Progress, what is it? "In effect," said Yellowly, "the suiting and smoothing of life's way to the great and struggling masses."—Author, chap. i.
What plan should I adopt with my proposed retrospective history? How should I best record the vast progress effected by our busy humanity in the past thousand years? It occurred to me that I would, first of all, lay before the reader a few special causes which markedly contributed to that wonderful progress. They were causes which, in most cases, began to come into operation about the time my retrospect begins, namely towards the end of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth century. I attach therefore great importance to that particular time; and no doubt that is why it is, curiously enough, always somehow so much more in my mind than any other of my retrospect. Some of these causes—as, for instance, the resolution of the State to see to the universal education of the people; the inclusion, also, of technical and scientific education; the complete removal, by a method presently to be noticed, of the parliamentary block of public business; the abolition of international war, and of the national waste of a professional soldiery; and, more perhaps than aught else, the rapid healthy increase of intelligent people, under the gradual but steady solution of the food question, together with the fact that the head and hand of woman, when she had secured all her rights, were in their various ways as active for progress as those of the man,—had altogether a most powerful and quite unprecedented after-effect on the advance and well-being of our people. After a brief sketch of each of the more prominent of these various causes, I purpose to take the general progress century by century. I shall first attend mainly to that of our own country and people, until the time when our previously separate national interests have merged finally into that of the whole advancing world at large. We enter upon this great change with the last half of our retrospect; after which we have to deal with that entire world which then began to assume its present grand aspect of one homogeneous society and substantially of one speech.
Let me here parenthetically remark, that it is indeed only from old association, and from the additional circumstance that both my residence and my business location are still in the old ancestral quarters of a good thousand years ago, that I find myself still keeping up the exploded anomaly of speaking and thinking of my people and my country, as though these were a still existing distinction in the world.
"Old England" has now finally disappeared from the earth, alike in her distinctive nationality, as in her physical islandic outlines of once familiar seacoast and scenery. In the contest of races which has been going actively on for the most part of the past thousand years, and in "the survival of the fittest," we English, along with the races kindred to us, have everywhere carried the day, and everywhere all others have been crowded off the world's too narrow surface. The French and German tongues, the Russian and Chinese, all lingered more or less in a protracted fight for dominancy or for life, while John Chinaman's prolific race was amongst the very last to succumb to the universal intrusion of our vigorous section of the white skins. The conjoined British and American Empires had at last everywhere predominated, to overspread our earth with the English speech and the Kelto-German races.
When we consider that the world, just as it is to-day, when we are upon the verge of the thirtieth century of our era, has considerably over a million times more people than it was possessed of when we were just upon the twentieth century, a thousand years ago, and that all this multitude is not only kept alive, but is even prosperous and comfortable throughout besides, as well as everywhere busy as bees over the earth's surface, both above and below ground, we cannot fail, in view of such a lively throng of working heads and hands, to be aware of, at any rate, one grand cause of our progress during the interval I am about to survey. Old prophetic Malthus, as things have turned out, sounded quite a false alarm, with his fears for the food-supply as against the population-increase of the future. For centuries after his long-past day, the still thinly peopled world had food enough in the old accustomed natural food-raising ways, when its comparatively sparse inhabitants had successively occupied and ploughed up the many vacant areas which the world could still show during and for long after the nineteenth century. But, as we have already hinted, when these previously empty spaces got completely covered with human beings, and their cultivation was thus no longer possible, chemistry had already come to man's help, to give him food by much shorter and more convenient processes than the tedious roundabout of old-fashioned Nature.
Early in my retrospect, as indeed I have already said, the woman also was at full work for the world's progress, as well as the man. The sex had fought bravely and well the battle for this right—the right, which should be common to both sexes, to help on the ever-advancing world. And this battle being gained, the world had since experienced the difference of pace due to the augmented numbers and variety of the propellants at its wheels. There was also another important consequence to this victory. The two sexes, thus busily and usefully occupied, met each other more frequently in the walks of industry, especially in their earlier life, and thus formed attachments which kept them steady until terminated in marriage. Thus marriage, and mostly early marriage, became the universal rule. Heavy family responsibilities followed of course, and the cause of population-increase was everywhere ascendant. But against that one expense, formidable as it might be, there arose concurrently quite a host of economies, moral, social and material, every item of which was a distinct, although a varied kind of gain to society. And thus, for example, ere the twentieth century had run its course, our society was able to boast that two great social evils of the nineteenth had practically disappeared, namely, the public-house in its old familiar and ungainly aspect, and that heretofore supposed ineradicable feature of all society, which had appropriated to itself, par excellence, the title of "the social evil."
