“Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated.”—Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Above all things, gentlemen,” says Goldsmith’s prisoner for debt, “let us guard our liberties.”

What were the liberties of the people? They were very real; but they did not open the debtor’s prison; nor did they include representation. You will hardly believe that the old condition of things should have lasted so long.

Before the Reform Act of 1832 the only persons who had votes at elections were freeholders; in some boroughs the electors were the Mayor and Corporation; some were “pocket” boroughs, in which the territorial magnate of the neighbourhood nominated the Member; in some there were only two or three electors, who openly put up the seat to the highest bidder. The House of Commons was a body made up almost entirely of younger sons or cousins of the Lords, who voted as they were ordered; many of the members held places under Government—they voted as they were told; many of the members were bribed on every important occasion. On the declaration of the American War of Independence it was in such a House Mr. Burke vainly thundered and protested that taxation in a free country could only go with representation. Alas! the liberties of the country had no other guard than the House of Commons; and the House betrayed the country. It took sixty years of almost continual struggle to get the Reform Act of 1832; yet in a country of twenty millions no more than 440,000 had votes. There are now six million voters; that is to say, the suffrage is practically universal. There are people still outside the wide limits of the franchise, but they are, as a class, so poor, so held down by the hourly necessities of finding food, that they can hardly be considered as suffering any loss of dignity by having no votes. For my own part, I do not think that the suffrage should be a matter of right, nor should it depend upon income or rent; I think that a man before he is allowed to vote should show that he possesses some knowledge of the history of his country and its constitution. I do not expect any one to agree with me, but that is my opinion.

Consider, next, the changes in the conduct of elections. Formerly the election was open and public: it occupied several weeks; during the whole time the town was filled with violence, clamour, drunkenness, and bribery; the elector had to fight his way to the hustings; the mob, which took sides with impartial ferocity, fought each other and hustled the electors. Since it was proclaimed how every man voted, electors had to vote against their conscience for the sake of their private interests—for instance, in the great Westminster election of 1784 the King let his tradesmen understand clearly how he expected them to vote; a contested election cost many thousands; no one could sit in the House who had not an estate worth £300 a year at least; Roman Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews were not permitted to become Members of Parliament.

On the other hand, an election of the present day is conducted with perfect order. There is no shouting; there is no fighting; at eight o’clock in the morning an office is thrown open; a policeman stands outside to direct the voters; almost everybody in the electoral district records his vote. He receives a paper with the names of the candidates upon it; he marks the name for which he votes, folds the paper, and gives it to a clerk, who in his presence drops the paper into a box. At the close of the day the voting papers are opened and counted. The election is over. There has been no bribery, nobody knows how any man has voted, and the whole business is complete in one day.

In changing the franchise and the mode of election we have changed the House of Commons itself. It represents the people—not one class only, but the whole people. There are in it younger sons of Lords; they no longer come in as nominees, but on their own merits; there are no pocket boroughs; there is no property qualification, some of the Members are lawyers, some literary men, some tradesmen, some working-men; all the nation is represented in that assembly. The House is no longer the rich man’s club as it used to be, but it represents the nation; it is no longer a fortress of prejudice and conservatism, but it represents the nation. And consider the vast accession of dignity and self-respect to the working-classes when they realise that the government of the country is really and actually in their own hands, and that they can bring in their own Members of Parliament without coercion and without fear.

The next change is in education. Sixty years ago the mass of the country was uneducated. Millions could neither read nor write; millions could read a little and could not write at all. The whole country is now educated—in every rural village, in every crowded city street, there is a school, and the children are compelled to come in. In addition to the schools there are village libraries, institutions with lending libraries, public libraries where the best literature of the past and the present is freely offered to the people. They can carry home the books, they can have as many books as they are able to read. We are creating new readers by the million. Are we, it is often asked, creating also a whole nation of students? Hardly. Education does not create students, who are born, not made. Besides, we do not want to become a nation of students. The hard work of the world is not done by students or philosophers. Education, however, teaches us something of our own ignorance, something of the source of information, something of humility. Above all, education falling on a kindly soul gives the lad a new recreation for his evenings: instead of horse-play along the streets, instead of drinking at a bar, instead of “keeping company” with a girl every evening, he reads. He does not read for instruction, he pursues no course of study, he reads just for recreation; but such is the character of the reading found for him that he imbibes a great amount of information, learns manners, and acquires a higher standard of morals. The circulation of the penny weeklies proves that he reads; there are a hundred of them at least; their circulation is enormous, some of them attaining to half a million. If we buy some and look at them we find them “scrappy”; they are not vicious, or immoral, or seditious, they are the exact opposites of these; but they are scrappy; it would seem as if their readers, which is probably the fact, are incapable of a sustained argument, and like to be stimulated by short stories of adventure, odds and ends of history, and so forth. Think, however, of the change from a nation which was in great part illiterate in 1837 to a nation which knows something of history and something of geography, and which now reads with avidity. Hardly a cottager now but takes in his weekly newspaper. Lloyd’s Weekly News is, I believe, the most widely circulated of them. It claims more than a million readers; it owns a great pine-forest in Norway to supply its paper, and it is a most respectable paper, popular and full of news, taking one side strongly, but never scurrilous. If you want to understand the English rustic of the day, send for the last number of Lloyd’s and read it through. I am sure that after reading this journal your appreciation of the British rustic will be distinctly raised. And you will own that he is changed indeed.

