TRANSFORMATION OF THE PEOPLE
“Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated.”--_Midsummer
Night’s Dream._
“Above all things, gentlemen,” says Goldsmith’s prisoner for debt, “let
us guard our liberties.”
What were the liberties of the people? They were very real; but they
did not open the debtor’s prison; nor did they include representation.
You will hardly believe that the old condition of things should have
lasted so long.
Before the Reform Act of 1832 the only persons who had votes at
elections were freeholders; in some boroughs the electors were the
Mayor and Corporation; some were “pocket” boroughs, in which the
territorial magnate of the neighbourhood nominated the Member; in
some there were only two or three electors, who openly put up the
seat to the highest bidder. The House of Commons was a body made
up almost entirely of younger sons or cousins of the Lords, who
voted as they were ordered; many of the members held places under
Government--they voted as they were told; many of the members were
bribed on every important occasion. On the declaration of the American
War of Independence it was in such a House Mr. Burke vainly thundered
and protested that taxation in a free country could only go with
representation. Alas! the liberties of the country had no other guard
than the House of Commons; and the House betrayed the country. It
took sixty years of almost continual struggle to get the Reform Act
of 1832; yet in a country of twenty millions no more than 440,000 had
votes. There are now six million voters; that is to say, the suffrage
is practically universal. There are people still outside the wide
limits of the franchise, but they are, as a class, so poor, so held
down by the hourly necessities of finding food, that they can hardly be
considered as suffering any loss of dignity by having no votes. For my
own part, I do not think that the suffrage should be a matter of right,
nor should it depend upon income or rent; I think that a man before he
is allowed to vote should show that he possesses some knowledge of the
history of his country and its constitution. I do not expect any one to
agree with me, but that is my opinion.
[Illustration: PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 8]
Consider, next, the changes in the conduct of elections. Formerly the
election was open and public: it occupied several weeks; during the
whole time the town was filled with violence, clamour, drunkenness, and
bribery; the elector had to fight his way to the hustings; the mob,
which took sides with impartial ferocity, fought each other and hustled
the electors. Since it was proclaimed how every man voted, electors
had to vote against their conscience for the sake of their private
interests--for instance, in the great Westminster election of 1784 the
King let his tradesmen understand clearly how he expected them to vote;
a contested election cost many thousands; no one could sit in the House
who had not an estate worth £300 a year at least; Roman Catholics,
Dissenters, and Jews were not permitted to become Members of Parliament.
On the other hand, an election of the present day is conducted with
perfect order. There is no shouting; there is no fighting; at eight
o’clock in the morning an office is thrown open; a policeman stands
outside to direct the voters; almost everybody in the electoral
district records his vote. He receives a paper with the names of the
candidates upon it; he marks the name for which he votes, folds the
paper, and gives it to a clerk, who in his presence drops the paper
into a box. At the close of the day the voting papers are opened and
counted. The election is over. There has been no bribery, nobody knows
how any man has voted, and the whole business is complete in one day.
In changing the franchise and the mode of election we have changed
the House of Commons itself. It represents the people--not one class
only, but the whole people. There are in it younger sons of Lords;
they no longer come in as nominees, but on their own merits; there
are no pocket boroughs; there is no property qualification, some of
the Members are lawyers, some literary men, some tradesmen, some
working-men; all the nation is represented in that assembly. The House
is no longer the rich man’s club as it used to be, but it represents
the nation; it is no longer a fortress of prejudice and conservatism,
but it represents the nation. And consider the vast accession of
dignity and self-respect to the working-classes when they realise
that the government of the country is really and actually in their
own hands, and that they can bring in their own Members of Parliament
without coercion and without fear.
[Illustration: A WATER-COLOUR DRAWING BY PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 12]
The next change is in education. Sixty years ago the mass of the
country was uneducated. Millions could neither read nor write; millions
could read a little and could not write at all. The whole country is
now educated--in every rural village, in every crowded city street,
there is a school, and the children are compelled to come in. In
addition to the schools there are village libraries, institutions with
lending libraries, public libraries where the best literature of the
past and the present is freely offered to the people. They can carry
home the books, they can have as many books as they are able to read.
