QUEEN’S STATE COACH
The outcome of the national discontent was the organisation called Chartism. Look at the working-man of the present day. He has received an education sound and thorough, up to a certain point, at the Board School; he has had the chance of continuing his education after leaving school at evening classes. He has also had the chance of joining a Polytechnic, which is a kind of technical University, teaching everything; and a kind of public school, in which athletics of all kinds are practised and encouraged. There are a great many thousand lads in the Polytechnics, and they are as fine young fellows as one can desire to see. They are skilled in technical work; they are taught by the best men in their own subjects; they do not drink or frequent taverns; they do not loaf about the streets. I do not pretend that these lads are representatives of their own class; I admit that they are the flower of the flock. The working-man has now free libraries and reading-rooms, where he can sit and read or borrow books to take away. There is no longer any revolutionary talk among those who converse; there is Socialism, of course, but that is very different. It would be difficult indeed for a young man to escape some of the Socialist ideas which are in the air, and are producing unexpected and far-reaching results. Here, however, except among a few foreigners, we have no Anarchists. The wages are better, the hours are shorter; there is a Saturday half-holiday; there are four Bank holidays in the year, besides Christmas Day and Good Friday. Everything is cheaper—food and clothes of all kinds. Lectures, concerts, dramatic recitals, debates, dances, are got up everywhere by the working-men for themselves.
The working-man’s attitude towards the Church, to which I have already alluded, has quite changed of late years. He formerly regarded it with a ferocious hatred, being taught by the papers they published for him that the clergy believe nothing, and wallow in ease and luxury at his expense. “Why,” said one of them to me twenty years ago, “if the Church was abolished we should all get our breakfast for nothing.” That kind of talk has now vanished. If the Sunday morning orator still denounces Christianity with perfervid vehemence—as he used to do in the Whitechapel Road—the working-man listens with a smile and presently goes on to the next ring, where the Socialist preaches universal happiness to come as soon as we can get the much-desired equal division; and him, too, he leaves presently with another smile. He is not in the least moved by either orator.
Canon Barnett’s Church in Whitechapel is an example of what may be done with a parish composed entirely of working-people. They do not attend his services, I believe. But he has educated them into an audience which listens intelligently to the best and most thoughtful and most cultivated scholars and teachers of the day; they flock every year to a Loan Exhibition of Pictures which he collects for them; he gives them receptions, concerts, discussions; he has built Toynbee Hall in their midst as a settlement and place of culture. Some of them he has made students and scholars: it is not too much to say that Canon Barnett’s parishioners are intellectually far above the average of the class supposed to be their superiors—that of the shopkeepers and the traders. However, it would not be fair to take these people as an average of our working-man. When I think of the mass of the people as they were sixty years ago—how ignorant they were, how drunken, how brutal, how dangerous to order and to government, how unruly, how disloyal—I cannot but claim for the men of the present a change nothing short of transformation! There is still much to be done, the Millennium is not yet reached; but there is no comparison—none—between the people of 1837 and the people of 1897; and the advantage is all on one side.
WINDSOR CASTLE FROM THE RIVER