Although the State is the only parent possible to the whole national family, the State was long of apprehending, and duly undertaking, its educational duties as such. But towards the end of the nineteenth century this duty was at last begun, and a most memorable era was thus inaugurated in the national life and history. At the outset there was much uncertainty, as well as curiosity, at what might be the result, upon the society at large, of our universal education. Looking back from so many centuries, our subject possesses the certainty of fact, as well as the interest of a great problem. We shall see the effects as we step along, century by century, through my retrospect.
I shall merely say here that, after some preliminary experiences, we entirely reversed most of our old educational ways. Thus grammar was taught last instead of first. Then, instead of Greek and Latin, there was a general grounding in science, and an after special grounding in technical education. The dead languages, in fact, were not taught at all, except for special pursuits and capacities; but, instead, there was thorough proficiency in the leading modern languages—in two or three such as the rule, and in more according to taste or capacity, or the final bent or business of life. One important and far-reaching change consisted in learning to read always as though naturally speaking. The old drawl was insufferable, and this dramatic method alone was sufficient to send the vigour of life, as compared with the languor of death, through a great and varied section of education. Again, the increasing multiplicities of study demanded all the possible economies of simplicity in charging the minds and memories of youth; and thus varying forms of the same letter or cypher were done away with, while writing and printing were brought as nearly as might be into one and the same aspect. A special feature of the new system was the general medical supervision, which was throughout of the most careful and discriminative character. With all these changes, facilities, and safeguards, capped by those of the decimal and metric system, education was deprived of half its difficulties, or rather, as was the happier result, the pupil was passed, with the same time and exertion as of old, through a double curriculum.
Education was "compulsory," if we must use that ugly term in such a cause; as though we described the hospital as for compulsory curing, and the parental home as a compulsory refuge. Education finally settled itself, as was inevitable as well as appropriate, in view alike of the present and the future, into the free gift of the State, impartially awarded to all its children, in degrees and varieties according to their natural capacity and aptitude. But, to the national credit, this was rarely any expense to the State, as the large and increasing means of its more prosperous citizens were ever emulatively offered to defray the cost. Repeatedly, at particular stages of the educational course, the millions of pupils were each and all carefully examined as to their respective dispositions, and their attainments physical and mental, so as to direct specially the further and higher education. The State thus appreciatively overlooked and estimated the vast and varied field of its future prospect and hope. It was truly the spectacle of a precious and priceless mine, which the State, as the privileged owner, could not but treat with all that science and skill which should secure from it the largest and best outcome.
The generation which inaugurated all this great change was not indeed fully rewarded by seeing and enjoying all its effects. Not indeed until the twentieth and succeeding centuries did we experience the full benefit of that great national movement. When scientific and technical education had come into full play, every one of the almost countless mass of workers was converted into an actual daily and hourly combatant in the battle of science, as well as of business and general progress. In thus ever marshalling forth the educated talent of the great mass of the nation, the new system gave to progress its prodigious after-impulse, and so at last amply rewarded the patriotic and far-seeing State, for its first heavy bill of cares and costs, by the greatness of the country's future. The effect of this system also, to level, by its quiet action, the hereditary class walls of an old society, and to assure everywhere the healthful predominance of personal merit and public usefulness, has always powerfully contributed to our political contentment, and to the stability of the social fabric.
Even material progress may be largely aided by social and moral advance. Such was our experience after the nineteenth century, when, happily, our youth required no longer to quit the amenities and protective surroundings of home, in order to complete their education at the university. The wider range of female education, which came in with the twentieth century, had much to do with this improved aspect of the university question. The attendance of both sexes, as regarded this higher education, became so large and general, that additional universities were necessary over all the country. Every dwelling was thus so near to one or other of these institutions, as to render unnecessary a permanent residence at the university, or elsewhere than at the parental home; and thus a practice, but too fertile of deteriorating influences for after-life, was wholly given up. The "University Express," filled morning and evening, going and returning, with the fresh young life of the rising race, was one of the stirring and characteristic railway spectacles of the time.
