Source.—An article by Mr. Gladstone in The Nineteenth Century, vol. xxi., p. 1.
The Prophet of the new Locksley Hall records against us many sad, and even shameful, defaults. They are not to be denied, and the list might probably be lengthened. The youngest among us will not see the day in which new social problems will have ceased to spring up as from the depths, and vex even the most successful solvers of the old; or in which this proud and great English nation will not have cause, in all its ranks and orders, to bow its head before the Judge Eternal, and humbly to confess to forgotten duties, or wasted and neglected opportunities. It is well to be reminded, and in tones such as make the deaf man hear, of city children who "soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime"; of maidens cast by thousands on the street; of the sempstress scrimped of her daily bread; of dwellings miserably crowded; of fever as the result. But take first the city child as he is described. For one such child now there were ten, perhaps twenty, fifty years back. A very large, and a still increasing proportion of these children have been brought under the regular teaching and discipline of the school. Take the maidens who are now, as they were then, cast by thousands on the streets. But then, if one among them were stricken with penitence, and sought for a place in which to hide her head, she found it only in the pomp of paid institutions, and in a help well meant, no doubt, yet carrying little of what was most essential, sympathetic discrimination, and mild, nay even tender care. Within the half-century a new chapter has opened. Faith and love have gone forth into the field. Specimens of womankind, sometimes the very best and highest, have not deemed this quest of souls beneath them. Scrimping of wages, no doubt, there is and was. But the fair wage of to-day is far higher than it was then, and the unfair wage is assumably not lower. Miserable and crowded dwellings, again, and fever as their result, both then and now. But legislation has in the interval made its attempts in earnest; and if this was with awkward and ungainly hand, private munificence or enterprise is dotting our city areas with worthy dwellings. Above all, have we not to record in this behalf martyred lives, such as those of Denison and Toynbee? Or shall we refuse honourable mention to not less devoted lives, happily still retained, of such persons as Miss Octavia Hill? With all this there has happily grown up not only a vast general extension of benevolent and missionary means, but a great parochial machinery of domestic visitation, charged with comfort and blessing to the needy, and spread over so wide a circle, that what was formerly an exception may now with some confidence be said to be the rule. If insufficiencies have come to be more keenly felt, is that because they are greater, or because there is a bolder and better trained disposition to feel them?...
I will refer as briefly as may be to the sphere of legislation. Slavery has been abolished. A criminal code, which disgraced the Statute Book, has been effectually reformed. Laws of combination and contract, which prevented the working population from obtaining the best price for their labour, have been repealed. The lamentable and demoralizing abuses of the Poor Law have been swept away. Lives and limbs, always exposed to destruction through the incidents of labour, formerly took their chance, no man heeding them, even when the origin of the calamity lay in the recklessness or neglect of the employer. They are now guarded by preventive provisions, and the loss is mitigated, to the sufferers or their survivors, by pecuniary compensation. The scandals of labour in mines, factories, and elsewhere, to the honour, first and foremost, of the name of Shaftesbury, have been either removed, or greatly qualified and reduced. The population on the sea-coast is no longer forced wholesale into contraband trade by fiscal follies; and the Game Laws no longer constitute a plausible apology for poaching. The entire people have good schools placed within the reach of their children, and are put under legal obligation to use the privileges and contribute to the charge. They have also at their doors the means of husbanding their savings, without the compromise of their independence by the inspection of the rector or the squire, and under the guarantee of the State to the uttermost farthing of the amount. Information through a free press, formerly cut off from them by stringent taxation, is now at their easy command. Their interests at large are protected by their votes, and their votes are protected by the secrecy which screens them from intimidation either through violence, or in its subtler forms.
It is perhaps of interest to turn from such dry outlines as may be sketched by the aid of almanacs to those more delicate gradations of the social movement, which in their detail are indeterminate and almost fugitive, but which in their mass may be apprehended, and made the subject of record. Pugilism, which ranges between manliness and brutality, and which in the days of my boyhood, in its greatest celebrations, almost monopolized the space of journals of the highest order, is now rare, modest, and unobtrusive. But, if less exacting in the matter of violent physical excitements, the nation attaches not less but more value to corporal education, and for the schoolboy and the man alike athletics are becoming an ordinary incident of life. Under the influence of better conditions of living, and probably of increased self-respect, mendicity, except in seasons of special distress, has nearly disappeared. If our artisans combine (as they well may) partly to uphold their wages, it is also greatly with the noble object of keeping all the members of their enormous class independent of public alms. They have forwarded the cause of self-denial, and manfully defended themselves even against themselves, by promoting restraints upon the traffic in strong liquors. In districts where they are most advanced, they have fortified their position by organized co-operation in supply. Nor are the beneficial changes of the last half-century confined to the masses. Swearing and duelling established until a recent date almost as institutions of the country, have nearly disappeared from the face of society.... At the same time the disposition to lay bare public mischiefs and drag them into the light of day, which, though liable to exaggeration, has perhaps been our best distinction among the nations, has become more resolute than ever....
The sum of the matter seems to be that, upon the whole and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that, in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference, or even connivance, it now not only winces, but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning, and not wasting.
II.
Source.—The Times, June 21.
The men of the Victorian age have lived in the midst of almost cataclysmic mental changes. New facts have rained upon them with a rapidity that baffles hypothesis, and stamps theory as obsolete before half the world has become reconciled to its existence. In such a time of intellectual flux anything like monumental art is impossible, since neither the artist nor the age possesses the permanence of mood required for a true presentment. Although, however, the Victorian era has not produced much that the most liberal charity can conceive as belonging to all time, it has shown immense fertility and vigour in supplying the intellectual wants of the present. In all but those supreme manifestations of the human intellect which we ascribe to genius, its products are at least equal, and in most cases superior, to those of any period of our history, while in quantity and variety of intellectual effort, and in diffusion of intellectual interest, it is entirely unapproachable.