Looked at from a right point of view, the world’s history is a series of dissolving views. We have had the gorgeous age of nobility, the money-making one of the middle-classes—lower still we must go. Truth lies at the bottom of the well; the pearls, whose lustre outshine even beauty’s eye are hidden in the deep. The men who now stamp their impress on the age—whose thought is genuine and free—who shew the hollowness of shams—who demand for the common brotherhood of man their common rights—who herald a coming age—who are its teachers and apostles—originally laboured in coal-mines, like Stephenson; or mended shoes, like Cooper; or plied the shuttle, like Fox; or stood, as did Burns and Nicoll, at the plough, with God’s heaven above them, and God’s inspiration in their hearts.
The decline and fall of England has already found chroniclers enough. Ledru Rollin and the Protectionists are agreed as regards the lamentable fact. G. F. Young, the chairman of the Society for the Protection of British Industry and Capital, believed it as firmly as his own
existence. A similar opinion is more than hinted in the tedious History of Dr. Alison. At a still earlier period the same doleful tale was ever on the lips and pervaded the writings of Southey, the Laureate and the renegade. If these gentlemen are right, then the melancholy conviction must be forced upon us that England has seen her best days; that it will never be with her what it was in time past, when she bred up an indomitable race, when her flag of triumph fluttered in every breeze, and floated on every sea. We must believe that England’s sun is about to set; that, with its brightness and its beauty, it will never more bless and irradiate the world.
Against such a conclusion we emphatically protest. We look back upon our national career, and we see that each age has witnessed the people’s growth in political power; that especially since that grand field-day of Democracy, the French Revolution, that power has gone on increasing with accelerated force; that it was to the increased ascendancy of that power that we owed it that we rode in safety whilst the political ocean was covered with wreck and ruin. If one thing be clearer than another in our national history, it is that our greatness and the power of the people have grown together. At a season like the present it is well to remember this. Prophets often fulfil their own prophecies. The Jeremiads of the weak, or the interested, or the fearful, may damp the courage of some hearts; and a people told that they are ruined, that the poor are becoming poorer every day, that the
end of all labour is the workhouse or the gaol, that their life is but a lingering death, may come to believe that the handwriting is upon the wall, and that it is hopeless to war with fate.
The fact is, nations, when they die, die of felo-de-se. The national heart becomes unsound, and the national arm weak. The virtue has gone out of it. Its rulers have usurped despotic powers, and the people have been sunk in utter imbecility, or have looked upon life as a May-day game, and nothing more. In our cold northern clime—with the remains of that equality born and bred amidst the beech-forests that bordered the Baltic—the English people could never stoop to this; and hence our glorious destiny. No nation under heaven’s broad light has been more sorely tried than our own. We have taken into pay almost every European power. Our war to restore the Bourbons, and thus to crush Liberalism at home, and keep the Tories in office, was carried on at a cost which only Englishmen could have paid; and yet from our long seasons of distress—from our commercial panics, the result of fettered trade—from our formidable continental wars—we have emerged with flying colours, and indomitable strength. Mr. Porter’s statistics showed what we had done in the face of difficulty and danger, and the progress we have made since Mr. Porter’s time is something prodigious. Not yet has the arm of the people been weakened or its eye dulled.
These are facts such as the united Croaker tribe can
neither refute nor deny. We understand the meaning of such men when they raise a cry of alarm. What such men dread does in reality infuse into the constitution fresh vigour and life. Not national death, but the reverse is the result. The removal of one abuse, behind which monopoly and class legislation have skulked, is like stripping from the monarch of the forest the foul parasite by which his beauty is hidden and his strength devoured. From such operations the constitution comes out with the elements of life more copious and active in it than before. It finds a wider base in the support and attachment of the people; it becomes more sympathetic with them. It grows with their growth and strengthens with their strength.
It is not true, then, that for us the future is more fraught with anxiety than hope. The theory is denied by fact. It is not true commercially, nor is it true morally. Our progress in morals and manners is, at least, equal to our progress in trade. The coarse manners—the brutal intoxication—the want of all faith in spiritual realities, held not merely by the laity but by the clergy as well of the last century, now no longer exists. Reverend Deans do not now write to ladies as did the bitter Dean of St. Patrick’s to his Stella. Sure are we that Victoria cannot speak of her bishops as, according to Lord Hervey, George II. did, and justly, speak of his. No Prime Minister now would dare to insult the good feeling of the nation by handing his paramour to her carriage from the Opera in the presence of Majesty. Fielding’s novels
graphically display a state of things which happily now no longer exists. The gossip of our times reveals enough—alas!—too much—of human weakness and immorality; but the gossip of our times is as far superior to that which Horace Walpole has so faithfully preserved, or to that which Mrs. Manley in her “New Atlantis” sullied her woman’s name by retailing, or to that which Count Grammont thought it no disgrace to record, as light to darkness or as dross to gold. Macaulay thus describes the country squire of the seventeenth century:—“His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field-sports, and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and his pronunciation were such as we should now only expect to hear from ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jokes, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accents of his province.” The country squire of the nineteenth century is surely some improvement upon this; nor has the improvement been confined to him—it has extended to all classes. We still hear much, for instance, of drunkenness, but drunkenness does not prevail as it did when publicans wrote on their signs, as Smollett tells us they did,—“You may here get drunk for one penny, dead drunk for two pence, and clean straw for nothing.”