Consider, next, the widening of the world. I think that it is the tendency of those who live in a small country to make it smaller by their own seclusion. The rustic, for instance, formerly knew nothing of the world but his farm and his village and the nearest market town, whither he carried produce or drove the pigs on market day. This town—which once a week was enlivened by the crowd attending the market; the farmers at the Corn Exchange or the cattle-sheds; the cries of the people at the stalls; the farmers’ ordinary at the principal inn—was, to the rustic, a metropolis, a centre of gaiety. There came rumours, it is true, of an outer world. Somewhere or other there was a king; a recruiting-sergeant carried off a young man here and there; there were recollections of the great wars when wheat went up to 103s. a quarter, when farmers became squires, and squires became peers, but the rustic remained where he was. The village was so full that wages ran down, even while wheat went up; in Devonshire, a man of eighty years assures me that the wages of the agricultural labourer in his youth were 7s. a week, with a two or four roomed cottage, and a pound or two to be made at harvest time. Such a man, with his family, never tasted meat all his life, except sometimes a piece of fat pork. His children lived chiefly on oat-cake. The man’s drink was rough harsh cider. It seems incredible how strong men, of splendid physique, could have been made out of such materials.

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.

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.

Consider next the cheap post. The people have begun to write to each other. Formerly there was little or no communication by letter. It is true that a cheap and easy way was practised, by means of which a young man could communicate to his friends the simple fact of his safety. It was to address a letter to his mother; if she took that letter in it would cost her eightpence at least, but she knew there was nothing written within, therefore she refused to take the letter, which was undelivered, but she knew from the address outside that her son was safe. Now, however, letters pass freely into the village; they convey information, as to work and pay, that the newspapers have not yet learned to furnish; wherever workmen are wanted, thither sets in a stream in search of work. Some years ago a mischievous fund was raised, called the Lord Mayor’s Fund, for the unemployed. A rumour of this fund ran through the whole length and breadth of the land; all the unemployed came up to London from all parts to share in the money so raised; it was distributed chiefly in soup tickets; the men took the tickets, sold them, and drank the contents. The point, however, to notice is that the people, before the proposed fund was started, knew all about it, and had begun to come up in order to claim their share.

I have spoken of the rise in wages. To this I will return presently. Meantime observe that with the rise of wages there has also arrived an extraordinary cheapness in food. The price of wheat, between the years 1786 and 1837 was never lower than 39s. a quarter, and rose to 106s., 113s., 119s., and even 126s. a quarter. It was over 70s. a quarter for seventeen years of that time, and over 50s. for forty years; it is now about 20s. With the price of grain, other things have fallen; tea, which sixty years ago was five shillings a pound, can now be had for eighteenpence; sugar, of which the commonest kind formerly cost ninepence a pound, is now about twopence; cheese, butter, rice, and other products are now imported, and are sold at a half of their former price; meat comes over from New Zealand, frozen, in unknown quantities; clothing is half the price it was; the working-man’s wages, therefore, which have more than doubled, represent a much greater purchasing power. He stands, therefore, upon a higher level of comfort. Another thing—a very important thing—has been done for the rustic. By an Act passed quite recently village councils—parish councils—have been founded. To these councils, elected by the working-classes from themselves, are entrusted the governing of the parish: the lighting, paving, cleaning of the streets, the order and police, and all matters belonging to the daily life of the place. On these councils the squire and the parson may sit, if they are elected; but they have no more power than the others.

So far, it is reported that without the presence of the squire or parson the new councillors flounder. This, however, was to be expected.