We are creating new readers by the million. Are we, it is often asked,
creating also a whole nation of students? Hardly. Education does not
create students, who are born, not made. Besides, we do not want to
become a nation of students. The hard work of the world is not done by
students or philosophers. Education, however, teaches us something of
our own ignorance, something of the source of information, something
of humility. Above all, education falling on a kindly soul gives the
lad a new recreation for his evenings: instead of horse-play along the
streets, instead of drinking at a bar, instead of “keeping company”
with a girl every evening, he reads. He does not read for instruction,
he pursues no course of study, he reads just for recreation; but such
is the character of the reading found for him that he imbibes a great
amount of information, learns manners, and acquires a higher standard
of morals. The circulation of the penny weeklies proves that he reads;
there are a hundred of them at least; their circulation is enormous,
some of them attaining to half a million. If we buy some and look at
them we find them “scrappy”; they are not vicious, or immoral, or
seditious, they are the exact opposites of these; but they are scrappy;
it would seem as if their readers, which is probably the fact, are
incapable of a sustained argument, and like to be stimulated by short
stories of adventure, odds and ends of history, and so forth. Think,
however, of the change from a nation which was in great part illiterate
in 1837 to a nation which knows something of history and something of
geography, and which now reads with avidity. Hardly a cottager now but
takes in his weekly newspaper. Lloyd’s _Weekly News_ is, I believe, the
most widely circulated of them. It claims more than a million readers;
it owns a great pine-forest in Norway to supply its paper, and it is
a most respectable paper, popular and full of news, taking one side
strongly, but never scurrilous. If you want to understand the English
rustic of the day, send for the last number of Lloyd’s and read it
through. I am sure that after reading this journal your appreciation of
the British rustic will be distinctly raised. And you will own that he
is changed indeed.
[Illustration: AN ETCHING BY HER MAJESTY]
Consider, next, the widening of the world. I think that it is the
tendency of those who live in a small country to make it smaller by
their own seclusion. The rustic, for instance, formerly knew nothing
of the world but his farm and his village and the nearest market
town, whither he carried produce or drove the pigs on market day.
This town--which once a week was enlivened by the crowd attending the
market; the farmers at the Corn Exchange or the cattle-sheds; the cries
of the people at the stalls; the farmers’ ordinary at the principal
inn--was, to the rustic, a metropolis, a centre of gaiety. There came
rumours, it is true, of an outer world. Somewhere or other there was
a king; a recruiting-sergeant carried off a young man here and there;
there were recollections of the great wars when wheat went up to 103s.
a quarter, when farmers became squires, and squires became peers, but
the rustic remained where he was. The village was so full that wages
ran down, even while wheat went up; in Devonshire, a man of eighty
years assures me that the wages of the agricultural labourer in his
youth were 7s. a week, with a two or four roomed cottage, and a pound
or two to be made at harvest time. Such a man, with his family, never
tasted meat all his life, except sometimes a piece of fat pork. His
children lived chiefly on oat-cake. The man’s drink was rough harsh
cider. It seems incredible how strong men, of splendid physique, could
have been made out of such materials.
[Illustration: THE CORONATION SPOON]
[Illustration: THE AMPULLA OR RECEPTACLE FOR THE HOLY OIL FOR ANOINTING]
This man’s position is now so far improved that he receives about
twenty shillings a week, with harvest allowances; that he has an
allotment on which he grows his vegetables; that he keeps poultry and
a pig; that he eats meat of some kind every day; that his wife and
children go warmly clad.
[Illustration: THE CORONATION VESTMENTS]
What has caused this change? The widening of the world. How the world
was first discovered by the English rustic to be so wide and so empty,
I do not know. It was during the twenty years between 1815 and 1835
that the discovery began; at first it spread very slowly; the rustic
heard of it at the market town; he met with a sailor who talked about
the splendid chances beyond the seas; he heard letters read from
settlers in Canada and Australia; here and there one, greatly daring,
left the village, and was considered as good as dead till letters
arrived entreating all--father, mother, brothers, and sisters--to
leave their home and join him. At last they began to go, and the tide
of immigration set in that has never since stopped or slackened. In
the year 1815 the emigration from this country amounted to no more
than 2000; in 1825 it was 25,000; in 1850 it was nearly 300,000. From
1815 to 1896 I do not think that the emigrants from these shores have
amounted to less than 10,000,000; of these more than one-half have gone
to the United States. These emigrants do not, for the first generation
at least, forget their native land and the kin they have left behind
them. Imagine, then, the difference between a village closed absolutely
to the outer world, into which there penetrates no voice, no rumour, no
report from without, and a village where every family has got sons and
daughters in the lands across the sea.
