Fifty Years Ago. Walter Besant
to the French was much nearer one of equality. The relief of the poor in 1831 absorbed 6,875,552l., but this sum in 1844 had dropped to 4,976,090l., the saving of two millions being due to the new Poor Law. The stream of emigration had hardly yet begun to flow. Witness the following figures:
| The number of emigrants in | 1820 | was | 18,984 |
| ” ” | 1825 | 8,860 | |
| ” ” | 1832 | 103,311 | |
| ” ” | 1837 | 72,034 |
It was not until 1841 that the great flow of emigrants began in the direction of New Zealand and Australia. The emigrants of 1832 chiefly went to Canada, and as yet the United States were practically unaffected by the rush from the old countries.
The population of the great towns has for the most part doubled itself in the last fifty years. London had then a million and a half; Liverpool, 200,000; Manchester, 250,000; Glasgow, 250,000; Birmingham, 150,000; Leeds, 140,000; and Bristol, 120,000.
Penal settlements were still flourishing. Between 1825 and 1840, when they were suppressed, 48,712 convicts were sent out to Sydney. As regards travelling, the fastest rate along the high roads was ten miles an hour. There were 54 four-horse mail coaches in England, and 49 two-horse mails. In Ireland there were 30 four-horse coaches, and 10 in Scotland. There were 3,026 stage coaches in the country, of which 1,507 started from London.
There were already 668 British steamers afloat, though the penny steamboat did not as yet ply upon the river. Heavy goods travelled by the canals and navigable rivers, of which there were 4,000 in Great Britain; the hackney coach, with its pair of horses, lumbered slowly along the street; the cabriolet was the light vehicle for rapid conveyance, but it was not popular; the omnibus had only recently been introduced by Mr. Shillibeer; and there were no hansom cabs. There was a Twopenny Post in London, but no Penny Post as yet. There was no Book Post, no Parcel Post, no London Parcels Delivery Company. If you wanted to send a parcel to anywhere in the country, you confided it to the guard of the coach; if to a town address, there were street messengers and the ‘cads’ about the stage-coach stations; there were no telegraphs, no telephones, no commissionaires.
GENERAL POSTMAN
Fifty years ago the great railways were all begun, but not one of them was completed. A map published in the Athenæum of January 23, 1836, shows the state of the railways at that date. The line between Liverpool and Manchester was opened in September, 1830. In 1836 it was carrying 450,000 passengers in the year, and paying a dividend of 9 per cent. The line between Carlisle and Newcastle was very nearly completed; that between Leeds and Selby was opened in 1834; there were many short lines in the coal and mining districts, and little bits of the great lines were already completed. The London and Greenwich line was begun in 1834 and opened in 1837. There were in progress the London and Birmingham, the Birmingham, Stafford, and Warrington, the Great Western as far as Bath and Bristol, and the London and Southampton passing through Basingstoke. It is amazing to think that Portsmouth, the chief naval port and place of embarkation for troops, was left out altogether. There were also a great many lines projected, which afterwards settled down into the present great Trunk lines. As they were projected in 1836, instead of Great Northern, North-Western, and Great Eastern, we should have had one line passing through Saffron Walden, Cambridge, Peterborough, Lincoln, York, Appleby, and Carlisle, with another from London to Colchester, Ipswich, Norwich, and Yarmouth; there was also a projected continuation of the G.W.R. line from Bristol to Exeter, and three or four projected lines to Brighton and Dover. The writer of the article on the subject in the Athenæum of that date (January 23, 1836) considers that when these lines are completed, letters and passengers will be conveyed from London to Liverpool in ten hours. ‘Little attention,’ he says, ‘has yet been given to calculate the effects which must result from the establishment throughout the kingdom of great lines of intercourse traversed at a speed of twenty miles an hour.’ Unfortunately he had no confidence in himself as a prophet, or we might have had some curious and interesting forecasts.
As regards the extent of the British Empire, there has been a very little contraction and an enormous extension. We have given up the Ionian Islands to gratify the sentiment of Mr. Gladstone, and we have acquired Cyprus, which may perhaps prove of use. We have taken possession of Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. In Hindostan, which in 1837 was still partially ruled by a number of native princes, the flag of Great Britain now reigns supreme; the whole of Burma is now British Burma; the little island of Hong Kong, which hardly appears in Arrowsmith’s Atlas of 1840, is now a stronghold of the British Empire. Borneo, then wholly unknown, now belongs partially to us; New Guinea is partly ours; Fiji is ours. For the greatest change of all, however, we must look at the maps of Australia and New Zealand. In the former even the coast had not been completely surveyed; Melbourne was as yet but a little unimportant township. Between Melbourne and Botany Bay there was not a single village, settlement, or plantation. It was not until the year 1851, only thirty-six years ago, that Port Phillip was separated from New South Wales, and created an independent colony under the name of Victoria; and for a few years it was a very rowdy and noisy colony indeed.
In New South Wales, the population of which was about 150,000, convicts were still sent out. In the year 1840, when the transportation ceased, 21,000 convicts were assigned to private service. There were in Sydney many men, ex-convicts, who had raised themselves to wealth; society was divided by a hard line, not to be crossed in that generation by those on the one side whose antecedents were honourable and those on the other who had ‘served their time.’ Tasmania was also still a penal colony, and, apparently, a place where the convicts did not do so well as in New South Wales.
Queensland as a separate colony was not yet in existence, though Brisbane had been begun; tropical Australia was wholly unsettled; Western Australia was, what it still is, a poor and thinly settled country.
The map of New Zealand—it was not important enough to have a map all to itself—shows the coast-line imperfectly surveyed, and not a single town or English settlement upon it! Fifty years ago that great colony was not yet even founded. The first serious settlement was made in 1839, when a patch of land at Port Nicholson, in Cook Strait, was bought from the natives for the first party of settlers sent out by the recently established New Zealand Company.
In North America the whole of the North-West Territory, including Manitoba, Muskoka, British Columbia, and Vancouver’s Island, was left to Indians, trappers, buffaloes, bears, and rattlesnakes. South Africa shows the Cape Colony and nothing else. Natal, Orange Free State, the Transvaal, Bechuanaland, Griqualand, Zululand are all part of the great undiscovered continent. Considering that all these lands have now been opened up and settled, so that where was formerly a hundred square miles of forest and prairie there is now the same area covered with plantations, towns, and farms, it will be understood that the British Empire has been increased not only in area, but in wealth, strength, and resources to an extent which would have been considered incredible fifty years ago. It is, in fact, just the difference between owning a barren heath and owning a cultivated farm. The British Empire in 1837 contained millions of square miles of barren heath and wild forest, which are now settled land and smiling plantations. It boasted of vast countries, with hardly a single European in them, which are now filled with English towns. In 1837, prophets foretold the speedy downfall of an Empire which could no longer defend her vast territories. These territories can now defend themselves. It may be that we shall have to fight for empire, but the longer the day of battle is put off the better it will be for England, and the greater will be her might. To carry on that war, there are now, scattered over the whole of the British Empire, fifty millions of people speaking the Anglo-Saxon tongue.