were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt
nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and
barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilisation.
But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it
recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is
now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when
noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be
intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers
breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot
in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was
a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men
died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the
most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in
the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.
We too shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and in our turn be
envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the
peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with
twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may
receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little
used to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that
sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several
more years to the average length of human life; that numerous
comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a
few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty
working man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the
increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the
few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen
Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when
all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the
rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did
not envy the splendour of the rich.
CHAPTER IV.
THE death of King Charles the Second took