=Source.=--An article by Mr. Gladstone in _The Nineteenth Century_,
vol. xxi., p. 1.
The Prophet of the new Locksley Hall records against us many sad,
and even shameful, defaults. They are not to be denied, and the
list might probably be lengthened. The youngest among us will not
see the day in which new social problems will have ceased to spring
up as from the depths, and vex even the most successful solvers of
the old; or in which this proud and great English nation will not
have cause, in all its ranks and orders, to bow its head before
the Judge Eternal, and humbly to confess to forgotten duties, or
wasted and neglected opportunities. It is well to be reminded,
and in tones such as make the deaf man hear, of city children who
"soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime"; of maidens cast by
thousands on the street; of the sempstress scrimped of her daily
bread; of dwellings miserably crowded; of fever as the result. But
take first the city child as he is described. For one such child
now there were ten, perhaps twenty, fifty years back. A very large,
and a still increasing proportion of these children have been
brought under the regular teaching and discipline of the school.
Take the maidens who are now, as they were then, cast by thousands
on the streets. But then, if one among them were stricken with
penitence, and sought for a place in which to hide her head, she
found it only in the pomp of paid institutions, and in a help well
meant, no doubt, yet carrying little of what was most essential,
sympathetic discrimination, and mild, nay even tender care. Within
the half-century a new chapter has opened. Faith and love have gone
forth into the field. Specimens of womankind, sometimes the very
best and highest, have not deemed this quest of souls beneath them.
Scrimping of wages, no doubt, there is and was. But the fair wage
of to-day is far higher than it was then, and the unfair wage is
assumably not lower. Miserable and crowded dwellings, again, and
fever as their result, both then and now. But legislation has in
the interval made its attempts in earnest; and if this was with
awkward and ungainly hand, private munificence or enterprise is
dotting our city areas with worthy dwellings. Above all, have we
not to record in this behalf martyred lives, such as those of
Denison and Toynbee? Or shall we refuse honourable mention to not
less devoted lives, happily still retained, of such persons as
Miss Octavia Hill? With all this there has happily grown up not
only a vast general extension of benevolent and missionary means,
but a great parochial machinery of domestic visitation, charged
with comfort and blessing to the needy, and spread over so wide
a circle, that what was formerly an exception may now with some
confidence be said to be the rule. If insufficiencies have come to
be more keenly felt, is that because they are greater, or because
there is a bolder and better trained disposition to feel them?...
I will refer as briefly as may be to the sphere of legislation.
Slavery has been abolished. A criminal code, which disgraced the
Statute Book, has been effectually reformed. Laws of combination
and contract, which prevented the working population from obtaining
the best price for their labour, have been repealed. The lamentable
and demoralizing abuses of the Poor Law have been swept away. Lives
and limbs, always exposed to destruction through the incidents of
labour, formerly took their chance, no man heeding them, even when
the origin of the calamity lay in the recklessness or neglect of
the employer. They are now guarded by preventive provisions, and
the loss is mitigated, to the sufferers or their survivors, by
pecuniary compensation. The scandals of labour in mines, factories,
and elsewhere, to the honour, first and foremost, of the name
of Shaftesbury, have been either removed, or greatly qualified
and reduced. The population on the sea-coast is no longer forced
wholesale into contraband trade by fiscal follies; and the Game
Laws no longer constitute a plausible apology for poaching. The
entire people have good schools placed within the reach of their
children, and are put under legal obligation to use the privileges
and contribute to the charge. They have also at their doors the
means of husbanding their savings, without the compromise of their
independence by the inspection of the rector or the squire, and
under the guarantee of the State to the uttermost farthing of the
amount. Information through a free press, formerly cut off from
them by stringent taxation, is now at their easy command. Their
interests at large are protected by their votes, and their votes
are protected by the secrecy which screens them from intimidation
either through violence, or in its subtler forms.
It is perhaps of interest to turn from such dry outlines as may be
sketched by the aid of almanacs to those more delicate gradations
of the social movement, which in their detail are indeterminate
and almost fugitive, but which in their mass may be apprehended,
and made the subject of record. Pugilism, which ranges between
manliness and brutality, and which in the days of my boyhood, in
its greatest celebrations, almost monopolized the space of journals
of the highest order, is now rare, modest, and unobtrusive. But,
if less exacting in the matter of violent physical excitements,
the nation attaches not less but more value to corporal education,
and for the schoolboy and the man alike athletics are becoming an
ordinary incident of life. Under the influence of better conditions
of living, and probably of increased self-respect, mendicity,
except in seasons of special distress, has nearly disappeared. If
our artisans combine (as they well may) partly to uphold their
wages, it is also greatly with the noble object of keeping all the
members of their enormous class independent of public alms. They
have forwarded the cause of self-denial, and manfully defended
themselves even against themselves, by promoting restraints
upon the traffic in strong liquors. In districts where they are
most advanced, they have fortified their position by organized
co-operation in supply. Nor are the beneficial changes of the
last half-century confined to the masses. Swearing and duelling
established until a recent date almost as institutions of the
country, have nearly disappeared from the face of society.... At
the same time the disposition to lay bare public mischiefs and drag
them into the light of day, which, though liable to exaggeration,
has perhaps been our best distinction among the nations, has become
more resolute than ever....
The sum of the matter seems to be that, upon the whole and in
a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and
are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public
conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and
that, in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded
with indifference, or even connivance, it now not only winces, but
rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not
scattering; earning, and not wasting.