to enter into their inheritance. And a spacious inheritance it is, and one that has expanded every day since the reign began.

That which at the beginning of the reign was the rare privilege and possession of a few has now been conferred upon the many, and that in no mean measure; but like the loaves and fishes it has multiplied even when in the act of distribution. This is true in many ways, some of which are but seldom realised. Take, for instance, the familiar boast that we are "heirs of all the ages." Contrast the meaning of that hackneyed phrase in 1837 and in 1897. What did all the ages mean to the ordinary man in the street when the Queen came to the throne? They meant a period of 5,840 years, of which 4,004 spanned the interval between the Creation and the coming of Christ. What do they mean to-day? What marvellous shifting of the perspective, what immeasureable receding of distances, as æons and æons unfurl behind us in the infinity of past time, and we realise that at the 4004 B.C. date with which our grand fathers begun the chronology of the world, the world was millions of years old, and that man had already behind him scores, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years of history! We have awakened to a sense of the antiquity of our lineage, and we are beginning to discern somewhat of the massy foundations upon which long æons since was based the evolutionary process, of which the man of to-day represents the most advanced but by no means the complete result. The Elizabethan age owed much of its stimulus and inspiration to the discovery of another world across the Atlantic. But what were all the discoveries of Columbus, or the conquests of Pizarro and Cortez compared with the rapid unfolding of the marvellous records of the eternity of past time with which we have been familiarised by the researches of the biologist, the reading of the book of geology, and the patient digging of the archeologist?

There are some who imagine that the Victorian age has been destructive of the belief in miracles. In reality, it, more than any other since the world began, has brought home to the average man the stupendous miracle of the world. They call it a Materialist age, which has chained the soul of man to inert matter. But almost before the reproach is heard, science proclaims that there is no such thing as inert matter, that every atom is alive, and that our mortal bodies are vast composite conglomerations of living organisms, upon whose pitched battles in our veins depend our health or our disease. To take but one instance. Imagine all that we understand by the word microbe, and then recall the fact that the microbe was practically unknown when the Queen came to the throne. In a very special fashion science has revealed to us a new Heaven and a new Earth, infinitely marvellous, testifying to an understanding so vast that the mind of man cannot by searching find it out. Behind each discovery that advances our knowledge, the infinite unknown indefinitely recedes. We weigh the stars, analyse their composition in the spectroscope, we photograph the moon, and make maps of the canals of Mars. But far more stupendous are the discoveries that have been made not in the infinitely distant abysses of space, but in the infinitesimally small molecules which are all around. Science has sent its Röntgen ray through the darkened veil, and revealed the Invisible, and summoned all men to enjoy it as their inheritance.

But it is not merely the Past and the Invisible Unknown that have become the inheritance of the nation at large. The one great aim and trend of the life of Britain during the reign has been the struggle to level up, to share round, to admit everybody to enjoy all that is going. We have struggled not unsuccessfully to democratise everything, to throw down all the walls of privilege, to burst open all the locked doors of monopoly. It is to the stoutest Conservatives of our time almost inconceivable that rational beings could ever have defended the system which prevailed in Britain sixty years ago. To jealously preserve for the exclusive use of a favoured few the inheritance

which is now thrown open to all seemed to many excellent and worthy people, sixty years ago, the last word of political wisdom. Wherever we might turn, there was the Warning Board of Privilege warning off the common people. Whenever a right was conceded, it was fenced in with limitations that robbed it of its value. While the service of the State was virtually open to all, the right to appointments in the Army, Navy, and Civil Service was practically in the hands of a small and exclusive section of the population. The Universities were open to all, but barriers of tests devised in the interests of a monopolising sect deprived Nonconformists of their share in the Educational Endowments of the nation. The same injustice prevails there to-day, where the prejudice of sex can be invoked in place of the prejudice of sect. The right to be elected was recognised, but it was linked with the demand for a property qualification, deliberately designed to shut poor men out of the work of legislation and administration. The right to vote was reluctantly conceded, but only on condition that the vote should be exercised under conditions which placed the voter at the mercy of his landlord or employer. So it was all round. Trade was crippled by a tariff designed to protect the few at the expense of the many. What with navigation laws, paper duties, taxes on knowledge and taxes on food, the whole national and Imperial machine was run in the interests of a handful to be counted by the thousand while the millions were left out in the cold.

Now the Victorian reign has changed all that. The process is not yet complete, but it has made sufficient progress to enable us to feel that already the people has entered upon its heritage. And not this nation only. To our hospitable shores, to our vast colonies, any man is as free to come, to settle, to buy or to sell as any Englishman of us all. Whereas other nations have fought and still fight for possessions in order that they might monopolise them for their own citizens, the policy of the Victorian reign has been exactly the reverse. Whatever we have we share. There is no preferential tariff in all our dominions. Everywhere under our flag all men trade on equal terms, and settle and found homes without questions asked as to their religion or nationality. It is this circumstance which gives us the second vote of every other nation whenever the question of ownership comes up. Each Power that finds its own claims inadmissible sooner prefers to see the land occupied by Britain than by anyone else. For what Britain holds is held for all the world, whereas France, Germany, or Russia hold their markets for themselves alone. Hence to her is fulfilled the promise, "Give, and it shall be given to you, heaped up, pressed down, running over."

