Part 5 (1/2)

What then?

Look at France, and see.

PARSON LOT.

PREFACE

_To the UNDERGRADUATES of CAMBRIDGE._

I have addressed this preface to the young gentlemen of the University, first, because it is my duty to teach such of them as will hear me, Modern History; and I know no more important part of Modern History than the condition and the opinions of our own fellow-countrymen, some of which are set forth in this book.

Next, I have addressed them now, because I know that many of them, at various times, have taken umbrage at certain scenes of Cambridge life drawn in this book. I do not blame them for having done so. On the contrary, I have so far acknowledged the justice of their censure, that while I have altered hardly one other word in this book, I have re-written all that relates to Cambridge life.

Those sketches were drawn from my own recollections of 1838-1842. Whether they were overdrawn is a question between me and men of my own standing.

But the book was published in 1849; and I am a.s.sured by men in whom I have the most thorough confidence, that my sketches had by then at least become exaggerated and exceptional, and therefore, as a whole, untrue; that a process of purification was going on rapidly in the University; and that I must alter my words if I meant to give the working men a just picture of her.

Circ.u.mstances took the property and control of the book out of my hand, and I had no opportunity of reconsidering and of altering the pa.s.sages. Those circ.u.mstances have ceased, and I take the first opportunity of altering all which my friends tell me should be altered.

But even if, as early as 1849, I had not been told that I must do so, I should have done so of my own accord, after the experiences of 1861. I have received at Cambridge a courtesy and kindness from my elders, a cordial welcome from my co-equals, and an earnest attention from the undergraduates with whom I have come in contact, which would bind me in honour to say nothing publicly against my University, even if I had aught to say. But I have nought. I see at Cambridge nothing which does not gain my respect for her present state and hope for her future. Increased sympathy between the old and young, increased intercourse between the teacher and the taught, increased freedom and charity of thought, and a steady purpose of internal self-reform and progress, seem to me already bearing good fruit, by making the young men regard their University with content and respect. And among the young men themselves, the sight of their increased earnestness and high-mindedness, increased sobriety and temperance, combined with a manliness not inferior to that of the stalwart lads of twenty years ago, has made me look upon my position among them as most n.o.ble, my work among them as most hopeful, and made me sure that no energy which I can employ in teaching them will ever have been thrown away.

Much of this improvement seems to me due to the late High-Church movement; much to the influence of Dr. Arnold; much to that of Mr. Maurice; much to the general increase of civilization throughout the country: but whatever be the causes of it, the fact is patent; and I take delight in thus expressing my consciousness of it.

Another change I must notice in the tone of young gentlemen, not only at Cambridge, but throughout Britain, which is most wholesome and most hopeful. I mean their altered tone in speaking to and of the labouring cla.s.ses. Thirty years ago, and even later, the young men of the labouring cla.s.ses were ”the cads,” ”the sn.o.bs,” ”the blackguards”; looked on with a dislike, contempt, and fear, which they were not backward to return, and which were but too ready to vent themselves on both sides in ugly words and deeds. That hateful severance between the cla.s.ses was, I believe, an evil of recent growth, unknown to old England. From the middle ages, up to the latter years of the French war, the relation between the English gentry and the labourers seems to have been more cordial and wholesome than in any other country of Europe. But with the French Revolution came a change for the worse. The Revolution terrified too many of the upper, and excited too many of the lower cla.s.ses; and the stern Tory system of repression, with its bad habit of talking and acting as if ”the government” and ”the people”

were necessarily in antagonism, caused ever increasing bad blood. Besides, the old feudal ties between cla.s.s and cla.s.s, employer and employed, had been severed. Large ma.s.ses of working people had gathered in the manufacturing districts in savage independence. The agricultural labourers had been debased by the abuses of the old Poor-law into a condition upon which one looks back now with half-incredulous horror. Meanwhile, the distress of the labourers became more and more severe. Then arose Luddite mobs, meal mobs, farm riots, riots everywhere; Captain Swing and his rickburners, Peterloo ”ma.s.sacres,” Bristol conflagrations, and all the ugly sights and rumours which made young lads, thirty or forty years ago, believe (and not so wrongly) that ”the ma.s.ses” were their natural enemies, and that they might have to fight, any year, or any day, for the safety of their property and the honour of their sisters.

