Nineteenth Century BY WE FREDERIC HARRISON, Esquire. 66 E are entering on the last lap of another hundred years, as the centuries encircle the growth of nations in swift revolving eras. Let us ask, "Is life growing nobler and purer?" "Does religion inspire the heart?" "Are we coming nearer to the just, the loving, the beautiful, the true?" As we look back over the nineteenth century, is it so glorious an advance upon the eighteenth, or indeed upon the seventeenth? In population, in huge cities, in area of dominion, in wealth, in material prosperity, in mechanical inventions, in physical discoveries, in all forms of material resources-yes! in these the advance has been portentous; wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, dominion that would make Alexander of Macedon pale with envy, appliances that to our grandfathers would seem like fairy tales. But is humanity measured by these material things, by power, by wealth? Our great poet tells us that riches abound not in Heaven-but elsewhere: "Let none admire That riches grow in hell; that soil may best I am not making any barren comparison of one century with another. And I doubt if, even in the narrow limit of a single nation, the general progress of mankind can be turned back, unless in rare and exceptional cases. I am a convinced believer in the gradual improvement of civilization when we judge it by areas and epochs sufficiently wide and typical. In all progress there are oscillations, partial degeneration, and local or temporary ailments. But I must profess my convic tion-and I hear the same confessed by the best men and women day by day-that our immediate generation has been sinking of late to meaner ideals, to coarser ways of life, to more vulgar types of literature and art, to more open craving after wealth, and a more insolent assertion of pride and force. The nineteenth century may be judged hereafter to be altogether as much superior to the eighteenth in moral progress, as it certainly has been superior in material progress. But to those of us who are well past the term of middle life there is a painful sense in these late decades that the moral currency has been debased. I am old enough myself to remember distinctly the whole reign of Queen Victoria. And as I compare one decade with another I note how to-day we have lost much of the higher spirit which inspired our public and private life not more than thirty years ago; how to-day we make idols of things which were then the object of loathing and shame. I am not speaking of glaring examples of vice, of gambling in its multifarious forms, of public extravagances, delusions, nor of special acts of infatuation and greed in political adventures. There are plenty of such things in any age. And it is easy to found general and sweeping charges on specific follies and crimes. What I mean is a gradual lowering of moral tone in these recent years an abandonment of the higher standard of public opinion, a deliberate acceptance of what is evil and base. As I look back over the present reign, it seems to me clear that the later years have a lower tone of truth and of honour than that we remember in the earlier and middle years of this period. With all the blunders, wrongs and delusions of the earlier times, our people had some finer inspirations, and more generous impulses for ends which were not wholly selfish or mercenary. In my boyhood there began that long, complicated, and indefatigable series of movements to improve the condition of the people, to lift up the burdens of the poor, to reform our entire financial system, in the interest of the masses and by casting the burdens on the rich-the long labour to secure Free Trade, cheap food, factory legislation, legislation for the rescue of the young, for the education of the people, Poor Law reform, sanitary reform, financial reform, law reform-causes associated with the names of Peel, Cobden, Bright, Gladstone, Shaftesbury, Brougham, Russell, Stanley, Chadwick, Forster, Mill and many more. I am not referring to any special legislation or agitation, nor do I say that it was all wise, or wholly disinterested. I mean that all these various changes in our political and social system were pressed on with an unselfish desire to make the world better, with a genuine enthusiasm for what was good and right in itself which has more or less died out of us to-day. Enthusiasm and devotion to-day there is; but how deeply are they degraded to personal, material and national ambition? The great religious upheaval associated with the name of John Henry Newman was a thing both deeper and more spiritual than the petty squabble to-day about vestments and incense. There was a generous sympathy with the independence of nations, and practical abhorrence of international oppression. We felt to the heart the griefs of Poles, of Hungarians, of Lombards and Venetians. The heart of the people was wrung to its fibre by a brotherly interest in the great crisis of the