We are nearing the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of Queen
Victoria's reign. A London writer, reviewing the changes which have
taken place in the period marks these notable points: A strange
country was England in those far-off days; there was but little
difference between the general state of society under William and the
general state of society under George II. If we compared the courts of
George IV. and William with the company of a low tap-room, we should
not flatter the tap-room. Broad-blown coarseness, rank debauchery,
reckless prodigality, were seen at their worst in the abode of English
monarchs. A decent woman was out of place amid the stupid horrors of
the Pavilion or of Windsor; and we do not wonder at the sedulous care
which the Queen's guardians employed to keep her beyond reach of the
prevailing corruption. A man like the Duke of Cumberland would not now
be permitted to show his face in public save in the dock; but in those
times his peculiar habits were regarded as quite royal and quite
natural. Jockeys, blacklegs, gamblers, prize-fighters were esteemed as
the natural companions of princes; and when England's king drove up to
the verge of a prize-ring in the company of a burly rough who was
about to exchange buffets with another rough, the proceeding was
considered as quite manly and orthodox. Imagine the Prince of Wales
driving in the park with a champion boxer!
A strange country indeed was England in those times; and to look
through the newspapers and memoirs of fifty years ago is an amusement
at once instructive and humiliating. The king dines with the premier
duke, makes him drunk, and has him carefully driven round the streets,
so that the public may see what an intoxicated nobleman is like. The
same king pushes a statesman into a pond, and screams with laughter as
the drenched victim crawls out. Morning after morning the chief man of
the realm visits the boxing-saloon, and learns to batter the faces and
ribs of other noble gentlemen. We hear of visits paid by royalty to an
obscure Holborn tavern, where, after noisy suppers, the fighting-men
were wont to roar their hurricane choruses and talk with many
blasphemies of by-gone combats. Think of that succession of ugly and
foul sports compared with the peace, the refinement, the gentle and
subdued manners of Victoria's court, and we see how far England has
travelled since 1837.
Fifty years ago our myriads of kinsmen across the seas were strangers
to us, and the amazing friendship which has sprung up between the
subjects of Victoria and the citizens of the vast republic was
represented fifty years ago by a kind of sheepish, good-humored
ignorance, tempered by jealousy. The smart packets left London and
Liverpool to thrash their way across the Atlantic swell, and they were
lucky if they managed to complete the voyage in a month--Charles
Dickens sailed in a vessel which took twenty-two days for the trip,
and she was a steamer, no less! For all practical purposes England and
America are now one country. The trifling distance of 3,000 miles
across the Atlantic seems hardly worth counting, according to our
modern notions; and the American gentleman talks quite easily and
naturally about running over to London or Paris to see a series of
dramatic performances or an exhibition of pictures. When Victoria
began to reign the English people mostly regarded America as a dim
region, and the voyage thither was a fearsome understanding.
There is something in the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost
affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen
picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a
sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at
the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they
were as much circumscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we
remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know
who the Duke of Wellington was. No such thing as a newspaper had been
seen there within the memory of man; only one or two of the natives
had seen a railway engine, and nobody in the whole village row had
been known to visit a town. But now-a-days the villager has his
high-class news-sheet; and he is very much discontented indeed if he
does not see the latest intelligence from America, India, Australia,
China--everywhere. An American statesman's conversation of Monday
afternoon is reported accurately in the London journals on Tuesday
morning; a speech of Mr. Gladstone's delivered at midnight on one day
is summarized in New York and San Francisco the next day; the result
of a race run at Epsom is known in Bombay within forty minutes. We use
no paradox when we say that every man in the civilized world now lives
next door to everybody else; oceans are merely convenient pathways,
howling deserts are merely handy places for planting telegraph poles
and for swinging wires along which thoughts travel between country and
country with the velocity of lightning. We see that the world with its
swarming populations is growing more and more like some great organism
whereof the nerve-centres are subtly, delicately connected by
sensitive nerve-tissues. Even now, using a lady's thimble, two pieces
of metal, and a little acid, we can speak to a friend across the
Atlantic gulf, and before ten years are over, a gentleman in London
will doubtless be able to sit in his office and hear the actual tones
of some speaker in New York.