How changed, thank G.o.d! is all this now. Before the influence of religion, both Evangelical and Anglican; before the spread of those liberal principles, founded on common humanity and justice, the triumph of which we owe to the courage and practical good sense of the Whig party; before the example of a Court, virtuous, humane, and beneficent; the att.i.tude of the British upper cla.s.ses has undergone a n.o.ble change. There is no aristocracy in the world, and there never has been one, as far as I know, which has so honourably repented, and brought forth fruits meet for repentance; which has so cheerfully asked what its duty was, that it might do it. It is not merely enlightened statesmen, philanthropists, devotees, or the working clergy, hard and heartily as they are working, who have set themselves to do good as a duty specially required of them by creed or by station. In the generality of younger laymen, as far as I can see, a humanity (in the highest sense of the word) has been awakened, which bids fair, in another generation, to abolish the last remnants of cla.s.s prejudices and cla.s.s grudges. The whole creed of our young gentlemen is becoming more liberal, their demeanour more courteous, their language more temperate. They inquire after the welfare, or at least mingle in the sports of the labouring man, with a simple cordiality which was unknown thirty years ago; they are prompt, the more earnest of them, to make themselves of use to him on the ground of a common manhood, if any means of doing good are pointed out to them; and that it is in any wise degrading to ”a.s.sociate with low fellows,”

is an opinion utterly obsolete, save perhaps among a few sons of squireens in remote provinces, or of parvenus who cannot afford to recognize the cla.s.s from whence they themselves have risen. In the army, thanks to the purifying effect of the Crimean and Indian wars, the same altered tone is patent. Officers feel for and with their men, talk to them, strive to instruct and amuse them more and more year by year; and--as a proof that the reform has not been forced on the officers by public opinion from without, but is spontaneous and from within, another instance of the altered mind of the aristocracy--the improvement is greatest in those regiments which are officered by men of the best blood; and in care for and sympathy with their men, her Majesty's Footguards stands first of all.

G.o.d grant that the friends.h.i.+p which exists there between the leaders and the led may not be tested to the death amid the snow-drift or on the battle-field; but if it be so, I know too that it will stand the test.

But if I wish for one absolute proof of the changed relation between the upper and the lower cla.s.ses, I have only to point to the volunteer movement. In 1803, in the face of the most real and fatal danger, the Addington ministry was afraid of allowing volunteer regiments, and Lord Eldon, while pressing the necessity, could use as an argument that if the people did not volunteer for the Government, they would against it. So broad was even then the gulf between the governed and the governors. How much broader did it become in after years! Had invasion threatened us at any period between 1815 and 1830, or even later, would any ministry have dared to allow volunteer regiments? Would they have been justified in doing so, even if they had dared?

And now what has come to pa.s.s, all the world knows: but all the world should know likewise, that it never would have come to pa.s.s save for--not merely the late twenty years of good government in State, twenty years of virtue and liberality in the Court, but--the late twenty years of increasing right-mindedness in the gentry, who have now their reward in finding that the privates in the great majority of corps prefer being officered by men of a rank socially superior to their own. And as good always breeds fresh good, so this volunteer movement, made possible by the goodwill between cla.s.ses, will help in its turn to increase that goodwill.

Already, by the performance of a common duty, and the experience of a common humanity, these volunteer corps are become centres of cordiality between cla.s.s and cla.s.s; and gentleman, tradesman, and workman, the more they see of each other, learn to like, to trust, and to befriend each other more and more; a good work in which I hope the volunteers of the University of Cambridge will do their part like men and gentlemen; when, leaving this University, they become each of them, as they ought, an organizing point for fresh volunteers in their own districts.

I know (that I may return to Cambridge) no better example of the way in which the altered tone of the upper cla.s.ses and the volunteer movement have acted and reacted upon each other, than may be seen in the Cambridge Working Men's College, and its volunteer rifle corps, the 8th Cambridges.h.i.+re.

There we have--what perhaps could not have existed, what certainly did not exist twenty years ago--a school of a hundred men or more, taught for the last eight years gratuitously by men of the highest attainments in the University; by a dean--to whom, I believe, the success of the attempt is mainly owing; by professors, tutors, prizemen, men who are now head-masters of public schools, who have given freely to their fellow-men knowledge which has cost them large sums of money and the heavy labour of years.

