We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were hardy, just
as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived. They
may have been able to say of themselves--as they do in a state paper of
1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude--"What comyn folk of
all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom,
liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and
so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have been
fed on "great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini
calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in numbers
slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of natural
selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared off the
less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by
wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of
the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and
enterprising race.

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first years of
the century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the
population. Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married,
brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to
live more or less civilised lives. An event, doubtless, for which God is
to be thanked. A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices
and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new
noblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that
duty should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when our
soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms. To
murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the will
of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.