From them no small part of the world is likely to remain hidden. To not a little that men have thought and felt they remain insensible. They can form a right judgment of those who differ from them only in opinion, but they find it hard to understand any who go further than this, and differ from them also in sentiment. Lord Macaulay had this defect in a striking degree, and yet he had been brought up in a wider circle than the life of a provincial town, and his mind ranged within no narrow bounds.[69]
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Some of the greatest benefactors of mankind would have held that, however true this might be of Horatio, it could not rightfully be addressed to themselves.
When all that is needed is an appeal to reason and not to sentiment, then in such men prejudices may quickly fall away. Like many another ardent and honest reformer of those days, Rowland Hill had in his youth formed a harsh judgment of the ruling classes. His father had belonged to a small political club, which met once a week at the houses of the members. “The conversation,” writes one of the brothers, “very commonly took a political turn, the opinions on all sides savouring of the extreme, so that my father was, by comparison, a moderate. It is notorious that men, very remote from power, with its duties and responsibilities, are apt to be extravagant in expectations and demands; and so it certainly was here. ‘I would do thus,’ or ‘I would have this,’ were put forth in full ignorance of what was practicable, sometimes of what was even desirable. Such discourse could not but assist the bias already in our minds, so that we grievously underrated the great actual advantages and high comparative freedom which our country enjoyed.”
When Rowland Hill, on one of his early visits to London, first saw Guildhall, he wrote in his Journal: “Much to the disgrace of the City of London, the monument of Pitt remains there still.” In some later year he placed opposite the word disgrace a mark of interrogation. Such feelings as these, which had been nursed in the worst days of Tory rule, began to die out with the dawn of happier times. With the passing of the great Reform Bill, all bitterness passed away from him and his brothers. Nay even, into such good heart had they been put by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Roman Catholic Emancipation, and the Battle of Navarino, that, though the King was George IV., yet at a small supper-party at Hazelwood one of them struck up, “The King: God bless him,” and all joined heartily in the refrain. Their enthusiasm was partly due to some spirited political verses composed and recited by Sheridan Knowles, who happened to be one of the guests. “It was not without considerable feeling,” wrote one of the brothers, “that we afterwards learnt that, while this loyal effusion was pouring forth, the poor King was dying.”
The removal to the neighbourhood of London at once opened to Rowland Hill a wider world:—
“In November, 1826 [he wrote], I assisted in founding the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which, commencing public operation in the following year, took so active and important a part in the creation of cheap literature. Though as a member of the committee[70] I took some share in the duty, I fear, upon reflection, that such aid as I was enabled to give was scarcely equivalent to the benefit which I derived from association with the able and eminent men with whom I was thus brought in contact.”
His residence at Bruce Castle he but briefly described in the Prefatory Memoir to “The History of Penny Postage.” It was, to a great extent, the life of a schoolmaster; and that life in the earlier part of the narrative had been set forth at considerable length. The following is the account he gave of these years:—