STRANGE OLD WORLD

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 28 March 1935, Page 6

STRANGE OLD WORLD

JUBILEE TIMES RECALLED CHANGES SINCE VICTORIA’S DAY THE MARCH OF INVENTION The approach of the King’s Jubilee has set many people looking back across the decades—barik nearly half a century to tnat other jubilee of 1887 when Queen Victoria completed 50 years of her reign. There are still plenty of older people who can look back and say: “Yes, I remember Jubilee year” —and marvel at the contrast between the world and the Empire, of then and to-day! What must these sixty-year-olds think when they review the changing panorama of the years, separating the Queen’s Jubilee from the coming King’s Jubilee.

To-day we are almost further from the youth of these sixty-year-olds than they were from the Middle Ages! The maps of the intellectual, political arid social worlds have been so changed as to have become, almost unrecognisable. They say human nature does not change, but surely everything else has so altered in the past 4S years that this is an entirely new, and no doubt an altogether brave, world compared with that of ISS7.

If we look at the map of the intellectual world to-day, and compare it with that at the fame of the Queen’s Jubilee, the gulf which separates us is startlingly evident. In every branch of human knowledge the advances made have been stupendous. In physics, chemistry, biology, surgery and, indeed, in all the “’ologies,” fundamental changes have come about. Marching side by side with these, Applied Science has staggered even the products of the New Age.

OIL LAMPS IN GENERAL USE In 1887, when Queen Victoria’s Jubilee was celebrated throughout tne British Empire, very little was known, for example, of electric lighting. The oil lamp and the candle were still supreme. The steam locomotive was in operation and the “electric telegraph” had revolutionised human communications, but there,were no telephones, no motor f cars, no films, no gramophones, no aeroplanes, only rather primitive 2 5 hotograpliy, no illustrated newspapers except those with quaint old woodcuts and engravings; no motor-buses —and' no safety razors, typewriters, dictaphones of X-rays! The horse-drawn vehicle was supreme In the British streets, and on the r highways; gas lighted the world, arid when once’a ship passed from sight of land she was. cut oil’ from" the shore qs completely as if she had saileri into another world.

In the political mag of the Empire itself we see equally great changes. In 1887, “Democracy” was a new word, regarded with suspicion; and “Dominion status” was only an aspiration. There were, indeed, no Dominions, except Canada —only colonies with limited powers of self-government.

Downing Street still controlled these colonies, and tne very adjective “colonial” now dropped, was in common and official use. Indi,a had never heard, of dreamed, of self : rule; Calcutta was tlie capital, and the Queen was the “Great White Empress.”'

FIRST “COLONIAL CONFERENCE” But already the British Empire was drawing together for its defence, and •the Queen’s Jubilee year, indeed, saw the first “Colonial Conference” ever hold in London. But Africa was still the “Dark Continent,” and Cecil Rhodes was a young man dreaming dreams, while Oom Paul Kruger was President of the Transvaal Republic, and the South African War, had still to come.

In Canada, a “Dominion” chiefly in name, the “great open prairie spaces” were mostly' peopled by wandering tribes; the first- of the great railways, crossing from Atlantic to Pacific, was only “projected”; the great wave of immigration into Australia, New Zealand and Canada was about to begin; and the names of the leading statesmen of the time included those of Beaconsffeld, Gladstone, Salisbury and Rosebery. As for the great world -dn general, the Arctic and the Antarctic were absolutely closed and unknown, as was also the interior of Australia. Nearly every country was a limited or despotic monarchy; Labour was unorganised; sweating and elnid slavery were rampant; and “Victorian Conservatism was the dominating spirit throughout the British Empire of 1887. ; WOMEN UN-EMANCIPATED. Let us turn to tne social map, and see how almost ludicrous has been tlie effect of changes in manners and modes, habits and customs. - Fortyeight years ago, women were still quite un-emancipated. Their sphere was The Home. There were visible tlie first i faint beginnings of the entry of wo-! men into the professions, notably in! medicine and the law, but except for | that, women were stiff almost complete- ’ ly debarred from the active world, of

commerce,' trade and the professions. The changes in" dress are sufficiently well known to need no comment; some years were to elapse before women were to, be seen riding bicycles,; women tennis playersi had not appeared. The crochet needle, the album, and the stroll “escorted by a. gentlemen,” were still de rigueur. The domestic scene in Britain had for its background in 1887 the Victorian home, with all that the phrase connotes. It had usually three or four storeys, no bathrooms, small windows and it was gas-lighted. Inva.ria.bly it had a basement, and was furnished with heavy hangings, mahogany tables and chairs. All meals were eaten at home; there were ho such institutions as cafqs and tea shops; and the family "often numbered ten-—or more! Evenings were invariably spent home In the bosom of the family, which gathered round the table, by the paraffin oil lamp, to pursue their reading aloud, their studies, work and “parlour games.” That world was self-confident, proud of itself. The British pound sterling was a golden sovereign—-with a purchasing power fire times greater than that of to-clay.

A DIFFERENT PSYCHOLOGY. Forty-eight years ago, too, a, different psychology moved the British peoples. It was a generation that was careful I and thrifty, narrow and rigid in its outlook, readily professing itself shocked. Smoking (of cigars) was permitted. in the Open air only;- the whisker was the pride of that hirsute generation which knew not the hare leg or Bing Crosby or syncopated music. They were limited (poor things) to the polka, mazurka and gavotte; their few evenings v out were hampered by the limitations of transport; ‘they could never make appointments except by the post. However, the first faint rumblings of a new era wore already drifting across the world- We stood o,n the verge of change, and the next half-century was to witness a Revolution which so completely altered everything that tlie world of 1887 is hardly recognisable to-day. It has all taken place within a lifetime, in much less thqn a lifetime! It'began slowly, with the coming of the ’nineties, but from thence onward the pace has been terrific.

Even the language has changed appreciably by the addition, of a large new section to our vocabulary needed’ for intercourse in the New World. The Jubilee Empire of King George and of Queen Victoria are indeed profoundly different.