efforts made by unpaid Christian zeal to cope with the multitudinous
ignorance and misery of our overgrown cities. It was very slowly that
the national conscience was aroused to the peril and sin of allowing
the masses to grow up in heathen ignorance; but at last the English
State shook off its sluggish indifference to the instruction of its
poor, and became as active as it had been supine. Mr. Forster's Bill
is the measure which indicates this turning of the tide. We do not
propose now to discuss the provisions of this Act, which were sharply
canvassed at the time, and which certainly have not worked without
friction; but we may say that the stimulus then given to educational
activity, if judged by subsequent results, must be acknowledged to
have been advantageous. The system of schools under the charge of
various religious bodies, which existed before the Education Act, has
not been superseded; that indeed would have been a deep misfortune,
for it is more needed than ever; the masses of the population have
been, to an appreciable extent, reached and instructed; and we shall
not much err in connecting as cause and effect the wider instruction
with the diminution of pauperism and crime which the statistics of
recent years reveal.

The same member who honoured himself and benefited his country by
this great effort to promote the advance of the "angel Knowledge"
also introduced, in 1871, the Ballot Bill, designed to do away with
all the violence and corruption that had long disgraced Parliamentary
elections in this free land, and that showed no symptom of a tendency
to reform themselves. The new system of secret voting which was now
adopted has required, it is true, to be further purified by the
recent Corrupt Practices Bill and its stringent provisions; but no
one, whose memory is long enough to recall the tumultuous and
discreditable scenes attendant on elections under the old system,
will be inclined to deny that much that was flagrantly disgraceful as
well as dishonest has been swept away by the reforming energy of our
own day.

It is to the same period, made memorable by these internal reforms,
that we have to refer the final settlement of the long-standing
controversy between Great Britain and the United States as to the
_Alabama_ claims. We have already referred to these claims and the
peaceful though very costly manner of their adjustment. That the
award on the whole should go against us was not very grateful to the
English people; but when the natural irritation of the hour had time
to subside, the substantial justice of the decision was little
disputed. While England was thus busied in strengthening her walls
and making straight her ways, her great neighbour and rival was
passing through a very furnace of misery. The colossal-seeming
Empire, whose head was rather of strangely mingled Corinthian metal
than of fine gold, and whose iron feet were mixed with miry clay, was
tottering to its overthrow, and fell in the wild days of 1870 with a
world-awakening crash. Again it was a dispute concerning the throne
of Spain which precipitated the fall of a French sovereign. It would
seem as if interference with the affairs of its Southern neighbour
was ever to be ominous of evil to France. The first great Napoleon
had had to rue such interference; it had been disastrous to Louis
Philippe; now Louis Napoleon, making the candidature of Leopold of
Hohenzollern for the Spanish crown a pretext for war with Prussia,
forced on the strife which was to dethrone himself, to cast down his
dynasty, and to despoil France of two fair provinces, Alsace and
Lorraine, once taken from Germany, now reconquered for United
Germany. With that strife, which resulted in the exaltation of the
Prussian King, our Princess Royal's father-in-law, as German Emperor,
England had absolutely nothing to do, except to pity the fallen and
help the suffering as far as in her lay; but it awakened profoundest
interest, especially while the long siege of Paris dragged on through
the hard winter of 1870-71; hardly yet is the interest of the subject
exhausted.

A certain fleeting effect was produced in England by the erection of
a New Republic in France in place of the fallen Empire, while the
family of the defeated ruler--rejected by his realm more for lack of
success than for his bad government--escaped to the safety of this
country from the angry hatred of their own. A few people here began
to talk republicanism in public, and to commend the "logical
superiority" of that mode of government, oblivious of the fact that
practical Britain prefers a system, however illogical, that actually
works well, to the most beautifully reasoned but untested paper
theory. But the wild excesses of the Commune in Paris, outdoing in
horror the sufferings of the siege, quickly produced the same effect
here that was wrought in the last century by the French Reign of
Terror, and English republicanism relapsed into the dormant state
from which it had only just awakened. The dangerous illness that
attacked the Prince of Wales in the last days of 1871, calling forth
such keen anxiety throughout the land that it seemed as if thousands
of families had a son lying in imminent peril of death, showed at
once that the nation was yet loyal to the core. True prayers were
everywhere offered up in sympathy with the mother, the sister, the
wife, who watched at the bedside of the heir to the throne; and when,
on the very anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, the life that
had seemed ebbing away turned to flow upward again; a sort of sob of
relief rose from the heart of the people, who rejoiced to be able, at
a later day, to share with their Queen her solemn act of thanksgiving
for mercy shown, as she went with her restored son, her son's wife,
and her son's sons, to worship and give praise in the great cathedral
of St. Paul's.