The world has been widened for us by the rise of the other nations of
our race. It has also been widened by the railway and by the cheap
post. Small as is our island compared with the great continent of
America, there was formerly no knowledge of any part of it outside
the native place; at the present moment the people can get about
all over the country--to the seaside, to London, to the Lakes, to
Wales; everywhere there are excursion trains and cheap tickets; the
children learn by their annual treats to look out every year for new
and interesting places; to the people the excursion is an event which
excites and stimulates them all. You may see them by thousands in the
ruins of an old abbey, trying to reconstruct the past splendours; or
among the ruins of a Norman Castle; or in the gardens and galleries of
some great house which is thrown open to them; or by the seashore,
rowing, sailing, bathing; or in some park, where the children dance
and sing and try to persuade the deer to let them come near. In one
small town of Lancashire, a town of factories, the people spend
£30,000 a year on their excursions; they descend upon the Lincolnshire
watering-places, which are small and ill-provided, and they eat up the
town and the farms all round; they invade the hotels of Ambleside and
Grasmere, and eat up all that therein is; they reduce the Isle of Man
to famine; they leave the coast of Northumberland empty and cleared
out, with an emptiness like that caused by the locust. Such is the
effect of the world’s widening.
[Illustration:
_Painting by Sir George Hayter_
THE CORONATION]
[Illustration:
_Painting by C. R. Leslie, R.A._
THE QUEEN RECEIVING THE SACRAMENT AFTER HER CORONATION]
Consider next the cheap post. The people have begun to write to each
other. Formerly there was little or no communication by letter. It
is true that a cheap and easy way was practised, by means of which
a young man could communicate to his friends the simple fact of his
safety. It was to address a letter to his mother; if she took that
letter in it would cost her eightpence at least, but she knew there
was nothing written within, therefore she refused to take the letter,
which was undelivered, but she knew from the address outside that her
son was safe. Now, however, letters pass freely into the village;
they convey information, as to work and pay, that the newspapers have
not yet learned to furnish; wherever workmen are wanted, thither sets
in a stream in search of work. Some years ago a mischievous fund was
raised, called the Lord Mayor’s Fund, for the unemployed. A rumour of
this fund ran through the whole length and breadth of the land; all
the unemployed came up to London from all parts to share in the money
so raised; it was distributed chiefly in soup tickets; the men took
the tickets, sold them, and drank the contents. The point, however, to
notice is that the people, before the proposed fund was started, knew
all about it, and had begun to come up in order to claim their share.
I have spoken of the rise in wages. To this I will return presently.
Meantime observe that with the rise of wages there has also arrived
an extraordinary cheapness in food. The price of wheat, between the
years 1786 and 1837 was never lower than 39s. a quarter, and rose
to 106s., 113s., 119s., and even 126s. a quarter. It was over 70s.
a quarter for seventeen years of that time, and over 50s. for forty
years; it is now about 20s. With the price of grain, other things have
fallen; tea, which sixty years ago was five shillings a pound, can now
be had for eighteenpence; sugar, of which the commonest kind formerly
cost ninepence a pound, is now about twopence; cheese, butter, rice,
and other products are now imported, and are sold at a half of their
former price; meat comes over from New Zealand, frozen, in unknown
quantities; clothing is half the price it was; the working-man’s wages,
therefore, which have more than doubled, represent a much greater
purchasing power. He stands, therefore, upon a higher level of comfort.
Another thing--a very important thing--has been done for the rustic. By
an Act passed quite recently village councils--parish councils--have
been founded. To these councils, elected by the working-classes from
themselves, are entrusted the governing of the parish: the lighting,
paving, cleaning of the streets, the order and police, and all matters
belonging to the daily life of the place. On these councils the squire
and the parson may sit, if they are elected; but they have no more
power than the others.
So far, it is reported that without the presence of the squire or
parson the new councillors flounder. This, however, was to be expected.
