How England Averted a A Survey of the Social Agitation Queen Victoria's By B. O. FLOWER Author of "The Century of Sir Thomas More," "Gerald Massey," "Whittier: Prophet, Seer, and Man," "Civilization's Inferno," New Time," "Persons, Places, and Ideas," etc. "The libus Leetts corum เม STANFORD LIURAMY ALBERT BRANDT: PUBLISHER TRENTON, NEW JERSEY T PREFACE HE founders of our government entered upon a bold experiment. With a superb faith in human nature and with a daring that have alarmed the royalty and aristocracy and have inspired the masses of Europe ever since, they established a State which at that time was the nearest approach to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people that civilization had known. For many years it was the glory of the New World that it was a leader on the highway of progress not a camp-follower among the nations. The republic possessed the faith, the confidence, and the determination of youth; and for nearly a century it was the hope of the downtrodden everywhere, the ideal of the truest statesmen the world over. Our fathers laid the foundations of our government with wisdom. They met the demands of society in their day in a comprehensive and satisfying way. Far more than this they did: In the Declaration of Independence they took issue boldly with the old theories of government and enunciated the fundamental and vital truths for which free government must stand, while they sought to bulwark the principles of the Declaration, and to preserve, against dangers that might come before the republic became a great established fact, the ideals for which the bravest sons of the New World had cheerfully laid down their lives. So long as the nation remained free and independent; so long as it insisted upon doing what was right, and upon being faithful to the ideal of the fathers; so long as it dared evince the same faith in the people that Washington and Jefferson had evinced, the republic moved forward with stately and commanding tread. In Europe the example set by the United States took firm hold on the popular imagination; while in the New World Toussaint L'Ouverture, the greatest of black men, and Simon Bolivar and San Martin, the noble Spanish Creole leaders, became the Washingtons respectively of Hayti and of the Spanish-American states, and republic upon republic rose on the ashes of despotic rule. After our Civil War the spirit of timid conventionalism began to manifest itself in the republic. This spirit was not very marked at first, but year by year statesmen, the press and, to a great degree, the nation began to lose something of the old robust independ ence and fearlessness. As a people we began to lose the faculty of taking the initiative. We began to look backward and overseas. We grew to demand precedents. Whenever, in order to preserve free government of, by, and for the people, any new proposal was made to meet new emergencies and new conditions, instead of demanding whether it were just and right, whether it were in accord with the fundamental demand of equal opportunities for all and special privileges for none, and whether it would secure the happiness and prosperity of the whole people, statesmen and the press were sure to ask if the proposed measure had ever been tried in the Old World, or where and at what time in the past it had been successfully introduced elsewhere; and if no satisfactory answer to this question were forthcoming, the measure was almost certain to be adjudged dangerous. Thus to-day we are brought face to face with the melancholy spectacle of that republic which was once the glorious representative of free government, the bold initiator, the leader of Liberty's hosts, falling behind monarchies and other foreign states in the march of progress. While, for example, Switzerland long since successfully introduced the initiative, the referendum, and the imperative mandate; while England has for years enjoyed a wise and |