Princess Alice, who had shared and softened the grief of her mother
ten years before, had been again at her side during all the
protracted anxiety of this winter, and had helped to nurse her
brother. The Princess's experience of nursing had been terribly
increased during the awful wars, when she had been incessantly busied
in hospital organisation and work, suffering from the sight of
suffering as a sensitive nature must, but ever toiling to lighten it;
and she had come with her children to recover a little strength in
her mother's Highland home. Thus it was that she was found at
Sandringham when her brother's illness declared itself, "fulfilling
the same priceless offices" of affection as in her maiden days, and
endearing herself the more to the English people, who grieved for her
when, in the ensuing year, a mournful accident robbed her of one
darling child, and who felt it like a personal domestic loss when in
1878 the beautiful life ended. Other royal marriages have from time
to time awakened public interest, and one, celebrated between the
Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne, heir of the dukedom of
Argyll, had just preceded the illness of the Prince and was regarded
with much more attention because no British subject since the days of
George II's legislation as to royal alliances had been deemed worthy
of such honour. But not even the more outwardly splendid match
between the Queen's sailor son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and the
daughter of the Czar Alexander, could eclipse in popularity the quiet
marriage, overclouded with sorrow, and the tranquil, hard-working
life of the good and gifted lady who was to die the martyr of her
true motherly and wifely devotion.

[Illustration: Lord Beaconsfield.]

[Illustration: Lord Salisbury.]

From these glimpses of the joys and troubles affecting the household
that is cherished in the heart of England, we return to the more
stormy records of our public doings. A sort of link between the two
exists in the long and very successful tour which the Prince of
Wales, some time after his restoration to health, made of the vast
Indian dominions of the crown. Extensive travels and wide
acquaintance with the great world to which Britain is bound by a
thousand ties have entered largely into the royal scheme of education
for the future King. No princes of England in former days have seen
so much of other lands as the sons of Queen Victoria; and this
particular journey is understood to have had an excellent political
effect.

Mr. Gladstone's five years' lease of power, which had been signalised
by so many important changes, came to an end in 1874, just before the
time when Sir Garnet Wolseley, sent to bring the savage King of
Ashantee to reason, returned successful to England, having snatched a
complete victory "out of the very jaws of approaching sun and fever"
on the pestilent West Coast of Africa in the early days of 1874. The
last Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, who now assumed office, was marked by
several noticeable events: the proclamation of the Queen as "Empress
of India," in formal definite recognition of the new relation between
little England and the gigantic, many-peopled realm which through
strange adventure has come directly under our Sovereign's sway; the
Russo-Turkish war, following on the evil doings in Turkey known as
the "Bulgarian atrocities," and terminating in a peace signed at
Berlin, with which the English Premier, now known as Lord
Beaconsfield, had very much to do; and the acquisition by England of
the 176,000 shares in the Suez Canal originally held by the Khedive
of Egypt--a transaction to which France, also largely interested in
the Canal, was a consenting party. To this period belong the
distressful Afghan and Zulu wars, the latter unhappily memorable by
the tragic fate that befell the young son of Louis Napoleon, a
volunteer serving with the English army. Deep sympathy was felt for
his imperial mother, widowed since 1873, and now bereaved of her only
child; and by none was her sorrow more keenly realised than by the
Queen, who herself had to mourn the loss of the beloved Princess
Alice, the first of her children to follow her father into the silent
land. The death of the Prince Louis Napoleon at the hands of savage
Zulus was severely felt by the still strong Bonapartism of France;
but Englishmen, remembering the early melancholy death of the heir of
the first Napoleon, were struck by the fatal coincidence, while they
could honestly deplore the premature extinction of so much youth,
gallantry, and hope-fulness, cast away in our own ill-starred
quarrel.

An agitation distinctly humanitarian and domestic had been going on
during the early years of this Ministry, which resulted in the
passing of the Merchant Shipping Bill, intended to remedy the many
wrongs to which our merchant seamen were subject, a measure almost
entirely procured by the fervent human sympathy and resoluteness of
one member of Parliament, Samuel Plimsoll; and other measures
belonging to this period, and designed to benefit the toilers of the
land principally, were initiated by the energy of the Home Secretary,
Mr. Cross. But neither the imposing foreign action of Lord
Beaconsfield's Government, nor the domestic improvements wrought
during its period of power, could maintain it in public favour. There
was great and growing distress in the country; depression of trade,
severe winters, sunless summers, all produced suffering, and
suffering discontent. An appeal to the country, made in the spring of
1880, shifted the Parliamentary majority from the Conservative to the
Liberal side. Lord Beaconsfield resigned, and Mr. Gladstone returned
to power.

