MARIA MILLIS AND MASTER ANTHONY COOPER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19009, 3 November 1923, Page 10

MARIA MILLIS AND MASTER ANTHONY COOPER.

• You will not find the name of Maria Millis in the Dictionary of National Biography, but “Master Anthony’s” you will find under the heading of “Lord Shaftesbury.” It would not be there, however* but for that fine old family servant, Maria Millis. Lord Shaftesbury says that she was the best friend he over had. It was she who made him “chief among those who have made England really worth while fighting for within the limits of a single century.” She did this by sheltering him in his hard youth. The hardness of his mother and father would be “incredible to most men.” But Maria Millis, an old Evangelical family servant, consoled him. From her he learned those “fortifying dogmas of Evangelical religion” which encased him as in an armour, and which inspired him to the many foes with whom he had to fight. And because of the faithful heart of that old servant. Lord Shaftesbury was able to do bis great work. Out of ’much unpromising material a very brilliant life of Lord Shaftesbury has now been produced by J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, whose happy comradeship in work (and marriage) have given us already two classics of the Industrial Revolution—in their famous books “The Village Labourer” and “The Town Labourer.” This book on Shaftesbury is an immense service to our social history, and will certainly be a classic on one of the blackest pages of our industrial history. It is also one of the terrible chapters of the Recording Angel, which reminds us for how long we kept Mercy on the doorstep and how recently it is that we let her in. What He Did.— “It is not yet 4(Tyears since the seventh Lord Shaftesbury died, having lived and worked and suffered for others through the greater/ part of the last century,” says the Times in a leading article. “Yet, of the hurrying thousands who daily pass his memorial in Piccadilly Circus, how manv know —or, if they do know, ever pause to remenjber and think about —a tithe of what he did for England '! “ ‘A philanthropist,’ one here and tnere may say to himself, and, with a. cynical shrug at tfje choice of such a site for a memorial to such a man, go on his way unheeding. For this reason, because in the stress of modern existence mankind easily forgets, Mr and Mrs Hammond’s new Life of this particular Maker of the Nineteenth Century does supply a want (Constable, 12s net). “To the men and women of to-day it comes as a grave and painful reminder of the danse macabre which, from his time at Harrow ■ onwards, was to haunt the remainder of Lord Shaftesbury’s days—- “ ‘the mill children deformed in spine and knee and stupified with weariness, the infant mine “trappers” quaking from the blackness and solitude of the rat-ridden pits, the all but naked women harnessed to the coal carts, the cancerous chimneyclimbing boys, their raw knees and elbows steeped in brine, the lunatic women crawling bearded and ragged, in the filth of uncontrolled asylums, the whole defile of spectres from the lower of the “Two Nations” into which industrialism had divided 'England.’ “To the ending of these inhuman tortures, which were part of the ‘ ‘savage logic of the Industrial Revolution,’ Lord Shaftesbury devoted his life.” He Was a Prophet.— “He was a prophet because to the evil and suffering which he found in the world he opposed the simple revelation of his Christian conscience,” adds the Times. “For all their narrowness, the religious convictions instilled into him b- his old nurse taught him above everything else to love and pity his fellow-men. He felt that it was not enough to save a man’s soul if he were starving or living like a pig or had no time for thought and recreation. To-day many men —far more than when Shaftesbury began his work—are of the same way' of thinking, and thanks to them, as well as to him, there is in the world—especially in the case of children —far less evil of the kind against which ho fought. Law and lawgivers are alike more humane. Innumerable societies have sprung up to carry out and develc--the work which he began,’’ “Lord Shaftesbury’s record of singlehanded victories over infamous wrongdoing supported by callous men for the sake of cash profits is less amazing than the arguments of those who opposed him with every form of obloquy,” says the Morning Post. “To-day it seems inconceivable that the horrors he discovered could be tolerated in a civilised community, much less supported as necessary to industrial stability. It is strange, indeed, that a child ‘rising eight’ could ever be allowed to work from three in the morning to ten at night in a mill—stranger still that the doctrinaire could insist that putting a stop to such a ghastly wrong was depriving the child of the right to sell its labour freely. Wherever he came upon such a reductio ad nbsurdum of a political theory of liberty Lord Shaftesbury, even in the days when he could not afford a secretary, worked night and day until the evil thing was eradicated. “It was a titled aristocrat—not Cobden or Bright or any philosophic Radical or political ‘Friend ot Man’—who was the leader in the long struggle for tae Factory Acts, and for clearing child-labour out of the mines. Ho also wag the champion of the ‘climbing boys’—against the kind old ladies who thought mechanical appliances would spoil their furniture—and he it was who put an end to the horrors of the Bethlehem (Bedlam), such as the confinement of William Norris, an educated man, for twelve years in a trough against a wall, bound with iron bars round neck, waist, arms and shoulders, under the control of a drunken keeper. “How can we remember the faults of the man who did more than anybody else to put an end to these nameless miseries, and, oven in his last pain-racked years, demonstrated his saeva indignatio against cruelty by helping Plimsoll to kill the industry of the coffin-ship !” The authors , disclose the soul of Shaftesbury by glimpses only, but those glimpses show its enthralling depth oi melancholy. “His is a life that seems curiously to exemplify a fond idea of the Romantic ago in which he grew up, the idea of a man marked from birth by a sombre destiny. “These mysterious predestinations in Romantic legend ftrq .debased too often

to some vulgar curse or sinister defect of nature; the suffering of Lord Shaftesbury's early years has the stamp of a dark but sacred initiation. Tire events of his youth seem designed to a single end, the forging of a necessary instrument. Each stroke subserves the purpose —the neglected childhood in the house oi parents who typified the polished heartlessness of the eighteenth century; the drinking in of the stem but fortifying dogmas of evangelical religion in their rudest form from the lips of the only friend of his solitude, the old servant, Maria Millis; the filth and bullying of a “Dotheboys Hall” at Chiswick; and then, when boyhood might have expanded into gaiety and perhaps forgetfulness m the pauper’s funeral shadowing his sunlig happier atmosphere of Harrow, e on the spot ‘ where the tablet still mar - s his memory. . , “For others there was dreaming under the churchyard elms, triumphs m school and field, pride of oratory and joy friendship; for him the drunkards lurd - mg with- oaths about the coffin they u* dropped upon the stones. ■ ■ • , , free air of the hill, by the cheerful mellow walls of the old school, a trapdoor had opened from that fetid under world of which we can scarcely bear o be told to-day, the long persistence ot which we can hardly credit, when read that as late as 1872 a boy was suffocated in an English chimney. The Necessary Man.— “We are tempted to call him the ' necessary man.’ He was a patrician who could plead the cause of the victims as the equal of their judges, and nad yet been taught sympathy with pam by misery. He had the gifts of a statesman, passing, young into the unreformed Parliament and taking office at the start of his career; but he had early tasted the transcience of honours and the chicanery and timeserving of politics. Endowed with the mingled sensitiveness and strength that often marks the itngfish aristocrat, he could feel as an everburning sore the wrongs he had set Himself to redress, and yet endure the conflict and strain of the task. _ Above all, as befitted the combatant in a super-, human struggle, his centre of gravity was not in this world. His religious zeal nad the intensity of its narrowness; when men like Bright and Cobden m the blindness of theory took sides with the dragon, it was well that St. George did not see two sides of a question. When office, and possibly even the Conservative leadersiupj might have been the reward of turning from his task, it was as well hat obstinacy should reinforce conscientiousness.” o,