, from his seat
+in the hotel coffee-room, from his position at the theatre, the opera, or
+from his chair in Hyde Park, he watched the representatives of the new
+order which during a few decades had sprung up in the old country, he
+would be aware of an improved expression of countenance upon the faces of
+the quietly and well dressed young men, of figures taller, better set up,
+and better carried, among the young women as well.
+
+The ideal of English womanhood as represented in the sketches of George du
+Maurier is a faithful generalization from actual life, historically
+accurate in all its essential details. Even the lofty stature since the
+bicycle began to develop certain muscles and parts of the human frame, is
+now seen to be no figment of the artist's imagination. The feminine forms
+which, towering majestically above the thrones of wheelwork, look down
+upon the dwarfed passenger or equestrian, are to-day perceived to have
+been presented on no exaggerated scale in the pages of _Punch_. English
+women have always had a beauty and a durability of attractiveness unique
+throughout the world. It is only of late years that to these qualities,
+consequently on improvements on their physical regimen, the maids and
+matrons of Britain have added a certain Junonian majesty of proportion
+that John Leech could not depict simply because in his day it did not
+exist, but that is portrayed with the fidelity of historic truth by the
+pencil of John Leech's successor. This latter development has been an
+unmixed good. The transition from the eventless purely domesticated
+existence to the locomotive, semi-public, generally unsettling, and
+exciting life in the case of the future wives and mothers of middle class
+Englishmen, has had its transient disadvantages. It was not indeed to be
+expected, nor was it possible, that the change from samplers and school
+rooms to skating rinks, lawn tennis tournaments, bicycle grounds, and
+suppers after the play at restaurants, could be accomplished with perfect
+smoothness, or that the bread-and-butter miss described by Byron should
+without any jar to the nerves of her compatriots develop into the girl of
+the period, though on a less aggressive scale than she was once sketched
+by a popular novelist in a famous article. The most circumspect of
+chaperons, the most drastic of duennas cannot ensure her charges against
+sometimes making ineligible acquaintance on these public pleasure grounds.
+The records of the Law Courts show that the dancing youths of subscription
+ballrooms, in the suburbs, are not invariably conducive to the domestic
+happiness of middle class homes. The development was to be expected. The
+percentage of friction or scandal was inevitable. As Brummel's valet said
+of his master's crumpled neckcloths: 'These are our failures;' in other
+words, they are the social miscarriages incidental to the strangeness of
+the new order. As the class now spoken of becomes more habituated to the
+cosmopolitan modes which it has assumed, the role will doubtless be played
+without any misadventures.
+
+Nothing less than a progress from insularity to cosmopolitanism is the
+social enterprise in which the upper classes led the way, and in which
+those who are always ready to imitate their example have followed them.
+The fashion is not yet fully acclimatised. For that reason carping
+critics, unjustly perhaps, have suggested that English families who take
+their holiday at Boulogne-sur-Mer would do well not to carry with them on
+their return to their suburban homes in England the social usages which
+flourish in the Assembly Rooms of an Anglicized French watering-place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+'THE PLAY'S THE THING'
+
+    Summary of the agencies and incidents preparing the way for the
+    revival of the theatre as a popular institution, Macready and his
+    purifying influences inside the theatre. Charles Kean at the
+    Princess's. Usefulness of Rugby and Eton associations to each of these
+    respectively. Miss Faucit (Lady Martin); her last appearance at Drury
+    Lane; her enduring influence on the profession. Mrs Boucicault, Miss
+    Kate Terry, Mrs P. H. Lee, Miss Ellen Terry and others. Henry Irving;
+    his first London hit at the St James's, afterwards at the Lyceum under
+    Bateman. His success characterized. T. W. Robertson's plays. Other
+    circumstances of the time favourable to the new popularity of the
+    play.
+
+
+At the different seaside resorts fringing the greater part of southern
+England from Beachy Head to Penzance, by the new sort of life organized at
+Eastbourne, Hastings, and innumerable other places, one is reminded very
+practically that only twenty miles of intervening sea separate the French
+from the English coast. The British climate may be less favourable than
+that on the other side of the Straits for the open air existence of the
+French littoral. The more praiseworthy, therefore, and not the less
+persistent are the efforts of visitors and residents on the unsunny side
+of the Channel to acclimatize themselves to the _al fresco_ habits of
+Boulogne, Dieppe, Trouville, or Biarritz.
+
+Brighton has not yet very visibly changed its regime since the days when
+George IV. lived at the Pavilion. Its newer rival, Eastbourne, has taken
+advantage of a local conformation, and especially of a paved sea front to
+present the stranger with various little reproductions of what is most
+characteristic in the social exterior of French holiday life during the
+bathing season. It is not only one or two families, mutually intimate,
+which meet and pass together the greater portion of the day on the
+esplanade that lies in the shadow of Beachy Head. The whole place
+practically turns out, settles itself down for a day's occupation, if the
+weather be fine enough, on the causeway above the pebbled shore. The
+ladies produce knitting instruments or appliances for domestic needlework.
+The men have their newspapers or books. The circle exactly after the
+French fashion is formed, big enough in compass to admit all the polite
+population of the place. When the luncheon hour approaches, there is a
+move not from off the sea front, but to some of the covered shelters that
+stud at intervals the esplanade. Improvised tables are covered with white
+cloths. The company, that the French stranger at a glance recognizes as
+belonging to the order of _bourgeoisie_, proves itself long to have
+outgrown the dislike to public meals common to most English men and women
+at the period of the Queen's accession. At night the boarding houses,
+hotels, or private dwellings that in a long line rise just above the sea
+terrace seem practically to amalgamate themselves into a single dancing
+hall.
+
+Other instances, more picturesque, or at least more suggestive, of the
+naturalization of continental examples, at English holiday resorts may be
+given. Eastbourne is indebted for the full development of its natural
+attractions and for the addition of its beauties of art to the Duke of
+Devonshire. Amongst other buildings with which the place has been enriched
+is a town hall of graceful proportions and artistic aspect. This building
+is crowned by a clock tower so exquisitely shaped and standing out in such
+classic profile against the dark South Downs in the background as to
+justify the local vaunt that had it been in Florence sightseers from all
+parts of the world would have flocked to see it; and guide books would
+long since have commemorated the glories of, a new Campanile added to the
+historic list of fair structures. While the Eastbourne clock tower is
+awaiting the architectural canonization it deserves, the town itself has
+still more closely approached to southern exemplars by starting a carnival
+of its own.[45] The slovenly and bedraggled mummeries into which the
+Italian saturnalia have degenerated have not prevented the enterprising
+authorities of the Sussex watering place from mimicking the battles of
+flowers and confetti that are still supposed to relieve the approach of
+Lent in the City of the Popes, but which as a fact have during late years
+only formed another feature in Roman vulgarity. One advantage over its
+more Southern original the Sussex shore imitation possesses. Real confetti
+are not employed. Pellets of tissue paper are missiles at once less costly
+and less dangerous than sugar plums. In other respects the continental
+type has been reproduced rather too faithfully. Whether on the Corso, the
+King's Road, Brighton, the Esplanade or Terminus Road, Eastbourne, the
+whole pageant, as to the costume, the humours, and the hand artillery of
+the mummers, resembles equally the scenes on the return from the Derby by
+road to be witnessed between Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.
+
+It was, perhaps, the foreign imitations in the social scheme of English
+life increasingly visible during his later years to Matthew Arnold which
+inspired that close observer with the advice to his countrymen to organize
+the theatre. To some extent, indeed, the counsel had long been
+anticipated. The organization of the stage into a wholesome agency of
+popular amusement and teaching began with Macready, the earliest of that
+line of considerable actors who have served their generation during the
+Victorian epoch. But the prejudice against the play prevailing among other
+than the austerer classes long survived the work of this great reformer of
+the English stage. The company which fills a theatre to-day in respect of
+ethics and behaviour is not inferior to the fashionable occupants of an
+opera box on a subscription night.
+
+It was not always so. When between 1827, the year of his first, and 1851
+the year of his last, appearance at Drury Lane, Macready was the head of
+the theatrical world, he found some difficulty in eliminating certain
+objectionable elements from the auditorium of Drury Lane. He persisted
+with his work. At last the moral atmosphere of a London playhouse was
+admittedly as unexceptionable as that of Exeter Hall. Macready himself who
+was born in 1793, and lived till 1873, had been educated at Rugby, as
+Charles Kean who followed him, had reached the Sixth Form at Eton.
+Macready, too, was in his day almost as much a favourite with the clergy
+of the Established Church as, since his _The Sign of the Cross_, Mr Wilson
+Barrett has become in ours. If the Etonian Keate inspired respect by the
+consciousness of his having birched future generations of statesmen, the
+Etonian Macready reflected the prestige of respectability upon his
+profession from the fact that during his retirement at Sherborne in
+Dorsetshire, most of the Anglican clergy noticeable for their elocution
+had received lessons from him in the art of reading.
+
+Charles Kean's acting life covered the period between 1820 and 1868. Like
+Macready, he was a favourite in the provinces before he made his mark on
+the London boards. With him there began, or was fairly established, the
+improvement of stage, scenery, costume, and in all incidental accessories
+that has been brought to so high a point of perfection by the genius,
+industry, and well-judged lavishness of Henry Irving. Byron's enthusiasm
+still glows in the words of his famous eulogy on the acting of Charles
+Kean's father, Edmund Kean, who seems to have been perhaps the most
+powerful and moving artist that the English stage has known. The energy,
+passion and fire of the Keans marked a reaction from, and were to some
+extent a protest against the stately and frigid classicism of the school
+of Kemble. They thus appropriately coincided in point of time with that
+romantic movement in English poetry which in his satire Byron ridiculed,
+but which in his practice he did so much to promote. The epoch, during
+which these attributes were displayed by Kean and his followers, roughly
+may be said to have synchronized with the season of the influence on the
+thought and diction of English poetry exercised through the publication of
+the _Reliques_ of Thomas Percy, who, towards the end of the last, and
+early in the present, century, was successively Dean of Carlisle and
+Bishop of Dromore. This book probably did more than any other single
+volume ever issued from the press, to quicken and complete the revolt of
+English taste against the formal models of the age of Pope. From the
+personal life, character and wide social acceptance both of Macready first
+and of Charles Kean afterwards, the English drama directly, as well as
+indirectly, was a gainer. In those days the social fusion was not nearly
+so complete as it has since become; but Macready and the younger Kean had
+both been popular in their school days. In after life Rugby and Eton
+respectively rallied round them. The amalgamating agency of the Garrick
+Club, practically so familiar at rather a later day, was not then an
+operative force. But of the Athenaeum and similar institutions Macready and
+in his turn Kean must have been free; their private acquaintances and
+visiting lists were as large and as representative as those of their
+successors during the present decade of the Queen's reign.
+
+It is not, however, under a dynasty of high tragedians that the full
+development, as a social and intellectual force, of the Victorian drama
+was to be attained. Long after the theatre became respectable, it remained
+dull. The audience seldom dwindled to the point of invisibility which a
+little time before was in some theatres habitual, and not infrequent in
+all. Before the period now spoken of, Lord Lytton, of whose place in
+letters more will be said elsewhere, had gone some way towards repeating
+the dual successes in Parliament and at the playhouse achieved by Sheridan
+in an earlier day. _Money_ was produced in 1840. Exactly a quarter of a
+century afterwards a dramatic hit not less palpable and destined to have
+results more considerable was made by an author till then little known on
+the London stage. The year in which _Society_ was played at the Prince of
+Wales's, till then the Queen's Theatre, in a street off the Tottenham
+Court Road, will be remembered by the theatre-goer as that in which Henry
+J. Byron's last burlesque was produced on the same boards and in which one
+of the actors in that extravaganza, _Don Giovanni_, Mr John Hare, took,
+for the first and only time in his life, a woman's part on the stage,
+wearing the petticoats of Zerlina, the simple peasant girl. The real
+significance of this occasion lay in its marking a new era in the fortunes
+of the nineteenth century drama. The germ of Anthony Trollope's novels of
+domestic life, may be seen in Bulwer-Lytton's fictions of _The Caxtons_
+school. The part performed by the author of _Society_ and its dramatic
+sequels for the English play resembled the performances of Anthony
+Trollope with regard to the English novel. Like Bulwer, Robertson
+fashioned his dialogue on the model of Sheridan. The writer of _Money_
+laboured to reproduce the antithetic polish of his original. The author of
+_Society_ and the series that followed it was attracted rather by the
+caustic repartee in which the author of _The School for Scandal_
+excelled. The change thus introduced at a theatre of which till then few
+had ever heard, was the substitution of the realities of contemporary life
+in drawing room, club, shooting field or camp for the threadbare
+traditions, stilted sentiment, and fustian talk of conventional melodrama.
+Whether the original were, or were not, too trivial for reproduction, it
+is at least human nature to which the mirror was now for the first time
+during recent years held up. The contrast between Robertson and most of
+his immediate predecessors who were nearly his contemporaries was not less
+marked than that between those masterpieces of the Laura Matilda school,
+which delighted Mrs Wititterly, and the works of Miss Edgeworth, or that
+between the _Great Cyrus_ and the author of _Waverley_. The _dramatis
+personae_ of Robertson were the men and women, the youths and maidens, the
+old bucks and young officers, the pretty servant girls, their ogling
+followers, the dapper apprentices, the seasoned topers whom the English
+public had long known from Leech's drawings in the 'London Charivari,' but
+who had not often been met with recently on the London stage. Now, for the
+first time within the experience of many, the theatre became the fashion;
+the stalls at the Prince of Wales's first, and at other houses soon
+afterwards, were peopled by occupants as modish as the Italian Opera when
+Piccolomini sang in _Traviata_. Even then, however, the first night of a
+new drama, though at the most popular playhouse fell very short of
+reproducing the personal distinctions of a premiere at the Comedie
+Francaise or the Palais Royal. That was to follow in due time. Early in
+the sixties an impressario, with judgment sharpened by American
+experience, became the lessee of the same theatre, the Lyceum, which
+twenty years earlier had been managed by Charles Mathews and Madame
+Vestris. The first great feature in Mr Bateman's management was the
+powerful and picturesque acting of his accomplished daughter in _Leah_
+first and in some Shakespearian parts afterwards. About the same time an
+actor with whose name in coming years the Lyceum was to be more widely
+associated had given the public specimens of an art surprisingly vigorous
+and picturesque. Henry Irving first played before a London audience in
+1859. In 1866 he had the good fortune to be cast with Miss Herbert (Mrs
+Crabbe) in one of those character parts in which he has had few equals,
+the worthless, persecuting husband in _Hunted Down_. This was in the
+theatre that witnessed the first triumphs of the great singer Braham, that
+more recently had been filled from pit to gallery by the laughter loving
+admirers of Mr and Mrs Frank Mathews,[46] or by the appreciative few who
+realized the charm of the more subtle impersonations of Alfred Wigan. The
+place, therefore, was of good omen for the rising star. The most
+accomplished dramatic critic whom in England the century has produced,
+George Henry Lewes, and the lady who bore his name, but is best known to
+the public as George Eliot, author of _Adam Bede_, both witnessed the
+debut. 'Ten or fifteen years hence,' said the gentleman, 'that young man
+will be where Kean once was, at the head of the English stage.' 'In my
+opinion,' faintly murmured the lady, 'he is there already.'
+
+Meanwhile, the popular taste of English playgoers had been educated by the
+impersonations of Miss Faucit as well as by her own literary expositions
+of Shakespeare's characters, and by the written discourses of her future
+husband, Sir Theodore Martin on cognate subjects. The daughter of an
+actress, Lady Martin received her first education for the stage from an
+actor, one of a race of actors, Percival Farren, of the Haymarket Theatre.
+This is the family which at the end of the eighteenth century gave a
+Countess, acknowledged on Mrs Abington's retirement to be the first
+actress of her day, to the Derby peerage. Its living representative, the
+gifted and exemplary William Farren, more than recalls to the present
+generation the genius of his predecessors. Soon after her arrival in
+London, Miss Faucit joined Macready's company, and her 'Juliet' became a
+classical performance. Probably the last occasion that this lady was seen
+on the London stage is her performance of 'Rosalind' in _As You Like It_
+at Drury Lane during the sixties. As a proof that Lady Martin has
+exercised an abiding influence on her profession for good it is enough to
+mention the names of Mrs P. H. Lee, as 'Juliet,' of Mrs Boucicault, the
+graceful and accomplished wife of a popular husband, Miss Kate Terry (Mrs
+Arthur Lewis), peerless in romantic melodrama, under the lesseeship of
+Benjamin Webster at the Adelphi. Some bright particular star from the
+days of Sir Walter Scott downwards has never failed any generation of the
+Terry family; Henry Irving's inexhaustible co-adjutress has only
+illustrated anew the ancestral tradition. Artists whether of the pen or
+pencil, practically experienced in all the publics of Europe, have been
+unanimous in testifying that there is none with whom conscientious toil
+and excellence are so sure ultimately to yield the reward of fame and
+profit as the public of England.
+
+The theatre with us was firmly established as an honourable and lucrative
+institution directly men of intellectual power and of competent education
+began to throw their energies into it as they might have done into the
+law, the legislature or any other of the liberal professions. Samuel
+Phelps was born some ten years later than Macready; he was trained in
+Macready's company; under him Sadler's Wells became once more the
+prosperous school of classical drama. Some years junior to Phelps, Walter
+Montgomery laboured in the same line. Both of those men unconsciously were
+preparing the way for Henry Irving; they were each endowed with high gifts
+of mind as well as with shrewd common sense. Their detractors of course
+were not wanting. Neither Montgomery nor Phelps, on the score of public
+appreciation, had more reason to complain than Henry Irving himself. If,
+therefore, the reason is asked for the revived popularity of the play in
+all grades of English life, the answer must be not so much the exceptional
+brilliance of individual successes as the qualifications of industry not
+less than aptitude which a succession of actors has brought to the
+vocation. Sir Henry Irving, as a stage artist may have his mannerisms or
+defects. Whatever career he might have embraced, he would have made his
+mark in it, because, besides being a great actor, he is a remarkably
+clever and far-seeing man. He is therefore in this way historically true
+to the best associations of his art.
+
+Public speakers at theatrical fund dinners are apt to cite as novel
+instances of the drama's popularity the proportion of young actors who
+have been educated at Eton or taken a degree at Oxford. So far from this
+being a novelty, it is rather, as the illustrations mentioned above show,
+the reversion to an older order. Henry Irving's knighthood only implied
+the just recognition of qualities that in another walk of life would have
+earlier elicited for their possessor a like distinction from the State.
+
+In accounting for the approximation as to popularity of a London to a
+Paris premiere which to-day so much impresses the foreign visitor, other
+circumstances must be remembered. During the last decade or two,
+especially since the collapse of the second French Empire, the English
+capital has been, to an entirely new extent, the pleasure ground of the
+world, and at all seasons of the year contains a large floating population
+of strangers, Anglo-American or European, as well as of British subjects
+visiting for a few days from other parts of the Kingdom, the capital on
+the Thames. These birds of passage seldom possess a large social
+acquaintance in the capital; the men among them do not always belong to
+clubs; the ladies are too busy shopping to invite, or to make, calls; the
+theatre is thus for a constantly increasing proportion of those who sleep
+within the bills of mortality the easiest and the most attractive form of
+pleasure. Hence as might be expected, the far more amusing repertory of
+the Victorian theatre at the end of this century than at any previous
+epoch. With a Pinero, or a Grundy, to mention only two typical names; with
+pieces so diverting as _Charley's Aunt_, or _Bootles' Baby_, to mention
+only one or two representative plays, the Englishman whose chief pastime
+the play has become finds laughter moving relaxation as effectually, more
+economically, and to himself a great deal more intelligibly within the
+roar of his own Strand, than by travelling to a Paris boulevard. The
+integral part now occupied by the play in the life of the most respectable
+portion of the middle class is shown by the spacious theatres that have
+lately risen in such decorous suburbs of the metropolis as Brixton.
+
+Its utility as an agency of mental improvement and moral teaching is
+suggested by the surprising success of the new religious drama that
+beginning perhaps with the _Judah_ of H. A. Jones, has reached its climax
+of well deserved success in _The Sign of the Cross_ of Wilson Barrett. The
+suburban theatres have not as yet provided a great field for original
+talent in the playwright; as might be expected, their patrons seem to
+prefer pieces that have already received the stamp of public approval.
+While musical comedies indicate an increasingly popular compromise between
+Drury Lane and the _Alhambra_, the romantic drama has once more proved to
+be not less attractive than when three decades since _The Corsican
+Brothers_ first filled the Princess's with enthusiastic audiences. This
+perhaps at the present moment is the latest of all the successful revivals
+on the English stage. The plays respectively founded on novels, _The
+Prisoner of Zenda_, and _Under the Red Robe_, are not only above the
+average as to merit, but show that the popularity of the cup-and-saucer
+drama of Albery and Robertson is consistent with a vigorous affection for
+the melodrama which in Bulwer's _Lady of Lyons_, and in Boucicault's
+_Colleen Bawn_ once absorbed the enthusiasm of the pit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING MILLIONS
+
+    Technical reasons rendering an exact comparison of foreigners settled
+    in England at different dates impracticable. Approximate results
+    yielded by the analysis of official figures, and their lessons. Danger
+    of German competition with English clerks exaggerated. Actual
+    occupations followed by foreigners. Allegations concerning alien
+    pauperism tested. Proportion of foreign to English pauperism in
+    London. Percentage and nationalities of foreigners in great towns of
+    England and their occupations. Theories about population, especially
+    Malthus. The Malthusian doctrine examined by the light of English
+    experience. Objections to it summarized. The truth and the details of
+    English population since 1793. Views of Dr Price and others as to
+    decrease refuted by Cobbett. Figures and facts of increase. How the
+    non-pressure on means of subsistence can be explained. New industries.
+
+
+In the preceding chapter it was mentioned that one of the elements in the
+increased popularity and prosperity of the theatre as an English
+institution is the growing addition of foreigners to our native
+population. This will be a convenient place at which not only to analyse
+the composition of the foreign influx to our shores, but generally to
+examine the rate and the results of the increase of our population.
+Official data for the numerical estimate of the strangers within our gates
+is not forthcoming with the certainty and completeness that might be
+desired. The reason given by the parliamentary report[47] is intelligible
+enough; and is to the following effect. The English census takes
+cognizance of birthplaces, not of nationalities. British subjects who have
+been born abroad are indeed asked to state the fact, but frequently fail
+to do so. When the return reaches the Registrar General, the confusion is
+frequently such as to render it doubtful whether the foreign birthplace
+implies a foreign nationality as well. This uncertainty was not removed,
+but was rather increased, when the Enumerating Officer exercised his
+ingenuity in deducing the national identity from the surname. For instance
+few patronymics are more distinctively German than Mueller. None is more
+likely to be written by an English clerk as the indubitably British
+Miller. The result has been at different times an understatement of
+residents in England who are foreigners both by nationality and birth, and
+an overstatement of the foreign-born British subjects. The operation of
+the principle adopted in the last census is exactly opposite to this; it
+tends to overrate foreign subjects domiciled in England and to underrate
+English subjects who were born beyond seas. The general consequence is
+that as the Report already mentioned reminds one, the foreign residents
+returns for 1891 are not minutely comparable with those for previous
+censuses. It will be enough to restrict ourselves on this point to the
+returns of the last three censuses 1871, 1881, 1891, a period of twenty
+years. Of persons being foreigners both by birth and nationality residing
+at these epochs in England and Wales, there were in 1871, 100,638; in
+1881 there were 117,999; in 1891 there were 198,113. The process indicated
+by these figures seems to have been at varying rates going forward through
+a long series of years.
+
+For the two decades between 1871 and 1891, the growth of foreigners among
+us was 98 per cent. It will, therefore, probably not be a serious
+miscalculation to estimate the total of strangers within our gates as
+having doubled itself during the more recent years of the Queen's reign.
+This estimate derives fresh probability from the fact that between 1881
+and 1891 the increase of foreigners domiciled in England outstripped by
+nearly six-fold the augmentation during the previous decade. The greater
+part of foreigners in England and Wales are with us for business purposes,
+or are sailors on board ships trading with England. As, therefore, might
+be expected, most of them are to be found in the great industrial centres,
+or at the large seaports. Thus, of a total of 198,113, 95,053, or nearly
+one-half were enumerated in London; 15,536 in the suburban counties of
+Surrey, Kent, Middlesex, Essex. Lancashire contained 25,109 with an
+overflow of 2,254 into the suburban parts of Cheshire. In Yorkshire there
+were 15,755; in the mining counties of Durham, Glamorganshire,
+Northumberland, though not engaged in mining but in shipping coals, there
+were 14,908. The foreign miners, it may be said, actually at work in
+England are very few. The town in which the total proportion of foreigners
+to the population has always been highest is of course London (the
+strictly metropolitan area); the London foreign population is 23 to
+1,000. In the suburban districts of West Ham, Willesden and Tottenham the
+proportion is 10 to 1,000. In the provinces, next to London come Cardiff
+with 21 per 4,000, South Shields and Manchester each with 18 per 1,000,
+Leeds and Grimsby each with 16, Liverpool and Hull each with 14; Newport
+and Swansea each with 12; the other towns where a proportion of 10 per
+1,000 is reached are Sunderland, Hastings and Brighton. Of the 198,000 odd
+foreigners now under consideration, 1,804 are Asiatics coming from China,
+Persia, Arabia or elsewhere; 1,062 are from Egypt or some other part of
+Africa; 26,226 are Americans; out of these 19,740 belong to the United
+States, the subjects of the Stripes and Stars enumerated as domiciled
+among us in 1881 were 17,767, an increase of 11.1 per cent, during the
+decade. The number of English living abroad is of course immeasurably
+greater than that of foreigners living in England. Thus in the case of the
+United States alone, in 1891 there were settled 1,008,220 English people;
+this was an increase of 35.2 per cent. over those enumerated in 1881.
+
+The complaint that foreign competition in England itself is crowding
+native industry out of the market recurs periodically; it renders of
+special importance to Englishmen the estimate of the European foreigners
+who have, during the period now under review, immigrated to our shores.
+The total of those composing this category, men, women and children, has
+been 168,814; as for the reasons already explained one is cautioned to
+remember, this is an outside calculation owing to the inclusion in it of
+many who though British subjects, omitted to set this forth in their
+schedules. Of the 168,814 European foreigners, 101,255 were males. From
+this total may be deducted 7,421 as boys under 15, and 3,039 as men of
+upwards of 65; the sailors, in number 15,035 should not appear in the
+estimate. When all deductions under these headings of industrial
+ineffectives have been made there is left an aggregate of 75,760 effective
+competitors with native industry on English soil, whom during these
+decades their respective countries have equipped and sent forth against
+us.
+
+With our own population of 37 millions steadily increasing, the numerical
+rivalry seems less alarming than might have been imagined. As a matter of
+fact that rivalry strictly speaking may be larger than the provisional
+estimate now given would show. It sometimes happens within the experience
+of local registrars that to avoid English jealousy and so to have a better
+chance of obtaining work, industrial aliens Anglicize their own
+patronymics, change them for purely English names, or give English towns
+and counties as their places of birth; for the most part these deceptions
+are detected by the enumerator. In St George's in the East, however, in
+Spitalfields, in Mile End Old Town and elsewhere some registrars seem to
+think the fraud often passes undiscovered; but others, with equal
+experience, disavow any reason for the suspicion of such a practice within
+their areas.
+
+As in the case of our Scotch and Irish colonies, so, too, with our
+settlers from the European continent the men largely outnumber the women.
+Whereas in the general population there are 106 women to every 100 of men,
+and 35 per cent. of the people are under 15 years of age; among the
+European foreigners there are only 67 women to every 100 men; only 8.8 per
+cent. of the whole are under 15. In the case of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes,
+chiefly of course, sailors, there are four men to every woman, and
+sometimes as many as seven or eight. That in the case of Belgians, French
+and Swiss permanently settled in England, the men are outnumbered by the
+women is of course to be explained by the demands made for the former in
+the capacity of governesses, milliners, and serving maids. The figures
+relating to the sex of the strangers within our gates, as might be
+expected, fluctuate. Especially notable is the difference between the
+statistics for 1881 and for 1891; in the former year children under 15
+formed 6.4 per cent. of all foreigners; in 1891 the percentage had risen
+to more than 8.
+
+The inference to be drawn from this statistical contrast suggests a new
+kind of immigration and probably implies that with a view to permanent
+settlement in England the foreigner was transporting his household gods
+bodily to our shores. Much has of late been heard about the crowding of
+pauper aliens into England. Some of the figures just examined may have
+involved cases of outdoor relief. Of this there is no evidence. But that a
+very serious addition was in this way made to the pauperism within English
+workhouses does not appear to be true. The exact figures and facts on this
+point may perhaps as well be given; of the 36,871 foreign Europeans
+living at the time of the last census in the East End of London, only 105
+had seen the inside of an English union; out of the other (English)
+668,243 inhabitants of these parts of the town 13.5 per 1,000 were pauper
+inmates; in other words, the proportion of foreign to native pauperism in
+those districts where foreigners chiefly congregate was less than
+one-fourth of the proportion of paupers in the remaining population. Of
+these foreigners inside English unions 51 were Germans; 16 were French; 14
+were Russians or Poles; 5 were Swiss; of the remainder no more than 4 came
+from any single foreign State.
+
+'Made in Germany' is a phrase round which there has centred lately much
+controversy, political, economical, social and personal. This will have
+prepared the reader to hear that on an analysis of the nationality of our
+foreign residents, Germany heads the list with 50,599; Poles and Russians
+come next with 45,074; then the French with 20,797; afterwards follow in
+the order indicated with numbers fluctuating between 10,000 and 5,000
+Austrians or Hungarians, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss; no other nationality
+contributed more than 5,000; the Russian and Polish names, which, after
+the Germans, constitute the majority are so unmistakable as to render a
+comparison between their numbers in 1881 and in 1891 tolerably safe. This,
+for reasons already stated, is not so in the case of foreigners with less
+distinctive patronymics. In 1881 the Poles or Russians enumerated were
+14,468; in 1891 they were 54,074; the increase in ten years had thus been
+some 212 per cent. Germans, in number 50,599, constitute nearly one-third
+of our whole foreign population. Of that moiety, 1,981 are teachers; 1,198
+musicians; 5,358 domestic servants in private families or inns; 659 are
+professional cooks. To pass to a higher social category, 1,207 Germans are
+established in business as brokers and merchants; 1,966 as clerks; 393 are
+commercial travellers; 2,833 are sea-faring men; 282 are jewellers or
+goldsmiths; 889 are watchmakers; 794 cabinetmakers; 1,309 are butchers;
+2,340 are bakers; 276 are sugar refiners; only 592 are classed as general
+labourers; 5,042 are occupied in ministering to the needs, luxuries, or
+vanities of the person from the making of coats to the dressing of hair,
+or the preparation of feathers for Court head dresses.
+
+From these figures two facts of some interest emerge. The business clerks
+who are complained of as interfering so disastrously with the clerical
+labour market of Englishmen do not represent the largest contingent of
+Teutonic industry among us. Numerically the most serious competition of
+German with English industry is in the case of domestic servants. German
+tailors are second in order of importance; the clerks come after, not only
+these, but other occupations. Next to Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium and
+Spain seem to supply the most numerous competitors with the industry of
+the British middle classes.
+
+The growth of the purely English population, not complicated by any
+foreign elements accompanied, as it has been, with a steady increase of
+national prosperity is enough to supply instructive material to the
+philosophical enquirer into the facts and figures of English progress
+during the Victorian epoch. Before looking into these by the light of the
+once accepted theory of population it will be as well clearly to state
+what these doctrines are, as well as to summarize the criticisms to which,
+on the face of them, they are open. The doctrine of Malthus was first put
+forward by him at the end of the last century. During the first years of
+the present, while the reverend philosopher was professor of history and
+political economy at Haileybury, few subjects excited so much interest or
+controversy among writers on political philosophy or comparative
+statistics. The doctrine, as it was originally propounded by its author,
+is that population tends to increase in geometrical ratio, that
+subsistence only increases in numerical ratio. It followed, therefore,
+that unless the population be periodically thinned by the external
+influences of pestilence or war, the poorest classes chronically must be
+at starvation point, and that unless the multiplication of the race be
+checked by prudential restraints, within a given time the point will be
+reached at which the population on this planet is altogether in excess of
+the means for its support. On the threshold of the discussion which this
+proposition elicited, the obvious remark was that it asserted not an
+actuality but a possibility. Hence, unless, instead of a tendency, a
+proved experience could be asserted; unless, in other words, in the place
+of a tendency to increase existing, a historical increase could be
+established, the commentators on Malthus maintained that the danger which
+he foresaw was too remote to be reckoned with. The following is the line
+taken by the critics of the Malthusian theory. It was declared to rest
+upon a series of hypotheses which as a matter of fact were never
+fulfilled. Granted that if the progression foreseen by Malthus took place,
+the calamity apprehended must ensue; it was maintained, as a matter of
+fact, that the abundant safeguards existing in practice were ignored by
+the alarmist _doctrinaires_. Supposing each marriageable pair upon the
+earth to marry first, and to produce afterwards as many children as a
+normally healthy couple may expect, not only subsistence, but standing
+room in this world would fail them. Experience, however, shows the
+fulfilment of any such forecast to be a moral impossibility. In daily
+practice there are apart from difficulty of subsistence many checks which
+avail to keep increase of population within reasonable bounds.
+
+Thus, statistics show that more than half the human beings born die from
+accidents or ailments before reaching marriageable age. Of those who
+actually reach that age, an uncertain, but considerable proportion fail to
+find mates; the men perhaps because they are over fastidious or selfish;
+the women possibly because they lack attractions of dower or person. With
+many more the course of true love runs crooked; the desired partner not
+being attainable, a solitary life is led. In other cases, the fear of not
+being able to maintain a conventional position acts as a deterrent. Then
+there is the considerable percentage of cases where legitimate
+opportunities of marriage are denied. Thus Colonial frontier men in
+solitary wilds have few opportunities of courtship or matrimony. Soldiers
+constantly changing their station; or sailors with a brevet wife in every
+port, are not usually marrying men, or the founders of numerous families.
+Of those who marry, many have no children, some have only one; others have
+sickly children who die. On the assumption that everyone in the world
+married, each pair must have two children to keep up the population.
+
+Hence the critics of the Malthusian theory have calculated that, striking
+out of their count those who cannot or will not marry, and those who,
+marrying, are childless; merely to maintain the population without
+increasing it, every married couple ought to produce a family of six.
+Though according to the Malthusians themselves this sufficiently liberal
+allowance of progeny might be reached without any calamitous consequences,
+practical acquaintance with the contingencies of domestic life shows that
+this quantum will not often be reached. If in any part of the world there
+existed conditions favourable to marriage and to fecundity, it was in
+Australia, shortly after the earliest gold discoveries, but when many
+immense fortunes had been made in farming; here there was work for all,
+wages were high, living cheap, cultivable, but uncultivated land abounded;
+finally there were no catastrophic checks from earthquake, pestilence or
+famine to the multiplication of human beings; if, therefore, the
+Malthusian doctrine could anywhere be verified, surely it would be here.
+Notwithstanding all these inducements to marriage and the propagation of
+the species, the actual rate of population increase was 2 per cent. a
+year.
+
+Hence it may perhaps be inferred that this represents the normal rate.
+That falls far short of the geometrical rate which the Malthusians would
+have us expect. The physiological truth, as expounded by experts in these
+matters would seem to be that in proportion as subsistence is more
+abundant and of a better kind, life more regular and artificial, fertility
+decreases. Scientific physicists point as proof of this statement to the
+fact that wild animals when domesticated or in good condition are less
+prolific than in their normally savage and poor state. So it is with women
+in the western wilds of Ireland, or in the Scotch Highlands. As their food
+and clothing are scarce and coarse, their maternity increases. The
+inference from the facts now cited clearly is that whatever the terms of
+the Malthusian proposition may mean, their significance does not warrant
+the conclusions that ardent Malthusians have at all times drawn from them.
+
+But it has been asserted that famine and plague are the Divinely appointed
+checks to the growth of population; thus showing some external restraint
+upon the multiplication of the race to be necessary to prevent population
+outstripping subsistence. The most familiar proofs offered of such an
+assertion are the periodical famines in India, especially that in the
+province of Orissa, and the Irish famine from the potato failure in 1846.
+On these proofs the following remarks suggest themselves. In the case of
+Orissa, numbers had nothing to do with the famine or consequent mortality;
+the people died because the heat of the sun untempered by rain literally
+scorched the food supply out of existence; if there had been only as many
+hundreds as there were millions, the same calamitous result, though on a
+numerically smaller scale, would have ensued; a province of Central India
+was decimated because the food did not exist. The famine therefore was
+real.
+
+In the case of Ireland, no famine at the close of the first decade of the
+Queen's reign existed in the same sense that it had done in Orissa; the
+potato crop alone failed; corn, dairy produce, food products generally
+were plentiful; corn in fact was being exported from Ireland while the
+Irish themselves were perishing from starvation. The calamity therefore
+was less the stoppage of supplies by Providence as a check on population
+than a pecuniary failure. Nor was it a visitation as regards which man
+could plead exemption from responsibility. The potato rot did not come
+upon the Irish peasantry in a day or in a week. The disease had appeared
+in Eastern Europe so early as 1844 and 1843; it was scientifically certain
+that eventually it would reach Ireland. When, after due warning it
+attacked the plots of miserable soil reclaimed by peasant industry from
+hillside and bog, the destruction of the staple of native food wrought by
+it was gradual. Weeks and months were required to complete the process of
+rotting. Nothing was done. The people died not from the unkindness of
+nature, but from the neglect of man. Had the prudential restraints of the
+Malthusians limited the numbers to half the actual total, the agrarian
+policy which was responsible for the diet of potatoes instead of corn
+would have resulted in the same poverty and, therefore, in the same
+death.[48]
+
+One is not here concerned with the abstract truth of the theory of
+population enounced by Malthus, but with its applicability to, or its
+instructiveness in the case of, the England of Queen Victoria. What then
+are the facts of population here to be dealt with? The multiplication of
+the inhabitants of this country is known never to have been so rapid as
+during the century which opens with the French Revolution in 1793, and
+which witnesses at its close the sixtieth anniversary of Her Majesty's
+accession. Earlier periods of augmentation may therefore be omitted. A
+hundred years ago, Dr Price, maintaining population actually to have
+decreased, spoke of its decline as a great danger. Cobbett and other more
+accurate observers, or less incautious generalizers, in opposition to Dr
+Price, established circumstantially the fact of an increase; but the
+possibility of a contrary view being taken is as suggestive as it now
+seems remarkable.
+
+Mr Thorold Rogers has been guided by his study of prices to the conclusion
+that the standard of comfort in living began to rise among us from the
+Reformation of the sixteenth century progressively onwards; and that even
+during the eighteenth century the masses were enjoying a golden age.
+Between 1750 and 1800;--the period during which the factory system began
+to be known, and the problems of population and production were both
+closely discussed,--no fear of population getting ahead of subsistence
+suggested itself. Similarly during the Corn Law agitation 1840-6, the
+increase of production from English soil, notwithstanding the
+economico-agrarian law of diminishing return was proved to have outgrown
+the population. Later and more detailed statistics show that since 1831
+population with us has increased 30 per cent., capital 100 per cent.,
+purchasing power 600 per cent. During the last half century the average
+price of corn has been falling. Our demand for foreign corn has increased
+and is increasing. This evidence fortified by the income-tax returns,
+forbids the notion that during the last two centuries population in
+England has outstripped the means of its support. The conclusion is
+therefore irresistible that the natural tendencies to increase of
+inhabitants, whatever the occult possibilities may be, practically are
+counteracted by motives invisible and undefinable, perhaps, but not less
+potent. As a writer in _Macmillan's Magazine_[49] points out, population
+generally increases up to the relative limit set by the power of procuring
+subsistence at any given time and place. The absolute limit as is shrewdly
+remarked, could only be reached when the highest skill and organization
+have extracted the last possible morsel of food from the earth; that
+experience has not yet been reached. So far from population always getting
+ahead of subsistence, its increase is by no means invariably as rapid as
+the development of the food supply. Both between 1560 and 1760; again
+between 1830 and 1880, this seems to have been the case in England.
+
+During many years, as each decennial census has appeared, timid
+sociologists may well have felt misgivings whether England could continue
+to support her ever multiplying millions. The fears of science have not
+been verified by the facts of experience; thus exactly a quarter of a
+century since the census return of 1871 seemed to leave no escape from the
+conclusion, that population had already all but overtaken the means of
+subsistence, or that unless our numbers were at once arrested, it must in
+a very short time do so. Since 1871 we have added 7 millions to our
+population, the equivalent, that is, of 1,200,000 families and the same
+number of working men. Instead of the pressure on subsistence being
+greater, or the average condition of our people being worse, the exact
+opposite has occurred. In comparison with the state of things two decades
+since, the masses among us are to-day better housed, better clothed,
+better shod, better fed, better educated. There is, as in an earlier
+chapter was shown, a steady decrease of pauperism; the number of those who
+with their dependents of all kinds live on the result of their
+investments, is growing constantly. Whether it be due to the reduction in
+the cost of conveyance, to the opening up of fresh fields of supply, or to
+the appreciation of gold, the fall in prices of the chief articles of
+consumption, corn, sugar, tea, cotton, timber, is a visible and a great
+benefit to the country.
+
+The fact that the increase between 1881 and 1891 fell short by about a
+quarter of a million of that which signalized the preceding ten years has
+been demonstrated by statistical experts of scientific authority not to
+indicate pressure on means of subsistence, but to be explicable by the
+stationariness of the population in many rural districts as well perhaps
+as by the disinclination, reflected from French and American precedent, of
+Englishwomen indefinitely to fulfil the functions of maternity.
+
+During the period now spoken of, with the exception of mining, the great
+staple industries of the United Kingdom have none of them increased, while
+agriculture has decreased. It may, therefore, well seem problematical how
+the 1,200,000 fresh heads of families have found a livelihood for
+themselves and their belongings.
+
+The explanation can only be that several new, as they are often nameless
+industries have during this time come into existence. Birmingham, the home
+of small industrial enterprises and in a less degree Sheffield, would of
+themselves explain the mystery. And here specific mention of a personal
+experience seems necessary. When the present writer by local observation
+was first acquiring material for such writing as that of which this book
+consists, he visited among other places Sheffield, under the obliging
+personal conduct of its then, and happily its present, Member, Mr A. J.
+Mundella. Close to one of the largest factories in that capital of cutlery
+and furnaces is a small establishment owned by a single proprietor who
+from that source of income alone, has realized a considerable fortune.
+This gentleman contracts for the purchase of all the refuse, the waste
+paper, the gilt or tin foil and other unconsidered trifles included which
+accumulate in the rubbish heaps of other premises. On their reaching his
+place of business, they are placed in a furnace; all the impurities are
+burnt out of them. There remains a nondescript residuum of charred and
+apparently worthless substances. Some of these, however, contain particles
+of gold dust; these are placed into a crucible; eventually there is often
+left a deposit of the precious metal which the jewellers are ready to buy.
+The gold watch chain worn by the Sheffield industrialist now spoken of,
+was of several carats, and was manufactured entirely out of the yield of
+this refuse. The incident is worth mentioning as a concrete suggestion
+drawn from real life of the protean methods of industrial money-making
+that are constantly being discovered by the ingenious and unabashed
+industry which in Virgil's phrase, conquers all things.[50]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN
+VICTORIA
+
+    Comparative novelty of constitutional government as understood to-day,
+    and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the
+    Queen's reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey's
+    Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with
+    the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the
+    Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent
+    changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to
+    Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier
+    parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy
+    to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P.
+    Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction.
+    Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.
+
+
+Constitutional Government and a popular legislature, did on Her Majesty's
+accession, both exist in England. Neither of them was more than four or
+five years old. Each therefore had arrived only at the experimental stage.
+The Reform Bill of '32 had scarcely begun to be operative when its
+imperfections made themselves felt. For the first time indeed in English
+history popular constituencies had been organized by that Measure. But
+while all householders rated at L10 and upwards had a voice in the
+national Government, various old historic franchises had been abolished.
+At Preston, for example, the suffrage had previously been in practice
+universal; so that there, and at Windsor like Preston, the Reform Act had
+a disfranchising effect.[51] All sections of the middle class were
+enfranchised by the Measure of 1832.
+
+With some show of reason it was complained that, while numbers were now
+supreme, opinions and interests were, as in the case of pocket boroughs,
+better able to make themselves felt under the nominally exclusive regime
+which had been swept away. The new constitution was not the only
+parliamentary novelty that signalized the opening of the Victorian epoch.
+In addition to a new parliament returned by fresh constituencies there had
+recently risen at Westminster a new Palace containing of course a House of
+Commons comparatively fresh from the workmen's hands. The old structure
+had been burnt down in 1834. The pile of buildings designed by Barry as
+its architect which is now so familiar a feature in the London landscape
+did not assume its present proportions in all their completeness till the
+reign had entered upon its second decade. During the six years between
+1834-40 the Houses sat in a temporary building which had been run up with
+miraculous rapidity. As nearly as possible ten years after Her Majesty
+received the early visit of her Chancellor at Kensington Palace, more
+exactly on April 13, 1847, the Peers took possession of their new
+Chamber.
+
+Three years later, May 30, 1850, the Commons met for the first time
+beneath the roof that shelters them to-day. Since the People's
+Representatives and the Barons were constituted into separate Assemblies,
+the building which the famous Clock Tower surmounts is in fact the fourth
+meeting place that has been assigned to the Commons of England. It was not
+till 1547, the first year of Edward VI. that the chapel of St Stephen in
+Westminster Palace was prepared for the Commons. Before that date they had
+assembled in the Chapter House.
