Great Britain and Her Queen Part 5

CHAPTER VIII.

OUR COLONIES.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sydney Heads.]

If now we turn our eyes a while from the foreign and domestic concerns of Great Britain proper, and look to the Greater Britain beyond the seas, we shall find that its progress has nowise lagged behind that of the mother Isle. To Lord Durham, the remarkable man sent out in 1838 to deal with the rebellion in Lower Canada, we owe the inauguration of a totally new scheme of colonial policy, which has been crowned with success wherever it has been introduced. It has succeeded in the vast Canadian Dominion, now stretching from ocean to ocean, and embracing all British North America, with the single exception of the Isle of Newfoundland. In 1867 this Federation was first formed, uniting then only the two Canadas with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, under a const.i.tution framed on Lord Durham's plan, and providing for the management of common affairs by a central Parliament, while each province should have its own local legislature, and the executive be vested in the Crown, ruling through its Governor General. It had been made competent for the other provinces of British North America to join this Federation, if they should so will; and one after another has joined it, with the one exception mentioned above, which may or may not be permanent. The population of the Dominion has trebled, and its revenues have increased twenty-fold, since its const.i.tution was thus settled.

The same system, it may be hoped, will equally succeed in that wonderful Australasia where our colonists now have the shaping of their destinies in their own hands, amid the yet unexplored amplitude of a land where "in the softest and sweetest air, and in an unexhausted soil, the fable of Midas is reversed; food does not turn to gold, but the gold with which the land is teeming converts itself into farms and vineyards, into flocks and herds, into crops of wild luxuriance, into cities whose recent origin is concealed and compensated by trees and flowers."

In such terms does a recent eye-witness describe the splendid prosperity attained within the last two or three decades by that Australia which our fathers thought of chiefly as a kind of far-off rubbish-heap where they could fling out the human garbage of England, to rot or redeem itself as it might, well out of the way of society's fastidious nostril, and which to our childhood was chiefly a.s.sociated with the wild gold-fever and the wreck and ruin which that fever too often wrought. The transportation system, so far as Australia was concerned, came virtually to an end with the discovery of gold in the region to which we had been shipping off our criminals. The colonists had long been complaining of this system, which at first sight had much to recommend it, as offering a fair chance of reformation to the convict, and providing cheap labour for the land that received him.

But it was found, as a high official said, that convict labour was far less valuable than the uncompelled work of honest freemen; and the contagious vices which the criminal cla.s.ses brought with them made them little welcome. When to these drawbacks were added the difficulties and dangers with which the presence of the convict element in the population enc.u.mbered the new gold-mining industry, the question reached the burning stage. The system was modified in 1853, and totally abolished in 1857. Transports whose sentence were unexpired lingered out their time in Tasmania, whence the aborigines have vanished under circ.u.mstances of cruelty a.s.suredly not mitigated by the presence of convicts in the island; but Australia was henceforth free from the blight.

The political life of these colonies may be said to have begun in the same year--1853--when the importation of criminals received its first check. New South Wales, the eldest of the Australian provinces, received a genuine const.i.tution of its own; Victoria followed in 1856--Victoria, which is not without its dreams of being one day "the chief State in a federated Australia," an Australia that may then rank as "a second United States of the Southern Hemisphere." Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, and New Zealand, one after another, attained the same liberties; all have now representative governments, modelled on those of the mother country, but inevitably without the aristocratic element. Such an aristocracy as that of England is the natural growth of many centuries and of circ.u.mstances hardly likely to be duplicated--a fact which the Prince Consort once had occasion to lay very clearly before Louis Napoleon, anxious to surround himself with a similar n.o.bility, if only he could manage it. But though the aristocratic element be lacking, the patriotic pa.s.sion and the sentiment of loyalty are abundantly present; nor has the mother country any intellectual pre-eminence over her colonies, drawn immeasurably nearer to her in thought and feeling as communication has become rapid and easy.

