For this reason it may not be amiss to call attention to what Dr. Farr laid down for the guidance of those who at this anxious time had the destinies of the people in their hands. He pointed out that “Society without a legal system of relief for destitution can be scarcely said to exist, as it leaves the protection of life against the most imminent calamity unprovided for.”113 Insecurity of life among the masses, he contended, naturally weakens their instinctive conservatism. It drives them into communism and anarchy, which are the rank and unwholesome outgrowths of a state in which Property is too selfish to appropriate a small portion of its profits as a life insurance premium for Labour—and where the State has not yet discovered that the insurance of the life of all is the insurance of the property of all. The Poor Law to a certain extent made this appropriation. But the objection to it was its cast-iron administration; its indiscriminating application to the good and the bad, the industrious and the idle, the worthy and the worthless. Was it not, then, possible to make Poor Law Relief bear some proportion to the ratepayer’s previous contributions to the Insurance fund against destitution? Could not the whole country be converted into a gigantic Friendly Society, of which the rich should be, so to speak, honorary members, but capable without the least shame or humiliation of becoming benefiting members, should sudden misfortune hurl them from the heights of opulence to the depths of destitution? Many philanthropic firms of employers co-operated at this time with their workmen in founding benefit societies for the purpose of insurance against sickness or accident. Why, it was asked, could they not develop this idea, and insure their workpeople against the consequences of that infirmity which is the result of old age? In other words, could not the Friendly Society be also made a Pension Club? The practical difficulty obviously lay in the complicated account-keeping which was necessary for the success of such schemes, and which private firms could hardly be expected to undertake. It was, however, shown by Dr. Farr, in the letter which has been quoted, and which is one of the most curious and characteristic products of a time of social turmoil, that the Government could alone with advantage receive small deposits of money in the early life of a generation, invest them at compound interest, and pay the accumulated amounts at short intervals to the aged and infirm survivors. Each establishment might, according to Dr. Farr’s idea, organise three insurance funds—a Pension Fund, a Health Fund, and a Life Fund—the premiums to be paid to the Government, who should conduct the whole business for the parties interested on fair and easy terms.
It is curious that though the Chartists and a large number of the Tories—notably the remnants of the “Young England” Party, led by Mr. Disraeli and Lord John Manners—sympathised with these ideas, they were coldly frowned down by the Whigs and the Manchester School of Radicals. The argument against the social reformers was that employers did enough for their “hands” when they bought their labour and paid for it in the open market. It was for the workpeople to spend their money as they pleased—if in insurance against sickness and old age, so much the better; if not, so much the worse. But even in the last case no real harm, it was urged, could come to them, for there was always “the parish” to fall back upon. In a word, Capital argued that it did enough for Labour when it paid wages and poor rates. On the other hand, it might be retorted, that by helping on schemes for promoting the permanent comfort of his workpeople the employer is only paying wages in the way which pays all parties best in the long-run. Such an employer, it might be said, gets the strongest command of the labour market, and the best and most efficient service from his men. His prestige becomes lustrous like that of a general who refuses to desert his wounded on the field where he wins his victorious laurels, or of a conquering king who refuses to let the veterans perish, whose valour has widened the range of his dominion. Often did the Queen and Prince Albert ponder these things in their hearts. Hence their eagerness to seize every opportunity, not of pressing schemes such as these on a Society whose economic prejudices were antipathetic to them, but for stimulating the upper and middle classes in such voluntary movements for ameliorating the lot of Labour, as were possible and practicable in these “bad old times.” It was in this spirit that they even studied the barren statistics of Pauperism, and that their discovery, in 1849, of the fact that the great majority of the poor people in London workhouses had been domestic servants, prompted Prince Albert to stimulate the Servants’ Provident and Benevolent Society to find a remedy for such a distressing state of things. “The appalling pauperism of this class,” as the Prince described it in a memorable speech, he strove to arrest by inducing servants to invest their savings under the Deferred Annuities Act, through the agency of the Society.114
On the 18th of March the Princess Louise was born, and on the 13th of May she was baptised in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, being
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named after Prince Albert’s mother and the Queen of the Belgians. The Prince himself adapted the music of a chorale he had composed for the Baptismal Service. “The Royal christening,” writes Bishop Wilberforce to Miss Noel, “was a very beautiful sight in its highest sense of that word beauty; the Queen, with the five Royal children around her, the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal hand-in-hand, all kneeling down quietly and meekly at every prayer, and the little Princess Helena alone just standing and looking round with the blue eyes of gazing innocence.” This was the little Princess a peep at whom, Lady Lyttelton says, always cheered her, for she was then “an image of life”—it is to be presumed Lady Lyttelton means child-life—in its prime, with “cheeks like full-blown roses, and her nose like a bud.” This month of May was ostensibly a merry one at Court, though from the correspondence that passed between the Queen and her half-sister, it is quite evident that her Majesty went through the festal pageant of Court balls and Royal birthday fêtes with her heart heavy from the anxieties of the times.
In July the Royal circle was broken up by the departure of Prince
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Albert to open the great Agricultural Show at York, where his speech, identifying himself closely with the farming interest, gave the country gentry and husbandmen of England the keenest delight. The Queen again wrote to Stockmar and the King of the Belgians, expressing her personal satisfaction with the Prince’s speeches at York, and her pleasure at seeing him develop high gifts of oratory. The rest of the summer her Majesty and her family spent at Osborne—a little anxious on account of the feeble health of Prince Alfred (Duke of Edinburgh), whose removal to the keen mountain air of the Highlands had been strongly pressed on them by Sir James Clark. Her Majesty then came to town on the 5th of September to prorogue Parliament. The present House of Lords was on that occasion used for the first time, and this fact, together with the interest excited by the appearance before her Senate of almost the only great European Sovereign who at this time dared appear in public, caused enormous crowds to assemble. The Queen was received by the mob who lined the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in a delirium of enthusiastic loyalty, and that she felt grateful for their greeting was evident from the emotion with which she delivered those passages of her Address, in