truths, to remark how slow man is to find them out. Now, this
exclusion of all those who could not afford to pay his toll to the man
at the gate had, up to that moment, been accepted as if it were a law
of Nature. As in other things, men said, if they talked about the
matter at all, 'What is, must be. What is, shall be. What is, has
always been. What is, has been ordained by God Himself.' There is
nothing more difficult than to effect a reform in men's minds. The
reformer has, first, to persuade people to listen. Sometimes he never
succeeds, even in this, the very beginning. When they do listen, the
thing, being new to them, irritates them. They therefore call him
names. If he persists they call him worse names. If they can, they put
him in prison, hang him, burn him. If they cannot do this, and he goes
on preaching new things, they presently begin to listen with more
respect. One or two converts are made. The reformer expands his views;
his demands become larger; his claims far exceed the modest dimensions
of his first timid words. And so the reform, bit by bit, is effected.
At first, then, the demand was for nothing more than an easier
entrance into the scientific world, This naturally rose out of the
case. 'Let us,' they said, 'take care that to such a man as this any
and every branch of science shall be thrown open. But for that purpose
it is necessary that scholarships, whether given at school or college,
shall be sufficient for the maintenance as well as for the tuition
fees of those who hold them.' These scholarships, it was argued, had
been founded for poor students, and belonged to them. All the papers
took up the question, and all, with one or two exceptions, were in
favour of 'restoring'--that was the phrase--'his scholarships'; 'his,'
it was said, assuming that they were his originally--to the poor man.
In vain was it pointed out that these scholarships had been for the
most part founded in recent times when public schools and universities
had long become the property of the richer class, and that they were
needed as aids for those who were not rich, not as means of
maintenance for those who wanted to rise out from one class into
another.
The cry was raised at the General Election; the majority came into
power pledged to the hilt to restore his scholarships to the poor
student. Then, of course, a compromise was effected. There was created
a class of scholarships at certain public schools for which candidates
had to produce evidence that they possessed nothing, and that their
parents would not assist them. Similar scholarships were created at
Oxford and Cambridge, out of existing revenues, and it was hoped that
concessions opening all the advantages that the public schools and
universities had to give would prove sufficient. By this time the
country was fully awakened to the danger of having thrown upon their
hands a great class of young men who thought themselves too well
educated for any of the lower kinds of work, and were too numerous for
the only work open to them. No one, as yet, it must be remembered, had
ventured to propose throwing open the Professions.
The concessions were found, however, to make very little difference.
Now and then a lad with a scholarship forced his way to the head of a
public school, and carried off the highest honours at the University.
Mostly, however, the poor scholar was uncomfortable; he could neither
speak, nor think, nor behave like his fellows; the atmosphere chilled
him; too often he failed to justify the early promise; if he succeeded
in getting a 'poor' scholarship at college, he too often ended his
University career with second-class Honours, which were of no use to
him at all, and so he was again face to face with the question: What
to do? His college would not continue to support him. He could not get
a mastership in a good school because there was a prejudice against
'poor' scholars, who were supposed incapable of acquiring the manners
of a gentleman. So he, too, fell back upon the only outlet, and tried
to become a journalist.
Every day the pressure increased; the pay of the journalist went down;
work could be got for next to nothing, and still the lads poured into
the classes by the thousand, all hoping to exchange the curse of
labour by their hands for that of labour by the pen. No one as yet had
perceived the great truth which has so enormously increased the
happiness of our time that all labour is honourable and respectable,
though to some kinds of labour we assign greater, and some lesser,
honour. The one thought was to leave the ranks of the working man.
It is not to be supposed that this great class would suffer and starve
in silence. On the contrary, they were continually proclaiming their
woes; the papers were filled with letters and articles. 'What shall we
do with our boys?' was the heading that one saw every day, somewhere
or other. What, indeed! No one ventured to say that they had better go
back to their trade; no one ventured to point out that a man might be
a good cabinet-maker although he knew the Integral Calculus. If one
timidly asked what good purpose was gained by making so many scholars,
that man was called Philistine, first; obstructive, next; and other
stronger names afterward. And yet no one ventured to point out that
all the Professions--and not science only, through the
Universities--might be thrown open.