In the year 1837 any person who owed another any sum of money, however small, was liable to be arrested for debt, and if he would not pay he could be thrown into prison and kept there till he did pay. Thousands of unfortunate debtors were kept in prison for the whole of their lives on account of some miserable debt which, if they had been out of prison, they could have paid off in a short time. There was a devilish malignity about the law which enabled an attorney to roll up a bill of costs (which the prisoner had to pay), on this pretence and that, like a snowball increasing as it rolled; the warders of the prison demanded fees and “garnish,” in default of which the prisoner was turned into the “poor side,” where the privations and misery and enforced idleness were terrible. If a working-man got into prison, as was always happening, there was no hope for him: the costs went mounting up, he could do no work, he must sit down and starve. Outside the prison, what became of his wife and children? In the year ending 5th January 1830, 7114 persons were sent to the prisons of London for debt; in 1840 the number of prisoners for debt were 1732 in England; in Ireland, under 1000; in Scotland, under 100. By the Act of 1861 imprisonment for debt was forbidden, except in case of debt fraudulently contracted; in 1887, by the Bankruptcy Act imprisonment for debt was virtually abolished altogether. A terror was removed from life when the walls of the Fleet and the Queen’s Bench were taken down and the gates thrown open. The recovery of small debts is now entrusted to the County Court, where the Judge makes an order that so much should be paid weekly or monthly. If the debtor breaks that order, he is liable to imprisonment for contempt of Court.

The English working-man has been accused of servility. Such a charge could never be brought against the working-man of London, or of the North; that servility existed in some of the agricultural districts was undoubtedly true. How should it be otherwise when a man’s daily bread, his work, his home, his wage, depended wholly on one man—the squire? His village was his prison; he could go nowhere else; there was no work for him out of his village; the squire was his “overlord,” to use the old phrase; he was not legally, yet he was in reality, ascriptus glebÆ, bound to the soil; he looked for help in sickness and in trouble to the great house whose ladies looked after the village, helping, feeding, clothing, and admonishing. The man was like a child in leading-strings, or at best like a schoolboy under rule and discipline. With the cause of that servility, the fact itself is vanishing.

The depression in agriculture seems also, on the whole, turning out favourably for the agricultural labourer; the farms are worked more economically and want fewer hands; but the superfluous hands have left the village—there are now no more than are wanted day by day; if an odd piece of work turns up it is difficult to find a man to do it. The men are therefore valued in proportion to their paucity of numbers; their wages, for the same reason, are going up; they live more comfortably, they have more money to spend, they are more independent.

The old laws forbidding workmen from making combinations or “Covins” for the advancement of wages were passed in the fourteenth century, and remained in force until the year 1825, when they were at last repealed. You think, then, that nothing remained for the workpeople but to form as many combinations as they pleased. You are quite wrong. There was still the right of holding public meeting. Until that was acquired—it was only fully granted a few years ago—the repeal of the old law was practically valueless. The right of forming trades unions has been acquired entirely during the present reign. Now the trades union is not popular; it has been ruthlessly enforced; the treatment of blacklegs has been cruel; yet no one can deny that the position of the working-man has been enormously improved, his independence advanced, his wages increased, by the union. The Agricultural Union has not done so much: partly because the countryman is difficult to manage; partly because it would appear that he wants another kind of union. Thus the skilled agriculturalist is a man who knows a great deal, he cannot be replaced except by one like himself; the best chance, therefore, is to stimulate emigration and keep down his own numbers.

I have not mentioned among the forces making for advance the abolition of flogging. As a matter of fact flogging is not abolished, but it is only inflicted upon civilians as a punishment for robbery with violence. About thirty-five years ago there was a common form of robbery called “garrotting,” in which violence and brutality were commonly exhibited. By the advice of the judges the garrotter, on conviction, was flogged. It is maintained that the flogging practically stopped the garrotting. However that may be, there is no doubt that the ruffian who suffers that punishment dislikes it extremely. But this punishment did not affect the respectable classes. In the Army and the Navy, on the other hand, where flogging was practised continually, it did affect them; and it seems wonderful that, in the face of the prejudice against the service which these punishments created, we should have been able to maintain an Army at all. It is, however, just to state that flogging in the Army had been enormously reduced: in 1869 there were only 21 soldiers flogged out of our whole army of 150,000, while an able seaman of the first class could not be flogged at all; and in the same year, in the whole of the navy of 80,000 men only 8 were flogged. By the Army Discipline Act of 1879 flogging was finally abolished. But, I repeat, I do not consider this reform as affecting materially the mind of the English working-man.

