But there can be no question that the river of civilisation reached a stretch of rapids towards the end of the eighteenth century. For instance, in locomotion the riding-horse and pack-horse had hardly given place to the coach and waggon before the railway superseded road traffic; the fast sailing clippers had a short lease of life before steam was used for crossing the seas. Industrial changes came too quickly for the government to make the necessary readjustments, at a time when the nation was fighting for its life and then recovering from its exhaustion. The greatest sufferings caused by the revolution in the life of the people were in the first half of the century; the latter half was a time of readjustment and reform. One great interest of the Victorian Age is that it was the time when a new social order was being built up, and entirely new problems were being solved. The nineteenth century has been called the age of hope; and perhaps only a superstitious belief in the automatic progress of humanity could have carried our fathers and grandfathers through the tremendous difficulties which the rush through the rapids imposed upon them.
Let us spend five minutes in picturing to ourselves the English nation in a condition of stable equilibrium, as it was in the eighteenth century. Before the Industrial Revolution, the country was on the whole prosperous and contented. The masses had no voice in the government, but most of them had a stake in the country. There were no large towns, and the typical unit was the self-contained village, which included craftsmen as well as agriculturists, and especially workers in wool, the staple national industry. The aim of village agriculture was to provide subsistence for the parishioners, not to feed the towns. The typical village was a street of cottages, each with a small garden, and an open field round it, divided up like a modern allotments area. The roads between villages were mere tracks across the common, often so bad that carts were driven by preference through the fields, as they still are in Greece. So each parish provided for its own needs. The population was sparse, and increased very slowly, in spite of the enormous birthrate, because the majority of the children died. Families like that of Dean Colet, who was one of twenty-two children, among whom he was the only one to grow up, remained common till the middle of the eighteenth century. Then, for reasons which have never, I think, been fully explained, the deathrate rapidly declined, at the very time when economic conditions demanded a larger population. This is the more remarkable, when we remember the manner in which young children were treated before the Factory Acts.
Political power was in the hands of a genuine aristocracy, who did more to deserve their privileges than any other aristocracy of modern times. They were, as a class, highly cultivated men, who had travelled much on the Continent, and mixed in society there. In 1785 Gibbon was told that 40,000 English were either travelling or living abroad at one time. They were enlightened patrons of literature and art, and made the collections of masterpieces which were the pride of England, and which are now being dispersed to the winds. Their libraries were well stocked, and many of them were accomplished classical scholars. They were not content, like their successors to-day, to load their tables with magazines and newspapers. Lastly, they fought Napoleon to a finish, and never showed the white feather. Those who have studied the family portraits in a great house, or the wonderful portrait gallery in the Provost’s Lodge at Eton, will see on the faces not only the pride and self-satisfaction of a privileged class, but the power to lead the nation whether in the arts of war or of peace.
No doubt, political corruption was rampant; but it was not till George III tried to govern himself by means of corruption, that its consequences were disastrous. The loss of America was the first serious blow to the aristocratic régime.
The necessary changes would have come about earlier but for the French Revolution and the war. The former caused a panic which now seems to us exaggerated. But we are accustomed to revolutions, and know that they never last more than a few years; the French Revolution was the first of its kind. Moreover, France had long been the acknowledged leader of civilisation, and a general overturn in that country terrified men like Gibbon into prophesying that a similar outbreak was likely to overwhelm law, order and property in England. They did not realise how different the conditions were in the two countries. The most modest democratic reforms were therefore impossible till Napoleon was out of the way, and till the anti-revolutionary panic had subsided.
One result of the war has not always been realised. The eighteenth century had been international; there was no Chauvinism or Jingoism anywhere till the French, fighting ostensibly under the banner of humanity, had kindled the fire of patriotism in Spain, in Germany, and even in Russia. England had always had a strong national self-consciousness; and after the war the bonds of sympathy with France were not at once renewed, so that our country, during the early part of Victoria’s reign, was more isolated from the main currents of European thought than ever before or since. Men of letters who lamented this isolation now turned for inspiration rather to Germany than to France. On the other hand, the war did not interrupt the intellectual life of the country to anything like the same extent as the recent Great War. At no period since the Elizabethans was there such an output of great poetry; and it does not seem to have occurred to any young lady of that time to ask Scott, Wordsworth or Jane Austen what they were doing during the war.