[Illustration:
_Painting by Sir G. Hayter_
PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 16]
In the year 1837 any person who owed another any sum of money, however
small, was liable to be arrested for debt, and if he would not pay he
could be thrown into prison and kept there till he did pay. Thousands
of unfortunate debtors were kept in prison for the whole of their
lives on account of some miserable debt which, if they had been out of
prison, they could have paid off in a short time. There was a devilish
malignity about the law which enabled an attorney to roll up a bill of
costs (which the prisoner had to pay), on this pretence and that, like
a snowball increasing as it rolled; the warders of the prison demanded
fees and “garnish,” in default of which the prisoner was turned
into the “poor side,” where the privations and misery and enforced
idleness were terrible. If a working-man got into prison, as was always
happening, there was no hope for him: the costs went mounting up, he
could do no work, he must sit down and starve. Outside the prison, what
became of his wife and children? In the year ending 5th January 1830,
7114 persons were sent to the prisons of London for debt; in 1840 the
number of prisoners for debt were 1732 in England; in Ireland, under
1000; in Scotland, under 100. By the Act of 1861 imprisonment for debt
was forbidden, except in case of debt fraudulently contracted; in 1887,
by the Bankruptcy Act imprisonment for debt was virtually abolished
altogether. A terror was removed from life when the walls of the Fleet
and the Queen’s Bench were taken down and the gates thrown open. The
recovery of small debts is now entrusted to the County Court, where the
Judge makes an order that so much should be paid weekly or monthly. If
the debtor breaks that order, he is liable to imprisonment for contempt
of Court.
The English working-man has been accused of servility. Such a charge
could never be brought against the working-man of London, or of the
North; that servility existed in some of the agricultural districts
was undoubtedly true. How should it be otherwise when a man’s daily
bread, his work, his home, his wage, depended wholly on one man--the
squire? His village was his prison; he could go nowhere else; there
was no work for him out of his village; the squire was his “overlord,”
to use the old phrase; he was not legally, yet he was in reality,
_ascriptus glebæ_, bound to the soil; he looked for help in sickness
and in trouble to the great house whose ladies looked after the
village, helping, feeding, clothing, and admonishing. The man was like
a child in leading-strings, or at best like a schoolboy under rule
and discipline. With the cause of that servility, the fact itself is
vanishing.
The depression in agriculture seems also, on the whole, turning out
favourably for the agricultural labourer; the farms are worked more
economically and want fewer hands; but the superfluous hands have
left the village--there are now no more than are wanted day by day;
if an odd piece of work turns up it is difficult to find a man to do
it. The men are therefore valued in proportion to their paucity of
numbers; their wages, for the same reason, are going up; they live more
comfortably, they have more money to spend, they are more independent.
[Illustration:
_Painting by Sir George Hayter_
TAKING THE OATH TO MAINTAIN THE PROTESTANT TRUTH]
The old laws forbidding workmen from making combinations or “Covins”
for the advancement of wages were passed in the fourteenth century,
and remained in force until the year 1825, when they were at last
repealed. You think, then, that nothing remained for the workpeople
but to form as many combinations as they pleased. You are quite wrong.
There was still the right of holding public meeting. Until that was
acquired--it was only fully granted a few years ago--the repeal of the
old law was practically valueless. The right of forming trades unions
has been acquired entirely during the present reign. Now the trades
union is not popular; it has been ruthlessly enforced; the treatment of
blacklegs has been cruel; yet no one can deny that the position of the
working-man has been enormously improved, his independence advanced,
his wages increased, by the union. The Agricultural Union has not done
so much: partly because the countryman is difficult to manage; partly
because it would appear that he wants another kind of union. Thus the
skilled agriculturalist is a man who knows a great deal, he cannot be
replaced except by one like himself; the best chance, therefore, is to
stimulate emigration and keep down his own numbers.
[Illustration:
_Painting by Sir David Wilkie_
THE QUEEN’S FIRST COUNCIL]
I have not mentioned among the forces making for advance the abolition
of flogging. As a matter of fact flogging is not abolished, but it
is only inflicted upon civilians as a punishment for robbery with
violence. About thirty-five years ago there was a common form of
robbery called “garrotting,” in which violence and brutality were
commonly exhibited. By the advice of the judges the garrotter, on
conviction, was flogged. It is maintained that the flogging practically
stopped the garrotting. However that may be, there is no doubt that the
ruffian who suffers that punishment dislikes it extremely. But this
punishment did not affect the respectable classes. In the Army and the
Navy, on the other hand, where flogging was practised continually,
it did affect them; and it seems wonderful that, in the face of the
prejudice against the service which these punishments created, we
should have been able to maintain an Army at all. It is, however, just
to state that flogging in the Army had been enormously reduced: in 1869
there were only 21 soldiers flogged out of our whole army of 150,000,
while an able seaman of the first class could not be flogged at all;
and in the same year, in the whole of the navy of 80,000 men only 8
were flogged. By the Army Discipline Act of 1879 flogging was finally
abolished. But, I repeat, I do not consider this reform as affecting
materially the mind of the English working-man.