Our sons thus escaped, at their most critical age, exposure to much evil. The restraining modesty, natural to youth, is usually proof against the ordinary tear and wear of society; but the exposure of old university life had been only too apt to entirely break down and dissipate its barriers, and to send forth the youth into his maturer life deprived of those restraining tendencies, and that regulated moderation of desire, which are so indispensable to life's highest efforts and most real enjoyment. Under the better auspices alluded to, our youth betook themselves both more steadily and more heartily to all the science and business progress of their day, and brought, as well, a greater strength and endurance, mind and body, to the world's work. The old saying that the youth would turn out all the better man by a free and early sowing of his wild oats, is about as well founded as that other old saw, which, in spite of medical contradiction, was wont to aver that our bodies were improved after having been scourged by fever, smallpox, syphilis, and the other ills that flesh is heir to.
If the world's pace was so visibly accelerated, as I have had occasion to notice, by the happy solution of the woman's rights problem, and the consequent accession of the whole sex to the ranks of its workers, there was yet another change of the twentieth century, which was hardly, if at all, less momentous, even in the same work-and-labour direction. This was the final cessation of war, and the converting of all war's levies and expenses into the interests of peace and progress. The professional soldier had ceased to be a European feature ere the twentieth century had run out. The remarkable, simple, and indeed somewhat sudden and even unexpected way in which international war came to its end—became, in fact, a practical impossibility, as between, at least, the chief civilized powers, from the practice, which came to be adopted in common, of training, all their respective youth to military drill, and the effective defensive use of the modern arms of precision—is one of the striking incidents with which my retrospect will have presently to deal. I will only meanwhile remark, that the effect of this result upon the civilized world's sentiment, and the mutual intercourse of its societies, and upon the entire world's general forward advance, could hardly be overrated.
No cause of our past progress was more real or more visible, during, at least, the earlier centuries of my retrospect, than that reforming and reconstructing spirit, which was introduced into all trade union life by its illustrious leader and renovator, Yellowly. It was Yellowly's proud prediction that his class-fellows were to take the van of future progress, and that, to this end, trade union law would be even stricter than the public law itself, and trade union economic views and practice more unchallengeable than the dicta of economic professors; and he survived far enough into the twentieth century to see these ardent hopes in fair way to fulfilment.
The twentieth century proved, indeed, specially favourable to the working class generally, by the great amelioration of the conditions of labour, as well as its improved efficiency, through the universally extended application of machinery. The quick turn over of capital, and the small amounts thus required in this way, were favourable to the co-operative association of working-men, which accordingly made marked progress in this century. And it was only to be expected that this advanced material condition, in the great mass of the population, associated as it was with universal educational attainment, should have an elevating effect on mind and habits; and there was, indeed, in these respects, a great advance along the whole industrial front.
Amongst other effects, Yellowly survived to see, in the fair way of realization, the desire of his heart—that the vast expenditure of his class upon intoxicating drinks, which he so much grudged, even as a mere money question, should be diverted to purposes more useful to the class and more creditable to the man. He had hoped that the very marked reform in that respect, which the nineteenth century had brought to the richer and employing classes, might, with the twentieth century, reach also the great mass of the employed; and ere he quitted the world he had the satisfaction to see that this hope was not to be disappointed. We shall also have occasion to see how, in carrying out with more and more practised hand, the economies of co-operative dwellings, our working classes were enabled to house themselves in large and commodious, and even elegant and elegantly furnished, mansions, where, as an entirely new feature of their life, the cheerful and varied social attractions became altogether superior to those of the old public-house. As I have already said, that seemingly inevitable accompaniment of our social life of the nineteenth century, had virtually ceased to haunt us, at least in any recognizable aspect, ere the twentieth had closed.
The economic marvels of co-operation had not escaped attention in the last half of the nineteenth century; but it was only in the twentieth that the system attained such extension and indeed universality of application, as brought comparative abundance and comfort to even the very poorest classes, and constituted quite a new era, not only in the economies of the production and distribution of society's material wants, but even more strikingly in the social comfort and cheerfulness of the new style of the homes of the great mass of the people.
