Great Britain and Her Queen Part 6

All honour to these servants of humanity! We rejoice to find among them many who could unite the simplest childlike faith with a wide and grand mental outlook; we exult not less to find in many Biblical students and commentators the same patience, thoroughness, and resolute pursuit of the very truth as that exemplified by the devotees of physical science. G.o.d's Word is explored in our day--the same clay which has seen the great work of the Revised Version of the Scriptures begun and completed--with no less ardour than G.o.d's world.

And what vast additions have been made to our knowledge of this earth! We have seen Nineveh unburied, the North-West Pa.s.sage explored, and the mysterious Nile stream at last tracked to its source. To compare a fifty-years-old map of Africa with one of the present day will a little enable us to estimate the advances made in our acquaintance with the Dark Continent alone; similar maps including the Polar regions of North America will testify also to a large increase of hard-won knowledge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: David Livingstone.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir John Franklin.]

Exploration--Arctic, African, Oriental and Occidental--has had its heroic devotees, sometimes its martyrs. Witness Franklin, Burke and Wills, and Livingstone. The long uncertainty overhanging the fate of the gallant Franklin, after he and the expedition he commanded had vanished into the darkness of Arctic winter in 1845, and the unfaltering faithfulness with which his widow clung to the search for her lost husband, form one of the most pathetic chapters of English story. The veil was lifted at last and the secret of the North-West Pa.s.sage, to which so many lives had been sacrificed, was brought to light in the course of the many efforts made to find the dead discoverer. As Franklin had disappeared in the North, so Livingstone was long lost to sight in the wilds of Africa, and hardly less feverish interest centred round the point, so long disputed, of his being in life or in death--interest freshly awakened when the remains of the heroic explorer, who had been found only to be lost again, were brought home to be laid among the mighty dead of England. The fervent Christian philanthropy of Livingstone endeared him yet more to the national heart; and we may here note that very often, as in his case, the missionary has served not only Christianity, as was his first and last aim, but also geographical and ethnological science and colonial and commercial development. We have briefly referred already to some of the struggles, the sufferings, and the triumphs of missionary enterprise in our day: to chronicle all its effort and achievement would be difficult, for these have been world-wide, and often wonderfully successful. Nor has much less success crowned other agencies for meeting the ever-increasing need for religious knowledge, which multiply and grow in number and in power. Witness, among many that might be named, the continuous development of the Sunday School system and the immensely extended operations of the unsectarian Bible Society.

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Ruskin. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_.]

Great advances have been made during this reign in English art and art-criticism, and more particularly in the extension of real artistic education to cla.s.ses of the community who could hardly attain it before, though it was perhaps more essential to them than to the wealthy and leisurely who had previously monopolised it. The multiplication of Schools of Design over the country, intended to promote the tasteful efficiency of those engaged in textile manufactures and in our decorative and constructive art generally, is one remarkable feature of the time, and the sedulous cultivation of music by members of all cla.s.ses of society is another, hardly less hopeful. In all these efforts for the benefit and elevation of the community the Prince Consort took deep and active interest, and the royal family themselves, from Her Majesty downwards, highly cultured and accomplished, have not failed to act in the same spirit. But the history of English nineteenth-century art would be incomplete indeed without reference to two powerful influences--the rise and progress of the new art of photography, which has singularly affected other branches of graphic work; and the career, hitherto unexampled in our land, of the greatest art-critic of this, perhaps of any, age--John Ruskin, the most eminent also of the many writers and thinkers who have been swayed by the magic spell of Carlyle, whose fierce and fervid genius, for good or for evil, told so strongly on his contemporaries. Ruskin is yet more deeply imbued with his master's philosophy than those other gifted and widely influential teachers, Maurice and Kingsley; and yet perhaps he is more strongly and st.u.r.dily independent in his individuality than either, while the unmatched English of his prose style differs not less widely from the rugged strength of Carlyle than from the mystical involution of Maurice and the vehement and, as it were, breathless, yet vivid and poetic, utterance of Kingsley. When every defect has been admitted that is chargeable against one or all of this group of sincere and stalwart workers, it must be allowed that their power on their countrymen has been largely wielded for good. Particularly is this the case with Ruskin, whose influence has reached and enn.o.bled many a life that, from pressure of sordid circ.u.mstances, was in great need of such help as his spirituality of tone, and deeply felt reverential belief in the Giver of all good and Maker of all beauty, could afford.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dean Stanley.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I was sick, and ye visited me."]