Now read through this long list of reforms, every one of them
exercising steady, continual, irresistible influence upon the
individual. What changes do you expect to find in him?
[Illustration: THE QUEEN IN BRIDAL DRESS]
He has become, in fact, more independent, more responsible; he knows
so much more that he feels his own ignorance; he is not so easily
led by a demagogue; it is not so easy to inflame his passions; he
thinks and asks questions; he is better fed, better clothed; he walks
more upright; he is no longer a machine; he understands the power of
combination; he sits at the table of his parish council on equal terms
with the squire and the vicar; he no longer regards his native village
as the place to which he is bound; he has friends in various parts of
the world; they come home from time to time and they tell him of these
countries--Republics all, except in name--where there are no squires
and no landlords; and he asks himself whether it is better to stay on
in the old place, or to try for a bigger thing beyond the seas.
Changed as he is, and certain to change yet more and more in the
immediate future, do not forget that the English working-man, even of
the town, feels a great shrinking about leaving the old home. In a
village this seems natural; the place is calm and lovely, the ancient
church with its gray tower standing in the churchyard, where the rooks
and pigeons and blackbirds keep up a continual chorus; the village
green, the village inn, the gabled cottages, the gates that lead to
the Hall, the fields and hedges, the stream, and the hills, and the
hanging woods--these things enter into the very heart and soul of the
Englishman; he loves them all, he cannot choose but love them, though
he would not know how to express his affection; in the churchyard he
knows the mounds that belong to his own people; in the tavern he sits
among his cronies on the polished settle beside the fire, his mug
before him, his pipe in his mouth. In his heart he wants no other life.
These things he could not find in America or Australia or New Zealand.
Yet he is changed, and if you wait for twenty years you will no longer
recognise him for what he was. He is getting a touch from America, a
thought from Australia, a custom from New Zealand; he will be a citizen
of the world, and, if I read the signs aright, he will become before
another generation the owner and the master of agricultural England.
[Illustration:
_Painting by Sir George Hayter_
THE MARRIAGE OF THE QUEEN TO PRINCE ALBERT]
Let us leave the village and turn to the town.
There are two books in our literature which tell of English factory
life in the early part of this century. One of these is Disraeli’s
_Sybil_; the other is Mrs. Trollope’s _Michael Armstrong_. I fear
that these two books are not read so much as they should be; partly,
perhaps, because we do not love to dwell too much on the shameful side
of history. The condition of the working-man before the Victorian era
is indeed a very shameful part of history. The record of the factory
and the mine is very black. Let me show you something of what it was.
I tell you beforehand, that the story proves that power over his
fellow-men must never be entrusted to any man; for he will abuse that
power--he will become an oppressor and a tyrant.
He began this oppression with the children. He has a mill, a factory,
a mine; in which he made the children work. He worked them so cruelly;
he gave them such long hours, such poor food, such wretched clothing,
that he lowered the vitality of these unfortunate children so that
an epidemic broke out among them; it carried off thousands. This
frightened the owner of these children, because, if they all died, what
would become of his mill?
Then the House of Commons interfered--very reluctantly--because to
stand between the master and his man was felt to be a dangerous
innovation. It interfered, however, and passed a law which forbade
children under nine to be employed in a factory, and limited their
hours to twelve, exclusive of an hour and a half for rest and food; so
that by this merciful Act a little girl of ten might be, and actually
was, made to work from six in the morning till half-past seven at
night. Can one conceive a readier method of destroying strength, youth,
self-respect, everything? But the injured millowner got over this law.
He was not forced to make the children work continuously. He therefore
made the children work in relays, so that they had half the night as
well as half the day to work in. This went on for thirty years before
the nation was moved by the injustice and cruelty of the thing. An Act
was passed that no children should work between 8.30 P.M. and 5.30
A.M.; that children under thirteen should not work more than 48 hours
a week or eight hours a day; and that those under eighteen should not
work more than 68 hours a week or 11⅓ hours a day. As I told you, the
man who had the power exercised it cruelly, heartlessly, ruthlessly,
for the conversion of his people into slaves.
[Illustration:
_Paintings by Winterhalter_
PRINCE ALBERT AND QUEEN VICTORIA AT THE TIME OF THEIR MARRIAGE]
Then, because the Act spoke of the factory or the mill, and not of the
mine, they took the little children and dropped them into the coal-pit.
