Social Transformations of the Victorian Age Part 14

That these can be minimized by a strenuous and keen referee is probable; that when this functionary is slack, professional football resembles the revival of the prize ring in disguise is admitted.[117] Football may seem to the mere observer almost to have become a misnomer, when carrying the ball is part of the game; when hands, shoulders, chest, fists, are nearly as active as legs and feet.

Among indoor games chess is that which has been transformed the most during our age. Here something may be attributed to the example of the Prince Consort, who was not, however, an invincible player, but more to his youngest son, the lamented Prince Leopold, who did a good deal to popularize the game. In point of universal popularity chess will never quite rival whist or billiards. It lacks the element of chance in the first, and the display of physical skill in the second which must ever chiefly fascinate men. The chess player, too, when well matched, uses more brain power than the whist player. Each has to keep the judgment perpetually alert. But the conventions in chess are left behind when the opening has been matured into the mid game, while the conventions of whist relieve the whist player continuously during the progress of the rubber.

Throughout the whole of this age chess has grown in favour among us. In most of our large towns for every chess club existing in 1847, there are ten or fifteen in 1897. On the Queen's accession English chess players still felt the stimulus given to the game in London from 1780-95 by Andre Francois Danican, commonly known as 'Philidor.' Hence may be dated the earliest English chess clubs, and the scientific study of the game. Three years before the Victorian age began, a series of matches was played by the English Alexander MacDonell and the French Labourdonnais. In 1844, the English Howard Staunton defeated the French St Amant in a match which decided the championship of the world. This, followed in 1847 by the publication of Staunton's _Chessplayer's Handbook_, brought hundreds more to the board.

Another agency in the same direction was the presence in Europe of a young American, Paul Morphy. His play was, upon the whole, the finest the world has ever seen. He crossed the Atlantic in 1857; at the close of 1858 he had beaten every European noteworthy enough to try conclusions with him.

The effect of these triumphs, won by a youth of twenty-one in the most difficult of all games, was electrical. No considerable town in the country was without its chess clubs. Nor is the influence more recently exercised by J. H. Blackburne less remarkable in its way. His skill in playing games without the board, exhibited in all parts of the United Kingdom, has raised up many imitators, but scarcely an equal.

With these great players there have come also fresh scientific discoveries in the conduct of the game itself; the first of these as to time was the Scotch Gambit, partially antic.i.p.ated indeed by Italian writers in the last century, but owing its new name and later vogue to its adoption by the Scotch players in the correspondence match between Edinburgh and London, 1824 to 1826 and subsequently improved upon in 1837. About that latter year, too, W. D. Evans, of the Royal Navy, invented the Gambit which now bears his name. Stimulated by these British achievements, the Austrian players. .h.i.t upon the Vienna or Queen's Knights game which was first made famous during the tournament of 1873. In this country, most of these advances have been sensibly helped by the movement that the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_ began in 1842, which the whole press has since followed, of publishing chess problems.

An exhibition of feminine needlework justly forms a feature in the Commemoration shows of the period. In 1837 the decorative functions of the needle were oftener shown by English women of the middle cla.s.ses than by acknowledged fashion leaders. In 1867 it is the middle cla.s.s ladies who do most of the reading and the ultra-fashionable ones who do most of the fancy work. What transformations has this latter pa.s.sed through? In 1857, as it had been in 1837, the mode was to work patterns for cushions and screens with Berlin wool on canvas. The squareness of the cross st.i.tch was fatal to artistic effect; the covering thus decorated went out of fashion soon after Rowland's Maca.s.sar hair oil ceased lavishly to be used, and heads no longer gleamed with unguent. The frame work was succeeded by that known to the Afghans as 'boning,' and to Britons as crochet, while chairs and sofas still needed some protection from locks not yet wholly unanointed. Even the crochet coverlets, tied with little pink ribbons, began to disappear when people left their hair to nature. But the artistic instinct was slowly helping forward this sort of work.