We have preferred not to dwell on one department of literature which, like every other, has received great additions during our period--that of religious controversy. A large portion of such literature is in its very nature ephemeral; and some of the disputes which have engaged the energies even of our greatest masters in dialectics have not been in themselves of supreme importance; but many points of doctrine and discipline have been violently canva.s.sed among professing Christians, and attacks of long-sustained vigour and virulence have been made on almost every leading article of the Christian creed by the avowed enemies or the only half-hostile critics of the Church, which the champions of Scripture truth have not been backward to repel. Amid all this confusion and strife of a.s.sault and resistance one thing stands out clearly: Christianity and its progress are more interesting to the national mind than ever before. It has been well, too, that through all those fifty years a large-minded and fervent but most un.o.btrusive and practical piety has been enthroned in the highest places of the land--a piety which will escape the condemnation of the King when He shall come in His glory, and say to many false followers, "I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited Me not."

These dread words are not for those who have cared as our Sovereign Lady and her beloved ones have cared for the sick and the suffering and the sad; who have bound up the heart-wounds of the widow and the orphan and ministered to their earthly needs; who, like our lost Princess Alice and her royal elder sister, have tended the victims of war, shrinking from no ghastliness or repulsiveness, no horrors of the hospital where victor and vanquished lay moaning in common misery; or, like their queenly mother, have shed the suns.h.i.+ne of royal smiles and soothing words and helpful alms upon the obscurer but hardly less pitiable patients who crowd our English infirmaries.

In her northern and southern "homes" of Osborne and Balmoral the Queen, too, has been able to share a true, unsophisticated friends.h.i.+p with her humble neighbours, to rejoice in their joys and lighten their griefs with gentle, most efficient sympathy. It was of a Highland cottage that Dr. Guthrie wrote that "within its walls the Queen had stood, with her kind hands smoothing the thorns of a dying man's pillow. There, left alone with him at her own request, she had sat by the bed of death--a Queen ministering to the comfort of a saint." It was in a cottage at Osborne that the same gentle and august almsgiver was found reading comfortable Scripture words to a sick and aged peasant, quietly retiring upon the entrance of the clerical visitant, that _his_ message of peace might be freely given, and thus allowing the sufferer to disclose to the pastor that the lady in the widow's weeds was Victoria of England. These are examples, which it would be easy to multiply, of that true oneness of feeling between the lofty and the lowly which is the special, the unique glory of Christ's kingdom. May our land never lack them; may they multiply themselves to all time.

The best evidence of the truth of the Gospel is admittedly its unequalled power of lifting up humanity to higher and yet higher levels. In many and mighty instances of that power our age is not barren. And in despite of the foes without and within that have wrought her woe--of the Pharisaism that is a mask for fraud, of the mammon-wors.h.i.+p cloaked as respectability, of scepticism lightly mocking, of the bolder enmity of the blasphemer--we cannot contemplate the story of Christianity throughout our epoch, even in these islands and this empire, without seeing that the advance of the Faith is real and constant, the advance of the rising tide, and that her seeming defeats are but the deceptive reflux of the ever-mounting waves.

CHAPTER X.

PROGRESS OF THE EMPIRE FROM 1887 TO 1897.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Duke of Connaught.]

Resuming our pen after an interval of ten years, we have thought it well, not only to carry on our story of the Sovereign and her realm to the latest attainable point, but also to give some account of the advance made and the work accomplished by the Methodist Church, which, youngest of the greater Nonconformist denominations, has acted more powerfully than any other among them on the religious and social life, not only of the United Kingdom and the Empire, but of the world. This account, very brief, but giving details little known to outsiders, will form a valuable pendant to the sketch of the general history of Victoria's England that we are now about to continue.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Imperial Inst.i.tute.]

Many thousands who rejoiced in the Queen's Jubilee of 1887 are glad to-day that the close of the decade should find the beloved Lady of these isles, true woman and true Queen, still living and reigning.

