SOCIAL PROGRESS IN THE QUEEN'S REIGN.
SIR, ALGERNON WEST'S reminiscences published in this month's Nineteenth Century are amusing and in their way of interest, but we confess in reading them to a certain feeling, not indeed of disappointment, but of want of satisfaction. Sir Algernon tells us very pleasantly many things about the surface manners of London society, when gentle- men began to smoke publicly, when they left off public drink- ing, when ladies commenced their present habit of outdoor exercise, and when, late in the Forties, 5 o'clock tea came into vogue, and was at first pronounced, not as it is now, a method of enabling women to meet and chat pleasantly with men, but a very dreary festivity. The old can read Sir Algernon West's recollections with real pleasure, and the historian of fifty years hence, if he has Macaulay's habit of digging among forgotten documents, will doubtless extract from them two or three hints as to the manners of his grand- mother's days which may be of real value. We seem, how- ever, to long for a little more, and should be glad if some bright-minded old gentleman with a knowledge of two or three social strata—a successful Q.C. for preference, or a great surgeon of Sir James Paget's type—would tell us all in a magazine how far the English world, not London society, but the whole community, has in his judgment, and according to the facts he knows, advanced or retrograded in his lifetime. Few secular things are so important to feel certain about as the existence under a high civilisation of a motor principle of progress always in active work, and there are few things about which it is so difficult to obtain trustworthy evidence. You can get it about the progress of a thousand or two thousand years in a pretty irrefragable form. The white world of the West, for example, has become incapable not only of enjoying, but even of tolerating, some of the scenes of the arena—the animal battles would still, we fear, attract; indeed we have ourselves seen gentlemen when outside England looking on them with delight—and the gentry of the Middle Ages would be pronounced violent brutes ; but the progress of one lifetime, even the Queen's, is very difficult to realise accurately. We can all see, of course, the enormous changes, usually for the better, made by applications of mechanical science. We can all travel quickly and com- fortably. We have indefinitely better artificial light. We can light a candle or a fire without splitting the ends of our fingers and wasting a perceptible portion of time. Comfort is amazingly much greater, and down to a certain rank is more diffused—just below the higher artisan ranks it is, we think, less than it was—and there has been an extra- ordinary diffusion of a thin and, if we may be pardoned the adjective, acidulous kind of knowledge. But on the three great points, whether men are better than they were, whether they are more competent, and whether they are happier, the evidence is singularly defective. The writer, who has a fairly long experience, will endeavour to contribute his mite.
We should say. on the whole, that England is distinctly better. The statement is often denied, partly because it is no longer dangerous to avow irreligious opinions, and partly because a rather minute, but exceedingly visible, class has become agnostic—there is very little true atheism of the French and Italian type in England—but those who deny it forget many facts. In the first ten years of the Queen's reign the majority of the educated middle class never con- sidered religion at all, disliked and distrusted any profession of it, and were, in fact, determined and rather stupid secularists. They did not fight the Evangelical movement, they often yielded about it in externals to their womenkind, but they had at heart a contempt for it, and indulged in what those Evangelicals would have called a gross carnality of soul. Imbedded among these secularists were in every class a few fierce blasphemers, men who had a singular loathing of religion which they could hardly keep down, and a spiteful malignity towards clergymen in particular, of which we nowadays hardly perceive a lingering trace. Morals, which seem to be layer now, because manners are layer and truthfulness more widespread, were in reality much worse, especially in country towns and over the countryside. Men were more cruel, more brutal, more untruthful, while opinion exercised over them incomparably less influence. The young were more hypocritical, and the old more given up to self-indulgence and to a kind of animal existence which produced a disease nowadays almost confined to workhouses and known as amentia senilis. Fraud of a gross kind, and especially fraud on relatives and dependents, was exceedingly common; while women were treated as regards all property matters and all control of their own lives with a callousness of which workmen would nowadays be ashamed. Philanthropy, though loudly professed by a large class and keenly felt by a small one, was scarcely an impulse among the majority, any more than it now is on the Continent. The " stir " in intellectual matters which now pervades :such large classes was con- fined to a minute one, while the acute interest in religion as a subject of thought, now so widespread, was almost un- known, and where it existed was regarded as something to be ashamed of. Among the lower classes habitual drunken- ness, now carefully concealed, was gloried in, and their language among themselves was more like that of drunkards than of men who recognised, as for the most part they do now, that reticence of tongue is as needful as propriety in dress. There are thousands of savages in trousers among us still, and we should not deny that much of the apparent improve- ment is a very thin veneer ; but we should have no hesitation in saying that there has been a perceptible advance, which in one respect has been of the most decided kind. The English world, in all classes and all places, is distinctly gentler, and this not only in manners, but from an instinctive hatred of brutality. The rough of to-day, bad as he is, is a gentleman compared with the rough of 1830, while the gentleman has been refined by comparison into a Sir Roger de Coverley. There is a reasonableness, or a power of hearing reason, spread among us which strikes foreigners with amazement, and which we think even Bishops to-day would fully allow sprung from something other than a mere increase of enlightenment. That increase would not greatly affect temper, and of all changes that in temper is the most visible. The young would scarcely believe what the old could tell them of the gnarled tempers of two generations ago, of the astounding pre- valence of a diseased vanity lacquered over as " self-respect," or of the amount of misery which was due to those two apparently slight causes alone.