Without insulting them by patronage, without interfering with their religious opinions, without tampering with their independence in any wise, but simply on the ground of a common humanity, they have been helping to educate these men, belonging for the most part, I presume, to the very cla.s.s which this book sets forth as most unhappy and most dangerous--the men conscious of unsatisfied and unemployed intellect. And they have their reward in a practical and patent form. Out of these men a volunteer corps is organized, officered partly by themselves, partly by gentlemen of the University; a nucleus of discipline, loyalty, and civilization for the whole population of Cambridge.

A n.o.ble work this has been, and one which may be the parent of works n.o.bler still. It is the first instalment of, I will not say a debt, but a duty, which the Universities owe to the working cla.s.ses. I have tried to express in this book, what I know were, twenty years ago, the feelings of clever working men, looking upon the superior educational advantages of our cla.s.s.

I cannot forget, any more than the working man, that the Universities were not founded exclusively, or even primarily, for our own cla.s.s; that the great ma.s.s of students in the middle ages were drawn from the lower cla.s.ses, and that sizars.h.i.+ps, scholars.h.i.+ps, exhibitions, and so forth, were founded for the sake of those cla.s.ses, rather than of our own. How the case stands now, we all know. I do not blame the Universities for the change. It has come about, I think, simply by compet.i.tion. The change began, I should say, in the sixteenth century. Then, after the Wars of the Roses, and the revival of letters, and the dissolution of the monasteries, the younger sons of gentlemen betook themselves to the pursuit of letters, fighting having become treasonable, and farming on a small scale difficult (perhaps owing to the introduction of large sheep-farms, which happened in those days), while no monastic orders were left to recruit the Universities, as they did continually through the middle ages, from that labouring-cla.s.s to which they and their scholars princ.i.p.ally belonged.

So the gentlemen's sons were free to compete against the sons of working men; and by virtue of their superior advantages they beat them out of the field. We may find through the latter half of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, bequest after bequest for the purpose of stopping this change, and of enabling poor men's sons to enter the Universities; but the tendency was too strong to be effectually resisted then. Is it too strong to be resisted now? Does not the increased civilization and education of the working cla.s.ses call on the Universities to consider whether they may not now try to become, what certainly they were meant to be, places of teaching and training for genius of every rank, and not merely for that of young gentlemen? Why should not wealthy Churchmen, in addition to the many good deeds in which they employ their wealth now-a-days, found fresh scholars.h.i.+ps and exhibitions, confined to the sons of working men? If it be asked, how can they be so confined? What simpler method than that of connecting them with the National Society, and bestowing them exclusively on lads who have distinguished themselves in our National Schools? I believe that money spent in such a way, would be well spent both for the Nation, the Church, and the University. As for the introduction of such a cla.s.s of lads lowering the tone of the University, I cannot believe it. There is room enough in Cambridge for men of every rank.

There are still, in certain colleges, owing to circ.u.mstances which I should be very sorry to see altered, a fair sprinkling of young men who, at least before they have pa.s.sed through a Cambridge career, would not be called well-bred. But they do not lower the tone of the University; the tone of the University raises them. Wherever there is intellectual power, good manners are easily acquired; the public opinion of young men expresses itself so freely, and possibly coa.r.s.ely, that priggishness and forwardness (the faults to which a clever National School pupil would be most p.r.o.ne) are soon hammered out of any Cambridge man; and the result is, that some of the most distinguished and most popular men in Cambridge, are men who have ”risen from the ranks.” All honour to them for having done so. But if they have succeeded so well, may there not be hundreds more in England who would succeed equally? and would it not be as just to the many, as useful to the University, in binding her to the people and the people to her, to invent some method for giving those hundreds a fair chance?

I earnestly press this suggestion (especially at the present time of agitation among Churchmen on the subject of education) upon the attention, not of the University itself, but of those wealthy men who wish well both to the University and to the people. Not, I say, of the University: it is not from her that the proposal must come, but from her friends outside. She is doing her best with the tools which she has; fresh work will require fresh tools, and I trust that such will be some day found for her.