Great Britain and Her Queen | Page 3

abhorring all
shams, whether in word or deed." [Footnote]
[Footnote: "Life of Norman Macleod, D.D." vol. ii.]
It was well for England that its young Sovereign could exemplify virile
strength as well as womanly sweetness; for it was indeed a cloudy and
dark day when she was called to her post of lonely grandeur and hard
responsibility; and to fill that post rightly would have overtasked and
overwhelmed a feebler nature. It is true that the peace of Europe, won

at Waterloo, was still unbroken. But already, within our borders and
without them, there were the signs of coming storm. The condition of
Ireland was chronically bad; the condition of England was full of
danger; on the Continent a new period of earth-shaking revolution
announced itself not doubtfully.
It would be hardly possible to exaggerate the wretched state of the
sister isle, where fires of recent hate were still smouldering, and where
the poor inhabitants, guilty and guiltless, were daily living on the verge
of famine, over which they were soon to be driven. Their ill condition
much aggravated by the intemperate habits to which despairing men so
easily fall a prey. The expenditure of Ireland on proof spirits alone had
in the year 1829 attained the sum of £6,000,000.
In England many agricultural labourers were earning starvation wages,
were living on bad and scanty food, and were housed so wretchedly
that they might envy the hounds their dry and clean kennels. A dark
symptom of their hungry discontent had shown itself in the strange
crime of rick-burning, which went on under cloud of night season after
season, despite the utmost precautions which the luckless farmers could
adopt. The perpetrators were not dimly guessed to be half-famished
creatures, taking a mad revenge for their wretchedness by destroying
the tantalising stores of grain, too costly for their consumption; the
price of wheat in the early years of Her Majesty's reign and for some
time previously being very high, and reaching at one moment (1847)
the extraordinary figure of a hundred and two shillings per quarter.
There was threatening distress, too, in some parts of the manufacturing
districts; in others a tolerably high level of wages indicated prosperity.
But even in the more favoured districts there was needless suffering.
The hours of work, unrestricted by law, were cruelly long; nor did there
exist any restriction as to the employment of operatives of very tender
years. "The cry of the children" was rising up to heaven, not from the
factory only, but from the underground darkness of the mine, where a
system of pitiless infant slavery prevailed, side by side with the
employment of women as beasts of burden, "in an atmosphere of filth
and profligacy." The condition of too many toilers was rendered more

hopeless by the thriftless follies born of ignorance. The educational
provision made by the piety of former ages was no longer adequate to
the needs of the ever-growing nation; and all the voluntary efforts made
by clergy and laity, by Churchmen and Dissenters, did not fill up the
deficiency--a fact which had only just begun to meet with State
recognition. It was in 1834 that Government first obtained from
Parliament the grant of a small sum in aid of education. Under a
defective system of poor-relief, recently reformed, an immense mass of
idle pauperism had come into being; it still remained to be seen if a
new Poor Law could do away with the mischief created by the old one.
Looking at the earliest years of Her Majesty's rule, the first impulse is
to exclaim:
"And all this trouble did not pass, but grew."
It seemed as if poverty became ever more direful, and dissatisfaction
more importunate. A succession of unfavourable seasons and failing
crops produced extraordinary distress; and the distress in its turn was
fruitful first of deepened discontent, and then of political disturbances.
The working classes had looked for immediate relief from their burdens
when the Reform Bill should be carried, and had striven hard to insure
its success: it had been carried triumphantly in 1832, but no perceptible
improvement in their lot had yet resulted; and a resentful feeling of
disappointment and of being victims of deception now added bitterness
to their blind sense of misery and injury, and greatly exasperated the
political agitation of the ten stormy years that followed.
No position could well be more trying than that of the inexperienced
girl who, in the first bloom of youth, was called to rule the land in this
wild transitional period. Her royal courage and gracious tact, her
transparent truthfulness, her high sense of duty, and her precocious
discretion served her well; but these young excellences could not have
produced their full effect had she not found in her first Prime Minister a
faithful friend and