When the boy or the girl was six years of age--six! think of it--they
took the little thing and put it in a dark passage, underground, with
instructions to open and shut a door in order to let the trucks come
and go. All day long--for twelve hours--that innocent infant was kept
in the dark opening and shutting the doors. They worked from four in
the morning till four in the evening; when they were taken up they were
stupid, and cared for nothing but to sleep. When they grew older they
pushed the trucks with their heads; when they grew older still the lads
became hewers of coal: the girls--now women--continued to push the
trucks with their heads or to drag them, clad in nothing but a pair
of short trousers. This was done in a Christian country which boasted
of having abolished slavery. Observe that there was no chance for
these children ever to learn anything, ever to do anything, except to
continue all their lives in the coal-pit; they were doomed to brutish
ignorance, to unremitting toil, without holidays, except on Sunday--day
after day, week after week, year after year, till they could push the
truck no longer, till the pick fell from their hands.
The chimney-sweep’s case was almost as bad as the miner’s. He too was
taken at a very early age, and his duty was to climb the chimney,
sweeping it as he went up. It is not a pleasant thing to climb a
chimney choked with soot; it abraded hands, elbows, and knees:
sometimes the little wretch could get no higher; if he failed he was
beaten unmercifully. There was a curious prejudice against sweeping
with a brush: the child was allowed to go unwashed, though the neglect
of cleanliness was certain to bring on a dreadful disease. It was not
till four years after the Queen began her reign that an Act was passed
protecting the children and substituting the brush for the human body.
[Illustration: BUCKINGHAM PALACE--FRONT VIEW]
[Illustration: BUCKINGHAM PALACE--GARDEN VIEW]
This was the treatment of children in mill, in mine, in town. There
were other lines and branches of cruelty because children are helpless.
But these examples will suffice.
Let us leave the children and turn to the men. The change for the
better began, I believe, with the ideas of the French Revolution, at
first eagerly caught by the English working people: it was continued
by the long agitation for the Reform Act of 1832 and the fierce
resistance of the Duke of Wellington and the Bishops: these ideas and
this agitation taught the people how to combine and act together. They
also taught the people to hate a Government in which they had no share
or part or lot. A great many--though still the minority--could now
read; the papers they read were bitterly hostile to the ruling powers.
As I have already pointed out, there was no loyalty at all among the
working-men of the Thirties; they did not pretend any. Their papers
were revolutionary; the things they said of the Queen and the Prince
Consort were revolting; the aristocracy, according to them, were open
and shameless; the clergy were pampered hypocrites. What has happened
since then? The people have been admitted to their share in the
Government; they can do what they like: if they choose they can alter
the Constitution. Do they choose? Not at all; they have become loyal;
they have become, comparatively, conservative.
[Illustration: THRONE ROOM, BUCKINGHAM PALACE]
[Illustration: BALL AND CONCERT ROOM, BUCKINGHAM PALACE]
The recreations of the working-man, apart from the tavern, were
boxing and dog-fighting. Single-stick, wrestling, quarter-staff,
cock-fighting, had to a great extent gone out. Boxing remained, every
man knew how to handle his fists: you may remember that in _Tom Brown
at Oxford_, there is a serious discussion on the knotty question
whether a gentleman can, or cannot, always lick a cad. Dear me, this
kind of talk is now so old-world. However, a man was always supposed
to be ready to strip and engage--gentleman or cad. Dickens’s stories
contain many instances of the rough-and-ready “turn up.” The change is
a gain from one point of view; it is a loss, from another, that the
noble art of self-defence has fallen out of practice; it is, further, a
gain as well as a loss, that it shows signs of returning to favour.
There are still fairs left. Several fairs were held in the
neighbourhood of London. Bartholomew’s, degenerated into a scene of
drunkenness and disorder, still continued. Greenwich Fair continued,
and Deptford Fair; there was also a fair at Barnet; but the fairs had
practically gone out of the life of the country. It was a mark of the
times that the working-classes no longer delighted in the noise and the
ribaldry that disgraced the later years of the London fairs.
I have spoken of education in the rural districts. Long before the
young rustic could learn to read, the townsmen had the chance of some
education. There were many charity schools: there were the schools of
the National Society and of the British and Foreign Society: there were
also the Sunday Schools.
Criminal procedure does not, perhaps, affect the average civilian. At
the same time one learns that before 1836 it was actually forbidden
that a prisoner should defend himself before the jury by counsel.
