M Faraday
-MICHAEL FARADAY-
The revival of the Church services has produced its effect also upon Dissent. Its ministers are more learned and more cultured: their congregations are no longer confined to the humbler trading-class: their leaders belong to society: their writers are among the best littérateurs of the day.
That the science of warfare, by sea and land, has also changed, is a doubtful advantage. Yet wars are short, which is, in itself, an immeasurable gain. The thin red line will be seen no more: nor the splendid great man-o’-war, with a hundred guns and a crew of a thousand men.
The Universities, which, fifty years ago, belonged wholly to the Church, are now thrown open. The Fellowships and Scholarships of the Colleges were then mostly appropriated: they are now free, and the range of studies has been immensely widened.
As for the advance in physical and medical science I am not qualified to speak. But everybody knows that it has been enormous: while, in surgery, the discovery of anæsthetics has removed from life one of its most appalling horrors.
In literature, though new generations of writers have appeared and passed away, we have still with us the two great poets who, fifty years ago, had already begun their work. The Victorian era can boast of such names as Carlyle, Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, and Browning, in the first rank of men of letters; those of Darwin, Faraday, and Huxley in science. Besides these there has been an immense crowd of men and women who belong to the respectable second rank—to enumerate whom would take pages. Who can say if any of them will live beyond the century, and if any will be remembered in a hundred years?
We have all grown richer, much richer. ‘The poor,’ says Mr. George, ‘have grown poorer.’ That is most distinctly and emphatically untrue. Nothing could be more untrue. The poor—that is to say, the working classes—have grown distinctly better off. They are better housed; they are better fed; they are more cheaply fed; they are better dressed; they have a thousand luxuries to which they were formerly strangers; their children are educated; in most great towns they have free libraries; they have their own clubs; they are at liberty to combine and to hold public meetings; they have the Post Office Savings Bank; and, as for political power, they have all the power there is, because you cannot give any man more than his vote.
Formerly they demanded the Six Points of the Charter, and thought that universal happiness would follow on their acquisition. We have now got most of the Six Points, and we do not care much about the rest. Yet happiness is not by any means universal. Some there are who still think that by more tinkering of the machinery the happiness of the people will be assured. Others there are who consider that political and social wisdom, on the possession of which by our rulers the welfare of the people does mainly depend, is outside and independent of the machinery.
Is it nothing, again, that the people have found out their own country? Formerly their lives were spent wholly in the place where they were born; they knew no other. Now the railways carry them cheaply everywhere. In one small town of Lancashire the factory-hands alone spend 30,000l. a year in excursions. The railways, far more than the possession of a vote, had given the people a knowledge of their strength.