There is something almost magical at first sight in the transformation which the Australian colonies have undergone in a very limited s.p.a.ce of time; yet it is but the natural result of the untrammelled energy of a race sovereignly fitted to "subdue the earth." It is curious to read how in 1810 the convict settlement at Botany Bay--name of terror to ignorant home criminals, shuddering at the long, dreadful voyage and the imagined horrors of a savage country--was almost entirely nourished on imported food, now that the vast flocks and herds of Australia and New Zealand contribute no inconsiderable proportion of the food supply of Britain.

The record of New Zealand is somewhat less brilliant than that of its gigantic neighbour. This is due to somewhat less favourable circ.u.mstances, to a n.o.bler and less manageable race of aborigines; the land perhaps more beautiful, is by the very character of its beauty less subduable. Its political life is at least as old as that of the old Australian colony, its const.i.tution being granted about the same time; but this colony has needed, what Australia has not, the armed interference of the Home Government in its quarrels with the natives--a race once bold and warlike, able to hold their own awhile even against the English soldiers, gifted with eloquence, with a certain poetic imagination, and no inconsiderable intelligence. It seemed, too, at one moment as if these Maoris would become generally Christianised; but the kind of Christianity which they saw exemplified in certain colonists, hungry for land and little scrupulous as to the means by which they could gratify that hunger, largely undid the good effected through the agency of missionaries, the countrymen of these oppressors, whose evil deeds they were helpless to hinder. A superst.i.tion that was nothing Christian laid hold of many who had once been altogether persuaded to embrace the teachings of Jesus, and the relapsed Maoris doubtless were guilty of savage excesses; yet the original blame lay not chiefly with them; nor is it possible to regard without deep pity the spectacle presented at the present day of "the n.o.blest of all the savage races with whom we have ever been brought in contact, overcome by a worse enemy than sword and bullet, and corrupted into sloth and ruin, ...ruined physically, demoralised in character, by drink."

n.o.bler than other aborigines, who have faded out before the invasion of the white man, as they may be, their savage n.o.bility has not saved them from the common fate; they too have "learned our vices faster than our virtues," aided by the speculative traders in alcoholic poison, who have followed on the track of the colonist, and who, devil's missionaries as they are, have counteracted too quickly the work of the Christian evangelists who preceded them.

The extraordinary natural fertility of the country, whose volcanic nature was very recently terribly demonstrated, is yet very far from being utilised to the utmost, the population of the islands, not inferior in extent to Great Britain, being yet a long way below that of London. Probably this "desert treasure-house of agricultural wealth" may, under wise self-government, yet rise to a position of magnificent importance.

Of all our colonies that in Southern Africa has the least reason to be proud of its recent history, which has not been rendered any fairer by the discovery of the great Diamond Fields, and the rush of all sorts and conditions of men to profit thereby. Into the entangled history of our doings in relation to Cape Colony--originally a Dutch settlement--and all our varied and often disastrous dealings with the Dutch-descended Boers and the native tribes in its neighbourhood, we cannot well enter. Our missionary action has the glory of great achievement in Southern Africa; of our political action it is best to say little.

A more encouraging scene is presented if we turn to the Fijian Isles, whose natives, once a proverb of cannibal ferocity, have been humanised and Christianised by untiring missionary effort, and by their own free-will have pa.s.sed under British domination and are ruled by a British governor. The extraordinary change worked in the people of these isles, characterised now, as even in their heathen days, by a certain bold manliness, that hitherto has escaped the usual deterioration, is so great and unmistakable that critics predisposed to unfriendliness do not try to deny it.

In consequence of the immensely increased facilities of communication that we now enjoy, our own great food-producing dependencies and the vast corn-growing districts of other lands can pour their stores into our market--a process much aided by the successive removal of so many restrictions on commerce, and by the practical science which has overcome so many difficulties connected with the transport of slain meat and other perishable commodities. England seems not unlikely to become a wonderfully cheap country to live in, unless some new turn of events interferes with the processes which during the last two decades have so increased the purchasing power of money that, as is confidently stated, fifteen shillings will now buy what it needed twenty shillings to purchase twenty years ago. To this result, as a matter of course, the enormous development of our manufacturing and other industries has also contributed.