Modern sociologists have drawn lurid pictures of the condition of the working class during the earlier part of the last century. It seems in truth to have been very bad. Byron in 1812 told the Lords: ‘I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country.’ In 1831 a member of parliament said: ‘An agricultural labourer and a pauper—the words are synonymous.’ Those who want details can find them in the well-known controversial books by the Hammonds, which state the case against the governing class in an exhaustive manner. There was in fact too much ground for Disraeli’s statement that England at that time consisted of two nations, the rich and the poor. The poor were still largely illiterate, and so inarticulate; and the comparative absence of the large half-educated class which now dominates all public discussion made the cultivated gentry a class apart. Their own standard of culture was higher than that of the leisured class to-day; but they took little interest in the lives of the poor, until they were forced to do so. We however who have witnessed the succession of economic crises which attend and follow a great war ought not to forget the appalling difficulties with which the government was confronted. In 1795 there was actual famine, which was met by the famous system of doles out of the rates, in augmentation of wages, a most mischievous bit of legislation, like the similar expedients of the last three years. It had the double effect of pauperising the rural labourer and of putting an artificial premium on large families—the children who were carted off in waggon-loads to feed the factories. It was repealed only when the ruined farmers were abandoning their land, and the glebe-owning clergy their livings. Fluctuations in prices had much to do with the miseries of the hungry thirties and forties; but over-population, as the economists of the time pointed out with perfect justice, was one of the main causes. It was not till much later that there was food enough for all; and this was the result of the new wheat fields of America and the sheep walks of Australia, which brought in food and took away mouths. In Ireland the barbarous and illiterate peasantry multiplied till the population exceeded eight millions, when the inevitable famine illustrated nature’s method of dealing with recklessness. The only error with which the economists of this time may be charged was that they did not realise that over-population is the result of a very low standard of civilisation. Families are restricted whenever the parents have social ambitions and a standard of comfort. Where they have none, the vital statistics are those of Russia, Ireland, India and China.
The astonishing progress in all measurable values which marked the first half of the reign produced a whole literature of complacency. I quoted some examples of the language which was then common, in my Romanes Lecture on ‘The Idea of Progress.’ Macaulay supplies some of the best examples. We must remember that the progress was real, and that its speed was unexampled in history. The country was, in vulgar language, a going concern, as it never was before and has not been since. The dominions beyond the seas were being peopled up and consolidated. At home education was spreading, liberty was increasing, and the light taxes were raised with an ease which fortunately for ourselves we no longer even remember. Principles seemed to have been discovered which guaranteed a further advance in almost every direction, intellectual as well as material. For that was the great age of British science; and most branches of literature were flourishing. Hope told a flattering tale, and optimism became a sort of religion.
Nevertheless, such complacency was bound to produce a violent protest. Disraeli, whose well-remembered warning about ‘the two nations’ has already been quoted, described the age as one which by the help of mechanical inventions had mistaken comfort for progress. And comfort, as another critic of social science has said, is more insidious than luxury in hampering the higher development of a people. The literature of social indignation was contemporaneous with the literature of complacency. Carlyle and Ruskin were its chief prophets; but we must not forget the novels of Dickens, Charles Reade and Kingsley.
Carlyle and Ruskin both denounced the age with the vehemence of major prophets—vehemence was in fashion at that time in English literature—but they did not approach the ‘condition of England question’ from quite the same angle. Carlyle was a Stoic, or in other words a Calvinist without dogmas; he had also learned to be a mystic from his studies of German idealism. He represents one phase of the anti-French reaction; he hated most of the ideas of 1789, as displayed in their results. He hated the scepticism of the Revolution, its negations, its love of claptrap rhetoric and fine phrases, and above all its anarchism. He wished to see society well ordered, under its wisest men; he wished to overcome materialism by idealism, and loose morality by industry and the fear of God. Justice, he declared, is done in this world; right is might, if we take long views. Institutions collapse when they become shams, and no longer fulfil their function. The sporting squires ought to be founding colonies instead of preserving game. As for the new industrialism, he disliked it with the fervour of a Scottish peasant.