On September 23, 1896, Queen Victoria had reigned longer than any other English monarch, and the desire was general for some immediate celebration of the event; but, by the Queen's express wish, all recognition of the fact was deferred until the sixtieth year should be fully completed, and the nation prepared to celebrate the "Diamond Jubilee" on June 22, 1897, with a fervour of loyalty that should far outs.h.i.+ne that of the Jubilee year of 1887.

In the personal history of our Queen during those ten years we may note with reverent sympathy some events that must shadow the festival for her. The calm and kindly course of her home-life has again been broken in upon by bereavement. All seemed fair in the Jubilee year itself, and the Queen was appearing more in public than had been her wont--laying the foundations of the Imperial Inst.i.tute; unveiling in Windsor Park a statue of the Prince Consort, Jubilee gift of the women of England; taking part in a magnificent naval review at Spithead. But a shadow was already visible to some; and early in 1888 sinister rumours were afloat as to the health of the Crown Prince of Germany, consort of the Queen's eldest daughter. Too soon those rumours proved true. Even when the prince rode in the splendid Jubilee procession, a commanding figure in his dazzling white uniform, the cruel malady had fastened on him that was to slay him in less than a year, proving fatal three months after the death of his aged father had called him to fill the imperial throne. The nation followed the course of this tragedy with a feverish interest never before excited by the lot of any foreign potentate, and deeply sympathised with, the distress of the Queen and of the bereaved empress.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Duke of Clarence. _From a Photograph by Lafayette, Dublin_.]

But the year 1892 held in store a blow yet more cruelly felt. The English people were still rejoicing with the Queen over the betrothal of the Duke of Clarence, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, to his kinswoman Princess May of Teck, when the death of the bridegroom elect in January plunged court and people into mourning. That the Queen was greatly touched by the universal sympathy with her and hers was proved by the pathetic letter she wrote to the nation, and by the frank reliance on their affection which marked the second letter in which, eighteen months later, she asked them to share her joy in the wedding of the Duke of York, now heir-presumptive, to the bride-elect of his late brother. This union has been highly popular, and the Queen's evident delight in the birth of the little Prince Edward of York in June, 1894, touched the hearts of her subjects, who remembered the deep sorrow of 1892.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Duke of York. _From a Photograph by Russell & Sons, Baker Street, W_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: d.u.c.h.ess of York. _From a Photograph by Russell & Sons, Baker Street, W_.]

Once more they were called to grieve with her, when the husband of her youngest daughter Beatrice, Prince Henry of Battenberg, who for years had formed part of her immediate circle, died far from home and England, having fallen a victim to fever ere he could distinguish himself, as he had hoped, in our last expedition to Ashanti. The pathos of such a death was deeply felt when the prince's remains were brought home and laid to rest, in the presence of his widow and her royal mother, in the very church at Whippingham that he had entered an ardent bridegroom. Not all gloom, however, has been Her Majesty's domestic life in these recent years; she has taken joy in the marriages of many of her descendants; and the visits of her grandchildren--of whom one, Princess Alice of Hesse, daughter of the well-beloved Alice of England, became Czarina of Russia only the other day--are a source of keen interest to her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Princess Henry of Battenberg. _From a Photograph by Hughes & Mullins, Ryde, Isle of Wight_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Prince Henry of Battenberg. _From a Photograph by Hughes & Mullins, Ryde, Isle of Wight_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Czarina of Russia.]

But there is no selfish absorption in her own family affairs, no neglect of essential duty. The Prince of Wales and "the Princess"

relieve the Queen of many irksome social functions; but she does not shun these when it is clear to her that her people wish her to undertake them. Witness her willingness to take part in the Jubilee Thanksgiving services and pageant, despite the feebleness of her advanced age.

We need not dwell long on the rather stormy Parliamentary history of the last decade, on the divisions and disappointments of the Irish Home Rule party, once so powerful, or on the various attacks aimed at the Welsh and Scottish Church establishments and at the principle of "hereditary legislation" as embodied in the House of Lords. Some useful legislation has been accomplished amid all the strife. We may instance the Act in 1888 creating the new system of County Councils, the Parish Councils Act, the Factory and Workshops Amendment Act, and the Education Act of 1891--measures designed to protect the toiling millions from the evils of "sweating," and to a.s.sure their children of practically free education.

