THE LIFE

OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

THE PRINCE CONSORT.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

'I AM long persuaded,' says Milton, in his Letter on Education, that to say or do aught worth memory or imitation, no purpose should sooner move us than simply the love of God and of mankind.' In this spirit the Prince Consort lived and acted. A rule good for all men he felt was especially incumbent on him, placed as he was in a position where his influence and example, whether for good or evil, must of necessity be greater than those of ordinary men. In a letter written in December 1847 we find him saying, in reference to having had his conduct in certain matters misunderstood: 'I must console myself with the consciousness that from my heart I mean well towards all men, have never done them aught but good, and take my stand on truth and reason,1

In a letter (17th January, 1862) to the late Sir Arthur Helps from the late Sir Charles Phipps, whose official position as Privy Purse brought him into contact with the Prince for many hours daily, he writes: "The principle of right was so firmly and immovably rooted in the Prince, and its influence was so ever present in his every thought, that I am quite sure he never spoke or answered a question without having made instantaneous reference in his thoughts to this principle. His every word, his every act was but a portion of one great resolution to do what was right, and to endeavour to do it with the greatest possible kindness and tenderness to others. To hear of a good

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PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPY

1857

the worship of which becomes daily more and more a matter of conscience with me.' But his was no cold worship of truth and reason in the abstract. Their value for him lay in their application to human beings, to the intricacies and perplexities of human life, and to the social wants and problems of the times in which we live.

Such being his principle of life, no question was indifferent to him, whether great or small, in which the happiness or well-being of his fellow-men was involved. He would turn aside at any time from the discussion of the most intricate question of European policy to deal with a case of personal hardship, or with any scheme for abolishing an abuse or bettering the condition of any section of Her Majesty's subjects. The same faculty of looking not only all round a subject, but also far ahead into remote consequences, which distinguished his political speculations, was applied to every subject to which his attention was directed. Considerations which had escaped the attention even of those whose business it was to deal with the matters which they brought under his notice, or who had made a special study of the subject on which they sought his opinion, presented themselves as if by intuition to his mind. And always, as we learn from those whose daily intercourse with him furnished them with the best means of observation, the fairness, the thoughtfulness for others, which pervaded all his suggestions, where the interests either of single individuals or of classes were involved, were peculiarly conspicuous.

At the same time, his mind, which has been by some called un-English, had at least the peculiarly English quality of being practical. Whether a reform was well-timed, and how it would work, was always his prominent thought, and in the means to be adopted for effecting it, he was careful to keep

action in anybody, from a young child up to a great statesman, was a positive enjoyment to him-a joy which was visibly seen in his countenance.'

1857

OF THE PRINCE.

3

in view English ways and even prejudices of thinking. His gifts in this respect were very early found out by those who met him in deliberation, and they had good reason to acknowledge that his timely forethought in council had smoothed the way where difficulties unforeseen and unprovided for might otherwise have defeated the most excellent intentions.

Thus it was that the things worth memory and imitation' which were done by the Prince were numerous and widely spread, and have left an inheritance of good in many quarters, especially in those where there is little to cheer the toil of a pinched and struggling life. As one among many instances may be cited the case of the ballast-heavers of the Port of London. It cannot be presented more truthfully than in their own words, in a Memorial presented to the Queen in June 1863, in which they acknowledged that to the Prince 'we owed eight years' contented life in our hard labour, after a long time of misery from which he relieved us.'

'Before he came to our rescue, we could only get work through a body of riverside publicans and middlemen, who made us drink before they would give us a job, made us drink while at it, and kept us waiting for our wages and drinking after we had done our work, so that we could only take half our wages home to our families, and that half often reached them, too, through a drunkard's hands. The consequence was that we were in a pitiable state; this truck-drinking system was raining us, body and soul, and our families too.

'Your Majesty, we tried hard to get out of this accursed system; we appealed to men of all classes, and opened an office ourselves; but we got no real help till we sent an appeal to your late Royal Consort on his election to the Mastership of the Trinity House. He at once listened to us. Your Majesty, he

loved the wife of his own bosom, and he loved the children of his love; he could put himself down from the throne he shared to the wretched home of us poor men, and could feel what we and our wives and children were suffering from the terrible truckdrinking system that had dragged us into the mire. He inquired

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MEMORIAL OF BALLAST-HEAVERS.

1857

himself into the evils that oppressed us; he resolved that, if he could release us from our bonds, he would; he saw the President of the Board of Trade (the Right Hon. E. Cardwell) about us, and with his counsel a clause was put into the Merchant Shipping Act, 1853, which placed us under the control of the Corporation of the Trinity House.

'At once our wrongs were redressed, and the system that had ruined us swept away. The good Prince and the Brethren whom he led framed rules for our employment, which secured us a fair wage for our very hard toil; they let us take it home to our families unclipt; they gave us a room to wait in for our work, and supplied it with papers and books; they encouraged us to form a Sick Benefit Society, and in every way strove to promote our welfare. Your Majesty may well imagine what a change this was to us; from the publicans and grasping middlemen seeking our money at the cost of our lives, to Albert the Good and his generous Brethren, desiring only our good! At one dead lift they raised us from the drunkard's life, and the drunkard's fate, to the comfort and respectability of the fairly paid, hard-toiling English working man.'

The Memorialists go on to inform the Queen, that they 'celebrate their deliverance by an annual treat' on Her Majesty's birthday, and that they then think with special gratitude of their deliverer.' We should like, they add, to have a representation of him in the room that he and the Brethren gave us; we should like to see his kind and earnest face looking on us as we daily partake of the boon he has secured us;' and they ask for a framed engraving of the Prince, as a remembrance of our benefactor, and as a reminder that we, in our humble way, should strive to be, as husbands, fathers, and men, what he was.' The request was at once granted, and the gift made more precious by the words that accompanied it, which told that of all the tokens of sympathy submitted to the Queen in her grief, 'no one was more in harmony with her feelings than the simple and unpretending tribute from these honest hard-working men.'

1857

SYMPATHY WITH WORKING-CLASSES.

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Himself the most hard-working of men, it was to the state of those who do the bulk of the hard and ungenial work of the world under conditions little favourable to their welfare, spiritual or bodily, that the thoughts of the Prince were most constantly directed. He early saw that the rapid overgrowth of our great cities, where the want of home comforts and of wholesome recreation for the labouring classes was rapidly developing vice, disease, and discontent to an alarming extent, was a problem which, if not effectively dealt with, must in the end become fatal to the habits and physical development of the people, and even dangerous to the State. The magnitude of the difficulties which surrounded this subject was not with him, as it is with many, a reason for doing nothing. He was among the first to show what could be effected in the way of improving the dwellings of the working-classes, not only by the cottages built upon the Royal estates at Osborne and Balmoral, but by model lodging-houses erected in the metropolis itself. It was his conviction that, under a proper system, these would pay, and indeed that they must be made to pay, otherwise no permanent improvement could be established anywhere, and still less could any wide measure of progressive amelioration be hoped for. On mere philanthropy the Prince was not disposed to lean; but he believed that a mighty change would be initiated, if men of kind hearts and sound business heads could be persuaded to invest their capital in providing on reasonable terms homes for the sons of labour, in which the decencies, at least, and the main comforts of domestic. life might be within their reach. His views on this subject, regarded at first as somewhat Utopian, have since become accepted truisms. Many of the great employers of labour throughout the country have proved to their own satisfaction the Prince's favourite axiom, that the capital sunk in good houses for those who work for them would prove an excellent