Lord Beaconsfield was
dead and he had forgotten his zeal for social justice long before he
attained power. Gladstone, then in the zenith of his fame, never took
any real interest in social questions as we now understand them. Lord
Salisbury was an aristocrat and thought as an aristocrat. John Bright
viewed industrial life from the standpoint of a Lancashire mill-owner.
William Edward Forster, the creator of national education, a Chartist in
his youth, had become the gaoler of Parnell and the protagonist of
coercion in Ireland. Joseph Chamberlain alone seemed to realise the
significance of the social problem, and unhappily political events were
soon to deflect his career from what then seemed to be its appointed
course.
The political parties therefore offered very little attraction to the
young men of the early eighties, who, viewing our social system with the
fresh eyes of youth, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged
them, not as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and
greater absurdities of earlier days, but by the standard of common
fairness and common sense, as set out in the lessons they had learned in
their schools, their universities, and their churches.
It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf
which separated the young generation of that period from their parents.
"The Origin of Species," published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual
revolution such as the world had not known since Luther nailed his
Theses to the door of All Saints' Church at Wittenberg.
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