Only to show on mercy's plan
How far and long God bears with man"—
and this superb piece of truculence was received with applause by all that was upright and noble in England. This indescribable villain presented himself as worthy to preside over the place where the flower of English youth were educated. A pleasing example he offered to young and ardent souls! Worst of all, he was elected. He adroitly gained the votes of country clergymen; he begged his friends to solicit the votes of their private chaplains; he dodged and manoeuvred until he gained his position. One voter came from a lunatic asylum, another was brought from the Isle of Man, others were bribed in lavish fashion—and Sandwich presided over Cambridge. The students rose in a body and walked out when he came among them; but that mattered little to the brazen fellow. To complete the ghastly comedy, it happened that four years later the Chancellorship fell vacant, and the Duke of Grafton, who was only second to "Jemmy Twitcher" in wickedness, was chosen for the high office.
Now I ask plainly, "Can the croakers declare that England was better under Grafton and 'Jemmy Twitcher' than she now is?" It is nonsense! The crew of bacchanals and blackguards who then flaunted in high places would not now be tolerated for a day. I look on our governing class now,[[3] ] and I may safely declare that not more than one Cabinet Minister during the past twenty years has been regarded as otherwise than stainless in character. What is the meaning of this transformation? It means that good, pure women have gained their rightful influence, that men have grown purer, and that the elevation of the general body of society has been reflected in the character of the men chosen to rule. Vice is all too powerful, and the dark corners of our cities are awful to see; but the worst of the "fast" men in modern England are not so bad as were the governors of a mighty empire when George III. was king.
If we look at the society that diced and drank and squandered health and fortune in the times which we mention, we are more than ever struck with the advance made. It is a literal fact that the correspondence of the young men mainly refers to drink and gaming, the correspondence of the middle-aged men to gout. There were few of the educated classes who reached middle age, and a country squire was reckoned quite a remarkable person if he could still walk and ride when he attained to fifty years. The quiet, steady middle-class certainly lived more temperately; but the intemperance of the aristocracy was indescribable. The leader of the House of Lords imbibed until six every morning, was carried to bed, and came down about two in the afternoon; two noblemen declared that they drank a gallon and a half of Champagne and Burgundy at one sitting; in some coffee-houses it was the custom, when the night's drinking ended, for the company to burn their wigs. Some of Horace Walpole's letters prove plainly enough that great gentlemen conducted themselves occasionally very much as wild seamen would do in Shadwell or the Highway. What would be thought if Lord Salisbury reeled into the House in a totally drunken condition? The imagination cannot conceive the situation, and the fact that the very thought is laughable shows how much we have improved in essentials. In bygone days, a man who became a Minister proceeded to secure his own fortune; then he provided for all his relatives, his hangers-on, his very jockeys and footmen. One lord held eight sinecure offices, and was besides colonel of two regiments. A Chancellor of the Exchequer cleared four hundred thousand on a new loan, and the bulk of this large sum remained in his own pocket, for he had but few associates to bribe. When patrols were set to guard the Treasury at night, an epigram ran—
"From the night till the morning 'tis true all is right;
But who will secure it from morning till night?"
There was a perfect carnival of robbery and corruption, and the people paid for all. Money gathered by public corruption was squandered in private debauchery, while a sullen and helpless nation looked on. Think of the change! A Minister now toils during seventeen hours per day, and receives less than a successful barrister. He must give up all the ordinary pleasures of life; and, in recompense for the sacrifice, he can claim but little patronage. By most of the men in office the work is undertaken on purely patriotic grounds; so that a duke with a quarter of a million per year is content to labour like an attorney's clerk.
If we think about the ladies of the old days, we are more than ever driven to reflection. It is impossible to imagine a more insensate collection of gamblers than the women of Horace Walpole's society. Well-bred harpies won and lost fortunes, and the vice became a raging pest. A young politician could not further his own prospects better than by letting some high-born dame win his money; if the youth won the lady's money, then a discreet forgetfulness of the debt was profitable to him. The rattle of dice and the shuffle of cards sounded wherever two or three fashionable persons were gathered together; men and women quarrelled, and society became a mere jumble of people who suspected and hated and thought to rob each other. It is horrible, even at this distance of time, to think of those rapacious beings who forgot literature, art, friendship, and family affection for the sake of high play. One weary, witty debauchee said, "Play wastes time, health, money, and friendship;" yet he went on pitting his skill against that of unsexed women and polished rogues.
The morality of the fair gamblers was more than loose. It was taken for granted in the whole set that every female member of it must inevitably be divorced, if the catastrophe had not occurred already; and one man asked Walpole, "Who's your proctor?" just as he would have asked, "Who's your tailor?" An unspeakable society—a hollow, heartless, callous, wicked brood. Compare that crew of furious money-grabbers with our modern gentlemen and ladies! We have our faults—crime and vice flourish; but, from the Court down to the simplest middle-class society in our provincial towns, the spread of seemliness and purity is distinctly marked. Some insatiable grumblers will have it that our girls and women are deteriorating, and we are informed that the taste for objectionable literature is keener than it used to be. It is a distinct libel. No one save a historian would now read the corrupting works of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and yet it is a fact that those novels were read aloud among companies of ladies. A man winces now if he is obliged to turn to them; the girls in the "good old times" heard them with never a blush. Wherever we turn we find the same steady advance. Can any creature be more dainty, more sweet, more pure, than the ordinary English girl of our day? Will any one bring evidence to show that the girls of the last century, or of any other, were superior to our own maidens? No evidence has been produced from literature, from journals, from family correspondence, and I am pretty certain that no evidence exists. Practically speaking, the complaints of the decline of morality are merely uttered as a mode of showing the talker's own superiority.