Not less have the material conditions of life improved. Food is purer—health is surer—life itself is safer and lasts longer. Comfort has crept into a million houses where it never found its way before. Security can be better depended upon. The emigrant terror has gone. Instead of sailing out on hearsay to an unknown land and finding himself in the wrong one, or in the wrong part of the right country, as has happened to thousands, the emigrant can now obtain official information, which may guide him rightly. Towns are brighter, there are more public buildings which do the human eye good to look upon. Means of recreation are continually being multiplied. Opportunity of change from town to country, or coast, fall now to the poorest Not in cattle trucks any more. Life is better worth living. Pain none could escape is evadable now. Parks are multiplied and given as possessions to the people. Paintings and sculpture are now to be seen on the Sunday by workmen, which their forefathers never saw, being barred from them on the only day when they could see them.
By a device within the memory of most, house owning has become possible to those whose fathers never thought it possible. Temperance, once a melancholy word, is now a popular resource of health and economy. The fortune of industry is higher in many ways. Into how many firesides does it bring gladness to know that in barrack, or camp, or ship, the son is better treated than heretofore.
Can any of the middle-aged doubt that some things are better now than before their time? Now two hundred workshops exist on the labour co-partnership principle. Forty years ago those commenced, failed—failed through lack of intelligence on the part of workers. The quality of workmen to be found everywhere in our day did not exist then. Sixteen years ago there were found more than a dozen workshops owned and conducted by working men. There are more than a hundred now; and hundreds in which the workers receive an addition to their wages, undreamt of in the last generation. In this, and in other respects, things go better than they did. Though there is still need of enlargement, the means of self-defence are not altogether wanting. Co-operation has arisen—a new force for the self-extrication of the lowest. Without charity, or patronage, or asking anything from the State, it puts into each man's hand the "means to cancel his captivity."
The rich man may vote twenty times where the poor man can vote only once. Still, the one voter counts for something where the unfranchised counted for nothing.
Political as well as civil freedom has come in a measure to those who dwell in cottages and lodgings. For one minute every seven years the workman is free. He can choose his political masters at the poll, and neither his neighbour, his employer, nor his priest, has the knowledge to harm him on that account. One minute of liberty in seven years is not much, but there is no free country in the world where that minute is so well secured as in England. If any one would measure the present by the past, let him recall the lines:—
"Allah! Allah!" cried the stranger,
"Wondrous sights the traveller sees,
But the latest is the greatest,
Where the drones control the bees."
They do it still, but not to the extent they did. The control of wisdom, when the drones have it, is all very well, but it is the other sort of control which is now happily to some extent controllable by the bees. The manners of the rich are better. Their sympathy with the people has increased. Their power of doing ill is no longer absolute. Employers think more of the condition of those who labour for them. The better sort still throw crumbs to Lazarus. But now Dives is expected to explain why it is that Lazarus cannot get crumbs himself.
In ways still untold the labour class is gradually attaining to social equality with the idle class and to that independence hitherto the privilege of those who do nothing. The workman's power of self-defence grows—his influence extends—his rights enlarge. Injury suffered in industry is beginning to be compensated; even old-age pensions are in the air, though not as yet anywhere else. Notwithstanding, "John Brown's soul goes marching on." But it must be owned its shoes are a little down at the heels. Nevertheless, though there is yet much to be done—more liberty to win, more improvements to attain, and more than all, if it be possible, permanences of prosperity to secure—I agree with Sydney Smith—
"For olden times let others prate,
I deem it lucky I was born so late."
There is a foolish praise of the past and a foolish depreciation of the present The past had its evils, the present has fewer. The past had its promise, the present great realisations. It is not assumed in what has been said that all the advantages recounted were originated and acquired by working men alone. Many came by the concessions of those who had the power of withholding them. More concessions will not lack acknowledgment "Just gifts" to men who have honour in their hearts, "bind the recipients to the giver for ever."