Imagine, if you can, a timid, shrinking girl, called upon to plead for
her life in open court after being maddened by jargon which she did not
understand and formalities which only filled her with bewilderment.
It is said that the judges themselves repaired this evil: it is quite
possible. Our judges have always been superior to the laws they have
had to administer; but then the prisoner was at the mercy of the judge;
he might, or he might not, find a remedy for the speechlessness and the
incapacity of the prisoner.
If you take up a bundle of old newspapers you will find that every one
of them has got a red stamp upon it. This was the tax upon newspapers.
It was a penny a copy in 1760; in 1815 it was actually fourpence
a copy; in 1836 it was reduced to a penny; in 1855 it was totally
abolished. There was, in addition, a tax on paper, which was repealed
in 1861. It is wonderful how newspapers continued to exist at all with
an impost so crushing: it is still more wonderful how working-men’s
papers could hold their own. In fact, their circulation was very small;
they were weekly, not daily; they were taken in at taverns where the
men could see them, not by the men themselves. It is not one of the
least reforms of this reign which has placed in the hands of everybody
a cheap newspaper, full, large, with copious intelligence, and educated
commentary.
[Illustration: QUEEN’S STATE COACH]
The outcome of the national discontent was the organisation called
Chartism. Look at the working-man of the present day. He has received
an education sound and thorough, up to a certain point, at the Board
School; he has had the chance of continuing his education after leaving
school at evening classes. He has also had the chance of joining
a Polytechnic, which is a kind of technical University, teaching
everything; and a kind of public school, in which athletics of all
kinds are practised and encouraged. There are a great many thousand
lads in the Polytechnics, and they are as fine young fellows as one
can desire to see. They are skilled in technical work; they are taught
by the best men in their own subjects; they do not drink or frequent
taverns; they do not loaf about the streets. I do not pretend that
these lads are representatives of their own class; I admit that they
are the flower of the flock. The working-man has now free libraries and
reading-rooms, where he can sit and read or borrow books to take away.
There is no longer any revolutionary talk among those who converse;
there is Socialism, of course, but that is very different. It would be
difficult indeed for a young man to escape some of the Socialist ideas
which are in the air, and are producing unexpected and far-reaching
results. Here, however, except among a few foreigners, we have no
Anarchists. The wages are better, the hours are shorter; there is
a Saturday half-holiday; there are four Bank holidays in the year,
besides Christmas Day and Good Friday. Everything is cheaper--food and
clothes of all kinds. Lectures, concerts, dramatic recitals, debates,
dances, are got up everywhere by the working-men for themselves.
The working-man’s attitude towards the Church, to which I have already
alluded, has quite changed of late years. He formerly regarded it with
a ferocious hatred, being taught by the papers they published for him
that the clergy believe nothing, and wallow in ease and luxury at
his expense. “Why,” said one of them to me twenty years ago, “if the
Church was abolished we should all get our breakfast for nothing.”
That kind of talk has now vanished. If the Sunday morning orator
still denounces Christianity with perfervid vehemence--as he used
to do in the Whitechapel Road--the working-man listens with a smile
and presently goes on to the next ring, where the Socialist preaches
universal happiness to come as soon as we can get the much-desired
equal division; and him, too, he leaves presently with another smile.
He is not in the least moved by either orator.
Canon Barnett’s Church in Whitechapel is an example of what may be
done with a parish composed entirely of working-people. They do not
attend his services, I believe. But he has educated them into an
audience which listens intelligently to the best and most thoughtful
and most cultivated scholars and teachers of the day; they flock
every year to a Loan Exhibition of Pictures which he collects for
them; he gives them receptions, concerts, discussions; he has built
Toynbee Hall in their midst as a settlement and place of culture.
Some of them he has made students and scholars: it is not too much to
say that Canon Barnett’s parishioners are intellectually far above
the average of the class supposed to be their superiors--that of
the shopkeepers and the traders. However, it would not be fair to
take these people as an average of our working-man. When I think of
the mass of the people as they were sixty years ago--how ignorant
they were, how drunken, how brutal, how dangerous to order and to
government, how unruly, how disloyal--I cannot but claim for the men of
the present a change nothing short of transformation! There is still
much to be done, the Millennium is not yet reached; but there is no
comparison--none--between the people of 1837 and the people of 1897;
and the advantage is all on one side.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE FROM THE RIVER]
[Illustration]