+
+The Speaker's Chair was then the former seat of the Abbot. Beneath this
+roof were passed the Statute of Provisors 1350, the Statute of Praemunire,
+the Act of Supremacy, and the Act of Submission. Until St Stephen's became
+the synonym for the Popular House, party government can hardly be said to
+have been, even rudimentarily, established. Government by groups, the rule
+in the French Chamber theoretically held to be so mischievous in England,
+but in whose direction we seem to be making further progress each year,
+was practically the rule in the pre-St Stephen's period. Nor would it be
+easy to exaggerate the influence favourable to a hard and fast dichotomy
+into parties exercised by the structural arrangements of the secularized
+shrine.
+
+What are the points of contrast in the economy of the Commons' House of
+Parliament and its precincts to-day which would most strike the shadowy
+observer revisiting the place by the glimpses of the moon after half a
+century's absence.
+
+The accommodations of comfort, study or pleasure that now make the House
+of Commons not perhaps the best but a really good club, are only the
+fulfilment of undertakings which our imaginary spectator would remember as
+having been begun when he was last there. Neither would he be much
+surprised by the increase in the occupants of the Strangers' Gallery; nor
+in the greater conveniences enjoyed by the reporters. Long before the
+necessity for Barry's new building had arisen these improvements in the
+internal fittings of any House of Commons were anticipated. When in 1847
+the Hereditary legislators were about to settle in their new home, they
+were much exercised by the conditions under which, and the exact places
+where, their wives and daughters should view the progress of their
+debates. The first suggestion of appropriating to the peeresses the
+gallery that runs above the Ministerial Bench elicited from the late Lord
+Redesdale the blunt remark: 'It will make the place like a casino.' To-day
+the bright toilettes lit up by the sun pouring through the multi-coloured
+glass, and blending with the bright tints of the decorated walls form
+nearly the most picturesque feature in the afternoon of a London season.
+
+Amazement, approbatory or the reverse, at this spectacle is the beginning
+of surprises which the spectral visitor would find in store. Descending
+into the hall which separates the two Houses, he would meet a commoner
+acting as a squire of dames, escorting detachments of ladies to points
+whence they could best see the House of Commons celebrities of the hour.
+Looking through the swing door of the Representative Chamber, the
+parliamentary Rip Van Winkle would for the first time in his experience
+note the flutter of muslins and silks through the grating that bars the
+compartment just above the reporters' benches, and that is known to-day by
+the name of the Ladies' Cage. In 1834 this was a novelty as yet undreamed
+of. The germs of it may perhaps first be detected during the opening year
+of the present century.
+
+In 1800 the admission of the Irish Members after the Act of Union involved
+structural alterations in the Chamber. Among other things a chandelier was
+fixed in the centre of the ceiling. At the same time a round hole was cut
+for the escape of the hot air. The top of the orifice was protected by a
+balustrade. From above this chandelier ladies were permitted
+surreptitiously to peep over. In that extremely uncomfortable and rather
+perilous position they saw what they could of the speakers and heard
+murmurs of the debate. The first subsequent novelty was the introduction
+of a few chairs. The temporary structure for the Commons after the 1834
+fire was in the old House of Lords formerly known as the Court of
+Requests, occupying as it did much, if not all, of the site of Edward the
+Confessor's palace. The Lords themselves at that time met in the present
+St Stephen's where the Commons meet to-day. Nor was it till after the
+first Reform Bill that the domiciles of the two Assemblies were exchanged.
+
+In the building which served the Commons between 1836-40, no provision was
+made for ladies. By the report of the select committee of 1836 this fresh
+accommodation was suggested. On the 3d of May in that, or in the following
+year, the House ordered[52] that a place should be provided where, with
+less discomfort, and more dignity than from the lamp balustrade, ladies
+could listen to the speeches, and catch an occasional glimpse of those who
+delivered them. In the temporary structure the exact spot thus allocated
+to them seems to have been behind the Speaker's chair, if not actually
+beneath the floor. Experts at least have discovered no alternative
+situation as possible. The Ladies' Gallery of to-day as it exists just
+above the Reporters' box is divided into three parts. The western third is
+reserved for Mrs Speaker. It is called by that lady's name. Here she
+receives as her guests personal friends or semi-official personages of her
+own sex. The two eastern thirds of the compartment now spoken of are at
+the disposal of Members for their wives and friends. There is a ballot for
+the Ladies' Gallery a week in advance. Certain representatives of the
+people have been favoured, as the result of consummate dexterity or rare
+luck, with singularly uniform success in this ordeal. During the earlier
+period to which reference has been made, there are believed to have been
+instances in which ladies clandestinely found a place not only in the
+balustrade above but in the ventilating chamber beneath the floor. Thus,
+when they did not flutter as angels above, they burrowed like moles below.
+Nor, as we have seen, was it till Barry's plan had become an architectural
+fact that the wives and daughters of the people's elect were delivered
+from these two predicaments.
+
+To-day a lady visiting the House of Commons during debate has her 5
+o'clock tea as comfortably as in her own drawing room. If the weather be
+sultry, or the debate tedious, she can refresh herself during the interval
+between tea and dinner with strawberries and ice as luxuriously as at
+Gunter's in Berkeley Square. During the more monastic period of the modern
+House of Commons, there occurred a short interval in which a very few
+ladies on the floor of the House itself on the same side as the Treasury
+Bench were stationed on chairs so placed that their occupants could hear
+without being seen. One day a sudden witticism of an orator upset the
+gravity of the listening stateswomen, and scandalized the Speaker. That
+laugh proved fatal. Henceforth Members were forbidden expressly by the
+House to secrete ladies in any part of the Chamber, either above or under
+the floor. To-day in the interior of the Chamber itself ladies are not
+more visible than formerly. The proposal to remove the grille that
+converts their gallery into a cage is still made periodically; but with as
+yet no great appearance of success.
+
+Outside but still beneath the parliamentary roof, or within the
+parliamentary precinct, the sex that is no longer 'suppressed,' pervades
+the place at all hours. The Members' dining room, where male strangers can
+be invited, is not yet open to guests of our new _ecclesiazusae_. All other
+parts of the premises are already pervaded by them. In the basement a room
+has been discovered in which the fair guests of Members can be
+entertained when the debate is over by a supper which may well repair the
+omission of a dinner. The river frontage of the Westminster Palace during
+some years has been surrendered at discretion to the politicians of the
+petticoat. Lord Redesdale foresaw the coming resemblance of the interior
+of the Peers' Chamber to a music and dancing saloon. Even his alarmist
+imagination never pictured at the height of the London season an assembly
+of ladies upon the Terrace just outside the Chamber, enjoying as the
+guests of the elected of the democracy ices, strawberries and cream, all
+the other modish adjuncts of 5 o'clock tea. This they have done since
+1888. More recently there have been added waitresses attractively dressed
+in a black and white uniform. Some years ago Mr John Bright, a special
+habitue of the tea room, arranged a subscription for a wedding present to
+the young person who presided over the cups and saucers, when on her
+marriage she retired into private life. Even that statesman would not
+perhaps have undertaken his graceful and chivalrous task in the case of a
+whole regiment of tea room nymphs.
+
+The lady M.P. has still to come into existence. Her sex controls votes and
+vicariously receives them. In New Zealand and other Colonies the same sex
+records votes directly as well as influences votes indirectly. If, as
+other precedents might suggest, the mother country is advancing towards
+the Colonial usage, is there any abiding reason why to their parliamentary
+influence already established beyond doubt, the mothers and daughters of
+England should not add the responsibility to public opinion which a
+parliamentary seat would bring and which they now escape?
+
+The personal changes in the composition of the House of Commons are only
+less striking than the innovations in its social life. Years have passed
+since Mr Disraeli's oft reiterated remark that the future of English
+politics was to the English youth. In a sense different perhaps from that
+which the phrase was first intended to bear, this consummation seems in
+gradual process of fulfilment. In 1837 a chief amusement of visitors to
+the House of Commons was to count the number of bald heads in the
+Assembly. Those phenomena, as the legitimate results of age, are very
+nearly unknown to-day. During the first three decades of the Queen's reign
+the average age of a Member was between 50 and 60. Now it is probably not
+much more than 40. Often it happens that senators are so fresh from school
+as to be unable to forget their schoolboy phraseology, and to address the
+Speaker in the exact terms they used but the other day to the master of
+their Form. Thus, 'If you please, Sir, Mr Speaker, Sir!' is the opening
+often heard of late years from a boyish senator who rises to address the
+House in response to the eye of its President. In other respects, the
+typical M.P. has changed not less conspicuously. Men of the social and
+political quality who followed the lead of Sir Robert Peel first, and of
+Mr Disraeli afterwards, who could be taken for nothing else than the
+country gentlemen that they were, have been replaced by men whose
+antecedents and whose interests are not less manifestly commercial.
+
+Long after the abolition of the Corn Laws the description of the
+Conservative party given in the Life of Lord George Bentinck continued to
+be true. A glance sufficed to show that these 'men of metal and of acres'
+were the products of their native soil. Specimens of this class lingered
+at times pretty plentifully after Household Franchise was added to the
+Statute Book. The tall erect figure of Mr Newdegate, broadened, but not
+bent, by age, still retaining much of the elasticity of youth; the less
+rugged and angular, but physically not less well developed, presence of
+Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, Knightley; these were specimens of Members
+not uncommon within the memory of the present generation. To the same
+order, in spite of a very different appearance, belonged the parliamentary
+Cato of those days, Mr J. W. Henley, the veteran Member for Oxfordshire.
+If the wisdom of the House, its occasional intolerance, and its hereditary
+good sense, were ever incarnate in an individual, they resided surely
+beneath the compact sturdy figure with the countenance, seamed and gnarled
+as of an ancient oak, of that remarkable man. Before Quarter Sessions had
+given place to County Councils, Mr Henley and others of his class ceased
+to be known in their places.
+
+These were the men, contemporaries of Disraeli and Northcote, brought up
+in the same parliamentary, often in the same social, school as them.
+These, too, were they who for his mastery of parliamentary law, his
+excellence of parliamentary manner, and his maintenance of historic
+standards in parliamentary debate, could almost tolerate the Liberalism of
+Mr Gladstone. With a pang they anticipated the day when his withdrawal
+would rob the Assembly of the last surviving monument of the eloquence and
+bearing which used to be the familiar attributes in the first assembly of
+gentlemen in the world. Already debating of the old stately order had
+begun to go out of fashion. Thirty years after the Queen's accession, in
+the Reform discussions of 1867, Mr Lowe had made one of the latest and
+happiest hits ever secured by a familiar phrase from Virgil. In 1881,
+after the death of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone pointed a reference of
+the same kind with not less felicity when he applied to his rival on
+returning from Berlin the words by which the Latin poet indicated the
+commanding presence of Marcellus among the winners of the _spolia opima_.
+
+With these exceptions, there is no recent record of signally successful
+quotation in the House of Commons from classical authors. Not indeed for
+want of classical scholars. Professor Jebb, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir M. W.
+Ridley, are at least the equals in this respect of their seniors.[53] The
+simple reason is that Latin and Greek quotation which were once held to
+be, as Mr Disraeli said of invective, an ornament of debate, have passed
+into the heritage of outworn words and faces. To-day if honourable
+gentlemen illustrate their meaning by a metaphor or clench an argument by
+an epigram, they go for their _tropes_ and ideas, not to the library, but
+to the laboratory. Thus one of them not long since was heard to compare
+the mind of an opponent to a series of condensing chambers. The masters of
+the grand style in parliamentary oratory, as it may be called, cannot be
+said to have passed away while David Plunket, Lord Rathmore, lives. But
+the business of the House of Commons is done in Committee. A Committee of
+the House of Commons is like a committee of any other gentlemen
+professedly met together to transact the greatest amount of work in the
+shortest space of time. Telling arrangement of ideas, clearness of
+thought, conciseness of phrase, dexterous support of special views by
+figures and facts; these are the qualities bred in the parliamentary
+atmosphere to-day. In such categories are the ideals consciously aimed at
+to be found. No competent person seriously supposes the average of
+intellectual power in Parliament to have declined. Mr Gladstone and other
+experts have testified that it has increased, and that the 1893 Parliament
+contained more men of first rate capacity than any within modern memory.
+
+The interest taken by the nations in the doings of the House of Commons
+has not permanently abated, nor is likely to do so, seeing that its
+attraction resides less in the letter of its debates than in the
+circumstance of its being a continuous commentary on the social as well as
+political history of the day, a concentration, epitome, and amalgam of the
+human nature of the period. The vicissitudes of human affairs, the sudden
+growth, the not less sudden rupture, of human friendships; the involuntary
+perjuries of political allies surely as laughable in the sight of Jove as
+the perjuries of lovers; the sworn confidants and colleagues in one
+Administration transformed into the mortal antagonists of the next; these
+are the episodes of everyday life reflected upon the stage of the Theatre
+Royal St Stephen's. Can they then, fail to be more full of dramatic charm
+than the entertainments provided in any other playhouse of the realm? The
+parallel between the theatrical and parliamentary stage might be made
+still closer. As on the former, so on the latter there are certain stock
+parts always sure to be enacted, whatever the title of the play, or the
+nature of the discussion.
+
+The Mr Henley already named, pre-eminently representative as he was of the
+hard good sense and rugged honesty of the Tory squire, was not a novelty
+in the Chamber. He had his forerunner in the 'down-right' Shippon, as Pope
+calls him, of a Georgian House of Commons. He it was who, as a Jacobite
+opposed to Sir Robert Walpole yet said of himself and his adversary, 'He
+is for King George; I am for King James. We differ on most things; but
+Robin and I are the two most honest men in Parliament.' The theatrical and
+parliamentary analogy might be illustrated much further. One or two more
+instances will suffice. The stage character whose chief function is to
+keep the audience smiling and to enliven dulness by a laugh has his exact
+analogue in the parliamentary humorist, whose very rising is the signal
+for a burst of anticipatory merriment. In the nineteenth century the name
+of that humorist has been, during its first half, Sir Charles Wetherell.
+He relieved the severity of the 1831-2 Reform Bill discussions by
+convulsing his hearers with laughter at the farcical absurdity of his
+sallies, or by the ludicrous incongruity of the metaphors with which he
+pointed his invective.
+
+Half a century later the name of the performer is changed. The function
+discharged is identical. In the place of a Wetherell there sits now a
+Bernal Osborne, now a Patrick Boyle Smollett, now a William Gregory, and
+again a Wilfried Lawson, or a Labouchere. In any case the wag is
+indispensable to the proceedings of the House. In every new Parliament he
+makes his appearance, if not quite so early, yet with the same regularity
+as the Queen's Speech, or the Debate on the Address.
+
+Other roles are equally familiar, and with the same undeviating regularity
+are forthcoming. High or Low Church, dry or Evangelical, the different
+champions of the Church, each in their own era and from their own point of
+view, come forward to defend the national Establishment. These are the
+gentlemen whom in once addressing a deputation of them Mr Disraeli
+characteristically styled 'the children of the Church.' Of this section,
+during the earlier decades of the reign, Sir Robert Inglis was a chief.
+Round him were grouped a little band in which Mr Spooner, and thereafter
+the intrepid Mr Newdegate, and poor Mr Whalley, with his jaded, hunted
+look, had a place. The burly presence of Sir John Mowbray, the less
+robust, but wiry figure of Mr Talbot, both Members for Oxford University,
+belong to a later date. When these may have disappeared, successors are
+already visible to take their place. The stalwart form and patriarchal
+beard of Sir John Kennaway, the less athletic and more sensitive figure of
+Mr Stanley Leighton are even to-day powers in that ecclesiastical faction.
+The two sons of Lord Salisbury, Lord Cranborne and Lord Hugh Cecil belong
+to another generation, but to the same category of ecclesiastical
+defenders.
+
+During the Queen's earlier years, Chartism, that is to-day only a name,
+was an active force. Most of the points of the Charter itself have quietly
+become law. The Septennial Act has not indeed been repealed; but
+practically the term of parliamentary life has been shortened. The ballot
+has quietly superseded the hustings. Payment of Members is seriously
+discussed. Election expenses have been much reduced. By the Redistribution
+Bill of 1884, an appreciable step towards equal electoral districts has
+been taken. The Georgian House of Commons, indeed the House till the full
+effects of the first Reform Bill were felt, was so small, its members so
+preponderantly came from the upper class of society as to give the
+Assembly the air rather of a family party than of a national forum.
+
+From 1707 to the beginning of this century, the English, Welsh and Scotch
+numbered 558. The Act of Union at the beginning of the century added 100
+to the House of Commons of 1801. The additions to the House made by the
+Reform Bill of 1832 in the case of Wales and Ireland 5 each, of Scotland
+8, were exactly compensated by the reduction of English Members. The
+Measure, therefore, which created popular constituencies and with them a
+popularly representative Chamber left St Stephen's numerically unaltered.
+As to quality, it socially modified rather than, as is sometimes said,
+revolutionized the Assembly. Nor, as to figures, did the Household
+Franchise Bill of 1868 enlarge the Chamber. The 7 fresh representatives to
+Scotland, and the 1 to Wales were balanced exactly by the disfranchisement
+of 8 English constituencies. The House of Commons remained therefore 658.
+An increase began with the Reform Bill of 1885. The emancipation of the
+agricultural labourer by the franchise on the same conditions as his urban
+brother involved the sole increase since the Irish union to the numbers of
+the House of Commons. Even that is only represented by 12. The whole of
+this increase was for the benefit of Scotland. Two new Members were indeed
+received by England under the latest franchise re-arrangement. Two were
+also lost by Ireland. Thus the Irish disfranchisement balances the English
+enfranchisement. The sole nett profit in the transaction accrued
+therefore, as has been said, to Great Britain beyond the Tweed.
+
+While the House of Commons as to arrangements, occupants and visitors has
+changed more than once during the period comprised in this survey, there
+has been in the opinion of experts like Mr Gladstone no diminution of
+ability in its general debates. The amount of varied and accurate
+knowledge displayed during discussions in Committee by the rank and file
+of its members has increased appreciably since the Derby-Disraeli Reform
+Act. But, it is said, as our constitution has become more democratic, our
+popular legislators have grown unmannerly. Those who know the volumes of
+parliamentary history summarizing debates in the House during the French
+Revolutionary epoch of 1793-5 may be disposed to doubt the justice of this
+censure. The violent personality of the recriminations between individual
+members of the two Whig sections at this period; the revolting grossness
+of the metaphors and the epithets by which the intellectual majesty of
+Burke stooped to express his loathing for the new Radicals on both sides
+of the Channel; the personal menaces exchanged by competitive debaters of
+smaller calibre; leave no room for doubt on the point. Two years after the
+first Reform Act, Church rates and other ecclesiastical topics gave rise
+in the debates upon them to scenes and noises, cockcrowing amongst them,
+that scandalised the parliamentary decorum of the period, as disgraceful
+beyond all precedent. These incidents were attended by a degree of
+parliamentary disorder which was habitually in excess of the ebullitions
+however scandalous, provoked during the session of 1893 by the Second
+Irish Government Bill of Mr Gladstone. The great change of recent years in
+parliamentary methods is of course the organized obstruction on frivolous
+and irrelevant pretexts raised during debate. Even this is not the novelty
+that some have seemed to suppose. During that distant era when no
+chandelier hung over the heads of Members, the only illuminants known in
+the Chamber were candles. A formal motion was made that these should be
+brought in. The early practitioners of obstruction seized upon this issue
+to delay the discussion. Motions for adjournment became effective
+instruments for delay during the Reform discussions of 1832. They were
+then employed with success generally, and with humour sometimes by the
+popular Sir Charles Wetherell, and in case of unpalatable amendments by Mr
+Sheridan. While motions for adjournment have thus always been used as
+methods of delay, they naturally have had different aspects at various
+times. Thus when employed for fighting a Bill to which conscientious
+objection was entertained, these motions differed entirely from those to
+the same ostensible end made by the feigned opponents of perfectly
+harmless Measures. Mr Pope Hennessy was practically the founder of this
+later and indiscriminate opposition to all attempts to legislate.
+
+The late Mr Parnell extended that system to routine business such as the
+nomination of Committees, also to unobjectionable votes in supply, and
+finally in 1877 to private Members' Bills as well as Government Bills,
+with the avowed aim of paralysing the whole machinery of Statute law. The
+late Sir Stafford Northcote, who more than any other statesman of our time
+resembled, in his conscientious caution and chivalrous devotion to
+principle, Mr Perceval, dealt perhaps too gently with this abuse of forms,
+nor saw fit to employ the new rule that was suggested to him by the
+consummate experience of the late Sir Thomas May. Mr Gladstone's
+management of this matter in 1881-2 was more drastic; it would have been
+successful but for the tactics of the late Lord Randolph Churchill and the
+present Sir John Gorst. After this came in 1888 the leadership of Mr W. H.
+Smith, resulting as it did in 15 new Rules. The practical result of the
+latest changes in House of Commons procedure may be summarized popularly
+and briefly as follows. The French principle of closure already adopted in
+all other Popular Assemblies is now part of the law of the English
+Parliament. This instrument can be moved for at any time. It depends
+wholly on the Speaker or, if the House be in Committee, on the Chairman,
+whether the motion for it be put to the House. If put it is generally
+opposed. Then follow debate and division. For its adoption there must be
+not only a majority but one composed of not less than 100 Members.
+
+With its larger numbers, the representative character of the House of
+Commons has been increased also. The steps by which it has acquired
+control of the executive as well as the legislative machinery of
+government need not be recapitulated here. Its moral, educational and
+social influence in the country is probably not proportionate to its
+actual power. The theory of delegacy so indignantly repudiated by
+Conservative speakers during the first Reform Bill debates is to-day
+accepted and actively illustrated by a majority of Members. More and more
+the tendency is for the constituencies to call into existence a
+Government to undertake a specific task of legislation whose scope is
+defined by the individual possessing for the moment the national
+confidence. To support in that special work that particular statesman, or,
+if he falls into disfavour, to thwart him, the householders send to St
+Stephen's men whose discretion is restricted within very narrow limits.
+
+This arrangement immensely increases the authority of the democratic
+favourite of the moment. It is less favourable to the prestige or
+usefulness of the Chamber as containing the collective wisdom of the
+nation. The aptitude for business talk that shall be to the point in
+Committee has not, when the House has a mind to it, declined. The great
+speeches, no sooner delivered than they constitute national text-books,
+are less frequent than the display of excellence in debate. Afraid of
+boring the Assembly, dreading the imputation of mere rhetoric, the Member
+who has something to say usually prefers delivering it to his constituents
+at his periodical reunion with them, or upon some other extra
+parliamentary occasion. The terse diction and urbane gravity of manner of
+Sir Charles Dilke made him, during his Foreign Under-Secretaryship, a
+parliamentary model. Such oratorical efforts as he sometimes made, were
+reserved for the meetings with his electors. The clever young politician,
+being on his promotion, speaks when he can that he may give his future
+chief a taste of his quality. Popular meetings therefore, and the
+periodical press have detracted from the House of Commons as a school of
+eloquence, or as a national educator. On the other hand the House of Lords
+has no constituencies in the background. Its time is less preoccupied. It
+is to-day far more representative of the English people than was the House
+of Commons a few years before the Queen's accession. It does indeed
+chiefly consist now of men whose station and whose antecedents are not
+very dissimilar from those of the House of Commons before that Chamber had
+been thrice Reformed. Hence some of those debates, especially on foreign
+policy, or grave points of constitutional procedure that used to mark
+epochs in the Elective Chamber are now almost confined to the Hereditary
+House.
+
+Outbursts of periodical petulance against the Peers will doubtless
+continue. Such Radicals as may be left in England to-day are at heart far
+more tolerant of a second Chamber, composed as that at Westminster is,
+than were the 'root and branch' men not merely of Cromwell's day, but of
+half a century ago. Something therefore may perhaps be said on behalf of
+the opinion that any movement which may be successful against the House of
+Lords is likely to affect the House of Commons as well.[54]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS
+
+    Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House
+    of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social
+    characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old
+    County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament.
+    Modifications in _personnel_ of the Liberal party since the great
+    fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of
+    the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone's opinion and experience on this
+    subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in
+    the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to
+    House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of
+    Lords and local debating societies.
+
+
+The average age of its members is not the only respect in which, during
+the Queen's reign, the House of Commons has been gradually transformed. If
+the country squire of the old school of Mr Henley has disappeared from it,
+that is because he is now as unknown in his own county as in Pall Mall.
+The social composition of the Whig, or Liberal, party was finally and
+entirely altered about the period of the first Reform Bill. The change had
+indeed been going forward from the earlier epoch when the middle class of
+commerce began to be, as from the days of the Edwards it was tending to
+become, the greatest power in the country. The replacement of the old
+Whig, with his territorial associations, by the new Liberal, like Mr
+Cobden, was only the last stage in the development of self-government in
+England. In truth, however, the kind of progress now spoken of was not
+limited to any single political connection. The Nestorian experience of Mr
+Gladstone testifies it to have been not less noticeable among Tories than
+among Whigs. There were not, he thinks, in 1835 five members of the
+Conservative party owing their seats to commercial or industrial
+influences. The change which has come about in the composition of the
+party since then is 'simply marvellous.'[55] The specific legislation that
+has surrounded the English Crown by a democracy, is the extension of the
+lodger franchise to boroughs in 1867, to counties in 1884, and the
+cheapening of elections by the Corrupt Practices Bill of Sir Henry James
+in 1883. Notwithstanding these advances, the blend between authority and
+freedom has never been more fortunately conspicuous nor more wisely active
+in this country than since the period of its self-government began. Before
+1870 it used to be said that the Pope, shorn of his temporal power, would
+exercise a prerogative not weaker, but stronger than when he was sole lord
+of Rome. Whether that prediction has, or has not been fulfilled, the
+influence that a constitutional Sovereign can exercise in the United
+Kingdom has increased rather than diminished since the days of absolute
+monarchy were over. Whatever in the way of political initiative the
+Sovereign has surrendered has in the department of social ascendancy and
+civic influence, been restored with interest to the Crown. The late Sir
+Henry Maine, differing in that respect from earlier political theorists,
+has in that very suppleness and elasticity which his predecessors praised
+discovered a source of weakness to the English constitution. So shrewd an
+observer as Mr Goldwin Smith bitterly complains of the fickleness of
+popularly elected Parliaments, and their quickness to reflect the external
+influences of the moment, as of the chief dangers to our political
+stability. Into that controversy it is needless to enter. It may seem
+strange to those who have had more than half a century's experience of her
+loyalty to constitutional principles; but in 1837 no one certainly knew
+whether the young Queen would not insist upon her technical right to
+nominate and dismiss her Ministers at will. Less than four years had
+passed since her uncle William IV. had practically exercised that
+prerogative. In 1834 Lord Althorp was called by his father, Lord
+Spencer's, death to the Upper House. Lord Grey had long wished to resign
+the Premiership. His unsatisfactory relations with the King made him seize
+this opportunity of doing so. The Sovereign accepted the resignation of
+the Cabinet with more than alacrity. Substantially therefore, and
+morally, there would seem something in the statement that William IV.
+dismissed the Whigs to please himself.[56] As Mr Gladstone in one of his
+essays has shown, the principle giving cohesion as well as joint and
+separate vitality to the members of a Cabinet independently of the
+personal pleasure of the Sovereign had been established before then. First
+actively applied if not discovered by Sunderland, the son-in-law of the
+great Duke of Marlborough, the Cabinet system, as Mr Gladstone has shown,
+can scarcely be said definitively to have triumphed till 1828, when George
+IV. reluctantly accepted Canning for Prime Minister. William IV., Mr
+Gladstone's first Royal master, is, it may be noticed in passing, admitted
+by his early servant to have used his prerogative unwisely; but is
+defended from the charge of having used it unconstitutionally. So great is
+the distance in political thought traversed since 1834 by the statesman as
+well as by others.
+
+No thought of reverting to this family precedent has ever probably
+occurred to her present Majesty. The comparison of the position
+voluntarily occupied by the Sovereign to-day to that of the permanent head
+of a great department of the State unchanged by Ministerial or electoral
+vicissitudes, roughly but not altogether inaccurately conveys some idea of
+the practical influence of the Crown upon the politics of the period.
+Continuous experience of public affairs is not however the sole source of
+the influence upon them which a constitutional monarch may be enabled or
+obliged to exercise. The familiar Bedchamber Plot, presently to be
+mentioned more in detail, and the momentary friction between the Sovereign
+and her responsible statesmen that followed it, is now known to have
+originated in a misapprehension. The Minister only desired that a few
+ladies should give up their places in the Household. The Sovereign
+resisted the dismissal of her entire suite. If, indeed, a solution of the
+difficulty had not been found; if, that is, the Queen had pressed her
+personal wishes to the point of the Premier's retirement, it is by no
+means certain that she would have lacked constitutional arguments
+justifying her course. A sort of plebiscite in 1841 had been given to Sir
+Robert Peel. On some national issues of broader import, the popular
+feeling at this time notoriously had not been expressed with convincing
+clearness. On all sides there seemed balance and consequently confusion of
+public opinion. From the altitude of her throne, and by the light of her
+ancestral knowledge, the Queen might have argued that she saw the
+situation more correctly than her Ministers in Parliament or her people
+outside, and so have vindicated the dissolution of the House had she
+chosen to adopt that course. This prerogative of sanctioning the recourse
+of a Minister to the constituencies is one of which the Crown can never
+finally divest itself. In the last resort, however much he may wish to
+abdicate his power, the first magistrate of a State must be prepared on
+that point for a definite individual responsibility. The latest
+indubitable illustration of this truth was given in 1868. In that year Mr
+Gladstone's Irish Church resolutions secured the defeat of the Disraeli
+Government. The Conservative Premier did not, as precedent for doing even
+then existed, resign immediately. He placed before the Queen the
+alternative of a dissolution then, or six months later, leaving absolutely
+to the Crown the responsibility of the choice. If that situation has not
+since exactly repeated itself, obviously from the very nature of things it
+is one which may at any moment recur. Thus it will be seen that under
+parliamentary government, the self effacement of the Sovereign is an
+impossibility. Years have passed since the sense of popular disappointment
+at the visible results of the Grey Reform Act found expression in
+_Coningsby_, and since the Sidonia of that romance ridiculed to his young
+disciple the imperfect vicariate of a House of Commons. However essential
+a part of our institutions it may be, its power and popularity are not
+to-day without competitors in popular favour. These rivals to the House of
+Commons are in their way as much as itself integral parts of the national
+life. If, notwithstanding all the gibes against it, the House of Lords,
+composed as it is to-day, be not a representative body, nothing which
+exists in England can deserve that epithet. Socially the peers of the
+later Victorian epoch are as a whole indistinguishable from the Commoners
+at St Stephen's of an earlier epoch. They reflect at least as faithfully
+the variety, the interests, the pursuits, and the convictions of the
+nation. The great difference between election to the Lower and promotion
+to the Upper House is that the former generally goes by local interest.
+The latter depends usually on political service, on personal merit, or
+individual achievement. That distinction was unknown before the present
+generation. Macaulay, a great writer and the best informed man of his day,
+received a peerage. His personal claims to the honour were admitted by
+reason of his place in the party which from 1832 he had continuously
+served in Parliament. His pretensions to a peerage were emphasized by his
+services as a State official. He had occupied Cabinet rank; he had been
+Secretary at War when that office was equivalent to a Secretaryship of
+State. No coronet was ever given to literary genius alone before that
+conferred upon Lord Tennyson.
+
+The younger Pitt is reported to have said that any man with L40,000 a year
+had a right to a seat in the House of Lords. Some of his creations notably
+that of Lord Carrington gave effect to that opinion. These peerages,
+however, did but foreshadow faintly the elevations of men actually engaged
+in commerce as in the case of Lord Armstrong, vicariously through his
+widow in that of Mr W. H. Smith, and many more. The press, too, is not
+less representative than the House of Commons. Nor in all probability is
+Lord Glenesk the last representative of journalism, as he has been the
+first to receive a seat in the Hereditary legislature. Under any
+circumstances, the well placed English newspaper is likely to be not less
+expository of public opinion than any body of gentlemen, by whatever mode
+elected, sitting at Westminster. Special tendencies of the time make the
+press an exceptionally lifelike measure of the thoughts and wishes in
+every department of life of every section of the English people. Newspaper
+proprietorship has in fact become not less a fashion of the day than
+theatrical lesseeship was a few years since. A number of men agreed on
+certain points such as the development or exploitation of particular
+enterprises, are seized with the conviction that 'an organ' is essential
+to their success. They combine, therefore, to buy or to press into their
+service by subsidies some printed sheet which may yet have the ear of the
+nation but which happens just now to have fallen upon evil times. If no
+such opportunity as this present itself, newspaper starting has become a
+recognized industry of commerce. After a time, therefore, a new literary
+champion of the Empire enters the lists. Its real object may be narrow and
+even personal. Its managers know that if their end is to be accomplished
+it must be veiled by a programme of more disinterested generalities, and
+that popular sentiment should form the first study of its conductors. In
+this way therefore, apart from the great newspaper oracles of the time
+which in all but name are national enterprises, the press has increasingly
+an inducement, that never fails, to hold up the mirror to the convictions,
+prejudices and sentiments into which public opinion can be analysed. The
+reptile press of Germany is, upon any considerable scale, not known in
+England. The connection between most journals whose support is envied, or
+whose opposition is dreaded, and some or more of the leading public men of
+the day, has been often very close[57] and is perhaps, still not quite
+unknown.
+
+The newspaper, however, is but a single agency for the literary influence
+exercised upon the public life of the day. Of late years periodicals,
+appearing at less frequent intervals, have among politicians themselves
+competed in attractiveness with the national assemblies at Westminster. In
+proportion as parliamentary reports have been in the daily press reduced
+to a few columns and in the case of all but speakers of the first rank to
+a few paragraphs or sentences; parliamentarians themselves have
+substituted the monthly Review for the stenographer or for Hansard as the
+depository of their views. Technically the presence of reporters in the
+gallery is even to-day connived at rather than constitutionally
+sanctioned. Yet the leader of the House of Commons, not very long since,
+reminded his hearers that those who were not present at his speech might
+master his points by referring to the parliamentary reports next day.
+Members with a taste for writing, having some carefully thought out
+message to deliver on an intricate topic of foreign or domestic policy are
+increasingly inclined entirely to pretermit the parliamentary stage of
+their exposition. By reserving their remarks for the monthly periodical,
+they can be sure of fixing popular attention more conspicuously. Their
+signatures are appended to their effusions. The editor incurs no
+responsibility either for the substance or the form of the opinions
+delivered. The reciprocity of the arrangement is, between him and his
+contributor, complete. On the one hand the literary impressario secures
+the advertisement of a familiar if not a famous name, good as he knows it
+to be for the sale of a certain number of copies, each one of which
+represents a clear if a small profit. On the other hand, assuming the
+senator to deserve an audience, he is more likely to secure one when his
+views are placed before the public for the first time with all the
+advantages of good type and paper, when they are read comfortably in
+library or club, not listened to with an effort, and even then but
+partially heard in the exhausted atmosphere of the House of Commons. Again
+if the Popular Chamber still be of the same intellectual calibre as of
+old, it has grown also more manifestly fastidious and more demonstratively
+intolerant of speakers who do not hit its taste. As Sir James Mackintosh
+and Lord Macaulay in different words both said, it was always a Chamber
+whose tastes and verdict were incalculable. Since, under a democratic
+franchise, it has become an Assembly primarily of business gentlemen, the
+chances of failure to satisfy it are so alarmingly numerous as to prevent
+all but the most self assured and impassive from making the effort. It
+prides itself above all things on its business-like tastes. Therefore, it
+abhors any approach to rhetoric. It fails not to remember its traditions
+of eloquence, or the ascendancy over itself which to a master of words and
+phrases, to a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lowe, a Canning, a Peel, it was
+proud to accord, like a horse that knows, and that takes a pleasure in,
+its rider. Therefore the House expects from those who address it something
+more than the bald, business talk of the Board room; an aptitude for
+clothing sound original reasons in diction which shall be without
+pretentiousness, but that shall not lack felicity and point always, and
+epigram sometimes. If these conditions be forthcoming; if the Chamber be
+in a good humour; if it be neither too long nor too soon since it lunched
+nor too near the hour when it dines; then the elective legislators will
+perhaps for a short time give their ear to one who rises at the right
+moment and in favour of whom they are predisposed. The conditions are
+obviously severe. It is therefore not to be wondered at that candidates
+for oratorical honours at St Stephen's tend steadily to diminish.
+
+There is another kind of rivalry to which of late years the House of
+Commons has been exposed, which may excite a smile, but which is in its
+way a reality to be reckoned with. This is not that of the provincial
+platform, of the public meeting room, or of the debating society in its
+older development. These latter have always, among the lower middle
+classes, fulfilled a function like that of the University Unions among the
+classes somewhat better to do. Coger's Hall was the school of discussion
+in which the late Charles Bradlaugh acquired great power of direct and
+incisive utterance as well as a perfect control over his temper. London
+and all the great provincial towns have as many of these places as ancient
+Rome possessed of gladiatorial schools. A really new growth of the last
+quarter of the nineteenth century is the local Houses of Commons. These
+sprung up in and for every quarter or suburb of London, and in many
+provincial districts as well. They are still known, and sometimes much in
+vogue. They are not of course recognized by the legislature. Nor, as in
+the case of the municipal bodies which we have already seen at work, is
+their machinery controlled by the Local Government Board. A seat in them
+has been known to be as much an object of rivalry among an increasing
+class, as a place on the green leather benches of Westminster. The member
+for Kennington or Lavender Hill in the south of London, for Westbourne
+Grove or Shepherd's Bush in the west, for Haverstock Hill in the north,
+may even be as considerable a personage with his immediate friends in the
+district as the member for Westminster in the Imperial Parliament. The
+leader in the Hampstead House of Commons, or the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer in that which meets on Richmond Hill is not certain that he
+would change his place with his titular equivalents at St Stephen's. These
+are considerations that may explain why the House of Commons, whose
+supremacy was unchallenged under a Peel, a Stanley, a Palmerston, a
+Disraeli, a Gladstone, is regarded no longer with awe, sometimes with the
+familiarity that breeds contempt.
+
+As yet this diminution of parliamentary prestige, if such there really be,
+is indicated only by a floating sentiment. It finds expression chiefly in
+social chatter or in newspaper flippancies. Nor in the present decade of
+the Victorian epoch are there many positive signs of our representative
+system being superseded by the controlling will of an individual autocrat
+for whom the late Mr Froude thought the time was steadily approaching. The
+same remark might with equal truth probably be made of every part in our
+national polity. It is certainly true of the House of Lords not less than
+of the monarchy. The position practically occupied by the Crown to-day, is
+that which the Prince Consort many years ago marked out for it. Some of
+these functions he was himself able to assist the Queen in discharging. To
+him there seemed to devolve upon the monarchy duties analogous to those
+discharged by the permanent officials in the great departments of State.
+Amid the vicissitudes of party, the rise and fall of Ministers, the
+changes of popular opinion, the Crown was in his judgment the one
+guarantee for continuity in policy, domestic not less than foreign. The
+occupant of the Throne took, as Ministers of State, those whom
+parliamentary majorities and public opinion indicated. The Sovereign
+however had other functions than merely to register and sanction the wish
+of subjects and the decisions of Commons. Chief among these, as every
+other page of Sir Theodore Martin's book during the Peelite and
+Palmerstonian periods clearly shows, was to judge of the quarters whence a
+stable Administration could be formed; whether, in fact, Lord John
+Russell, Lord Palmerston, or Lord Derby, in a balanced state of
+parliamentary feeling, had the best chance of carrying on the Queen's
+government to the welfare of the realm and the confidence of its
+representatives. The most familiar aspects of the political and
+parliamentary situation have ceased to be now what in the Prince
+Consort's day they habitually were. The doctrine that Ministers are the
+free choice of the Sovereign was never propounded absolutely by the
+husband of the Queen. The doctrine was rather assumed by him in the
+interests of the national convenience than expressed in any terms defining
+the Royal prerogative. The slow process of absorption of the Peelites into
+the Liberal ranks; the lifelong rivalry of Lord John Russell and Lord
+Palmerston produced, during much of the Prince Consort's time, a condition
+of unstable equilibrium in party organization, which in these later days
+of popular mandates, general elections which are plebiscites and of
+overwhelming majorities which amount to commissions of the democracy, it
+is not easy to realize.
+
+Some there were who thought that the Liberal disruption of 1886 might
+reproduce in English politics the precarious and fluctuating relations of
+parties and statesmen that seemed between 1852 and 1865 to have become
+permanent. Had that forecast been fulfilled, the Sovereign to-day might be
+confronted with personal responsibilities of Ministerial selection which
+would have recalled the duty devolved upon her during earlier portions of
+her reign. Nothing of the kind has happened. The event of ten years ago
+has resulted not in party instability, but in fresh fixity of tenure to
+the political conglomerate that the constituencies have as yet shown no
+wish to dismiss. Of course in time the same conditions as of old must
+recur. The national organization of which Liberals as well as
+Conservatives are constituent parts, will at some day or other upon
+issues perhaps now unsuspected resolve themselves into their elements.
+Ancient lines of demarcation will again declare themselves. A cycle of
+government by groups may yet be opened.[58] People and Parliament may
+still wait for the Royal choice to close an interval of confusion and of
+doubt. In whatever form this reversion to an older order may present
+itself, whatever the exact contingencies in store, the occupant of the
+Throne as has been shown above cannot divest himself of the right,
+therefore of the duty, of giving a casting vote when his officers of State
+hesitate, as Mr Disraeli did in 1868, as to the exact moment when the
+appeal to the constituences most advantageously can be made.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE
+
+    The general power and usefulness of the English Crown strengthened,
+    and not weakened, by the constitutional transfer of political power to
+    Parliament and Ministers. The national aims of Queen Victoria and
+    Queen Elizabeth contrasted. Possibility of the Sovereign more
+    correctly than Parliament or Ministers interpreting indications of
+    national will. What happened under Queen Anne may conceivably occur
+    under some of her successors. The facts concerning the monarchy as
+    they are to-day. Posthumous recognition of the soundness of the Prince
+    Consort's views on the sphere of Royal duties, and the legitimate
+    field of the Crown's activities. His influence still a living force.
+    Court offices, and reforms attributable to him. The present Prince of
+    Wales exactly follows his father's example.
+
+
+Whatever of power may have been resigned by the Crown in the way of
+political authority has since that resignation abundantly been recompensed
+to it in the direction of social authority. The latest predecessor of her
+own sex upon the English Throne correctly interpreted as against
+periodical parliamentary majorities the loyalty of the nation to the
+Anglican Establishment; then a synonym for High Church Toryism. The Legion
+Memorial,[59] probably drawn up by Daniel Defoe, marks the lowest point of
+unpopularity ever reached by the House of Commons. No one would venture
+to say that a repetition of such an experience, however unlikely, is more
+impossible under Queen Victoria, than at one time it might have seemed
+under Queen Anne. The chances of a revival, with the national consent, of
+the personal prerogative of the Sovereign in Church and State affairs,
+though far from being inconceivable towards this changeful close of the
+century are too problematical for serious calculation. Like Queen
+Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, from her accession to the Throne, proposed to
+herself as an ideal the affection of her people. The Tudor Sovereign,
+however, amid all her desire for the personal attachment of her subjects,
+bated no jot of her queenly dignity or hereditary pretensions. The
+Hanoverian Sovereign who blends the lines of Tudor and Stuart in her own
+person has always kept before her an object equally distinct, but far more
+congenial to the graciousness of her sex. An Elizabeth never willingly
+allowed the tenderness of the woman to eclipse the majesty of the Queen. A
+Victoria has never, consciously or unconsciously, veiled the motherhood of
+her people by the pomp of their ruler. The stages by which the conception
+of English sovereignty that is to-day a national possession has attained
+its present completeness, must now be examined. From her sex, and the
+circumstances of her life, it has long been inevitable that some of the
+social functions (in the sense in which that epithet is now used) of the
+Sovereign should be discharged vicariously by other members of the
+reigning House. Whether it be Prince and Heir Apparent, or Royal Duke
+makes no difference to the present argument. The idea of the monarchy
+actually operative among us to-day whether in its constitutional,
+ceremonial, or social attributes is at all points stamped with the impress
+of one systematizing and controlling mind.
+
+That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never
+was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more
+vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that
+has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply
+to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member
+of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so
+familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign
+or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth
+century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time
+when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or
+resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian
+England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned
+individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was
+who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, assistance in
+the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more
+conspicuously associated with the representatives of the kingly principle
+in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms.
+Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen from
+earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with
+an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the
+accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the Duchess
+of Kent, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert:
+'The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin' (the Princess
+Victoria).[60] Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte
+naturally supplied the first link of cousinly association between his
+nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course
+wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial
+diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be
+developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and
+the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that
+the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast
+by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more
+difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found
+impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of
+a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and
+institutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne's
+over sanguine anticipations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted
+countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that
+the proposed allowance of L50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp
+suggested, reduced to L21,000, was to be fixed at L30,000. All he
+regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of
+science would be necessarily more restricted than he had hoped.[61]
+
+Naturally the economy of the Court system was the first to feel the
+reforming influence of the man who afterwards helped profoundly to modify
+the whole system of English life at large. The first opposition was
+encountered at the hands not of an Englishman, but of a fellow
+countrywoman of his own, the Baroness de Lehzen, who, from being the young
+Queen's governess, had become the head of her household. The abuses and
+extravagance of the Royal establishment shocked, as they well might have
+done, the frugal Prince. Nor was it only that the money expended yielded
+no proportionate return of comfort and convenience. The very rudiments of
+domestic supervision were found to be wanting. Windsor Castle was only one
+degree better than Buckingham Palace. Those employed about the Royal
+dwelling not only had themselves free ingress into the living rooms of the
+family, a nondescript gathering of camp followers, loafers and errand boys
+also contrived to pass in and out unchallenged. On one occasion a boy was
+found, with no felonious intent, to have passed the night under a sofa in
+a parlour next to the Queen's bedroom. The lad had no wish to have done
+so. He was simply shut in, unperceived by those whose business it was to
+lock up.[62] In this work the Prince Consort was confronted by the
+opposition which the reformer of inveterate abuses never fails in any
+department of life to encounter. The administration of the Palace
+household below stairs in a less wantonly wasteful manner was held to
+threaten the dignity of those about the Throne. A check upon weekly bills
+in the basement was suspected of veiling a sinister design on the
+constitution of Church and State. Sir Robert Peel in 1841 had dwelt on the
+difficulty of domestic reforms in the Palace. In 1843 he acknowledged the
+economy and efficiency with which the Queen's Household was now conducted.