So much has the magic half century brought about.
If we think of the scientific knowledge possessed by the most
intelligent men when the Queen ascended the throne, we can hardly
refrain from smiling, for it seems as though we were studying the
mental endowment of a race of children. The science of electricity was
in its infancy; the laws of force were misunderstood; men did not know
what heat really was. They knew next to nothing of the history of the
globe, and they accounted for the existence of varying species of
plants and animals by means of the most infantine hypotheses. A
complete revolution--vital and all-embracing--has altered our modes of
thought, so that the man of 1887 can scarcely bring himself to
conceive the state of mind which contented the man of 1837. We have
dark doubts now, perplexing misgivings, weary uncertainties, painful
consciousness of limited powers; but along with these weaknesses we
have our share of certainties. Are we happier? Nay, not in mind. A
quiet melancholy marks the words of all the men who have thought most
deeply and learned most. The wise no longer cry out or complain--they
accept life and fate with calm sadness, and perhaps with prayerful
resignation. We have learned to know how little we can know, and we
see with composure that even the miracles already achieved by the
restless mind of man are as nothing.
* * * * *
There is a far better reason than this for the sadness of thinking
men. It is that, with all the progress of science, art, and education,
poverty, misery, disease, and crime still afflict society as they did
in ruder ages, and our progress is _onward_, but not _upward_. It is
_upward_ progress to which the JOURNAL OF MAN is devoted.
In the foregoing sketch very little is said of the real progress of
the age--the increase of education, the uprising of the people into
greater political power and liberty, the prostration of the power of
the church, which is destined to disestablishment, and the uprising of
spiritual science.
What is there in the reign of Victoria to be celebrated? Was there
ever a more perfect specimen of barely respectable commonplace than
the reign of Victoria? What generous impulse, or what notable wisdom
has she ever shown? What has she done for the relief of Ireland, for
the improvement of a society full of pauperism, crime and suffering,
or for the prevention of unjust foreign wars? When has she ever given
even a respectable gift to any good object from her enormous income?
But virtue is not expected in sovereigns; they are expected only to
enjoy themselves hugely, to make an ostentatious display, and consume
all their benighted subjects give them.
Mrs. Stanton says:--"The two great questions now agitating Great
Britain are 'Coercion for Ireland,' and the 'Queen's Jubilee,' a
tragedy and a comedy in the same hour."
Speaking of the Queen's Jubilee she says:
"In this supreme moment of the nation's political crisis, the
Queen and her suite are junketing around in their royal yachts
on the coast of France, while proposing to celebrate her year of
Jubilee by levying new taxes on her people, in the form of penny
and pound contributions to build a monument to Prince Albert.
The year of Jubilee! While under the eyes of the Queen her Irish
subjects are being evicted from their holdings at the point of
the bayonet; their cottages burned to the ground; aged and
helpless men and women and newborn children, alike left
crouching on the highways, under bridges, hayricks and hedges,
crowded into poorhouses, jails and prisons, to expiate their
crimes growing out of poverty on the one hand and patriotism on
the other.
"A far more fitting way to celebrate the year of Jubilee would
be for the Queen to scatter the millions hoarded in her private
vaults among her needy subjects, to mitigate, in some measure,
the miseries they have endured from generation to generation; to
inaugurate some grand improvement in her system of education; to
extend still further the civil and political rights of her
people; to suggest, perchance, an Inviolable Homestead Bill for
Ireland, and to open the prison doors to her noble priests and
patriots.
"But instead of such worthy ambitions in the fiftieth year of her
reign, what does the Queen propose? With her knowledge and
consent, committees of ladies are formed in every county, town
and village in all the colonies under her flag, to solicit these
penny and pound contributions, to be placed at her disposal.
"Ladies go from house to house, not only to the residences of
the rich, but to the cottages of the poor, through all the marts
of trade, the fields, the factories, begging pennies for the
Queen from servants and day-laborers."
These forced collections are not entirely for the benefit of the
Queen, but are to be appropriated also to a vast variety of local
objects and institutions.