They will not please. I, for one, have the greatest confidence in the justice, the common-sense, and the Conservatism of the English and the Scotch. The people do not, as yet, half understand their own power; while they are gradually growing to comprehend it, they will be learning the history of their country, the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, the dangers of revolution, and the advantages of those old institutions by whose aid the whole world has been covered with those who speak the Anglo-Saxon speech and are governed by the English law.
My friends, we are changed indeed. Fifty years ago we were, as I have said, still in the eighteenth century. The people had no power, no knowledge, no voice; they were the slaves of their employers; they were brutish and ill-conditioned, ready to rebel against their rulers, but not knowing how; chafing under laws which they did not make, and restraints which kept them from acting together, or from meeting to ask if things must always continue so. We are changed indeed.
We now stand upright; our faces are full of hope, though we are oppressed by doubts and questions, because we know not which path, of the many before us, will be the wisest; the future is all our own; we are no longer the servants; we are the Masters, the absolute Rulers, of the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen.
God grant that we govern it with wisdom!
CHAPTER VI.
WITH THE MIDDLE-CLASS.
The great middle-class—supposed, before the advent of Mr. Matthew Arnold, to possess all the virtues; to be the backbone, stay, and prop of the country—must have a chapter to itself.
In the first place, the middle-class was far more a class apart than it is at present. In no sense did it belong to society. Men in professions of any kind, except the two services, could only belong to society by right of birth and family connections; men in trade—bankers were still accounted tradesmen—could not possibly belong to society. That is to say, if they went to live in the country they were not called upon by the county families, and in town they were not admitted by the men into their clubs, or by ladies into their houses. Those circles, of which there are now so many—artistic, æsthetic, literary—all of them considering themselves to belong to society, were then out of society altogether; nor did they overlap and intersect each other. The middle-class knew its own place, respected itself, made its own society for itself, and cheerfully accorded to rank its reverence due. The annals of the poor are meagre; only here and there one gets a glimpse into their lives. But the middle-class is much better known, because it has had prophets; nearly all the poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, and artists have sprung from it. Those who adorned the Thirties and the Forties—Hood, Hook, Galt, Dickens, Albert Smith, Thackeray—all belonged to it; George Eliot, whose country towns are those of the Thirties and the Forties, was essentially a woman of the middle-class.
GEORGE ELIOT