The history of the Gladstone Ministry does not come well within the
scope of this work. Certain very memorable events must be touched
upon; there are dark chapters of our national story, stains and blots
on our great name, which force themselves upon us. But to follow the
Government through its years of struggle with the ever-growing bulk
of Irish difficulty, and to track it through its various enactments
designed still further to improve the condition of the English
people, would require a small volume to itself. England still
remembers the thrill, half fury, half anguish, which ran through her
at the tidings that the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, charged with
a message of peace and conciliation, had been stabbed to death within
twenty-four hours of his landing on that unhappy shore. She cannot
forego the deep instinctive feeling--so generally manifested at the
time of Lincoln's murder--that the lawless spilling of life for any
cause dishonours and discredits that cause; nor have various
subsequent efforts made to terrorise public opinion here been
differently judged.

But it was a far more cruel shock that was inflicted through the
series of ill-advised proceedings that brought about the great
disaster of Khartoum. Before we deal with these, we must glance at
the African and Afghan troubles, again breaking out and again
quieted, the first by a peace with the Boers of the Transvaal that
awakened violent discussion not yet at an end, and the second, after
some successes of the British arms, by a judicious arrangement
designed to secure the neutrality of Afghanistan, interposed by
nature as a strong, all but insurmountable, barrier between India and
Central Asia. These transactions, the theme of sharp contention at
the time, were cast into the shade by events in which we were
concerned in Egypt, our newly acquired interests in the Suez Canal
making that country far more important to us than of yore. Its
condition was very wretched, its government at once feeble and
oppressive, and, despite the joint influence which France and England
had acquired in Egyptian councils, an armed rebellion broke out,
under the leadership of Arabi Pasha. France declining to act in this
emergency, the troops and fleet of England put down this revolt
single-handed; and in their successes the Queen's third son, Arthur,
Duke of Connaught, took his part, under the orders of Sir Garnet
(afterwards Lord) Wolseley. There were again rejoicings in Balmoral,
where the Queen, with her soldierly son's young wife beside her, was
preparing to receive another bride--Princess Helen of Waldeck, just
wedded to our youngest Prince, Leopold, Duke of Albany.

But this gleam of brightness was destined to be followed by darker
disaster far than that which seemed averted for the moment. A
mightier rebellion was arising in the Soudan, a vast tract of country
annexed by the ambition of Ismail, the former Khedive of Egypt, to be
ill governed by his officials and ravaged by the slave-trade. These
evils were checked for a few years by the strong hand of Charles
George Gordon, already famous through his achievements in China, and
invested with unlimited power by Ismail; but, that potentate being
overthrown, the great Englishman left his thankless post, no longer
tenable by him. Then it seemed that chaos had come again; and a bold
and keen, though probably hypocritical, dervish, self-styled the
_Mahdi_, or Mohammedan Messiah, was able to kindle new flames of
revolt, which burned with the quenchless fury of Oriental fanaticism.
His Arab and negro soldiers made short work of the poor Egyptian
fellaheen sent to fight them, though these were under the command of
Englishmen. The army led by Hicks Pasha utterly vanished in the
deserts, as that of Cambyses did of old. The army under Baker Pasha
did not, indeed, disappear in the same mysterious manner, but it too
was routed with great slaughter.

The English Government, willing to avoid the vast task of crushing
the revolt, had counselled the abandonment of the Soudan, and the
Khedive's Ministers reluctantly acquiesced. But there were Egyptian
garrisons scattered throughout the Soudan which must not be abandoned
with the country. Above all, there was Khartoum, an important town at
the junction of the Blue and the White Nile, with a large European
settlement and an Egyptian garrison, all in pressing danger, loyal as
yet, but full of just apprehension. These troops, these officials,
these women and children, who only occupied their perilous position
through the action of the Khedive's Government, had a right to
protection--a right acknowledged by Her Majesty's Ministers; but they
wished to avoid hostilities. General Graham, left in command on the
Red Sea littoral, was allowed to take action against the Mahdi's
lieutenant who was threatening Suakim, and who was driven back with
heavy loss; but he might not follow up the victory.

[Illustration: General Gordon.]