The cheapness of wholesale dealing was everywhere availed of. The nineteenth century had indeed experienced something of this benefit, in the Civil Service and other "co-operative store-keeping;" but that had been chiefly for the good of classes already comparatively well-off. In the twentieth century, on the other hand, this co-operation had spread its gains and savings to the entire people, including even the very poorest. The revolution thus brought to many vocations, as, for example, the necessary superseding of a vast mass of small shopkeeping, was, in reality, after all, much less rapid, and much less disturbing to society than theorizing fears had predicted. The thorough understanding amongst all classes and vocations—that the car of progress must have its perfectly free course, and that no one class or trade was to be protected at the expense of the rest—had everywhere the best possible effect in stimulating all parties to face their respective contingencies, and to enter heartily upon the larger and better field everywhere opened to them. The great resources arising out of the universal diffusion of education enabled such classes as were in turn from time to time affected by the various and not seldom rapid economic changes of that stirring age, to bear them with comparative impunity, and to adjust themselves with more or less facility to the new circumstances.
Then, again, the co-operative principle had, with this twentieth century, successfully pervaded all industrial life, thus largely realizing Yellowly's ambitious anticipations as to his class-fellows becoming themselves principals instead of servants in their various work. This position was all the more easily attained amongst a universally educated people, by the greater efficiency and promptitude of result given to labour by universal mechanical appliance. Large capital became thus, for many kinds of undertakings, almost quite a secondary consideration. By the cheapness and excellence of all kinds of machinery, which our skilled countrymen turned out at home, or our free ports invited from all parts of the world, and by the quick turn over of work which such machinery effected, co-operations of working-men were enabled, even with very limited spare means, to compete successfully with great capitalists in most of the cases of ordinary enterprise. When strikes did occur in the twentieth century, the alternative of having co-operation to fall back upon was always one of the considerations of the case, and a consideration which the employer, most of all, had to keep precautionarily in view. Indeed not more important was it for the welfare of the striker himself, than for that of society at large, that the former should strike for the alternative merely of a different form of work, rather than for a complete cessation from labour.
The tactics of obstruction by small minorities, as on the occasion of the grave and perplexing Irish questions, which crowded upon our Parliament towards the close of the nineteenth century, were not by any means the sole cause of parliamentary block, although they happily contributed a powerful and timely stimulus towards the eventual removal of a continually increasing difficulty in national legislation. All could see that the endless legislative needs of an advancing civilization could be but inadequately responded to in parliament under the old accustomed modes of procedure, even if these were never otherwise than honestly dealt with. Some process was wanted by help of which, within reasonable hours, or even, for that matter, within any possible hours whatever, all the required public measures could be adequately discussed as well as passed and enacted. Prior to that great and complete cure which was finally effected, and which, as I am now about to explain, acquired the name of the "Special Hansard," all attempted remedies had the defect, more or less, of saving time by the prevention, exclusion, or suppression of discussion. Mind and opinion, good, bad, or indifferent, were thus alike shut out. Such a system, failing the possibility of any other, might be of necessity submitted to in cases of predetermined obstruction, and of glaring abuses of parliamentary privileges. But it proved intolerable in any general application, and thus the parliamentary block remained substantially uncured by such mere shifts as the "cloture," and got worse and worse from session to session, and from day to day. The accumulation of postponed, or abortive, or wholly unattempted measures had reduced successive premiers and ministries at last to blank despair.
Necessity is ever the fertile mother of invention or expedient. Very early in my retrospect, it happened that one of the overwhelmed premiers of that time, after exhibiting to the House the otherwise hopeless aspects of his case, besought its tolerance of the experiment of a new procedure. The suggestion was substantially this, that instead of the usual speeches upon important propositions, members should give their views in writing. These written views formed a special publication of parliament, which took the afterwards famous name of the "Special Hansard." Sufficient intervals and opportunities were given for adequate discussion, reconsideration, or suggestion, after which each successive measure went swiftly and quietly to final division. Parliament having assented, perhaps, at the time, not less helplessly than willingly, to try the new method, it was brought at once into life and action; and it promptly became far too indispensable to each parliamentary programme to be ever afterwards abandoned. Thus was begun an altogether new parliamentary system, by which successive ministries could meet, easily and adequately, the legislative wants of their time, and the Government of our advancing country could be piloted with comparative facility through centuries of after progress.