+The Minister was vilified in the cheap weekly papers as a joint
+conspirator with those foreigners who christened their treason by the fair
+names of retrenchment and order. He was even attacked in clubs and drawing
+rooms by fine and fashionable people for being ready to compromise the
+dignity and disturb the equilibrium of the British Crown. The chief point
+of the Prince Consort's Court improvements was concentration of
+responsible power upon a single individual in the place of its confused
+distribution among mutually conflicting understrappers. In this task he
+was aided by Baron Stockmar who had all the national aptitude of the
+German for the details small and great in the domestic routine of palaces
+and princes. The ultimate result of these operations was to invest a
+Master of the Household identical in all respects with that functionary as
+he exists to-day, with supreme jurisdiction over the domestic arrangements
+of the Sovereign, able directly to communicate with the departments for
+executing the different repairs. Other duties gradually gathered round
+this personage. To-day, as the Prince Consort had always purposed, it is
+upon him that there devolves the duty of issuing at the Royal command,
+invitations to guests to sleep and dine beneath the Queen's roof.
+
+The composition of the Queen's immediate entourage is now practically the
+same as that decided upon by Her Majesty in conjunction with the Prince
+Consort. The ladies of the Court, that is, consist of the Mistress of the
+Robes, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Women of the Bedchamber, and the
+Maids of Honour. The first named of these, the Mistress of the Robes, is
+in her way, a State official. She must not be below the rank of a Duchess.
+She changes with the Government of the day. Her attendance on the Queen is
+limited to State occasions. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, all of them
+peeresses, are in number eight. One of them is invariably waiting upon the
+Queen. These are the ladies who in 1839 Sir Robert Peel, when forming his
+Administration, thought should be changed. The Women of the Bedchamber are
+also eight. These generally are only in attendance when the Mistress of
+the Robes is present. One of them is always near the Sovereign. The Maids
+of Honour are also eight in number. These must be either the daughters or
+grand-daughters of peers. They have the courtesy title of 'Honourable.'
+Two of them are always in waiting for a month at a time. The Prince
+Consort also in selecting the officers of the Household, showed special
+care and judgment in his choice of the person who discharges the duties of
+Privy Purse. From the days of Colonel Phipps, or Colonel Anson, to Sir
+Fleetwood Edwards; these have been men of first rate financial and
+administrative capacity. Misled by a similarity of terms, some persons
+seem to fancy there exists a vital association between the gentleman who
+fills that position in the Queen's Household and the nobleman who, as Lord
+Privy Seal, has a seat in the Cabinet of the day, and who in 1896-7 was
+Viscount Cross. Hence the recurrent announcements in the newspapers that
+this statesman has been summoned to Windsor or Balmoral to assist Her
+Majesty with her business papers. The present opportunity therefore may
+usefully be taken to contradict the construction placed upon the character
+of the visit of that Minister to the Court. This the present writer has
+the very highest authority for doing. The connection between the Cabinet
+and Court offices whose names so closely resemble each other is in no
+sense organic. Lord Cross, now spoken of, is eminent for his knowledge of
+business of all kinds. He is a man of the widest and most varied
+experience in every department of civil and political affairs. He had a
+seat in Lord Beaconsfield's last Cabinet. Than him the Queen possesses
+to-day few older servants, or more trusty friends. In that capacity, not
+in virtue of his Ministerial position, it is that Lord Cross finds
+himself so frequently the guest of his Sovereign.
+
+The Prince Consort's reforms in the economy and administration of the
+Court itself, though not the least valuable or necessary of his labours,
+naturally appealed less directly to the popular interest than his other
+activities, by the results of which the land of his adoption is to-day the
+gainer. Not a moment had been lost by the Prince in beginning to realize
+his early idea of associating for the first time since the days of the
+Stuarts the Sovereign with the promotion of letters, science, and art. The
+Court of Henry VIII. had been visited by Erasmus, and by other men of
+letters of the Protestant connection. If the story of Shakespeare's
+presence in the group that surrounded Elizabeth be apocryphal, Edmund
+Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh undoubtedly paid their
+homage to the Virgin Queen. Charles I. was the patron of Van Dyck and an
+admirable connoisseur as well as encourager of true art wherever it could
+be found. Charles II., after his restoration, was less interested in
+painters and poets than in science.
+
+Before Queen Victoria, the Hanoverian Sovereigns had not identified the
+new dynasty with any special affection for the accomplishments which gild
+and refine life. The Prince Consort, at the outset of his career mastered
+two facts. First, he discerned, that, even in the absence of a national
+scheme of education, the taste for reading and culture bred not only by
+improved intelligence, but by the growth of material prosperity and the
+humanizing influences of foreign travel, must before long result in a
+marked improvement of the appreciation among the countrymen of Reynolds,
+of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of Southey, of all that sweetens and
+brightens daily existence. The Prince perceived, too, that the lines on
+which English social intercourse was developing must involve a demand for
+amusements and for recreations upon a larger scale than family reunions
+beneath the domestic life could provide. The theatre in England had not
+become then a considerable force. It would have been premature to
+anticipate the later advice of Mr Matthew Arnold to organize the stage.
+The demand for good music in public places and on reasonable terms; the
+growing interest in the works of English artists; above all the newly
+awakened interest among the whole community in the welfare of their least
+fortunate members;--these are the features of the time which in his survey
+of the domestic situation chiefly impressed the Prince.
+
+So early as 1840 his knowledge of musical science and his skill in musical
+execution were well known to all with whom he had been brought into
+contact. By this time it was generally perceived that a mistake had been
+made in not, from the first, establishing the Prince as the Queen's
+private secretary, and in delaying to entrust him with the control of the
+whole Household. The Prince's remarkable aptitudes had impressed the
+leading statesmen of both parties and through them the general public.
+Thus, in 1840 there existed a growing desire to turn to national account
+the special knowledge and exceptional talents of the accomplished husband
+of the Queen. On the 9th of October 1840 Lady Lyttelton, then in
+attendance at Windsor, has recorded that 'there arose from the room below
+hers sounds of an instrument which she did not at first recognize, played
+with such master skill, modulated so learnedly, winding through every kind
+of bass and chord, finally culminating in the most perfect cadence, then
+off again, louder first and afterwards softer. I only heard,' she adds,
+'the harmony, being too distant to catch the tune, or perceive the
+execution of the small touches. It was Prince Albert playing on the
+organ.' April 29 of the year now mentioned was, from the point from which
+it is now looked at, a memorable date in this blameless and beneficent
+career. Then it was that the Prince having been appointed one of the
+directors of the Ancient Concerts, discharged these duties for the first
+time. All the music had been selected by himself. He had attended the
+rehearsal with the Queen. Experts in this matter have dated from that day
+the revival of the public taste for classical music in this country.
+
+Nearly simultaneous with this was his appearance upon a public platform on
+one of those non-political occasions that his example has specially
+appropriated to the representatives of English Royalty. In the same year,
+too, at the very height of the London season, the Prince took the
+initiative in a function of a graver kind, but not less specially adapted
+for energies and knowledge to which under a Constitutional monarchy
+political life is not held to afford a proper outlet. The most important
+public meeting of the summer of 1840 was that convened for the purpose of
+encouraging the legislature to complete the machinery for the removal of
+the last traces of the slave trade. Technically the abolition had already
+taken place. Well grounded apprehensions, however, existed that the new
+'apprenticeship' which was to educate the emancipated negro for the
+blessings of freedom might sometimes be too much like the old servitude
+which it was designed to supersede. This occasion produced the first
+speech delivered on an English platform by the Prince Consort at a time
+when platform eloquence was less common than it has since become. The
+address pointed, pithy, without an ambiguous or superfluous word, was the
+model by which the speaker may well have shaped his subsequent utterances.
+Its terse felicities of phrase have since often been reproduced by his
+son, the Prince of Wales. As a corrective to the innate nervousness of a
+highly organized temper, he had carefully prepared these remarks, writing
+them out and rewriting them, so that nothing might be left to the chance
+inspiration of the moment.
+
+This was the first of a series of princely appearances on non-political
+occasions. To-day, and in the case of his descendants, these things are
+taken as a matter of course. During many years no great movement for the
+improvement by politically unsectarian agencies of human life has been
+considered complete without the active participation in it of the Crown,
+or, which comes to the same thing, a nominee of the Crown. That in its
+popular aspects the artistic movement which fills so large a space in the
+second half of this century was practically the creation of the Prince
+Consort's discriminating taste and patriotic industry would, if by
+nothing else be shown by the course of preparations for the Hyde Park
+Exhibition of 1851. Sir Robert Peel, at the time, repeatedly stated that
+without the collaboration and counsel of the Queen's husband, the
+Commission for the promotion and encouragement of the fine arts in the
+United Kingdom could scarcely have got through its work. On the other
+hand, while the public has accustomed itself to regard Lord Melbourne as
+the nearly exclusive influence for training the Sovereign and her husband
+in the tasks of Royal routine, one may point out that the Prince himself
+never failed to emphasize his personal obligations to Sir Robert Peel as
+his first trainer in the duties of an English public man. Nor from these
+associations did he acquire only a correct insight into the official ways
+of his new country. In his tastes and appreciations, the Prince Consort
+became as patriotic as any of the great men by whom he was surrounded.
+Some have questioned whether the patronage of a not unmixed English Court
+has been entirely favourable to the development of native genius in
+certain branches of the fine arts. The historic facts enumerated by Sir
+Theodore Martin on this point are worth mentioning.[63]
+
+On December 2, 1841, the Prince met on the official business of the
+Commission the Secretary, then Mr, afterwards Sir Charles, Eastlake. The
+latter entered upon the interview with an idea of resigning his post,
+should the Prince insist on the introduction of foreign artists. His Royal
+Highness anticipated his visitor by volunteering the remark that to him
+there appeared no necessity for so much as the employment of a single
+foreign artist even among those entrusted with the management of
+considerable works. 'In all that related to practical dexterity (the
+department in which it was assumed that some instruction for fresco would
+be necessary), the English were particularly skilful.' Such were the
+Prince's words as recorded by Sir Charles Eastlake. The same narrator adds
+that His Royal Highness volunteered many instances of English superiority
+over all other nations in everything concerned with artistic mechanism.
+'Even to the varnish on coaches,' said the Prince, 'it is surprising how
+much more perfect the English practice is than that of the Continent.' The
+talk then turned on the encouragement of fresco painting in England. The
+words of the Queen's husband are especially noticeable showing as they do
+his just appreciation of the conditions of artistic prosperity in England.
+Two great auxiliaries in this country seldom fail to promote the success
+of any scheme. Of the forces thus alluded to, fashion was one, high
+example was another. Hence the Prince inferred that if the Queen and
+himself set the example of having works of this kind done, the taste would
+extend itself to wealthy individuals. The English country seats which are
+the most beautiful in the world would acquire additional effect from the
+introduction of such a style of decoration. With such occupation the
+school would never languish, and would at least have time fully to develop
+itself. When on one occasion Mr Eastlake, in reference to the necessary
+limitation of frescoes compared them to sculpture in which nothing could
+be concealed, and in which this necessity involved the necessity of beauty
+also, the Prince replied: 'You have expressed in a few words what I would
+have said in many.'[64]
+
+This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the
+direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English
+Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the
+work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with
+English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art
+Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute
+and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not
+only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically
+placed the Queen's husband in the van of the new movement for the
+encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly
+than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the
+premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince's opportunities of good were
+increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a
+technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the
+importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They illustrate,
+as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular
+conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day
+with the Sovereign or the Sovereign's social and ceremonial vicegerents.
+
+Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the
+deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity
+concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving
+the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone
+living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince
+Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman,
+for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the
+Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing
+at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the
+statesman's country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort
+was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellorship of the
+University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the
+great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the
+next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the
+same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen's
+eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his
+countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the
+ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it
+is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical
+perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force,
+which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much
+created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.
+
+    The obliging information of Sir Arthur Bigge, of Viscount Cross, and
+    of Sir Francis Knollys, has enabled the writer accurately to state
+    such facts of Court organization as are legitimate matters of interest
+    to Her Majesty's subjects.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+CROWN AND SWORD
+
+    The Monro-Fawcett duel turned the Prince Consort's attention, as
+    representing the Crown, to duelling, the abolition of which must begin
+    with the army. Courts of Honour suggested as successful abroad. Why
+    distrusted by English opinion. Views of the Duke and others. Hence the
+    Court first occupied with army reforms to good results. Contrast
+    between military resources 1837-97. Special attention of Court to
+    military education. Old and new schools of officers compared. Duke of
+    Wellington as Commander contrasted with his latest successors. Growth
+    of rifle volunteers; special influences in military education, _e.g._
+    Edward Hamley. Military democracy. Why necessarily imperfect.
+
+
+So plausible a case may theoretically be made out for the duel as a social
+institution that it is not surprising the custom should have died hard in
+a combatant nation like the English. The ordeal by arms furnishes a simple
+if barbaric mode of settling personal differences without the scandal and
+the weariness of law; in an age whose boast is freedom of speech not less
+than of thought, whose bane is the degeneration of that chartered liberty
+into the unlicensed malignity and curiosity of small-talk, there always
+will be ill-conditioned persons whom only fear of the horsewhip, the
+rapier, or the pistol, can teach to discipline their tongue; all these
+things have been said in favour of the duel as a mode of social
+discipline. In practice, however, it was never found that the fear of a
+challenge ensured social discretion of tongue, or a higher standard of
+personal courtesy. When these combats were not farcical, as the duel has
+generally become in France, where it still survives, they proved the
+instruments of the professional homicide, who, trained to artistic murder,
+went about society, seeking a feud with those whom he or his patrons
+desired to be put out of the way. Stung to the quick by the brutalities of
+O'Connell, Sir Robert Peel, during the early forties demanded, as the
+story runs, the satisfaction which was not then an anachronism. The great
+Irishman replied that yielding to the expostulations of his wife, he must
+forego the pleasure of the encounter for which he was 'spoiling.' A second
+invitation was declined on the ground that the entreaties of his offspring
+had subdued the spirit of the warrior. Hence the point in Theodore Hook's
+epigram published in the _John Bull_ of the period:--
+
+  Some men in their horror of slaughter,
+  Improve on the scriptural command;
+  They honour their wife and their daughter,
+  That their days may be long in the land.
+
+The same statesman is known at a little later date to have been persuaded,
+not without difficulty, to abstain from sending a friend to his chief
+opponent[65] at the time of the latter's onslaughts on the Conservative
+concession of Free Trade. Since then, Wimbledon Common or Wormwood Scrubbs
+has probably never for a moment seriously suggested itself to any
+honourable gentleman as a possible place to which to adjourn a
+controversy with a parliamentary opponent.
+
+A duel was the incident which caused the first intervention of the Prince
+Consort in the social arrangements of English life. On the 1st of July
+1843, Colonel Fawcett had been shot by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant
+Monro. The latter had accepted the challenge most reluctantly; he had been
+the grossly aggrieved party.[66] Under the then existing code, the
+survivor's sole alternative to the certainty of being stigmatised as a
+coward had been to accept the risk of being hung for a felon. Eight years
+before the Queen's accession, in 1829, however, the great Duke of
+Wellington had faced Lord Winchilsea's pistol; the memories of the (1809)
+Canning-Castlereagh and other encounters did not then seem part of ancient
+history. The Prince Consort, with the military instincts of his race
+decided that the reform which he was bent on establishing must begin with
+the army. The authority of the Duke of Wellington was at this moment
+paramount equally in social, political, and military life. The great
+general was known himself seriously to have considered the subject. With
+him therefore, the Prince arranged an interview. Courts of Honour were
+suggested by the Prince as rational substitutes for the appeal to the
+sword. The Tribunals des Marechaux were said to have done good work in
+France; Courts of Honour had been followed with the best results in the
+Bavarian army. The Duke's objection to the proposal was the English
+distrust of a secret tribunal; the authorities of the navy took the same
+view as the Commander-in-Chief. Sir George Murray, then Master of the
+Ordnance, a serious and accomplished man of the world, bluntly remarked
+that quarrels would not be made up, or differences composed by the
+arbitration of others; that the law as it already existed could do all
+which was practicable to repress the practice. The Prince persevered with
+his purpose. His suggestion was laid by the Secretary of State for War
+before his colleagues in the Cabinet. Though the scheme was not adopted in
+the form suggested by the Prince, his action in the matter led to an
+amendment in the Articles of War (April 1844). Henceforward it was
+declared to be suitable to the character of honourable men to apologize
+and offer redress for wrong or insult committed, and equally suitable for
+the aggrieved party frankly and cordially to accept the amende. Thus on
+the initiative of the Queen's husband, there began the organization of
+public opinion on the lines that have long since made the ordeal by arms
+as practically obsolete in England as the ordeal by touch.
+
+The Queen's devotion to her army has always been that of a mother for her
+children; the Queen's gratitude evinced upon all possible occasions to her
+soldiers for what they have done in the field has ever resembled that of a
+woman to the protector of the weak against the strong. It was natural
+therefore that, amid his civilian duties, the new representative of the
+Throne, himself nurtured in a land that from being the Mark of Brandenburg
+was growing into a great military monarchy, should actively show his
+interest in the whole field of military reform. Later, when the post
+became vacant, the Prince Consort, after consulting with the Ministers of
+the day, declined more than once the Commandership-in-Chief. His
+suggestions for army reform, and for national defence during the period of
+the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny, and again during the
+Franco-Austrian wars were made with a sense of responsibility which the
+tenure of office could not have deepened as well as with a shrewd
+perception of the needs and possibilities of the time that no statesman of
+English birth could surpass. He had already been among the first to
+recognize the brilliant merits of the Duke of Wellington's plan for the
+defence of London, during the Chartist disturbances of 1848. To the
+Prince's discrimination it is largely due that this domestic exploit of
+the hero of Waterloo, not less memorable in its way than Waterloo
+itself,[67] came properly to be appreciated by the country. To this day
+the mighty fortresses which protect the shores of the Solent and
+Southampton Water, and which make that part of the previously too
+vulnerable South coast practically safe are to a great extent the
+memorials of the wisdom and exertion of the Prince Consort. He had
+already, while our soldiers were before Sebastopol, urged upon the
+Government of the day the establishment of militia depots in place of the
+regulars should they be withdrawn by an emergency, at Malta and
+elsewhere, along the line of our Mediterranean possessions. When
+therefore, the national alarm caused by the words and actions of our
+French ally found its expression in Lord Palmerston's scheme of coast
+defences, the memorandum on which these measures were based had been drawn
+up by the Prince Consort at the wish of the Cabinet, and practically
+formed the basis of the action of Ministers.
+
+Nor of all the army reformers who have lived and worked since the Prince's
+day, is there one who has failed to testify his indebtedness to the
+suggestions of the husband of the Queen. In his many talks on this subject
+with the military advisers of the Government of the day, the Prince often
+anticipated those improvements in the administration of the land forces of
+the Crown which since his time have been carried out. As the Prince
+Consort correctly inferred from the character of the English people as
+well as from the pace of official movements in England, must be the case,
+the progressive changes in the English army have been effected piecemeal
+by slow or minute instalments. The method pursued here has differed not
+less from that followed in the reorganization of Continental armies than
+the composition of the army of England differs from that of the great
+fighting machines of the rest of Europe. In Prussia, after the defeat of
+Jena (1806); in Austria after France had triumphed for Italy on the field
+of Solferino (1859) the organic reconstruction of armies was possible.
+Nothing of the same sort has taken place in England. Nothing, as the
+Prince Consort perceived, of this kind could be effected here, unless
+under the conscription. That system the Queen's husband once observed was
+not likely to be established in England without a revolution.
+
+The changes which the Prince suggested in able memoranda to successive
+Ministers, which indeed he partly foresaw as coming, may in their general
+results briefly be glanced at now. The mere enumeration of the military
+resources of the country on the Queen's accession and on the eve of the
+sixtieth anniversary of that event needs few words to deepen the contrast.
+In 1837 the total military strength (regular army) of the country was
+101,000. Sixty years later these figures were 147,105.[68] In 1837 India
+was garrisoned by the Company's army of 26,500. In 1897 the Indian
+military strength was 74,299 British, 129,963 Native. The increase has
+been therefore, nearly threefold. In 1837 the Irish troops were 20,000. In
+1897 these were between 26,000 and 27,000. As against the 26,000 troops in
+the Channel Islands and Great Britain in 1837, there were in 1897, 81,516.
+The entire strength of the horsed-field artillery in the accession year
+was 72 guns--all at home. On New Year's Day 1897 the artillery total of
+all kinds at home and abroad was 219 batteries or companies. In 1837 the
+Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 12-pounder howitzers, and
+6-pounder guns; the Field batteries had 9-pounder guns, 24-pounder
+howitzers. The infantry still used the old flint 'Brown Bess,' which in
+the cant phrase of the time was warranted at 200 yards to miss a haystack.
+The Rifle regiments used the Brunswick rifle which at 400 yards, according
+to Lord Wolseley, could not implicitly be trusted. To-day, the equipping
+of our troops with the latest weapons of precision which contemporary
+science designs is of itself a great department of English artificership.
+Jealousy of the army is as much a bequest from Puritan times to the House
+of Commons, as jealousy of the Church. Under the two first Georges, bitter
+and tedious debates on the maintenance of the Hanoverian soldiers were of
+constant recurrence. As a consequence, the standing troops which in the
+Napoleonic wars had been 220,000 men were gradually reduced till in three
+years after the peace (1818), they were only 80,000 strong.
+
+Not without much pressure had Parliament during the earliest infancy of
+the Colonies provided a handful of soldiers for the protection of settlers
+in the lands beyond the sea as well as for the maintenance of civil order
+at home. It was the paucity of the numbers available for his orders which
+rendered the Duke of Wellington's scheme of London defence against
+Chartist attack so memorable a piece of strategy. Even the influence and
+popularity of this great soldier only secured the existence of a small
+army at home on condition that it did not flaunt itself ostentatiously
+before the civilian population. To keep up any fighting strength at all
+the non-combatant portion of the army was reduced to an ineffective
+minimum. Without exception, regiments were weak in men and horses. The
+four chief company depots at home consisted of veterans waiting their
+discharge, of invalids, and of ineffective, or imperfectly effective,
+recruits.
+
+Sometimes, as during the Canadian and Jamaica troubles in the earlier
+years of the reign, additional troops were required for the Colonies.
+These were composed of volunteers from other regiments and of casual
+recruits. The _personnel_ of our army may be inferred from the Duke of
+Wellington's oft-quoted remark that the man who enlisted was the worst and
+most drunken inhabitant of the village. This was the scum of the earth
+which under officers trained on the playing fields of Eton, the Duke had
+led to victory in his Peninsular campaigns and in the Low Countries
+against the consummate veterans of the French army. To win the affection
+of his men; to make them feel that their commander was also their friend,
+and of the same flesh and blood as themselves never occurred to the great
+Duke. His latter-day successor, Lord Wolseley, on the Christmas day of
+1896, visited the Wellington Barracks to taste the pudding and test the
+comforts of the men. That was not the great Duke's way.
+
+The moral and social improvement in the private soldier since the era of
+humaner treatment began is shown by a progressive decrease in the number
+of Courts Martial. In 1876 they were 12,187, in 1895, 8,211, a reduction
+of about one-third. The treatment of soldiers by their superiors was
+admirably adapted to demoralize them as men without improving them as
+soldiers. When the recruit took the Queen's shilling, he ceased to be a
+free citizen. He had said farewell to the world outside the barrack yard.
+He became a nameless piece of martial machinery; sometimes he was
+indulged; more often he was flogged. Nothing that could extinguish respect
+for himself or his officers, was left undone. It had been the Duke of
+Wellington's business to win victories not to conciliate men. The moral
+and personal influence of such men as Lord Roberts and others which since
+the Duke's day has been exercised for the moral and physical advantage of
+the soldier is not an instrument that the hero of Waterloo often employed;
+he did not believe in it. Nor was it a soldier, but a schoolmaster, Dr
+Arnold of Rugby, who formulated the truth, that the best way of improving
+character is to treat persons on the assumption of their becoming what you
+wish them to be.
+
+To pass to other details in the military contrast between the sixtieth and
+the first years of the Queen's reign the short service system which has
+proved admittedly so effective had occurred as a possibility only to a few
+reformers of whom the Prince Consort was one, and Sir Charles Napier
+another. In 1837 enlistment was for life or twenty-one years; the seven
+years' term had been urged already by Napier. It was not however till 1847
+that the reduction to ten years was sanctioned and then only by way of
+special inducement for recruits when they were exceptionally few. Those
+who can recall the scenes witnessed outside public houses in the country,
+in the purlieus of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in London will not
+consider the term 'crimping' too strong an expression to apply to the
+process of forcing the Queen's shilling into the hands of half tipsy
+yokels, and entirely intoxicated or desperate roughs. Nor is it surprising
+that the Sergeant Kites of the period found all their arts of inventive
+persuasion, all their largesses of drink necessary to induce the gallant
+fellows whom they addressed to serve the Queen. Without the stimulating
+allurement of drums and fifes playing, of banners flying, and unless the
+future had been seen through a haze of beery or spirituous splendour, the
+tale of recruits would have fallen lamentably short.
+
+In the eyes of sober citizens of the industrial class, the life of the
+soldier seemed only one degree less dismal and shameful than the career of
+the hulks. As a fact the soldier's lot was perhaps half a century ago not
+much more tolerable than that of the convict shipped for his offences
+beyond seas. A prison with a chance of being killed in it represented in
+the popular eye the existence of the private soldier. It involved
+transportation with hard labour as a matter of course. One battalion first
+raised in 1700 had been the whole of those 137 years abroad on active
+service. When his destiny was less severe than this, a life insufferably
+tedious was led by him in barracks pestilently unhealthy. To-day, upon a
+different plane of comfort, and on a reduced scale of luxury, the private
+soldiers may be said to enjoy the same recreations and opportunities of
+improvement as his officer. He is the master of his own time during
+several of the best hours in every day. He has no more difficulty in
+obtaining leave up to midnight for a theatre visit than a Woolwich cadet
+in getting a Sunday exeat from the Academy. Rooms for study and pastime
+are provided within his barracks.
+
+Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in
+1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children
+herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever,
+with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their
+country's battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not
+wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The
+Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to
+time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a
+prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British
+punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after
+an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of
+parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire
+abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of
+Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was
+to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of
+regulars every other branch of the Service.
+
+Thus sixty years ago the Militia force of the country was declared by the
+Adjutant-General of the day practically to be non-existent. Before 1815
+this force had been a considerable body. After the Peace it dwindled down
+to less than 70,000; when the Queen mounted her throne, it was seldom or
+never regularly drilled. There had been no ballot for it since 1831.
+Twenty-eight years later, December 1895, the strength of an annually
+trained Militia was 107,742. The Militia, too, in 1837 was administered
+not as it now is by the War Office, but by the Home Secretary in
+conjunction with the Lords Lieutenant of Counties; its payment was
+provided for in the civil not the military estimates; in 1837 its expense
+was L192,115. The Yeomanry, then called Volunteers, comprised 18,000 men
+of all ranks, at a cost in round numbers of L105,400. In 1897 the
+Yeomanry, instructed not less systematically than the Militia, were a
+force of 11,678 men.
+
+Important additions to the permanent strength of the country against an
+emergency were made, largely on the Prince Consort's initiative, during
+the first decade of the reign. In 1842 the military pensioners already
+enrolled and liable to service were regularly organized, less however as a
+military power than as an aid to the civil Government, to the number of
+7,000 men. This, too, was the period in which (1846) Sir John Burgoyne
+submitted to Lord John Russell a State paper on that subject of coast
+defences which had already engaged the Duke of Wellington and had been
+taken up warmly as mentioned above by the Queen's husband. The Channel
+Tunnel scheme was then unborn in the brains of future projectors. Our
+military experts held England sufficiently to be weakened as it was by
+the isthmus of steam which bridged the Straits of Dover. Sir John
+Burgoyne's estimate in 1846 was that after providing for Ireland and for
+home fortifications, only a maximum of 10,000 men could be placed in the
+field; that the entire United Kingdom did not possess field guns enough
+for 20,000 men; that there were no reserves of muskets or military stores;
+that the dockyards were defenceless against any sudden attack. In 1847 the
+apprehensions caused by these expert disclosures moved Lord Palmerston,
+when Foreign Secretary in the Russell Cabinet, to suggest a loan for
+military works along the Hampshire and Dorsetshire coast. Nothing,
+however, was actually done until the Prince Consort in May 1859 secured
+the issue of instructions to Lords Lieutenant of Counties by the War
+Secretary. These resulted in the raising of the Volunteers. Lord
+Palmerston was himself Prime Minister then. The attitude of Napoleon III.
+towards England and the Austrian war scare of 1859 supplied the Government
+with the leverage for the vote needed to strengthen the coast protection
+of England in accordance with the Prince Consort's proposal of twelve
+years earlier. On June 23, 1860, the earliest Volunteer Review was held in
+Hyde Park. A week or so later, on July 2, the Volunteers first met on
+Wimbledon Common; the competition was opened by Her Majesty discharging
+her rifle and scoring the inaugural bull's eye.
+
+A quarter of a century later the Volunteers had risen from 119,000 in 1860
+to 226,752 in 1886, of whom 220,000 were efficients. At the number then
+reached subject to fluctuations of some thousands periodically they seem
+disposed to remain. In Great Britain 800,000 men of military age have
+passed through the Volunteers. Thus, not counting our natural rampart of
+sea, and a navy which public opinion, if not official patriotism, insists
+on maintaining at a high point, the coast fortresses bristling in nearly
+continuous array from Dover to the Land's End mask behind them little less
+than 1,000,000 citizen soldiers, who with some help from their brethren of
+the Royal Artillery could effectively man our coast batteries.
+
+Military education under teachers of the new school and the class of
+officers thus produced are the immediate outcome of the interest taken in
+the army by the Court at, and subsequently to, the time of the Prince
+Consort. The whole scheme of education under which the commanders of the
+future are trained and a general anxiety for the most beneficent use of
+the Queen's prerogative, were much in the thoughts of the Queen's husband.
+The council of military education was largely the work of the Prince, as
+also was the formation of the Aldershot camp. When a 'governor' was to be
+chosen for the Prince of Wales, the selection made was the first Commander
+at Aldershot and one of the chief members of the education council, Sir
+William Knollys, who, on the Prince reaching his majority became chief of
+his household. When that veteran was appointed Usher of the Black Rod he
+was succeeded as Private Secretary to the Heir Apparent by one so
+thoroughly trained to his administrative methods as his son, Sir Francis
+Knollys;--a man in whom common sense attains as nearly as is conceivable
+to the calibre of absolute genius. It was at the period now mentioned and
+under these influences that officers in the scientific corps began to get
+their proper share of army staff appointments and commands. So entirely
+have the old disabilities of that corps disappeared that to-day, in
+striking contrast to the earlier experience, an officer of Royal Artillery
+or Royal Engineers who in general respects shows the necessary aptitude
+enjoys the same chance as anyone else of staff employment in peace. When
+he has reached the grade of General officer, he will not be at any
+disadvantage in the process of selection for a command. Here merit alone
+tells now. Whatever arm of the Service to which he belongs the best
+candidate practically never fails to be chosen. Generally, in the opinion
+of the best professional judges, the young officer finds the army a
+self-supporting profession. The exact experience seems to be that a young
+man obtaining a commission in the infantry of the Line or in the Artillery
+can look forward at no distant date to marrying in fair comfort, and that
+as a bachelor he requires no larger allowance or private means than he
+would need in any other branch of the public employ, that, for example, of
+the Colonial Service.
+
+In cavalry regiments, or in the Household Brigade, life is more costly. In
+these cases, the young officer could scarcely subsist in comfort without
+private resources equal to those on which young men entering the
+diplomatic service must at the outset of their career be able to count.
+Obviously if the army is to be made a career sufficiently attractive for
+young Englishmen of first-rate abilities as well as of gentle birth, the
+prizes of the profession must not, for the sake of an unwise national
+economy, be too severely diminished in value. The complaint is general and
+just that the emoluments of those who win their way to the top are already
+unattractively small and few. It cannot be a satisfactory state of things
+under which no General officer can afford, without private fortune of his
+own, to take a command. Impolitic retrenchment has touched other positions
+than these. Thus, quite recently the salary of the Military Secretary to
+the Commander-in-Chief has been cut down from L2,100 to L1,500; that of
+Adjutant-General to the Forces from L2,700 to L2,100; that of Governor of
+the Royal Military Academy from L2,000 to L1,500. The unwisdom of these
+reductions and the comparative smallness of the highest army stipends,
+become the more apparent when it is remembered that all military
+appointments, unlike civil appointments from the Primacy of Canterbury
+down to a junior Treasury lordship, are for five years only, that the
+installation in these posts, and the establishment they require are
+necessarily costly; thus the choice is practically limited to men of
+means. Nor does a timocratic[69] scheme of military preferment accord well
+with the democratic ideal of careers unrestrictedly open to all talents.
+
+The reform in the system of officers' education which the Prince Consort
+launched his eldest son has already lived to see practically
+accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer
+at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his
+worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be
+recognised to-day in Thackeray's Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish;
+before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had
+developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course
+candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day,
+naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a
+shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But
+he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of
+history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There
+are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore
+or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps
+something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely
+an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers,--the
+school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was,
+and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.
+
+The man-of-war's-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books,
+with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better
+informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To
+speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has
+felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the
+atmosphere of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed
+through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to
+mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty
+years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between
+what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a
+future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the
+spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some
+looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after
+Albert Smith's medical student.
+
+Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any
+afternoon issuing from the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up
+gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly
+noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley.
+Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of
+the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian
+friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by
+the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of
+Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These
+were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went
+on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained
+to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this
+able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a
+right to be so by having done more than any other man of his generation
+for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who
+stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot,
+Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when
+there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his
+dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the
+intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than
+anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal
+partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of
+over-estimating the good done by his book on the _Operations of War_. This
+was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and
+tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those
+subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war
+out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts
+of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley's great
+treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and
+M'Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by
+years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the
+clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers
+how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the
+past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim
+to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct
+from that of mere information.
+
+Intellectual quality is not the only respect in which there has been
+lately witnessed a change among the officers of the army. The Crimean War
+was followed by many promotions to the grade of officers from the ranks.
+Since then the average number of commissions given in this way seems to
+have been about twenty-five a year. Of this number 16 have gone to
+infantry, 4 to cavalry, and the remainder to other branches of the
+Service. These promotions, suitable as they are to the day of democracy,
+cannot of course affect sensibly the tone or the _personnel_ of the
+officers of the Queen's army, who will continue to be, as they have been,
+men born to the social advantages of gentle station. The social fusion and
+personal intimacy of men whose antecedents and interests differ, though
+their official rank be identical, is not likely ever to be more complete
+than between English and native officers in the Indian Staff Corps
+regiments; though the difficulty in the way of amalgamation proceeds
+probably less from the exclusiveness of the older officer than from the
+indisposition of the new to avail himself of the social opportunities
+placed technically at his disposal.[70]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES
+
+    Great reduction of the navy, as well as of the army, between the
+    Napoleonic wars and the Queen's accession. But silently a reaction
+    soon set in. First beginnings of new policy. Reform in the training of
+    sailors in gunnery; later developments of naval education for officers
+    and men; the existing course compared with the past. Successive stages
+    in the replacement of sails by steam power. A navy transformed by
+    Steam and Iron. Lessons of contemporary experience gradually applied
+    to the English navy, especially those learnt from the American Civil
+    War and the Austro-Italian War.
+
+
+After the Napoleonic wars the British navy, like the British army, was
+greatly reduced. In the Navy List of 1837, 132 vessels are named. Sixty
+years later they had increased to 461. Now the naval policy of successive
+Administrations seems to have acquired the same continuity as belongs
+traditionally to foreign policy. It is a first principle to-day with all
+parties in the State that the iron walls which, as our first line of
+defence, have replaced the walls of wood, should not be reduced to a point
+at which they need fear the combined opposition, if not of Europe, still
+of the two or three most powerful of European fleets. At the moment when
+the great reductions in our fleet were contemplated, Napoleon at St
+Helena, in the course of the conversations recorded by O'Meara,[71] said:
+'It was bad policy to encourage the military mania instead of sticking to
+your marine, which is the real force of your country.' In 1832 the naval
+vote had been 4-1/4 millions. Two years later, it was reduced to 3
+millions. The fleet reductions did not, however, reach their limit until
+the year before the Queen's accession. Then the naval vote was reduced to
+2-3/4 millions, with the dwindling of our squadrons already noted.
+Contrast with this the 1896-97 estimate of L22,774,318, providing for the
+services of a total, every branch included, of 93,750 officers and men,
+inclusive of the 461 ships already named.
+
+The history of the naval transformations through which during the
+Victorian age we have passed, may be described as a succession of
+periodical scares, a steadily progressive instruction by science in its
+latest application to maritime affairs, and by the lessons contained in
+the experience of other countries. The English operations by sea during
+the Crimean War; in a still greater degree perhaps the improvements in
+naval construction, attack and defence, shown in the hostilities between
+the Federal and Confederate navies in the civil war on the other side of
+the Atlantic; later again the lessons taught by the engagements between
+Italian and Austrian squadrons, notably at Lissa;--these are the incidents
+that have gradually taught us, as well as our European neighbours, to
+bring our naval arrangements and appliances up to the latest mark of
+mechanical perfection.
+
+Even during the time when the security brought by relief after long war
+was causing England to neglect her navy, some of those movements which in
+Victorian days have given us our present race of seamen were in progress.
+
+Seven years before the Queen's accession, the 'Excellent,' as a gunnery
+school for sailors, had been established. Soon after its establishment, it
+was gradually enlarged and improved till it has become to-day the chief
+source from which our ships are manned. Before that institution, naval
+gunnery was taught, or not taught, at the discretion of the captains in
+command. From being, as at the beginning of the present age it was, always
+precarious and generally insufficient, the supply of sailors has become
+fairly adequate and regular. Weeks and months used to be wasted before a
+crew could be put together. The social haunts of seamen were visited by
+officers; thus eventually by promises or threats men were induced to join
+the ship. When the commission of the ship came to an end, the sailors were
+thrown adrift, usually returning to their civil vocations until a new job
+was offered. By the time of the Crimean War all this had been changed.
+Apart from the inducements of prize money sailors flocked in animated by a
+real enthusiasm. Thus though in France the naval conscription had existed
+since the time of Colbert the manning of the English fleet proceeded more
+quickly in Crimean days than that of the French. The continuous service
+for ten years certain, with the choice of prolonging that term and
+receiving a pension, has transformed the condition of our navy. Other
+reforms have given us in time of war a reserve of 20,000 sailors of the
+mercantile marine, the equivalents of our rifle volunteers on land. These
+are annually subject to gun and small arm drill on our coasts, and, in the
+opinion of an expert like Captain Eardley Wilmot, will prove adequate to
+any demand.[72]
+
+There have been later reforms than this in the professional education of
+our sailors. Till between forty and fifty years ago men and boys entered
+the navy without any previous training. In, or about 1855, all sailors
+entered the service as boys chiefly from fifteen to sixteen and a half
+years old. They now begin by passing from twelve to eighteen months on
+board the training ship. Here they are instructed in seamanship and
+gunnery. They thus bring with them to sea a practical knowledge of their
+duties. The system which has given us a new race of naval officers dates
+from nearly the same time as that which began to produce a fresh
+generation of seamen. Before 1857, no regular system of training
+midshipmen existed. All their knowledge was actually acquired afloat,
+exactly as Captain Marryat describes. The large ships only were furnished
+with regular naval instructors. Since the 'Britannia' was instituted in
+1857, all midshipmen receive from fifteen months to two years education in
+naval subjects and in mathematics. The educational term is not over when
+the professional career begins. The course of study necessary before the
+examination for Lieutenant can be passed has been greatly expanded.
+Formerly acting mates were supposed to satisfy all educational tests for
+Lieutenant in about three months. Now a year is occupied with these
+studies; the qualifying standard for the pass examination is pitched far
+higher than was ever known before.
+
+The transformation undergone by our navy which strikes the eye most
+forcibly is of course the replacement of the wooden walls by the floating
+ironclad and the substitution of steam for wind-filled sails as the
+propelling power of our fleet. A naval officer, Sir William Symonds,
+instead of a member of the School of Naval Architecture, was appointed
+Surveyor of the Navy; the first step towards improving ship construction
+was taken. Almost on the eve of the Queen's accession, certainly during
+all the earlier thirties, steamers 5 of which in all existed, were only
+used to tow ships of the line in and out of harbour; or at the utmost for
+a trip to Gibraltar or Malta. When Captain Charles Napier predicted that
+steam would soon become to the navy what cavalry is to the army, and have
+the post of honour, the prediction seemed impossible. The adoption of
+steam was a very gradual and tentative process. First the 'Active,' a
+46-gun frigate was fitted with paddles, but not as yet engines. The result
+was progress at a maximum of from 2 to 3 knots an hour. Captain Napier
+carried the experiment a little further; but in no case was steam yet
+exclusively relied on for working the paddles. When Queen Victoria came to
+the throne the navy included 5 steam paddle vessels. Each of them had
+three masts furnished with sails. All were generically known as steam
+sloops. The largest was 830 tons; the maximum of speed from 8 to 10 knots.
+Larger steamers called steam frigates, from 1,200 to 1,800 tons were
+introduced soon after the reign began. They were first actively employed
+at the bombardment of Acre in 1840, and notwithstanding their old lines of
+construction, proved the usefulness of armed ships at sea against forts on
+land. The Acre operations seem to have been important, as showing for the
+first time the skill of Victorian seamen in gunnery and in the management
+of the machinery of steam ships. Similarly, long before this only the
+skill with which English ships were handled had overcome, in their
+encounters with French, the faults of their design. The weight of metal
+thrown by the largest guns on board these earlier craft, _e.g._ the
+'Nelson,' was 2,750 lbs. Further steam progress was marked when, eight
+years after the reign began, the 'Erebus' and 'Terror' in which Sir John
+Franklin's expedition sailed for the Pole, were fitted with the screw.
+
+As yet iron had not been employed on the present scale in ship
+construction. Both in 1857 and 1858 larger ships than had yet been known,
+the 'Niagara' first, the 'Orlando,' the 'Mersey,' afterwards, were built,
+all, however, of wood. Long after steam was partially employed, sails were
+retained. Even during our Black Sea and Baltic operations in Crimean days,
+screw and paddle were still combined with canvas. Such success as our
+fleet secured at this time was not promoted by the excellence of our naval
+organization which according to Captain Eardley Wilmot, was not much
+better than our military.[73] The first lesson as to the new mode of
+motion by sea learnt from the naval operations in Crimean waters was
+recognized by Kinglake and is confirmed by Captain Eardley Wilmot as being
+that 'in regions where land and sea much intertwine, steam is stronger for
+attack than for defence.'
+
+The iron ships now almost as essential to the idea of a navy as steam
+itself, had been tried for different purposes long before our Admiralty
+adopted them; the material had been used, first in 1812 for canal barges,
+secondly, a little later, for the mercantile marine. Iron was not employed
+for our navy till the last days of William IV. The tragic fate of the
+first iron ship, the 'Birkenhead,' may well have prejudiced both the
+Department and the public against the new material.
+
+The iron-plated ship of the modern type appears to have been a French
+idea, first tried by Colonel Paixhaus in 1825. The floating batteries
+employed in the Crimean War in which Napoleon III. was specially
+interested, marked a fresh advance in this direction. Nor does it seem
+easy to overrate the value of the lessons in scientific seamanship derived
+from the French and English operations on the Black Sea, 1854-5. The
+result was the invitation by the Admiralty of designs from all quarters,
+the ordering of the 'Warrior,' designed by Mr Scott Russell, in 1859,
+completed in 1861.[74] This vessel was equipped with a battery extending
+her whole length. Before the fifties were out, the naval and the national
+mind had been familiarized with the idea of mastless ships, long repulsive
+to the national sense of the picturesque at sea. The 'Warrior,' however,
+was furnished with sails in addition to steam and marked an epoch in the
+development not only of the English navy, but of the navies of the world,
+as the first absolutely complete iron ship ever built.
+
+The French ships, earlier in point of time were not equally perfect as
+regards material. They were, in fact, wooden ships cut down and plated
+with iron. Thus with literal truth referring to the launch of 'Warrior'
+could our Naval Minister of the day, Sir John Pakington, describe the
+whole world as interested in the bold experiment. Other ships of the same
+kind soon followed, and of even larger proportions. It is to the credit of
+English workmanship that the building of these vessels at Chatham was
+performed by shipwrights who had hitherto worked only on wood; and that
+the craftmanship shown by them in the new material was pronounced by
+experts to be excellent. Timber having been definitely superseded by
+metal, there followed the long and technical controversy about the
+relative merits of turret and broadside armaments. The concentration of
+guns into a single citadel on board ship was first in England powerfully
+advocated by Sir E. Reed. Since then, the naval warfare between Federals
+and Confederates on the other side of the Atlantic, followed by the
+exciting manoeuvres off Cherbourg between the 'Alabama' and the
+'Keersage,' and in Europe the naval portions of the Austro-Italian war of
+1866 have taught lessons the full results of which are not, perhaps even
+yet, perfectly realized. So long is the experimental stage which has to be
+traversed before the newest system of maritime defence and attack with its
+complicated machinery can be said entirely to have reached what is alone
+to be called properly the scientific stage.[75]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE
+
+    The Prince Consort's influence in organizing pursuits and departments
+    of knowledge, a characteristic of the Victorian age. The Prince not
+    only the advocate of the 1851 Exhibition, but most active in the
+    movement that has given us South Kensington as an instrument in the
+    knowledge of art and science. The British Association foreshadowed by
+    a like organization in Germany which may have impressed the youthful
+    Prince Albert, but certainly set the example to the leaders of English
+    science. Like its German forerunners the British Association gradually
+    grew in popular favour. Its progress as shown by facts and figures.