Substantial good has been done, whether the reins of power have been held by Mr. Gladstone or by Lord Salisbury--whose long tenure of office expiring in 1892, the veteran statesman whom he had displaced again took the helm--or by Lord Rosebery, in whose favour the great leader finally withdrew in 1894 into private life, weary of the burden of State. In 1897 we again see Lord Salisbury directing the destinies of the mighty empire--a task of exceptional difficulty, now that the gravest complications exist in Europe itself and in Africa.

The horrors suffered by the Armenian subjects of the Turk have called for intervention by the great powers; but no sooner had Turkish reforms been promised in response to the joint note of Great Britain, France, and Russia, than new troubles began in Crete, its people rising in arms to shake off the Turkish yoke.

Meanwhile our occupation of Egypt is compelling us to use armed force against the wild, threatening dervishes in the Soudan, and well-grounded uneasiness is felt as to the position and action of our countrymen in Southeastern Africa in connexion with the Boer republic of the Transvaal. The British South Africa Chartered Company, formed in 1889, adventurous and ambitious, loomed large in men's eyes during 1896, when the historic and disastrous raid of Dr. Jameson and his followers startled the civilised world. The whole story of that enterprise is yet to unfold; but it has added considerably to the embarra.s.sments of the British government. Hopes were entertained in 1890 that the British East Africa Company, by the pressure it could put on the Sultan of Zanzibar, had secured the cessation of the slave trade on the East African sh.o.r.e; these hopes are not yet fulfilled, but it may be trusted that a step has been taken towards the mitigation of the evil--the "open sore of the world."

If we turn to India, we see it in 1896-7 still in the grip of a cruel famine, aggravated by an outbreak of the bubonic plague too well known to our fathers, which, appearing three years ago at Hong-Kong, has committed new ravages at Bombay. Government is making giant efforts to meet both evils, and is aided by large free-will offerings of money, sent not only from this country, but also from Canada. "Ten years ago such a manifestation would have been unlikely. The sense of kins.h.i.+p is stronger, the imperial sentiment has grown deeper, the feeling of responsibility has broadened." Kins.h.i.+p with a starving race is felt and shown by the Empress on her throne, and her subjects learn to follow her example.

But the sense of brotherhood seems somewhat deficient when we look at the continual labour wars that mark the period in our own land. From the Hyde Park riots of socialists and unemployed, in the end of 1887, to the railway strikes of 1897, the story is one of strikes among all sorts and conditions of workers, paralysing trade, and witnessing to strained relations between labour and capital; the great London strike of dock labourers, lasting five weeks, and keeping 2,500 men out of work, may yet be keenly remembered. There seems an imperative need for the wide diffusion of a true, practical Christianity among employers and employed; some signs point to the growth of that healing spirit: and we may note with delight that while never was there so much wealth and never such deep poverty as during this period, never also were there so many religious and charitable organisations at work for the relief of poverty and the uplifting of the fallen; while not a few of the wealthy, and even one or two millionaires, have shown by generous giving their painful sense of the contrast between their own wealth and the dest.i.tution of others.

It has been a period of sharp religious disputes, and every religious and benevolent inst.i.tution is keenly criticised; but great good is being done notwithstanding by devoted men and women. The centenary of the Baptist Missionary Society, observed in 1892, recalled to mind the vast work accomplished by missions since that pioneer society sent out the apostolic "shoemaker" Carey, to labour in India, and reminds us of the great change wrought in public opinion since he and his enterprise were so bitterly attacked. The heroic missionary spirit is still alive, as is proved by the readiness of new evangelists to step into the place of the missionaries to China, cruelly murdered at Ku-Cheng in 1895 by heathen fanatics.

The immense development of our colonies during the reign has already been noticed; some of them have made surprising advances during the last ten years. In southern and eastern Africa British enterprise has done much to develop the great natural wealth of the land; but the frequent troubles in Matabeleland and the complications with the Transvaal since the discovery of gold there may be regarded as counterbalancing the material advantages secured. Ceylon has a happier record, having more than regained her imperilled prosperity through the successful enterprise of her settlers in cultivating the fine tea which has almost displaced China tea in the British market, Ceylon exporting 100,000,000 lbs. in 1895 as against 2,000,000 lbs.

ten years previously. Canada also now takes rank as a great maritime state, and the fortunes of Australia, though much shaken a few years ago by a great financial crisis, are again brilliant; in the world of social progress and democracy it is still the colonial marvel of our times.