Various remarkable and beneficial changes followed in the wake of the "Special Hansard." The system certainly developed a more wide and free and careful expression of view; and there was an almost instantaneous collapse of all unseemly or disturbing scenes. Again, when so much of parliamentary work was transferred from the floor of the House to that of the bureau, alike with members generally as with ministers, and when, by "Special Hansard," so much of the House's time was saved, the parliamentary hours took a prompt accordance to the new circumstances. A minister could now be carrying through, all at one and the same time, as many great measures as there was occasion for, and yet be simultaneously and quietly conducting the other and ordinary business of Parliament, and all within some few reasonable and convenient hours of the afternoon or evening.
No after consequence of this "Special Hansard" system was either more striking or more generally useful than the habit it encouraged, or rather of necessity enforced, of concise expression. Indeed, from the very first, every reasonable mind must have foreseen that the chief chance of being attended to, in the crowd of competitive views, lay in a judicious brevity. As time went on, and the field of scientific and business life took its due concurrent expansion, this brevity of expression, into which, in its particular department, the "Special Hansard" had graduated us, became a general feature of all society's many vocations, and thus enabled the advancing race to keep up with a breadth of knowledge, which, otherwise, must have been an attainment impossible alike to time and strength.
The old question as to whether the State should intervene in general progress, or leave the whole field to private enterprise, received a happy solution, after the nineteenth century, in the principle of Special Trusts, in which the State would originate and conduct certain classes of great and desirable projects, but without involving the country's government in pecuniary responsibility. Each such project was expected to clear its own cost eventually; and if not by ordinary reproduction, at any rate, in the final resort, by that natural increment of value, in a progressive country, through the mere efflux of time. Of course, therefore, anything to be attempted, in this promising and convenient way, must necessarily be only of a kind calculated for such a result. Many such works successively presented themselves; and thus grand and beneficial works, of a kind, or upon a scale, which private enterprise could hardly have even dreamt of, were duly entered upon, and, after a more or less protracted term of years, successfully carried through, free of any ultimate cost.
We did not, indeed, keep quite strictly, in every case, to where the sure "unearned increment of value" of the real estate was ultimately to clear all costs. Some of these special great national works were adventured upon under more ordinary prospects as to final reimbursement; as when the bold but successful and convenient project was taken up of concentrating all the public offices in one grand and commodious edifice, reared upon the less crowded space, at the time, just a little outside the metropolis. The costs in this case were met, partly by sale of the superseded offices in their too crowded but valuable sites, and partly by the increasing fees and rentals of the future, as I shall have presently more fully to tell. And, again, when the State took in hand the inauguration of a great national theatre, and other such works, of a kind which private enterprise was not ready for, or not disposed to try in the way most desirable or beneficial, we would, in such cases, group the several results under one trust, with its better promise of a successful average. But any such works were exceptionally few, and only the occasional subjects of the special trust system. The regular field lay rather in those works which repaid first cost by the reliable future rise of value in the nation's real estate, through the certain advance of the people, in numbers, in science and commerce, and in wealth.
The first great step in this direction—in the regular road, so to say, of these special trusts—was the ever famous resanitation, or rather sanitary reconstruction of London, a work which, in its main result, as we shall shortly see, was successfully carried through, as anticipated, in about a third of a century, although partially protracted, in view of certain other objects, for some time longer. But even greater than this great project, and necessarily protracted in its redemptive operation for a much longer interval, was the magnificent work of the embankment and reclamation of the Lower Thames, by which English soil acquired an accession of some hundreds of square miles, at a comparative trifle of concurrent outlay; the cost having eventually been mainly defrayed by the said advance in value due to a busy century of national progress.
These special trust enterprises involved, of course, a vast outlay of ready money at the first. The source of supply lay in the successive issue of trust stocks, which stocks, for several reasons at the time, came to be quite adequately, and, indeed, often greedily competed for in the expanding money market of those days. First, there was the effect of the full confidence, which soon came to be felt by the public, in the soundness of the principle of these trusts. Second, the vast and constantly increasing amount of savings' bank, insurance, and other funds, had provided a corresponding demand for just such a class of investments as these stocks then offered. The reserve funds of the many insurance companies, for instance, ere the nineteenth century was out, had reached, in not a few cases, to twenty millions each and upwards, and in the course of the twentieth to even a hundred millions each. Lastly, there was concurrently also, about this time, the continual diminution and final extinction of that long-accustomed investment resource, our once great national debt, whose manner of decline, and whose ultimate death, I am about to relate. As the rate of interest on our debt—by a bold and happy stroke, during one of the recurring intervals of "cheap money" towards the end of the nineteenth century—had been successfully reduced from three per cent. to two and a half per cent., so there was the less difficulty in negociating the Special Trust issues at moderate rates of interest, these being usually not over three per cent.
