Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1937. THOSE VICTORIANS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 144, 19 June 1937, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1937. THOSE VICTORIANS

Some few years ago—not mapy — ;. to mention the name Victorian in a mixed company of young and old was to court an argument, the young - in contemptuous criticism, the old • in somewhat timid defence, of an age ". that is past. To the young the Vie- - torians were not only old fogeys, with all sorts of stuffy ideas and no sense of art, but people who had made a . mess of things and left the present generation to clear up an almost impossible muddle. The Victorian parent or grandparent was blamed, \as it were, for the unsatisfactory state of the family fortunes; he might ' have made a better job of it. It is only now, a hundred years after the accession to the Throne of the Queen ■ who stamped her character and name on her age, that we are beginning to realise that "those Victorians" had a very difficult job to do, ancl did it : not sq badly, and.that if it is any ' good grumbling about the past at . all, they had as much right to com- ■ plain about their predecessors as we ' have about ours. In 1837 Britain and the British Empire had a peck of trouble at home and abroad, just as we have today in 1937. If the world in 1937 is suffering from the aftermath of a great war, so it was in 1837. If there is social and industrial unrest today, so there was in 1837, to a far greater degree. If our civilisation appears to be threatened by the impact, of science in the shape of new inventions and discoveries—the aeroplane, the motor, the radio, and a score of others—it is at least no worse off than that of the Victorian Age which had to accommodate the railway, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the dynamo, and also a multitude of other ingenious devices in the system of society which it had inherited. That the Victorians managed to do it without a devastating foreign war or a destructive internal convulsion, that they left Britain and the Empire stronger and immeasurably wealthier than they had found them, and incidentally populated half the world is at least worth setting in the balance against their aesthetic shortcomings. The parallel between the periods is instructive. The first thing Britain did after the Great War was ito demobilise and disarm. In this the British ran'true to form. They did the same after the Napoleonic War, only more so. Ih 1821 the great army, which had fought the French and their allier all over the world, was reduced to a bare hundred thousand men, charged with the duty of defending the whole of the British possessions beyond the sea. The' Militia were disbanded and the Volunteers ceased to exist. Lord Wolseley thought that in 1837 50,000 Frenchmen could easily have taken London. There was no hasty re-armament, yet such was the confidence in the prestige of Britain that British interests were sustained abroad with success. Just before Victoria came to the Throne, there was a civil war in Spain just as there' is . today. Britain did not intervene directly, but in 1835 suspended the Foreign Enlistment Act to enable a British Legion, some ten thousand strong, to go to the help of the infant Queen Isabella and the Constitutional Government: of Spain against the rebellion of Don Carlos, the Pretender. The Basques were also assisted with military stores. Eventually Don Carlos was defeated and left the country. Within . the Empire itself there was trouble. Cape Colony was in revolt and in Canada there was a rising which had to be suppressed by troops. Yet out of it emerged Lord Durham's report on the administration of Canada which resulted in full self-government by the colonists. Constitutionalism was established in New South Wales in 1840, and in the same year was signed the Treaty of Wait'angi, which gave birth to the colony of New Zealand. Nearly a hundred years have . elapsed since then, with momentous changes, but it can hardly be said-that the Victorians made a mess of the Empire. On the whole, with, perhaps, one exception, Ireland, they managed well enough. Certainly no other country could have done better. It was, however, the internal problems of Britain that constituted the Victorians' most serious task. It is hard to believe today the descriptions of Britain in the thirties of the last century. Politically, the horizon had brightened with the Reform Bill of 1832, which gave the rising middleclass of the industrial North and mercantile London access to Parliament. Socially, Disraeli described England at that time as two nations— the rich and the poor. Women were at work in the coalmines pushing loaded trucks of coal, exactly like beasts of burden. Children of tender years worked half the clock round in cotton mills. The conditions in the cities, including London, were shocking in the extreme. There was practically not sanitation, and typhus, typhoid, cholera, and smallpox took heavy toll of a rapidly increasing population. There .was- a crisis, in

1837, unemployment was rife, and the sufferings of the poor intense. Naturally there was the gravest discontent, breaking out sporadically in riots. These were the days when the Chartists were met with armed force, when trade unionism struggled for existence against heavy odds, when Robert Owen tried to practise Socialism, and the co-operative movement took its humble start in an obscure lane in an industrial town of Lancashire. There were all the elements in Britain at that time of the revolutionary upheavals that in 1348 rent the Continent of Europe. Yet none took place in Britain. Why? "Those Victorians" managed it better. The |ecret of the success of the Victorians in solving their domestic .problems lies in the functioning of the Parliamentary system. A hundred years ago the People's Charter of the Chartists contained six points: (1) Universal suffrage; (2) the ballot; (3) annual Parliaments; (4) the abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament; (5) payment of members; (6) equal electoral districts. Nothing could have seemed more chimerical at the time, yet it has all come about—all that matters—without the revolution for which the Chartists were prepared. One or two items the Victorians did not live to see, but the People's Charter is now all but completely the law of the land. It has not brought the millennium its promoters expected, but it has placed political power in the hands of the people, if they choose to exercise it. This is democracy, and to the Parliaments of the Victorians, which pioneered it through stage by stage, as the'country became ripe for each new move, the people of today owe the credit. If there is any great difference between the Victorians and their successors, it is that this generation has lost, more than a Jittle, the faith in Parliamentary institutions that moved the mountains in the path of reform. "The House of Commons," says Dean Inge in his lecture- on the Victorian Age, "enjoyed that immense prestige which has been completely lost since the old Queen's death. The debates were read with semi-religious fervour by every good citizen over his breakfast, and a prominent politician was treated with even more exaggerated reverence than our worthy grandfathers paid to bishops." This was an atmosphere in which great orators and statesmen could flourish. If the Victorians failed in many things, they triumphed in Parliament, and it is to their example the modern age must look with respect, not scoffingly, if .democracy is to hold its own in the latest struggle.