More popular than crochet had ever been, leather frames for pictures, cut out of leaves copied from Nature, or the pinning down of fern leaves on a soft cloth or silk began to be; for these Indian ink, used with a fine brush made an effective background. Ruskin's gospel of following Nature had not been preached in vain. Accomplished women like the late Lady Marion Alford began to revive, with improvements of her own, the art of embroidering flowers, plants, birds and b.u.t.terflies in wool or silk; while the stately arum lilies were used for screens, and gorgeous poppies for curtains. Next came a renascence of lace work. Many amateurs produced beautiful samples of pillow and point; but the work was trying to the eyes, and competed unfairly with the poor professionals of Honiton or Nottingham.

The early days of Ritualism popularized the copying of the borders of the old painted missals and prettily occupied many drawing rooms. Oil painting on pottery, wood, and gla.s.s came in during the early South Kensingtonian period. All young ladies now were water colour artists, or busied themselves with colouring panels and dados on their friend's walls. Bra.s.s work was a later and not very long lived development. It was costly; it was noisy; the long suffering male gradually rose up against it. Iron work, the torturing into fantastic shapes of ductile strips of metal, was a little more enduring; but it required too much accuracy and too many instruments ever to be very popular. The beautiful gla.s.s painting in churches of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford was admired rather than reproduced.

Irish cabins supplied a modish industry to English drawing rooms in drawn linen work. The principle of this seems to be hem st.i.tching, or unbinding work into the s.p.a.ces left by the drawn threads. Poker work done within the outline traced by this simple instrument on a wooden board, is practised successfully by ladies of genius who could touch nothing without adorning it, but is scarcely to be commended to bunglers or in school rooms.[118]

CHAPTER x.x.xI

THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND COLONIAL

Significance of the New Law Court buildings in London. Early efforts after law reform in Parliament. No appreciable result till 1841. Slow progress and subsequent changes, culminating in the 1869 Commission, and the 1873 Judicature Act. The popular consequences of this, and general view of our legal system as it affects to-day the Colonies as well as the mother country.

Transformation in our Colonial system shown by the latest facts and figures. Special usefulness as well as Imperial value of the Colonies to England. Social fusion of the mother country and the Colonies prefigured by the presence and influence on both sides of the Atlantic of the American element in the best society in London. Individual influences which have promoted this movement, and are doing the same thing for our Colonial cousins, as for our American.

No architectural change during the age has more affected the perspective of Fleet Street and the Strand than the disappearance of Temple Bar and its replacement by the griffin which marks its former site, and the erection of the Royal Courts of Justice that now flank the central thoroughfare. This is the outward and visible sign of a transformation not less great, as regards the administration of the law within the new palace of justice itself.

The Reform Act of 1832 was followed by various movements in Parliament in the direction of law reform. The proposals and their very slight results were solely technical; the public reaped no appreciable benefit so long as the separation of the Common Law Courts from the Court of Chancery existed, and on different sides of Westminster Hall two legal systems, often mutually antagonistic, were at work. Ten years after the Accession, the monopoly of Serjeants of Law in the old Court of Common Pleas was swept away. Still justice was delayed. During the early days of railway enterprise, commerce was obstructed, by the postponement, for inadequate or vexatious reasons, of the trial of cases arising out of bills of exchange on which large sums of money depended, and which, till they were decided, blocked commercial enterprise. This may be looked back to now as the scholastic era in nineteenth century law administration. The categories into which causes and kinds of legal action and pleas, were divided, in their pedantic complexity, recalled the tortuous refinements of the logical school men upon the comparatively simple predicaments of Aristotle.

In 1851 a flagrant and inveterate anomaly was removed by the success of those law reformers who had long in vain protested against the absurdity of disallowing the evidence of persons immediately interested in the suit.

After this, the movement did not pause till the Commission of 1869 was appointed, with the result that in 1873 there pa.s.sed the Judicature Act which has amalgamated conflicting usages into a h.o.m.ogeneous system, and produced the long desired fusion between Equity and Law. The ancient divisions are perpetuated to-day not in different Courts but in different divisions of the same Court. The result briefly stated is that notwithstanding the real difference which still exists between Equity and Law, and the practical division of the Bar into two branches, Law and Equity can to-day be administered by the same Courts and one judge can give suitors the same relief as any other judge.