There is another side to the medal, and not so fair a one. The necessaries of life are cheaper; wages are actually higher, when the greater value of money is taken into account; more care is taken as to the housing of the poor; the workers of the nation have more leisure, and spend not a little of it in travelling, being now by far the most numerous patrons of the railway; the altered style of the conveyances provided for them is a sufficient testimony to their higher importance. All this is to the good; so, too, is the diminution in losses by bankruptcy and in general pauperism, the increasing thrift shown by the records of savings banks, the lengthening of life, the falling off in crime, which is actually--not proportionally--rarer than ten years ago, to go no further back.

Against this we have to set the facts that the terrible malady of insanity is distinctly on the increase--whether due to mere physical causes, to the high pressure at which modern society lives, or to the prevalent scepticisms which leave many wretched men so little tranquillising hope or faith, who shall say?--that all trades and professions are more or less overcrowded; and that there is a terrible amount, not of pauperism, but of hard-struggling poverty, ma.s.sed up in the crowded, wretched, but high-priced tenements of great towns, and maintaining a forlorn life by such incessant, cruel labour as is not exacted from convicted criminals in any English prison. London, where this kind of misery is inevitably at its height, receives every week an accession of a thousand persons, who doubtless, in a great majority of cases, simply help to glut the already crowded labour market and still further lower the wages of the workers; and the other great towns in like manner grow, while the rural population remains stagnant or lessens. Agricultural distress, which helps to keep the tide of emigration high, also accounts in part for this singular, undesirable displacement of population; while recent testimony points to the fact that the terribly unsanitary and inefficient housing of the rural poor does much to drive the best and most laborious members of that cla.s.s away from the villages and fields which might otherwise be the homes of happy and peaceful industry. For this form of evil, in town and country, private greed--frequently shown by small proprietors, who have never learnt that property has duties as well as rights--is very largely responsible; for how many other of the evils we have to deplore is not the greed of gain responsible?

The sins of the age are still much the same sins that the Laureate roughly arraigned when the Crimean war broke our long peace; denouncing the race for riches which turned men into "pickpockets, each hand l.u.s.ting for all that is not its own;" denouncing the cruel selfishness of rich and poor as the vilest kind of civil war, being "underhand, not openly bearing the sword." We had made the blessings of peace a curse, he told us, in those days, "when only the ledger lived, and when only not all men lied; when the poor were hovelled and hustled together, each s.e.x, like swine; when chalk and alum and plaster were sold to the poor for bread, and the spirit of murder worked in the very means of life." Yet those very days saw the uprising of a whole generation of n.o.ble servants of humanity, resolute to tight and overcome the rampant evils that surrounded them. And though we would avoid the error of praising our own epoch as though it alone were humane, as though we only, "the latest seed of Time, have loved the people well," and shown our love by deeds; though we would not deny that to-day has its crying abuses as well as yesterday; yet it is hardly possible to survey the broad course of our history during the past sixty years, and not to perceive, amid all the cross-currents--false ambitions, false pretences, mammon-worship, pitiless selfishness, sins of individuals, sins of society, sins of the nation--an ever-widening and mastering stream of beneficent energy, which has already wonderfully changed for the better many of the conditions of existence, and which, since its flow shows no signs of abating, we may hope to see spreading more widely, and bearing down in its great flood the wrecks of many another oppression and iniquity.

CHAPTER IX.

INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Robert Southey.]

"Man doth not live by bread alone." The enormous material progress of this country during the last sixty years--imperfectly indicated by the fact that during the last forty years the taxable income of the United Kingdom has been considerably more than doubled--would be but a barren theme of rejoicing, if there were signs among us of intellectual or spiritual degeneracy. The great periods of English history have been always fruitful in great thinkers and great writers, in religious and mental activity. Endeavouring to judge our own period by this standard, and making a swift survey of its achievements in literature, we do not find it apparently inferior to the splendours of "great Elizabeth" or of the Augustan age of Anne.

