When the real history of the people comes to be written—which will be the History, not of the Higher, but of the Lower Forms of Civilisation—it will be found that, as regards the people of these islands, they sank to their lowest point of degradation and corruption in the middle of the eighteenth century—a period when they had no religion, no morality, no education, and no knowledge, and when they were devoured by two dreadful diseases, and were prematurely killed by their excessive drinking of gin. No virtue at all seems to have survived among all the many virtues attributed to our race except a bulldog courage and tenacity. There are glimpses here and there, when some essayist or novelist lifts the veil, which show conditions of existence so shocking that one asks in amazement how there could have been any cheerfulness in the civilised part of the community for thinking of the terrible creatures in the ranks below. They did not think of them; they did not know of them; to us it seems as if the roaring of that volcano must have been always in their ears, and the smoke of it always choking their throats. But our people saw and heard nothing. Across the Channel, where men’s eyes were quicker to see, the danger was clearly discerned, and the eruption foretold. Here, no one saw anything, or feared anything.

How this country got through without a revolution, how it escaped the dangers of that mob, are questions more difficult to answer than the one which continually occupies historians—How Great Britain, single-handed, fought against the conqueror of the world. Both victories were mainly achieved, I believe, by the might and majesty of Father Stick.

He is dead now, and will rule no more in this country. But all through the last century, and well into this, he was more than a king—he was a despot, relentless, terrible. He stripped women to the waist and whipped them at Bridewell; he caught the ’prentices and flogged them soundly; he lashed the criminal at the cart-tail; he lashed the slaves in the plantations, the soldiers in the army, the sailors on board the ships, and the boys at school. He kept everybody in order, and, truly, if the old violence were to return, we might have to call in Father Stick again.

He was good up to a certain point, beyond which he could not go. He could threaten, ‘If you do this, and this, you shall be trounced.’ Thus the way of transgressors was made visibly hard for them. But he could not educate—he taught nothing except obedience to the law; he had neither religion nor morals; therefore, though he kept the people in order, he did not advance them. On the other hand, under his rule they were left entirely to themselves, and so they grew worse and worse, more thirsty of gin, more brutal, more ignorant. So that, in the long run, I suppose there was not under the light of the sun a more depraved and degraded race than that which peopled the lowest levels of our great towns. There is always in every great town a big lump of lawlessness, idleness, and hostility to order. The danger, a hundred years ago, was that this lump was getting every day bigger, and threatening to include the whole of the working class.

Remember that as yet the government of this realm was wholly in the hands of the wealthier sort. Only those who had what was humorously called a stake in the country were allowed to share in ruling it. Those who brought to the service of their native land only their hands and their lives, their courage, their patience, skill, endurance, and obedience, were supposed to have no stake in the country. The workers, who contribute the whole that makes the prosperity of the country, were then excluded from any share in managing it.

It seems to me that the first improvement of the People dates from their perception of the fact that all have a right to help in managing their own affairs; I think one might prove that the ideas of the French Revolution, when they were once grasped, arrested the downward course of the People—the first step to dignity and self-respect was to understand that they might become free men, and not remain like unto slaves who are ordered and have to obey. Then they began to struggle for their rights, and in the struggle learned a thousand lessons which have stood them in good stead. They learned to combine, to act together, to form committees and councils; they learned the art of oratory, and the arts of persuasion by speech and pen; they learned the power of knowledge—in a word, the long struggle whose first great victory was the Reform Act of 1832 taught the People the art of self-government.

Fifty years ago, though that Act had been passed, the great mass of the people were still outside the government. They were governed by a class who desired, on the whole, to be just, and wished well to the people, provided their own interests were not disturbed, as when the most philanthropic manufacturers loudly cried out as soon as it was proposed to restrict the hours of labour. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the working classes should at that time regard all governments with hostility, and Religion and Laws as chiefly intended to repress the workers and to safeguard the interests of landlords and capitalists. This fact is abundantly clear from the literature which the working men of 1837 delighted to read.

As regards their religion, there was already an immense advance in the spread of the Nonconformist sects and the multiplication of chapels. As for the churches, I am very certain that the working man does not go much to church even yet, but fifty years ago he attended service still less often. A contemporary who pretends to know asserts that nine out of ten among the working men were professed infidels, whose favourite reading was Paine, Carlile, and Robert Taylor, the author of ‘The Devil’s Chaplain.’ Further, he declares that not one working man in a hundred ever opened a Bible.