There is now no possibility of a question being decided by one tribunal according to Common Law principles, and by another according to the principles of Equity. To prevent any chance of confusion it has further been enacted that wherever the rules of Equity and Law seem to conflict, those of Common Law are to prevail. The principle of a division of labour still exists. Every judge, that is, does not transact every sort of business. The judges in the Chancery division are still specially charged with the execution of trusts and other such matters, even as happened in the case of their predecessors fifty years ago. To do justice with as little regard as may be to forms and precedents is the visible object of the administrators of the law in every department. That professional prejudices should have disappeared was not to be expected, and, perhaps, not to be desired. But the exclusive etiquette of judges and lawyers is not greater than prevails in other professions, among doctors, diplomatists, or divines. The plaintiff in person is no more welcome in the reformed, than in the unreformed, Courts; nor, in the interests of public time and of common sense, is it probably to be wished that he should be. The two princ.i.p.al and practical defects in the administration of English law that still need attention would seem to be--one, the barbarous system which still obtains through the imperfect arrangements of the Circuit Courts of keeping untried prisoners unreasonably long in prison. Of late cases have been noticed in which persons, proved on trial to be innocent, have been detained in prison for weeks or months. The second defect is the undue licence allowed to the legal profession of protracting the hearing of cases secondary in their importance by the acc.u.mulation of unnecessary evidence and cross-examination. This has often been objected to, but has seldom been firmly controlled by the judges.

The great public benefit conferred by the reforms whose monument is the New Law Courts hard by the church of St Clement Danes, may be condensed into the remark that whereas from 1837 to 1875 it was an accident whether the right party won his case, the presumption in favour of his success in 1897 is so strong as almost to amount to a certainty.

Of another sort of fusion, that between the two divisions of the legal profession, solicitors and barristers, much has been heard. But in Canada and some other Colonies some inconvenience and disadvantage are found to result from the absence of any distinction between barristers and solicitors. Gradually, perhaps, a solution in practice is being arrived at. Without mentioning individual names it is the fact that among the men who now stand highest, whether at the Bar or on the Bench, many while students at the Inns of Court have perfected themselves in the practical details of law by voluntarily attending the offices of great firms of solicitors, whether in Westminster or elsewhere.

The palace of justice whose opening marked the close of the fourth decade of the reign, commemorates, in a fashion of its own, the unity of the Empire as well as the late achieved unity of the administration of justice.

Among the Queen's subjects are nations not only of every creed and of every colour, but trained in obedience to every code of law which human skill has devised. Since the modern era of our Colonial Empire began in 1836, the practice has been to continue to those dependencies the laws under which they were when they came into being, or when they were first acquired by diplomatic cession or military conquest, always provided that these pre-existent systems do not contradict the fundamental principles of British jurisprudence. Thus, in British Guiana, in the Cape Colony, and in Ceylon, the letter and spirit of Roman-Dutch law have been continued under English rule. In lower Canada, French forms have become so confused as to be impracticable: the laws of this province are to-day identical with those in vogue in England at the time of its acquisition in 1763, periodically of course improved by modern lights. In the Mauritius, the French Code Civile and the French Code de Commerce still exist. It is for the sovereign embodying in her own person the unity of the Empire to decide through the Privy Council, that is, to-day, through the Judicial Committee in all disputed cases what the particular law of the locality may be.

On page 227 of the writer's earlier book _England_, etc., the Colonial as well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Privy Council Judicial Committee was explained in detail. Since those words were written an important step has been taken under an Act pa.s.sed some years ago by Lord Hersch.e.l.l. By this, the Chief Justice of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry de Villiers, Chief Justice Sir Henry Strong of Canada, Sir Samuel Way, Chief Justice of South Australia, have been added to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in order to strengthen that body with special reference to the Roman-Dutch, French-Canadian and Australasian law, in legislation and practice. Here too, it is well to refer to the recent formation of the Society of Comparative Legislation. This body is actively engaged and has already done good work in cla.s.sifying materials throughout the Empire, as well as in acc.u.mulating a compendium of information which will greatly promote the simplicity and uniformity of the laws of the world.

Some distinct idea must, however, be formed of the concrete reality connoted by the familiar expression 'Colonial Empire,' beginning, as in truth for our generation it did, with the founding of the Australasian capital called Adelaide, after his Queen, in the last year of William IV., but practically co-extensive in its growth with the reign of his successor. The area of the United Kingdom is 121,000 square miles. That of its possessions in foreign parts is 8,725,000 square miles. In other words the mother country is only in extent a seventieth part of the Empire of which that mother country is the nucleus.