+    Modern course of science summarized. The transforming influences of
+    science traced in all intellectual pursuits.
+
+
+If in a few words the contrast between the England of the later and the
+earlier part of the Queen's reign were to be summed up, it might be
+expressed by the single word, organization. For that process, as for its
+most impressive results, Victorian England is indebted primarily to the
+husband of its Queen. To-day Englishmen are reminded locally and visibly
+of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by the elaborately picturesque memorial of
+the man who spared no pains to secure its success, situated, as that
+monument is, on the spot where the great glass house once stood.
+
+That event was the earliest triumph of the new epoch of culture including
+science in its application to the conveniences or luxuries of daily life.
+From 1851 too, may be dated the organized encouragement of the inventor in
+all departments of scientific ingenuity.
+
+Such a world's show might in due course have been devised by the wit of
+man, even if the Queen's husband had not recalled for reproduction in
+England the idea of the Frankfort fairs of the sixteenth century.[76] It
+is quite certain that without the Prince's personal enterprise and
+sustained supervision, and but for the invaluable co-operation of the late
+Sir Henry Cole, the movement which has transformed the Court suburb from
+laundry grounds, or riding schools, into a centre of artistic or
+scientific education for the whole country had it taken place at all,
+would not have occurred till many years later than it actually did. The
+contrast between the South Kensington of the Queen's accession year with
+its suburban desolations, and of the sixtieth anniversary year, with its
+palaces of art, its private mansions rivalling those of Park Lane, its
+Imperial Institute, its provision for educational classes by day, for
+musical fetes by lamplight, might have been indefinitely postponed.
+
+The name of Her Majesty written in the clear bold hand of youth when she
+became Queen may be read to-day in the register of the Royal Society. That
+entry prefigured the close connection between science and the Court which,
+for the first time in the history of the monarchy, was to signalize her
+reign. The period preparatory to the enthronement of science and art
+beneath the glass roof of Paxton was of scarcely less educational value to
+the Kingdom than, to most appliances of daily life, the Exhibition itself
+was to prove. The instructive addresses delivered at this time by the
+Prince Consort, now to a gathering of artists and writers, now to more
+popular audiences at Birmingham or elsewhere, may seem to those who read
+them to-day familiar or even commonplace. They were then entire novelties,
+not only from their authorship, but from their subject.
+
+In 1897 it appears the most natural and suitable thing in the world that a
+Royal Prince should vary the more strictly ceremonial functions of State
+by opening an art gallery in London, a science school in the provinces, an
+Imperial Institute, a Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington. Fifty
+years since such a part seemed of questionable wisdom to some, of
+dangerous precedent for the monarchy to others; at the best a foreign
+experiment which the Queen's husband would most wisely have left unmade.
+In the sixtieth year of the reign, there is no social gathering or private
+dwelling, there is scarcely a village inn, or country cottage, or a
+seaside lodging house, that by the paper on its walls, the designs of its
+furniture, the suspended pictures cut from illustrated prints, fails to
+remind one with eyes to see such things the extent to which ideas of art
+or ornament that began with the Prince and Sir Henry Cole have directly
+from South Kensington penetrated into every corner of the land, and made
+their humanizing influence felt beneath the roof of peasant as well as of
+peer.
+
+Even in the thirtieth year of the reign, these forces had scarcely
+advanced beyond the embryonic stage. Had the Prince Consort himself
+claimed visibly to exercise the Royal prerogative, on which as a fact he
+never presumed, he could scarcely have given a greater shock to the
+prejudices of those high in social position and near the Court who
+inherited from Hanoverian times a contempt for all distinctions save those
+of birth and rank.
+
+Up to the moment of his death the Queen's husband was endeavouring to make
+his wife's Court a centre not only of achievement in war, of statesmanship
+in peace, but of letters, art, science, and of the most famous among their
+contemporary ornaments. Death prevented the design from ever being carried
+out completely. The names of Alfred Tennyson and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
+are enough to remind one of the direction actually travelled by the Prince
+in producing some resemblance between the Windsor where a Victoria
+reigned, and the Weimar whose intellectual glories, a Goethe had typified.
+Here again the intellectual revolution which the Court began has been
+continued by those who represent the Crown to-day.
+
+Such knowledge of physical science as the Prince Consort's son possesses
+was largely imparted to him by the teacher Faraday, who was his father's
+choice. Appropriately enough, therefore, in the winter of 1897 did the
+Prince of Wales assist in founding the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal
+Society. The progress now spoken of seems to be symbolized by the
+acceptance of the word 'science' as the nearly exclusive synonym for that
+physicism which is strictly only one of the divisions that generically it
+includes. From the check to the regular teaching of physical knowledge at
+the disorganization spread through the world by the collapse of the Roman
+Empire, and by the concentration of human thought upon politics and
+theology, instead of those subjects first expounded by Thales, after him
+by Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy, till the day of the modern doctors had
+dawned, the conquests achieved by man over nature were inconsiderable.
+Francis Bacon's equalization of human _ingenia_, and his elaborately
+tabulated apparatus for studying phenomena, created an appetite for
+mastering the arcana of the visible universe, but did not satisfy it. As
+the Prince Consort clearly saw, Nature's secret had been yielded in the
+past, and would be surrendered in the future, not to founders of systems
+like a Verulam or a Descartes, but to actual discoverers who did not owe
+even their methods to the Schools.
+
+Half a century after Bacon's labours, Newton, with no help from Baconian
+methods discovered the law of gravitation, and with it the unity of
+sequences which pervade material creation. The cause of the slight
+progress of physical science whether before or immediately after Bacon
+formulated his method may be partly explained by the want of the material
+appliances for physical investigation. These in anything like their
+mechanical perfection of to-day are not much older than our present era.
+The agencies of glass, of alcohol, of microscopes and of other such
+appliances were as unknown to the physicists of Alexandria, of Athens, or
+of the Middle Ages as the electric wire itself. Where the subject matter,
+the heavenly bodies, the structure of the human frame, could be studied
+without elaborate machinery, the contemporaries or successors of the
+Ionian physicists who searched for the origin of all things in some single
+element, air, fire or water, seem rudely to have anticipated later
+discoveries. The Aristotelian philosophy and the rudiments of practical
+medicine, preserved together by Averrhoes, Avicenna, and the whole school
+of the Arabian thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, descended
+in each other's company to the Italian schoolmen, and were delivered by
+them to English students. Thus, on the eve of the present century, the
+indestructibility of matter, however Protean the forms of its
+manifestations, had been ascertained by European chemists. The year of the
+Queen's accession was also that of the publication of Whewell's _History
+of the Inductive Sciences_.
+
+In this age, as in that of Bacon, great lawyers have taken a foremost
+place among enquirers into the nature of things. Lord Brougham did
+something to methodize, and more to popularize, the facts of science. A
+greater lawyer than Brougham, Sir William Grove, Justice of the Common
+Pleas first, Judge of the High Court of Justice afterwards, was also
+professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution during the
+first decade of the reign. His discoveries with regard to the correlation
+of forces had not been entirely formulated when Dr Whewell's book
+appeared. Nor had Charles Darwin completed in his retirement at Down, in
+Kent, those researches which in 1859, gave the world _The Origin of
+Species_. This book, if the work of any single man ever did so, created an
+epoch, not in physical enquiry alone, but in every branch of human
+knowledge conducted on scientific principles.
+
+The Victorian Court had begun to encourage science before Darwin's great
+book was published. In 1847 the Prince Consort became Chancellor of the
+University of Cambridge, and in this capacity he was naturally brought
+into official and friendly relations with Dr Whewell, then Master of
+Trinity, as well as with other English leaders of scientific thought. The
+growing success of the British Association after its inaugural congress
+had been held, is not unjustly connected with the Prince's name. The idea
+of an annual parliament of learning was, like that of the Great Exhibition
+itself, not of English origin. Even in Germany, where the first trial of
+it had been made, prosperity had been gradual. At Halle, Frankfort,
+Dresden, and Munich, notwithstanding the personal distinction of its chief
+promoter Professor Oken, and its encouragement by many of the enlightened
+Kinglets who then divided the rule of the Fatherland, during the second
+decade of the century when the enterprise began, its most noticeable
+meeting does not seem to have numbered more than from 200 to 400. At
+Leipsic in 1822, the attendance was barely two score; six years later in
+Berlin, it amounted to 464. Before that assemblage probably had much
+impressed the young Prince Albert, it had stimulated the most
+distinguished representatives of scientific thought in England. Sir David
+Brewster, Sir John Herschel, Sir Humphry Davy based, upon the German
+example, an appeal to the English Government. The decline of arts and
+science in this country was attributed to their total neglect by the
+State, to the exclusion of men eminent in either of these departments from
+the titular decorations of the country, and to the heavy exactions from
+scientific inventors imposed by the fees payable under the patent law.
+
+More than two or three decades of the Victorian age had passed before art,
+science, and letters began to receive the State recognition now firmly
+acknowledged as their due. Both Bulwer Lytton and Macaulay had served in
+Parliament or in office fifteen years before they were ennobled.[77]
+Tennyson was the first English poet raised to the peerage who knew no
+politics save those of patriotism; to the same epoch, too, belongs a like
+honour bestowed upon three men of science at successive intervals:--now a
+physician, Playfair, now the physicist, Lord Kelvin, and again the latest,
+and to not a few the most welcome and significant of all, the inventor of
+the antiseptic treatment which has saved so many lives and limbs, who will
+henceforth be known as Lord Lister.
+
+It is suggestively prophetic of the new era which in the next reign was to
+open for letters, science and art in their relations to the English State,
+that while the country had been preparing for a revolution peaceful but
+complete in politics, there had assembled at York, September 29, 1831, a
+company which prognosticated the coming revolution throughout the whole
+region of popular thought and culture. The York meeting mustered less than
+200. It was intended only to launch the programme of the society. 'To
+point out the lines of direction in which the researches of science should
+move, to state the problems to be solved, the data to be fixed, to assign
+to every class of mind a definite task, to amend the laws relating to
+patents, to agitate for a Government provision to encourage and reward
+scientific research;'--these are the objects which Mr Harcourt enumerated
+in the first official document of the body. As proof of the vitality of
+the revolution which that Yorkshire company, less than 200 strong,
+introduced, it is enough to mention Dr Rae's Arctic voyages of 1853-4, the
+Challenger expedition of 1872, and the last Oxford University Commission
+which at the instance of the first scientific Premier England has ever
+known, Lord Salisbury, endowed scientific research as one of the estates
+of the realm, and has done something more than relieve that seat of old
+learning from the reproach of discouraging the newest sciences. Little
+perhaps did the doctors of divinity, and classical professors, when, on
+June 18, 1832, they welcomed the second senate of savants to its session
+on the Isis, imagine themselves to be fostering a movement which would
+partially oust from its emoluments and honours in their own Schools the
+old learning, and give to the new not only professorships for its
+teachers, but scholarships for the reward of its learners. As against the
+York meeting in 1831 of not much more than 100, the Oxford meeting of the
+Reform Act year attracted 700. In another twelvemonth the Cambridge
+meeting of June 25, 1833, was attended by 900. The Edinburgh meeting of
+September 8, 1834, mustered 1,298.
+
+Since then the most noticeable figures have been 1855--2,133, 1861--3,138;
+while 1887 crowns the list with 3,838. The figures necessarily are to some
+extent governed by the importance or attractiveness of the towns at which
+the meetings are held. The names on the books of the society are more than
+half a million. So progressive a thing is English science. The meeting
+itself is only a part of the work done. Throughout the year committees are
+investigating various branches of science prominent at the moment, and
+preparing their reports to be included in the Annual General Report, a
+document of over 1,000 pages. Social satire at first made merry over the
+learned ladies and gentlemen who combined mutual laudation of themselves
+with picnics, excursions and pleasure parties of all sorts in interesting
+neighbourhoods at the most agreeable season of the year. To-day no one
+denies the British Association the credit of having promoted the discovery
+of new facts in science, or at least having been the first agency to draw
+public attention to them. Within the last few years, it was at one of
+these Association meetings (Liverpool 1870) that Professor Huxley
+pronounced against the popular theory of spontaneous generation of the
+lower forms of life, thus placing on record his adherence to the theory of
+biogenesis as opposed to abiogenesis; life, in other words, could in every
+grade of creation only come from life, not from the corruption of death.
+Thus was a physical tradition that from the earliest times down to the
+seventeenth century had held its own, finally repudiated by the greatest
+authority of his day on all biological matters.
+
+Even this pronouncement seems to have been anticipated. A physicist less
+famous than Huxley, Schwann, some half a century before Huxley's day, is
+said to have been the first to criticize the abiogenesis doctrine as
+supported by no sufficient evidence. The tendency towards unity in
+multiplicity declared by the old Greek thinkers to characterize all true
+science marked the doctrines of the correlation of force as well as of the
+conservation of energy, both of them connected with this age. It was also
+inherent in the theory of evolution as explained by Charles Darwin in
+1859, 28 years, that is, after the British Association for the first time
+met. Even the great Kentish physicist of our day was not entirely the
+first in the field with the discovery that was to transform the whole
+region of thought. Early in the last century De Maillet had applied the
+principle of the survival of the fittest to the world of human life. On
+the eve of the present century Charles Darwin's ancestor, Erasmus, as well
+as German philosophers still more famous, elaborated with more ability
+and knowledge the same idea, which also underlay the discussions between
+the French Academicians, Cuvier and St Hilaire. However the ground may
+have been prepared for him, so far as any single man can be said to have
+discovered any great idea, Charles Darwin must be accounted the author of
+the theory of evolution as it is now understood.
+
+Whewell's survey of the inductive sciences at the beginning of the reign
+dimly forecasts some discoveries which have since been verified. It
+contains no word prophetic of the doctrine by which, in the countless
+possibilities of its application, every branch of science in little more
+than a quarter of a century was potentially if not actually to be
+transformed. The eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's accession
+has witnessed the completion by Mr Herbert Spencer of the monumental
+treatise that applies the doctrines of Darwin to subjects that Darwin had
+not specially studied, perhaps with results which Darwin himself had not
+entirely foreseen. Whether a reaction against Darwinism has already, as
+some think, set in; how far, and with what consequences, that movement may
+go, are as yet only matters of speculation.
+
+The exploration of the Italian soil has caused many chapters of Roman
+history to be rewritten more in accordance with the older traditions than
+with the newer learning. Like processes near the sites of Babylon and
+Nineveh have done much to vindicate the authors of the Pentateuch as
+chroniclers of fact; and have even created a reaction in favour of the
+Mosaic cosmogony, and the sacred narrative of the Deluge. Evolution as a
+philosophy is not altogether rejected by physicists of orthodoxy so
+unimpeachable as Mr St. George Mivart. More lately it has been discovered
+that an Anglican divine may keep an open mind on the subject of Darwinism
+and yet be made Archbishop of Canterbury. To the unlearned English vulgar
+the question is whether the visible universe and its inhabitants are more
+likely to have developed themselves by a series of indescribable processes
+than to have developed, as the Scriptural tradition has been interpreted
+as teaching, by a Power external to them and directing every stage of
+their progress. If it be said that evolution is the method in which that
+superhuman Power who is behind and above all often chooses to act, there
+is no reason why the occupant of Lambeth should not be as good an
+evolutionist as the scientific investigator whose nearest country
+neighbour at Down, Sir John Lubbock, appropriately presided over the
+Jubilee meeting of the British Association at York.
+
+The transformations effected in other departments of physical study during
+our age are not less remarkable. Many of them have been appreciably
+assisted by the social intercourse of mind with mind which the British
+Association has so signally promoted. Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ was
+published in pre-Association days and seven years before the Victorian age
+began. Its influence was in the same direction as that of Darwin; it
+suggested, that is, the enquiry why the natural processes that are said to
+explain the globe we inhabit should not explain also the presence of man
+upon it. Biology and anthropology, the two studies which have most been
+promoted by the Darwinian doctrine, can consequently be pronounced with
+truth the creations of the present age. As far back as Elizabethan times,
+electrical phenomena had been systematically studied. Many of these
+manifestations, however, especially their relations with heat and light,
+as well as most of their adaptations to the offices of daily life, belong
+to the era that opened in 1837.
+
+Photography of course was an unknown art in pre-Victorian days. Even when
+its predecessor, the Daguerreotype, discovered in 1839, had been
+considerably improved upon, it still remained a contrivance rather for
+distorting the human features than for faithfully reproducing them as
+photography does upon glass or paper, and with the addition of natural
+colours as photography now bids fair soon to have done.
+
+These achievements of a science which is generically new have not been
+accompanied with inactivity on the part of those sciences which, like
+astronomy, are probably in one shape or another nearly coeval with
+Creation itself. Long before the planet was actually discovered, the
+telescopes that swept the heavens had brought within their ken the spot at
+which in 1846 Neptune was proved to be. If the number of the heavenly
+bodies has not of late received many additions, new asteroids are
+constantly swimming into sight in the quarters where they had been
+suspected; comets, less looked for than these apparitions, are often
+announced to have flashed themselves upon the observer's sight.
+
+The influence of scientific thought and conceptions upon the language of
+literature as well as of daily life, is only less remarkable than the
+material conquests of science themselves. The most instructive instance of
+this is afforded by the scholarly and illustrious woman of genius who will
+always be known to fame as George Eliot. The popular idea of Mr Herbert
+Spencer having influenced her studies and her phraseology is not quite
+true. Mr Spencer was her own, and her companion's, friend. Her diction in
+her later works was inspired by the intellectual forces of her day. Of the
+formative power of these she was probably herself unconscious. If Herbert
+Spencer had a place among them, he was at least only one of several. From
+George Eliot, in that phase of her genius now under consideration, there
+has sprung a school. However original the gift of writers like Mrs Humphry
+Ward, it seems unlikely that their talents would have taken the direction
+they have received and found their expression in the language they employ
+unless the author of _Adam Bede_ and _Middlemarch_ had first supplied a
+new want or created a fresh intellectual taste by a style that our
+forefathers might have admired, but might not always have been able to
+understand.
+
+Of the many transformations wrought by Victorian science, not the
+least;--unscientific people might think it the greatest--is the
+assimilation of the idiom of fiction to that of the text books of the
+schools. The entire ethos of our oral diction not less than our
+literature has been revolutionized by science. When a parliamentary
+speaker illustrates his argument by a metaphor, it is not, as his
+forerunners once did, to the Latin and Greek classics, or even to
+literature at all, but to the laboratory, to the dissecting room, or to
+the crucible that he most frequently goes for his _trope_. The similes of
+the Attic masterpieces are taken habitually from those operations with
+which their naval empire familiarized the Athenian mind. Nor can these
+metaphors be understood without some remembrance of the processes which
+marine affairs involve. A similar acquaintance with the later operations
+of science is scarcely less useful for a proper appreciation of the most
+characteristic beauties of Victorian prose, by whatever master displayed.
+This dispossession of the literary by the scientific is universal.
+Following unconsciously perhaps the example of a great statesman, those
+who have in our day most widely differed from him on national affairs, a
+Randolph Churchill, or a Charles Stewart Parnell have reproduced the taste
+of a Salisbury in finding their recreations, not in the _belles lettres_
+that were congenial to the day of a Pitt or a Canning, but in the
+researches that a Tyndall, a Huxley, a Thomson, have popularized.
+
+Galileo's astronomical views found a useful ally by the incisive raillery
+of his literary style. The admirable prose of a Huxley and his fellow
+labourers has been no less effective for popularizing scientific studies
+with the public they have addressed. The social urbanity with which
+Nature and training have endowed Sir John Lubbock has prepossessed not a
+few on his own level in life in favour of those branches of physical
+enquiry that have enabled him to rehabilitate the moral character of the
+autumnal wasp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+CECILIA'S TRIUMPHS
+
+    The revolution in the conditions of English music--effected since its
+    first encouragement by the Victorian Court--illustrated by a contrast
+    between the social status of the musician to-day, and forty years ago.
+    Music always a tradition of the present dynasty. Handel. English
+    machinery for teaching music instituted under the Georgian era, and
+    perfected under the Victorian. Has English organization for musical
+    teaching outstripped English capacity for learning? Certain reforms
+    approved by high musical experts. Other individual agencies than those
+    of the Court favourable to Music during this century. Mendelssohn; his
+    encouragement of John Parry, the forerunner of Corney Grain, and
+    Arthur Cecil. Sir Charles Halle, Herr Joachim, Grove, Sullivan.
+    Anglo-German ladies. Crystal Palace Concerts.
+
+
+The transformation, at once artistic and scientific, with which the Prince
+Consort as the past representative of the Crown, and his descendents as
+its present representatives, will always be chiefly associated, remains to
+be glanced at. One need not have reached middle age to be able to realize
+the revolution in the English capacity for the enjoyment as well as for
+the performance of music, vocal or instrumental, that has taken place
+since the Victorian age began. A dowdily dressed young woman, alighting
+from an omnibus at the street corner, trailing after her a fragment of the
+straw that littered the floor of her conveyance; her clothes, what was
+then called shabby genteel. She carried under her arm a roll of papers or
+a portfolio; she was insolently eyed by the servant who opened the door of
+the house in Portland Place at which she timidly knocked, and
+contemptuously motioned to take a seat in the hall until the drawing room
+was ready for the music lesson to be given to the young lady of the
+family. A hungry looking gentleman, of foreign aspect, and slightly French
+or German accent, also descended from an omnibus in the same quarter; he
+bore in his hand a black case which might be from its appearance a
+sarcophagus for a deceased cat, but which might be identified by more
+experienced observers as containing a fiddle. He was received by the
+servant at the front door not more ceremoniously than the instructress of
+a few hours earlier. This was the proprietor of a little orchestra which
+attended private dances. A few hours after he might be accompanying with
+his fiddle the wind instruments of his troupe, for Thackeray's Mrs Timmins
+gave that very night her little dance. If the musician played well, and
+pleased the head footman as well as the mistress of the house, he might as
+a special favour be invited downstairs to help the servants finish the
+cold chicken and the champagne heeltaps when the guests had gone.
+
+To-day the lady who condescends to teach the art of pianoforte execution
+to the young people in a popular London quarter drives up to the house in
+her own victoria and would no more be kept waiting a minute for her
+appointment than if she were a duchess in her own right. The accomplished
+foreigner who plays the violin alights from a brougham drawn by a pair of
+thoroughbreds. If he is to be induced to honour a friend in Grosvenor
+Square with his company at dinner, the invitation must be given at least
+three weeks beforehand. The 'master' must choose his own fellow guests,
+and supervise the menu before it is finally decided on; the dinner itself
+must be so arranged that to a moment it will occupy the time which the
+great man prescribes. The conversation must be so contrived as to
+coruscate with epigram, and to fascinate with anecdotes all warranted to
+be new, lest the diner of the evening should have the slightest touch of
+boredom. If these conditions are not satisfied, this arbiter of taste may
+refuse to sit through the meal. He is the chartered libertine of the
+dining rooms and drawing rooms of the great.
+
+England has always possessed a considerable school of national composers.
+These might have achieved the highest triumphs of genius without acquiring
+a fraction of that social ascendancy for their art which it has gradually
+won. Under the auspices of the Prince Consort first, the patronage of the
+Court was secured for the art of St Cecilia. That day already mentioned on
+which Lady Lyttelton first heard the Queen's husband playing on the organ
+at Windsor was an eventful one for the social esteem of music in the
+adopted country of the Royal executant. After this came the Prince's
+directorship of the Ancient Concerts, and the arrangement of its
+programmes on special occasions by himself. The club principle during the
+married life of the Queen had in its popular illustration not gone beyond
+infancy. Otherwise, one of the Royal Family would, as he has since done,
+regularly have handled the conductor's baton; while for the special
+amusement of another a series of smoking concerts might as to-day have
+been arranged in Piccadilly palaces.
+
+Music of course has always been a tradition of English Royalty. The Royal
+Academy of Music now domiciled in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, was
+founded in 1822 with the King as patron. It was opened March 24, 1823,
+with a small and precarious attendance of pupils seldom exceeding two or
+three score, even at the date of its receiving the Royal charter, June 23,
+1830. The number of students at Christmas 1896 was 500, all of whom were
+regular in their visits. The Royal College of Music at Kensington Gore was
+first founded as the National Training School in 1875. Its avowed motive
+was to honour the Consort's memory. It was due partly to the efforts of
+the Prince of Wales with a Committee of which the then Duke of Edinburgh
+was chairman. He was also a most indefatigable promoter of the whole
+scheme from the very first. Its first Principal was Dr, now Sir Arthur,
+Sullivan. Some years later, again at the Heir Apparent's initiative, as a
+result of a meeting held at St James's Palace, February 28, 1882, this
+institution was re-formed. It was opened in the building formerly occupied
+by the National Training School by the Prince and Princess of Wales, May
+7, 1883. Of this Sir George Grove was the first director, holding the post
+till Christmas 1894 when he was succeeded by Dr. C. H. H. Parry. The
+Charter of the Royal College was obtained in 1883. It has to-day an
+endowment of L130,000 which provides some 60 different scholarships. This,
+too, in its existing shape was opened by the Prince Consort's descendants,
+the Prince and Princess of Wales; it had at the Christmas of 1896, 300
+regular pupils. A very important part of the institution consists of the
+Donaldson museum of musical instruments; these were given to the College
+by Mr G. Donaldson in 1894.
+
+The Guildhall School of Music was founded in 1880 by that same Corporation
+which has done more perhaps than any other single body since the Queen's
+accession to promote the humanities of life. Its first Principal was Mr
+Weist Hill; he was succeeded by Sir Joseph Barnby, who again in 1896 was
+followed by Mr W. H. Cummings. This Guildhall School is undoubtedly the
+most popular institution of the kind which we possess. Its pupils at the
+Christmas of 1896 were 3,496. The other great metropolitan school of music
+is Trinity College, London. This was incorporated in 1875 under the
+Companies Act. Six years later, in 1881, it was reorganized upon a wider
+basis. The number of pupils at Christmas 1896 shows a steady increase.
+
+These and other institutions less important are only some of the national
+monuments to the progress of the study of music as an art during the last
+two or three decades.
+
+The organization and the educational machinery of music have now, in the
+opinion of those competent judges to whom the writer of these lines is
+indebted, reached a point beyond which further development is neither
+necessary nor desirable. Production and execution leave perhaps little to
+be wished for. Appreciation, however, of musical excellence is not
+universally proportionate to musical activity. Audiences more
+intelligently critical and better trained are apparently the chief
+_desiderata_, if composers and performers are to rise above mediocrity.
+Instruction in the art now spoken of has, of course, shared in the
+advantages incidental to the transformation of London from an insular into
+a cosmopolitan capital. As a result, the best teachers from all countries
+are available for the London learner.
+
+Nor in this respect does England to-day, as thirty years ago it did,
+compare disadvantageously with Leipsic, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgardt. There
+seems however reason to fear that, like Gwendolen Harleth in _Daniel
+Deronda_ before Klesmer, we fail in that important and indefinable
+quality, style. The best critics complain that, when a student has been
+through the regular course here, and has perhaps become a first rate
+technical musician, he seldom seems to get any further; he never, in other
+words, develops any individuality. To some extent this result follows the
+collective teaching of all academies. The area of level mediocrity is,
+however, it may be feared, larger here than in France or Germany. There is
+more of delicacy and daintiness in the French student; there is more of
+individual expansion and thoughtfulness in the German. Both are trained in
+academies. The quicker intuition and more intelligent appreciation of
+French and German audiences are in the opinion of unprejudiced critics
+attributed to this cause. Hence the expert, if consulted by an English
+student, probably would advise him to go abroad for a year or two when
+his technical course has been finished in England. Unfortunately the
+advice too often resembles that of a medical man who might prescribe a
+generous diet and a glass of port wine to an invalid labourer, earning
+less than L1 a week.
+
+In respect of education, cheapness and free scholarships seem to have been
+carried at least as far as is conducive to the real interest of learners
+in this country. A reform, favoured by many good judges, is to make
+payment for teaching universal with a few exceptions; then to give to
+students of promise an allowance sufficient to enable them to go abroad
+and complete their education. As it is, some risk is run of gratuitously
+training mediocrities, launching them on professional careers which can
+only land them in disappointment and poverty.
+
+The late Prince Consort, though the most highly placed, is only one of
+several individuals whose personal influence has conspicuously encouraged
+the growth and the gratification of a musical taste more or less
+cultivated. The discussion which agitated English taste in the eighteenth
+century as to the merits of German and other music is summed up in a
+familiar epigram as the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee:--
+
+  Some say, compared to Bononcini,
+  That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny;
+  Others aver that he to Handel
+  Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
+
+The commanding genius of the great German composer is enough to account
+for the traditional complaint that native genius in England has been
+eclipsed by foreign products. The Elector of Hanover had recognized
+Handel's genius before he became George I. of England, but began his reign
+by showing little favour to the composer, who had absented himself without
+leave from his duties at the Electoral Court. Already in Queen Anne's
+reign Handel's _Te Deum_ had celebrated in St Paul's Cathedral the
+conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. It was not till after his _Water
+Music_ had procured his restoration to favour that the new English monarch
+took him back into his service. Gradually, however, till in 1741 it was
+confirmed by the _Messiah_ produced in Dublin and by his operas in London,
+the triumph of the German over the Italian school thus advanced. Neither
+then nor later did it involve neglect of the great English composer of the
+seventeenth century, our own Henry Purcell,[78] organist at Westminster
+Abbey at eighteen years of age, and author of a greater number of songs,
+anthems, operas, glees and cantatas, at once famous and popular, than
+probably any other musician whom England has produced. Felix Mendelssohn
+of Hamburg, not less precocious than our own Purcell, also at eighteen
+produced an opera. His personal influence in England was scarcely less
+great than that of Handel, and of course tended towards the further
+popularization of Teutonic art: he lived on terms of intimate friendship
+during his different sojourns in this country with English musicians. The
+popular and accomplished pianoforte improvisatore, John Parry, who was
+familiar to the English public of this age from his connection with the
+German-Reed company, 1860-9, the forerunner of the Corney Grain and Arthur
+Cecil of a later day, might almost be called Mendelssohn's pupil. By
+Mendelssohn, Parry was first encouraged to adopt music as a profession;
+the present writer well remembers how he heard from John Parry himself the
+account of Mendelssohn's listening during half a winter night to the piano
+improvisations devised by the versatile genius of the then young man.
+
+Charles Halle, born in Westphalia in 1819, and so just ten years younger
+than Mendelssohn was driven from Paris to London by the Revolution of
+1848, to which England was indebted for such an influx of foreign genius
+of all kinds to her shores. Beethoven, like Handel, first became known in
+Europe through a German Elector, him of Cologne. He died in 1827. Though
+the charm and fame of Beethoven had been steadily growing upon English
+critics and musicians first and upon the general public afterwards, to
+Charles Halle[79] belongs the distinction of having done much towards
+popularizing this great author of classical music with the English public.
+The Musical Union which preceded the Popular Concerts was then directed by
+John Ella, whose programmes included Beethoven's sonatas, played by Halle
+with great applause.
+
+The English public, if by voluntary culture it had not been disciplined
+into a genuine admiration for Teutonic music, as interpreted by various
+foreign executants, would have been wooed to its love by the educating
+influences of the Hungarian violinist Herr Joachim, deservedly reverenced
+by all circles of English society, ever receiving his homage with the
+dignified modesty of great genius. This director of the Royal Academy of
+Music at Berlin had, before that appointment, received the degree of
+Doctor of Music at Cambridge. The bow with which he elicited entrancing
+strains from his instrument was a social sceptre as well. When George
+Eliot was writing _Daniel Deronda_, Herr Joachim's social and artistic
+ascendancy had just reached its culminating point. A scientific musician
+herself, George Eliot visited those circles where first-rate music was to
+be heard. No writer more artistically found the suggestions of her
+characters in real life. The Herr Joachim whom English society knew is
+reflected so strikingly in the Herr Klesmer of whom the _Daniel Deronda_
+public reads as to warrant the conjecture that the master before whom
+Gwendolen Harleth trembled had been suggested by the violinist at whose
+feet the aristocracy of birth, beauty, wit, intellect and wealth with
+unfeigned admiration knelt down.
+
+Other individuals deserve a place in the catalogue of those who have
+helped on the musical movement of our times. Sir George Grove made a
+substantial addition to the musical wealth of the world by contributing a
+chapter to its musical romance; that which relates his discovery of the
+lost scores of Schubert in a Vienna cupboard. His dictionary of music will
+survive when the honourable record of his Directorship of the Royal
+College of Music may be forgotten. Sir Arthur Sullivan has not only
+illustrated with melodies, that have at once caught the ear of the town,
+the fantastic conceptions of Mr W. S. Gilbert's intellect; he has used his
+personal popularity on all levels of social London to diffuse improved
+notions of musical taste. Agencies of the same kind, collective as well as
+individual have not, during the Victorian age, been wanting.
+
+The _personnel_ of upper middle class society in England has been
+perceptibly affected by the entrance into it through the gate of marriage,
+of ladies of German origin, of great taste and accomplishments generally,
+and like all their nation, devoted to music. Hence among other things the
+increased patronage of the Italian Opera, of all high-class concerts in
+public as well as of musical artists in private by that well to do section
+of the Queen's subjects which combines the tastes of culture and of birth
+with the resources of trade. Its composition of the veritable materials of
+Paxton's Glass House for the Great Exhibition is not the only respect in
+which the Crystal Palace at Sydenham is connected with that enterprise of
+the Prince Consort as a reformer of English taste. To mention only its
+connection with the subject now being specially considered, the Crystal
+Palace has maintained its full orchestra since 1854. These concerts have
+been admittedly during near half a century prime instruments of
+metropolitan and suburban civilization. They have practically
+revolutionized the home life of tens of thousands of the prosperous
+commercial class which fixes its household gods out of earshot of Bow
+Bells. The impulse thus given to the study of the art on a basis wider and
+deeper than anything formerly existing can scarcely be exaggerated. It is
+of itself enough to explain why the number of English students of music in
+the nineties is so vastly larger than it was during any of the preceding
+decades.[80]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART
+
+    English art stimulated and strengthened to a degree second only to
+    science by the movements with which, through the Prince Consort, the
+    Victorian Court identified itself. Contrast between the social
+    consideration of artists now and fifty years ago. From Gandish to
+    Gaston Phoebus. Progress in the association of art with the government
+    of England, and general gain to all concerned in consequence. Gradual
+    endowment of art by the State and establishment of the existing
+    machinery for teaching art and displaying its triumphs to a cultivated
+    public. The work of South Kensington. Success of the Academy tested by
+    figures and facts. Reciprocal benefits to art workers and art patrons.
+    Foreign recognition of English art. The past, present and future of
+    English sculpture.
+
+
+The popularization and improvement of art in all its manifestations
+followed the 1851 Exhibition and the initiative of the Prince Consort in a
+degree second only to the development of science and music themselves.
+That the Court of Victoria and Albert should have been to the painters of
+a later day what the Court of Charles I. was to Van Dyck could not have
+been expected. The Consort's interest and judgment in pictures were
+inferior to his genuine concern for science. The complacency with which he
+regarded the canvases of Winterhalter could not promise much enthusiasm in
+the patronage of English painters. His rescue from disorder and decay of
+the Raphael cartoons, long before the Prince's day belonging to our
+Court, but by him first properly cared for and arranged, was not a work of
+creation, but was one of artistic development. His were the active mind
+and useful hand that rendered available for national instruction or
+delight the hereditary treasures of Crown and country which before his day
+were not indeed unknown, but were not perhaps properly appreciated in the
+country which possessed them. The rise of a moneyed and fairly cultivated
+class in English society was the chief element in the improvement of the
+social and commercial position of the English painter. These agencies
+happily coincided with the example set by the Prince to his successors of
+assisting at the great artistic gatherings of the year.
+
+Before May 3, 1851, the Crown had not been represented at the Royal
+Academy dinner. It has seldom been unrepresented since. Sir Charles
+Eastlake, in whose election to the Presidency the Queen and Prince had
+been much interested, had not brought oratorical euphuism to the same
+perfection as his successor, Lord Leighton. He was, however, a man of
+cultivated mind, of acceptable presence, and of well-bred speech. His
+proposal of the Prince's health was made in words that have to-day an
+historical value. The reply of the Prince blended a philosophic criticism
+less English than German, with an appreciation of our national masters
+which was entirely patriotic. It was, he said, the fate of all
+aristocracies to be assailed habitually from without, sometimes from
+within. The Academy being an aristocracy of the brush, must accept the
+position and turn to practical account any hints for improvement which it
+might contain.[81]
+
+These were still the days when art and artists had not migrated from the
+gloomy studios of unfashionable Bloomsbury to the gleaming palaces of
+modish Kensington. Sir Charles Eastlake's predecessor had been Sir Martin
+Archer Shee, who, very faintly disguised, appears in Thackeray's Mr Smee
+in _The Newcomes_. Gandish, the unappreciated genius of the palette at
+whose school, on Mr Smee's advice Clive Newcome is placed, is not a
+caricature at all of the most serviceable art teacher of that period whose
+real name was Sass and who counted among his pupils John Everett Millais.
+What has taken place since then is that in the smiles of popular favour,
+Thackeray's Gandish has blossomed into the Mr Gaston Phoebus of Lord
+Beaconsfield's _Lothair_. Colonel Newcome thought it a condescension to
+ask the painter of 'Boadishia' to dinner. That artist's later and
+transformed self would have resented an invitation at short notice as an
+impertinence; he would have bluntly excused himself on the plea of being
+pre-engaged to the Prime Minister,[82] the Heir Apparent, or to Windsor
+three months ago. The social prejudice, confined to a small section of the
+upper middle class, against the studio which lingered so long and so
+unintelligently in England is easily explained. It is identical in its
+origin with an equally unreasoning and antiquated feeling against
+doctors, singers and players. This superstition had disappeared in the
+days of Sir Henry Holland who, half a century ago was a welcome and
+honoured guest at the most exclusive houses; under men like Sir James
+Paget and Sir Richard Quain it has long since ceased even to be a memory.
+In each of these cases money is regarded as passing directly between the
+patronizing public and the employed professional. The purse is opened at
+the door of the theatre, the concert hall, or in the consulting room of
+the physician. That the payment is in the other cases as real though not
+as sensibly direct is ignored. The terms on which Sir Charles Eastlake was
+a visitor at the Victorian Court are those that have marked the subsequent
+relations of his successors with the Crown. The intellectual influences of
+a whole school of intelligent and highly educated critics following as
+nearly as they could the example of Mr Ruskin, has shed a dignity on the
+painter's calling that could not have resulted from material prosperity or
+the favour of high place alone.
+
+Sir Edwin Landseer, elected R.A. 1830, it may be said, years before the
+transformation now spoken of, was welcome in any house whose threshold he
+pleased to cross. His was rather the exception which proved the rule, and
+for these reasons; he flourished most just when Court patronage was making
+the Scotch Highlands fashionable; he was the painter of hounds, horses,
+animals themselves so eminently aristocratic that no Englishman with any
+pretensions to social breeding could affect disregard for them, or for
+their reproducer in art without losing caste. Hence it is that while
+fifty years since, the Clive Newcomes who took to painting were spoken of
+by their families in a low voice much as if they had taken to drink, the
+painter of repute to-day who chose to receive pupils[83] would have no
+more difficulty in filling his studio twice over, than a fashionable
+crammer for the army or Civil Service in filling his lecture room. As a
+fact it is not in the private studios of great artists that the Royal
+Academician of the future, unlike the intending exhibitor in the Parisian
+salon, is to-day generally trained. Sass had a rival, or a professional
+descendant, in the father of a clever versifier H. S. Leigh. Since that
+day, English artists have generally learnt their craft in the Royal
+Academy, or the Slade or other schools of England, or in foreign ateliers.
+These have transformed the surface of Victorian England. The same
+organization of art teaching, which is to-day at the disposal of all is
+said to have discouraged the development of individuality. Where genius
+exists, it is not very likely to be strangled by the conventions of a
+public school, nor to be prevented from exchanging State teachers for
+those whom native inspiration prompts it to prefer.
+
+The South Kensington[84] machinery is not the only artistic growth of the
+Victorian age. The National Gallery had been in existence more than ten
+years before the reign began (since 1824). It was not a popular
+institution until a year later, the architect Wilkins having made the
+design, the present building in Trafalgar Square was opened, April 9,
+1838. The nucleus of the collection was the Angerstein pictures,
+thirty-eight in number, bought by the Government for L57,000. Twenty-seven
+years had still to pass before the Trafalgar Square structure was enlarged
+to its existing size by a parliamentary vote of L50,000. The immediate era
+of the Queen's accession was marked by the purchase of a masterpiece of
+Murillo, a landscape by Salvator Rosa, and an important picture by Rubens.
+Still the Gallery lingered below the Imperial dignity of the nation to
+which it belonged. The Vernon bequest enriched it only when the Queen had
+been on the Throne ten years. It was not till after the Crimean War that
+Parliament could attend to artistic claims, and that under the
+Directorship of Sir Charles Eastlake, deservedly trusted by Crown and
+country, the rooms designed by Barry were added to the block which Wilkins
+had shaped.
+
+The institution, now endowed with the paintings that had belonged to Sir
+Robert Peel, began steadily to approach towards the dimensions and the
+dignity of an Art Gallery comparable with that of any other capital in the
+world. Nor probably have its perfections or its premises yet reached their
+final limit.
+
+While this was going on in London, the entire provinces were vigorously
+taking their part in the new movement. The death of the Duchess of
+Gloucester in 1857 was not allowed by the Queen's representative to
+interfere with his opening in that year the Manchester Art Treasures
+Exhibition, the completeness of which was largely due to the Royal
+encouragement to private owners to send their statues and paintings to the
+show. Thirty years later the Jubilee anniversary of 1887 was observed in
+the same city by a like display of the creations of British genius. Then
+the objects exhibited were the property no longer of the leisured, or a
+patrician class. They belonged also to the new patrons whom, during less
+than half a century, success in manufacture and commerce, accompanied by
+the liberal agencies of travel and education have stimulated to
+competition with the social order whose exclusive appanage art
+encouragement once was. The material proof of art progress is the increase
+of art values. Many instances of these were given in an earlier chapter.
+During his lifetime David Cox was glad to sell his landscapes for L20. Cox
+had formed his genius amid the rural scenes of Hereford. He never liked
+London. After living there fourteen years he settled at Birmingham. Here,
+during his lifetime he had the satisfaction of seeing his masterpiece in
+oil colour bought for L40. Ten years later, when the painter was dead, it
+secured L50 in the open market. In the early seventies a Birmingham
+manufacturer, the former partner of Mr Chamberlain gave for it L2,300. In
+the same way De Wint's landscapes during his lifetime seldom commanded
+more than L50. To-day they sometimes fetch L1,000, and are reckoned cheap
+at 700 or 800 guineas.
+
+The social consideration, and with it the commercial possibilities, of any
+professional calling have in England always been regulated by its degree
+of connection with the State. The department of practical art established
+at South Kensington with the encouragement of the Prince Consort under the
+Directorship of Mr Henry Cole in 1852 had no sooner expanded into the
+science and art department under the President of the Council instead of
+under the Board of Trade than the social repute of practitioners in all
+branches of decorative art appreciably improved.
+
+About this time, too, Marlborough House, up to that date an asylum for
+exhibited pictures and a receptacle for the Duke of Wellington's funeral
+car, suggested itself as a future residence for the Prince of Wales when
+he came to have an establishment of his own. In 1856-7, therefore, the
+House of Commons, without demur, allotted L10,000 for the removal of the
+chaos of artistic treasures from their temporary resting place in Pall
+Mall to their permanent home in South Kensington. Hither, therefore, were
+sent the national purchases made at the sale of the Bernal collection, a
+full account of which has been given in an earlier chapter.
+
+Directly art was in this way officially and substantially incorporated by
+the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in
+great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will
+remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the Dickens manuscripts
+and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the
+friend and biographer of Dickens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These
+had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-a-brac, and
+foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed
+away in the glass-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which,
+studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the '51
+Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English
+manufacture.
+
+South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears.
+Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which
+institutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at
+discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose,
+but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual
+endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable
+holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom;
+it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both sexes to pass through
+its art and science classes.
+
+This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England
+has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State
+when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth.
+Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting
+from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the
+same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire
+collection of Sir Robert Peel.[85]
+
+The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of
+English art is illustrated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal
+Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices
+itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the 'private'
+view of the Royal Academy become a fete day of fashionable society;--a
+promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street
+toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort's
+death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly
+to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense
+meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both sexes, art
+fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of
+critical aptitude or profession, and of some slight connection with
+periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the
+earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the
+Queen's reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they
+just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000.
+The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of
+391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as
+one might naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon
+the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season.
+Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were
+10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen's jubilee year of
+1887.
+
+The mutual relations of art and wealth are probably for the most part
+beneficial to each. The painter, during the latter half of the whole
+Victorian age, has been the chief educator of the plutocrat, as Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti shrewdly anticipated must prove the case. If the
+intellectual teaching of the brush were not easily apprehended, there
+would, for the representatives of the new wealth, have been no special
+training in the humanities at all. As it is, the aristocracy of wealth,
+following the creditable example of the aristocracy of birth, in England
+as well as Italy, has secured for itself mental culture not less than
+social distinction by its patronage of the creators of the nation's art.
