I said to the Captain to-day, putting my hand upon his shoulder, “Sir, may one speak from one’s heart?” “Yes,” said he, “certainly, and God bless you for your kind thought.” “Sir,” said I, “you are a strong, silent, God-fearing man and my heart goes out to you—no more.” He was silent, and went up on the bridge, but when I attempted to follow him, he assured me it was not allowed.
Later in the day I asked him what he thought of the Roman trouble. He answered, “Oh! knock their heads together and have done with it.” It was a bluff seaman’s answer, but is it not what England would have said in her greatest days? Is it not the very feeling of a Chatham?
I no longer speak to the First Mate. But in a few days I shall be able to dismiss the fellow entirely from my memory, so I will not dwell on his insolence.
Leghorn, Oct. 5, 1873.
Here is the end of it. I have nothing more to say. I find that the public has no need of my services, and that England has suffered a disastrous rebuff. The fleet has retreated from Apulia. England—let posterity note this—has not an inch of ground in all the Italian Peninsula. Well, we are worsted, and we must bide our time; but this I will say: if that insolent young fool the First Mate thinks that his family shall protect him he is mistaken. The press is a great power and never greater than where (as in England) a professor of a university or the upper classes write for the papers, and where a rule of anonymity gives talent and position its full weight.[53]
IX.
Lambkin’s Address to the League of Progress
Everybody will remember the famous meeting of the Higher Spinsters in 1868; a body hitherto purely voluntary in its organisation, it had undertaken to add to the houses of the poor and wretched the element which reigns in the residential suburbs of our great towns. If Whitechapel is more degraded now than it was thirty years ago we must not altogether disregard the earlier efforts of the Higher Spinsters, they laboured well each in her own sphere and in death they were not divided.
The moment however which gave their embryonic conceptions an organic form did not sound till this year of 1868. It was in the Conference held at Burford during that summer that, to quote their eloquent circular, “the ideas were mooted and the feeling was voiced which made us what we are.” In other words the Higher Spinsters were merged in the new and greater society of the League of Progress. How much the League of Progress has done, its final recognition by the County Council, the sums paid to its organisers and servants I need not here describe; suffice it to say that, like all our great movements, it was a spontaneous effort of the upper middle class, that it concerned itself chiefly with the artisans, whom it desired to raise to its own level, and that it has so far succeeded as to now possess forty-three Cloisters in our great towns, each with its Grand Master, Chatelaine, Corporation of the Burghers of Progress and Lay Brothers, the whole supported upon salaries suitable to their social rank and proceeding entirely from voluntary contributions with the exception of that part of the revenue which is drawn from public funds.
The subject of the Conference, out of which so much was destined to grow, was “The Tertiary Symptoms of Secondary Education among the Poor.”