To put the facts somewhat differently this British Empire, covering some 9,000,000 square miles, occupies a fifth part of the habitable globe. No other world power such as this has been known to past or can be found in present history. The British Empire of the Victorian age is five times as large as was the Empire of Darius five centuries before the Christian Era began. It is four times the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Among modern Powers, the Empire of Great Britain is larger by an eighth than that of Russia; it contains 230 millions more people. It is sixteen times as great as the foreign dominions of France; forty times as great as the Empire of Germany. Seven days and nights of continuous travelling are required to cross the American Continent. The lands which owe allegiance to the monarch of these Islands are three times as extensive as those composing the Republican Empire of the United States.

The relative progress, according to the population test, of the mother country, and the nationalities, voluntarily incorporated into her government, beyond seas will best be judged by the facts and figures of a comparatively recent contrast, such as is alone practicable in the case of an essentially modern experience. Between 1871, then, and 1881, the increase in the inhabitants of the United Kingdom was at the rate of 10 per cent. In the case of our American Colonies it was 19 per cent.; in the case of our Australasian it was 42 per cent. The same progress which has marked our recent history in other respects than numbers at home, has not been wanting with our kin beyond sea. Thus, in respect of education; in the single province of Quebec, then fairly typical of our other possessions, in 1837 barely one-fourth of the population could read; less than one-tenth could make even a pretence at writing. In 1897 there are in the same province 4,000 schools, with a total of 200,000 scholars, each of whom is periodically certified by examiners to be making gradual progress in the prescribed standards, according to age, and qualified individually to swell the claim upon the Government grant for efficiency.

As for higher teaching, all our princ.i.p.al Colonies have their Universities. In the mother country, corresponding progress since the legislation of 1870 was at work was shown by the ability of the framer of that measure, the late W. E. Forster, himself well known in the Colonies, before his death in 1885, to point to the fact that the school attendance from being seven per cent. before his Act was pa.s.sed had within fifteen years' operation of that measure risen to seventeen per cent. In the Australasian Colonies the results are not less striking than in the mother country or in the Canadian. In 1837 New South Wales was without a const.i.tution as well as without any elementary education machinery of its own. Within rather less than half a century the inst.i.tution of responsible government had been followed by an Education Act on the same lines as the English Act of 1870, but providing inter-mediate schools as well, with the result that the last census in Victoria shows that, of every 10,000 children of school age, 9,500 could read, and more than 8,500 could write.

These are specimen cases which establish the point that the extension of English power is accompanied by the spread of whatever advantages modern civilization can bring. As was seen in the preceding chapter, since the Colonial Bishoprics movement of 1851, religion has followed everywhere in the wake of our Empire. So, too, has education. These are the things which distinguish the Colonial methods of Great Britain from those of any other country whether in earlier or in contemporary times.

Dependencies, _i.e._ places necessary for the maintenance of Empire, but not suitable for permanent British habitation; Crown Colonies, controlled by a Governor, and legislated for by orders in Council, with, as soon as the soil is ripe for it, some representative Council on the spot, reduplications of the mother country under foreign suns, with Const.i.tutions of their own and representative Government after the pattern of the United Kingdom; these are the different heads under which the Colonial Empire that has grown up in our age may be divided. As this Empire is in itself new, so the machinery for its central administration in the form in which it now exists is a product of the present reign.

Evelyn the diarist, writing under date February 28th, 1671, mentions his appointment as a member of the Committee of the Privy Council, that had been established in 1660 for controlling the foreign plantations. This Council in 1672 was joined to the Council of Trade, the entire body being called the Council of Trade and Plantations. That was reconst.i.tuted in 1695, and again in 1748, when India came under its charge, continuing to remain under it until the appointment of the Board of Control in 1784.