The English Government hoped to withdraw the garrisons in safety,
without force of arms. They had been for some time urging on the
Khedive that the marvellous influence which Gordon was known to have
acquired in his old  province should now be utilised, and that to
_him_ should be entrusted the herculean task of tranquillising the
Soudan, by reinstating its ancient dynasties of tribal chiefs and
withdrawing all Egyptian and European troops and officials. Their
plan was at last accepted; then Gordon, hitherto unacquainted, like
the public at large, with the Government designs, was informed of
them and invited to carry them out. He consented; and, with the
chivalric promptitude which essentially belonged to his character, he
departed the same night on his perilous errand. Passing through
Cairo, he received plenary powers from the Khedive, and went on
almost alone to Khartoum, where he was received with an overflowing
enthusiasm. But, with all his eager haste, he was too late to bring
about the desired results by peaceful means. "He should have come a
year ago," muttered his native well-wishers. Week after week and
month after month, his position in Khartoum became more perilous;
the Mahdi's power waxed greater, and his hordes drew round the city,
which long defied them, while garrison after garrison fell into their
hands elsewhere. It was in vain that General Gordon urged the
despatch of British troops, a few hundred of whom would at one time
have sufficed to turn the tide, and insure success in his enterprise.
They were still withheld; and he would not secure his own safety by
deserting the people whom his presence had induced to stand out
against the impostor and his hosts. The city endured a long, cruel
siege, and fell at last, reduced by hunger and treachery, just as a
tardily despatched British force was making its way to relieve it--a
force commanded by Lord Wolseley, who half a year before had been
protesting against the "indelible disgrace" of leaving Gordon to his
fate. He was not able even to bury his friend and comrade, slain by
the fanatic enemy when they broke into the city in the early morning
of January 26th, 1885.

[Illustration: Duke of Albany. _From a Photograph by A. BASSANO, Bond
Street, W._]

"I have done my best for the honour of our country," were the parting
words of the dead hero. His country felt itself profoundly
dishonoured by the manner in which it had lost this its famous son--a
man distinguished at once by commanding ability, unsullied honour,
heroic valour; a man full of tenderest beneficence towards his
fellows, and of utter devotion to his God; "the grandest figure,"
said an American admirer, "that has crossed the disc of this planet
for centuries." Him England had fatally delayed to help, withheld by
the dread of costly and cruel warfare; and then just failed to save
him by a war enormously costly and cruelly fatal indeed. A general
lamentation, blent with cries of anger, rose up from the land. Her
Majesty shared the common sorrow, as her messages of sympathy to the
surviving relations of Gordon testified. Various charitable
institutions, modelled on the lines which he had followed in his work
among the poor, rose to keep his memory green; and thus the objects
of his Christlike care during his life are now profiting by the
world-famous manner of his death. But there is still a deep feeling
that even time itself can hardly efface the stain that has been left
on our national fame. An English expedition, well commanded, full of
ardour and daring, sent to accomplish a specific object, and failing
in that object; its commander, entirely guiltless of blame, having to
abandon the scene of his triumphs to a savage, fanatic foe as was now
the case--this was evil enough; but that our beloved countryman, a
true knight without fear and without reproach, should have been
betrayed to desertion and death through his own magnanimity and our
sluggishness, added a rankling, poisonous sense of shame to our
humiliation. That the same year saw further electoral privileges
extended to the humble classes in England, beyond what even the last
Reform Bill had conferred, which might prove of advantage afterwards,
but was an imperfect consolation at the time. Another grief fell upon
the Queen in this year in the early death of Leopold, Duke of Albany,
a Prince whose intellectual gifts were nearly allied to those of his
father, but on whom lifelong delicacy of health had enforced a life
of comparative quietude. His widowed bride and infant children have
ever since been cared for tenderly by his royal mother.

[Illustration: Duchess of Albany. _From a Photograph by A. BASSANO,
Bond Street, W._]



CHAPTER VIII.

OUR COLONIES.

[Illustration: Sydney Heads.]

