Effects of these Causes in Modern England.
The reader will see at a glance how all these reasons against the tenderness of sentiment in patriotism tell in modern England.
Lack of small Proprietors.
The Population not Stationary.
Facility in changing Residence.
England is not a country of small proprietors. Without committing the mistake, so common amongst foreigners, of believing that there are no small landowners in England, we know that they are not so numerous as in France, and therefore that the intense local affection of the peasant has fewer chances of developing itself. Again, the population of England is less and less a stationary population, it becomes constantly more urban and more migratory. The lower and middle classes change their place of residence with a facility unknown to the yeomanry of former times. It seems to be a matter of indifference to them whether they will live in one ugly and smoky street or in another ugly and smoky street, and why indeed should we expect their affections to take root in a “wilderness of bricks”? Nor do they limit themselves to the same town. They change towns almost as easily as streets on the slightest prospect of increased income, and often merely for the sake of the change itself, to break the monotony of a life destitute of local interests and local attachments. In its extreme development the facility in removing that characterises the modern Englishman of the unsettled class will include not merely the United Kingdom, but the most remote dependencies of the British Empire. The following is a case well known to me; it is given here as an extreme case, not as an average one, but it is thoroughly English, and most remote from the stay-at-home habits of the French.
History of an English middle-class Family.
Constant Changes of Address.
Condition of Feeling incompatible with Local Attachments.
A middle-class Englishman in a scientific profession began by going to Scotland in his youth, and there he married early. From Scotland he emigrated to New Zealand, and thence to Australia, where he prospered well, but in the midst of his prosperity he determined to return to Great Britain. He settled first in Glasgow, and afterwards migrated successively to Hull, Bristol, Cardiff, Southampton, Liverpool, and London. I pass over a temporary residence in the United States. When staying in one town it was his habit to change his residence frequently. During the thirty or forty years of his married life he made twice as many removals. Since his death his family have gone on in the same way: they are constantly changing their addresses, and are dispersed over the British possessions, including New Zealand, Canada, and British Columbia. A family of this kind is not cosmopolitan, because it confines itself to English-speaking countries, but its world is the vast area over which the English language is known. There was a condition of feeling in that family quite incompatible with old-fashioned local attachments. The members of it were ready at any time to leave England and each other and pitch their temporary camp in distant latitudes. This readiness was reflected in their conversation, which ranged easily over vast spaces of land and sea.