Sooner or later this suggestion was certain to be made. It appeared,
first of all, in an unsigned letter addressed to one of the evening
papers. The writer of the letter was almost certainly one of the
suffering class. He began by setting forth the situation, as I have
described it above, quite simply and truly. He showed, as I have
shown, that the Professions and the Services were closed to those who
had no money. And he advanced for the first time the audacious
proposal that they should be thrown open to all on the simple
condition of passing an examination. 'This examination,' he said, 'may
be made as severe as can be desired or devised. There is no
examination so severe that the students of our Polytechnics cannot
face and pass it triumphantly. Let the examination, if you will, be
intended to admit none but those who have taken or can take
first-class Honours. The Poly students need not fear to face a
standard even so high as this. Why should the higher walks of life be
reserved for those who have money to begin with? Why should money
stand in the way of honour? Among the thousands of young men who have
profited by the opportunities offered to them there must be some who
are born to be lawyers; some who are born to be doctors; some who are
born to be preachers; some who are born to be administrators.' And so
on, at length. It was not, however, by a letter in a paper, or by the
leading articles and the correspondence which followed that the
suggested change was effected. But the idea was started. It was talked
about; it grew as the pressure increased it grew more and more.
Meetings were held at which violent speeches were delivered: the
question of opening the Professions was declared of national
importance; at the General Election which followed some months after
the appearance of the letter, members were returned who were pledged
to promote the immediate throwing open of all the Professions to all
who could pass a certain examination; and the first step was taken in
opening all commissions in the Army to competitive examination.
The Professions, however, remained obstinate. Law and Medicine refused
to make the least concession. It was not until an Act of Parliament
compelled them that the Inns of Court, the Law Institute, the Colleges
of Physicians, Surgeons, and Apothecaries consented to admit
all-comers without fees and by examination alone.
Then followed such a rush into the Professions as had never before
been witnessed. Already too full, they became at once absolutely
congested and choked. Every other man was either a doctor or a
solicitor. It was at first thought that by making examinations of the
greatest severity possible the rush might be arrested. But this proved
impossible, for the simple reason that an examination for admission,
necessarily a mere 'pass' examination, must be governed and limited by
the intellect of the average candidate. Moreover, in Medicine, if too
severe an examination is proposed, the candidate sacrifices actual
practice and observation in the Hospital wards to book-work. Therefore
the examinations remained much as they always had been, and all the
clever lads from all the Polytechnics became, in an incredibly short
time, members of the Learned Professions.
There can be no doubt that the Bench and the Bar, that Medicine and
Surgery, owe to the emancipation of the Professions many of their
noblest members. Great names occur to every one which belong to this
and that Polytechnic, and are written on the walls in letters of gold
as an encouragement to succeeding generations. One would not go back
to the old state of things. At the same time there were losses and
there are regrets. So great, for instance, was the competition in
Medicine that the sixpenny General Practitioner established himself
everywhere, even in the most fashionable quarters; so numerous were
solicitors that the old system of a recognised tariff was swept away
and gave place to open competition as in trade. That the two branches
of the law should be fused into one was inevitable; that the splendid
incomes formerly derived from successful practice should disappear was
also a matter of course. And there were many who regretted not only
the loss of the old professional rules and the old incomes, but also
the old professional _esprit de corps_--the old jealousy for the
honour and dignity of the profession: the old brotherhood. All this
was gone. Every man's hand was against his neighbour; advocates sent
in contracts for the job; the physicians undertook a case for so much;
the surgeon operated for a contract price; the usages of trade were
all transferred to the Professions.
As for the Services, the Navy remained an aristocratic body; boys were
received too young for the Polytechnic lads to have a chance; also,
the pay was too small to tempt them, and the work was too scientific.
In the Army a few appeared from time to time, but it cannot be said
that as officers the working-classes made a good figure. They were not
accustomed to command; they were wanting in the manners of the camp as
well as those of the court; they were neither polished enough nor
rough enough; the influence of the Poly might produce good soldier
obedient, high-principled, and brave; but it could not produce good
officers, who must be, to begin with, lads born in the atmosphere of
authority, the sons of gentlemen or the sons of officers. Yet even
here there were exceptions. Every one, for instance, will remember the
case of the general--once a Poly boy--who successfully defended Herat
against an overwhelming host of Russians in the year 1935.
It was not enough to throw open the Professions. Some there were in
which, whether they were thrown open or not, a new-comer without
family or capital or influence could never get any work. Thus it would
seem that Engineering was a profession very favourable to such
new-comers. It proved the contrary. All engineers in practice had
pupils--sons, cousins, nephews--to whom they gave their appointments.
To the new-comer nothing was given. What good, then, had been effected
by this revolution? Nothing but the crowding into the learned
Professions of penniless clever lads? Nothing but the destruction of
the old dignity and self-respect of Law and Medicine? Nothing but the
degradation of a Profession to the competition of trade?