If now we turn our eyes a while from the foreign and domestic
concerns of Great Britain proper, and look to the Greater Britain
beyond the seas, we shall find that its progress has nowise lagged
behind that of the mother Isle. To Lord Durham, the remarkable man
sent out in 1838 to deal with the rebellion in Lower Canada, we owe
the inauguration of a totally new scheme of colonial policy, which
has been crowned with success wherever it has been introduced. It has
succeeded in the vast Canadian Dominion, now stretching from ocean to
ocean, and embracing all British North America, with the single
exception of the Isle of Newfoundland. In 1867 this Federation was
first formed, uniting then only the two Canadas with New Brunswick
and Nova Scotia, under a constitution framed on Lord Durham's plan,
and providing for the management of common affairs by a central
Parliament, while each province should have its own local
legislature, and the executive be vested in the Crown, ruling through
its Governor General. It had been made competent for the other
provinces of British North America to join this Federation, if they
should so will; and one after another has joined it, with the one
exception mentioned above, which may or may not be permanent. The
population of the Dominion has trebled, and its revenues have
increased twenty-fold, since its constitution was thus settled.

The same system, it may be hoped, will equally succeed in that
wonderful Australasia where our colonists now have the shaping of
their destinies in their own hands, amid the yet unexplored amplitude
of a land where "in the softest and sweetest air, and in an
unexhausted soil, the fable of Midas is reversed; food does not turn
to gold, but the gold with which the land is teeming converts itself
into farms and vineyards, into flocks and herds, into crops of wild
luxuriance, into cities whose recent origin is concealed and
compensated by trees and flowers."

In such terms does a recent eye-witness describe the splendid
prosperity attained within the last two or three decades by that
Australia which our fathers thought of chiefly as a kind of far-off
rubbish-heap where they could fling out the human garbage of England,
to rot or redeem itself as it might, well out of the way of society's
fastidious nostril, and which to our childhood was chiefly associated
with the wild gold-fever and the wreck and ruin which that fever too
often wrought. The transportation system, so far as Australia was
concerned, came virtually to an end with the discovery of gold in the
region to which we had been shipping off our criminals. The colonists
had long been complaining of this system, which at first sight had
much to recommend it, as offering a fair chance of reformation to the
convict, and providing cheap labour for the land that received him.
But it was found, as a high official said, that convict labour was
far less valuable than the uncompelled work of honest freemen; and
the contagious vices which the criminal classes brought with them
made them little welcome. When to these drawbacks were added the
difficulties and dangers with which the presence of the convict
element in the population encumbered the new gold-mining industry,
the question reached the burning stage. The system was modified in
1853, and totally abolished in 1857. Transports whose sentence were
unexpired lingered out their time in Tasmania, whence the aborigines
have vanished under circumstances of cruelty assuredly not mitigated
by the presence of convicts in the island; but Australia was
henceforth free from the blight.

The political life of these colonies may be said to have begun in the
same year--1853--when the importation of criminals received its first
check. New South Wales, the eldest of the Australian provinces,
received a genuine constitution of its own; Victoria followed in
1856--Victoria, which is not without its dreams of being one day "the
chief State in a federated Australia," an Australia that may then
rank as "a second United States of the Southern Hemisphere." Western
Australia, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, and New Zealand,
one after another, attained the same liberties; all have now
representative governments, modelled on those of the mother country,
but inevitably without the aristocratic element. Such an aristocracy
as that of England is the natural growth of many centuries and of
circumstances hardly likely to be duplicated--a fact which the Prince
Consort once had occasion to lay very clearly before Louis Napoleon,
anxious to surround himself with a similar nobility, if only he could
manage it. But though the aristocratic element be lacking, the
patriotic passion and the sentiment of loyalty are abundantly
present; nor has the mother country any intellectual pre-eminence
over her colonies, drawn immeasurably nearer to her in thought and
feeling as communication has become rapid and easy.

There is something almost magical at first sight in the
transformation which the Australian colonies have undergone in a very
limited space of time; yet it is but the natural result of the
untrammelled energy of a race sovereignly fitted to "subdue the
earth." It is curious to read how in 1810 the convict settlement at
Botany Bay--name of terror to ignorant home criminals, shuddering at
the long, dreadful voyage and the imagined horrors of a savage
country--was almost entirely nourished on imported food, now that the
vast flocks and herds of Australia and New Zealand contribute no
inconsiderable proportion of the food supply of Britain.

