According to the Prince’s speech at the meeting of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes, on the 18th of May, two objects should be kept in view. Firstly, Society, through individual and associated effort, should show what can be done by model lodging-houses, improved dwellings, loan funds, allotments, and the like, to ameliorate the lot of the poor. Secondly, the poor must be taught that all the work of amelioration cannot be done by Society—that, in fact, they must, by their cultivation of the homely virtues of thrift, honesty, diligence, and self-denial, help themselves into the condition in which it is possible for others, either by individual or associated effort, to help them. He implored the country to think more of the identity than the rivalry of class interests, and contended that it was the imperative duty of the rich, each one in his sphere, “to show how man can help man, notwithstanding the complicated state of Society.” Self-reliance in the individual, and confidence between individuals—these were the moral forces which Prince Albert seems to have thought it was the mission of all good citizens to evoke. It has been hinted that such utterances are mere platitudes, and hardly worth recording. As David Hume observed, the truths that are prized as discoveries by a few philosophers in one generation become the commonplaces of their grandchildren. Had the ideas of the Queen and her husband on the Social Problem been platitudes among statesmen in 1848, Revolution would not have fallen on Europe like “a bolt out of the blue,” nor would the panic-stricken kings and princes of the Continent have been flying, as Mr. Carlyle put it, “like a gang of coiners when the police had come among them.”[112] Nothing could be more gratifying to the Queen than the universal approval that greeted this address. It struck the true note of sympathy with Labour that should ever ring through “the sad, sweet music of Humanity.” Her Majesty said, in a letter to Stockmar, “the Prince made a speech on Thursday which has met with more general admiration from all classes and parties than any I can remember;” and it
THOMAS CARLYLE. (After the Medallion by T. Woolner, 1855.)
is in truth impossible to give a juster idea of the effect which it produced all over the English-speaking world.
It is curious to observe that all through the Queen’s correspondence during the most alarming year of her reign, there is expressed a feeling of proud confidence in the stability of the British Monarchy, and an abiding certitude that under her rule no effort will be spared to minimise the sufferings or better the lot of the poor. Bolingbroke’s “patriot King” could not have more completely identified Sovereignty with national life and national yearning. That the Revolution had no perceptible effect on England, one can now see was mainly due to the fact that alike in the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in the encouragement of schemes for social improvement, the Monarchy
CHRISTENING OF THE PRINCESS LOUISE IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE CHAPEL.