Alexander Macdonald said in 1850 that the Conservatives had done more for ...

Alexander Macdonald said in 1850 that the Conservatives had done more for the working classes in five years, than the Liberals in fifty.

A modern Tory might add that his party did more for Socialism in 1888 than the Socialists themselves did in another fifty. The permeation of local government by Fabian ideas is the Late Victorian counterpart of the assault and capture of the Poor Law administration by Philosophic Radicalism in the fighting person of Chadwick.

But we should be out in our analysis if we failed to give its due place also to the tidal surge of a movement which had been gathering momentum from the fifties onward. Right from the beginning, from Billy Owen and the Christian Socialists, the notions of industry and the good life had been kept together: from Pugin onwards, the Gothic Revival had presented the strangest blend of ethics and aesthetics, where it was of equal importance that the mason and the carver should present eternal truth in symbols and that they should not drink or swear.

We must think, too, that never perhaps had the natural world appeared so beautiful as it did to a generation whose senses had been trained to the last fineness by the art and literature of a century, by Constable and the water-colourists, by Tennyson, Ruskin, Kingsley, and all the school of word painters.