Yellowly gave us at times his ideas about reducing the interest of our National Debt, and finally extinguishing the principal.—Author, chap. i.
Let us glance back for a moment to these two great events, which formed national eras in their respective times, and were almost unexpectedly simple in the means by which they were successively accomplished. From the middle of the nineteenth century, a distinguished minister and premier of those remote but not yet forgotten times had made the question of the reduced interest his own; and he happily survived to see his grand expectation realized. When seasons of cheap money came round, so as to send up the price of the old three per cent. consols substantially above par, which happened, in fact, on repeated occasions before the actual step of conversion into two and a half per cent. was ventured upon, there had always seemed to be two great obstacles in the way. First, there was the hugeness of the total to be dealt with; and, second, the fact that much the larger part of the amount required a twelve months' notice to the national creditor. As to the first obstacle, then, the idea of attacking so great an amount, if it were to be done in any piecemeal fashion, appeared all but hopeless of final and complete result; while, as to the second, however favourable any present moment of the market might seem for the projected conversion, who could answer, in those shifting, unpredictable times, for the monetary conditions twelve months later?
The simple course eventually taken, and the easy success which attended it, showed how needless were the many fears and hesitations which preceded this great public measure. For example, instead of the largeness of the amount being a difficulty, it proved, as was foreseen by the practical minds consulted, to be the chief cause of ensuring and facilitating the operation. The State, in offering to its creditors a two and a half per cent, stock in exchange for a three per cent., must offer, of course, the alternative of a money payment. But any large amount of such money payments, seeking simultaneously other investments, must so violently disturb the market, comparatively limited as it would be in other like suitable securities, as soon to make such other investment difficult or impossible on advantageous terms. And, besides, there was the probable fact that the larger part of consols' holdings were bound to that particular security, and would thus be maintained, even under the proposed reduction of the interest rate.
The other difficulty remained, namely, the practical surmounting of the twelve months' notice, so as to give prompt and simultaneous effect to the whole operation. Let us consider the way in which this was successfully accomplished. The issue of a two and a half per cent., in simple exchange for a three per cent., hundred for hundred, was not deemed possible, or even, perhaps, quite a fair and reasonable offer of treatment to the public creditor. Accordingly he was to be met by the concession of a substantial discount upon the substituted two and a half per cent., but still a discount, comparatively speaking, so moderate as to leave an enormous advantage to the State by the conversion. The temptation of this discount became the efficient leverage by which the disadvantage of the twelve months' notice was obviated. The discount was allowed to those only who decided at once. This proved a generally successful argument. Indeed, only a comparatively small amount of money payment was actually demanded in the entire operation.
There are but a few more words to complete the account of the final procedure in this business. The principle adopted was, that, on the one hand, there should be a uniform two and a half per cent. stock offered to the public; and, on the other hand, a stock of terminable annuities in readiness, from the sale of which, in amounts as might happen to be required, the State was to be put in funds to pay off dissentients. The State, in short, offered the former stock on its own terms, but was compelled, of course, to accept the terms of buyers for the latter stock. It was only because the latter stock proved to be very much the lesser of the two, that the State came off the decided gainer upon the operation.
Let me now turn to the still more important subject of the final extinction of our national debt. This great operation was successfully accomplished by using, seemingly, very inadequate means, aided, however, by steady accumulative action over a long interval of time. Our story begins a little outside of its own actual boundaries, and introduces us to the old interminable questions about the currency. Our monetary circulation, up to nearly the close of the nineteenth century, was mainly metallic; and there was a tacitly understood national monetary policy in keeping it so, and in preventing any very general substitution of paper. But the public's preference for the more handy and convenient paper was all this time very decided, and all that the public wanted was but the chance of getting it. The field was thus a tempting one to poach upon, and it was at last so seriously invaded by the paper of cheque banks, and by other issue contrivances, as to threaten the disappearance of most of the great metallic reserves. The public, in its readiness for the paper, would accept even the second class of it, offered by all and sundry issuers, if the first were not to be had.
