This man’s position is now so far improved that he receives about twenty shillings a week, with harvest allowances; that he has an allotment on which he grows his vegetables; that he keeps poultry and a pig; that he eats meat of some kind every day; that his wife and children go warmly clad.
THE CORONATION VESTMENTS
What has caused this change? The widening of the world. How the world was first discovered by the English rustic to be so wide and so empty, I do not know. It was during the twenty years between 1815 and 1835 that the discovery began; at first it spread very slowly; the rustic heard of it at the market town; he met with a sailor who talked about the splendid chances beyond the seas; he heard letters read from settlers in Canada and Australia; here and there one, greatly daring, left the village, and was considered as good as dead till letters arrived entreating all—father, mother, brothers, and sisters—to leave their home and join him. At last they began to go, and the tide of immigration set in that has never since stopped or slackened. In the year 1815 the emigration from this country amounted to no more than 2000; in 1825 it was 25,000; in 1850 it was nearly 300,000. From 1815 to 1896 I do not think that the emigrants from these shores have amounted to less than 10,000,000; of these more than one-half have gone to the United States. These emigrants do not, for the first generation at least, forget their native land and the kin they have left behind them. Imagine, then, the difference between a village closed absolutely to the outer world, into which there penetrates no voice, no rumour, no report from without, and a village where every family has got sons and daughters in the lands across the sea.
The world has been widened for us by the rise of the other nations of our race. It has also been widened by the railway and by the cheap post. Small as is our island compared with the great continent of America, there was formerly no knowledge of any part of it outside the native place; at the present moment the people can get about all over the country—to the seaside, to London, to the Lakes, to Wales; everywhere there are excursion trains and cheap tickets; the children learn by their annual treats to look out every year for new and interesting places; to the people the excursion is an event which excites and stimulates them all. You may see them by thousands in the ruins of an old abbey, trying to reconstruct the past splendours; or among the ruins of a Norman Castle; or in the gardens and galleries of some great house which is thrown open to them; or by the seashore, rowing, sailing, bathing; or in some park, where the children dance and sing and try to persuade the deer to let them come near. In one small town of Lancashire, a town of factories, the people spend £30,000 a year on their excursions; they descend upon the Lincolnshire watering-places, which are small and ill-provided, and they eat up the town and the farms all round; they invade the hotels of Ambleside and Grasmere, and eat up all that therein is; they reduce the Isle of Man to famine; they leave the coast of Northumberland empty and cleared out, with an emptiness like that caused by the locust. Such is the effect of the world’s widening.
Painting by Sir George Hayter
THE CORONATION
Painting by C. R. Leslie, R.A.