Our fifth Queen-regnant, whose reign, longer than that of any of her four predecessors, is also happier than that of the greatest among them, can reckon among her subjects an even larger number of men eminent in all departments of knowledge, though perhaps we cannot boast one name quite equal to Newton in science, and though a.s.suredly neither this nor any modern nation has yet a second imaginative writer whose throne may be set beside that of Shakespeare.

[Ill.u.s.tration: William Wordsworth.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Alfred Tennyson. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_]

We excel in quant.i.ty, indeed; for while, owing to the spread of education, the number of readers has been greatly increased, the number of writers has risen proportionately; the activity of the press has increased tenfold. Journalism has become a far more formidable power in the land than in the earlier years when, as our domestic annals plainly indicate, the _Times_ ruled as the Napoleon of newspapers. This result is largely due to the removal of the duties formerly imposed both on the journals themselves and on their essential paper material; and it would indeed "dizzy the arithmetic of memory" should we try to enumerate the varied periodicals that are far younger than Her Majesty's happy reign. Of these a great number are excellent in both intention and execution, and must be numbered among the educating, civilising, Christianising agencies of the day.

They are something more and higher than the "savoury literary _entremets_" designed to please the fastidious taste of a cultured and leisured cla.s.s, which was the just description of our periodical literature at large not so very long ago. The number of our imaginative writers--poets and romancers, but especially the latter--has been out of all proportion great. We give the place of honour, as is their due, to the singers rather than to the story-tellers, the more readily since the popular taste, it cannot be denied, chooses its favourites in inverse order as a rule.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Robert Browning. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_.]

When Her Majesty ascended the throne, one brilliant poetical constellation was setting slowly, star by star. Keats and Sh.e.l.ley and Byron, none of them much older than the century, had perished in their early prime between 1820 and 1824; Scott had sunk under the storms of fortune in 1832; the fitful glimmer of Coleridge's genius vanished in 1834, and a year later "the gentle Elia" too was gone.

Southey, who still held the laureate-ship in 1837, had faded out of life in 1843, and was succeeded in his once-despised office by William Wordsworth, who, with Rogers and Leigh Hunt and Moore, lived far into the new reign, uniting the Georgian and the Victorian school of writers. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor and oppressed, whose too short life ended in 1845, gives in his serious verse such thrilling expression to the impa.s.sioned, indignant philanthropy, which has actuated many workers and writers of our own period, that it is not easy to reckon him with the older group. His song rings like that of Charles Kingsley, poet, novelist, preacher, and "Christian socialist," who did not publish his "Saint's Tragedy" till three years after Hood was dead.

There has, indeed, been no break in the continuity of our great literary history; while one splendid group was setting, another as ill.u.s.trious was rising. Tennyson, who on Wordsworth's death in 1850 received at Queen Victoria's hand the "laurel greener from the brows of him that uttered nothing base," had published his earliest two volumes of poems some years before Her Majesty's accession; and of that rare poetic pair, the Brownings, each had already given evidence of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning's tragedy of "Strafford" being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future wife's translation of the "Prometheus Bound" saw the light four years earlier. The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has done almost all his laureate work, the lucid splendour of his style, the perfect music of his rhythm, and the stinging sharpness with which he has sometimes chastised contemporary sins, have all combined to win for him a far wider popularity than even that accorded to the fine lyrical pa.s.sion of Mrs. Browning, or to the deep-thoughted and splendid, but often perplexing and ruggedly phrased, dramatic and lyric utterances of her husband. All three have honoured themselves and their country by a majestic purity of moral and religious teaching--an excellence shared by many of their contemporaries, whose powers would have won them a first place in an age and country less fruitful of genius; but not so conspicuous in some younger poets, later heirs of fame, whose lot it may be to carry on the traditions of Victorian greatness into another reign.

