Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country
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Title: Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country
Author: T. H. S. Escott
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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_
PAGE
CHAPTER I
TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED, 1
CHAPTER II
THE NEW WEALTH, 13
CHAPTER III
TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM, 27
CHAPTER IV
THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS, 39
CHAPTER V
THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST, 53
CHAPTER VI
SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND, 67
CHAPTER VII
THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES, 77
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES, 92
CHAPTER IX
COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION, 103
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS
OF 'SIBYL,' 115
CHAPTER XI
FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS, 132
CHAPTER XII
THE LADDER OF EDUCATION, 151
CHAPTER XIII
THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE, 168
CHAPTER XIV
THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE, 179
CHAPTER XV
FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW, 193
CHAPTER XVI
'THE PLAY'S THE THING,' 206
CHAPTER XVII
THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING
MILLIONS, 220
CHAPTER XVIII
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL
PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA, 238
CHAPTER XIX
CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS, 259
CHAPTER XX
ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE, 274
CHAPTER XXI
CROWN AND SWORD, 290
CHAPTER XXII
FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES, 311
CHAPTER XXIII
TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE, 320
CHAPTER XXIV
CECILIA'S TRIUMPHS, 337
CHAPTER XXV
TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART, 349
CHAPTER XXVI
POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE, 362
CHAPTER XXVII
NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES, 380
CHAPTER XXVIII
TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE, 388
CHAPTER XXIX
TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, 398
CHAPTER XXX
THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY, 408
CHAPTER XXXI
THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND
COLONIAL, 422
INDEX 439
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
regime, 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
manoeuvred 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
L600 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
L51,000,000 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 regime 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 L2 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 L4 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 L612,836,058.
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 archaeologists 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 L180,138,901.
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
L297,584,709. In 1894, the latest date to which the Board of Trade returns
are published, the total was L985,387,855. After forty years, therefore,
the railway investments of these Islands had increased by L687,803,146.
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 L29,579,001. The figures referring to railways
for the same year were, it will be remembered, seen to be L21,507,599.
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 L8,071,402. Forty years later this
balance is more than redressed. In 1894 the total of mineral wealth was
L80,900,453. The entire railway receipts were L84,310,831. 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 L3,410,378.
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
L1,000 or upwards a year and those who, earning less than L150 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 L150 and
L1,000 have increased from three hundred thousand to nine hundred and
ninety thousand. Incomes above L1,000 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 L29, 12s. per head of the population. In
1895 it had been reduced to six hundred and sixty millions, or about L17,
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 regime 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 L500 to L800 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'oeuvre 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 Croesus 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 L5 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 regime 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 2-1/2 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
fete 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 mediaeval
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 prae-_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 43-1/2 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 regime, 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 L300 in land, or by the receipt of an income of L100 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 regime 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 mediaeval 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 habitues 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
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