Great Britain and Her Queen | Page 6

much against his desire. Not only were the medals
which he gave as badges to his vowed abstainers regarded as infallible
talismans from the hand of a saint, but the giver was credited with
miraculous powers such as only a Divine Being could exercise, and
which he disclaimed in vain--extravagances too likely to discredit his
enterprise with more soberly judging persons than the imaginative
Celts who were his earliest converts. But, notwithstanding every
drawback, his action was most important, and deserves grateful
memory. We may see in it the inception of that great movement whose
indirect influence in reforming social habits and restraining excess had
at least equalled its direct power for good on its pledged adherents.
Though it is still unhappily true that drunkenness slays its tens of
thousands among us, and largely helps to people our workhouses, our
madhouses, and our gaols, yet the fiend walks not now, as it used to do,
in unfettered freedom. It is no longer a fashionable vice, excused and
half approved as the natural expression of joviality and
good-fellowship; peers and commoners of every degree no longer join
daily in the "heavy-headed revel" whose deep-dyed stain seems to have
soaked through every page of our last-century annals. And it would
appear as though the vice were not only held from increasing, but were
actually on the decrease. The statistics of the last decade show that the
consumption of alcohol is diminishing, and that of true food-stuffs
proportionally rising.
[Illustration: Father Mathew]
There were other enterprises now set on foot, by no means directly
philanthropic in their aim, which contemplated utility more than virtue
or justice--enterprises whose vast effects are yet unexhausted, and
which have so modified the conditions of human existence as to make
the new reign virtually a new epoch. As to the real benefit of these
immense changes, opinion is somewhat divided; but the majority would
doubtless vote in their favour. The first railway in England, that
between Liverpool and Manchester, had been opened in 1830, the day
of its opening being made darkly memorable by the accident fatal to Mr.
Huskisson, as though the new era must be inaugurated by a sacrifice.
Three years later there was but this one railway in England, and one,

seven miles long, in Scotland. But in 1837 the Liverpool and
Birmingham line was opened; in 1838 the London and Birmingham
and the Liverpool and Preston lines, and an Act was passed for
transmitting the mails by rail; in 1839 there was the opening of the
London and Croydon line. The ball was set fairly rolling, and the
supersession of ancient modes of communication was a question of
time merely. The advance of the new system was much accelerated at
the outset by the fact that railway enterprise became the favourite field
for speculation, men being attracted by the novelty and tempted by
exaggerated prospects of profit; and the mania was followed, like other
manias, with results largely disastrous to the speculators and to
commerce. But through years of good fortune and of bad fortune the
iron network has continued to spread itself, until all the land lies
embraced in its ramifications; and it is spreading still, like some strange
organism the one condition of whose life is reproduction, knitting the
greatest centres of commerce with the loneliest and remotest villages
that were wont to lie far out of the travelled ways of men, and bringing
Ultima Thule into touch with London.
[Illustration: George Stephenson]
Meanwhile the steam service by sea has advanced almost with that by
land. In 1838 three steamships crossed the Atlantic between this
country and New York, the Great Western, sailing from Bristol, and
Sirius, from Cork, distinguished themselves by the short passages they
made,--of fifteen days in the first case, and seventeen days in the
second,--and by their using steam power alone to effect the transit, an
experiment that had not been risked before. It was now proved feasible,
and in a year or two there was set on foot that regular steam
communication between the New World and the Old, which ever since
has continued to draw them into always closer connection, as the
steamers, like swift-darting shuttles, weave their multiplying magic
lines across the liquid plain between.
The telegraph wires that run beside road and rail, doing the office of
nerves in transmitting intelligence with thrilling quickness from the
extremities to the head and from the head to the extremities of our State,

are now so familiar an object, and their operations, such mere matters
of every day, that we do not often recall how utterly unfamiliar they
were sixty years ago, when Wheatstone and Cooke on this side the
Atlantic, and Morse on the other, were devising their methods for
giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places