I refrain from dwelling upon this state of things as compared with that of the present, but it appears from a census taken by a recent weekly newspaper (which, however, omitted the mission churches and services in school-rooms and other places) that about one person in nine now attends church or chapel on a Sunday.

As regards drink, a question almost as delicate as that of religion, it is reported that in London alone three millions of pounds were spent every year in gin, which seems a good deal of money to throw away with nothing to show for it. But figures are always misleading. Thus, if everybody drank his fair share of this three millions, there would be only a single glass of gin every other day for every person; and if half the people did not drink at all, there would be only one glass of gin a day for those who did. Still, we must admit that three millions is a sum which shows a widespread love of gin. As for rum, brandy, and Hollands, the various forms of malt liquor, fancy drinks, and compounds, let us reserve ourselves for the chapter on Taverns. Suffice it here to call attention to the fact that there was no blue ribbon worn. Teetotallers there were, it is true, but in very small numbers; they were not yet a power in the land; there was none of the everlasting dinning about the plague spot, the national vice, and the curse of the age, to which we are now accustomed. Honest men indulged in a bout without subsequent remorse, and so long as the drink was unadulterated they did themselves little harm. Without doubt, if the men had become teetotallers, there would have been very much more to spend in the homes, and the employers would, also without doubt, have made every effort to reduce the wages accordingly, so as to keep up the old poverty. That is what the former school of philosophers called a Law of Political Economy. The wages of a skilled mechanic fifty years ago seem to have never risen above thirty shillings a week, while food, clothes, and necessaries were certainly much dearer than at present. He had savings banks, and he sometimes put something by, but not nearly so much as he can do now if he is thrifty and in regular work. It is quite clear that he was less thrifty in those days than now, that he drank more, and that he was even more reckless, if that is possible, about marriage and the multiplication of children.

As for the material condition of the people, there cannot be a doubt that it has been amazingly improved within the last fifty years. It is not true, as stated in a very well known work, that the poor have become poorer, though the rich have certainly become richer. The skilled working man is better paid now than then, his work is more steady, his hours are shorter. He is better clad, with always a suit of clothes apart from his working dress; he is better taught; he is better mannered; he has holidays; he has clubs; he is no longer forbidden to combine; he can co-operate; he holds meetings; he has much better newspapers to read; his food is better and cheaper; he has model lodging houses. Not only is he actually better; he is relatively better compared with the richer classes, while for the last ten years these have been growing poorer every day, although still much richer than they were fifty years ago. Moreover, it is becoming more difficult in every line, owing to the upward pressure of labour, to become rich.

His amusements no longer have the same brutality which used to characterise them. The Ring was his chief delight, and a well-fought battle between two accomplished bruisers caused his heart to leap with joy. Unhappily the Ring fell, not because the national sentiment concerning pugilism changed, but by its own vices, and because nearly every fight was a fight on the cross; so that betting on your man was no longer possible, and every victory was arranged beforehand. There are now signs of its revival, and if it can be in any way regulated it will be a very good thing for the country. Then there was dog-fighting, which is still carried on in certain parts of the country. Only a few years ago I saw a dozen dog-fights, each with its ring of eager lookers-on, one Sunday morning upon the sands between Redcar and Saltburn. All round London, again, there were ponds, quantities of ponds, all marked in the maps of the period and now all filled up and built over. Some, for instance, were in the fields on the east side of Tottenham Court Road. Hither, on Sundays, came the London working man with ducks, cats, and dogs, and proceeded to enjoy himself with cat-hunts and duck-hunts in these ponds. There were also bull-and-bear-baitings and badger-drawings. As for the fairs, Bartholomew and Greenwich, one is sorry that they had to be abolished, but I suppose that London had long been too big for a fair, which may be crowded but must not be mobbed. A real old fair, with rows of stalls crammed with all kinds of things which looked ever so much prettier under the flaring lamps than in the shops, with Richardson’s Theatre, the Wild Beast Show, the wrestlers and the cudgel-players, the boxers, with or without the gloves, the dwarfs, giants, fat women, bearded women, and monsters, was a truly delightful thing to the rustics in the country; but in London it was incongruous, and even in Arcadia a modern fair is apt to lose its picturesque aspect towards nightfall. On the whole, it is just as well for London that it has lost its ancient fairs.

It is not in connection with working men, but with the whole people, that one speaks of prisons. I do not think that our prison system at the present day is every thing that it might be. There have been one or two books published of late years, which make one uncomfortable in thinking of the poor wretches immured in these abodes of solitary suffering. Still, if one has to choose between a lonely cell and the society of the prison birds by day and night, one would prefer the former. Some attempts had been made in Newgate and elsewhere to prevent the prisoners from corrupting each other, but with small success. Those who were tried and sentenced were separated from those who were waiting their trial; the boys were separated from the men, the girls from the women. Yet the results of being committed to prison, for however short a period, were destructive of all morals and the last shred of principle. Not a single girl or woman who went into prison modest and virtuous but became straightway ashamed of her modesty and virtue, and came out of the prison already an abandoned woman. Not a man or boy who associated with the prisoners for a week but became a past master in all kinds of wickedness. In the night rooms they used to lock up fifteen or twenty prisoners together, and leave them there all night to interchange their experiences—and what experiences! Only those who were under sentence of death had separate cells. These poor wretches were put into narrow and dark rooms, receiving light only from the court in which the criminals are permitted to walk during the day. They slept on a mat, and in former days had but twenty-four hours between sentence and execution, with bread and water for all their food.

Transportation still went on, with the horrors of the convict ship, the convict hulks, and the convict establishments of New South Wales and Tasmania. The ‘horrors’ of the system have always seemed to me as forming an unessential part of the system. With better management on modern ideas, transportation should be far better than the present system of hopeless punishment by long periods of imprisonment. We can never return to transportation as far as any colony is concerned, but I venture to prophesy that the next change of the penal laws will be the re-establishment of transportation with the prospect of release, a gift of land, and a better chance for an honest life.

Meantime the following lines belong to Fifty Years Ago. They are the Farewell of convicts about to sail for Botany Bay:

Debtors’ prisons were in full swing. There were Whitecross Street Prison, built in 1813 for the exclusive reception of debtors, who were before this crowded together with criminals at Newgate; Queen’s Bench Prison, the Fleet, and the Marshalsea. The King’s Bench Prison was the largest, and, so to speak, the most fashionable of these prisons. Both at the King’s Bench and the Fleet debtors were allowed to purchase what were called the ‘Rules,’ which enabled them to live within a certain area outside the prison, and practically left them free. They paid a certain percentage on their debts. This practice enabled the debtor to refuse paying his debts, and to save his money for himself or his heirs. Lodgings, however, within the Rules were bad and expensive.

There was no national compulsory system of education; yet the children of respectable working men were sent to school. The children of the very poor, those who lived from hand to mouth by day jobs, by chance and luck, were not taught anything. If you talk to a working man of sixty or thereabouts, you will most likely discover that he can read, though he has very often forgotten how to write. He was taught when he was a child at the schools of the National Society, or at those of the British and Foreign Society, or at the parish schools, of which there were a great many. There were also many thousands of children who went to the Sunday School. Yet, partly through the neglect of parents, and partly through the demand for children’s labour in the factories, nearly a half of the children in the country grew up without any schooling. In 1837 there were forty per cent. of the men and sixty-five per cent. of the women who could not sign their own names.

And there were already effected, or just about to be effected, three immense reforms, the like of which the nation had never seen before, which are together working for a Revolution of Peace, not of war, greater than contemplated by the most sincere and most disinterested of the French Revolutionaries.

The first was the Reform of the Penal Laws. In the beginning of the century the law recognised 223 capital offences. A man might be hanged for almost anything: if he appeared in disguise on a public road; if he cut down young trees; if he shot rabbits; if he poached at night; if he stole anything worth five shillings from a person or a shop; if he came back from transportation before his time; a gipsy, if he remained in the same place a year. In fact, the chief desire of the Government was to get rid of the criminal classes by hanging them. It was Sir Samuel Romilly, as everybody knows, who first began to attack this bloodthirsty code. He was assisted by the growth of public opinion and by the juries, who practically repealed the laws by refusing to convict.

It was not, again, until the year 1836 that counsel for a prisoner under trial for felony was permitted to address the jury. In the year 1834, there were 480 death sentences; in 1838, only 116. In 1834, 894 persons were sentenced to transportation for life, and in 1838 only 266. Remember that this wicked severity only served to enlist the sympathies of the people against the Government. The second great step was the repeal of the Acts which forbade combination. Until the year 1820, the people had been forbidden to combine. Their only power against employers who worked them as many hours a day as they dared, and paid them wages as small as they could, who took their children and locked them up in unwholesome factories, was in combination, and they were forbidden to combine. When the law—an old mediÆval law—was repealed, it was found that any attempt to hold public meetings might be put down by force; so that, though they could not combine, the chief means of promoting combination was taken from them.

The third great step was the Extension of the Suffrage, so that now there is no Briton or Irishman but can, if he please, have his vote in the government of the nation. It is not a great share which is conferred by one vote, but it enables every man to feel that he is himself a part of the nation; that the government is not imposed upon him, but elected and approved by himself.

Considering all these things, have we any reason to be surprised when we learn that, on the Queen’s Accession, there was among the people no loyalty whatever? Attachment to the Sovereign, personal devotion to the young Queen, rallying round the Throne—all these things were not even phrases to the working class. For they never heard them used.

There was no loyalty at all, either to the Queen, or to the institution of a limited Monarchy, or to the Constitution, or to the Church.

For a hundred and fifty years there had been no loyalty among the people. Loyalty left the country with James II. Not one of the Sovereigns who followed him commanded the personal enthusiasm of the people, not even Farmer George, for whom there had been some kind of affection with something of contempt. From 1687 until 1837, which is exactly one hundred and fifty years, not one Sovereign who sat upon the Throne of England could boast that he had the love of the people. Not one wished to have the love of the people. He represented a principle: he governed with the assistance of a few families and by the votes of a small class. As King he was a stranger. When he drove through the streets, the people hurrahed; but they did not know him, and they cared nothing for him.

Therefore the sentiment of loyalty had to be re-born. It could only be awakened by a woman, young, virtuous, naturally amiable, and resolved on ruling by constitutional methods. Yet in some of the journals written for, and read by, the working men, the things said concerning the Queen, the Prince Consort, and the Court were simply horrible and disgusting. Such things are no longer said. There are still papers which speak of the aristocracy as a collection of titled profligates, and of the clergy as a crowd of pampered hypocrites, but of the Queen it is rare indeed to find mention other than is respectful. Her life and example for fifty years have silenced the slanderers. It has been found once more possible for a Sovereign to possess the love of her people.

The papers read by the working men were not only scurrilous, but they were Republican and revolutionary. The Republic whose example they set before themselves was not the American, which is Conservative, for of this they knew nothing. Let us clearly understand this. Fifty years ago America was far more widely separated from England than is China now. The ideal Republic was then the earlier form of the first French Republic. These people cared little for the massacres which accompanied the application of Republican principles. I do not say that they wished to set the heads of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting on pikes, but they thought the massacres of innocent women by the French an accident rather than a consequence. They loved the cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ and still believed in it. They dreamed of a country which they thought could be established by law, in which every man was to be the equal of his neighbour—as clever, as skilful, as capable, as rich, and as happy. The dream continues, and will always continue, to exist. It is a generous dream—there never has been a nobler dream—so that it is a thousand pities that human greed, selfishness, ambition, and masterfulness will not suffer the dream to be realised. Those who advocated an attempt to realise it flung hard names at the Crown, the Court, the aristocracy, the Church, the educated, and the wealthy. Presently they began to formulate the way by which they thought to place themselves within reach of their object. The way was Chartism. They wanted to carry six measures—Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property Qualification, Payment of Members, and Equal Electoral Districts. Very well; we have got, practically, four out of the six points, and there are many who think that we are as far off the Millennium as ever. Yet there are, however, still among us people who believe that we can be made happy, just, merciful, and disinterested by changing the machinery. Changing the machinery! The old party of Radicals still work themselves into a white heat by crying for change in the machinery.

And now a thing which was never contemplated even by the Chartists themselves—the really important thing—has been acquired by the people. They are no longer the governed, but the governors. The Government is no longer a thing apart from themselves, and outside them. It is their own—it is the Government of the People of England. If there is anything in it which they do not like, they can alter it; if there is anything they agree to abolish, they can abolish it, whether it be Church, Crown, Lords, wealth, education, science, art—anything. They may destroy what they please: they may reduce the English to an illiterate peasantry if they please.

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!