HINTS OF CHANGE

SLOWLY, but surely, inevitably, is Democracy, making its way in England. The times are full of significant hints of changes, clearly showing the struggling of a new order of things to be born. Agricultural laborers, ground down by poverty and oppression for centuries, hear the voice of an Arch, and suddenly there comes a revolution, bloodless, but vast, and its consequences almost incommensurable by land-holders and tyrants. Monarchy to once assail which meant, to the daring truthspeaker, Death or the Tower, is now denounced with the fire and fervour of Radical and Republican oratory ; and the Queen's person is not safe from criticism. The cry for Disestablishment of the Church goes up and finds an echo in the hearts of the multitude, and the Ballot and the Franchise bring upon the scene myriads of earnest men, carrying in their hard heads ideas which, uttered, blanch the faces of Nobles, Aristocrats, Plutocrats, and Soil-possessors, the Tories for whom feudalism declared all men of lesser wealth and power were created —a notion of feudalism which Nobles, Aristocrats, Plutocrats, and Soil-possessors have cherished in the Senate by prescription of law and in quarrel by the pinching of bellies, the horse whip, and the bayonet. Such a delusion as this, opposed to the " law of veracities," must fail in time. Is it not failing now ? Rude men, grown bold and uncivil to shams grown hoary, are speaking in tones which cannot be misunderstood; that will be affected to be misunderstood, but which, with increasing growth of volume, will have to be interpreted, and interpreted amidst much crumbling away of error laden with the dust and cobweb of precedent and usage. They are beginning to ask curious questions. They are irreverent and prying. There is a higher law than the laws by which human society is regulated now—the law which gives each soulholder something like a title of equality with the soul-plus-land-and-wealth holder—and tho toiling masses are finding it out. Under the new light diffused by a Penny Press, by the great fact of an American Republic—than which no fact in the world's history is more stupendous, more wonderful—by the thousand and one achievements making up the sum of Progress—under this new light old oppressions, old injustices, old formalities of custom, old greeds begin to look like what they are—chartered lies, and the true "rights of man" begin to body forth to the understandings of the people and to call for a new regime to take in what Walt Whitman, the true poet of Democracy, terms " the years of the unperformed," the shape of the higher law of Humanity. Ginx's baby has grown stronger and wiser, has an odd notion that he has been hardly dealt by; and his cry is being heard throughout England in demand for Reform—for the right of payment in fair terms for his body service, for right to share the benefits of his out-put of wealth from the field of production, for right to occupy the soil of which, by the indisputable law of Nature, he is the heir, for right of social comfort—surely the divinest right of all—for rights innumerable, denial of which for long years has been gross tyranny and injustice. The days of class despotism in England are coming to an end, as inevitable as the days of sham kingcraft are doomed to end in these same "years of the unperformed." The Press of the mother country is pregnant with hints of the change,—the old order giving place to the new—and these hints cannot be mistaken. The agricultural laborers' blow for freedom from oppression, poverty and brutal degradation; the tocsin of the Land Tenure Reform Leaguers, the protests of the underground delvers for coal and iron, by the powerful weapon of "strike;" the summing up of the cost of Monarchy to the nation, and the demands of extreme Radicals for the abolition of Kingcraft; the constant demands for an extended franchise; the growing disaffection to the House of Lords and the hereditary peerage—all these and many other "signs of the times" convey the lesson that the spirit of change is working amidst the chaos that the centuries have produced in England.

Kyneton Observer (Vic. : 1856 - 1900), Saturday 17 January 1874, page 2