[84] This was not my father's first pamphlet. In 1832 he published “Home Colonies: Sketch of a Plan for the Gradual Extinction of Pauperism and for the Diminution of Crime.” The pamphlet advocated the settlement of able-bodied paupers on waste lands—a proposal frequently revived by different writers—by the cultivation of which the men would be made self-supporting, and the State be saved their charge. The successful working of similar experiments in Belgium and Holland was instanced as proof that the theory was not mere Utopianism.
[85] No. 128, p. 531. The author of the diatribe was John Wilson Croker, whose name is preserved from oblivion by Macaulay's fierce criticism in one of his famous “Essays,” that on Croker's edition of Boswell's “Life of Johnson”—criticism which in severity rivals that on the poet Montgomery in the same series. Many years later Gladstone said to Dr Hill: “You have succeeded in doing what Macaulay attempted to do, and failed—you have suppressed Croker.”—(Mrs Lucy Crump's “Letters of George Birkbeck Hill.”)
[86] Mr Ashurst, as we are reminded in Mr Bolton King's “Mazzini” (pp. 88 and 104), was a solicitor who had been a friend of Robert Owen, and who made Mazzini's acquaintance at the time of the once famous Governmental letter-opening scandal which agitated the far-off 'forties, and caused Carlyle, Duncombe, Shiel, Macaulay, and many more people both in the House of Commons and out of it to denounce a practice which, as was only too truly said, through sending “a warning to the Bourbons, helped to entrap hapless patriots,” meaning the brothers Bandiera. The agitation led to the abolition of the custom of opening private letters entrusted for conveyance to the Post Office; or did so for a while. It is a custom that is very old, and has not lacked for apologists, as what evil custom ever did? During Bishop Atterbury's trial in 1723, a Post Office clerk deposed on oath that some letters which were offered in evidence were facsimiles made of actual documents stopped, opened, and copied in the office “by direction”; and on Atterbury's asking if the witness had received warrant for the act, the Lords put in the plea of public expediency, and the enquiry came to an end.
[87] Mr John Dillon, of the once famous old firm of Morrison, Dillon, & Co., was probably one of the last wealthy London merchants who lived above their place of business. The Dillons were hospitable people, and their dwelling was commodious and beautifully furnished; but not many merchant princes of the present day would choose as a residential quarter—Fore Street, E.C.
[88] Mr Rintoul was fortunate in being father to a devoted daughter who, from an early age, gave him valuable assistance in his editorial work. While still a young girl, and for the space of some few weeks when he was suffering from severe illness, she filled the editorial chair herself, and did so with ability. At the present day we are frequently assured by people who did not live in the times they criticise so freely that the “early Victorian” women were inferior to those of the present day. The assertion is devoid of truth. The women of half a century and more ago were bright, witty, unaffected, better mannered and perhaps better read than their descendants, often highly cultivated. They dressed simply, not extravagantly—happily for the bread-winning members of their family—did not gamble, were self-reliant, original-minded, and not, as has been asserted, absurdly deferential to their male relations. Indeed, it is probable that there were, proportionately, quite as many henpecked husbands in the land as there are now. If in some ways the Victorian women had less liberty than have the women of to-day and travelled less, may it not, as regards the former case, have been partly because the community was not so rich as it is at the present time, and because the facilities for travel were fewer and the conditions harder? In intellectual power and noble aims the women of half a century ago were not inferior to those of to-day. Certain it is that the former gave less time to pleasure and more to self-culture, etc. There are to-day many women who lead noble, useful lives, but their generation does not enjoy a monopoly of all the virtues. To take but a few instances from the past: has any woman of the present time excelled in true nobility of character or usefulness of career Elizabeth Fry, first among female prison reformers; Florence Nightingale, pioneer of the nursing sisterhood, and indefatigable setter to rights of muddle in Crimean War hospitals and stores; Caroline Herschel, distinguished astronomer; Mary Somerville, author and scientist—though three of these belong to a yet earlier generation—and Barbara L. S. Bodichon, artist, foundress of Girton College, and originator of the Married Women's Property Act? The modern woman is in many ways delightful, and is, as a rule, deservedly independent; but it is not necessary to accompany insistence on that fact by cheap and unmerited sneers at former generations of the sex. It is also not amiss to ask if it was not the women of the past age who won for the women of the present the liberties these latter enjoy.
CHAPTER IV
EXIT THE OLD SYSTEM
By the early summer of 1837 the agitation in favour of the postal reform was in full movement, and in the midst of it the old king, William IV., died. His youthful successor was speedily deluged with petitions in favour of penny postage. One of the first acts of her first Parliament was to appoint the Select Committee for which Mr Wallace had asked—“To enquire into the present rates and mode of charging postage, with a view to such a reduction thereof as may be made without injury to the revenue; and for this purpose to examine especially into the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage in a pamphlet published by Mr Rowland Hill.” Of this Committee, which did so much to help forward the postal reform, the doughty Member for Greenock was, of course, chosen as Chairman. The Committee sat for sixty-three days; and in addition to the postal officials and those of the Board of Stamps and Taxes (Inland Revenue), examined Rowland Hill and over eighty other witnesses of various occupations and from different parts of the country.