The Government at length intervened. It seemed advisable that the State should supply, to its own profit as well as the public benefit, a suitable and undoubted paper. While free play was to be given to the public appetite in this direction, the exchanged specie was all to be held available, until, at any rate, experience had determined what proportion of it might be safely dispensed with, and thus turned to other and profitable account. By a modification of the postal notes system, an excellent smaller currency was gradually brought into extensive domestic use, and was exchanged for many millions of specie. Successive portions of this great metallic stock were afterwards applied to redemption of parts of the public debt. But a substantial metallic reserve was still kept on hand, and experience proved that even five or ten millions, available in this way, were more effective against crisis than fifty millions scattered amongst the public. The amounts thus saved were strictly and steadily applied, on the accumulative principle, by a commission specially intrusted with the business, and the funds in hand were solemnly placed beyond reach of the temptations incident to any future "First Lord of the Treasury." In this way, with the aid of repayments at times out of surplus revenue, the entire debt was finally redeemed within a century.
It was something for the State to be able at last to boast that there was difficulty to discover anywhere a poor youth, needing, or willing to accept, help, and who would thus confer upon it the luxury of helping one of its sons forward in life's struggle. That condition was indeed substantially attained. But towards its high attainment a good deal had been done, in preceding generations, as to the suppression or extirpation of crime, mendicancy, tramping, gipsying, and so on, as we shall have occasion to see further on. The time arrived when the State could not only give a free education to all its youth, but could help forward into the successes of their maturer life any who were in need. Advances were made, in money or clothing, as required by the youth on quitting school. This was at first from funds supplied to the State's use in this way by the charity organization of the time. But eventually, when there was a satisfactory and reliable regularity established in the final repayments of these advances, the system was made the subject of a special trust. A great ledger of the State, in short, was opened for these national advances; and when the assisted youth afterwards repaid his loan, he was awarded a medal which was often long preserved as an honoured heirloom, even in the most prosperous families. These repayments, principal and interest, became at last so regular as to justify, as I have said, the application of the special trust system. By charging the borrowers a a slightly higher interest than was paid upon the trust stock, the comparatively small loss from the defaulting, or the exceptionally unlucky, was covered, and the trust became self-paying. As every honest or willing youth of either sex could thus always fall back upon the ways and means to get on in the world, the whole society moved forward by so much the quicker and better pace.
As subdivision of labour has been so fruitful in the business field, so did it prove also when increasingly applied, in those busy times, to other departments of work, and especially to the great field of science. But science itself became more and more associated with ordinary business, the latter, in most cases, depending at every step upon scientific attainment and application. With the increasing crowd of workers, and the vast and ever-expanding field of work, no one could hope to be of any great service to the world, or leave his mark behind him, who aimed to try his hand or his head at many different things. Those who stuck to some one subject, which, with its limitation of range, they were able thoroughly to master, were most likely to rise to the position of authorities upon such a limited range, and to be listened to by the rest of the world.
Thus science, when pursued by each of its countless students, within their respective small enclosures, but with thorough and continuous study, made collectively a giant progress. As most people began, about this time, to be content to work in this quiet but effective way, they became masters and authorities in their respective specialities; and thus the vast army of workers, each soldier within his own particular range, advanced the boundaries of science by ever increasing observation and discovery.
At the close of the nineteenth century, society had indeed already entered, but only to the mere threshold, of a vast field of progress. There was some slight foretaste of that progress during the last half of that century, when, besides the ordinary electric telegraph, introduced just a little while before, the spectroscope, the telephone, the microphone, the photophone, and such-like, came successively crowding upon the raw and astonished world of that primitive day, and when electric light was everywhere empowering us to turn night into brilliant day. In due time succeeded the far grander discovery of the cross-electric, with all its powers and marvels, bringing to science universally a double or treble power and pace.