Of the intellectual advance of Great Britain we cannot speak so favourably. The great cloud of ignorance which rested on the body of the people, and which you can still detect if you talk to very old working men and women, has, it is true, been lifted a little. Everybody can read, and all women under thirty can write—that is by no means equally true of all men—and as most of them read newspapers they all get a few rather gritty and disconnected facts into their minds. The average has been lifted in every class, so that in the lower a dozen men speak well where one could hardly do it ; and in the middle ten men and twenty women can write good prose, or what a century ago would have been esteemed quite charming poetry. There is much greater width of mind, too, in all classes, and an extraordi- nary progress in intellectual tolerance ; but of increased intel- lectual strength we see no sign in books, while there has been a definite decrease of it, not quite satisfactorily explained, in oratory. Ordinary conversation has improved, chiefly perhaps because women have learned to converse ; but we do not think the best talk has, while we should say there had been a marked tendency in thought to become slipshod. Vagueness is the note of an extraordinary quantity of It. Indeed, if we dared say anything which to all decadente will seem impertinent and false, we should say that true realism had visibly de- clined, and that the reluctance to look at facts as they are, always excepting the facts of the cesspool, had perceptibly developed. The scientific spirit, though widely diffused, applies itself only to the concrete, and except when the subject of study is perceptible to the senses, there is less truthfulness and insight. Certainly this is true in politics, where men are always uttering falsehoods because they wish they were truths, and we think it is true in other regions besides. Hard thinking, in short, is not increasing, and the competent of our day are not quite so competent, especially as regards strength of will and intellectual energy, as the competent of two generations ago. There is a larger number of the qualified, but if education and numbers had remained at the same level, it would, we think, have been a smaller one. Knowledge has come, but wisdom has lingered, and mental force has been dissipated. partly by the removal of limita- tions, and partly by the influence of circumstances which have been singularly unfavourable to mental concentration.
That the English world has become happier seems a strong thing to say, but we think on the whole it is true. No doubt the restful life, in which to-day was as yesterday, has almost disappeared, and with it much content. There is too much strain everywhere, and the passion for self-advertisement,
which has vulgarised almost everybody, has produced a de- velopment of envy fatal to tranquillity of character. Fuss is t he note of our day,—fuss and materialisation ; and while the rormer kills rest, the latter develops a desire which in its (fleets is equivalent in mental life to hunger in the physical. We doubt if Jews, in whom the two influences reach their lighest development. are happy people, and the Jewish ideal of life has spread during this reign to a startling extent. Never- theless, the weight on the other side is very heavy. The im- provement in general health, to begin with, of which we could give some remarkable illustrations, is an immense factor in happiness. Chloroform alone has reduced the liability to un- bearable pain by at least one-fifth. So is the increased free- dom of child-life, which is so strikingly visible everywhere, and which affects three-fifths of all who are alive. So is the comparative "emancipation of women," in spite of all the absurdities and efforts to achieve the impossible which have accompanied that immense reform. So is the decay of "privilege," which has gone on steadily and has removed from millions of hearts a cankering sense of suffering from irrational injustice. So, too, is the enormous increase in the interestingness of life, a point to which the young are entirely blind, they not realising as the old do how intolerably dull and uniform life tended to become. And so, finally, is the im- provement in physical condition, visible in the faces and the dress even of villagers, and in every other class—except the .‘ residuum," whose happiness is decreased by the increasing bitterness of contrast—almost incalculably great. People who, worried by the increase of rent—a real blot in the picture—deny this have not an idea of what life was for the poor under the Corn-laws and Protection, when four-sixths of the men in England and five-sixths of the women never had as much food or as much warmth as they wished for. You do not know, 0 landator temporis acti, what it is to be permanently chilly. We are sure that the masses are happier, as we are sure—we have said this already —there is a better temper, which could not have arisen if they had been more miserable. This, however, is the conclusion of only one observer, who may be deceived, though he thinks he is not, by a personal experience; and what we wish to see is testimony from many, and especially from those few among the cultivated who actually know, and do not merely guess, what life was, and is, in many strata of society. Old lawyers,
old clergymen, old squires of the minor kind, and old surgeons are the people who should speak out, and so provide the materials for the future historian. The testimony of all will be valuable, except that of the new school of pessimists, who, because they see a wart on a beautiful face, say that society wilfully cultivates warts, and that if we look at the "real " facts, nothing but warts has any "real" existence.
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