Much more than this had been achieved. The Democratic movement which
had marked the nineteenth century received its final impulse from this
great change. Everyone knows that the House of Lords, long before the
end of that century, had ceased to represent the old aristocracy. The
old names were, for the most part, extinct. A Cecil, a Stanley, a
Howard, a Neville, a Bruce, might yet be found, but by far the greater
part of the Peers were of yesterday. Nor could the House be kept up at
all but for new creations. They were made from rich trade or from the
Law, the latter conferring respect and dignity upon the House. But
lawyers could no longer be made Peers. They were rough in manners, and
they had no longer great incomes. Moreover, the nation demanded that
its honours should be equally bestowed upon all those who rendered
service to the State, and all were poor. Now a House of poor Lords is
absurd. Equally absurd is a House of Lords all brewers. Hence the fall
of the House of Lords was certain. In the year 1924 it was finally
abolished.
In the next chapter I propose to relate what followed this rush into
the Professions. We have seen how the grant of the higher education to
working lads caused the Conquest of the Professions and brought about
the change I have indicated. We have seen how this revolution was
bound to sweep away in its course the last relics of the old
aristocratic constitution of the country. It remains to be told how
learning, when it became the common possession of all clever lads,
ceased to be a possession by which money could be made, except by the
very foremost. Then the boys went back to their trades. If the reign
of the gentleman is over, the learning and the power and culture that
has belonged to the gentleman now belongs to the craftsman. This, at
least, must be admitted to be pure gain. For one man who read and
studied and thought one hundred years ago, there are now a thousand.
Editions of good books are now issued by a hundred thousand at a time.
The Professions are still the avenues to honours. Still, as before,
the men whom the people respect are the followers of science, the
great Advocate the great Preacher, the great Engineer, the great
Surgeon, the great Dramatist, the great Novelist, the great Poet. That
the national honours no longer take the form of the Peerage will not,
I think, at this hour, be admitted to be a subject for regret by even
the stanchest Conservative.
[1893.]
I.--THE LAND OF ROMANCE
At the back of the setting sun; beyond the glories of the evening; on
the other side of the broad, mysterious ocean, lay for nine
generations of Englishmen the Land of Romance. It began--for the
English youth--to be the Land of Romance from the very day when John
Cabot discovered it for the Bristol merchants it continued to be their
Land of Romance while every sailor-captain discovered new rivers, new
gulfs, and new islands, and went in search of new north-west passages,
while the rovers, freebooters, privateers and buccaneers, put out in
their crazy, ill-found craft, to rob and slay the Spaniard; while the
mystery of the unknown still lay upon it; long after the mystery had
mostly gone out of it, save for the mystery of the Aztec; it remained
the Land of Romance when New England was fully settled and Virginia
already an old colony; it was the English Land of Romance while King
George's redcoats fought side by side with the colonials, to drive the
French out of the continent for ever.
We have had India, as well. Surely, in the splendid story of the long
struggle with France for the Empire of the East, in the achievements
of our soldiers, in the names of Clive, Lawrence, Havelock; in the
setting of the piece, so to speak, in its people, its wisdom, its
faith, its cities, its triumphs, its costumes, its gold and silver and
precious stones and costly stuffs--there is material wherewith to
create a romance of its own, sufficient to fire the blood and stir the
pulse and light the eye. Or, we have had Australia, New Zealand, the
Cape of Good Hope; coral isles, strongholds, fortresses, islands here,
and great slices and cantles of continent there. We have had all these
possessions, but round none of these places has there grown up the
romance which clung to the shores of America, from the mouth of the
Orinoco round the Spanish Main, and from Florida to Labrador. This
romance formerly belonged to the whole of our people. In their
imaginations--in their dreams--they turned to America. There came a
time when this romance was destroyed violently and suddenly, and,
apparently, for ever. In another shape it has grown up again, for some
of us; it is taking fresh root in some hearts, and putting forth new
branches with new blossoms, to bear new fruit. America may become,
once more, the Land of Romance to the Englishman. I say with intent,
the Englishman. For, if you consider, it was the Englishman, not the
Scot or the Irishman, who discovered America by means of John Cabot
and his Bristol merchants--not to speak of Leif, the son of Eric, or
of Madoc, the Welshman. It was the Englishman, not the Scot or the
Irishman, who fought the Spaniard; who sent planters to Barbadoes; who
settled colonists and convicts in Virginia; from England, not from
Ireland or Scotland, went forth the Pilgrims and the Puritans. While
the Scottish gentlemen were still taking service in foreign
courts--as, for example, the Admirable Crichton with the Duke of
Mantua--the young Englishman was sailing with Cavendish or Drake; he
was fighting and meeting death under desperadoes, such as Oxenham; he
was even, later on, serving with L'Olonnois, Kidd, or Henry Morgan.