The record of New Zealand is somewhat less brilliant than that of its
gigantic neighbour. This is due to somewhat less favourable
circumstances, to a nobler and less manageable race of aborigines;
the land perhaps more beautiful, is by the very character of its
beauty less subduable. Its political life is at least as old as that
of the old Australian colony, its constitution being granted about
the same time; but this colony has needed, what Australia has not,
the armed interference of the Home Government in its quarrels with
the natives--a race once bold and warlike, able to hold their own
awhile even against the English soldiers, gifted with eloquence, with
a certain poetic imagination, and no inconsiderable intelligence. It
seemed, too, at one moment as if these Maoris would become generally
Christianised; but the kind of Christianity which they saw
exemplified in certain colonists, hungry for land and little
scrupulous as to the means by which they could gratify that hunger,
largely undid the good effected through the agency of missionaries,
the countrymen of these oppressors, whose evil deeds they were
helpless to hinder. A superstition that was nothing Christian laid
hold of many who had once been altogether persuaded to embrace the
teachings of Jesus, and the relapsed Maoris doubtless were guilty of
savage excesses; yet the original blame lay not chiefly with them;
nor is it possible to regard without deep pity the spectacle
presented at the present day of "the noblest of all the savage races
with whom we have ever been brought in contact, overcome by a worse
enemy than sword and bullet, and corrupted into sloth and
ruin, ...ruined physically, demoralised in character, by drink."
Nobler than other aborigines, who have faded out before the invasion
of the white man, as they may be, their savage nobility has not saved
them from the common fate; they too have "learned our vices faster
than our virtues," aided by the speculative traders in alcoholic
poison, who have followed on the track of the colonist, and who,
devil's missionaries as they are, have counteracted too quickly the
work of the Christian evangelists who preceded them.

The extraordinary natural fertility of the country, whose volcanic
nature was very recently terribly demonstrated, is yet very far from
being utilised to the utmost, the population of the islands, not
inferior in extent to Great Britain, being yet a long way below that
of London. Probably this "desert treasure-house of agricultural
wealth" may, under wise self-government, yet rise to a position of
magnificent importance.

Of all our colonies that in Southern Africa has the least reason to
be proud of its recent history, which has not been rendered any
fairer by the discovery of the great Diamond Fields, and the rush of
all sorts and conditions of men to profit thereby. Into the entangled
history of our doings in relation to Cape Colony--originally a Dutch
settlement--and all our varied and often disastrous dealings with the
Dutch-descended Boers and the native tribes in its neighbourhood, we
cannot well enter. Our missionary action has the glory of great
achievement in Southern Africa; of our political action it is best to
say little.

A more encouraging scene is presented if we turn to the Fijian Isles,
whose natives, once a proverb of cannibal ferocity, have been
humanised and Christianised by untiring missionary effort, and by
their own free-will have passed under British domination and are
ruled by a British governor. The extraordinary change worked in the
people of these isles, characterised now, as even in their heathen
days, by a certain bold manliness, that hitherto has escaped the
usual deterioration, is so great and unmistakable that critics
predisposed to unfriendliness do not try to deny it.

In consequence of the immensely increased facilities of communication
that we now enjoy, our own great food-producing dependencies and the
vast corn-growing districts of other lands can pour their stores into
our market--a process much aided by the successive removal of so many
restrictions on commerce, and by the practical science which has
overcome so many difficulties connected with the transport of slain
meat and other perishable commodities. England seems not unlikely to
become a wonderfully cheap country to live in, unless some new turn
of events interferes with the processes which during the last two
decades have so increased the purchasing power of money that, as is
confidently stated, fifteen shillings will now buy what it needed
twenty shillings to purchase twenty years ago. To this result, as a
matter of course, the enormous development of our manufacturing and
other industries has also contributed.

There is another side to the medal, and not so fair a one. The
necessaries of life are cheaper; wages are actually higher, when the
greater value of money is taken into account; more care is taken as
to the housing of the poor; the workers of the nation have more
leisure, and spend not a little of it in travelling, being now by far
the most numerous patrons of the railway; the altered style of the
conveyances provided for them is a sufficient testimony to their
higher importance. All this is to the good; so, too, is the
diminution in losses by bankruptcy and in general pauperism, the
increasing thrift shown by the records of savings banks, the
lengthening of life, the falling off in crime, which is actually--not
proportionally--rarer than ten years ago, to go no further back.

Against this we have to set the facts that the terrible malady of
insanity is distinctly on the increase--whether due to mere physical
causes, to the high pressure at which modern society lives, or to the
prevalent scepticisms which leave many wretched men so little
tranquillising hope or faith, who shall say?--that all trades and
professions are more or less overcrowded; and that there is a
terrible amount, not of pauperism, but of hard-struggling poverty,
massed up in the crowded, wretched, but high-priced tenements of
great towns, and maintaining a forlorn life by such incessant, cruel
labour as is not exacted from convicted criminals in any English
prison. London, where this kind of misery is inevitably at its
height, receives every week an accession of a thousand persons, who
doubtless, in a great majority of cases, simply help to glut the
already crowded labour market and still further lower the wages of
the workers; and the other great towns in like manner grow, while the
rural population remains stagnant or lessens. Agricultural distress,
which helps to keep the tide of emigration high, also accounts in
part for this singular, undesirable displacement of population; while
recent testimony points to the fact that the terribly unsanitary and
inefficient housing of the rural poor does much to drive the best and
most laborious members of that class away from the villages and
fields which might otherwise be the homes of happy and peaceful
industry. For this form of evil, in town and country, private
greed--frequently shown by small proprietors, who have never learnt
that property has duties as well as rights--is very largely
responsible; for how many other of the evils we have to deplore is
not the greed of gain responsible?

