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SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
OF THE
VICTORIAN AGE

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

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 manœuvred 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’œuvre 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 Crœsus 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 2½ 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 43½ 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 Crœsus 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.