The first Victorian generation had built with the sword in one hand ...

The first Victorian generation had built with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other: in the fifties the sword was laid aside and the trowel was wielded, quietly, unobtrusively, anonymously, by civil servants and journalists, engineers and doctors, the secretaries of Trade Unions and the aldermen of manufacturing towns.

Early in the thirties, Nassau Senior had boldly declared, against the current Maithusianism, that if the influx of Irish labour could be checked and the outflow of English labour assisted the population question could be left to settle itself. Now his words seemed to be coming true.

A race so tenacious of its immemorial village life that in 1830 a Sussex family could hardly be persuaded to seek its fortune in Staffordshire, or a Dorset family that Lancashire existed, was flocking by the hundred thousand in quest of the Golden Fleece,

or the land where the gates

of night and morning stand so close together that a good man can earn two days' wages in one. By 1860 the whole world was the Englishman's home and England was at peace.

Released from fear, the English mind was recovering its power to speculate, to wonder, and to enjoy. The dissolvent elements in Early Victorian thought, romance and humour and curiosity, the Catholicism of Oxford, the satire of Dickens, the passion of Carlyle, the large historic vision of Grote and Lyell and Arnold, were beginning to work.

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