The sins of the age are still much the same sins that the Laureate
roughly arraigned when the Crimean war broke our long peace;
denouncing the race for riches which turned men into "pickpockets,
each hand lusting for all that is not its own;" denouncing the cruel
selfishness of rich and poor as the vilest kind of civil war, being
"underhand, not openly bearing the sword." We had made the blessings
of peace a curse, he told us, in those days, "when only the ledger
lived, and when only not all men lied; when the poor were hovelled
and hustled together, each sex, like swine; when chalk and alum and
plaster were sold to the poor for bread, and the spirit of murder
worked in the very means of life." Yet those very days saw the
uprising of a whole generation of noble servants of humanity,
resolute to tight and overcome the rampant evils that surrounded
them. And though we would avoid the error of praising our own epoch
as though it alone were humane, as though we only, "the latest seed
of Time, have loved the people well," and shown our love by deeds;
though we would not deny that to-day has its crying abuses as well as
yesterday; yet it is hardly possible to survey the broad course of
our history during the past sixty years, and not to perceive, amid
all the cross-currents--false ambitions, false pretences,
mammon-worship, pitiless selfishness, sins of individuals, sins of
society, sins of the nation--an ever-widening and mastering stream of
beneficent energy, which has already wonderfully changed for the
better many of the conditions of existence, and which, since its flow
shows no signs of abating, we may hope to see spreading more widely,
and bearing down in its great flood the wrecks of many another
oppression and iniquity.



CHAPTER IX.

INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS.

[Illustration: Robert Southey.]

"Man doth not live by bread alone." The enormous material progress of
this country during the last sixty years--imperfectly indicated by
the fact that during the last forty years the taxable income of the
United Kingdom has been considerably more than doubled--would be but
a barren theme of rejoicing, if there were signs among us of
intellectual or spiritual degeneracy. The great periods of English
history have been always fruitful in great thinkers and great
writers, in religious and mental activity. Endeavouring to judge our
own period by this standard, and making a swift survey of its
achievements in literature, we do not find it apparently inferior to
the splendours of "great Elizabeth" or of the Augustan age of Anne.
Our fifth Queen-regnant, whose reign, longer than that of any of her
four predecessors, is also happier than that of the greatest among
them, can reckon among her subjects an even larger number of men
eminent in all departments of knowledge, though perhaps we cannot
boast one name quite equal to Newton in science, and though assuredly
neither this nor any modern nation has yet a second imaginative
writer whose throne may be set beside that of Shakespeare.

[Illustration: William Wordsworth.]

[Illustration: Alfred Tennyson. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_]

We excel in quantity, indeed; for while, owing to the spread of
education, the number of readers has been greatly increased, the
number of writers has risen proportionately; the activity of the
press has increased tenfold. Journalism has become a far more
formidable power in the land than in the earlier years when, as our
domestic annals plainly indicate, the _Times_ ruled as the Napoleon
of newspapers. This result is largely due to the removal of the
duties formerly imposed both on the journals themselves and on their
essential paper material; and it would indeed "dizzy the arithmetic
of memory" should we try to enumerate the varied periodicals that are
far younger than Her Majesty's happy reign. Of these a great number
are excellent in both intention and execution, and must be numbered
among the educating, civilising, Christianising agencies of the day.
They are something more and higher than the "savoury literary
_entremets_" designed to please the fastidious taste of a cultured
and leisured class, which was the just description of our periodical
literature at large not so very long ago. The number of our
imaginative writers--poets and romancers, but especially the
latter--has been out of all proportion great. We give the place of
honour, as is their due, to the singers rather than to the
story-tellers, the more readily since the popular taste, it cannot be
denied, chooses its favourites in inverse order as a rule.

[Illustration: Robert Browning. _From a Photograph by Elliott &
Fry_.]