[Ill.u.s.tration: H. M. Stanley.]

The last census, taken in 1891, in Great Britain and Ireland showed a vast increase of population, sixty-two towns in England and Wales returning more than 50,000 inhabitants, and the total population of the United Kingdom being 38,104,975. Alarmists warned us that, with the ratio of increase shown, neither food nor place would soon be found for our people; and a great impetus being given to emigration, our colonies benefited. But despite such alarms, articles of luxury were in greater demand than ever, the tobacco duty reaching in 1892 the sum of 10,135,666, half a million, more than in the previous year; and the consumption of tea and spirits increased in due proportion. The same year saw great improvements in sanitation put into practice as the result of an alarm of cholera, that plague ravaging Hamburg.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dr. Fridtjof Nansen.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Miss Kingsley.]

Vast engineering works, of which the Manchester s.h.i.+p Ca.n.a.l is the most familiar instance, have been carried on. This great waterway, thirty-five miles long, and placing an inland town in touch with the sea, was begun in 1887 and finished in 1894. Numerous exhibitions, at home and abroad, have stimulated industrial and aesthetic progress; and science has continued to advance with bewildering rapidity, developing chiefly in practical directions. The bacteriologist has unveiled much of the mystery of disease, showing that seed-germs produce it; the photographer comes in aid of surgery, for the discovery of the X or Rontgen rays, by the German professor whose name is a.s.sociated with them, now enables the surgeon to discover foreign bodies lodged within the human frame, and to decide with authority their position and the means of removing them. Burial reforms, in the interests of health and economy, have been introduced, and nursing, elevated into a science, has become an honourable profession for cultured women. In 1894 that eminent _savant_ Lord Rayleigh brought before the British a.s.sociation his discovery of a hitherto unknown const.i.tuent in the atmosphere. The use of steam as a motive power, almost contemporaneous with the Queen's reign, has bound our land in a network of railways: now it is electricity which is being utilised in the same sense, and to the telephone and the telegraph as means of verbal communication is added the motorcar as a means of rapid progression, 1896 seeing its use in streets sanctioned by Parliament. It may not yet supersede the bicycle, which in ten years has greatly increased in favour. Electric lighting, in the same period, has become very general; and further adaptations of this mysterious force to man's service are in the air.

[Ill.u.s.tration: J. M. Barrie.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Richard Jefferies.]

This is an age of great explorers. Stanley has succeeded to Livingstone, Nansen to Franklin; but it has been only within comparatively recent years that women have emulated men in penetrating to remote regions. Within the decade we have seen Mrs.

Bishop a veteran traveller, visiting south-west Persia; Mrs. French Sheldon has shown how far beyond the beaten track a woman's adventurous spirit may lead her; and Miss Mary Kingsley, a niece of the late Charles Kingsley, has intrepidly explored the interior of Africa, her scientific observations being welcomed by British _savants_. In 1896 women, who had long sought the privilege, were permitted to compete for the diploma of the Royal College of Surgeons, and in many other walks of usefulness the barriers excluding women have been removed, with benefit to all concerned. It is not other than natural that under the reign of a n.o.ble woman there should arise women n.o.ble-minded as herself, cheris.h.i.+ng ideas of life and duty lofty as her own, and that their greatest elevation of purpose should tent to raise the moral standard among the men who work with them for the uplifting of their fellow subjects. Such signs of the times may be noticed now, more evident than even ten years ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Professor Huxley. _From a Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Professor Tyndall. _From a Photograph by Alexander Ba.s.sano, Ltd_.]

The educational progress of the last decade has been very great, especially as regards the instruction of women; yet the period has not been noticeably fruitful of literature in the highest sense. In the world of fiction there is much that looks like degeneration; the lighter magazines and serials have multiplied past computation, and form all the reading of not a few persons. To counteract the unhealthy "modern novel" has arisen the Scottish school, the "literature of the kailyard," as it has been termed in scorn; yet a purer air breathes in the pages of J. M. Barrie, "Ian Maclaren," and Crockett. Their many imitators are in some danger of impairing the vogue of these masters, but still the tendency of the school is wholesome. Other artists in fiction a.s.sume the part of censors of society, and write of its doings with a bitterness that may or may not profit; the unveiling of cancerous sores is of doubtful advantage to health.