There are not a few writers of our day whose excellent prose work has won more of popular favour than their verse, which notwithstanding is of high quality. Such was the "unsubduable old Roman," Walter Savage Landor, a contemporary of Byron and Wordsworth, who long outlived them, dying in 1864. Such--to bring two extremes together--are the critic and poet Matthew Arnold, the poet and theologian John Henry Newman. Intimately a.s.sociated in our thought with the latter, who has enriched our devotional poetry with one touching hymn, is Keble, the singer _par excellence_ of the "Catholic revival," and the most widely successful religious poet of the age, though only very few of his hymns have reached the heart of the people like the far more direct and fervent work of the Wesleys and their compeers. He is even excelled in simplicity and pa.s.sion, though not in grace and tenderness, by two or three other workers in the same field, who belong to our day, and whose verse is known more widely than their names.

We have several women-poets who are only less beloved and less well known than Mrs. Browning; but so far the greatest literary distinction gained by the women of our age and country, notwithstanding the far wider and higher educational advantages enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the field of prose fiction. More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist, whose humour and observation, something redeeming his coa.r.s.eness, have ranked him among cla.s.sic English authors, referred mischievously to the engrossing of "that branch of business" by female writers, whose "ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart," have not, however, availed to redeem their names from oblivion. For some of their nineteenth-century successors at least we may expect a more enduring memory.

Numerous as are our poets, they are far outnumbered by the novelists, whose works are poured forth every season with bewildering profusion; but as story-tellers have always commanded a larger audience than grave philosophers or historians, and as our singers deal as much in philosophy as in narrative, perhaps in seeking for the cause of this overrunning flood of fiction we need go no further than the immensely increased number of readers--a view in which the records of some English public libraries will bear us out. We may therefore be thankful that, on the whole, such literature has been of a vastly purer and healthier character than of yore, reflecting that higher and better tone of public feeling which we may attribute, in part at least, to the influence of the "pure court and serene life" of the Sovereign.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles d.i.c.kens. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: W.M. Thackeray. _From a Drawing by Samuel Lawrence_.]

This n.o.bler tone is not least perceptible in the eldest of the great masters of fiction whom we can claim for our period--d.i.c.kens, who in 1837 first won by his "Pickwick Papers" that astonishing popularity which continued widening until his death; Thackeray, who in that year was working more obscurely, having not yet found a congenial field in the humorous chronicle that reflects for us so much of the Victorian age, for _Punch_ was not started till 1841, and Thackeray's first great masterpiece of pathos and satire, "Vanity Fair," did not begin to appear till five years later. Each of these writers in his own way held "the mirror up" to English human nature, and showed "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," with manly boldness indeed, but with due artistic reticence also; each knew how to be vivid without being vicious, to be realistic without being revolting; and despite the sometimes offensive caricature in which the one indulged, despite the seeming cynicism of the other their influence must be p.r.o.nounced healthy. Thackeray did not, like d.i.c.kens, use his pen against particular glaring abuses of the time, nor insist on the special virtues that bloom amid the poor and lowly; but he attacked valiantly the crying sins of society in all time--the mammon-worship and the mercilessness, the false pretences and the fraud--and never failed to uphold for admiration and imitation "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever thing are pure, whatsoever things are lovely." And though both writers were sometimes hard on the professors of religion, neither failed in reverence of tone when religion itself was concerned.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charlotte Bronte.]

The sudden death of both these men, in the very prime of life and in the fulness of power, was keenly felt at the time: each had a world-wide fame, and each awakened a blank, distressful sense of personal loss in his many admirers as he was suddenly called away from incomplete work and faithful friendship. Contemporary literature has not benefited by the removal of these two men and the gradual diminishing of the influence they so strongly exerted while yet they "stood up and spoke." The work of Charlotte Bronte--produced under a fervent admiration for "the satirist of Vanity Fair," whom she deemed "the first social regenerator of his day"--is, with all its occasional morbidness of sensitive feeling, far more bracing in moral tone, more inspiring in its scorn of baseness and glorifying of goodness, than is the work of recent Positivist emulators of the achievements of George Eliot. Some romances of this school are vivid and highly finished pictures of human misery, unredeemed by hope, and hardly brightened by occasional gleams of humour, of the sardonic sort which may stir a mirthless smile, but never a laugh. Herein they are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her "Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity.

Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and helpful; and it is no unreasonable hope that these may increase and their gloomier rivals decrease, or at least grow gayer and wiser.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lord Macauley.]

There are many other great writers, working in other fields, whom we may claim as belonging altogether or almost to the Victorian age.

Within that period lies almost entirely the brilliantly successful career of Macaulay, essayist, poet, orator, and historian. For the last-named _role_ Macaulay seemed sovereignly fitted by his extraordinary faculty for a.s.similating and retaining historical knowledge, and by the vividness of imagination and mastery of words which enabled him to present his facts in such attractive guise as made them fascinating far beyond romance. His "History of England from the Accession of James II," whereof the first volumes appeared in 1849, remains a colossal fragment; the fulness of detail with which he adorned it, the grand scale on which he worked, rendered its completion a task almost impossible for the longest lifetime; and Macaulay died in his sixtieth year. Despite the defects of partisanship and exaggeration freely and not quite unjustly charged upon his great work, it remains a yet unequalled record of the period dealt with, just as his stirring ballads, so seemingly easy of imitation in their ringing, rolling numbers, hold their own against very able rivals and are yet unequalled in our time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Thomas Carlyle.]

Macaulay was not the first, and he is not the last, of our picturesque historians. It was in 1837 that Carlyle, who four years before had startled the English-reading public by his strangely worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing "History of the French Revolution"--a prose poem, an epic without a hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which was better received by his English readers than the later "History of Friedrich II," marvel of careful research and graphic reproduction though it be. To Carlyle therefore and to Macaulay belongs the honour of having given a new and powerful impulse to the study they adorned; dissimilar in other respects, they are alike in their preference for and insistent use of original sources of information, in their able employment of minute detail, and in the graphic touch and artistic power which made history very differently attractive in their hands from what it had ever been previously. Mr. Froude and Mr. Green may be ranked as their followers in this latter respect; hardly so Mr.

Freeman or the philosophic Buckle, Grote, and Lecky, who by their style and method belong more to the school of Hallam, however widely they may differ from him or from each other in opinion. But in thoroughness of research and in resolute following of the very truth through all mazes and veils that may obscure it, one group of historians does not yield to the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: William Whewell, D.D.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir David Brewster.]

And the same zealous pa.s.sion for accuracy that has distinguished these and less famous historians and biographers has shown itself in other fields of intellectual endeavour. Our Queen in her desire "to get at the root and reality of things" is entirely in harmony with the spirit of her age. In scientific men we look for the ardent pursuit of difficult truth; and it would be thankless to forget how numerous beyond precedent have been in the Victorian period faithful workers in the field of science. Though some of our _savants_ in later years have injured their renown by straying outside the sphere in which they are honoured and useful and speaking unadvisedly on matters theological, this ought not to deter us from acknowledging the value of true service rendered. The Queen's reign can claim as its own such men as John Herschel, worthy son of an ill.u.s.trious father, Airy, Adams, and Maxwell, Whewell and Brewster and Faraday, Owen and Buckland and Lyell, Murchison and Miller, Darwin and Tyndall and Huxley, with Wheatstone, one of the three independent inventors of telegraphy, and the Stephensons, father and son, to whose ability and energy we are indebted for the origination and perfection of our method of steam locomotion; it can boast such masters in philosophy as Hamilton and Whately and John Stuart Mill, each a leader of many.

It has also the rare distinction of possessing one lady writer on science who has attained to real eminence--eminence not likely soon to be surpa.s.sed by her younger sister-rivals--the late Mrs. Mary Somerville, who united an entirely feminine and gentle character to masculine powers of mind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir James Simpson.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Michael Faraday.]

Only to catalogue the recent discoveries and inventions we owe to men of science, from merciful anaesthetics to the latest applications of electric power, would occupy more s.p.a.ce than we ought here to give.