+To that role it brings the shrewdness already displayed in making its
+fortune. Such a patron may be a generous paymaster; he insists on having
+value for his money; he is quick to detect scamped work, or shortcomings
+in technical detail; he no longer, as he was once fabled to do, buys his
+canvases at so much per square foot any more than he fills his library
+shelves by the yard. That no meritorious artist in Victorian England is
+now likely to live and die so miserably as Haydon is due to the fact that
+the newest wealth finds its natural outlet in the encouragement of the
+oldest art. No aggregate of spiritual or intellectual interests has ever
+been firmly established in England without being subject to some great
+organic movement as a test of vitality before its roots struck deep in the
+soil of British minds. Literature experienced many such phases. So did
+science. So also, in the Oxford Anglican movement and in others since
+then, did religion. Before, therefore, the new art was firmly enthroned in
+our midst, it was at once shaken and quickened by that nineteenth century
+revolution known as pre-Raphaelite; about this so much has been written by
+recent experts as to absolve one from the duty of dwelling on it in detail
+here. Art in the hands of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, and other
+men of genius entered upon this ordeal as a sectional and limited pursuit.
+It came forth a new national interest or rather one of European concern as
+well. Without that severe process of discipline, Leighton and Millais, to
+mention only two typical names, would not have taken their place as
+masters of the brush for a continental as well as for an insular public.
+Nor would the fame of the English school first known through the Paris
+Exhibition of 1855, extended by the Paris Exhibition of 1868, have secured
+for English artists representation in all the great galleries of the
+world, and have added to British painters or to their national themes the
+crown of foreign recognition and of cosmopolitan esteem. Later chroniclers
+of the Victorian age may be able to record the same progress in the
+sculptor's, as in the painter's art. Our climate is not favourable to the
+out of door triumphs of the plastic art. But those who have examined the
+statue of Outram in Pall Mall; who have gazed upon the effigy of the great
+Duke of Wellington by Alfred Stevens in St Paul's; or have noted the
+growing power as well as popularity of Hamo Thornycroft, still a young
+man, cannot doubt that, apart from the successful labours of a naturalized
+but most patriotic foreigner and his school, Sir Edgar Boehm, the English
+chisel is in a fair way of emulating the progress of the English brush.
+
+Commercial prosperity in art, as in other things, moves in cycles. The
+years between 1870 and 1885 were very prosperous to English painters. The
+lean years followed then, and are still being experienced while these
+lines are written. As to the high prices given at Christie's and set forth
+elsewhere in this volume, they have been generally for the works of old
+and departed masters. With very few exceptions, the decade between 1886
+and 1896 has witnessed none of those prices for contemporary artists which
+marked the preceding period. This, too, notwithstanding the standard of
+artistic work to-day is infinitely higher than it was; and that the
+paintings which were hung on the line and were the talk of the town thirty
+years ago, would have a very slight chance of being accepted at all
+to-day.[86]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE
+
+    Translation into fact of ideals not less than transformations seen in
+    the People's Palace, Whitechapel, and in the free libraries,
+    originated by the Ewart Act, affecting as they do all contemporary
+    life. The working of these in town and country. Proved connection
+    between popular education and morality; what books free libraries like
+    best. Analogous work for upper classes done by Mudie's, and by the
+    London Library. Their progress traced. Help rendered by these to
+    public servants and literary producers. Carlyle, Thackeray, etc.
+    Eclectic and educating influences of these shown in detail. The new
+    public and the new magazines. General review of influences at work.
+    Great services of minor poets and prophets of the period.
+
+
+Not only transformations, but translations of ideals into fact, mark our
+age. A popular novelist gave a fancy sketch of a palace in which art,
+pleasure, and instruction should meet together to gladden the lives of the
+London poor. Almost as soon as could have been done by the genius of
+Aladdin's Lamp, the People's Palace shoots up in the Mile End Road.
+
+In 1841 Thomas Carlyle sighed for the day when a 'people's library' should
+be as much a part of every town as Her Majesty's jail, or in his own grim
+words--Her Majesty's gallows. The reign was still young when the
+philosopher's vision began to take shape and substance. In every centre of
+population from the Tyne to the Thames, from the Thames to the Tamar, a
+place where, without payment, upon no other conditions save those of
+reasonably clean hands, and silence, the working man is as well off for
+newspapers and books as a Bishop at the Athenaeum Club, has changed the
+Victorian landscape. These buildings, comely to look at, comfortable to
+enter, have competed with the later board schools in transforming the
+appearance of London suburb and provincial town. Where Knightsbridge
+merges into Chelsea first, and Fulham afterwards, there, during the early
+days of the reign, desolate fields and miry ways used to stretch their
+unlovely length. After dusk there were few lamps to light; the roads were
+not more safe than Hounslow Heath had been some generations earlier.
+To-day this district is covered by a mass of buildings in red brick or
+stone, of aspect rather more academic than the new quarter of Victorian
+Oxford. Among these are the free libraries, built, partly out of the
+public rates, partly out of private funds. If it chance to be Saturday
+night, hundreds of working men, decently clad, with parcels under their
+arms will be seen passing to and fro near these buildings. They are not
+going to the public house. The packages they carry do not imply a
+negotiation with the pawnbroker. The men are, in fact, returning to the
+library the books which, taken out some days earlier, have given them
+their reading during the week after the day's work has been done. Certain
+processes supplementary to these studies have still to be performed. Even
+in our age of improvement, the reference library kept by an artizan at his
+fireside is not extensive. Nothing quickens the intellectual appetite
+like its earliest gratification. As our student has travelled through the
+volumes which have occupied him, he has become aware of allusions for the
+full understanding of which fresh information is required. He has,
+therefore, while going along, made notes of points to look up. This,
+therefore, is one of his errands to-night.
+
+No professional visitor to the British Museum sets more systematically to
+work than our day labourer in the Fulham or Pimlico district. Before his
+visit this evening to the place of silence and of books he has, perhaps,
+had recourse to a member of the University Settlement in his
+neighbourhood, or possibly even to his own employer if the employer
+happens to be better read than the employed. The local librarian presently
+to be consulted needs to combine patience and method with something like
+omniscience. The note book is produced by our working man in which the
+points for enquiry have been jotted down. In a few minutes the official
+has placed the researcher on the right track. Before his studies are ended
+that night he will have hunted up facts and figures enough to furnish
+forth a leading article for a journalist, or a speech in Committee for a
+Member of Parliament.
+
+Not only in the industrial suburbs of the capital, but throughout the
+Kingdom, this is the sort of thing which takes place at least on one
+evening in every week. It is one among the many agencies which, nowadays,
+make the humblest reader so terrible a critic, and which cause a working
+man's meeting to be not less intolerant of mere rhetoric than the House
+of Commons itself.
+
+Like everything else which during our age has been brought towards
+perfection, the free library movement existed among us in germ from the
+earliest days, before indeed the books themselves were known. When
+Lancashire monasteries had ceased to be gratuitous places of literary
+study, their manuscripts and parchments were housed in the Chetham
+Library, with its old oriel windows at Manchester; in the Guildhall
+Library at London, certainly coeval with Whittington; in the libraries of
+Bristol or Liverpool which compete with London in antiquity, and with
+which the Protector Somerset is said to have made somewhat too free.
+
+The patronymic of the man who was the father of the free library as it is
+known in England to-day is preserved in the second name of Mr Gladstone.
+Mr Ewart belonged to an old Kirkcudbright family. He had been at Eton with
+Dr Pusey and Speaker Denison. In the spring of 1843 he obtained a
+Committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the conditions of
+popular reading throughout the United Kingdom. Disraeli, Monckton Milnes,
+Cardwell, Kershaw, were among the more famous names that the Committee
+included. Less than ten years after this, the Ewart Act, based on the
+Committee report was the law of the land.
+
+In the early autumn of 1852, the new legislation was celebrated in a very
+practical manner by the opening of the free library at Manchester; the
+town which had been the birthplace of the movement.
+
+Sir John Potter, the father of the present Mr T. B. Potter, took the
+chair. On the platform among the speakers were John Bright, Bulwer Lytton,
+Sir James Stephen, the future Lord Houghton, Dickens and Thackeray;
+Charles Dickens made a speech in his happiest, and therefore incomparable,
+vein, on the Manchester School, an expression then in many mouths. The
+success of the experiment first illustrated on the Irwell was gradual. The
+provinces led the way which at last the capital followed. So late as 1886,
+only two parishes out of the sixty-seven within the metropolitan area had
+adopted the Acts. By August 1891 this number had risen to thirty. Other
+London districts have since followed.[87] With time the result has been
+more than satisfactory. In the manner already seen it has affected the
+life and appearance of every town in the country, and has certainly
+provided a machinery without which as a supplement the educational
+apparatus of free schools would do little.
+
+To-day, therefore, in any large district, London or provincial, it is the
+exception for the Free Libraries Act not to be operative. That the power
+to read and the taste for reading does not always make good citizens, is
+of course true enough. On the other hand the close connection between
+ignorance and crime is instructively shown by a few historic statistics
+cited by Mr T. Greenwood, in his valuable volume on _Public Libraries_.
+These figures are to the following effect.
+
+In 1856 the number of young persons committed for indictable offences was
+14,000. In 1866, when the State had, by the action of the Privy Council,
+since 1833 assumed educational responsibility, and cheap literature of the
+better sort had, thanks to Charles Knight, and his many public-spirited
+imitators, become general, the number was decreased to 10,000. When School
+Boards were fully at work, there was a yet further reduction to 7,000; and
+this though the population had risen from 19 to 27 millions. Passing to a
+later date, out of 164,000 persons in prison between the years 1880-90,
+60,000 were entirely uneducated. Nor is it less suggestive that since the
+teaching of the people was seriously taken in hand by the State in 1870,
+no new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons
+have been changed into public libraries, or, as in the case of Milbank,
+have been converted into a fine art gallery.
+
+An objection is sometimes raised against the multiplication of free
+libraries on the ground that they promote exclusively the perusal of the
+most worthless fiction among the class least likely to be proof against
+the social dangers of this class of writing. No novel, perhaps, is so
+entirely mischievous as not to be preferable to the occupations from which
+for a few hours, it may withdraw the illiterate reader. In truth however a
+very careful examination of the facts by enquiries made at representative
+free libraries throughout the country justify the statement that novels
+form a stepping stone to books of a more seriously improving kind.
+
+The same statistics show the demand for fiction already to be on the
+decrease. Thus, in the case of the Newcastle-on-Tyne library; during a
+recent twelvemonth, of the books issued to readers 65.69 were fiction. The
+next year the proportion was 64.28. A year later it was 61.81. In 1896 the
+figures were 55.22. The latest enquiries show this decline in the demand
+for fiction to be steadily going forward. Further, the category of fiction
+is stretched by free libraries to include not only the coloured paper
+boards containing the latest sensational romance of the day, but all the
+masterpieces of Fielding, nearly all the writings of Defoe, the _Arcadia_
+of Sir Philip Sidney, the _Tristram Shandy_ of Lawrence Sterne, the _Don
+Quixote_ of Cervantes, and the Dialogues of Lucian.
+
+The remarkably elastic connotation with which the word fiction is thus
+invested, may make one doubt whether a case might not be established even
+for novel reading. As a fact the works most in demand at any typical
+London library, _e.g._, that of Chelsea, are not novels at all. Here the
+favourites seem to be Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_, thrice asked
+for on the day this library was visited, his _Ecclesiastical
+Institutions_, twice asked for. Aristotle's _Ethics_, the works of
+Spinoza, Martineau's _Types of Ethical Theory_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of
+Nations_, J. S. Mill's _Logic_, Professor Sayce's _Vindications of
+Revealed Religion by the Light of Ancient Monuments_, all Sir Charles
+Dilke's works of travel, Carlyle, Froude; _Cassell's Popular Educator_,
+Todhunter's _Euclid_ are in greater demand than any fictions. However many
+copies of these there might be, none, it is thought, would be often out of
+hand.
+
+It is not only what are called the industrial classes whose literary
+resources have been expanded and transformed during the Victorian age.
+Libraries for a different class of readers have of late years increased
+throughout the Kingdom, in the provinces not less than in the capital.
+Mudie's is, in the most literal sense of the epithet, a national agency.
+Its headquarters are in London. There is no town or village book club in
+the country, which is not fed from its metropolitan shelves. Mudie's
+Library was founded by the late C. E. Mudie, in 1842, two years after the
+St James's Square London Library. If light literature were alone in
+demand, this library would not flourish as during more than half a century
+it has done. Without it, many of the candidates for the Indian, the Home
+Civil Services and other such examinations would be unable to get up their
+books. A theologian like Canon Liddon turns new light on old truths. A
+pious and picturesque impressionist like Dean Arthur Stanley presents the
+scenes and incidents of sacred story as he has himself seen or imagined
+them. A Darwin propounds a fresh theory for the origin of life; a Froude
+rehabilitates a Tudor; a Freeman refutes a Froude; a Livingstone explores
+a Dark Continent; a Stanley recovers a reluctant Livingstone or an
+indignant Emin. A Green illustrates the growth of an English people; a
+Lecky supplements the work of a Buckle or makes the eighteenth century
+real as the nineteenth.
+
+Mudie's is the channel through which these streams of culture are conveyed
+to the majority of English readers; for, highly educated as the Victorian
+age may be, it is with books that its economies begin To buy volumes that
+can be borrowed or hired, is accounted wanton extravagance. A work which
+requires more study, which holds public attention longer than a novel,
+must obviously be most profitable to the circulating librarian. Nor would
+self-interest let him be a distributor of fiction alone or even primarily.
+
+The increase of novel readers as of novel writers is indeed the great
+literary feature of the day. Not less characteristic of the time are the
+new periodicals which have created a fresh public for themselves. The
+sixpenny magazines count their circulation by millions, and are borrowed
+from the library as well as bought by their readers. But it is the
+standard works, as shown by the instances already specified that give to
+Mudie's its deserved epithet of 'Select.'
+
+Rather more grave in its contents, and didactic in its origin and purpose,
+the London Library, in St James's Square has during more than half a
+century been a most productive agent in the culture not less of the whole
+upper middle classes than in the equipment for their tasks of writing men
+and women.[88] On the Mid-summer Day of 1840, with Lord Eliot in the chair
+there was held at the Freemasons' Tavern a meeting, the object of which
+was to provide literary workers and others at their homes with those books
+for which they then had to go to the reading room of the British Museum.
+The result was the formation of a Committee of the leading literary
+persons of the period, the drawing up of rules and of a list of
+desiderated books, the acquisition of premises in Pall Mall. Towards the
+end of December in the same year, the new institution was opened in its
+first home in Pall Mall with, on a smaller scale, the same kind of
+accommodations that it possesses to-day in St James's Square. As the
+earliest prospectus reminded the public, no less a person than Edward
+Gibbon had first lamented the lack of any lending library befitting the
+dignity of an Imperial capital in London.
+
+When, in the May of 1841, this library was first in working order, its
+stock was some 3,000 volumes. A year later these figures had risen to
+13,000. Since then, at an outlay of some L50,000, its contents have been
+increased to nearly 200,000. Situated in the heart of clubland, the
+Library has done for the education of clubmen, including penmen of every
+degree, all that Mudie's can have done for the instruction of families.
+Not that the London Library is without claim to be considered a domestic
+institution. Its reading room is frequented by as many lady journalists of
+the new school verifying references for their articles, as by male writers
+of an older type. There are few households where its books are not to be
+found. Carlyle and Thackeray are only two of the many well-known men who
+have been helped by it in suffusing historic descriptions with local or
+personal colour. It was to ascertain the exact hues of George Washington's
+waistcoat[89] that Thackeray consulted the late librarian Robert Harrison
+as to the classical authorities.
+
+Nor are there many writers of recent years in the English tongue, who have
+not been indebted to London Librarians from the days of Cochrane, the
+first of the line, to those of Hagberg Wright, his latest successor,[90]
+for seasonable hints as to what authorities most usefully to consult.
+
+As has been already seen, in the theory and practice of the culture now
+popularized in England, there is a growing tendency on the part of science
+and art to trench upon the ground formerly occupied by literature. The
+fashionable vocabulary of culture is itself an instance of this. Metaphors
+from the palette, the scalpel, the crucible, the retort, are applied to
+indicate the commonest and oldest literary phenomena. Or we hear of loaded
+epithets, of dynamic diction, of sonatas in sentences, of fugues in
+periods, and of new stratifications in style. Amid all our improvements we
+are a little mixed, and have still to decide where the province of the
+writer ends and that of his brother in some other art begins. This is a
+transient, as it is a transitional phase. It may perhaps confuse posterity
+which will scarcely recognize as the same language the lectures of Sir
+Joshua Reynolds, the orations of Lord Leighton, the art criticisms of
+Steele or Addison in _The Spectator_, of Walter H. Pater, of J. A.
+Symonds, in _The Cornhill Magazine_, or one of the monthly Reviews.
+
+The survey of the agencies now at work upon different social levels, shows
+that even thus the education which comes of reading, competes at some
+disadvantage with the instruction that is the result of lectures in class
+rooms, of demonstrations in scientific 'theatres,' of days and nights
+spent in museums of sculpture or in galleries of paintings.
+
+During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary
+system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work,
+was dominated by the presence of a few illustrious men, who naturally
+became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives,
+Dickens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the
+weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing,
+especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to
+so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire
+company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by
+Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary
+imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or
+successors. The author of _The Newcomes_ was outlived[91] by the
+accomplished writer of that series which began with _Pelham_ in 1828 and
+neared its end with _The Parisians_ almost fifty years later.
+
+While the anniversaries of the Queen's accession were few in number,
+Lytton by the side of Dickens, as a popular master of the pen, filled
+something like the place which Thackeray had occupied before him. During
+most of his time, another man of letters belonging like Lytton to the
+titled classes divided with Lytton the social patronage of literary
+beginners. No man of his day did so much as Lytton to help younger men
+with the booksellers, as in his old-fashioned phrase he was apt to call
+the publishers. He had indeed a rival or a colleague in these good offices
+in Lord Stanhope, then Lord Mahon, the historian, as also in Mr Monckton
+Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, the timely friend of Coventry Patmore,
+and the rescuer from great troubles of a forgotten but deserving poet
+David Gray.
+
+When as yet journalism as a profession was not fully organized, and young
+authors still looked first to the pillars of Paternoster Row, an
+introduction to Lord Lytton or to Lord Stanhope was the surest stepping
+stone to print. In this way Antonio Gallenga, then an obscure refugee,
+with associations of the dagger and bowl about him, having won the good
+word of Lytton, found a publisher for his _History of Piedmont_. This in
+its turn opened to him the office of the _Times_. Here he made his name
+not only as among the most brilliant, best informed and versatile of
+newspaper writers but, together with William Howard Russell, as a founder
+of that school of graphic newspaper narrative since represented by
+Archibald Forbes, Edward Dicey, B. H. Becker, G. A. Henty, George Augustus
+Sala, and John O'Shea.
+
+The development of the press has changed most of the conditions of
+literary life. For very many Englishmen of all classes, the periodical,
+daily, weekly, or monthly, is practically an exclusive synonym for
+literature itself. This fact of course has reacted upon the whole class of
+professional writers. The most commercially successful of men and women of
+letters are, as, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, they have been,
+authors of some novel which hits the taste of the moment, and fixes the
+interest of the town. When George Eliot wedded in her writings the
+artistic to the scientific spirit, she invented a combination unknown till
+then; she opened a gold mine for herself and the more dexterous of her
+disciples. Dickens and Thackeray both realized high prices for the labour
+of their pen. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were not far behind. But
+the men of this class were either original creators of literary types that
+will take their place with the characters of Shakespeare, and Cervantes,
+or else were masters in the manufacture of exciting and dramatic plots.
+
+Lord Lytton knew a little of everything, science included. He was indeed
+not only a marvel of varied productiveness but a consummate student,
+summing up in his own person all the intellectual interests and tendencies
+of his time. During his most industrious period, before he had attained
+Cabinet rank in politics, and before Carlyle's deeper studies of Fichte
+and Goethe had familiarized the English public with modes of German
+thought, Bulwer did more than anyone of his day to educate the average
+reader on lines, and in subjects, which now seem commonplace, but of
+which, when the dandy who dashed off _Falkland_, as Byron dashed off
+_Beppo_, had matured into the student who travailed with _Rienzi_,
+Englishmen knew nothing.
+
+The mental inquisitiveness and activity of a newly enlightened generation,
+resolved, like Bacon, to take all learning for its province, finds the
+reflection of some aspect of itself in every page of Bulwer. The polished
+conceits, the recondite illustrations drawn from every sphere of human
+thought or achievement, the similes sometimes as far fetched, and
+obscurely ingenious as those of Sir Piercie Shafton or of Euphues himself,
+suggest at times the inspiration of an universally-informed, and
+precociously-gifted youth who displays his cleverness before it is yet
+quite disciplined, and parades his patchwork learning before it is fully
+digested.
+
+In all these things Bulwer was essentially the product and the mirror of
+the new and eclectically educated Victorian age. He had been a young man
+of great fashion, a good specimen of that social school of which the
+younger Disraeli at his _Vivian Grey_ period was a bad specimen. A dandy
+of the older type through life Lytton remained. Tennyson's lines in
+_Punch_ on the padded man who wore the stays, stuck to him throughout life
+as did Thackeray's caricatures of Sir Edward Bulwig. People therefore
+insisted on finding affectations in his manner, and insincerities in his
+nature.[92] He saw his time in its entirety abroad as well as at home
+more clearly than most of his contemporaries. The reforming zeal and
+humanitarian spirit of his age were not expressed more powerfully, if to
+many persons more intelligibly, by Dickens himself than by Lytton.
+
+All the modern masters of English fiction are in their different ways as
+much the products of that series of movements comprehended in, or grouped
+round, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as Byron himself
+was in England the immediate progeny of that organic upheaval of thought
+and faith. The year of the accession produced Carlyle's _History of the
+French Revolution_. Four years later, the most powerful picture of these
+episodes presented by any writer of fiction was given to the world by
+Bulwer in _Zanoni_. To the same era of revolutionary influences belonged
+_A Tale of Two Cities_, in which Dickens not only illustrated after his
+own manner the age of Robespierre, but produced a work not inferior in
+literary art to the _Esmond_ of his great rival. Lytton's genius impelled
+him to mysticism, as George Eliot's associations inclined her to
+positivism. Both after their own manner dealt with human problems from
+what they respectively thought the scientific point of view. Add to this
+that Lytton remained a student annexing new domains of interest, thought
+and knowledge to the last; that he showed himself the prophet of the new
+and better France in _The Parisians_, as he had been the bard of the new
+England beyond the seas before the curtain fell on the fortunes and the
+friends of Pisistratus Caxton.
+
+Enough is said to vindicate his place as among the most representative
+writers of the age, as well as to explain the recent renascence of his
+writings in France and the growing popularity of his works as attested by
+the fresh editions issuing from the house of Routledge in England.
+Macaulay, though never a newspaper man, is in point of manner, the father
+of the leading article. The terse impressionist style which has much
+superseded the Macaulayan in the press may be referred to George Borrow,
+author of _The Bible in Spain_, than whom no one has influenced periodical
+writers more beneficially; to Kinglake in his _Eothen_; to his literary
+disciple, Lawrence Oliphant in _Piccadilly_; to the late Grenville Murray,
+whose 'Roving Englishman' in _All the Year Round_ contains the happiest of
+travel sketches, and whose Young Brown in the _Cornhill Magazine_ is a
+miracle of clever writing. Each of these has contributed to make such
+happy writers of concise prose as Jehu, Junior, in _Vanity Fair_, and
+Violet Fane, now Lady Currie, in her clever and original novel, _Sophy_.
+Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold complete a
+representative list of educators of popular taste during our age. They
+are, however, heroic instances. Others, with not a tenth of their fame
+have reached at least as far in their influence, and have brought their
+refining mission home to the masses with an intimacy not approached by
+their mightier rivals.
+
+Emerson's writings, his visit to, and lectures in, London in 1847 leavened
+English thought with the same spiritualizing quality which had long since
+penetrated the American mind. For one Briton who was inspired by Emerson,
+hundreds were charmed and humanized by Longfellow first, and by Whittier
+afterwards. If Longfellow's simple ballads had never been written, the
+higher offices of poetry, notwithstanding a Tennyson or a Browning, would
+have remained a mystery hidden from the toiling millions of the
+Anglo-Saxon world.
+
+The same gentle and gracious offices have been performed by less known and
+not always respected writers, Martin Tupper of the _Proverbial
+Philosophy_, and the late Hain Friswell of _The Gentle Life_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES
+
+    The newspaper press of all kinds, largely, the penny press,
+    exclusively, a Victorian product. Its recent growth reviewed. A
+    valuable rival to Parliament because its publicity assures
+    parliamentary efficiency. Growth of the cheaper journalism summarized.
+    The _Daily News_, the _Daily Telegraph_, the halfpenny press, morning
+    and evening as a special product of the age. The press and party.
+
+
+'Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.' Such, in reference to
+the then editor of the _Times_, was the remark made a year or two
+after the Victorian age had begun by Lord Lyndhurst, himself an
+ex-journalist,[93] to Charles Greville, the Diarist. Like opinions by
+equal authorities as to the successors of Barnes have been delivered
+frequently since, but are less known because the memoir-writer has not yet
+stamped them with immortality. No attribute of skill or power belonging to
+Barnes was wanting to Delane. To his weight with the public a
+characteristic tribute was once paid by a shrewd judge of editors as of
+men generally, Lord Beaconsfield. 'I think,' were that statesman's exact
+words, on a social occasion to Lord Granville, 'I had better postpone
+giving you my views of Delane till he is dead.'
+
+On her accession the Queen was congratulated by some 479 newspapers
+representing the collective press of the United Kingdom and its outlying
+islands. Her sixtieth commemoration gives a theme to 2396 journals
+published within the same area.[94] The English newspaper press which in
+effect began under one Queen, reached its final term of greatness under
+another Queen. 1837 is a landmark in newspaper history, because it was the
+first year in which the public press published the parliamentary division
+lists, and thus made another stride towards equality of influence with the
+legislature. Its effect was to increase the usefulness of Members of
+Parliament, as well as of the press itself. The Long Parliament made
+English freedom, but gagged the press.
+
+In 1712 Harley had taxed newspapers at a penny a sheet, and one shilling
+for each advertisement. Under North and Pitt successively, these taxes
+were raised to prohibitive figures. In 1836 Spring Rice had fixed the
+stamp duty at a penny, so that the first step towards newspaper prosperity
+was made on the eve of the Victorian age. The Victorian press means the
+penny press. That was only possible after the fourteenth year of the
+reign, and the repeal of the paper duty in 1851.
+
+Popular politics are changed as little by newspaper articles as are
+political votes by parliamentary speeches. The press rather organizes
+political opinion. Existing convictions are deepened. But the average
+reader chooses his newspaper not because he wants to be converted, but
+because his self love is flattered by seeing his formed ideas reflected in
+its columns. The modern newspaper is therefore a Victorian creation. In
+its best form it belongs to England alone. In no other country is there a
+second _Times_, as since 1788 the older _Universal Register_ has been
+called; no such epitome of foreign history from day to day; no such
+reflection, in letters to the editor, of English opinion.
+
+So far as the cheap newspaper is due to any one man, it may be connected
+with the name of the first proprietor of the _Athenaeum_, like its latest,
+a Charles Wentworth Dilke. In the twelfth year of the Victorian age the
+_Daily News_, to which the short editorship of Charles Dickens gave
+literary distinction rather than commercial success, its proprietors,
+Bright, Cobden, Walmsley, called in Mr Dilke, as the great newspaper
+organizer of his day. He at once reduced the price, though not yet to its
+final penny. In 1865 the proprietary was enlarged by the late Mr S.
+Morley, Mr Labouchere and others, with the intention of turning it into a
+penny paper. That was done. Its success was made by its foreign
+correspondence during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. Meanwhile, the
+_Daily Telegraph_, started by Colonel Sleigh in 1856, had been acquired,
+enlarged, and improved by the strenuous ancestors of its present owners.
+It at once electrified the town by its original writing of all kinds,
+notably its Paris correspondence. The letters to the _Times_ from the
+Crimea of William Howard Russell, first caused the Sebastopol
+enquiry;--then in 1855 produced the Roebuck motion[95] and with it the
+fall of the Government of Lord Aberdeen. In this way the whole conception
+of the province of the press was enlarged. Soon there sprung up a new and
+organized profession of the pen. If to-day the political writing of the
+great London dailies be below the mark of that of the two _Couriers_ and
+some later publicists in France, its special and descriptive
+correspondence by a Forbes, a Henty, a W. W. Knollys, a Pearce, a Becker,
+a Conan Doyle, a G. W. Steevens, in point of graphic vigour, of accurate
+and comprehensive swiftness of execution, is superior to anything which
+other periodicals of Europe can show.
+
+The Jubilee Year of 1887 witnessed the completion of a revolution in the
+public press, that had in fact begun a twelvemonth earlier. Hitherto the
+great London broadsheets had either been affected really if not
+professedly to one of the great political parties; or had, as in the case
+of the _Times_, not less than of the chief weekly journals, made some show
+of impartially criticizing both parties alike. In 1886 the Liberal party
+was rent in twain by the Irish policy of its greatest member. The result
+with the press was to divest political writers of all show of
+independence. Those journals which accepted the great leader's view were
+converted into uncompromising champions of the scheme that their opponents
+said would dismember the monarchy. Those, on the other hand, which
+resisted the great statesman's plan found themselves by the force of
+events they could not control detached from their earlier traditions of
+independence and converted into the enemies of political Liberalism not
+only on one issue, but on all.
+
+From that day newspaper criticism of men and measures has practically
+ceased. With a few able exceptions, signally that of the _Daily
+Chronicle_, the paramount task of the press in the sixth decade of the
+epoch is to support a combination of groups rallied not under a party
+flag, but an Imperial banner. About the same time another newspaper change
+may be said to have taken place. Hitherto, the anonymous system had been
+fairly preserved. The names of newspaper writers were not known beyond
+their office, or at least beyond Fleet Street. Now, however, English
+journalism was undergoing two distinct and mutually antagonistic
+processes. On the one hand it had by the agency of the great newspapers
+with their enlarged staffs and various departments been organized into a
+liberal profession, attracting specialists of all kinds to its columns. On
+the other hand its pleasures and its profits had gathered a host of camp
+followers who as amateurs vied with the older professionals. Next, persons
+of fashion or of quality took to the proprietorship or editorship of new
+journals, as, till then, they had taken to the owning and management of
+theatres for the benefit of personal friends. In _Lothair_, someone
+advises the hero to amuse himself with theatre proprietorship 'as being
+the high mode for all swells.' The paper next enjoyed the same vogue as
+the playhouse.
+
+The former secrecy now became impracticable. As had long been the case
+with the monthly periodical, the weekly print first and the daily print
+afterwards showed a tendency towards a transformation from an organ of
+collective opinion into a platform for individual display. The new
+editor's chief business was not as formerly to point the gun for the
+marksmen of the pen to fire, but to recruit writers with well known names.
+If their signatures were suppressed, the authorship, as it was intended it
+should do, speedily transpired. Fleet Street became a whispering gallery
+of press gossip. Its murmurs were heard throughout the land.
+
+What the sixpenny magazine is to the monthly press that the halfpenny
+newspaper is to the daily. The first daily journal at this price, the
+_Echo_, after some startling vicissitudes came into the capable hands of
+John Passmore Edwards, a Celt of Cornwall with all the characteristics of
+his race. Morning as well as evening rivals at the same price sprung up
+like mushrooms after rain. _Evening News_ or _Star_ at night, the
+_Morning_, the _Leader_ are only a few of the fresh notes added to the
+music of the London street vendors. No urchin so ragged that he does not
+proclaim the printed wares of a millionaire _in esse_ or _in posse_.
+Believers in literature as part of popular education will think it a good
+sign that book reviews, and articles of a kindred sort are features in
+characteristically Victorian newspapers. Signally in the arrangements for
+supply of foreign news, a revolution extending throughout the whole press
+of the country has been effected by the enterprise of these journals. The
+telegrams on which for its tidings from abroad the public used exclusively
+to depend, have been often superseded by the dispatches of special
+representatives of their journal stationed abroad.
+
+Every journal has now become its own Reuter. Men like Alfred C.
+Harmsworth, being millionaires as well as resourceful journalists, thought
+no more of having their own agents in every capital at the end of a
+telegraphic wire than of arranging a little Arctic expedition on their own
+account. They have thus forced the hand of newspaper proprietors all
+round. The leisurely descriptive writing has gone out. The condensed
+three-line paragraph has come in. The _Daily Mail_ has shown a busy
+generation which reads its papers as it takes its lunch standing at a
+buffet, that the essence of the day's news of the world can be read in a
+few odd minutes as easily as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were once
+packed into a nutshell.[96]
+
+For this new journalism new men have been needed. In most cases very young
+men; generally fresh from Balliol or Trinity where they have perhaps won
+Fellowships as well as First Classes, but in appearance often not much
+older than a public school sixth form boy. Youth is an error which
+unfortunately time too soon corrects.
+
+In ability, in conscientious use of increased power; in education, in
+social position, in all the best guarantees of responsibility, the British
+press has improved immeasurably within the present age. Even now it shows
+signs of perceiving that a certain amount of political impartiality
+towards the great leaders of State and Church renders its praise, its
+censure, and its criticism the more effective because the less mechanical.
+The condition of things which has made so many great newspapers patriotic
+partizans instead of independent guides must in its nature be temporary.
+When it has gone by, and a more normal state of affairs is re-established,
+there will be perhaps no compensating disadvantages to the increasing
+influence with which the Victorian age has endowed and is yet endowing
+what is really a fourth estate.[97]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE
+
+    Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive
+    feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court
+    through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided
+    with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular
+    sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new
+    nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed.
+
+    Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between
+    these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and
+    curative medicine also entitled to credit. General course of medical
+    progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained
+    usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors,
+    with particular instances.
+
+
+Before the Victorian age, there had been no legislation for the purpose of
+helping the helpless, housing the homeless, providing for the health of
+those whose birth-right was the squalor, the starvation, the disease, that
+come from systematic neglect. Here, as in other things, the representative
+of the Crown, transformed from a political power into an agency of social
+good, led the way. The Prince Consort, moved by the condition and by the
+address of the ballast heavers in the East End of London took the
+initiative; the legislature gradually followed. Thus was the principle
+established and acted on that one of the prime duties of the State is to
+those for whom from any other quarter there is no help.
+
+The last instance of that wholesome truth was the Dilke Commission for the
+better housing of the poor aptly presided over by the Prince Consort's
+eldest son in 1885. Exactly forty-five years earlier than this, Colonel
+Slaney's[98] motion in the House of Commons produced an enquiry into the
+health of towns. Local Improvement Acts had been multiplied to the number
+of 500. There was still no proper drainage. The Duke of Buccleuch's
+Commission of 1848 led to the Public Health Act of the same year. As the
+cholera invasions of 1853 and of 1865-6 showed, the Local Boards
+established by the Act of 1848 were too permissive in their operations to
+be fully effective. Edwin Chadwick, and Southwood Smith had from the first
+co-operated with the Queen's husband. Their activity did not cease when
+the earliest steps to reform had been taken: 1858 witnessed fresh
+improvements.[99]
+
+It was not till 1875 that the confused mass of sanitary laws was
+consolidated. Then the Local Government Board which, with the powers of
+the superseded Poor Law Board, had been established in 1871 was in full
+and in most beneficent work. Still the Commission that last investigated
+the matter, due as it was largely to Lord Shaftesbury, showed many evils
+still to remain. Overcrowding was worse in the West London rookeries than
+it had been in the East. In 1885 the Dilke Commission Act gave fresh power
+to local authorities to destroy unhealthy dwellings.
+
+The machinery which thus exists as the sixth decade of our epoch draws to
+its close, is therefore tolerably complete. Guarantees for its promptly
+being put into motion are still wanted. Not only the credit, but the very
+conception of this wholesome function of the State belongs entirely to our
+era, and arises out of the enlarged idea of Royal service which fills the
+modern mind.
+
+Strictly consistent with family tradition is the effort of the Prince of
+Wales to help those who are only one degree more helpless than the
+dwellers in city and suburban alleys and courts in time of need. To free
+the London hospitals of debt will crown the edifice of sick relief that in
+Crimean days the Queen and her husband began.
+
+From the departure of Miss Florence Nightingale[100] and her trained staff
+for the Crimea in 1854 must be dated the birth of nursing as a polite
+profession. But for that mission of mercy one would hear nothing of the
+contemporary parade of nurses in the height of the London season in the
+grounds of Marlborough House. The fashionable vogue of the vocation may
+sometimes attract modish recruits who have not counted the cost.
+
+Amiable sympathy is not the sole qualification which the lady nurse needs.
+Self-consciousness is as much a disqualification as a shuddering dislike
+of sick room scenes. It is also the attribute that the patient is the most
+quick to observe. Not a few of the sick whom the ministering angel of the
+new school desires to relieve may still sigh for the presence by their
+bedside of the displaced Mrs Gamp instead of the young lady in the
+coquettish muslin cap and dainty grey frock who casts complacent glances
+at herself as she passes the mirror, and with an air not quite suited for
+a sick room offers her patient his medicine or his barley water as if she
+were suggesting black coffee, green Chartreuse, and a cigarette after a
+whitebait dinner. These defects will no doubt be mended when the lady
+nurse is more habituated to her calling. Decayed billiard markers, and
+scripture readers who have gone wrong, will not eventually figure so
+largely among the self-sacrificing males who also find their career in
+tending the invalid. The scandals of which the nurse (old style) was
+sometimes the heroine still live in the pages of Dickens. They arose from
+the rumoured hastening of the sick man's death by the scriptural practice
+of laying a wet cloth over his mouth. Any scandals with which the nurse
+(new style) might be connected would perhaps come from the desirable
+marriage that she arranges for herself in the sick room or from the
+legacies made to her by grateful patients, but disputed by thankless
+relations. These things, therefore, should be no doubt regarded not as
+slurs upon her disinterestedness, but as tributes to her efficiency.
+
+Inside the hospital the same transformation has been effected as in the
+aspect of the ministering angels themselves. The grave young gentlemen in
+training for the medical profession have nothing about them left of the
+lamp breaking, policemen baiting, medical student of Albert Smith. If
+sometimes one reads of the too engrossing attractions for these youths of
+the sylphs who flit to and fro in the wards, the answer is obvious--'Evil
+be to him who evil thinks.'
+
+Hospital management is the subject not for a few pages in a single book,
+but for a library in itself. One or two not controversial facts may be
+given. Throughout the Victorian age a marked feature in medical charities
+has been the supplementing of the historic hospitals with many new
+dispensaries and establishments for special diseases. If the latest
+hospital endowments are smaller than those originating in an earlier
+century, the explanation is less a decline in eleemosynary purpose or
+power than the development of the value of the property assigned to the
+older foundations.[101] Thus the revenue of St Bartholomew's in the middle
+of the sixteenth century seems to have been only L371 a year. Towards the
+close of the nineteenth century it is L32,000 a year. During our own era
+hospital benefactions approaching a quarter of a million are far from
+unknown. These do not include such special and comparatively recent
+hospitals as that for consumption, with the 40 new dispensaries connected
+with it.
+
+To epitomize the facts; the total of London hospitals or infirmaries with
+wards for the sick amounts to 49. The movement still goes forward. So vast
+is the scale on which these buildings, less houses than towns in
+themselves, were first planned that in many of them there is yet room for
+fresh beds. This is only a specimen of what has been, and is being, done
+throughout the kingdom. There thus seems a fresh argument in favour of
+continuing to London itself an institution like St Thomas's, Southwark,
+the removal of which to the country was not long since suggested.
+
+Like all gracious works, these places are twice blessed. They relieve
+those who are in need. They humanize those whom prosperity and comfort
+might make callous. Before our age began, no one thought of sending game
+or fruit to the sufferers or convalescents within these places of refuge.
+Now it is the exception for the millionaire not to make the spoils of his
+fashionable battue pay tithe to those for whom such food is often the best
+of physic. The costly flowers that decorate the drawing rooms or dining
+rooms during the season are not discarded as rubbish when the festivity is
+over. They are scrupulously tended so as not to lose their freshness.
+Presently their hues and fragrance will relieve the bleak expanse of
+white-washed wall in those places where our sick are nursed away from
+their own homes.[102]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The contrasts of our age include a marked connection between the
+organization of the healing art and the advance of medical science on the
+one hand and the reduction of the death rate on the other. In 1855 the
+mortality of the United Kingdom was 23 per 1,000. In 1875 it was 21 per
+1,000. In 1895 it had fallen to 18 per 1,000. The figures,[103] and the
+conclusions to which they point, are tributes, not only to medical skill
+in healing disease, but to sanitary reform in preventing it.
+
+Before the Victorian age began the whole population of these Islands
+awaited the periodical onsets of pestilence with the resigned fatalism of
+the Turk, or with the passive submission of latter day London to the
+incubus of snow. The notorious consequences of unhealthy living prompted
+no preventive measures. Divine wrath was believed to express itself in
+deadly epidemics. When that anger was assuaged health would return. Till
+then human remedies could do little. Meanwhile, the truth that Providence
+helps those who help themselves was being scientifically shown. Hence in
+1838, a State enquiry into the whole matter was instituted. In 1848 the
+legislation began which, by promoting cleanliness, at once disarmed
+disease. John Simon proved the propagation of pestilence to proceed by
+impure particles. In 1858-65, on his initiative, the Government
+strengthened the defences of public health. The entrance of foreign
+plagues was stopped at our ports. Three sons of a clever West of England
+doctor named Budd[104] had been trained from their childhood in practical
+medicine by their father. These doctors showed the connection between
+impure water and typhoid fever, as before them Snow had shown between
+cholera and water. When the improvements suggested by these researches
+were adopted health generally benefited. Consumption statistics became
+less alarming every year. Fevers of all kinds were successfully combated.
+Since vaccination had become general, smallpox cases had fallen by at
+least one-half.
+
+Meanwhile, the discovery of anaesthetics, of chloroform by Professor J. Y.
+Simpson of Edinburgh in 1848, of ether in 1846 by Morton and Robinson of
+the United States, at once robbed surgical operations of their terrors,
+and rendered them practicable in cases where till then they could not
+safely be tried. In 1860 came the antiseptic treatment of Sir Joseph,
+since Lord, Lister. Before then, the nervous system had been explored
+successfully by Carpenter.[105] Instruments for examining by reflected
+lights the hidden parts of the human frame had been invented by several
+English surgeons. Operations for certain internal tumours, that had
+hitherto defied removal, were first performed by Caesar Hawkins, born 1798,
+brother of the famous Oriel Provost, a pupil of Brodie at St George's; and
+more recently by Spencer Wells.
+
+More than a half of the medical discoveries of the period are English.
+The latest perhaps, certainly not the smallest if the least known, was the
+treatment by the late Sir William Gull of the swellings technically known
+as myxoedema by an entirely new process, that of supplementing deficiences
+of the thyroid gland with matter taken from animals. The throat
+specialists of Germany found much to learn from the late Morell Mackenzie.
+Not till 1860, was the scheme of medical education perfected in its
+present shape by the College of Physicians, which to-day, under its
+President and two Censors, arranges all examinations; while the Medical
+Association represents the whole profession, bringing its grievances and
+needs before the legislature. The average of ability throughout the
+practitioners of the country is as noticeable as the achievements of its
+scientific pioneers. The treatise on _Heredity_ in disease by Dr Douglas
+Lithgow, on gout and allied complaints by Dr Robson Roose, and on the
+medical uses of electricity by Dr W. S. Hedley, are instances of permanent
+contributions by busy practitioners to the scientific knowledge of their
+daily labours.
+
+The late Dr Quinn, the late Oscar Clayton, are men who have improved the
+status of their calling by their social services and gifts, and have
+helped to extend the authority of the physician over every department of
+life. We have long since shaken off the rule of priests. Some may think we
+have already placed ourselves under a despotism of doctors, who by their
+word can make or mar the reputation of places and climates if not of
+characters and of men; and on whom the obligations of professional
+etiquette seem at least equal to their sense of responsibility to the
+public.[106]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
+
+    The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated
+    by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization
+    of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of
+    Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures
+    illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and
+    abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant
+    and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the
+    Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In
+    the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly
+    critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on
+    the new High Church critics, _e.g._ _Lux Mundi_ and _The Sermon on the
+    Mount_.
+
+
+A verger at St Mary's Church, Oxford, during the sixties used devoutly to
+thank his Maker that after having heard University sermons for thirty
+years, he still remained a Christian. Conflicts within, attacks without,
+at least as severe as any to which either was exposed during the Georgian
+epoch, have been the lot of the Christianity whose depository is the
+Church of England during the Victorian age. Neither Christian faith, nor
+the Church that is its national expression, has come forth maimed or
+weakened from that ordeal. Modern scepticism scarcely aims at substituting
+for a Divine Being any tangible object of faith. It retires from the
+discussion with the remark that high and invisible things are beyond human
+knowledge. Hence nothing in agnosticism, however hostile its tendency to,
+need be inconsistent with, Revelation. The mere statement of difficulties
+in the way of belief and of purely abstract alternatives to belief makes
+no proselytes.[107]
+
+Freethinkers of the last century appealed, and were limited, to the rich.
+The secularists who are their successors since 1840 pose as the friends of
+the poor. Neither school can consider itself a power. The Victorian age is
+in fact above all others an age of religious revival. This has been
+largely due to the influence of the Court. From the _entourage_ of the
+later Georges and of William IV. the best of their subjects held aloof.
+Had the year of Revolution come then instead of in 1848, the English
+throne, whose possessor lacked all personal hold of the people, might have
+shared the fate of continental crowns.
+
+The Queen saw nothing of any Court until she presided over a transformed
+Court of her own. Her subjects no sooner knew their fresh ruler than they
+were powerfully impressed by the contrast of her blameless life and
+society to anything of which they had read, heard, or seen. Under such a
+sovereign, a change in the whole spirit of the nation's religious life
+naturally followed. Thinking minds had indeed long been in a state of
+spiritual ferment. The Tractarian movement had begun with Keble's Assize
+Sermon five years before the Queen's accession. Its full results were not
+to be seen till 1846.
