THE PAST AND PRESENT.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 91, 16 April 1908, Page 3

THE PAST AND PRESENT.

CHANGES IN SOCIAL HABITS

"I would not exchange the twentieth century, for any that have gone before it; my only regret is that I do not live in the twenty-first." With this statement Bishop Welldon (Dean of Manchester) prefaced a lecture at the Manchester Athenaeum on "Some changes in the social habits of the people of England." He went on to state, chronologically, .some of the reasons for his' preference. "If you lived before th& !; thirteenth century you would have had no sugar," he said. "At the beginning of the fifteenth century you would have had no butter; in the sixteenth century no potatoes and no, tobacco; in the seventeenth no tea, coffe, or soap. lam afraid that our ancestors were all dirty. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were no lamps and no umbrellas; at the beginning of the nineteenth no trains, matches, telegrams, gas, or chloroform. William the Conqueror ate with his fingers; Chaucer never saw a printed book; Queen Elizabeth never heard of tea or saw a newspaper; and Queen Victoria was the first Sovereign ot England not dependent on wind | and weather, for opportunity of leaving her island home." Bishop Welldon spoke of the strenuous opposition which every improvement of higher civilisation had had to face. Holinshead,.; the Elizabethan chronicler, spoke of the new-fangled notion which allowed smoke to escape up a given channel, instead' of through the i cracks and crevices of a house's walls. John Wesley ascribed most of the evils of a degenerate' age to the practice of drinking tea. Matches "were called lucifers, because they were thought to be connected with the evil one. Even the use of anesthetics, one of science's greatest discoveries was fought against. Sir James Simpson made one of the finest possible answers to ; the critics who were opposed to chloroform by pointing out that in the record of the earliest operation m human: history, when God was said to have taken a rib out of Adam's body, He first cast the man into a- deep sleep. Of gambling, changes ingress, • food, and drink Bishop Welldon had much to say! Une, of the most marked aspects of the progress of civilisation was, he thought, the increase of humanity, lhe last advertisement of the sale of a slave m England appeared as recently as November 11th, 1771, in the Birmingham Gazette. In that paper a VValsall auctioneer announced the sale by auction of "a negro boy from Atnca, supposed to be about 10 or 11 years of age. He is remarkablystraight, well-proportioned, speaks tolerably good English, of a mild disposition, friendly, sound in health, fond of labour, and for colour an excellent fine lad." The present illegality of bear-baiting and cock-fighting he spoke of withf satisfaction, but, he added, "there was still room for the humanising of sports in England," and if proof of this were needed it was to be found in a report, published in The Times of March 1, 1907, of "A remarkable scene at a stag hunt," the hunt being the Berks and Bucks, lhe report told how a terrified and, wounded stag appeared in the main street of a village and collapsed. I here a rope was thrown around its neck, and some men were leading it to a stable when the beast detected the sounds of the approaching hounds, and in its frantic efforts to get free it strangled itself. It was some consolation, Bishop Welldon added, that the members of the hunt were the objects of an uncomplimentary demonstration."