At the beginning of our century, War and Colonies formed the province of a single Secretary of State and continued to do so till 1854. The first Colonial Secretary holding that office alone was Sir George Grey, followed in 1859 by the Duke of Newcastle. This was the Peelite duke whose father had founded the Newcastle scholarship at Eton, and who himself accompanied the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1859. The Colonies were not the department he had desired when Lord Palmerston formed his last Government, but he did his work not unsympathetically and bequeathed his post in good order to Cardwell. The ablest of the earlier Colonial Secretaries was without doubt Lord Grey, son of the Reformer, who held the office in Lord John Russell's Administration. During the forties, especially in 1849, Colonial sensitiveness was wounded by the perpetual motions brought forward in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume and others of his party for reducing the salary of Colonial Governors,[119] accompanied as these motions were by language not complimentary to the new polities. Not without party criticism had the office of Parliamentary Under Secretary been created in 1810. The same opposition was called forth by the appointment of Permanent Under Secretaries, and Legal Advisers to the Home Government in 1867, in 1870, 1874, and by the vote for the new Colonial offices in Downing Street first occupied in 1876. In 1897 politicians of all parties take the same patriotic pride in the Colonial Empire, while an ex-Radical leader is that Empire's Minister. The increased popularity of Colonial in preference to United States emigration is shown by the fact that in 1837 35,264 persons went to the Colonies, and some sixty years later the number was 52,029.

The pride that the Queen's subjects take in the Empire beyond seas, created by Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and the honour they derive from it are accompanied by the growing interest with which the Colonies are regarded by political thinkers who see in their development an antic.i.p.ation of the const.i.tutional movements soon to be witnessed on British soil. The Australian legislatures have not only kept pace with, they have stolen a march on, the socialistic Radicals of the old country. New Zealand generally has led the way. This and three other Colonies, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, have adopted Woman's Suffrage with the legislative freaks which seem to be its sequel. To the action of this franchise is attributed the proposal recently made in one of these Parliaments to give every domestic servant a statutory holiday once a week. Tasmania, too, will not apparently be satisfied till she has secured the Swiss Referendum for ending disputes between the two legislative Chambers by submitting the single point in issue to the const.i.tuencies. Tasmania, also, has made several efforts, as yet unsuccessfully, to acclimatise the Hare system of proportional representation which is now forgotten in England, save when some theorist uses a periodical re-adjustment of our franchise, to revive its interest. South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, have also attempted, but not as yet carried, the establishment of national banks; perilous experiments enough for any new, or for that matter old, country.

Individual effort gave England its Colonies. The same agency--as embodied in a Gibbon Wakefield, who began life by being Secretary to Lord Durham in Canada 1838, who, 1839, obtained the annexation and colonization of New Zealand, and who in 1849 published _The Art of Colonization_; in a Sir William Molesworth, the pioneer of Colonial self-government; who, obtaining from Palmerston the great object of his ambition, the Colonial Secretaryship 1853, died shortly afterwards; more recently in the fourth Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary (1866-7; 1874-8)--applied the social cement which has joined the new countries with the old in personal rather than in merely political relation. Colonial patriotism was also reasonably gratified on its intellectual side by Mr Lowe's sojourn in New South Wales 1843-50, and by Sir Robert G. W. Herbert's share in the Administration of Queensland before he became Colonial Under Secretary in London.

A shrewd Colonial statesman not long since observed that if another flying Australian, but a born and bred Colonial horse, were to win the Derby, no whisper of separation from the British Crown would ever be heard among the most advanced of Colonial democrats. Popular enthusiasm at the Antipodean winner of the Blue Ribbon would spread from Epsom Downs throughout the kingdom; it would be flashed along every wire or transmitted by every cable to the four winds of heaven; the Colonists would cease to complain that they, or their products, were not appreciated by the mother country.

This half serious remark contains more than a grain of truth; it points to the fact that the grievance alleged by our kinsman beyond sea against the headquarters of their race is sentimental, rather than practical. Pending the Derby winner from beyond seas, the less sternly democratic of England's Colonial cousins have appreciated the peerages bestowed on a few of them, and can point to other substantial proofs that they have become a power in English society. Thus they have founded clubs in London; they possess a party of their own in the House of Commons, and entertain the social leaders of the old country at their b.a.l.l.s and parties during the season in famous restaurants, or at their own homes.