This entering of the people into their heritage has been accompanied by many striking features. The first and the most conspicuous has been that they have entered into the world and possessed it. In the last sixty years there have poured from this teeming womb of nations, vagina gentium in a sense and to a degree which the old Roman authors of the phrase could never have understood; there have streamed to the uttermost ends of the world over nine millions who were born in these islands in the Northern Seas. A population twice as great as that even of mighty London, nearly equal to the whole population of Ireland and Scotland, has taken ship from these shores for homes in other lands. More than one-half found shelter under the Stars and Stripes, that other banner of the English-speaking race. But wherever they wan dered they carried with them the kindly English speech, the principles of English liberty, the respect of the English for law if so be it be by themselves made and determined. And while this vast overflow of the surplus of the English cradle has been streaming southward and westward night and day, year in and year out, all these long years, the Empire has been strengthening its stakes and strengthening its cords to make room. for the new-comers. We have added in this reign to the Empire in India 275,000 square miles—a territory larger than Austria; 80,000 square miles—a space as vast as

Great Britain-in the rest of Asia; 200,000 square miles-a region as large as Germany -in South Africa, and in West and East Africa, 1,000,000 square miles-or about half the extent of European Russia. To-day our possessions in North America and in Australasia cover one-ninth of the earth's dry-land. The population of Canada has sprung from one million to nearly six; of Australia, from 175,000 to four millions and a-half. To-day our flag is Queen of the Seven Seas, and of all that is best and richest of the non-European Continents.

This expansion of England, which has covered the world with our outposts and

CORONATION OF THE QUEEN, TAKEN AT THE MOMENT WHEN THE PEERS ARE LIFTING THEIR CORONETS TO THE SOVEREIGN.

our colonies, has been followed of late years by a reflex action. In the early years of the reign the sentiment of race was weak, the pride of Empire was slight. We contemplated with complacency the severance of the delicate bonds that united the colonies. to the motherland. From the Franco-German war, which unified Germany and reminded the world as by a thunderpeal of the importance of race-unity, we may date the rising of the tide of that loyalty of Greater Britain which has not even yet attained high-water mark. Hence the Victorian era has witnessed two great movements, one

the complement of the other-the dispersion of the race over the surface of the globe, followed after a time by a sudden revival of the sense of race-unity, the practical realisation of which has been rendered possible by the shrinkage of the world.

The Master-men of the Reign have been, not the politicians and statesmen, the soldiers and sailors, the poets and artists-they have been the engineers, the shipbuilders, the electricians, the men who have yoked the thunderbolts of Jupiter to the hammer of Vulcan, and have usurped the authority of Neptune over the waves, at the same time they have outstripped the herald Mercury by the speed of their despatches. The steam-engine, the steam-ship, and the electric wire have, in sixty years, effected a more revolutionary change in the conceptions of distance than all the millenniums that have passed since the Stone Age. When the Queen ascended the throne, the United States, measured by time, were three times farther away than they are to-day. India was forty days distant instead of fourteen, Australia six months instead of six weeks. While this shrinkage has been made a practical reality for all manner of brute substances, a much more rapid and total conquest of space and time has been effected in the exchange of thought and knowledge. The cables have enabled us to beat the sun, to deliver messages in London hours by the clock before they started from India. To-day, all news of importance is practically reported simultaneously all over the whole world. Our steamships bridge every sea, our cables link every continent, and Commerce, that Spider of the Planet, despite the temporary hindrance of protective tariffs, is weaving all the nations of the world into one vast web, and the home and nest and central abode of that Spider is the capital of the Empire of our Queen.

The Age of the Engineer coincided with the era of Free Trade. The more closely the history of the reign is scrutinised, the more vividly will be seen to stand out in immense relief the enormous significance of Free Trade. Down to 1842 there seemed no reason to believe that the Queen's reign would be prosperous. Things were in a bad way. Business was depressed, there were deficits at the Treasury, and the rate of pauperism was nearly four times as high in proportion to population as it is to-day. The prisons were full, the factories were empty, and the condition-of-England question, as Carlyle called it, was serious indeed. But after Free Trade the whole scene changed as by magic. Surpluses replaced deficits, business improved by leaps and bounds. England became the emporium of the world. Our exports and imports rose from £140,000,000 in 1837 to nearly £700,000,000 in the nineties. The Income Tax penny, which when it was first levied only drew £700,000, now yields £2,250,000. Probate was paid on £50,000,000 in 1838; it had mounted up to £164,000,000 in 1894. England has become the creditor of the world.

Closely connected with the Free Trade movement there was the rise, triumph and decay of the Manchester school of laisser faire. Cobden in his day did good work, cleared away much rubbish, and secured national recognition for many sound principles. The idea that to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest sums up the whole duty of nations was never preached by Cobden in this naked simplicity of explicit assertion. But it was a deduction which some not unnaturally drew from the excessive zeal which the Manchester men showed in minimising the action of the State. They were in politics what the voluntaries of the Anti-State-Church agitation were in religion. As the Nonconformist minimised the right of the State to interfere in things religious, so the Manchester school protested against State intervention in affairs secular. They were Administrative Nihilists who would fain have reduced the Government to zero, the natural recoil from a system of administration which was clumsy and unjust, and which moreover used the power and influence of the State to increase the wealth and strengthen the position of a privileged minority. From the ultra-negation of the Manchester school, the wheel has come round in full circle, and, as Sir W. Har