Now read through this long list of reforms, every one of them exercising steady, continual, irresistible influence upon the individual. What changes do you expect to find in him?

He has become, in fact, more independent, more responsible; he knows so much more that he feels his own ignorance; he is not so easily led by a demagogue; it is not so easy to inflame his passions; he thinks and asks questions; he is better fed, better clothed; he walks more upright; he is no longer a machine; he understands the power of combination; he sits at the table of his parish council on equal terms with the squire and the vicar; he no longer regards his native village as the place to which he is bound; he has friends in various parts of the world; they come home from time to time and they tell him of these countries—Republics all, except in name—where there are no squires and no landlords; and he asks himself whether it is better to stay on in the old place, or to try for a bigger thing beyond the seas.

Changed as he is, and certain to change yet more and more in the immediate future, do not forget that the English working-man, even of the town, feels a great shrinking about leaving the old home. In a village this seems natural; the place is calm and lovely, the ancient church with its gray tower standing in the churchyard, where the rooks and pigeons and blackbirds keep up a continual chorus; the village green, the village inn, the gabled cottages, the gates that lead to the Hall, the fields and hedges, the stream, and the hills, and the hanging woods—these things enter into the very heart and soul of the Englishman; he loves them all, he cannot choose but love them, though he would not know how to express his affection; in the churchyard he knows the mounds that belong to his own people; in the tavern he sits among his cronies on the polished settle beside the fire, his mug before him, his pipe in his mouth. In his heart he wants no other life. These things he could not find in America or Australia or New Zealand. Yet he is changed, and if you wait for twenty years you will no longer recognise him for what he was. He is getting a touch from America, a thought from Australia, a custom from New Zealand; he will be a citizen of the world, and, if I read the signs aright, he will become before another generation the owner and the master of agricultural England.

Let us leave the village and turn to the town.

There are two books in our literature which tell of English factory life in the early part of this century. One of these is Disraeli’s Sybil; the other is Mrs. Trollope’s Michael Armstrong. I fear that these two books are not read so much as they should be; partly, perhaps, because we do not love to dwell too much on the shameful side of history. The condition of the working-man before the Victorian era is indeed a very shameful part of history. The record of the factory and the mine is very black. Let me show you something of what it was. I tell you beforehand, that the story proves that power over his fellow-men must never be entrusted to any man; for he will abuse that power—he will become an oppressor and a tyrant.

He began this oppression with the children. He has a mill, a factory, a mine; in which he made the children work. He worked them so cruelly; he gave them such long hours, such poor food, such wretched clothing, that he lowered the vitality of these unfortunate children so that an epidemic broke out among them; it carried off thousands. This frightened the owner of these children, because, if they all died, what would become of his mill?

Then the House of Commons interfered—very reluctantly—because to stand between the master and his man was felt to be a dangerous innovation. It interfered, however, and passed a law which forbade children under nine to be employed in a factory, and limited their hours to twelve, exclusive of an hour and a half for rest and food; so that by this merciful Act a little girl of ten might be, and actually was, made to work from six in the morning till half-past seven at night. Can one conceive a readier method of destroying strength, youth, self-respect, everything? But the injured millowner got over this law. He was not forced to make the children work continuously. He therefore made the children work in relays, so that they had half the night as well as half the day to work in. This went on for thirty years before the nation was moved by the injustice and cruelty of the thing. An Act was passed that no children should work between 8.30 P.M. and 5.30 A.M.; that children under thirteen should not work more than 48 hours a week or eight hours a day; and that those under eighteen should not work more than 68 hours a week or 11? hours a day. As I told you, the man who had the power exercised it cruelly, heartlessly, ruthlessly, for the conversion of his people into slaves.

Then, because the Act spoke of the factory or the mill, and not of the mine, they took the little children and dropped them into the coal-pit. When the boy or the girl was six years of age—six! think of it—they took the little thing and put it in a dark passage, underground, with instructions to open and shut a door in order to let the trucks come and go. All day long—for twelve hours—that innocent infant was kept in the dark opening and shutting the doors. They worked from four in the morning till four in the evening; when they were taken up they were stupid, and cared for nothing but to sleep. When they grew older they pushed the trucks with their heads; when they grew older still the lads became hewers of coal: the girls—now women—continued to push the trucks with their heads or to drag them, clad in nothing but a pair of short trousers. This was done in a Christian country which boasted of having abolished slavery. Observe that there was no chance for these children ever to learn anything, ever to do anything, except to continue all their lives in the coal-pit; they were doomed to brutish ignorance, to unremitting toil, without holidays, except on Sunday—day after day, week after week, year after year, till they could push the truck no longer, till the pick fell from their hands.