Till the Victorian age was well developed, the latter day American elements in London fashion were unheard of. To-day these leaven the whole of our social life. It is those born under the Stripes and Stars who relieve, at a princely rental, English n.o.bles of house property which its owners are not occupying, and supply Countesses and d.u.c.h.esses to the English peerage. The great feature of our time has been the concentration of our people in the Metropolis. A like gravitation to towns has indeed taken place throughout the whole country. Between the eighties and the nineties, the increase of the urban population has been 3,016,579; the decrease of the rural has been 139,545.[120]

With respect to this movement, as in other matters, London has shown itself the true mirror of England. For a proof of this, it would be enough to mention the Langham Hotel, and those caravanserais which have followed it, down to the latest and most palatial of all, the Hotel Cecil. That the capital thus socially re-created has been successfully reorganized as the most cosmopolitan and modish centre of fashion for two hemispheres is due largely to the agency of American dollars and American arbiters of elegance. In the thirties and the sixties the gifted men who were sent to represent the United States in the old country, a Washington Irving, and a Lothrop Motley, made their Emba.s.sies social centres for the most pleasant company of the time, attracted famous men from their own country, one of whom, the Rev. Cleveland c.o.xe,[121] formed a lasting link between the two chief branches of the Anglo-Saxon Church, most of these Transatlantic visitors left behind them brilliant reputations as conversationalists.

More recently a Russell Lowell and a Bayard have adorned this tradition.

In their day, the American season following hard upon the London season proper has become a regular, and to all concerned most profitable, observance in the social calendar. The dictatresses of polite life from the other side of the Atlantic generally have been educated in Paris, not a few of them by the daughter of Emile Souvestre at that inst.i.tution for turning intelligent girls into charming women, Les Ruches, Fontainebleau; they always bring with them to their London homes the tastes of citizens of the world. These tastes are gratified as successfully on the Thames as on the Seine; it is _la belle Americaine_ who has most visibly impressed her image on the capital where, since the Second Empire fell, she has chiefly delighted to dwell; she decided that English life needed enlivening: she has enlivened it and continues to do so effectually. Some restlessness is const.i.tutional to her, as also to the Anglo-Indians and Colonials who are perennially so much with us; thus largely to please her the London season is now subdivided into innumerable parts. It would be truer to say some form of that season lasts all the year round. The constant locomotion from one centre, or from one country seat to another, began, as has been already seen, with the Prince Consort. It has not been discouraged by later representatives of the Crown. From the day that in 1860 the Prince of Wales visited the tomb of George Washington, he has never lost the American heart. The new London regime exactly suits the future peeresses of the old country when they are fresh from New York.

The constant alternations of Hyde Park promenades, not only with suburban racecourses, but with long days under summer suns given to Thames-side picnics, or with rapid flittings on any opportunity to and fro between Mayfair on the one hand, the Boulevard des Italiens, Monte Carlo, or Homburg on the other: these innovations have been brought about by the American Londoner more than by any other single person. The Colonial millionaire or millionairess has not yet been so fully developed as their Transatlantic equivalents. But the process is going steadily forward, no doubt with similar results to follow.

The contrast between the amount of international friction that was caused before the Oregon Boundary dispute, and the Trent difference, between the two countries were composed in 1846 and in 1863, respectively, and the comparative ease with which the Venezuela Question in our own day was settled, suggests the solid international advantages of the arrangement under which New York and London have become socially one and the same capital, having their pleasures, their lions and lionesses, their favourite composers, authors, dramatists and players, in common.

The late Mr Samuel Ward, who is as well remembered in London as in New York, and who liked to be called the prince of _bon vivants_ at Delmonico's, the king of the lobby at Washington, was a cultivated little old gentleman, of whom it is difficult to conceive as ever having been much less, or more, than some seventy-odd years of age. He was known throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon world as 'Uncle Sam.' He had become popular in English society soon after the examples of the then Lord Hartington and Lord Rosebery included America in the grand tour of every educated Briton. He really did something to ent.i.tle him to his universal sobriquet. He was the founder of a social and literary Anglo-American school which has struck its roots deep in the chosen homes of English fashion. As Californian gold preceded Australian, so the Transatlantic force that has transformed the social England of our day has come before the fully organized exercise of a Colonial power of the same sort. But every year brings one visibly nearer its final development, with all the international advantages which will no doubt accompany that event.[122]