+
+Meanwhile, in the third year of the reign the idea of reviving
+Convocation, which since 1717 had been suspended, of which Burke had said
+that it was without functions save to pay compliments to the king and then
+dissolve, took form; since 1850, that body has met. Unreformed this
+clerical parliament still remains. As in 1864 it declared _Essays and
+Reviews_ heretical, but could not punish the men whom it branded, so,
+to-day, a canon of Convocation, though approved by the Crown, has no
+binding power. But the days when the _Times_, long since convinced of its
+Erastian errors, could sneer at Convocation as 'a clerical debating
+society with a long name' are altogether gone by.
+
+Many who are by no means ardent Churchmen, or are outside the Church
+Communion, are interested to know the actual opinion of Convocation on
+social and industrial questions of the hour, as this opinion is expressed
+by educated men who reflect the views of their cloth at least as
+faithfully as the House of Commons reflects the views of the people. Thus,
+during the recent sittings of a single year, Convocation in its two
+provinces with their divisions into lower and upper Houses, has discussed
+and suggested solutions of subjects so varied as sisterhoods and
+deaconesses, betting and gambling, popular education, soldiers' marriages,
+marriage law amendment Bills, spiritual provision for workhouses, clergy
+discipline Bill, the relations between the Church and State in the
+Colonies. Even in its unreformed condition, this body can scarcely fail to
+be of some use in officially telling Parliament men the opinion of the
+Church, which, on any view of it, is at least a considerable corporation,
+on matters affecting clerical interests or popular morals. In the remote
+event of the Church being disestablished, Convocation is a useful drilling
+ground on which Churchmen of all degrees can be trained to collective
+action.
+
+What are the facts relating to the Church to-day? At the opening of this
+age, the beneficed clergy were often unfit for their posts; they were very
+largely indifferent to their duties. The attacks on the Establishment led
+by the Lord Henley of that day and others, shortly after the 1832 Reform
+Act, were more organized and plausible than anything which has been
+witnessed since. There are, after all, not many things more national in
+England than the Church. Even the differences of the clergy, and the
+professed desire of some among them to be free from State supervision,
+have not lessened the national regard for the Established Faith. The
+attack from within, therefore, seems likely to be weathered not less
+successfully than the attack from without.
+
+The parochial system of the Church--its clergy resident in every village
+where the squire is often an absentee, has struck its fibres too deep into
+the soil of English life, to be rooted out by any sectarian agitation. The
+best proof that Church endowments do not check, but rather encourage,
+private beneficence is the amount of money donations to the Established
+Church during the present age. Gifts to the Church, whether in the shape
+of lands, tithes, other rent charges, stock or cash, represent roughly a
+sum of L5,500,000, yielding a perpetual yearly income of L181,940.
+
+The second of the two Acts establishing the Ecclesiastical Commission is
+of Victorian date. The operations of this body have increased the incomes
+of Church livings by L1,016,775 a year, or by a capital sum of
+L30,599,100; and this during the twelve years ending 1896-97. Queen Anne's
+bounty does not, indeed, seem to have been uniformly administered with
+such wisdom. Its funds have sometimes been granted to incumbents to
+enlarge houses, schools, and other buildings beyond the point at which
+there was an assured income for the maintenance of these fabrics. The
+Tithes Commutation Act is not blamed for the periodical return of hard
+times for the clergy. The distress itself is partial, sometimes
+exaggerated. Still, there seems to have been a general reduction of
+incomes in rural districts by 25 per cent. No offertories, which in towns
+greatly help the clergy, can make the country deficiency good. The
+suggestion of repealing the Act which put down pluralities so as to
+concentrate several poor preferments in one incumbent is not likely to be
+acted on. But some relaxation of the Act might be a feasible concession to
+a growing opinion. Rich livings are sometimes the worst served. Some
+re-adjustment of stipends after a new enquiry seems, therefore, likely to
+be proposed.
+
+So much for the purely English aspect of clerical activity in our age. The
+alliance in the foreign enterprise of the Church with the State coincides
+exclusively with the Victorian reign. In 1841 the Colonial Bishopric fund
+was begun. By 1851 the Colonial episcopate was fairly organized. Four
+years after the Queen's accession there were 10 Anglican dioceses out of
+England. Sixty years after that accession there are 92.[108] These sees
+are grouped into provincial Synods. This foreign Church, one in doctrine
+with the Established Church at home, is modified in its agency and
+development to suit the soil to which it is transplanted. The late Sir J.
+R. Seeley, with respect to its calming influences amid jarring faiths, has
+in a familiar passage dwelt on the Christianity of the English Church as a
+reconciling element between the rival creeds of the Eastern world. Add to
+this the organization of episcopal Protestantism of the Anglican type, not
+only in the West Indies and in our Canadian Dominion, but in the United
+States themselves.[109]
+
+A fair idea may thus be formed of the State Church in its character of a
+veritable catholic, not less than a national, power. Improved organization
+does not always argue increased efficiency. The machinery of the Roman
+Empire was never more elaborate than when it was in a state of atrophy.
+Coinciding, however, with the unmistakable signs of spiritual life at home
+and abroad, the domestic resources and the foreign work of the national
+religion are tributes alike to the efficacy of the Church as a world-wide
+instrument of righteousness, and to the increased motive power of religion
+during the Victorian age. With the spiritual work that has been done,
+certain names very briefly must be associated. The Oxford Tractarianism
+between 1832-46 is only one of many manifestations of religious life which
+mark that epoch, and which nearly perplexed into infidelity the Oxford
+verger aforesaid. In extreme Evangelicalism outside our Church, the
+followers of Wesley, regardless of their founder's injunction not to form
+a separate sect, were perfecting their system when the reign began. In
+1833, an English clergyman at Plymouth, J. L. Darby, left the National
+Church and founded the sect of 'Brethren' who take their name from the
+Western seaport where he had officiated. Fifteen years later, in 1848,
+Plymouth Brethrenism was itself divided by one of Darby's followers, named
+Newton; he created a clique of his own now called by their rival
+religionists, the loose, or open, Brethren. The missionary and literary
+activities of this little sect are really remarkable. In 1843
+Presbyterianism across the Tweed had a schism of its own. The secession of
+Chalmers on the issue of State patronage resulted in the founding of the
+Free Kirk. The religious activity of the epoch has been universal. Among
+the older dissenting bodies, Congregationalists, in point of numbers,
+influence, in national repute of their leaders, perhaps come first. These
+in 1837, numbered 170,000 full members. Now they number nearly 400,000. Of
+the Baptists there were, in 1837, 125,000. Sixty years later they are
+340,000. This increase is due to the single agency of C. H. Spurgeon,
+whose personal influence is not yet fully realized but may be judged from
+the circulation by millions of his posthumous Sermons, as well as by the
+pulpit imitations of him in all Communions, not excepting the high
+Anglican pulpits. Hence of course Nonconformist numbers depending largely
+on individual attractions, are subject to greater fluctuations than in the
+Establishment. Roman Catholics have increased in the large towns of
+England and in the Colonies. In 1837 their priests were less than 1,000.
+Fifty years later they were in round numbers 2,500. Their Churches have
+risen from 600 to 1,350. The activity of British Evangelicalism is farther
+shown by the doubling of the income of the British and Foreign Bible
+Society during the reign, by the cost of a New Testament being ten-pence
+in 1837, a penny in 1897. Similarly the income of the Propagation of the
+Gospel Society is very nearly twice, and of the Church Missionary Society
+almost thrice, as much to-day as it was in the Accession year.
+
+Among Nonconformist bodies, numbers vary according to the eminence of
+individual leaders, rising by bounds with a Spurgeon, diminishing
+temporarily with some of his successors. Similarly, among Anglican
+Communicants numbers fluctuate according to the influence of the leaders
+of the great schools, a Liddon, or a Ryle, a Maurice, a Webb Peploe, or a
+Lefroy. R. W. Dale, of Birmingham, whose work on the Atonement is a
+recognised text book, even among many Anglicans, did as much as A. P.
+Stanley of Westminster, to soften down sectarian differences, and to
+command the respect of other Communions. Nor has Dale had any lack of
+worthy successors now living. Unless religion had been ineradicable in the
+national, because in the human, mind, results very different from this
+general increase in the number of all religious Communions, judged by
+whatever test, would have been witnessed.
+
+Scarcely had the Church recovered from the shock of Newman's secession,
+and the agitating effects during two decades of High Church and Low Church
+controversies[110] when Dr Mansel, then an Oxford tutor and
+professor,[111] in his ardent, but not wholly discreet zeal, expressed
+views on the relations of the Infinite to the finite which, as F. D.
+Maurice perceived, declaring the Deity to be unknowable by man, might be
+perverted into an apology for agnosticism. That religion did not really
+suffer is due in some degree to Benjamin Jowett. This good and honest
+scholar's life was spent in educating young men into useful Christians,
+into serious citizens, and into sincere believers. He claimed liberty; he
+loved truth. He ridiculed with quiet satire the religious nescience and
+despair which Mansel's terrific propaganda had been distorted into making
+the vogue. When Dr Temple was made Primate:--the first and greatest
+tribute was paid to the variety of Oxford ecclesiasticism that would be
+rightly described not as the broad, or high, but as the hard Church.
+There could be no more striking instance of the transformation in
+religious ideas witnessed during our age than the fact that the volume to
+which Dr Temple and Mr Jowett both contributed, _Essays and Reviews_, was
+branded by Convocation as heretical during the sixties, and is discovered
+to be harmless during the nineties.
+
+So qualified a judge on these matters as Mr Stopford Brooke deplores the
+declension of religious liberalism into something indistinguishable from
+unbelief. But as Professor Mansel's orthodox zeal for the dignity of his
+faith helped his enemies rather than his friends, so the services rendered
+by his devout successors are not always unmixedly conducive to the old
+faith. The 'higher criticism' has been a dubious ally of Biblical
+Christianity. _Lux Mundi_ distinguished between the historic and mythic
+elements in the _Pentateuch_. The gifted editor of that work has more
+recently[112] applied the same method to the sayings of the Founder of
+Christianity, and has seemed to some to sanction the evaporation into
+proverbs of some Divine utterances.[113]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY
+
+    The new Court as head of the old society. Social transformations which
+    would most strike one revisiting the London West End in 1897. Going to
+    Court. Multiplication of clubs in St James's and Pall Mall, but
+    disappearance of gambling clubs. Socially transforming effects of the
+    Parliamentary Committee in 1844. Then and now. 'Play and Pay' betting
+    modified by its recommendations. Necessary connection between horse
+    breeding and horse racing. Cricket--then and now. The new football or
+    the old prize ring. Indoor amusements. Transformation, by development,
+    of Victorian chess. The men and events which have made it what it is.
+    Ladies' drawing room work. Middle class English ladies the great
+    readers nowadays. Fashionable needlework of all kinds from 1837-97.
+
+
+The transformed society of the Victorian age may be regarded as a new
+combination of old elements. The interests, and the pursuits represented
+in it have always existed. The grouping and the mutual relations are the
+only novelty. Even during the Prince Consort's time, the Court had begun
+to be the federal head of the many coloured corporation which, under the
+name of society, has superseded the 'genteel' or 'polite' world of earlier
+days. That all liberal professions or worthy pursuits should find their
+natural head among the representatives of the Crown was the central idea
+of the Queen's husband. So far as the opportunities of a short life
+allowed, he translated this notion into practice. It was reserved for his
+eldest son to witness, and himself largely to promote, the full
+realization of Prince Albert's purpose. The result is that to-day not only
+diplomacy or soldiership, statemanship or wealth, sends its envoys to a
+transformed Court. There is no sort of human achievement or distinction
+that, directly it has won the approval of the people, lacks the
+recognition, personal or vicarious, of the people's rulers.
+
+Each of the callings noticed in the present survey, clerical or lay, sends
+its deputies to Marlborough House or Sandringham in the same way that
+diplomacy and arms are represented at a Royal drawing room or levee. For a
+reflection of the chief currents of thought, of the favourite pursuits of
+the most absorbing interests and influences of Victorian England, the
+historian will have to consult the list of visitors to the Heir Apparent's
+house, or read the account of his doings. The Prince Consort was attacked
+by the Tories in 1846 because he listened to Peel's speeches on Free Trade
+from the Peers' Gallery in the Commons. In 1897 the Prince of Wales
+attends daily the State trial of South African celebrities at Westminster,
+and is praised for a fresh proof of his interest in Colonial affairs. No
+artist or author; no sailor, soldier, cricketer or actor, makes his mark
+upon his age without some tribute from a popular Court to prowess that is
+already a household word with the multitude.
+
+Thus in its relations to those aspects of national life in which the
+people itself is most interested, the Court of to-day has been transformed
+into a federal head of the entire motley system. If the competition of
+individuals for personal recognition in the highest quarter sometimes
+embitters social life, that is not the Royal patron's fault.
+
+Among the changes which would make the fashionable quarter of the town
+most difficult of recognition to-day by one who knew it only in the early
+years of the reign, is the multiplication of joint stock palaces called
+clubs, which are really co-operative homes for poor gentlemen.[114] The
+absence of the gaming houses of which Crockford's was only one among many;
+and the widely representative quality of the ladies and gentlemen whom our
+stranger might notice driving to Court on a presentation day during the
+season is as visible as the disappearance of the West End hells.[115]
+
+In the seventh year after the Queen's accession, the House of Commons'
+Committee on Gambling began its sittings. It was presided over by Lord
+Palmerston. Among the witnesses it examined were men well known in every
+section of London or of national life. Trainers, jockeys, magistrates,
+policemen, all contributed to the remarkable picture of contemporary life
+and manners, contained between the covers of this document.
+
+The state of the law as regards gambling was then, as now, obscure.
+Magistrates shrank from giving constables a chance of confirming their
+suspicions as to houses of shy-looking exterior; but generally in the
+streets off St James's nearly every third house was a place of play.
+Between Pall Mall and the east side of Leicester Square, some 36 gambling
+houses were proved to exist. At Crockford's itself the tables were
+honestly managed. It was the perversion of Crockford's example which did
+the harm. Thus, some half dozen years before the Great Exhibition,
+Crockford's ceased to exist; its humbler but more mischievous imitators
+were also weeded out. An improved epoch began. Before the twentieth
+anniversary of the Accession, the building at the top of St James's Street
+described by Disraeli in the first chapter of _Sibyl_ had become under the
+style of 'The Wellington' the best restaurant of the kind then, or for
+many years, known to London. Thereafter, indeed, it reverted to a club,
+the 'Argus' first, and then the 'Devonshire;' but a gambling club no more.
+The periodical flutter caused by rumoured scandals, is itself evidence of
+the improved standard of social morals. One other result of this
+Enquiry[116] is probably felt among sporting persons to-day.
+
+Lord Palmerston's Committee pronounced against play and pay betting, that
+is, the system under which the bet is valid whether the horse runs or
+not. In betting at the post for ready money the bet is off to-day if the
+horse does not start. Not only is the Turf more popular than it ever was
+before. It binds sections of the polite world more closely together than
+they are held by any political or ecclesiastical cement. It is thus a
+social interest of the first importance which a prudent statesman makes a
+point of conciliating not less than he would the clergy, the lawyers, or
+even the licensed victuallers. The constantly increasing encouragement
+given to the Turf by men who have no personal end to serve, and whose
+refinement must be revolted by the aspect of many of its accessories,
+justifies the conclusion that the racecourse is indispensable to the breed
+of horses.
+
+From the Plantagenet and Tudor period the best horses in England were
+raced; they were made better that they might be raced more successfully.
+Hence the wise introduction, for beauty as the crown of strength, of Arab
+blood, especially under Charles II. and onwards. The early excellence of
+stallions followed. The sires of racers begot also English hunters, so
+that the best horses in the hunting field to-day derive their pedigrees on
+one side from the founders of the best racing blood. The general utility
+animal, seen in carriages and cabs, is bred in the same way but has just
+fallen below the hunter level. Thus, without thoroughbred sires, the
+excellence of our horses generally must decline. The expense of breeding
+the best quadrupeds of the stud book is so heavy that without the
+stimulus of racing, the stock could scarcely be maintained.
+
+The long distance plates on the Turf dating back to the time of Anne have
+been replaced by the Queen's premium stallions, periodically on view at
+Islington, and at the disposal, for a small fee, of horse owners
+throughout the country. These fine animals are almost all the winners of
+races. The necessary expense of racing suggests the usefulness, as in an
+earlier chapter was seen, of the sporting plutocrat to the Turf, and hence
+to the national quadruped generally. Unless the sport gave to its
+followers some sort of social diploma, the wealthy breeders whom the mart
+has furnished to the racecourse, from the earliest of the Rothschilds down
+to the latest of the Hirsches or the Maples, would scarcely have given
+time and money to their own pleasure as well as to the country's good.
+
+To pass to the horse in another aspect, the conjectural estimate of packs
+of hounds at the beginning of the hunting season in 1837 was 28. At a
+corresponding date in 1897 the ascertained figures were 61. This does but
+faintly indicate the change undergone by the national sport. Not even John
+Leech's pictorial satire in _Punch_ could deter the Cit from the hunting
+field, or discourage him from educating himself into a more than passable
+rider across country. Capel Court has or had a cry of beagles of its own.
+At longer distances from London than the Surrey pastures 15 per cent. of
+the wearers of pink and buckskin wear on ordinary days the glossy uniform
+of the brokers and jobbers of the House. A little earlier in the year,
+these sportsmen were tramping after partridges by the early September
+twilight that they might be at their business in the City before the West
+End sits down to breakfast. This is a specimen of what goes on throughout
+the kingdom. On the outskirts of all great cities, co-operative shootings
+are as common as co-operative stores.
+
+Other pastimes are too much in daily evidence to need many words or to
+allow the apprehension that the male acceptance of the feminine lawn
+tennis implies any degeneration in the Victorian race of youth. The
+addition of Scotch golf to English games, and the vast improvement as to
+pace, style, and time shown by crews at Henley or on the Metropolitan
+waters in 1897 over 1837 may dispel any fears of a deterioration of
+youthful stamina or of muscular zeal. Whether as regards its own surface
+or the meadows which it waters, the Thames in the South, like the Tyne or
+Mersey in the North, is still a river that feeds the sea of English
+manhood.
+
+As regards cricket, it is impossible to compare ancient or modern players,
+batsmen or bowlers; so entirely have the conditions of the game been
+transformed. The high scoring of the later Victorian days which would have
+amazed earlier players seems due, first, to the vastly improved pitches,
+making as they do, almost any bowling fairly easy; secondly, to the great
+increase of good players, consequent of course upon the evergrowing
+popularity of the game. The first of these facts, the improved pitches,
+explains why the difficult shooter that before 1875 was so fatal to
+batsmen at Lord's has now become a very rare ball. Although the power of
+the bat seems to-day greater than that of the ball, the ground had no
+sooner become easy and overhand bowling allowed, than the utmost was done
+to equalize the attack and defence. Hence the bowling is much straighter
+than of old; long leg and long stop no longer have a place among the
+fieldmen, and the absence of long leg hitting and fielding makes the game
+less interesting for spectators; still the grounds improve, the scoring
+consequently increases. The feature which has transformed the bowling
+seems to be that now the best bowlers are fast with a break even on a hard
+wicket: whereas formerly they only broke on a sticky wicket. The still
+astounding power of the best bowlers is shown by the havoc they make when
+they get a sticky wicket to bowl on. In fine weather there is no serious
+obstacle to the stupendous scoring; the batting is of a more monotonous
+type than it used to be, and the play therefore less interesting to
+onlookers.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, individual influence has been a transforming power.
+Between 1871 and 1883 when W. G. Grace was at his best, no fast bowler
+could do anything with him. Slow bowling, therefore, was adopted to keep
+down his run getting. As this batsman has taken his place among the
+veterans the old swift style has come into vogue once more. In the opinion
+of the greatest experts of modern cricket, as W. G. Grace is the most
+formidable bat, so Richardson of Surrey first, after him, Spofforth, the
+Australian, in his middle career, have been the most difficult bowlers.
+
+The popularity of football, whose vogue is a recent Victorian growth is
+shown by the collection of 50,000 spectators at the Crystal Palace, to
+witness a final tie for the Association Cup. Admissions of 20,000 and
+30,000 are daily events in all great towns; the money thus paid by the
+public has created the professional football player. Hence many questions
+on which authorities differ. The subject has divided the different
+football unions: the northern Rugby clubs having seceded to found a union
+of their own. The feuds among football legislators are thus as varied and
+violent as the forms of muscular ferocity which the game itself allows.
+That these can be minimized by a strenuous and keen referee is probable;
+that when this functionary is slack, professional football resembles the
+revival of the prize ring in disguise is admitted.[117] Football may seem
+to the mere observer almost to have become a misnomer, when carrying the
+ball is part of the game; when hands, shoulders, chest, fists, are nearly
+as active as legs and feet.
+
+Among indoor games chess is that which has been transformed the most
+during our age. Here something may be attributed to the example of the
+Prince Consort, who was not, however, an invincible player, but more to
+his youngest son, the lamented Prince Leopold, who did a good deal to
+popularize the game. In point of universal popularity chess will never
+quite rival whist or billiards. It lacks the element of chance in the
+first, and the display of physical skill in the second which must ever
+chiefly fascinate men. The chess player, too, when well matched, uses more
+brain power than the whist player. Each has to keep the judgment
+perpetually alert. But the conventions in chess are left behind when the
+opening has been matured into the mid game, while the conventions of whist
+relieve the whist player continuously during the progress of the rubber.
+
+Throughout the whole of this age chess has grown in favour among us. In
+most of our large towns for every chess club existing in 1847, there are
+ten or fifteen in 1897. On the Queen's accession English chess players
+still felt the stimulus given to the game in London from 1780-95 by Andre
+Francois Danican, commonly known as 'Philidor.' Hence may be dated the
+earliest English chess clubs, and the scientific study of the game. Three
+years before the Victorian age began, a series of matches was played by
+the English Alexander MacDonell and the French Labourdonnais. In 1844, the
+English Howard Staunton defeated the French St Amant in a match which
+decided the championship of the world. This, followed in 1847 by the
+publication of Staunton's _Chessplayer's Handbook_, brought hundreds more
+to the board.
+
+Another agency in the same direction was the presence in Europe of a young
+American, Paul Morphy. His play was, upon the whole, the finest the world
+has ever seen. He crossed the Atlantic in 1857; at the close of 1858 he
+had beaten every European noteworthy enough to try conclusions with him.
+The effect of these triumphs, won by a youth of twenty-one in the most
+difficult of all games, was electrical. No considerable town in the
+country was without its chess clubs. Nor is the influence more recently
+exercised by J. H. Blackburne less remarkable in its way. His skill in
+playing games without the board, exhibited in all parts of the United
+Kingdom, has raised up many imitators, but scarcely an equal.
+
+With these great players there have come also fresh scientific discoveries
+in the conduct of the game itself; the first of these as to time was the
+Scotch Gambit, partially anticipated indeed by Italian writers in the last
+century, but owing its new name and later vogue to its adoption by the
+Scotch players in the correspondence match between Edinburgh and London,
+1824 to 1826 and subsequently improved upon in 1837. About that latter
+year, too, W. D. Evans, of the Royal Navy, invented the Gambit which now
+bears his name. Stimulated by these British achievements, the Austrian
+players hit upon the Vienna or Queen's Knights game which was first made
+famous during the tournament of 1873. In this country, most of these
+advances have been sensibly helped by the movement that the _Illustrated
+London News_ began in 1842, which the whole press has since followed, of
+publishing chess problems.
+
+An exhibition of feminine needlework justly forms a feature in the
+Commemoration shows of the period. In 1837 the decorative functions of the
+needle were oftener shown by English women of the middle classes than by
+acknowledged fashion leaders. In 1867 it is the middle class ladies who do
+most of the reading and the ultra-fashionable ones who do most of the
+fancy work. What transformations has this latter passed through? In 1857,
+as it had been in 1837, the mode was to work patterns for cushions and
+screens with Berlin wool on canvas. The squareness of the cross stitch was
+fatal to artistic effect; the covering thus decorated went out of fashion
+soon after Rowland's Macassar hair oil ceased lavishly to be used, and
+heads no longer gleamed with unguent. The frame work was succeeded by that
+known to the Afghans as 'boning,' and to Britons as crochet, while chairs
+and sofas still needed some protection from locks not yet wholly
+unanointed. Even the crochet coverlets, tied with little pink ribbons,
+began to disappear when people left their hair to nature. But the artistic
+instinct was slowly helping forward this sort of work.
+
+More popular than crochet had ever been, leather frames for pictures, cut
+out of leaves copied from Nature, or the pinning down of fern leaves on a
+soft cloth or silk began to be; for these Indian ink, used with a fine
+brush made an effective background. Ruskin's gospel of following Nature
+had not been preached in vain. Accomplished women like the late Lady
+Marion Alford began to revive, with improvements of her own, the art of
+embroidering flowers, plants, birds and butterflies in wool or silk; while
+the stately arum lilies were used for screens, and gorgeous poppies for
+curtains. Next came a renascence of lace work. Many amateurs produced
+beautiful samples of pillow and point; but the work was trying to the
+eyes, and competed unfairly with the poor professionals of Honiton or
+Nottingham.
+
+The early days of Ritualism popularized the copying of the borders of the
+old painted missals and prettily occupied many drawing rooms. Oil painting
+on pottery, wood, and glass came in during the early South Kensingtonian
+period. All young ladies now were water colour artists, or busied
+themselves with colouring panels and dados on their friend's walls. Brass
+work was a later and not very long lived development. It was costly; it
+was noisy; the long suffering male gradually rose up against it. Iron
+work, the torturing into fantastic shapes of ductile strips of metal, was
+a little more enduring; but it required too much accuracy and too many
+instruments ever to be very popular. The beautiful glass painting in
+churches of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford was admired rather than
+reproduced.
+
+Irish cabins supplied a modish industry to English drawing rooms in drawn
+linen work. The principle of this seems to be hem stitching, or unbinding
+work into the spaces left by the drawn threads. Poker work done within the
+outline traced by this simple instrument on a wooden board, is practised
+successfully by ladies of genius who could touch nothing without adorning
+it, but is scarcely to be commended to bunglers or in school rooms.[118]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND COLONIAL
+
+    Significance of the New Law Court buildings in London. Early efforts
+    after law reform in Parliament. No appreciable result till 1841. Slow
+    progress and subsequent changes, culminating in the 1869 Commission,
+    and the 1873 Judicature Act. The popular consequences of this, and
+    general view of our legal system as it affects to-day the Colonies as
+    well as the mother country.
+
+    Transformation in our Colonial system shown by the latest facts and
+    figures. Special usefulness as well as Imperial value of the Colonies
+    to England. Social fusion of the mother country and the Colonies
+    prefigured by the presence and influence on both sides of the Atlantic
+    of the American element in the best society in London. Individual
+    influences which have promoted this movement, and are doing the same
+    thing for our Colonial cousins, as for our American.
+
+
+No architectural change during the age has more affected the perspective
+of Fleet Street and the Strand than the disappearance of Temple Bar and
+its replacement by the griffin which marks its former site, and the
+erection of the Royal Courts of Justice that now flank the central
+thoroughfare. This is the outward and visible sign of a transformation not
+less great, as regards the administration of the law within the new palace
+of justice itself.
+
+The Reform Act of 1832 was followed by various movements in Parliament in
+the direction of law reform. The proposals and their very slight results
+were solely technical; the public reaped no appreciable benefit so long as
+the separation of the Common Law Courts from the Court of Chancery
+existed, and on different sides of Westminster Hall two legal systems,
+often mutually antagonistic, were at work. Ten years after the Accession,
+the monopoly of Serjeants of Law in the old Court of Common Pleas was
+swept away. Still justice was delayed. During the early days of railway
+enterprise, commerce was obstructed, by the postponement, for inadequate
+or vexatious reasons, of the trial of cases arising out of bills of
+exchange on which large sums of money depended, and which, till they were
+decided, blocked commercial enterprise. This may be looked back to now as
+the scholastic era in nineteenth century law administration. The
+categories into which causes and kinds of legal action and pleas, were
+divided, in their pedantic complexity, recalled the tortuous refinements
+of the logical school men upon the comparatively simple predicaments of
+Aristotle.
+
+In 1851 a flagrant and inveterate anomaly was removed by the success of
+those law reformers who had long in vain protested against the absurdity
+of disallowing the evidence of persons immediately interested in the suit.
+After this, the movement did not pause till the Commission of 1869 was
+appointed, with the result that in 1873 there passed the Judicature Act
+which has amalgamated conflicting usages into a homogeneous system, and
+produced the long desired fusion between Equity and Law. The ancient
+divisions are perpetuated to-day not in different Courts but in different
+divisions of the same Court. The result briefly stated is that
+notwithstanding the real difference which still exists between Equity and
+Law, and the practical division of the Bar into two branches, Law and
+Equity can to-day be administered by the same Courts and one judge can
+give suitors the same relief as any other judge.
+
+There is now no possibility of a question being decided by one tribunal
+according to Common Law principles, and by another according to the
+principles of Equity. To prevent any chance of confusion it has further
+been enacted that wherever the rules of Equity and Law seem to conflict,
+those of Common Law are to prevail. The principle of a division of labour
+still exists. Every judge, that is, does not transact every sort of
+business. The judges in the Chancery division are still specially charged
+with the execution of trusts and other such matters, even as happened in
+the case of their predecessors fifty years ago. To do justice with as
+little regard as may be to forms and precedents is the visible object of
+the administrators of the law in every department. That professional
+prejudices should have disappeared was not to be expected, and, perhaps,
+not to be desired. But the exclusive etiquette of judges and lawyers is
+not greater than prevails in other professions, among doctors,
+diplomatists, or divines. The plaintiff in person is no more welcome in
+the reformed, than in the unreformed, Courts; nor, in the interests of
+public time and of common sense, is it probably to be wished that he
+should be. The two principal and practical defects in the administration
+of English law that still need attention would seem to be--one, the
+barbarous system which still obtains through the imperfect arrangements of
+the Circuit Courts of keeping untried prisoners unreasonably long in
+prison. Of late cases have been noticed in which persons, proved on trial
+to be innocent, have been detained in prison for weeks or months. The
+second defect is the undue licence allowed to the legal profession of
+protracting the hearing of cases secondary in their importance by the
+accumulation of unnecessary evidence and cross-examination. This has often
+been objected to, but has seldom been firmly controlled by the judges.
+
+The great public benefit conferred by the reforms whose monument is the
+New Law Courts hard by the church of St Clement Danes, may be condensed
+into the remark that whereas from 1837 to 1875 it was an accident whether
+the right party won his case, the presumption in favour of his success in
+1897 is so strong as almost to amount to a certainty.
+
+Of another sort of fusion, that between the two divisions of the legal
+profession, solicitors and barristers, much has been heard. But in Canada
+and some other Colonies some inconvenience and disadvantage are found to
+result from the absence of any distinction between barristers and
+solicitors. Gradually, perhaps, a solution in practice is being arrived
+at. Without mentioning individual names it is the fact that among the men
+who now stand highest, whether at the Bar or on the Bench, many while
+students at the Inns of Court have perfected themselves in the practical
+details of law by voluntarily attending the offices of great firms of
+solicitors, whether in Westminster or elsewhere.
+
+The palace of justice whose opening marked the close of the fourth decade
+of the reign, commemorates, in a fashion of its own, the unity of the
+Empire as well as the late achieved unity of the administration of
+justice.
+
+Among the Queen's subjects are nations not only of every creed and of
+every colour, but trained in obedience to every code of law which human
+skill has devised. Since the modern era of our Colonial Empire began in
+1836, the practice has been to continue to those dependencies the laws
+under which they were when they came into being, or when they were first
+acquired by diplomatic cession or military conquest, always provided that
+these pre-existent systems do not contradict the fundamental principles of
+British jurisprudence. Thus, in British Guiana, in the Cape Colony, and in
+Ceylon, the letter and spirit of Roman-Dutch law have been continued under
+English rule. In lower Canada, French forms have become so confused as to
+be impracticable: the laws of this province are to-day identical with
+those in vogue in England at the time of its acquisition in 1763,
+periodically of course improved by modern lights. In the Mauritius, the
+French Code Civile and the French Code de Commerce still exist. It is for
+the sovereign embodying in her own person the unity of the Empire to
+decide through the Privy Council, that is, to-day, through the Judicial
+Committee in all disputed cases what the particular law of the locality
+may be.
+
+On page 227 of the writer's earlier book _England_, etc., the Colonial as
+well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Privy Council Judicial
+Committee was explained in detail. Since those words were written an
+important step has been taken under an Act passed some years ago by Lord
+Herschell. By this, the Chief Justice of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry de
+Villiers, Chief Justice Sir Henry Strong of Canada, Sir Samuel Way, Chief
+Justice of South Australia, have been added to the Judicial Committee of
+the Privy Council, in order to strengthen that body with special reference
+to the Roman-Dutch, French-Canadian and Australasian law, in legislation
+and practice. Here too, it is well to refer to the recent formation of the
+Society of Comparative Legislation. This body is actively engaged and has
+already done good work in classifying materials throughout the Empire, as
+well as in accumulating a compendium of information which will greatly
+promote the simplicity and uniformity of the laws of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some distinct idea must, however, be formed of the concrete reality
+connoted by the familiar expression 'Colonial Empire,' beginning, as in
+truth for our generation it did, with the founding of the Australasian
+capital called Adelaide, after his Queen, in the last year of William IV.,
+but practically co-extensive in its growth with the reign of his
+successor. The area of the United Kingdom is 121,000 square miles. That of
+its possessions in foreign parts is 8,725,000 square miles. In other
+words the mother country is only in extent a seventieth part of the Empire
+of which that mother country is the nucleus.
+
+To put the facts somewhat differently this British Empire, covering some
+9,000,000 square miles, occupies a fifth part of the habitable globe. No
+other world power such as this has been known to past or can be found in
+present history. The British Empire of the Victorian age is five times as
+large as was the Empire of Darius five centuries before the Christian Era
+began. It is four times the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Among
+modern Powers, the Empire of Great Britain is larger by an eighth than
+that of Russia; it contains 230 millions more people. It is sixteen times
+as great as the foreign dominions of France; forty times as great as the
+Empire of Germany. Seven days and nights of continuous travelling are
+required to cross the American Continent. The lands which owe allegiance
+to the monarch of these Islands are three times as extensive as those
+composing the Republican Empire of the United States.
+
+The relative progress, according to the population test, of the mother
+country, and the nationalities, voluntarily incorporated into her
+government, beyond seas will best be judged by the facts and figures of a
+comparatively recent contrast, such as is alone practicable in the case of
+an essentially modern experience. Between 1871, then, and 1881, the
+increase in the inhabitants of the United Kingdom was at the rate of 10
+per cent. In the case of our American Colonies it was 19 per cent.; in
+the case of our Australasian it was 42 per cent. The same progress which
+has marked our recent history in other respects than numbers at home, has
+not been wanting with our kin beyond sea. Thus, in respect of education;
+in the single province of Quebec, then fairly typical of our other
+possessions, in 1837 barely one-fourth of the population could read; less
+than one-tenth could make even a pretence at writing. In 1897 there are in
+the same province 4,000 schools, with a total of 200,000 scholars, each of
+whom is periodically certified by examiners to be making gradual progress
+in the prescribed standards, according to age, and qualified individually
+to swell the claim upon the Government grant for efficiency.
+
+As for higher teaching, all our principal Colonies have their
+Universities. In the mother country, corresponding progress since the
+legislation of 1870 was at work was shown by the ability of the framer of
+that measure, the late W. E. Forster, himself well known in the Colonies,
+before his death in 1885, to point to the fact that the school attendance
+from being seven per cent. before his Act was passed had within fifteen
+years' operation of that measure risen to seventeen per cent. In the
+Australasian Colonies the results are not less striking than in the mother
+country or in the Canadian. In 1837 New South Wales was without a
+constitution as well as without any elementary education machinery of its
+own. Within rather less than half a century the institution of responsible
+government had been followed by an Education Act on the same lines as the
+English Act of 1870, but providing inter-mediate schools as well, with the
+result that the last census in Victoria shows that, of every 10,000
+children of school age, 9,500 could read, and more than 8,500 could write.
+
+These are specimen cases which establish the point that the extension of
+English power is accompanied by the spread of whatever advantages modern
+civilization can bring. As was seen in the preceding chapter, since the
+Colonial Bishoprics movement of 1851, religion has followed everywhere in
+the wake of our Empire. So, too, has education. These are the things which
+distinguish the Colonial methods of Great Britain from those of any other
+country whether in earlier or in contemporary times.
+
+Dependencies, _i.e._ places necessary for the maintenance of Empire, but
+not suitable for permanent British habitation; Crown Colonies, controlled
+by a Governor, and legislated for by orders in Council, with, as soon as
+the soil is ripe for it, some representative Council on the spot,
+reduplications of the mother country under foreign suns, with
+Constitutions of their own and representative Government after the pattern
+of the United Kingdom; these are the different heads under which the
+Colonial Empire that has grown up in our age may be divided. As this
+Empire is in itself new, so the machinery for its central administration
+in the form in which it now exists is a product of the present reign.
+Evelyn the diarist, writing under date February 28th, 1671, mentions his
+appointment as a member of the Committee of the Privy Council, that had
+been established in 1660 for controlling the foreign plantations. This
+Council in 1672 was joined to the Council of Trade, the entire body being
+called the Council of Trade and Plantations. That was reconstituted in
+1695, and again in 1748, when India came under its charge, continuing to
+remain under it until the appointment of the Board of Control in 1784.
+
+At the beginning of our century, War and Colonies formed the province of a
+single Secretary of State and continued to do so till 1854. The first
+Colonial Secretary holding that office alone was Sir George Grey, followed
+in 1859 by the Duke of Newcastle. This was the Peelite duke whose father
+had founded the Newcastle scholarship at Eton, and who himself accompanied
+the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1859. The Colonies were not the
+department he had desired when Lord Palmerston formed his last Government,
+but he did his work not unsympathetically and bequeathed his post in good
+order to Cardwell. The ablest of the earlier Colonial Secretaries was
+without doubt Lord Grey, son of the Reformer, who held the office in Lord
+John Russell's Administration. During the forties, especially in 1849,
+Colonial sensitiveness was wounded by the perpetual motions brought
+forward in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume and others of his party for
+reducing the salary of Colonial Governors,[119] accompanied as these
+motions were by language not complimentary to the new polities. Not
+without party criticism had the office of Parliamentary Under Secretary
+been created in 1810. The same opposition was called forth by the
+appointment of Permanent Under Secretaries, and Legal Advisers to the Home
+Government in 1867, in 1870, 1874, and by the vote for the new Colonial
+offices in Downing Street first occupied in 1876. In 1897 politicians of
+all parties take the same patriotic pride in the Colonial Empire, while an
+ex-Radical leader is that Empire's Minister. The increased popularity of
+Colonial in preference to United States emigration is shown by the fact
+that in 1837 35,264 persons went to the Colonies, and some sixty years
+later the number was 52,029.
+
+The pride that the Queen's subjects take in the Empire beyond seas,
+created by Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and the honour they derive from it are
+accompanied by the growing interest with which the Colonies are regarded
+by political thinkers who see in their development an anticipation of the
+constitutional movements soon to be witnessed on British soil. The
+Australian legislatures have not only kept pace with, they have stolen a
+march on, the socialistic Radicals of the old country. New Zealand
+generally has led the way. This and three other Colonies, New South Wales,
+Victoria and Tasmania, have adopted Woman's Suffrage with the legislative
+freaks which seem to be its sequel. To the action of this franchise is
+attributed the proposal recently made in one of these Parliaments to give
+every domestic servant a statutory holiday once a week. Tasmania, too,
+will not apparently be satisfied till she has secured the Swiss Referendum
+for ending disputes between the two legislative Chambers by submitting the
+single point in issue to the constituencies. Tasmania, also, has made
+several efforts, as yet unsuccessfully, to acclimatise the Hare system of
+proportional representation which is now forgotten in England, save when
+some theorist uses a periodical re-adjustment of our franchise, to revive
+its interest. South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, have also
+attempted, but not as yet carried, the establishment of national banks;
+perilous experiments enough for any new, or for that matter old, country.
+
+Individual effort gave England its Colonies. The same agency--as embodied
+in a Gibbon Wakefield, who began life by being Secretary to Lord Durham in
+Canada 1838, who, 1839, obtained the annexation and colonization of New
+Zealand, and who in 1849 published _The Art of Colonization_; in a Sir
+William Molesworth, the pioneer of Colonial self-government; who,
+obtaining from Palmerston the great object of his ambition, the Colonial
+Secretaryship 1853, died shortly afterwards; more recently in the fourth
+Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary (1866-7; 1874-8)--applied the social
+cement which has joined the new countries with the old in personal rather
+than in merely political relation. Colonial patriotism was also reasonably
+gratified on its intellectual side by Mr Lowe's sojourn in New South
+Wales 1843-50, and by Sir Robert G. W. Herbert's share in the
+Administration of Queensland before he became Colonial Under Secretary in
+London.
+
+A shrewd Colonial statesman not long since observed that if another flying
+Australian, but a born and bred Colonial horse, were to win the Derby, no
+whisper of separation from the British Crown would ever be heard among the
+most advanced of Colonial democrats. Popular enthusiasm at the Antipodean
+winner of the Blue Ribbon would spread from Epsom Downs throughout the
+kingdom; it would be flashed along every wire or transmitted by every
+cable to the four winds of heaven; the Colonists would cease to complain
+that they, or their products, were not appreciated by the mother country.
+This half serious remark contains more than a grain of truth; it points to
+the fact that the grievance alleged by our kinsman beyond sea against the
+headquarters of their race is sentimental, rather than practical. Pending
+the Derby winner from beyond seas, the less sternly democratic of
+England's Colonial cousins have appreciated the peerages bestowed on a few
+of them, and can point to other substantial proofs that they have become a
+power in English society. Thus they have founded clubs in London; they
+possess a party of their own in the House of Commons, and entertain the
+social leaders of the old country at their balls and parties during the
+season in famous restaurants, or at their own homes.
+
+Till the Victorian age was well developed, the latter day American
+elements in London fashion were unheard of. To-day these leaven the whole
+of our social life. It is those born under the Stripes and Stars who
+relieve, at a princely rental, English nobles of house property which its
+owners are not occupying, and supply Countesses and Duchesses to the
+English peerage. The great feature of our time has been the concentration
+of our people in the Metropolis. A like gravitation to towns has indeed
+taken place throughout the whole country. Between the eighties and the
+nineties, the increase of the urban population has been 3,016,579; the
+decrease of the rural has been 139,545.[120]
+
+With respect to this movement, as in other matters, London has shown
+itself the true mirror of England. For a proof of this, it would be enough
+to mention the Langham Hotel, and those caravanserais which have followed
+it, down to the latest and most palatial of all, the Hotel Cecil. That the
+capital thus socially re-created has been successfully reorganized as the
+most cosmopolitan and modish centre of fashion for two hemispheres is due
+largely to the agency of American dollars and American arbiters of
+elegance. In the thirties and the sixties the gifted men who were sent to
+represent the United States in the old country, a Washington Irving, and a
+Lothrop Motley, made their Embassies social centres for the most pleasant
+company of the time, attracted famous men from their own country, one of
+whom, the Rev. Cleveland Coxe,[121] formed a lasting link between the two
+chief branches of the Anglo-Saxon Church, most of these Transatlantic
+visitors left behind them brilliant reputations as conversationalists.
+
+More recently a Russell Lowell and a Bayard have adorned this tradition.
+In their day, the American season following hard upon the London season
+proper has become a regular, and to all concerned most profitable,
+observance in the social calendar. The dictatresses of polite life from
+the other side of the Atlantic generally have been educated in Paris, not
+a few of them by the daughter of Emile Souvestre at that institution for
+turning intelligent girls into charming women, Les Ruches, Fontainebleau;
+they always bring with them to their London homes the tastes of citizens
+of the world. These tastes are gratified as successfully on the Thames as
+on the Seine; it is _la belle Americaine_ who has most visibly impressed
+her image on the capital where, since the Second Empire fell, she has
+chiefly delighted to dwell; she decided that English life needed
+enlivening: she has enlivened it and continues to do so effectually. Some
+restlessness is constitutional to her, as also to the Anglo-Indians and
+Colonials who are perennially so much with us; thus largely to please her
+the London season is now subdivided into innumerable parts. It would be
+truer to say some form of that season lasts all the year round. The
+constant locomotion from one centre, or from one country seat to another,
+began, as has been already seen, with the Prince Consort. It has not been
+discouraged by later representatives of the Crown. From the day that in
+1860 the Prince of Wales visited the tomb of George Washington, he has
+never lost the American heart. The new London regime exactly suits the
+future peeresses of the old country when they are fresh from New York.
+
+The constant alternations of Hyde Park promenades, not only with suburban
+racecourses, but with long days under summer suns given to Thames-side
+picnics, or with rapid flittings on any opportunity to and fro between
+Mayfair on the one hand, the Boulevard des Italiens, Monte Carlo, or
+Homburg on the other: these innovations have been brought about by the
+American Londoner more than by any other single person. The Colonial
+millionaire or millionairess has not yet been so fully developed as their
+Transatlantic equivalents. But the process is going steadily forward, no
+doubt with similar results to follow.
+
+The contrast between the amount of international friction that was caused
+before the Oregon Boundary dispute, and the Trent difference, between the
+two countries were composed in 1846 and in 1863, respectively, and the
+comparative ease with which the Venezuela Question in our own day was
+settled, suggests the solid international advantages of the arrangement
+under which New York and London have become socially one and the same
+capital, having their pleasures, their lions and lionesses, their
+favourite composers, authors, dramatists and players, in common.