United States. The Crimean war, even if it were a blunder and an illusion, was entered upon with a genuine resolve to protect the weak against the strong. I am far from pretending to justify or extol all that was done in the first half of the present reign. But in those days what stirred the heart of our people were those strivings after well being, peace, and freedom at home and abroad, and not the ignoble passion to domineer and to grasp, to pile up wealth and to make a bigger Empire, to beat our rivals in trade and in arms. Nor is it only that our national sympathies and enthusiasm have grown colder and coarser, but there has come over us a positive turn for vulgarity of thought, manners and taste. We seem to be declining on what the poet calls "a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart" than of old. It is a common observation that the widowhood and retirement of the Queen have been followed by a deplorable decline in the simplicity, purity, and culture which marked the dominant society in the days of her married life. Fashion, as it is called, is now at the mercy of any millionaire gambler, or any enterprising Monte Cristo from across the seas. Victorian literature is declining into the “short story" and the “problem play”, taking its heroines from women with a past and its heroes from the slums. In prose and in verse the favourite style is the cockney slang of the costermonger, the betting ring, and the barrack canteen. The reek of the pot-house, the music hall, the turf, of the share-market, of the thieves' fence, infects our literature, our manners, our amusements, and our ideals of life. The note of the smart world is to bluster about guns, war-ships, race-horses, and Rand shares, in the jargon that is current at a race course. Any general debasement of tone must have some determining cause. And the causes of this debasement are as usual somewhat mixed, and are partly material and partly spiritual. To begin with the material, it cannot be denied that a great change came over the world when it witnessed the triumph of the Bismarckian policy by which the map of Europe was transformed thirty years ago. The defeat and dismemberment of Denmark, followed by the defeat of Austria and the reorganization of Germany, and this crowned by the overthrow of France and the conquest of two of her provinces with 200,000,000 in money, raised Prussia in seven years from the fourth place of Continental Powers to the acknowledged primacy in the first rank. But it did much more. It started a wonderful development of financial, commercial, and colonial expansion. For the first time in this century war had been made "to pay". Industry had been nourished by war. A tremendous war was followed by unexampled national prosperity. It was a policy avowedly of "Blood and Iron", of force and ambition, of might without right. It mocked at moral considerations as foolish sentiment. Its creed was the good old rule, the simple plan-"Take what you can ". "To the victors the spoils!" The previous wars in Europe, since the fall of Napoleon had all been professedly waged to protect some people from oppression, for defence against aggression, not of avowed offence and conquest. And they had all been the source of distress and heavy burdens even to the victor. But here was a series of three wars in succession which were hardly disclaimed as wars of conquest, which had been followed by prosperity in leaps and bounds, and had raised the nation in eight years to the primacy of Europe of a kind that might demand a century of progress in less violent ways. From the grossly material point of view, it was an astonishing success. Upon Prince Bismarck's death, the repulsive side of the reviews of his career lay in this, that no one thought anything of the question if it were right or wrong, just or unjust, beneficent or retrograde; to them all it seemed, however barbarous from the point of view of morality and civilization, a splendid and typical success. To doubt this was "unctuous rectitude". He Bismarck set the fashion in statesmanship; he did not long wait for imitators and rivals. One after another the nations of Europe started rather poor copies of the Blood and Iron invention. It was taken up like a new machine-gun. Our own Disraeli was one of the first to try the new weapon. started the Jingo fever in the Turko-Russian war, the "forward" policy in Afghanistan and Cyprus and he added to the historic crown of England the tawdry paste jewel of Empire. He founded Imperialism, which has grown since like a Upas tree, and has poisoned Conservatives, Whigs, and Radicals alike. Mr. Gladstone himself, with many reserves and various excuses, fell under the spell of it at last, and Mr. Gladstone's successor is now one of the chief prophets of the new Mahdism. British statesmen, to be just, were shy of resorting to the "Blood and Iron" weapon of Europe; but they made an excessive use of it in Colonial and Oriental regions. And |