Our youths of those days, then, as they passed out of school or university into the working world, were usually exhorted to choose early and deliberately, if they had not already done so, their special field, whether of business or science, in order that no time might be needlessly lost, where life was so short, and where so much must be first done ere each fresh candidate could aspire to be of any use to the world, in adding anything to the previous accumulation of its attainments. All were started in common with the advantage of a good and respectively suitable education; and, as we have seen in the general State-aid system, no one deserving and willing needed to want such further material help as the first steps of his life's career might require. There was thus before every one a fair start upon a fair field; and under all these favouring circumstances, as we have already said, a very vigorous human race was maintained.
The discovery of Cross-Electric power, and next of the Duplication of the Cross, and finally of the Reduplication, mark the successive stages of science progress, during the busy period embraced by my retrospect. These grand successive discoveries were made indeed at wide intervals. The first, that of the simple Cross-Electric, came comparatively early in my history; the third and last, that greatest of all past discoveries, that of the Reduplicatory power, belongs to the current age, and is still in the recollection of not a few now alive, who can thus look to times almost, one could say, of comparative ignorance which preceded it. Some sanguine minds already indulge the hope of science's advance into the powers of the CrossTriplication, or the Ter-Cross, as it is alternatively and abbreviatively called; and there are some few who talk wildly of even the Quarto-Cross, and such powers and such range of mental view as pertain, in the opinion of more sober spirits, only to the superhuman.
But however it may be with that outer ledge of the progress question, the discovery of the cross-electric, simple and small as, in a comparative sense, that old discovery may now appear to us, inaugurated a progress far outstripping anything previously in human experience. This great event of its time opened to man a new range of power over the material universe. We have had occasion already to notice the great advance it gave to organic chemistry, in helping us to produce our food directly in the laboratory, instead of by the old protracted circuitous process of natural vital growth, with all its monopolizing requirement of surface-room on the earth, which could no longer be spared to it. This cross-electric discovery led us promptly to that of the Electro-Light speed, a speed exceeding that of the heretofore amazing speed of simple light, in the proportion in which the distance between the crests of the waves or vibrations of light exceeds that between the atomic points of the component ether. Light-speed and Electro-light speed passed, or, as it were, leaped, these respective intervals of space in the same time. We look back, let me here remark, upon the incredible dulness of the nineteenth-century mind, which was unable to catch many a subsequent discovery, although such discovery rested mainly upon proportions of which the elements or factors were, in certain instances, already well ascertained—such as the cases of the comparative wave dimensions of sound and light, which are long ago amongst our basal facts for so much of modern knowledge and discovery; for, on ascertaining, for instance, electro-light speed, we are able, and at once, to infer the distance separating the ether points, or particles; while that inference, by a further inference, in curious backward process, gave us the separating distance between ordinary material atoms, and the dimensions and mass of these themselves: this latter very remarkable inference being, however, of the less consequence at the time, as we had already arrived, by another and independent process, at the separating distances, the mass and the form of these elementary bodies.
By this great discovery of cross-electric speed, we were enabled to despatch the electro-light motor into far-off space, to overtake the ordinary light on its image or picture-carrying mission. It was not, however, until the further discovery of the Duplication of the Cross-Electric that we could bring back the overtaken picture—as, for instance, that of our little earth, as it was when the light quitted it so many years or so many ages past. Indeed, the vastly greater speed thus attained made us at last regard, with something like contempt, the old ordinary light-speed of about one hundred and eighty thousand miles in a second. But what a grand field, as we may suppose, now opened upon our ancestors, in bringing back the past aspects of the world! And these, as we shall afterwards see, could be restored by high scientific manipulation, even to the actual life dimensions.
Finally came the discovery of our venerable and illustrious Black, within, as I have hinted, quite modern times—the climax discovery of the Reduplication of the Cross-Electric, by which we have since been enabled to launch our material bodies into that ether-filled space, which was previously traversed only by our minds and imaginations and our vibration messages. But now, with electro-light speed at locomotive command, who or what is to limit our future travel, as to either range or speed! White already foresees for us a travel-speed approaching that of ordinary light. "Give to us sailors," he says, "the wide interastral ocean, and who knows what speed we may fail to work up to in such a free field of open sea? Whereas we now only travel to the planets, a thousand years hence, Green," he would say to me, "we shall be voyaging to the very stars, and having personal acquaintance and handshaking with those whom as yet we are permitted only to intermessage."