+
+The late Mr Samuel Ward, who is as well remembered in London as in New
+York, and who liked to be called the prince of _bon vivants_ at
+Delmonico's, the king of the lobby at Washington, was a cultivated little
+old gentleman, of whom it is difficult to conceive as ever having been
+much less, or more, than some seventy-odd years of age. He was known
+throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon world as 'Uncle Sam.' He had become
+popular in English society soon after the examples of the then Lord
+Hartington and Lord Rosebery included America in the grand tour of every
+educated Briton. He really did something to entitle him to his universal
+sobriquet. He was the founder of a social and literary Anglo-American
+school which has struck its roots deep in the chosen homes of English
+fashion. As Californian gold preceded Australian, so the Transatlantic
+force that has transformed the social England of our day has come before
+the fully organized exercise of a Colonial power of the same sort. But
+every year brings one visibly nearer its final development, with all the
+international advantages which will no doubt accompany that event.[122]
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  ADDRESSES of Prince Consort on Exhibition of 1851, 322.
+
+  AGNEW, Mr (now Sir William), sketch of, 51;
+    gives L10,100 for Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire, 52.
+
+  ALFRED Club, the 'Dandies' Club, 5;
+    named after Count Alfred D'Orsay, 5.
+
+  ALMACK'S, subscription balls at, at end of 18th century, 196;
+    modern suburban subscription balls, imitations of, 197.
+
+  AMERICAN elements in modern London Society, 435;
+    countesses and duchesses, 435;
+    embassies and ministers--Washington Irving and Motley, 435;
+    Russell Lowell and Bayard, 436;
+    ladies, their education in Paris, 436;
+    restlessness a characteristic feature of, 436.
+
+  ANAESTHETICS, discovery of, 395;
+    Simpson's use of, at Edinburgh, 395;
+    Morton and Robinson's work in connection with, at New York, 395.
+
+  APPETITE for higher teaching, universality of, 161.
+
+  ARISTOCRACY of birth and wealth, Sir R. Peel's attitude towards, 13.
+
+  ARKWRIGHT, inventor of spinning jenny, founder of two county families,
+        37.
+
+  ARMY, traditional jealousy of, by House of Commons, 297;
+    a bequest from the Puritans, 297;
+    strength of, reduced by two-thirds immediately after Waterloo, 297;
+    _personnel_ of, during Napoleonic Wars, 298;
+    social position of private soldier in, 299;
+    treatment of soldiers in, by Duke of Wellington, 299;
+    by Lords Wolseley and Roberts, 299;
+    flogging in, not abolished until 1860, 301;
+    as a profession, now self-supporting, 305;
+    except in guards and cavalry, 305;
+    retrenchment of pay in, impolitic, 306;
+    education of officers in, in 1837, 307;
+    in 1897, 307;
+    promotions from ranks of, 310;
+    average annual number of, 310;
+    remarks on, 310.
+
+  ART, improvement in, since Exhibition of 1851, 349;
+    promoted by rise of wealthy and cultivated classes, 350;
+    in the days of Sir Martin Archer Shee, 351;
+    of Sir Charles Eastlake, 352;
+    of Leighton and Millais, 360.
+
+  ARTISTS, old social prejudice against, 351;
+    same as against doctors, singers and players, 351;
+    alleged reason for, 352;
+    foreign education of, in painters' studios, 353;
+    English training at Royal Academy, Slade or other schools, 353.
+
+  ATHENAEUM Club, doors of, opened to Macready and the Keans, 211.
+
+  AUSTIN, Charles, his two fortunes made out of railway bills, 35.
+
+  AVELAND, Lord, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 15.
+
+
+  B
+
+  BACON, Francis, Lord, fillip given to scientific study by, 324.
+
+  BARNES, editor of the _Times_, 'The most powerful man in the country,'
+        380.
+
+  BATH, Marquis of, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  BEACONSFIELD, Earl of, _see_ Disraeli.
+
+  BEDCHAMBER Plot, account of, 263.
+
+  BELL, Andrew, founder of Bell's scholarships at Cambridge, 133;
+    first promoter of a scheme for national education, 133.
+
+  BOARD Schools, growth of, 147;
+    for elementary instruction, 147;
+    playgrounds and gymnasia at, 147;
+    for higher grade teaching, 147;
+    laboratories and workrooms at, 147;
+    improvements in private schools produced by, 148.
+
+  BOLEYN, Anne, Queen of Henry VIII., descended from Sir Godfrey Boleyn, a
+        Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  BRASSEY, Thomas, railway contractor, sketch of, 35;
+    millionaire, before he built his last railway, 35.
+
+  BRAYBROOKE, Lord, descended from Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Mayor of
+        London, 14.
+
+  BRITISH Association, steady success of, 326;
+    idea of, not of British origin, 326;
+    smallness of early meetings of, at Leipsic and Berlin, 326;
+    associated with names of Prince Consort and Lord Salisbury, 327;
+    appeal of Brewster, Herschel and Humphry Davy to Government on behalf
+        of, 327;
+    objects of, described at meeting at York, 328;
+    meetings of, at Oxford 1831, Cambridge 1832, Edinburgh 1833, 329;
+    over 500,000 members of, at the present time, 329.
+
+  BRITISH and Foreign Bible Society, _see_ Missionary Societies.
+
+  BROUGHAM, Lord, his work in relation to popularizing science, 325.
+
+  BUCKINGHAM, Duke of, descended from Sir Thomas Gresham, Lord Mayor, 14.
+
+  BUILDINGS, Municipal, great improvement in architecture of, 43;
+    and in that of warehouses and shops in towns, 43;
+    and in private houses of suburban London, 43.
+
+
+  C
+
+  CABINET system, discovered by Sunderland, son-in-law of Marlborough, 262;
+    definite triumph of, in 1828, 263.
+
+  CARPENTER, Doctor, exploration of the nervous system by, 395.
+
+  CHADWICK, Edwin, his work as a sanitary reformer, 389.
+
+  CHARTISM, formerly an active force, now a name, 252;
+    most of the demands of, now matured into law, 252;
+    Duke of Wellington's defence of London against, 294.
+
+  CHESS, progress of study of, 417;
+    Prince Leopold as a player of, 417;
+    comparison of, with whist and billiards, 417;
+    stimulus given to game of, by 'Phillidor,' 417;
+    and by Staunton, Paul Morphy and Blackburne, 418;
+    invention of gambits at, 418;
+    the Scotch gambit, 418;
+    Evans's gambit, 418;
+    the Vienna or Queen's Knights gambit, 418;
+    publication of problems on, by _Illustrated London News_, 419;
+    imitated by other papers, 419.
+
+  CHURCH of England, status of, in 1897, 401;
+    national regard for, 401;
+    parochial system of, 401;
+    benefactions to, during present era, 402;
+    reduced incomes of livings belonging to, 402;
+    notwithstanding work of Ecclesiastical Commission, 402;
+    and of Queen Anne's bounty, 402;
+    readjustment of incomes of livings needed, 402;
+    dioceses of, abroad, 403;
+    clergy of, abroad, 403;
+    christianity of, a reconciler of rival creeds, 403;
+    tributes to world-wide efficacy of doctrines of, 404.
+
+  CLUBS, beneficial effect of, for adults, in west end of London, 117;
+    established in east end by university settlements, 117;
+    as co-operative homes for poor gentlemen, 410;
+    increase of social, 410;
+    decrease of gambling clubs, 410;
+    working men's, combined with gymnasia, 119;
+    popularity of, with wives of working men, 120;
+    mostly federated with Working Men's Club and Institute Union, 123;
+    democratic sentiments of east end, 129.
+
+  COLE, Sir Henry, his work at South Kensington, 322.
+
+  COLONIAL emigration, in 1837 and 1897, compared, 432.
+
+  COLONIAL Empire, area of, compared with area of England, 427;
+    compared with Persian and Roman Empires, 428;
+    and with Russia, Germany, France and America, 428;
+    progress of, as indicated by increase of populations, 428;
+    by advance in education, 429;
+    by institution of Colonial Parliaments, 429.
+
+  COLONIAL offices, in Downing Street, completed in 1876, 432.
+
+  COLONIAL party in House of Commons, 434.
+
+  COLONIAL peerages, 434.
+
+  COLONIAL secretary, Sir George Grey, first, in 1854, 431;
+    office of, previously held in conjunction with some other office, 431.
+
+  COLONIAL secretaries, eminent, Duke of Newcastle in 1859, 431;
+    Lord Cardwell, 431.
+
+  COLONIES, social development of, in the past, 438;
+    anticipations of, in the future, 438.
+
+  COLONISTS, London clubs devoted to, and their friends, 434;
+    Radicalism of, 432;
+    as displayed in Legislatures of New Zealand, New South Wales and
+        Victoria, 432.
+
+  COMMERCIAL middle class, growth of, 259;
+    beginnings of, in the days of the Edwards, 259;
+    culminated with Cobden, 259;
+    not five Conservative members connected with, in 1835, 260.
+
+  COMMONS, House of, composition of, in 1707, 252;
+    number of members of, in 1707, compared with 1879, 254;
+    altered manners of members of, 254;
+    'cockcrowings' in debates of, on Church Rates, 254;
+    'disorder' in, during debates on Mr Gladstone's second Irish Bill, 254.
+
+  CONSTITUENCIES, right of appeal to, 263;
+    permission to appeal to, given to Sir R. Peel in 1841, 263;
+    alternative of immediate or postponed appeal to, placed before the
+        Queen in 1868 by Disraeli, 264.
+
+  CONTRAST between condition of working classes now and twenty years ago,
+        153.
+
+  CONVOCATION, revival of, in 1854, 400;
+    declares _Essays and Reviews_ heretical, 400;
+    reflects, as a clerical parliament, views of church, 400;
+    work of, illustrated, 400;
+    possible use of, in event of disestablishment, 401.
+
+  CORPORATION Act, introduced by Lord John Russell in 1835, 93;
+    two millions of Englishmen affected by, 93;
+    abuses prior to passing of, 94;
+    London not included in operation of, 95;
+    reasons for excluding London from operation of, 103.
+
+  CORRUPT Practices at Elections Bill, 1883, 260.
+
+  COUNTRY squire, disappearance of, in country and in Parliament, 259.
+
+  COUNTY Councils, election of councillors to, 99;
+    co-optation of aldermen from among councillors of, 99;
+    term of office in, 100;
+    presidents of, county magistrates, 100;
+    elections to, by ballot, 100;
+    expenses of elections to, defrayed out of county rate, 100;
+    jurisdiction of, how far co-ordinate with that of Quarter Sessions,
+        100;
+    does not extend to public house licensing, 100;
+    mixed committees of old and new magistracy, 100;
+    checks and limitations on borrowing powers of, 101;
+    controlled in different parts of England by different classes, 102;
+    judicial functions of magistrates unaffected by, 105;
+    peers as chairmen of, 112;
+    representatives of, on governing bodies of secondary schools, 140.
+
+  COUNTY Councils Act, 1888, principle of, same as that of Corporation
+        Act, 1835, 92;
+    number of administrative counties under, 99;
+    electoral divisions of counties under, 99;
+    electors, 99;
+    municipalities inside County Council area, dealt with by, 99.
+
+  COURT, The, the federal head of Society. 408;
+    central idea of Prince Consort's policy, 408;
+    illustrations of the working of the idea, 409.
+
+  COX, David, his pictures, 355;
+    prices received by him for, in his lifetime, 355;
+    prices paid for pictures by, now, 356.
+
+  CRANBORNE, Viscount, title from Sir Christopher Gascoigne, Lord Mayor of
+        London, 15.
+
+  CRICKET, growth of, during Victorian era, 414;
+    increased power of the bat, 415;
+    pre-eminent position of W. G. Grace as a batsman, 415;
+    and of Richardson as a bowler, 415.
+
+  CRIME, statistics of, 366;
+    close connection between ignorance and crime, 367.
+
+  CRYSTAL Palace, magnificence of orchestra at, 348;
+    maintained continuously since 1854, 348;
+    concerts, influence and aesthetic value of, 349.
+
+
+  D
+
+  'DAILY Telegraph' started in 1856 by Colonel Sleigh, 382.
+
+  DANDIES, the toilettes of, 4.
+
+  DARBY, J. L., founder of sect of Plymouth Brethren, 404;
+    split among followers of, 404.
+
+  DARWIN, Charles, publication by, of _Origin of Species_, 326;
+    epoch in science created by, 326;
+    doctrine of survival of the fittest enunciated by, 330;
+    anticipated in point of time by Dr Maillet, 330;
+    and foreshadowed by Erasmus Darwin and others, 331;
+    relations of Herbert Spencer and, 331;
+    apparent reaction against theories of, setting in, 331.
+
+  DEATH-RATE, steady reduction in death-rate, due to progress of physical
+        and surgical science, 394;
+    from 23 per million in 1855, 394;
+    to 21 per million in 1875, 394;
+    and 18 per million in 1895, 394.
+
+  DE LANE, John T., editor of the _Times_, sketch of, 5;
+    his influence and power, 10;
+    his personality kept in background, 11;
+    Disraeli's remark, 'I had better postpone giving my views of De Lane
+        till he is dead,' 380.
+
+  DEMOCRACY, instinctive, of great English schools, 174;
+    modern, confirmed by Lodger Franchise in boroughs by Act of 1867, 260;
+    completed by extension to counties in 1884, 260.
+
+  DENBIGH, Earl of, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  DEVONSHIRE, the Duke of, and Sunday crowds in Hyde Park, 155.
+
+  DILKE, C. W., proprietor of _Athenaeum_ newspaper, 382;
+    called in to edit _Daily News_ in 1849, 382;
+    reduces price of paper, 382.
+
+  DILKE Commission, presided over by Prince of Wales, 389;
+    power to destroy unhealthy dwellings, result of, 389;
+    a consequence of the enlarged idea of royal service, 390.
+
+  DISRAELI, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, sketch of, 67;
+    the Young England school of 1846, 68;
+    services rendered by the Young England movement, 69;
+    influence of the _Coningsby_, of, on opening of parks, 70;
+    sends Lord Rowton to visit and report on Clerkenwell outrage, 73;
+    impressions made on Lord Rowton by visit, 74.
+
+  DISTRICT Councils, establishment of, 83;
+    seats on, objects of ambition among a certain class, 84;
+    jurisdiction of, commensurate with that of rural sanitary authority,
+        85;
+    special business of, 85;
+    members of, guardians of the poor, 85;
+    female members of, 85;
+    chairmen of, become county magistrates, 86;
+    assessment, part of duty of, 87.
+
+  DIXIE, Sir Wolston, Lord Mayor of London, ancestor of the peerages of
+        Compton and Northampton, 14.
+
+  DONALDSON Museum of Musical Instruments at South Kensington, 341.
+
+  DUELLING, practice of, discussed, 290;
+    still in vogue in time of Sir Robert Peel, 291;
+    abolition of, attempted by Prince Consort, 292;
+    courts of honour suggested as substitutes for, 292;
+    amendment of articles of war, April 1844, the first real blow to, 293.
+
+  DUELS, celebrated, between Canning and Castlereagh, 1809, 292;
+    Wellington and Winchilsea, 1829, 292;
+    Monro and Fawcett, 1843, 292.
+
+
+  E
+
+  EAST END, homes founded in the, by Oxford and Cambridge, 75;
+    St Margaret's House in the, 75;
+    population of, tact required in dealing with, 130;
+    resentment of patronage by, 130.
+
+  EASTLAKE, Sir Charles, President of Royal Academy, 350;
+    proposes health of Prince Consort at Royal Academy dinner, 350;
+    reply of Prince Consort, 351.
+
+  EDUCATION, Act 1870, W. E. Foster's, 136;
+    School Boards established by, 136;
+    compulsory only when voluntary efforts failed, 136;
+    Act 1880, Mundella's, 136;
+    made compulsory under, 136;
+    made free by Act of 1891, 137.
+
+  EDUCATION Department, first organisation of, in 1839, 135;
+    first vice-president of, appointed in 1856, 135;
+    not concerned with Secondary Education, 162.
+
+  EDUCATION, National, State responsibility for, ignored till 1833, 133;
+    Samuel Whitbread earliest promoter of, 134;
+    proposes foundation of National Schools for, in 1809, 134;
+    scheme of, brought forward by Lord Brougham, 1820, 134;
+    first grant towards, in 1833, 133;
+    Lord Melbourne's attempt to include Roman Catholics in benefit of
+        grant for, in 1839, 134;
+    Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, first promoters of a general and
+        practical scheme for, 1836, 133;
+    previously left to be dealt with by Church of England and other
+        religious bodies, 133.
+
+  EDUCATION, Private, by reading and by lectures, compared, 373.
+
+  EGLINTON, Earl of, pre-eminence of, in early Victorian era, 3.
+
+  ELIOT, George, influence of Herbert Spencer on, 334;
+    and through her on language of literature, 334.
+
+  ENDOWED Schools Act, 1874, objects of, 138;
+    work accomplished by, 139.
+
+  ENDOWED Schools Commission, now merged in Charity Commission, 162.
+
+  EPPING Forest, Crown rights over, sold in 1842, 17;
+    declared a public pleasure ground, 1882, 17.
+
+  ETON, example of social evolution of Victorian era, 169;
+    not injuriously affected by the 'new rich,' 169;
+    expenses of education at, not increased, 170;
+    lessons learnt at, which books cannot teach, 171;
+    Latin verses, things of the past at, 171;
+    honours at Oxford and Cambridge during last forty years, 173;
+    social discipline of, shared with Harrow, 175;
+    successes of, boys direct from school in Civil Service examinations,
+        177;
+    at Woolwich and Sandhurst, 177;
+    public opinion at, favourable to work at school, 178;
+    new workshops at, for use of school, 178;
+    study of natural science at, 178;
+    classics and mathematics not displaced at, 178.
+
+  ETONIANS, distinguished, of Victorian era, 171-3;
+    the 12th Earl of Derby, the most typical of, 178.
+
+  EVOLUTION, the sociological feature of Victorian era, 169.
+
+  EXETER School, connection of, with Cambridge University extension
+        system, 192.
+
+  EXPLORATIONS, at Pompeii, 331;
+    and at Babylon and Nineveh, 331;
+    effects of, on Roman and Biblical histories, 331.
+
+  EXPORTS, English, stationary during early part of century, 17;
+    rapid increase of, on discoveries of gold, 1848-55, 23;
+    value of, for the twenty-five years preceding repeal of the Corn-laws,
+        1885 millions, 44;
+    succeeding repeal, 3031 millions, 44;
+    for last twenty-five years, 1871-96, 6290 millions, 44.
+
+
+  F
+
+  FALKNER, J. Pascoe, founder of Melbourne, alive in 1866, 25.
+
+  FARADAY, and the Prince of Wales, 323;
+    laboratory of, at Royal Institution, 323.
+
+  FARREN, the, family a race of actors, 215;
+    Percival, at Haymarket Theatre, 215;
+    William, 215.
+
+  FAUCIT, Miss Helen, now Lady Martin, 215;
+    Shakesperian impersonations of, 215;
+    abiding influence exercised by, on the profession, 215.
+
+  FERRIER, Dr, his work in connection with the brain, 395.
+
+  FINES, in factories, disapproval of, 154;
+    lists of, compelled to be displayed in buildings, 155.
+
+  FISCAL Reforms, effects of, of Cobden, Bright and Peel, 16.
+
+  FITZWILLIAM, Earl, descended from a Lord Mayor of London, 14.
+
+  FOOTBALL, popularity of, 416;
+    a recent growth, 416;
+    feuds among players at, 416;
+    dangers of a referee at modern matches, 416.
+
+  FOREIGNERS, resident in England, over 200,000, 222;
+    number of, doubled in twenty years, 222;
+    majority of, engaged in business, 222;
+    and nearly one-half of total number in London, 222;
+    European, about 170,000, 224;
+    American, about 26,000, 224;
+    remainder Asiatics or Africans, 224;
+    proportion of males to females among, 224;
+    distribution and employments of, 226;
+    pauperism amongst, 226;
+    small proportion of, employed as clerks, 227;
+    opinions of, on changes in appearance of English people in twenty
+        years, 152.
+
+  FOREIGN intelligence, no longer dependent on telegrams, 386;
+    vast machinery and expenditure for supply of, 386.
+
+  FRANCE, industry in, effects of revolution on, 21;
+    all classes in, involved in common ruin, as a consequence of
+        revolution, 21.
+
+  FREE Libraries, establishment of, 362;
+    popularity of, 363;
+    sketches of working-men students at, 364;
+    origin and gradual growth of, 365;
+    the Chetham Library, 365;
+    the Guildhall Library, 365;
+    the Manchester Library, 365;
+    the Ewart Act, and its relation to, 365;
+    growth of metropolitan free libraries, 366;
+    examination of books most in demand at the, 368.
+
+  FUSION of classes, product of Victorian era, 114;
+    and keynote of our epoch, 201;
+    a process of levelling up, not down, 201.
+
+
+  G
+
+  GALLOWS, in public highways until Lord Grey's Reform Act, 40.
+
+  GAMBLING, committee on, in 1844, 410;
+    number of, hells in 1841, 411;
+    'Crockfords' as a, club, 411;
+    'play and pay,' abolished 412.
+
+  GLADSTONE, W. E., and Sir Robert Peel, comparative popularity of, 10;
+    scheme of, for converting consols in 1853, 22.
+
+  GOLD, importation of, from Russian mines, 1837-47, 16;
+    discovery of, in California, 1848, 17;
+    in Ballarat, 1850, 17;
+    gloomy predictions of Chevalier and Cobden as to consequences of
+        discoveries of, 18;
+    views of Sir Roderick Murchison as to same, 18;
+    'Nature's Currency Restriction Act,' 18;
+    of Sir Archibald Alison as to same, 19;
+    'Nature's Currency Extension Act,' 19;
+    output of Mexican and Peruvian mines in fifteenth century, L800,000,
+        19;
+    Australian diggings in 1850-1, L18,000,000, 19;
+    fallacious arguments, as to effect of, based on 'grain test,' 19;
+    demonetization of, in Holland, 20;
+    advantages of supply of, recognized by Prince Consort, 20;
+    influx of, into Bank of England, 22;
+    decrease of bank rate, 22;
+    conversion of L3 per cent. consols, 22;
+    interest on Exchequer Bills, 1-1/2 per cent. per annum, 22;
+    Australian cities built by, 24.
+
+  GOLD fields, emigration to, in 1852, 369,000, 21;
+    average for five years succeeding discovery of, 250,000 per annum, 21;
+    maximum emigration to, in any one year, 500,000, 21;
+    costs of living at, 22;
+    rise of wages here, consequent on rush to, 23;
+    scarcity of agricultural labour in country, 23;
+    reduced to 100,000 per annum before 1859, 25.
+
+  GOLDWIN Smith, his fear of result of popularly elected Parliaments, 261.
+
+  GOLF, revival of, as an English game, 414.
+
+  GOOCH, Sir Daniel, chairman of Great Western Railway, 37;
+    his fortune not made in railways, 37.
+
+  GRAMMAR schools, wasteful geographical distribution of, 141;
+    well endowed, with insufficient scholars, 141;
+    cases of, Chudleigh, Ashburton, Totnes and Bovey Tracey in Devon, 141;
+    Walsingham, Norwich, Ipswich and Bury Saint Edmunds in East Anglia,
+        142;
+    Ossett and other schools in the north, 142;
+    suggestions for utilizing decayed, 143;
+    instances of beneficial modifications of established, 143;
+    Bath College, excellent work done by, 143;
+    amalgamation of Somerset College and Sydney Grammar School, 143;
+    Charterhouse, successfully removed from London to Godalming, 144;
+    Archbishop Holgate's, removed from Hewsworth to Barnsley, 144;
+    policy of maintaining the old, as machinery for Secondary Education,
+        144.
+
+  GRANTS for educational purposes, growth of, 135;
+    first grant in 1833 of L20,000, 134;
+    in 1857, amounted to L451,000, 135;
+    in 1860, exceeded L1,000,000, 135;
+    in 1870, were L1,125,000, 136.
+
+  GRESHAM, Sir Thomas, first of the Great Loan negotiators, 64.
+
+  GROUPS, government by, as in France, 240;
+    as distinguished from government by party, 240;
+    cycle of, a possibility in store for England, 273.
+
+  GROVE, Sir George, discovery of lost scores of Schubert, 347;
+    dictionary of music by, 347.
+
+  GROVE, Sir William, discoveries with regard to correlation of physical
+        forces, 325.
+
+  GUILDHALL School of Music, founded in 1880, 341;
+    3496 pupils at, at Christmas 1896, 341.
+
+
+  H
+
+  HALLE, Charles, born in Westphalia, 1819, 345;
+    Beethoven's music popularized in England by, 346.
+
+  HAMLEY, Sir Edward, sketch of, 308;
+    his work on the _Operations of War_, 309.
+
+  HANDEL, genius of, 344;
+    recognized by George I. when Elector of Hanover, 344;
+    his _Te Deum_ performed at St Paul's in Queen Anne's reign, 344;
+    _Messiah_ produced at Dublin in 1741, 344.
+
+  HELPLESS, the, legislative help for, distinctive of Victorian era, 388;
+    initiated by Prince Consort, 388.
+
+  HENRY VIII., privileges of people as enjoyed under Plantagenets,
+        contracted under, 93;
+    and under Elizabeth, 93;
+    practically ceased to exist under the Stuarts, 93.
+
+  HENTY, joint-founder of Melbourne, alive 1882, 25.
+
+  HERCOMER, Professor, receives pupils into his studio, 353.
+
+  HIGHER Grade Elementary Schools, in effect secondary schools, 148;
+    sixty, under control of English School Boards, 149;
+    thirty-nine of the, organized as science schools, 149;
+    4606 boys and 2023 girls, students at, 149.
+
+  HIGHER Grade Schools Examination Board, 147.
+
+  HOSPITALS, Prince of Wales's fund for relief of, from debt, 390;
+    transformation in, during Victorian era, 391;
+    in character of medical students at, 392;
+    in management and organization of, 392;
+    revenues of, modern and ancient compared, 392;
+    St Bartholomew's in 1650 and in 1890, 392;
+    special and general, 392;
+    number of, in London, 392;
+    game, flowers and other presents for, the fashion and rule, 393.
+
+  HOUNDS, packs of, number of, in England in 1837, 413;
+    number of, in England in 1897, 413;
+    subscribers to and supporters of, in 1897, 414.
+
+  HOUSE of Lords, debates such as formerly took place in House of Commons
+        now confined almost exclusively to, 258;
+    composition of, similar to composition of old House of Commons, 258;
+    really a representative body, 264;
+    socially indistinguishable from Commoners in many ways, 265;
+    Peers in, created for political and social distinction, 266;
+    Peerages in, conferred on Lord Carrington, Macaulay, and Tennyson, 265;
+    later on, on Lord Armstrong, on widow of W. H. Smith and on Lord
+        Glenesk, 265.
+
+  HUDSON, George, the railway king, 6;
+    his gorgeous chariot, 6;
+    his personal appearance, 6;
+    his house at Albert Gate, 6;
+    entertains royalty, 7;
+    his fall, 7, 30;
+    hotel life at Calais, 7;
+    compared with Beau Brummell, 7;
+    born at York, son of a linen draper, 15;
+    drives train conveying Queen and Prince Consort to Cambridge, 29;
+    member for Sunderland, 30.
+
+  HUXLEY, Professor, and spontaneous generation, 330;
+    his observations anticipated by Schwann, 330.
+
+  HYDE Park, the social parade ground of the kingdom, 1;
+    originally a royal pleasure ground, 2;
+    visitors to, in different decades compared, 3;
+    bicycles admitted into, 7;
+    early water drinkers in, 9;
+    succeeded by early riders in, 9;
+    condition of, between 1840 and 1860, 7.
+
+
+  I
+
+  IMPORTS, value of, during last twenty-five years, nearly 10,000 millions.
+
+  INCOME-TAX, gradual increase of, 25;
+    extended to Ireland, 1855, 25.
+
+  INCOMES, assessment of, in 1855, 308 millions;
+    1875, 571 millions;
+    1882, 612 millions.
+
+  INDESTRUCTIBILITY of matter, ascertained chemically in eighteenth
+        century, 325.
+
+  INDUSTRIES, no increase in staple, during recent years, 236;
+    decrease in agricultural, 236;
+    new, constantly arising, 236.
+
+  INTERMEDIATE Education Act, 149.
+
+  IONIAN physicists, anticipation of modern discoveries by, 325.
+
+  IRISH Famine, compared with that at Orissa, 231;
+    remarks on, in connection with Malthusian doctrine, 232.
+
+  IRVING, Sir Henry, sketch of, 217.
+
+  ISLINGTON in 1840, still a country suburb, 40.
+
+
+  J
+
+  JACOB Omnium, nickname of Thackeray's friend, Big Higgins, 6.
+
+  JERSEY, Lady, popularity of, in early Victorian period, 10.
+
+  JEWS, sufferings of, in England, under Henry III., 54;
+    levies on, Westminster Abbey completed by, in reigns of Richard III.
+        and Henry VII., 54;
+    only twelve families of, in England, in 1633, 54;
+    re-establishment of, in England by Cromwell and Charles II., 54;
+    the Rodrigues and Goldsmids the heads of the, in time of George III.,
+        55;
+    the Rothschilds originally Frankfort, 55;
+    no magistrates or sheriffs before 1837, 60;
+    Lord Campbell's bill for removing this disability of, 60.
+
+  JOACHIM, Herr, popularity of, in England, 346;
+    director of Royal Academy of Music, Berlin, 346;
+    Doctor of Music of Cambridge, 346;
+    portrait of, by George Eliot, 346.
+
+  JOWETT, Benjamin, personal efforts of, to extend first-class education,
+        156;
+    favoured scheme of unattached students at Oxford, 183;
+    lecture-rooms at Balliol opened to non-collegiate students by, 183.
+
+
+  K
+
+  KEAN, Charles, actor, 1820-68, son of Edmund, 210;
+    educated at Eton, 210;
+    social position of, 211.
+
+  KEAN, Edmund, Byron's eulogy of, 210.
+
+  KEMBLE, frigid classicism of, 210.
+
+  KINGLAKE, A. W., historian of Crimean War, 11;
+    last survivor of early Hyde Park equestrians, 11.
+
+
+  L
+
+  LADIES College, Cheltenham, work of, in East End, 122.
+
+  LADIES of the Court, 280;
+    Mistress of the Robes, 280;
+    Ladies of the Bedchamber, 280;
+    Women of the Bedchamber, 280;
+    Maids of Honour, 280;
+    functions of the several, 281.
+
+  LANDSEER, Sir Edwin, elected R.A., 1830, 352;
+    social position of, exceptional, 352.
+
+  LANSDOWNE, Marquess of, pre-eminence of, in early Victorian days, 4.
+
+  LAW, administration of, in Colonies, 426;
+    Roman Dutch Law in Ceylon, Guiana, and at the Cape, 426;
+    French forms of, still retained in Canada, 426;
+    Code Civile continued in Mauritius, 426.
+
+  LAW Courts, effect of, on Fleet Street and the Strand, 422;
+    commemorate the unity of the Empire as well as the unity of
+        administration of justice, 426.
+
+  LAW reform, small results of, so long as two legal systems at work in
+        Westminster Hall, 423;
+    abolition of monopoly of serjeants-at-law, a step in, 423;
+    permission to take evidence of persons interested in suit, a further
+        important step in, 423;
+    appointment of commission to enquire into, 423;
+    Judicature Act, 1873, result of commission of 1869, 424;
+    fusion of law and equity by Judicature Act, 424;
+    principle of, laid down, that where equity and law conflict equitable
+        doctrines shall prevail, 424;
+    room for, in connection with the circuit system, 425;
+    benefits of, to general public, summary of, 425.
+
+  LAWN tennis, subscription clubs for, 196;
+    part of revolt of sons and daughters of middle class, 196.
+
+  LEGION Memorial, The, probably drawn up by Defoe, 274;
+    low-water mark of Parliamentary popularity, 275.
+
+  LEGISLATION, modern, salutary effect of, 140;
+    on governors and teachers as well as on the taught, 140.
+
+  LISTER, Lord, his discovery of the antiseptic treatment, 395.
+
+  LITERARY Leaders, of Victorian era, 373;
+    Dickens and Thackeray as, compared, 373;
+    Lord Lytton, Lord Stanhope and Monkton Milnes as patrons of, 374.
+
+  LITERATURE and art, encouraged by Crown from Henry VIII. until Queen
+        Anne, 282;
+    neglected by the Hanoverian Kings, 282;
+    revived encouragement of, by Queen Victoria, 282;
+    influence of Prince Consort in revival, 282.
+
+  LOCAL Councils of Education, proposal to establish, 164;
+    functions of proposed, 164;
+    suggested composition of, 164;
+    suggested machinery for carrying out, 165.
+
+  LOCAL Government Act, 1888, educational functions of County Council
+        under, 140.
+
+  LOCAL Government Board, establishment of, 1871, 389.
+
+  LOCAL Improvement Acts, number of, prior to 1840, 389.
+
+  LONDON, the pleasure ground of the world, 217;
+    the influence of Americans in making, 435;
+    the true mirror of England, 435.
+
+  LONDON City Mission, opinions of missioners of, on East-end progress,
+        126.
+
+  LONDON, Corporation of, always a popularly elected body, 103;
+    commission of 1853 for inquiring into affairs of, 104;
+    judicial functions of Lord Mayor and Aldermen preserved to, 106;
+    powers of an ordinary Borough Council retained by, 106;
+    an example to provincial townships, 106;
+    intense feeling of corporate life in, 106;
+    impression made by, on foreigners, 107;
+    relations of, to London County Council, 107;
+    four representatives of, on County Council, chosen by ratepayers, 108;
+    charities and hospitalities of, 108;
+    relation of Commissioners of Sewers to, 109.
+
+  LONDON County Council, differs from other County Councils, 103;
+    judicial functions of officers of corporation left untouched by, 106;
+    eminent men who have been chairmen of, 112.
+
+  LONDON Library, The, foundation and objects of 370;
+    first started in Pall Mall, 371;
+    its usefulness and growth, 371;
+    difference between, and Mudie's Library, 371.
+
+  LONGFELLOW, far-reaching influence of, as a poet, 379.
+
+  LORD-Mayors of London, number of noble houses founded by, 14;
+    attributes of, in minds of foreigners, 110;
+    not merely head officers of a great city, 110;
+    territorial estates, schools and other foundations controlled by the,
+        110.
+
+  LORD-Mayor's day, traditional entertainment of ministers on, 14;
+    improvement in demeanour of mob on, 140;
+    characteristic of improvement in the masses, 140.
+
+  LOWE, Robert, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, early educational reformer,
+        135;
+    introduces principle of payment by results, 135;
+    advice of, to educate our masters, followed, 151;
+    his sojourn in New South Wales, 434.
+
+  LYELL, Sir Charles, his work in relation to geology, 332;
+    influence of the _Principles of Geology_, 332.
+
+  LYTTON, Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton, 327;
+    fifteen years in office as a public servant before being raised to the
+        peerage, 327.
+
+
+  M
+
+  MACAULAY, T. B., afterwards Lord, fifteen years in office as a public
+        servant before raised to peerage, 327.
+
+  MACREADY, actor, 1827, 51, born 1793, died 1873, 209;
+    favourite with clergy, whom he taught elocution, 210;
+    social acceptance of, in London, 211.
+
+  MAGISTRATES, 1000 elective, since District Councils instituted, 86;
+    instances of working men as, 86;
+    and agricultural labourers as, 86;
+    and an ex-policeman as, 86;
+    effect upon rural mind of elective element among the, 90;
+    powers of borough, since Corporation Act of 1835, 95;
+    specially qualified county, elected to County Councils, 98.
+
+  MAKING up parties, modern fashion of, for theatres, 197;
+    for dinners or suppers at restaurants, before or after theatres, 197.
+
+  MALLOCK, W. H., statistics relating to 'Classes' and 'Masses,' 32;
+    contribution of railways to prosperity of both, 34.
+
+  MALTHUS, Doctor, doctrines of Malthus, considered generally, 228;
+    increase of population during Victorian era considered in connection
+        with, 231.
+
+  MANDATES, popular, at elections, modern doctrine of, 272.
+
+  MEDICAL discoveries, English, of Victorian era, large proportion of to
+        whole, 396;
+    treatment of myxoedemia by Sir William Gull, one of the latest, 396.
+
+  MEDICAL education, scheme of in England, perfected in 1860, 396;
+    relation of College of Physicians to, 396.
+
+  MEMBERS of Parliament, 'English politics to the English youth,' 246;
+    average age of, in 1837, over fifty years, 246;
+    in 1897, under forty years, 246.
+
+  MENDELSSOHN, Felix, born at Hamburg, 344;
+    his precocious genius, 345;
+    his influence in England, 345;
+    patron of John Parry, 345.
+
+  METROPOLITAN 'Board of Works,' established 1855, 105;
+    product of Metropolitan Local Management Act, 1855, 105;
+    unity of administration for the parishes of London by, 105.
+
+  MIDDLE class, modern English, restlessness of, 194;
+    result of rapid locomotion and cheap press, 194;
+    influx of continental ideas among the, 194;
+    relaxation of orthodoxy of, 197;
+    all sections of, enfranchised by Reform Bill of 1832, 239.
+
+  MILLIONAIRES, Victorian, and their trades, 24;
+    sheep farmers of Australia, 24;
+    Brassey, the railway contractor, 35;
+    Jones Lloyd, a banker, 42;
+    Hope, a merchant, 42;
+    Bass and Guinness, brewers, 42;
+    Maple, retail tradesman, 42.
+
+  MILITARY education, establishment of council of, 304;
+    formation of Aldershot camp for, 304.
+
+  MILITARY resources of country, 296;
+    comparison of, in 1837 with those of 1897, 296;
+    incapacity of, to place 10,000 men in field in 1846, 303;
+    inadequacy of reserves of guns and stores, 303.
+
+  MILITIA, practical non-existence of, at Queen's accession, 302;
+    last ballot for, in 1831, 302;
+    strength of in 1895, 302.
+
+  MINERALS, L29,000,000 worth of, recovered in 1855, 32;
+    L80,000,000 worth of, recovered in 1895, 32.
+
+  MINING and steam industries compared, 32;
+    results of, 32.
+
+  MISSIONARY societies, activity of, during Victorian era, 405;
+    British and Foreign Bible Society, income of, doubled, 405;
+    Society for Propagation of Gospel, income of, doubled, 405;
+    Church Missionary Society, income of, trebled, 405.
+
+  MIXED metaphors, modern, instances of, 372;
+    signs of the overlapping of literature by science and art, 372.
+
+  MOLESWORTH, Sir William, pioneer of colonial self-government, 433;
+    Colonial Secretary, in 1853, 433.
+
+  MUDIE'S Select Library, founded in 1842, 369;
+    far-reaching usefulness of, 369.
+
+  MUSIC, revolution in, and in taste for, during Queen's reign, 337;
+    the lady teacher of, in 1837, 337;
+    and in 1897, 338;
+    patronage of, by Court, 339;
+    fondness for, a tradition of English royalty, 340;
+    Royal Academy of, 340;
+    triumph of German over Italian school of, 344.
+
+  MUSICAL education, in England and on Continent compared, 342;
+   encouraged and promoted by Prince Consort, 343.
+
+  MUSICIAN, the professional, sketch of, in 1837, 338;
+    and in 1897, 339.
+
+
+  N
+
+  NATIONAL character, insularity of, disappearing generally, 194;
+    cosmopolitanism of, among upper classes, 204;
+    imitated by the middle class, 205.
+
+  NATIONAL debt, gradual reduction of, during Queen's reign, 45;
+    reduced from L821,000,000 after Crimean War, in 1856, 45;
+    to L652,000,000 in 1896, 45.
+
+  NATIONAL Gallery, established in 1824, 354;
+    present building of, opened in 1838, 354;
+    Angerstein Collection, the nucleus of, 354;
+    Vernon bequest to, in 1847, 354;
+    L70,000 paid for Sir Robert Peel's collection, 355;
+    L70,000 paid for 'Ansidei Madonna' to the Duke of Marlborough, 358.
+
+  NAVY, training of officers and men of, 307;
+    reduction of, on conclusion of Napoleonic Wars, 311;
+    132 vessels on, list on Queen's accession, 311;
+    461 vessels on, list at Queen's diamond jubilee, 311;
+    Parliamentary vote for, in 1837, L3,000,000, 312;
+    in 1897, L23,000,000, 312;
+    establishment of H.M.S. _Excellent_ as gunnery school for, 313;
+    manning of the, 313;
+    the naval reserve of the, 314;
+    institution of H.M.S. _Britannia_ for education of midshipmen for, 314;
+    introduction of steam into the, 315;
+    five paddle-wheel steamers in, at Queen's accession, 315;
+    condition of, at outbreak of Crimean War, 316;
+    recognition of value of, by Kinglake, 317;
+    and of the special value of steam in, 317;
+    the floating batteries of Crimean War, first ironclads of, 317;
+    the _Warrior_ first sea-going ironclad of, 317;
+    turret and broadside armaments in, of to-day compared, 319.
+
+  NEEDLEWORK, embroidery and lace, as fashionable amusements, 419.
+
+  NEIGHBOURHOOD guilds, the, of New York, 121.
+
+  NEW educational authority, the want of a, 161;
+    must have an elastic operation, 161;
+    necessary functions of a, indicated, 162.
+
+  NEW South Wales, colony of, 25;
+    no foreign trade before 1848, 25;
+    exports from, in 1878 amounted to L13,000,000, 25;
+    imports into, in 1878 amounted to L17,000,000, 25;
+    valuable coalfields of, 25.
+
+  NEW York, advantages of intimate social connexion between, and London,
+        437.
+
+  NEWSPAPERS, English, number of in 1837, only 479, 381;
+    number of in 1897, 2396, 381;
+    heavily taxed by Harley in 1712, 381;
+    and by North and Pitt afterwards, 381;
+    taxation of, lowered by Spring Rice in 1836, 381;
+    repeal of paper duty in 1851, and rise of penny, in consequence, 381;
+    the _Echo_, the first of the halfpenny, 385;
+    increase of halfpenny, of late years, 385;
+    reviews of books in, 385;
+    great improvement in general character of, 387;
+    growing tendency of, towards political impartiality, 387.
+
+  NEWSPAPER writers, growth of, as a class, 374;
+    instances of, Russell, Forbes, Dicey, Sala and others, 375;
+    action and reaction of, on the public press, 375;
+    Macaulay as one of the, father of the leading article style, 378;
+    no longer really anonymous, 385;
+    the recruiting of writers with well-known names for, 385;
+    the youth of modern, 386.
+
+  NEWTON, Sir Isaac, his discovery of law of gravitation, 324.
+
+  NIGHTINGALE, Florence, her training in Germany, 390;
+    the trained nurses who accompanied, in 1854, 390;
+    influence of, on origin of nursing as a profession, 390;
+    supercession of the 'Mrs Gamp' and decayed billiard-markers of former
+        days, 391;
+    tributes to efficiency of system started by, 391.
+
+  NONCONFORMISTS, subject to greater numerical fluctuations than
+        established churches, 405;
+    reasons for same, 405;
+    the numbers of the Congregationalists in 1837 and 1897, 404;
+    the numbers of Baptists in 1837 and 1897, 404.
+
+  NOVEL writers of eminence since Sir Walter Scott, 375;
+    commercial successes of, 375;
+    George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, as
+        instances of, 375;
+    Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli as, compared, 376.
+
+
+  O
+
+  ORGANIZATION, faculty for, of Prince Consort, 320;
+    of exhibition of 1851, by Prince Consort, 320.
+
+  OVERLAPPING of schools, waste of educational energy caused by, 161.
+
+  OXFORD, number of unattached students at University of, 183;
+    system of control over unattached students at, 183;
+    system of teaching the unattached at, 183;
+    honours gained at, by the unattached students, 184;
+    exemplary conduct of unattached at, 185;
+    professor of modern history at, formerly an unattached student, 186;
+    social clubs for undergraduates at, 188;
+    effect of social clubs at, on 'union society,' 188.
+
+  OXFORD and Cambridge, middle class examinations, beginnings of, 147;
+    still uphold the standard of general culture in England, 150.
+
+
+  P
+
+  PALMERSTON, Lord, sketch of, 4;
+    descent from Sir John Houblon, Lord Mayor of London, 15.
+
+  PARISH Councils, apparent tendency of, 80;
+    female members of, 80;
+    subjects of discussion at, 81;
+    'one man one vote' for, 81;
+    effect of, to restore many old manorial rights, 82;
+    sense of responsibility developed by, 83;
+    seldom convened more than once a year, 84;
+    differences between, and County Councils decided by the Local
+        Government Board, 84;
+    obliged to hold their sittings in the evening, 90.
+
+  PARISHES, English, prior to 1894, 77;
+    State represented by squire in, 77;
+    Church by vicar in, 77;
+    the village by the village club in, 77;
+    subjects of interest to inhabitants of rural, 78;
+    change which has come over, since 1894, 78;
+    the village meeting halls, modern centres of, 78;
+    home rule in, since 1894, 79;
+    the grouping of, great care taken in, 80.
+
+  PARLIAMENT, an assembly of business men, 268;
+    abhors rhetoric, 268;
+    submits to ascendency of great masters of eloquence, 269;
+    will not tolerate commonplace speeches, 269;
+    local Houses of, 269;
+    Houses of, burnt in 1834, 239;
+    temporary building for the meeting of, 239;
+    the new Houses of, several years building, 239;
+    House of Lords side of, opened after thirteen years, 240;
+    House of Commons side, opened after sixteen years, 240;
+    peeresses' gallery in, 241;
+    ladies' cage in, 242;
+    members of (see members of Parliament);
+    types of members, in the past, 247;
+    more modern types of, 251;
+    acceptance of position of delegates by, 256.
+
+  PARLIAMENTARY, oratory, change in fashion of, 248;
+    classical quotations no longer a feature of, 248;
+    business language used in modern, 249;
+    proceedings, foreign interest taken in, 249;
+    hospitality, five o'clock tea on Terrace, 245;
+    stage, and theatrical stages, parallel between, 250;
+    humorists, a succession of, 251;
+    children of the church, a regular supply of, 251;
+    obstruction, methods of, practised by Parnell, 255;
+    closure, the remedy for obstruction, 256.
+
+  PAROCHIAL schools, first suggested by S. Whitbread in 1807, 134.