The chimney-sweep’s case was almost as bad as the miner’s. He too was taken at a very early age, and his duty was to climb the chimney, sweeping it as he went up. It is not a pleasant thing to climb a chimney choked with soot; it abraded hands, elbows, and knees: sometimes the little wretch could get no higher; if he failed he was beaten unmercifully. There was a curious prejudice against sweeping with a brush: the child was allowed to go unwashed, though the neglect of cleanliness was certain to bring on a dreadful disease. It was not till four years after the Queen began her reign that an Act was passed protecting the children and substituting the brush for the human body.

This was the treatment of children in mill, in mine, in town. There were other lines and branches of cruelty because children are helpless. But these examples will suffice.

Let us leave the children and turn to the men. The change for the better began, I believe, with the ideas of the French Revolution, at first eagerly caught by the English working people: it was continued by the long agitation for the Reform Act of 1832 and the fierce resistance of the Duke of Wellington and the Bishops: these ideas and this agitation taught the people how to combine and act together. They also taught the people to hate a Government in which they had no share or part or lot. A great many—though still the minority—could now read; the papers they read were bitterly hostile to the ruling powers. As I have already pointed out, there was no loyalty at all among the working-men of the Thirties; they did not pretend any. Their papers were revolutionary; the things they said of the Queen and the Prince Consort were revolting; the aristocracy, according to them, were open and shameless; the clergy were pampered hypocrites. What has happened since then? The people have been admitted to their share in the Government; they can do what they like: if they choose they can alter the Constitution. Do they choose? Not at all; they have become loyal; they have become, comparatively, conservative.

The recreations of the working-man, apart from the tavern, were boxing and dog-fighting. Single-stick, wrestling, quarter-staff, cock-fighting, had to a great extent gone out. Boxing remained, every man knew how to handle his fists: you may remember that in Tom Brown at Oxford, there is a serious discussion on the knotty question whether a gentleman can, or cannot, always lick a cad. Dear me, this kind of talk is now so old-world. However, a man was always supposed to be ready to strip and engage—gentleman or cad. Dickens’s stories contain many instances of the rough-and-ready “turn up.” The change is a gain from one point of view; it is a loss, from another, that the noble art of self-defence has fallen out of practice; it is, further, a gain as well as a loss, that it shows signs of returning to favour.

There are still fairs left. Several fairs were held in the neighbourhood of London. Bartholomew’s, degenerated into a scene of drunkenness and disorder, still continued. Greenwich Fair continued, and Deptford Fair; there was also a fair at Barnet; but the fairs had practically gone out of the life of the country. It was a mark of the times that the working-classes no longer delighted in the noise and the ribaldry that disgraced the later years of the London fairs.

I have spoken of education in the rural districts. Long before the young rustic could learn to read, the townsmen had the chance of some education. There were many charity schools: there were the schools of the National Society and of the British and Foreign Society: there were also the Sunday Schools.

Criminal procedure does not, perhaps, affect the average civilian. At the same time one learns that before 1836 it was actually forbidden that a prisoner should defend himself before the jury by counsel. Imagine, if you can, a timid, shrinking girl, called upon to plead for her life in open court after being maddened by jargon which she did not understand and formalities which only filled her with bewilderment. It is said that the judges themselves repaired this evil: it is quite possible. Our judges have always been superior to the laws they have had to administer; but then the prisoner was at the mercy of the judge; he might, or he might not, find a remedy for the speechlessness and the incapacity of the prisoner.

If you take up a bundle of old newspapers you will find that every one of them has got a red stamp upon it. This was the tax upon newspapers. It was a penny a copy in 1760; in 1815 it was actually fourpence a copy; in 1836 it was reduced to a penny; in 1855 it was totally abolished. There was, in addition, a tax on paper, which was repealed in 1861. It is wonderful how newspapers continued to exist at all with an impost so crushing: it is still more wonderful how working-men’s papers could hold their own. In fact, their circulation was very small; they were weekly, not daily; they were taken in at taverns where the men could see them, not by the men themselves. It is not one of the least reforms of this reign which has placed in the hands of everybody a cheap newspaper, full, large, with copious intelligence, and educated commentary.

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.