When Her Majesty ascended the throne, one brilliant poetical
constellation was setting slowly, star by star. Keats and Shelley and
Byron, none of them much older than the century, had perished in
their early prime between 1820 and 1824; Scott had sunk under the
storms of fortune in 1832; the fitful glimmer of Coleridge's genius
vanished in 1834, and a year later "the gentle Elia" too was gone.
Southey, who still held the laureate-ship in 1837, had faded out of
life in 1843, and was succeeded in his once-despised office by
William Wordsworth, who, with Rogers and Leigh Hunt and Moore, lived
far into the new reign, uniting the Georgian and the Victorian school
of writers. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor and oppressed, whose
too short life ended in 1845, gives in his serious verse such
thrilling expression to the impassioned, indignant philanthropy,
which has actuated many workers and writers of our own period, that
it is not easy to reckon him with the older group. His song rings
like that of Charles Kingsley, poet, novelist, preacher, and
"Christian socialist," who did not publish his "Saint's Tragedy" till
three years after Hood was dead.

There has, indeed, been no break in the continuity of our great
literary history; while one splendid group was setting, another as
illustrious was rising. Tennyson, who on Wordsworth's death in 1850
received at Queen Victoria's hand the "laurel greener from the brows
of him that uttered nothing base," had published his earliest two
volumes of poems some years before Her Majesty's accession; and of
that rare poetic pair, the Brownings, each had already given evidence
of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning's tragedy of
"Strafford" being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future
wife's translation of the "Prometheus Bound" saw the light four years
earlier. The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than
these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special
admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has done
almost all his laureate work, the lucid splendour of his style, the
perfect music of his rhythm, and the stinging sharpness with which he
has sometimes chastised contemporary sins, have all combined to win
for him a far wider popularity than even that accorded to the fine
lyrical passion of Mrs. Browning, or to the deep-thoughted and
splendid, but often perplexing and ruggedly phrased, dramatic and
lyric utterances of her husband. All three have honoured themselves
and their country by a majestic purity of moral and religious
teaching--an excellence shared by many of their contemporaries, whose
powers would have won them a first place in an age and country less
fruitful of genius; but not so conspicuous in some younger poets,
later heirs of fame, whose lot it may be to carry on the traditions
of Victorian greatness into another reign.

There are not a few writers of our day whose excellent prose work has
won more of popular favour than their verse, which notwithstanding is
of high quality. Such was the "unsubduable old Roman," Walter Savage
Landor, a contemporary of Byron and Wordsworth, who long outlived
them, dying in 1864. Such--to bring two extremes together--are the
critic and poet Matthew Arnold, the poet and theologian John Henry
Newman. Intimately associated in our thought with the latter, who has
enriched our devotional poetry with one touching hymn, is Keble, the
singer _par excellence_ of the "Catholic revival," and the most
widely successful religious poet of the age, though only very few of
his hymns have reached the heart of the people like the far more
direct and fervent work of the Wesleys and their compeers. He is even
excelled in simplicity and passion, though not in grace and
tenderness, by two or three other workers in the same field, who
belong to our day, and whose verse is known more widely than their
names.

We have several women-poets who are only less beloved and less well
known than Mrs. Browning; but so far the greatest literary
distinction gained by the women of our age and country,
notwithstanding the far wider and higher educational advantages
enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the field of
prose fiction. More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist,
whose humour and observation, something redeeming his coarseness,
have ranked him among classic English authors, referred mischievously
to the engrossing of "that branch of business" by female writers,
whose "ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human
heart," have not, however, availed to redeem their names from
oblivion. For some of their nineteenth-century   successors at least
we may expect a more enduring memory.

Numerous as are our poets, they are far outnumbered by the novelists,
whose works are poured forth every season with bewildering profusion;
but as story-tellers have always commanded a larger audience than
grave philosophers or historians, and as our singers deal as much in
philosophy as in narrative, perhaps in seeking for the cause of this
overrunning flood of fiction we need go no further than the immensely
increased number of readers--a view in which the records of some
English public libraries will bear us out. We may therefore be
thankful that, on the whole, such literature has been of a vastly
purer and healthier character than of yore, reflecting that higher
and better tone of public feeling which we may attribute, in part at
least, to the influence of the "pure court and serene life" of the
Sovereign.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens. _From a Photograph by Elliott &
Fry_.]

[Illustration: W.M. Thackeray. _From a Drawing by Samuel Lawrence_.]

This nobler tone is not least perceptible in the eldest of the great
masters of fiction whom we can claim for our period--Dickens, who in