+
+  PAUPERISM, statistics of, in England, 45;
+    50 per cent. less in 1897 than in 1857;
+    enormous reduction of, in the Midlands, 88;
+    and in Sussex, 88;
+    reduction in, a direct consequence of Act of 1834, 88;
+    less frequent application of workhouse test in cases of, 89.
+
+  PEEL, Sir Robert, sketch of, 4;
+    his seat on horseback, 4;
+    popular respect in which held, 10.
+
+  PEERAGES, modern, conferred on representatives of science and art, 327;
+    on Tennyson as a poet, 327;
+    Playfair as a physician, 327;
+    Kelvin as a physicist, 327;
+    Lister as a surgeon, 327.
+
+  PEOPLE'S Palace, The, a fanciful sketch of Sir Walter Besant, 362;
+    difficulties of administration in connection with, 125.
+
+  PERIODICALS, magazines and reviews, their popularity, 267;
+    used as substitutes for parliamentary speeches, 267;
+    mutual advantages to publisher and member of Parliament of the use of,
+        as substitutes for speeches, 267.
+
+  PHELPS, pupil of Macready, his position on stage, 216.
+
+  PHOTOGRAPHY, a production of the Victorian era, 333.
+
+  PHYSICAL investigations, appliances for, former want of, 324;
+    perfection of appliances now, product of Victorian era, 324.
+
+  PICTURES, prices of, in 1649, 46;
+    gradual rise in, 47;
+    great sums paid by Russian Emperor, 48;
+    L30,000 realised by sale of the Walpole, in 1842, 49;
+    L60,000 by sale of the Bernal Collection of, in 1856, 50;
+    Gainsborough's picture of the 'Sisters' sold for L6615 in 1873, 52;
+    resold in 1887 for L9975, 52.
+
+  PITT, William, peerages bestowed on wealthy men by, 13;
+    his theory that L40,000 per annum should command a peerage, 42.
+
+  PLUTOCRAT, education of the, by painters, as prophesied by Rossetti, 359;
+    the prophecy fulfilled, 359.
+
+  POOR, ignorance respecting the condition of the, 71;
+    the brothers Mayhew and the London, 71;
+    the Greenwoods and the casual ward, 72;
+    Leighton, Hicks-Beach and Denison, their work amongst the, 73;
+    the Dilke Commission for inquiry into the housing of, 389.
+
+  POOR-LAW, under the Act of 1834, 87;
+    the Unions under the Act, called the New Bastilles, 87;
+    marked improvement in condition of working class since, 87.
+
+  POPULAR, constituencies organised by Reform Bill of 1832, 238;
+    franchises, a few abolished by Bill, 239;
+    meetings, displacement of great parliamentary speeches by, 257.
+
+  POPULATION, increased, 30 per cent. during last sixty years, 234;
+    comparison of, with increased means of subsistence, 235.
+
+  PRE-RAPHAELITE, the, revolution in art, 360;
+    its effect on English art, 360.
+
+  PRESBYTERIANISM and the Free Kirk of Scotland, 404.
+
+  PRESS, the, anonymous system of, modified by various agencies, 384;
+    enlarged staffs employed on, 384;
+    amateurs and others, 384;
+    proprietorship of the newspaper, a fashion, 266;
+    a reflex of English thought and life, 266;
+    reptile of Germany, unknown in England, 266;
+    connection of leading men with special portions of, 267;
+    competition of periodicals with the newspaper, 267;
+    result of Gladstone's Irish policy on the, 383;
+    political independence of, affected by that policy, 383.
+
+  PRESTON, strike at, the first great struggle between labour and capital,
+        24.
+
+  PRINCE Consort, sagacity of, early discovered, 20;
+    cultivation of artistic sense in English manufactures, due to, 20;
+    influence of, in shaping monarchy of to-day, 276;
+    sets example of royal sympathy with extra political activities of
+        daily life, 276;
+    early training of, in view of his possible future home, 277;
+    reforms the domestic economy of the palace, 278;
+    attacks on, in clubs and drawing-rooms, 279;
+    as well as in the inferior press, 279;
+    institutes office of master of the household, 280;
+    promotion of science and art by, 282;
+    skill of the, as an organist, 284;
+    first public speech of, on the slave trade in 1840, 285;
+    revives the taste for classical music, 285;
+    initiates royal platform speeches on non-political matters, 285;
+    influence of Sir Robert Peel on the, 286;
+    Sir Charles Eastlake and the, friendship of, 288;
+    visits of Queen and, to Sir Robert Peel, 289;
+    to Louis Philippe, 289;
+    to Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Leeds, 289;
+    elected chancellor of the University of Cambridge, 289;
+    declines the post of commander-in-chief, 294;
+    suggestions of, for a system of national defence, 294;
+    acts as director of Ancient Concerts, 339;
+    rescues the Raphael cartoons from decay, 349;
+    efforts of, to make Court the centre of literary, scientific and
+        artistic efforts, 323.
+
+  PRINCE of Wales, ubiquity of, 289;
+    untiring energy of, derived from his father, 289;
+    visit of, to tomb of George Washington in 1860, 437.
+
+  PRISONS, no new, built since 1870, 367;
+    several, converted into public libraries, 367;
+    one of the, now the site of a fine art gallery, 367.
+
+  PRIVATE theatricals, local clubs for, 197.
+
+  PRIVY Council, judicial committee of, 427;
+    functions of, 427;
+    constitutional modifications of, 427.
+
+  PRIVY Purse, succession of able men who have acted as, 281;
+    distinction between, and Privy Seal, 281.
+
+  PROBLEM, the educational, awaiting solution, Higher grade schools, 139.
+
+  PUBLIC Health Act, 1875, embodiment of efforts of individuals extending
+        over forty years, 99.
+
+  PUBLIC Schools, increased numbers at, 96;
+    Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, Cheltenham and others;
+    products of Victorian era, 96.
+
+  PUBLIC School Act, 1868, effect of, 139.
+
+  'PUNCH,' Staffordshire miner, as delineated by, no longer true, 154.
+
+  PURCELL, Henry, born 1675, 344 (note);
+    organist at Westminster when eighteen years old, 344;
+    prolific composer, 344;
+    German unintentional compliment to, 344.
+
+
+  Q
+
+  QUAKER School at Ackworth, specially complimented by the Education
+        Commission, 146.
+
+  QUARTER Sessions, sketch of county town during, 97;
+    before Corporation Act and afterwards, 97.
+
+  QUEEN Elizabeth, comparison of, with Queen Victoria, 275.
+
+
+  R
+
+  RACEHORSE, the, indispensable to breed of horses, 412;
+    antiquity of, 412;
+    introduction of Arab blood into, 412;
+    social diploma to breeders of, 413.
+
+  RAILWAY, the Manchester and Liverpool, death of Huskisson on, 28;
+    pays ten per cent. dividend in 1836, 29;
+    Queen did not travel by, until 1842, 28;
+    1800 miles of, open in England in 1843, 28;
+    enterprise, reaction in, in 1846, 31.
+
+  RAILWAYS, capital invested in, in 1850, L230,000,000, 31;
+    in 1894, L985,000,000, 31;
+    receipts of, in 1855, L21,000,000, 32;
+    in 1895, L84,000,000, 32;
+    how far, have enriched the landowners, 36;
+    wealth derived from, compared with that from other sources, 37;
+    nationalisation of, objections to, 38;
+    State control of, 38;
+    England and America, the two exceptions to, 38.
+
+  REACTION, signs of, against educational enthusiasm, 165;
+    grounds of, 165.
+
+  READING School, connection of, with Oxford University extension system,
+        192.
+
+  RELIGIOUS education, struggle over, sketch of the, 137.
+
+  RELIGIOUS thought, various phases of, 398;
+    gratitude of Oxford verger for remaining a Christian, 398;
+    modern scepticism and, 398;
+    influence of Court on, 399;
+    Tractarian movement as a phase of, 399;
+    agnosticism as a phase of, fillip given to, by Dr Mansel, 406;
+    progress of, stayed by Benjamin Jowett, 406;
+    the 'hard' church, 407;
+    Dr Temple as representative of, 407;
+    _Lux Mundi_, 407.
+
+  ROMAN Catholicism, increase of, in large towns, 405;
+    and in colonies, 405;
+    increase of numbers of priests and churches, 405.
+
+  ROTHSCHILD, Lionel, issues Irish famine loan, 1847, 59;
+    lends L16,000,000 to English Government in 1854, 59;
+    advances L4,000,000 for purchase of Suez Canal shares, 1876, 60;
+    elected to Parliament as member for London, 1847, 60;
+    unable to take his seat until 1866, 60;
+    hospitalities at Gunnersbury, 61;
+    death of, in 1879, 61.
+
+  ROTHSCHILD, Mayer A., of Frankfort, founder of the family in the
+        eighteenth century, 55;
+    known as the Croesus of Europe, 55.
+
+  ROTHSCHILD, Nathan Mayer, arrives in England at end of the eighteenth
+        century, 56;
+    buys bills on English Government during Napoleonic Wars, 56;
+    transmits funds to English forces in Peninsula, 56;
+    wrongly said to have watched the Battle of Waterloo, 56;
+    story of his agent at Ghent, 57;
+    early news of victory received by him from Ghent, 57;
+    causes dividends and interest on foreign stocks and loans to be paid
+        in London, 57;
+    lends L12,000,000 to the English Government in 1829, 58;
+    buys Gunnersbury, 58;
+    death of Mayer Amschel in 1836, 59.
+
+  ROTHSCHILDS, the foreign loans of the firm, 61;
+    connection of the, with Egypt, 62;
+    monthly advances by the, to Egyptian Government, 62;
+    take security of private letter of English Foreign Secretary, 62;
+    charitable generosity of the, 62;
+    patrons of sport, 65;
+    and of art, 65;
+    loyalty of the, to England, 66;
+    influence of the, on Judaism generally, 66.
+
+  ROWING, the, of 1837 and 1897 compared, 414.
+
+  ROYAL Academy of Music, 340;
+    foundation of, in 1822, 340;
+    original site of, 340;
+    charter granted to, 1830, 340;
+    number of students at, in 1837, 340;
+    and in 1897, 340.
+
+  ROYAL Academy of Painting, 350;
+    Crown represented at dinner of, for the first time in 1851, 350;
+    speech of Sir Charles Eastlake at, 350;
+    and reply of the Prince Consort, 350;
+    visitors to Exhibition of, in 1837, 358;
+    and in 1897, 358.
+
+  ROYAL College of Music, 340;
+    founded in 1875 as a training school, 340;
+    reformed in 1882, 340;
+    charter granted to, in 1883, 340;
+    present endowment of, 341;
+    scholarships at, 341;
+    opened by H. R. H. Princess of Wales, 341.
+
+  ROYAL Society, Queen's signature in register of, 321.
+
+  RURAL population, decrease in, during last twenty years, 325.
+
+
+  S
+
+  SANITARY reform, reduction in death-rate due to, 394;
+    work of John Simon in connection with, 395;
+    and of the Budds and Dr Snow, 395.
+
+  SAVINGS banks, deposits in, doubled in ten years ending 1896, 45.
+
+  SCHOOL Board, instances of successful, boys, 156;
+    at universities and in Civil Service examinations, 156;
+    and of girls, 157;
+    at Girton College and elsewhere, 157.
+
+  SCHOOL Board children, increase in number of, under the Free Education
+        Act, 1891, 137;
+    numbers of, for five years preceding Act, 269,903, 138;
+    for five years succeeding Act, 521,860, 138.
+
+  SCIENCE and art, slowness of State recognition of, 320.
+
+  SCIENCE and Art Department, grants made by, to schools, 138.
+
+  SCIENTIFIC Corps, the, engineers and artillery, 305;
+    recent recognition of rights of, in army, 305.
+
+  SCULPTORS, Alfred Stevens, effigy of Wellington by, 361;
+    Hamo Thornycroft and Sir E. Boehm, works of, 361;
+    growing popularity of English, 361.
+
+  SCULPTURE, our climate not favourable to exhibitions of, 361;
+    progress of, in England, notwithstanding, 361.
+
+  SEASIDE resorts, imitation of continental examples at, 208.
+
+  SECONDARY schools, estimated proportion of population educated at, does
+        not exceed 2.5 per 1000, 145;
+    proportion very variable, 145;
+    from 1.1 per 1000 in Lancashire, 145;
+    to 13.5 in Bedfordshire, 145;
+    private, efficient service rendered to education by, 146;
+    plea for State help to private, 146;
+    of the great city companies, 149;
+    especially those of the drapers', the goldsmiths' and the grocers',
+        149.
+
+  SKATING rinks, shock to old-fashioned ideas caused by, 195;
+    first revolt of sons and daughters of middle class illustrated at, 195.
+
+  SLANEY, Colonel, motion by, for enquiry into health of towns, 389.
+
+  SMALLER endowed schools, old practice of farming out, 140;
+    evil effects of, 141;
+    vigorous dealing of corporations with the practice, 141;
+    closing of, recommended by the commissioners, 141.
+
+  SOCIETY, still a close corporation, 198;
+    but more and more subject to external influences, 198;
+    recruited from alien elements, 199;
+    ideal standard of, unaltered, 202.
+
+  SOCIETY of comparative legislation, 427.
+
+  SOMERSET, Duchess of, the Queen of Beauty at Eglinton tournament, 3.
+
+  SOUTH America, English loans to Republics of, 16.
+
+  SOUTH Kensington, the whole of, market gardens in 1840, 41;
+    contrast between the, of 1840 and that of 1890, 321;
+    labours of Prince Consort in connection with, 322;
+    entirely the growth of the Victorian era, 354;
+    an artistic 'Mecca,' 354;
+    Department of Practical Art at, 356;
+    under control of Board of Trade, 356;
+    Department of Science and Art at, 356;
+    under control of President of the Council, 356;
+    Marlborough House Collection, removed to, in 1856, 356;
+    Forster bequest of Dickens's manuscripts to, 357;
+    institutions affiliated to, 357;
+    30,000 pupils annually pass through the Science and Art Department at,
+        357.
+
+  SOVEREIGN, constitutional influence of, 261;
+    increased since days of absolute monarchy, 261;
+    surrender of political initiative by, 261;
+    compensated by increase of social ascendancy of, 261;
+    technical right of, to nominate and dismiss ministers, 261;
+    exercise of that prerogative in 1834 by William IV., 262;
+    the permanent head of a department of the State, 262;
+    view of Prince Consort, as to Sovereign's position, 262;
+    self-effacement of, impossible under Parliamentary Governments, 264;
+    the sole guarantee for continuity of policy, 271;
+    duty of Sovereign to judge which party in state can best carry on the
+        government of the country, 271.
+
+  STEAM, transformation of country by, 27.
+
+  STEPHENSON, George, his invention at first decried, 28;
+    sums up relations between the railways and the country, 37.
+
+  SULLIVAN, Sir Arthur, his work and public services, 347.
+
+  SUNDAY Schools, started by Robert Raikes late in eighteenth century, 133.
+
+  SURGEONS, work of eminent, 395;
+    exemplified by Caesar Hawkins, Benjamin Brodie and Spencer Wells, 395.
+
+
+  T
+
+  TAIT, Archbishop and family, riders in Hyde Park, 9.
+
+  TEACHERS, profession of, no proper representation of, 163;
+    assistant, in secondary schools, underpaid, 164.
+
+  TECHNICAL Education Act, 1890, for teaching handicrafts, 160;
+    grants authorised to be made by, 100.
+
+  TERRY, the family, a family of actors and actresses, 216;
+    Kate (Mrs Arthur Lewis), peerless in melodrama, 215;
+    Ellen, as a comedian, 216.
+
+  THACKERAY, W. M., distinguished figure in Hyde Park, 6.
+
+  THAMES, shocking condition of, between 1804 and 1866, 40.
+
+  THEATRE, The, position of, in early Victorian times, 41;
+    advice of Matthew Arnold, to organize, 209;
+    Macready, first organizer of, 1827 to 1851, 209;
+    difficulties experienced by him in attempt, 209;
+    dulness of, long after it became respectable, 212;
+    Lord Lytton's _Money_, dramatized for, 212;
+    Robertson's _Society_ produced at Prince of Wales's, 212;
+    revival of popularity of, 213;
+    caused by production of Robertson's plays, 213;
+    Lyceum, under Bateman, 214;
+    Miss Bateman as Leah at, 214;
+    first appearance of H. Irving at, 214;
+    opinions expressed by George Lewes and George Eliot on Irving at, 215;
+    result of influx of strangers into London, on Victorian, 218;
+    the suburban, of recent times, 218;
+    status of, raised by succession of high-class actors, 219.
+
+  TOLLEMACHE, Lord, of Peckforton, sketch of, 12;
+    the harness and trappings of his team, 12.
+
+  TROLLOPE, Anthony, sketch of, 12;
+    his sturdy cob, 12.
+
+
+  U
+
+  UNIVERSITIES, advice to settlers in East End, from, 130;
+    extension lectures of, 180;
+    Oxford and Cambridge brought to people's doors by, 180;
+    revolution in domestic life at the, 180;
+    less noticeable at Oxford than at Cambridge, 180;
+    unattached or non-collegiate students at, 181;
+    a return to mediaeval usage, 181;
+    comparative cost of education to unattached students at, 182;
+    fellows and tutors of colleges at the, 189;
+    altered habits and duties of fellows and tutors, 189;
+    alteration due to extension lectures and similar causes, 190;
+    scope of, extension lectures, 190;
+    synopsis of course, distributed beforehand, 190;
+    local schools and colleges in communication with, 192.
+
+  UNIVERSITY settlement in East End of London, 115;
+    clubs for adults encouraged by, 117;
+    dominant idea of, 120;
+    multifarious duties of a settler in, 121.
+
+  URBAN population, increase of, during last twenty years, 435.
+
+
+  V
+
+  VANDERBILT, Commodore, sells fleet of ships to buy railway shares, 34.
+
+  VICTORIA, colony of, indebted mainly to gold for its progress, 24;
+    gold raised in, between 1851 and 1859, 89 millions, 25;
+    imports rose to L30 per head of population, 26;
+    exports to L56 per head of population, 26.
+
+  VICTORIAN squire, often a self-made man, 200;
+    seldom violates old traditions, 200;
+    life of, at hall or manor, 200;
+    not very different from his predecessor, 200;
+    supports the subscription pack, 201;
+    breeds shorthorns, 201;
+    and becomes a judge of cattle, 201.
+
+  VOLUNTEERS, instructions to Lords-Lieutenant in 1859 to raise, 303;
+    Prince Consort's influence in securing issue of, 303;
+    first review of, in Hyde Park, 23d June 1860, 303;
+    number of, in 1860, 119,000, 303;
+    in 1886, 226,752, 303;
+    800,000 men, still of military age, in Great Britain, have been, 304.
+
+
+  W
+
+  WAGES, increase of, of working classes, in Victorian era, 43.
+
+  WAKEFIELD, Gibbon, sketch of his career, 433;
+    his _Art of Colonization_, 433.
+
+  WARD, Samuel, sketch of, 437;
+    nicknamed 'Uncle Sam,' 438;
+    founds a social and literary Anglo-American school, 438.
+
+  WARWICK, Earl of, descended from Sir Samuel Dashwood, vintner, a Lord
+        Mayor of London, 15.
+
+  WATKIN, Sir Edward, exceptional position of, 37.
+
+  WEALTH, aristocracy of, unknown before 1851, 42.
+
+  WELLINGTON, Duke of, personal sketch of, 4;
+    popular respect shown to, at all times, 10.
+
+  WHEWELL, Dr, historian of the Inductive Sciences, 325.
+
+  WINDSOR, compared with Weimar, 323.
+
+  WORKING Men's Club, established at Lancaster in 1860, 118;
+    and Institute Union, functions of, 126;
+    founded by Lords Brougham and Lyttleton, 118.
+
+  WORKING Men's College, Great Ormond Street, 118;
+    founded by Maurice and Thomas Hughes, 118.
+
+
+  Y
+
+  YOUTH, change in figure and appearance of English, 202;
+    improved expression on countenances of, 203;
+    taller and better set up, 203;
+    women as well as men, 203;
+    lofty stature and Junonian majesty of modern English feminine, 203.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Colston & Coy., Limited. Printers, Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Edited by Dr Ernst Regel--Berlin, 1894.
+
+[2] The grandfather of the fifth Marquess. As Lord Henry Petty, he had so
+long since as 1806 been Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1848 he was
+President of the Council, and led the peers in the Russell Government.
+Died 1863.
+
+[3] But much of the Forest being saved by the Common rights had not at any
+time been enclosed.
+
+[4] _The Age of Gold_, vol. i. p. 37.
+
+[5] While these lines are being prepared for the press there appears in a
+London newspaper a statement of the prices current at the Western
+Australia gold fields in the summer of 1896. They may be compared with the
+figures given in the text and are as follows:--Tea 3s., flour 10d., sugar
+1s., bacon 3s., beef and mutton 4d. to 8d., cheese 2s. 6d., coffee 3s.,
+tobacco 8s., and preserved potatoes 1s. 9d. per lb.; milk (condensed) 1s.
+9d. per tin; flour 20s. per 50 lbs.; and eggs 10s. a dozen; but the cost
+of living generally, as compared with earnings, is low. On the Ashburton
+River gold fields mutton is 4d., beef 6d., flour 10d., tea 3s., sugar 9d.
+to 1s., preserved potatoes 1s. 6d., salt 1s., rice 1s., and oatmeal 1s.
+3d. per lb. On the Yilgarn gold fields meat is 9d. to 1s. a lb., flour
+10s. to 30s. per 50 lb. bag, tea 3s. 6d. a lb., and other provisions are
+equally scarce and dear. At Coolgardie, to the east of Yilgarn, flour
+costs L3 per 200 lbs., bread 1s. per 1-1/2 lb. loaf, butter 2s. 3d. per
+lb., potatoes 6d. per lb., sugar 8d. per lb., tinned milk 1s. 3d. per lb.,
+bacon 1s. 9d. per lb., salt 6d. per lb., and board and lodgings L3 to L7 a
+week. On the Murchison gold fields in the North, the prices per lb. are:
+Flour 8d., sugar 8d., tea 3s. 6d., tobacco 6d., fish 1s. 6d., mutton 8d.,
+beef 8d., butter 3s., and tinned meats 1s. 3d.
+
+[6] Still more than this was given to get men on the home voyage from
+Melbourne.
+
+[7] See _Our Railways_. By John Pendleton. Cassell & Co.
+
+[8] Brought down to 1897 instead of 1881, these _mutatis mutandis_ figures
+are derived from Mr Mallock's most useful book.
+
+[9] In the West of England, with which the writer is specially acquainted,
+this is generally the case.
+
+[10] These figures are taken from 'Art Sales,' by George Redford,
+privately printed, 1882.
+
+[11] Now Sir William Agnew.
+
+[12] All the details of art prices given in this chapter are derived from
+Mr G. Redford's authentic record of art sales, first privately printed in
+1888. For other information the writer is indebted to the late Sir J. E.
+Millais, P.R.A.
+
+[13] See Picciotto's Anglo-Jewish History for all these early facts about
+the Jews.
+
+[14] The idea of the Exhibition being 'universal' was not that of the
+Prince, but of the Committee of the Society of Arts. It was first
+suggested in fact by Mr Thomas Winkworth.
+
+[15] Most of the time he was at Ghent. His stay there is known in French
+history as _La cour de Gand_.
+
+[16] These anecdotes are given from Mr Reeves' volume already mentioned.
+They are suggestive of incident if not uniformly accurate in fact. The
+correction of the Waterloo incident given above commended itself to some
+among Baron Lionel's friends who would be likely to know.
+
+[17] While Lord Palmerston has become a historical name, Lord
+Beaconsfield's precedents are daily, alike by friends and foes, cited as
+living forces.
+
+[18] See _Quarterly Review_, July, 1896.
+
+[19] This anecdote was often told by Lord Shaftesbury.
+
+[20] Not, however, the most appreciated by his master.
+
+[21] Now of course Battersea Park.
+
+[22] Who, to the regret of all who knew his abilities, died February 1897,
+having exercised influence rather than achieved distinction.
+
+[23] While he yet lives, his enduring monuments are his blocks of working
+men's dwellings in the King's Cross district and elsewhere.
+
+[24] The guarantees against undue delegation are stringent and successful.
+
+[25] Opinions vary as to the workability of this clause in the shape in
+which it left the Lords.
+
+[26] _E.g._ In a typical Surrey village, where there are no
+Nonconformists, the Chairman is the Vicar, but of 38 Gloucestershire
+parishes, where dissenters abound, only in two or three.
+
+[27] Urban District Councils have taken the place of Local Boards; they
+are in fact town councils of those districts which are not incorporated
+into municipalities.
+
+[28] Molesworth's _History of England_, vol. i. p. 19.
+
+[29] As a fact, the County chairman is most likely a J.P. already.
+
+[30] For valuable facts and figures, bringing this chapter down to the
+latest date the writer is indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin and his staff at
+the Local Government Board, as for much other useful help to Sir Henry
+Fowler, Sir Charles Dilke, the Rev. Charles Cox, D.D., and to Mr G. W. E.
+Russell.
+
+[31] In addition to Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Henry Fowler and others already
+mentioned, the writer is indebted for invaluable help in the preparation
+of facts and the revision of proofs in this portion of the book to Mr W.
+J. Soulsby the accomplished private secretary to a succession of Lord
+Mayors of London.
+
+[32] An account of the University Settlements in East London. Edited by
+John M. Knapp, Oxford House, Bethnal Green. Rivington, Percival & Co.
+1895.
+
+[33] _England: Its People, Polity and Pursuits._ 2 vols. Cassell & Co. 1
+vol. Chapman & Hall.
+
+[34] This usage varies under different Administrations and at different
+epochs. Mr Forster [1870] was an actual Education Minister. His Liberal
+successors have been so since; his Conservative successors only in a
+qualified sense.
+
+[35] See Report of the Secondary Education Commission, vol. i. _passim_,
+but especially, pp. 44, and seq.
+
+[36] These have produced not a few famous men even in this generation:
+Thus Bishop Stortford shares with Oriel, Oxford the honour of educating Mr
+Cecil Rhodes.
+
+[37] As the writer has a personal reason for knowing, this is the year in
+which the amalgamation first took a definite shape, though it was not
+perhaps fully carried out till a little later.
+
+[38] This point was dwelt upon strongly in the letters of London
+correspondents to the French press at the time of the 1887 Jubilee.
+
+[39] Recent legislation providing for the information of the working
+classes on this point, by the display of lists in factories, has not given
+entire satisfaction to the persons interested.
+
+[40] The statistics showing the new rungs in the educational ladder in
+this chapter have been supplied to the writer by Mr G. H. Croad of the
+London School Board, by other gentlemen in like positions and by private
+friends in the Education Department. Thanks are also due to Sir John
+Gorst, and to Mr Mundella for the kind trouble they have taken in checking
+the facts of the narrative portion, and for making valuable suggestions.
+
+[41] This, during the youth of the late Rev W. G. Cookesley was said by
+that authority to be, not hyperbole, but historical fact.
+
+[42] This title has been denied to the King here named, but Waynflete,
+also an Eton benefactor as well as official, was himself transferred by
+Henry from Winchester to Eton, becoming Headmaster and Provost
+successively.
+
+[43] For the facts and figures in this chapter showing the relations of
+the old public schools to the new educational tests, as for the facts of
+Eton expenditure, the writer is indebted to the Rev. Edmond Warre, D.D.,
+the Headmaster, who has placed at his disposal all the necessary data.
+
+[44] See _Eothen_, edn. 1896--Blackwood, p. 7.
+
+[45] Now in vogue at nearly all the pleasure towns in southern England.
+
+[46] The name of Frank as well as of Charles Mathews was often on the
+bills of this theatre during the sixties.
+
+[47] Census of England and Wales, 1891. Vol. iv. General Report, pp. 64
+and fg.
+
+[48] For a valuable dissertation, to which the present writer is much
+indebted on this subject, see A. J. Ogilvy--_Westminster Review_, 1891.
+Vol. 136, pp. 289 to 297.
+
+[49] W. Cunningham on the Malthusian theory--_Macmillan's Magazine_, Dec.
+1883.
+
+[50] In addition to the published official statistics from which the above
+facts and figures are taken, the writer is indebted to the
+Registrar-General for much useful information, and to Mr G. Shaw-Lefevre
+for further friendly help.
+
+[51] See Molesworth's _History of England_. Vol. i. p. 90 and fg.
+
+[52] Commons Journal, xci. 319.
+
+[53] In the Upper House, there is perhaps no one to whom the classics are
+more familiar as literature than Lord Morley.
+
+[54] For nearly all the details as to the structural arrangements of the
+two Houses of Parliament, and to the particulars of what may be called
+their social life, the writer desires to express his grateful
+acknowledgments to Mr Archibald Milman, C.B., a Clerk of the House of
+Commons. On other parliamentary points, he is not less indebted to Sir
+Charles Dilke, and to many more Members of Parliament, only a few of whom
+now survive.
+
+[55] See the following extract from the _Daily News_, Dec. 16, 1896:--
+
+MR GLADSTONE ON PARLIAMENTARY CHANGES.--Mr Gladstone having read an
+article in the _Westminster Review_ entitled 'The Old M.P. and the New,'
+by George A. B. Dewar, writes that, speaking from recollection, he thinks
+there were not five members of the Conservative party in 1835 who sat in
+the House of Commons by reason of their connection with trade or industry.
+He describes the change which has come about in the composition of the
+party since then as 'simply marvellous.'
+
+[56] 'It is the Queen's doing,' is the statement of the newspapers of that
+year; but seems to apply not to the dismissal of Lord Grey, but of Lord
+Melbourne who had followed him.
+
+[57] The reference to Lord Palmerston and the _Morning Post_ is
+historical.
+
+[58] It might be argued of course with much plausibility that this order
+of things has begun long since, and that, the verbal distinction
+notwithstanding, government by party has always, from another point of
+view been government by groups.
+
+[59] This (1701) followed the Kentish petition to the Commons protesting
+against distrust of the King, and desiring that the addresses of the loyal
+petitioners might be turned into Bills of Supply.
+
+[60] Sir Theodore Martin's 'Life,' chapter i. These references are in all
+cases to the People's Edition.
+
+[61] 'Life,' p. 11.
+
+[62] Before Prince Albert's reforms, the jurisdiction of the Palace
+interior was divided between the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Steward.
+The Lord Chamberlain was responsible for providing the lamps, the Lord
+Steward for lighting them; before a pane of glass or cupboard could be
+repaired, months sometimes passed; all external repairs were in the hands
+of the Woods and Forests, on which it therefore depended how much daylight
+should be admitted through the windows. More than two-thirds of the indoor
+servants seemed without control, coming in, going out, when, and with whom
+they chose.--'Life,' pp. 26-27.
+
+[63] 'Life,' p. 21.
+
+[64] 'Life,' p. 21.
+
+[65] Not, as was long said, Mr Disraeli, but Mr Disraeli's then titular
+leader, Lord George Bentinck.
+
+[66] At this interval, traditions as to the merits of the quarrel may
+differ. The account here given is from the most authentic source
+existing.--Martin's 'Life,' p, 29.
+
+[67] This opinion used to be expressed very strongly by Lord Raglan who
+commanded in the Crimea. It was shared by the French military experts of
+the day.
+
+[68] The figures in the earlier estimate are taken from the _Imperial
+Federation Journal_, June 1886: Those of the later date are supplied by
+the Army Estimates, and by the courtesy of Lord Lansdowne and his
+colleagues at the War Office.
+
+[69] This (_i.e._ distribution of honours according to property) seems
+from _Ethics_, Book viii. ch. 10, the exact meaning of the convenient
+compound.
+
+[70] For the chief facts in these remarks on the army, where they are not
+directly drawn from the Blue Books, or as above specified from the
+Imperial Federation Journal, the writer is indebted, and would express his
+thanks, to Lord Lansdowne, Secretary of State for War; to Field Marshal
+Lord Wolseley, and to his old and distinguished friend General Sir Henry
+Brackenbury.
+
+[71] Quoted by Captain Eardley Wilmot in _The Development of Navies_, p.
+1.
+
+[72] _The Development of Navies_, p. 12.
+
+[73] P. 27.
+
+[74] The 'Warrior,' at this time standing by herself, was a vessel of
+9,210 tons. Thirty-five years later the advance made in our ideas of
+dimension and power may be judged from the fact that on Jan. 31, 1895, the
+'Majestic' was launched. Her tonnage was 14,900, an increase of 5,690 on
+her predecessor. Unlike the 'Warrior' of an earlier date, the 'Majestic'
+was only one of several, the building of which began at the end of 1894,
+the last parliamentary record of which reaches to the spring of 1896.
+Briefly to summarize the results that emphasize the contrasts between the
+two epochs, the average size of vessels built at the present time
+approaches thrice that of twenty years ago. Then too, steel was not used
+for ship building; now it is gradually supplanting iron. Of late there
+have been more ships built than formerly on a less colossal scale. The
+result is partially due to the dimensions of the Suez Canal whose depth is
+not equal to an ironclad of the first magnitude. Time, apparently, is
+still needed to show if our seamen can develop a skill as great in
+handling these iron leviathans as in controlling those wooden craft, their
+management of which was the admiration of the world.
+
+[75] Apart from the parliamentary papers bearing on the navy, Captain
+Eardley Wilmot's _The Development of Navies_ is the literary authority
+that has been found most useful in preparing this chapter. The writer is
+however, chiefly indebted to the details with which he has been kindly and
+copiously supplied by the present First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr Goschen
+and his staff, especially Lord Encombe.
+
+[76] In the nineteenth century, on a much smaller scale, exhibitions had
+been held in Paris 1801, 1806, 1836, 1849, as well as in Belgium, Germany
+and Spain. The true precursor of the '51 Exhibition has been discovered by
+Mr Molesworth (History ii. p. 363) in the Covent Garden Free Trade Bazaar
+1846.
+
+[77] Macaulay's House of Commons speeches in the 1832 Reform Bill debates
+are famous. When he was best known as a writer, he had been Secretary at
+War (1839) and Paymaster General (1846). Lytton at the zenith of his
+literary fame had been Colonial Secretary under Lord Derby in 1858, before
+he was made a peer in 1866.
+
+[78] The vitality of Purcell's fame at the 200th anniversary of his death
+was attested by the celebrations of 1895. Since then a very remarkable
+tribute to his greatness has been given accidentally in an unexpected
+quarter. The great German classical authority, the Bach Gesellschaft (vol.
+xlii. p. 250) prints as a doubtful work of Bach, Purcell's Toccata in A
+which is given in the Harpsichord and Organ volume of the Purcell Society
+(p. 42). That a work of Purcell's should have been mistaken for one of the
+very greatest organ writer's who has ever lived, and that by Bach's own
+jealous countrymen, is a panegyric more significant than words on our own
+great national composer.
+
+[79] _Life and Letters of Sir Charles Halle_ (Smith, Elder & Co.)
+illustrates with interesting detail the service rendered to Beethoven by
+this great exponent of his genius.
+
+[80] For the facts and figures contained in this survey of our musical
+state, the writer desires to express his special obligations to Sir George
+Grove, and to Sir Arthur Sullivan, both private friends of many years
+standing.
+
+[81] Martin's 'Life,' People's Edition, part ii. p. 63.
+
+[82] The habit of inviting other than parliamentary guests, men famous in
+art or science, to the State dinners on the eve of the session began with
+Mr Gladstone, and after him Mr Disraeli.
+
+[83] A class chiefly, if not exclusively, represented by, to his honour be
+it said, Professor Herkomer.
+
+[84] While these pages are passing through the press, the French critic,
+M. Yriarte, writing in the _Times_, gives the following interesting
+testimony to the world-wide value of this British centre of humanity and
+culture:--To-day for all of us foreigners South Kensington is a Mecca.
+England there possesses the entire art of Europe and the East, their
+spiritual manifestations under all forms, and Europe has been swept into
+the stream in imitation of England. Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Nuremberg,
+Basle, Madrid, St Petersburg, Moscow, the large towns of America itself
+have now their South Kensingtons; but in the original one of England still
+unfinished, where the splendour of the start (excessive, as it seems to
+me) contrasts with the inertia of the last fifteen years, the
+inconceivable treasures are becoming so much heaped up as to be a
+veritable obstacle to study. How is it possible to study this
+extraordinary series of textiles of all times and countries, ranged one
+upon another, overlapping and hiding one another, without proper
+perspective and proper light?
+
+[85] L70,000, to which the Duke of Marlborough reduced the L100,000 which
+he originally asked.
+
+[86] For the information embodied in this chapter, the writer is under
+many obligations to the late Sir John E. Millais, to the late Sir Philip
+Cunliffe Owen, long Director at South Kensington, and Mr F. A. Eaton, the
+present Secretary to the Royal Academy.
+
+[87] Greenwood, p. 291.
+
+[88] Thackeray, when writing _The Virginians_, Carlyle, in the preparation
+of all his later works, are authentic and only the more illustrious
+instances which could be given.
+
+[89] Such was the precise garment mentioned by Mr Harrison when he told
+the story to the present writer.
+
+[90] To whom, while at work on portions of this book at a distance from
+London, the present writer owes much courteous help.
+
+[91] By exactly ten years, Thackeray dying 1863, Lytton 1873. The
+increased interest in Dickens is shown by Messrs Chapman & Hall's latest
+editions, the revived interest in Lytton by Messrs Routledge's new
+ventures.
+
+[92] Personally, Lord Lytton was more correctly appreciated in Paris where
+in his last years he much lived. His unfailing presence of mind in
+physical difficulties or dangers compelled the admiration of all who knew
+him. A Colonial Secretary himself, he first showed, in the closing
+chapters of _The Caxtons_, that sense of the greatness of our Colonial
+empire, to-day a commonplace but unknown up to then.
+
+[93] John Copley, afterwards Lord Lyndhurst, and John Campbell, afterwards
+Lord Campbell, during their student days at the Bar, both wrote for the
+London papers, chiefly theatrical critiques.
+
+[94] These figures for the later date are taken direct from Mitchell's
+Newspaper Press Directory 1897; for the earlier from a note by Mr Garnett
+in Mr Ward's _Reign of Queen Victoria_; Mr Garnett's statistics being
+apparently derived from an article contributed probably by Albany Fonblanc
+to an early number of the _Westminster Review_.
+
+[95] Carried in the January of 1855 a majority of 157 (305 to 148).
+
+[96] Successes of a new sort have been made. The penny newspapers had paid
+by their advertisements; when the price of the paper on which they were
+printed exceeded a certain figure, circulation beyond the amount necessary
+to maintain advertisements was not therefore in itself a paramount object.
+The new halfpenny sheets realized on every copy sold a profit larger even
+proportionately than the penny papers had ever made on their copies,
+advertisements of course excepted.
+
+[97] For the commercial details of newspaper enterprise, the reader is
+referred to the author's earlier work _England_, etc., where he duly
+acknowledged his obligations to his editorial chief and personal friend,
+Mr W. H. Mudford, of the _Standard_; for the fresh facts and figures here
+given the writer is indebted to Sir Charles Dilke, to Mr H. Labouchere, to
+an article on _Halfpenny Papers_ by Mr F. A. McKenzie in the _Windsor
+Magazine_ for January 1897, and above all to Mitchell's invaluable
+_Newspaper Press Directory_.
+
+[98] M.P. for Shrewsbury since 1832.
+
+[99] Each reform was followed by a fresh diminution in the death rate.
+
+[100] This lady, in addition to her natural gift of organization, had been
+trained at the Prussian hospital of Kaisersworth. Accompanied by her
+friends, Mr and Mrs Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall, and 37 nurses, she
+reached Scutari November 5, just in time to tend the wounded after
+Balaclava.
+
+[101] Sampson Low's _Charities of London_, p. 2.
+
+[102] The statistics illustrative of this subject have been derived
+exclusively from Mr Sampson Low's _Charities of London_, at the places
+already indicated in the footnotes. For the other facts to complete the
+little picture, the writer is indebted to friends who have made this
+subject their special study, such as Lady Priestley, or reluctantly to his
+own personal experience.
+
+[103] For these statistics, some of them perhaps now given for the first
+time the writer is beholden to Sir Brydges Henniker, Registrar General.
+
+[104] This most gifted family came originally from Plymouth or its
+neighbourhood, sending representatives to Bath, Bristol and Barnstaple.
+The Barnstaple Budd, universally respected, died 1896.
+
+[105] Dr Ferrier's work on the brain, mapping it out according to its
+functions, appeared 1876 and also perhaps marks an epoch.
+
+[106] Shortly before his death, the late Sir Andrew Clark assured the
+present writer that his remarks in his earlier work, _England_, on the
+medical profession were accurate in all respects and applicable to the
+existing state of things. For the purpose of the present volume when the
+writer was first contemplating it, and was in occasional correspondence
+with Sir Andrew, the great physician kindly made a few fresh hints. These,
+with the information of Sir William and Lady Priestley, have been
+indispensable to the writer throughout.
+
+[107] Evidence in support of this has been collected by the writer
+throughout the manufacturing districts, an important fact being that where
+secularism was most organized, there well-to-do mechanics and artizans are
+Communicants, and often Sunday School teachers as well.
+
+[108] The Ramsden Sermon, preached before Oxford University June 12, 1892,
+pp. 10, 11.
+
+[109] These Bishoprics, 75 in America, 4 in other countries, that is 79 in
+all, control (1897) 4,666 clergy; among the church goers 622,194 are
+Communicants. The total of Anglican clergy in foreign parts, at the period
+of the Queen's accession, excluding Bishops, was 897. In 1850 it was
+1,193. To-day (1897) it is 4,312. Roughly, therefore, the increase has
+been 300 per cent.
+
+[110] The most noticeable being the Gorham dispute about _Baptismal
+Regeneration_ 1850, which issued in defining the Evangelical status, as in
+1847 Hampden's bishopric had secured the broad Church position. In 1871
+the Frome case secured the highest doctrines on the Eucharist. These three
+decisions practically constitute the Charters of the three chief parties
+in the National Church.
+
+[111] Not Dean of St Paul's till 1869.
+
+[112] _The Sermon on the Mount_, 1897.
+
+[113] For the information as to the Church of England embodied in this
+chapter, the writer's thanks are sincerely tendered to the Rev. H. W.
+Tucker of the S.P.G. Society; to the Rev. J. C. Cox, D.D., Holdenby, North
+Hants; to the Rev. A. L. Foulkes, Steventon, Berks; and to Mr G. W. E.
+Russell. No official statistics of the numbers in the different Churches
+exist. The basis of the estimate given is supplied by the statistics of
+the _Federation League Journal_, June, 1886.
+
+[114] This is not the conventional idea of clubs. Thackeray, who knew
+club-life well, first illustrated this view. An examination of the tariff
+and general charges at the professional clubs in Pall Mall or St James's
+would show the absolute truth of the description.
+
+[115] The Honourable Mr Algernon Bourke has a more than amateur experience
+of modern clubs. While these pages are passing through the press, he gives
+it as his opinion that nowadays there is practically no play in clubs. All
+who know anything of the subject would confirm the general truth of that
+statement.
+
+[116] See _passim_ the evidence taken before this Committee printed in the
+1844 Parliamentary Blue Books.
+
+[117] The reluctance of referees to interfere is natural and pardonable in
+view of the fashionable brutality not only of the players but the
+spectators. A proof of this may be found in a typical instance reported in
+a daily paper:--A FOOTBALL REFEREE ASSAULTED.--A disgraceful scene was
+witnessed at Lincoln last night after the close of the League match
+between Lincoln City and Newton Heath. The decisions of the referee (Mr
+Fox, of Sheffield) gave great dissatisfaction to the crowd, and the
+hostile demonstration commenced when he awarded the Heathens two penalty
+kicks in quick succession. After the match he had to seek shelter in the
+secretary's office for some time, and when he did leave the ground he was
+badly assaulted by several roughs. The windows of a cab in which he drove
+to his hotel were completely smashed.
+
+[118] In the diverse materials for this chapter, the writer has been
+helped greatly by the volume on the Turf in the Badminton Series, but in
+all which has to do with horses by the Earl of Dunraven, by Lord
+Ribblesdale, by Mr Leopold de Rothschild; in all that relates to cricket
+and football by the Hon. and Rev. E. Lyttelton, Headmaster of Haileybury
+College, and in the football facts by one of Mr Lyttelton's Haileybury
+colleagues. His chess facts have been given him by a great West of England
+authority in the game, H. Maxwell Prideaux. For his knowledge of ladies'
+work he is indebted, as in _England_ he was, to Miss F. S. Hollings.
+
+[119] The motion in 1849 for the Sierra Leone reduction was, as Hansard
+shows, only one of a series of such proposals. Hume's views on the
+Colonies were much those which Mill had set forth in his famous
+Encyclopaedia Britannica article. Mill may have been against Colonial
+expansion, but not against Colonial retention.
+
+[120] On this subject see the very interesting and accurate statistics
+compiled by Mr F. Leveson Gower, and published by the Cobden Club.
+
+[121] A. Cleveland Coxe, then Rector of Grace Church, Baltimore, published
+his _Impressions of England_, 1856. His Ballads and Carols, ecclesiastical
+or religious, especially one entitled _In Dreamland_, abound in graceful
+fancy, and have had a popularity among English and American Anglicans
+approaching that of _The Christian Year_.
+
+[122] For the facts relating to the administration of law, the writer is
+indebted to Sir Edward Clarke, and to the Master John MacDonell, of the
+High Court of Justice. The facts and figures with respect to the Colonies
+have been drawn from official sources as well as from the very valuable
+_Imperial Federation League Journal_ for June 1886. He is further
+personally beholden for the local colour inparted to his Colonial
+descriptions by the private information of Sir Robert G. W. Herbert, Sir
+Julius Vogel, Mr John Bramston, and other Colonial officials. The
+privately printed papers of the fourth Lord Carnarvon distributed among
+his personal friends (1897), opportunely confirm and illustrate the views
+here given of the Colonial past, present, and future.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE
+VICTORIAN AGE***
+
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