All the history of North America before the War of Independence is
English history. Scotland and Ireland hardly came into it until the
eighteenth century; till then their only share in American history was
the deportation of rebels to the plantations. The country was
discovered by England, colonized by England; it was always regarded by
England as specially her own child; the sole attempt made by Scotland
at colonization was a failure; and to this day it is England that the
descendants of the older American families regard as the cradle of
their name and race.
As for the men who created this romance, they belong to a time when
the world had renewed her youth, put the old things behind, and begun
afresh, with new lands to conquer, a new faith to hold, new learning,
new ideas, and new literature. Those who sit down to consider the
Elizabethan age presently fall to lamenting that they were born three
hundred years too late to share those glories. Their hearts,
especially if they are young, beat the faster only to think of Drake.
They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as
Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the
new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre
de Dios--Brothers, what a Gest was that!--and to Cartagena, where
Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the
very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the
_Golden Hind_, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, _Our Lady
of the Conception_, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his
own ship. Drake--the 'Dragon'--is the typical English hero; he is
Galahad in the Court of the Lady Gloriana; he is one of the long
series of noble knights and valiant soldiers, their lives enriched and
aglow with splendid achievements, who illumine the page of English
history, from King Alfred to Charles Gordon.
The first and greatest of the Elizabethan knights is Drake; but there
were others of nearly equal note. What of Raleigh, who actually
founded the United States by sending the first colonists to
Virginia--the country where the grapes grew wild? What of Martin
Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert? What of Cavendish? What of Captain
Amidas? What of Davis and half a score more? The exploits and
victories and discoveries--in many cases, the disasters and death--of
these sea-dogs filled the country from end to end with pride, and
every young, generous heart with envy. They, too, would sail Westward
Ho! to fight the Spaniard--three score of Englishmen against thousand
Dons--and sail home again, heavy laden with the silver ingots of Peru,
taken at Palengue or Nombre de Dios. Kingsley has written a book about
these adventurers; a very good book it is; but his pictures are marred
with the touch of the ecclesiastic--we need not suppose that the young
men sat always Bible in hand, talked like seminarists, or thought like
curates. The rovers who sailed with Drake and Raleigh had their
religion, like their rations, served out to them. Sailors always do.
Drake, the captain, might and did, consult the Bible for encouragement
and hope. Even he, however, reserved the right of using profane oaths;
that right survived the older form of faith. In a word, the
Elizabethan sailor--although a Protestant--was, in all respects, like
his predecessor, save that on this new battle-field he was filled with
a larger confidence and an audacity almost incredible to read
of--almost impossible to think upon.
This was the first phase of the romance which grew up along the shores
of America. So far it belongs to the Spanish Main and to the Isthmus
of Panama. The romance remained when the Elizabethans passed
away--they were followed by the buccaneers, privateers, marooners and
pirates--a degenerate company, but not without their picturesque side.
Pierre le Grand, François l'Olonnois, Henry Morgan, are captains only
one degree more piratical than Drake and Raleigh. Edward Teach, Kidd,
Avery, Bartholomew Roberts were pirates only because they plundered
ships English and French as well as Spanish; that they were roaring,
reckless, deboshed villains as well, detracted little from the renown
with which their names and exploits were surrounded, and that they
were mostly hanged in the end was an accident common to such a life,
the men under Drake were also sometimes hanged, though they were
mostly killed by sword, bullet, or fever. The romance remained. The
lad who would have enlisted under Drake found no difficulty in joining
Morgan, and, if the occasion offered, he was ready to join the bold
Captain Kidd with alacrity.
The seventeenth century furnished another kind of romance. It was the
century of settlement. In the year 1606, after Sir Walter Raleigh had
led the way, the Virginia Company sent out the _Susan Constant_ with
two smaller ships, containing a handful of colonists. They settled on
the James River. Among them was John Smith, an adventurer and
free-lance quite of the Elizabethan strain. In him John Oxenham lived
again. We all know the story of Captain John Smith. He began his
career by killing Turks; he continued it by exploring the creeks and
rivers of Virginia, with endless adventures. Sometimes he was a
prisoner of the Indians. Once, if his own account is true, he was
rescued from imminent death by the intervention of Pocahontas, called
Princess--or Lady Rebecca. He explored Chesapeake Bay, and he gave the
name of New England to the country north of Cape Cod. Such histories,
of which this is only one, kept alive in England the adventurous
spirit and the romance of the West. The dream of _finding_ gold had
vanished: what belonged to the present were the things done and
suffered in His Majesty's plantations with all that they suggested. It
is most certain that in every age there are thousands who continually
yearn for the 'way of war' and the life of battle. Mostly, they fail
in their ambitions because in these times the nations fear war. In the
seventeenth century there was always good fighting to be got somewhere
in Europe; if everything else failed there were the American Colonies
and the Indians--plenty of fighting always among the Indians.