Education, which had been to a great extent a class monopoly, gradually penetrated to all ranks and grades of society. In 1867 the second Reform Act was passed; a very large proportion of the urban working classes were given the power of voting, and it was naturally impossible to entrust such powers for long to an illiterate democracy. Therefore, in 1870, Mr Forster's Education Act was passed, which required that in every district where sufficient voluntary schools did not exist a School Board should be formed to build and maintain the necessary school accommodation at the cost of the rates. By a later Act of 1876 school attendance was made compulsory. Every effort was made in succeeding years to raise the level of intelligence among present and future citizens. Education became national and universal.
During the period 1865-85 the population of the kingdom increased, and the emigration to the British colonial possessions reached its maximum in the year 1883, when the figures were 183,236.
The rapid rise in population of the large towns drew attention more and more urgently to the question of public health. Every city and every town had its own problems to face, and the necessity for solving these cultivated and strengthened the sense of civic pride and responsibility. We find during this period an ever-growing interest throughout the country in the welfare, both moral and mental, of the great mass of the workers. Municipal life became the training-ground where many a member of Parliament served his apprenticeship.
Municipalities took charge of baths and washhouses, organized and built public markets, ensured a cheap and ample supply of pure water, installed modern systems of drainage, provided housing accommodation at low rents for the poorer classes, built hospitals for infectious diseases, and, finally, carried on the great and important work of educating its citizens.
The power of Labour began, at last, to make itself felt. The first attempt at co-operation made by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 stimulated others to follow their example, and in 1869 the Co-operative Union was formed. The Trade Unions showed an increased interest in education, in forming libraries and classes, and in extending their somewhat narrow policy as their voting power increased. Out of this movement sprang Working Men's Clubs attached to the Unions and carrying on all branches of work, educational and beneficial, amongst its members.
The standard of society was continually rising, and it was already a far cry to the Early Victorian England described in an earlier chapter.
The world was growing smaller—that is to say, communications between country and country, between continent and continent, were growing more easy. The first insulated cable was laid in 1848, across the Hudson River, from Jersey City to New York, and in 1857 an unsuccessful attempt was made to connect the New and the Old World. In 1866 the Great Eastern, after two trials, succeeded in laying a complete cable. The expansion of the powers of human invention led to a great increase in the growth of comfort of all classes. To take only a few striking examples: at the beginning of the century matches were not yet invented, and only in 1827 were the 'Congreve' sulphur matches put on the market; they were sold at the rate of one shilling a box containing eighty-four matches! In the year 1821 gas was still considered a luxury; soap and candles were both greatly improved and cheapened. By the withdrawal of the window tax in 1851 obvious and necessary advantages were gained in the building of houses.
In 1855 the stamp duty on newspapers was abolished. In these days of cheap halfpenny papers with immense circulations it is difficult to realize that at a date not very far distant from us, the poor scarcely, if ever, saw a newspaper at all. Friends used to club together to reduce the great expense of buying a single copy, and agents hired out copies for the sum of one penny per hour. The only effect of the stamp duty had been to cut off the poorer classes from all sources of trustworthy information.
In 1834 not a single town in the kingdom with the exception of London possessed a daily paper. The invention of steam printing, and the introduction of shorthand reporting and the use of telegraph and railways, revolutionized the whole world of journalism.
Charles Dickens, on the occasion of his presiding, in May 1865, at the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, gave his hearers an idea of what newspaper reporters were and what they suffered in the early days. "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren here can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back-row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep—kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew."