The consideration of the country as it was would not be complete without some comparison with the country as it is. But I will make this comparison as brief as possible.

In the Church, the old Calvinism is well-nigh dead: even the Low Church of the present day would have seemed, fifty years ago, a kind of veiled Popery. And the Church has grown greater and stronger. She will be greater and stronger still when she enlarges her borders to admit the great bodies of Nonconformists. The old grievances exist no longer: there are no pluralists: there is no non-resident Vicar: the small benefices are improved: Church architecture has revived: the Church services are rendered with loving and jealous care: the old reproaches are no longer hurled at the clergy: fat and lazy shepherds they certainly are not: careless and perfunctory they cannot now be called: even if they are less scholarly, which must be sorrowfully admitted, they are more earnest.

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.

The civil service of the country is no longer in the patronage of the Government. There are few spoils left to the victors; there are no sinecures left; except in the Crown Colonies, there are few places to be given away. It is, however, very instructive to remark that, wherever there is a place to be given away, it is invariably, just as of old, and without the least difference of party, whether Conservatives or Liberals are in power, filled up by jobbery, favouritism, and private interest.

You have been told how they have introduced vast reforms in Law. Prisons for debt have been abolished; yet men are still imprisoned for debt. Happily I know little about the administration of Law. Some time ago, however, I was indirectly interested in an action in the High Court of Justice, the conduct and result of which gave me much food for reflection. It was an action for quite a small sum of money. Yet a year and a half elapsed between the commencement of the action and its hearing. The verdict carried costs. The costs amounted to three times the sum awarded to the plaintiff. That seems to be a delightful condition of things when you cannot get justice to listen to you for a year and a half, and when it may cost a defendant three times the amount disputed in order to defend what he knows—though his counsel may fail to make a jury understand the case—to be just and right. I humbly submit, as the next reform in Law, that Justice shall have no holidays, so as to expedite actions, and that the verdict shall in no case carry costs, so as to cheapen them.

As for our recreations, we no longer bawl comic songs at taverns, and there is no Vauxhall. On the other hand, the music-hall is certainly no improvement on the tavern; the ‘Colonies’ was perhaps a more respectable Vauxhall; the comic opera may be better than the old extravaganza, but I am not certain that it is; there are the Crystal Palace, the Aquarium, and the Albert Hall also in place of Vauxhall; and there are outdoor amusements unknown fifty years ago—lawn tennis, cycling, rowing, and athletics of all kinds.

There has been a great upward movement of the professional class. New professions have come into existence, and the old professions are more esteemed. It was formerly a poor and beggarly thing to belong to any other than the three learned professions; a barrister would not shake hands with a solicitor, a Nonconformist minister was not met in any society. Artists, writers, journalists, were considered Bohemians. The teaching of anything was held in contempt; to become a teacher was a confession of the direst poverty—there were thousands of poor girls eating out their hearts because they had to ‘go out’ as governesses. There were no High Schools for girls; there were no colleges for them.

Slavery has gone. There are now no slaves in Christendom, save in the island of Cuba. Fifty years ago an American went mad if you threw in his teeth the ‘Institution;’ either he defended it with zeal, or else he charged England with having introduced it into the country: in the Southern States it was as much as a man’s life was worth to say a word against it; travellers went South on purpose that they might see slaves put up to auction, mothers parted from their children, and all the stock horrors. Then they came home and wrote about it, and held up their hands and cried, ‘Oh, isn’t it dreadful?’ The negro slavery is gone, and now there is only left the slavery of the women who work. When will that go too? And how can it be swept away?

Public executions gone: pillory gone—the last man pilloried was in the year 1830: no more flogging in the army: the Factory Acts passed: all these are great gains. A greater is the growth of sympathy with all those who suffer, whether wrongfully or by misfortune, or through their own misdoings. This growth of sympathy is due especially to the works of certain novelists belonging to the Victorian age. It is producing all kinds of good works—the unselfish devotion of men and women to work among the poor: teaching of every description: philanthropy which does not stop short with the cheque: charity which is organized: measures for prevention: support of hospitals and convalescent homes: the introduction of Art and Music to the working classes.

All these changes seem to be gains. Have there been no losses?

In the nature of things there could not fail to be losses. Some of the old politeness has been lost, though there are still men with the fine manners of our grandfathers: the example of the women who speak, who write, who belong to professions, and are, generally, aggressive, threatens to change the manners of all women: they have already become more assured, more self-reliant, less deferent to men’s opinion—the old deference of men to women was, of course, merely conventional. They no longer dread the necessity of working for themselves; they plunge boldly into the arena prepared to meet with no consideration on the score of sex. If a woman writes a bad book, for instance, no critic hesitates to pronounce it bad because a woman has written it. Whatever work man does woman tries to do. They boldly deny any inferiority of intellect, though no woman has ever produced any work which puts her anywhere near the highest intellectual level. They claim a complete equality which they have hitherto failed to prove. Some of them even secretly whisper of natural superiority. They demand their vote. Perhaps, before long, they will be in both Houses, and then man will be speedily relegated to his proper place, which will be that of the executive servant. Oh! happy, happy time!

It is said that we have lost the old leisure of life. As for that, and the supposed drive and hurry of modern life, I do not believe in it. That is to say, the competition is fierce and the struggle hard. But these are no new things. It is a commonplace to talk of the leisure and calm of the eighteenth century—it cannot be too often repeated that in 1837 we were still in that century—I declare that in all my reading about social life in the eighteenth century I have failed to discover that leisure. From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria I have searched for it, and I cannot find it. The leisure of the eighteenth century exists, in fact, only in the brain of painter and poet. Life was hard; labour was incessant, and lasted the whole day long; the shopmen lived in the shop—they even slept in it; the mill people worked all day long and far into the night. If I look about the country, I see in town and village the poor man oppressed and driven by his employer: I see the labourer in a blind revenge setting fire to the ricks; I see the factory hand destroying the machinery; I see everywhere discontent, poverty, privilege, patronage, and profligacy; I hear the shrieks of the wretches flogged at the cart tail, the screams of the women flogged at Bridewell. I see the white faces of the poor creatures brought out to be hung up in rows for stealing bread; I see the fighting of the press-gang; I see the soldiers and sailors flogged into sullen obedience; I see hatred of the Church, hatred of the governing class, hatred of the rich, hatred of employers—where, with all these things, is there room for leisure? Leisure means peace, contentment, plenty, wealth, and ease. What peace, what contentment was there in those days?

The decay of the great agricultural interest is a calamity which has been coming upon us slowly, though with a continually accelerated movement. This is the reason, I suppose, why the country regards it with so strange an apathy. It is not only that the landlords are rapidly encountering ruin, that the farmers are losing all their capital, and that labourers are daily turned out of work and driven away to the great towns; the very existence of the country towns is threatened; the investments which depend on rent and estates are threatened; colleges and charities are losing their endowments; worst of all, the rustic, the backbone and support of the country, who has always supplied all our armies with all our soldiers, is fast disappearing from the land. I confess that, if something does not happen to stay the ruin of agriculture in these Islands, I think the end of their greatness will not be far off. Perhaps I think and speak as a fool; but it seems to me that a cheap loaf is dearly bought if, among other blessings, it deprives the countryside of its village folk, strong and healthy, and the empire of its stalwart soldiers. As for the House of Lords and the English aristocracy, they cannot survive the day when the farms cannot even support the hands that till the soil, and are left untilled and uncultivated.

There are, to make an end, two changes especially for which we can never be sufficiently thankful. The first is the decay of the old Calvinism; that gone, the chief terror of life is gone too; the chief sting of death is gone; the terrible, awful question which reasoning man could not refrain from asking is gone too.

The second change is the transference of the power to the people. All the power that there is we have given to the people, who are now waiting for a prophet to teach them how best to use it. I trust I am under no illusions; Democracy has many dangers and many evils; but these seem to me not so bad as those others which we have shaken off. One must not expect a Millennium; mistakes will doubtless be committed, and those bad ones. Besides, a change in the machinery does not change the people who run that machinery. There will be the tyranny of the Caucus to be faced and trampled down; we must endure, with all his vices and his demagogic arts, the professional politician whose existence depends on his party; we must expect—and ceaselessly fight against—bribery and wholesale corruption when a class of these professional politicians, poor, unscrupulous, and grasping, will be continually, by every evil art, by every lying statement, by every creeping baseness, endeavouring to climb unto power—such there are already among us; we shall have to awaken from apathy, and keep awake, those who are anxious to avoid the arena of politics, yet, by education, position, and natural abilities, are called upon to lead. Yet who, even in the face of the certain dangers, the certain mistakes, of Democracy, shall say that great, terrible, and most disastrous mistakes have not been made by an Aristocracy? There is always hope where there is freedom; let us trust in the common-sense of the nation, and remain steadfast in that trust.