They were sitting one morning at breakfast—that pleasantest of meals, unless you have to be up at an unusually early hour to catch the train and be off to London. Modern life is not such an improvement on that of the past as we are apt to fancy. The breakfast was the one meal at which people could meet and discuss matters—private, local, political, literary, or religious, in an informal way. We have no pleasant breakfast in these more ostentatious days, when society is too large to admit of friendship; but it seems to me that in my younger days we got a good deal more pleasure out of life. No wonder, then, that we sigh for the good old times, and long for their revival; that we have Queen Anne furniture, and houses built in what is called the Elizabethan style, and an effort to do away with the rail, and to revive the far-famed coaches with four horses which were the delight of the nation in the Georgian days.
I can call well to mind the time when I held the coachman of a certain Royal Mail, which made its appearance in our benighted village about breakfast-time, to have been one of the most eminent men of the day, and felt at least a foot taller when, as was his wont, he gave me, boy as I was, a friendly nod of recognition. As to seeing the horses changed, that was a scene I would not have missed on any account. How we all stood admiring as the panting steeds, which had galloped gloriously their stage, were led sweating away, and the fresh team, with cloths on, and their hoofs newly-cleaned, and everything about them bright and shiny, took the vacant places! What a pleasure it was to see them as they stood pawing the ground, impatient to be off! How glad we were when the coachman, as he climbed up into his lofty seat, and gathered up the reins in his capacious hand, gave the signal, ‘Let ’em go!’ How beautiful it was to us lads to see the coach bound off like a thing of life, while the guard blew a farewell flourish on his horn, and the horses settled down steadily to their work after a playful flourish or two!
Woe is me! I, and other miserable sinners like unto me, come to town through tunnels, and over the tops of houses, or along cuttings in which one gets an unlovely view of the backs of dirty houses and slovenly yards, in a closely-packed railway carriage, where we can neither talk, nor hear, nor read, and grow nervous as the engine screams and shrieks on all occasions, while the railway porters close the doors with a bang sufficient to send one into a fit. Life in our railway age is hard for us all.
Wentworth and his wife were at breakfast, as I have said. London had been disturbed by rumours as to the claim to the titles and estates of the deceased Baronet. Newspapers were not so full of twaddle as they are now; that spawn of the press, the newspaper interviewer, had not as yet sprung into existence. But still then, as now, there was a great deal of unmeaning gossip that did manage to find its way into the columns of the weekly and daily journals. It has ever been so. Apparently, it seems as if it ever will be so. The fashion originated in the servants’ hall. ‘A chambermaid to a lady of my acquaintance,’ writes Dean Swift, ‘when talking with one of her fellow-servants, said: “I hear it is all over London already that I am going to leave my lady.”’ In this respect she resembled the footman who, being newly married, desired his comrade to tell him freely ‘what the town really thought of it.’ From the servants’ hall the habit spread to Grub Street, and thence to the West-End, to become the leading feature in journals only written for men, or gentlemen, or ladies, as circumstances required. We laugh at the old divine who wrote a threepenny pamphlet against France, and who, being in the country, hearing of a French privateer hovering along the coast, fled to town and told his friends that they need not wonder at his haste, which he accounted for from the fact that the King of France, having got intelligence of his whereabouts, had sent a privateer on purpose to carry him away. How ridiculous was good Dr. Gee, Prebendary of Westminster, who wrote a small paper against Popery! Being ordered to travel on the Continent for his health, he disguised his person and assumed another name, as he fancied he would be murdered, or put into the Inquisition. But are we less ridiculous, or rather has not that ridiculous exaggeration of the personal, which is the foundation of newspaper twaddle, become more of a nuisance than ever?
Again, we all of us think too much of money and money-making. Is it not time that we utter a word of warning in the matter? It is inconvenient to have no money, most of us know by practical experience; but the possession of much of it is not after all a guarantee of respectability of character, or individual capacity. We call ourselves a Christian people, we profess to be actuated by Christian principles. The Master was a poor man—a carpenter’s son—His disciples were poor men. If any class are particularly referred to in the New Testament as far from the kingdom, they are the rich. All modern society is based on the opposite idea. We give the rich man the chief place in the synagogue. The society journals delight to do him honour. He has even made church-going the fashion. This is no age of poor geniuses. Our artists, our poets or teachers are all of the well-to-do. A Burns, or a Bloomfield, would be thought nothing of in our time. The modern woman is impossible in a poor community. When a lady writer is described in our magazines and newspapers, the writer dwells at painful length on the costliness of her surroundings; her dresses, her parties, the expensiveness of her furniture, and the signs of wealth she everywhere displays. The millions—how they toil and how miserably they live! The rich—what an idle life they lead! And then think of the way in which that wealth, which is often a curse to them, is obtained! Far away indeed is the new heaven and the new earth in which dwelleth righteousness; infamous as are the means by which the wealth we envy and admire is obtained, how ready we are to do homage to its possessor, poor as he may be in spirit, and unclean and unlovely in his life! Wentworth saw, as we all do, this unsatisfactory side of all human affairs. The time had come, he thought, for an effort for something better, for a state in which the wealth earned by the labourer should be more equitably distributed. There was a divine order in life, he believed, which had been lost sight of, and forgotten, and the result was unmitigated poverty and wretchedness. For this society was responsible, and especially its rulers, who had increased the sufferings of the poor, who had trampled on the weak, who had played into the hands of the rich and the strong; he did not believe, as some of our modern lights do, that the masses were always right and the classes always wrong. It seemed to him that there were good and bad amongst them all, that circumstances were such, that there was little hope of change for the better. Circumstances were too strong for the individual to conquer. Take intemperance, for instance, the main cause of England’s wretchedness; how is it possible to grapple with that in society, where intoxicating drink is deemed, in most circles, a daily necessity of life?
‘You must form new social conditions,’ said Buxton as he entered: ‘I have just left,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine. We were fellow students. He was the leader in all the classes, and graduated with high honours. He took his doctor’s degree and then became a clergyman, acquired great popularity, was the means of drawing together a large congregation, became one of the ornaments of the temperance platform, was for awhile a power in Exeter Hall, had everything that heart could wish, a charming wife, a comfortable income, a large family; and now he has become a sot and a drunkard, and I see no hope for him as long as he lives. I can only believe that he was born with a hereditary taint—and that after fighting against it all his life, it has broken out at last and proved his master.’
‘Then you think drunkenness is a disease, and that a man is not responsible for it?’
‘In many cases I do, and I smile when I hear the parson denounce him as guilty of a heinous sin, or the judge brand him as a criminal offender. Examine the drunkard’s body after death, and you see in the stomach, in the liver, in the heart and brain signs of a diseased condition. At the same time, I am ready to admit that there are many who drink out of mere cussedness or who are so wretched that they take to it for temporary relief; or who just drink because they live in a drunken set, and like to do as others around them do. Whatever the immorality, the vice, or the sin of drunkenness, in a very large number of cases the drunkard is more to be pitied than blamed, as the subject of disease. If you get him to take the pledge, the chances are that he will break it, and that the last state of that man will be worse than the first.’
‘Ah! that helps me to what I have been long thinking of,’ replied Wentworth.
‘What is that—a community planted where no drink can be had? That is all very well; but while you are about it, you may as well go a step further. There are other hereditary diseases besides drunkenness: why permit them? Man is an animal,’ said Buxton. ‘I am, of course, speaking only from a medical point of view. What do we do with animals? Why, we stamp out the disease, and thus we get a new generation. It is thus we battle with lung disease in bullocks, swine fever and glandered horses. We must stamp out disease in men and women as we stamp it out of other animals.’