Like the sovereign, the peers of England are a legacy from the past, and, in spite of many drawbacks, they are a useful one. Few of the descendants of the original barons created by William the Norman and the Tudors now survive; but the order persists, and receives accessions every year. They give firmness and direction to society; they are trained to public affairs, and the fact that they are uniformly found opposed to progressive measures is the very fact that gives them their chief political value; for they afford season to the people to reconsider their first impulses. The nobility is also an object toward which men of ability and ambition may legitimately strive; a peerage is the conventional recognition of merit, and there is nothing unworthy in the acceptance thereof. A lord is no more than a man; he may often be less than many men; but a man who has been made a lord is not therefore less a man than he was before; and it may happen that his worth is thus made more available for public uses. At the same time it must be admitted that the world is pleased when a man like Gladstone declines a peerage; for it will always be true that character confers a nobility compared with which the titles of the aristocracy seem cheap and vulgar.

Victoria was of course under an obligation to marry, in order to secure the succession of her ancient line, which on one side ran back to Cerdic the Saxon. The marriages of royalty are usually melancholy affairs, in which the affections are the last things to be considered. But Victoria was destined to a fate far happier than the common one of sovereigns; for she fell in love with her young cousin, Albert of Saxe Coburg Gotha, and made her preference known to him with a graceful naivete which might have won his heart, had it not been hers before. They were married in 1840, and the union was full of felicity from first to last, ending only with the Prince Consort's death in 1861. He was a good man, conscientious and intelligent, and his political services, which never could appear openly and receive their popular meed of praise, were not the less assiduous and valuable. He was a model husband, and so identified himself with his royal wife that in all things they acted as one, and she learned only after his death how faithfully he had served her, in loyalty as well as in love. On her side, no queen ever loved her husband better; perhaps, outside of romances, none ever loved so well. She trusted him and deferred to him; he stood between her and the world, though she never sought to evade her duties; he became a statesman for her sake, and his prudence and wisdom are attested by the eminent men who were brought in contact with him. His life was a thoroughly unselfish one; and he made the place of the Prince Consort, which in the nature of things is a difficult one, honored and honorable. The marriage was blessed with many children, none of whom have fallen below the average of royal offspring, and one or two of whom have risen above it. The Princess Royal, in particular, who became at last Empress of Germany, was a woman of character and ability. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, has committed his follies, but has upon the whole maintained a fair front before the world, remembering as one must the temptations of his position; he has borne with quiet composure the long wait at the foot of the throne, for his turn to ascend it, and to assume one of the highest of earthly dignities; and now that he has passed the meridian of life, he has come to be regarded with good will by Englishmen. Of the other children of Victoria, some have died, and some have lived to more or less good purpose; but it may be said that she has not been unhappy in her offspring. She has been a strict and conscientious parent; and whatever education could do for her sons and daughters has been faithfully done. The good example she has given to all England in her domestic life cannot but have had the most benign effect; for if happiness and integrity in the matrimonial relation were possible to royalty, they should be possible to all.

Her wedding year was marked by the introduction, by Sir Rowland Hill, of the extremely useful system of penny postage, which has since been imitated in all countries, and has been both a vast convenience to the people and a source of constant revenue to the government. During the next few years the movement which culminated in the Chartist demonstration of 1848 began. The franchise, though so much enlarged, had still not been bestowed upon the mass of the working classes in the kingdom; and a radical party came into being which had for its object the establishment of popular rights, as embodied in a "People's Charter." Universal male suffrage, ballot voting, annual Parliaments, and abolition of property qualifications for parliamentary candidates, were their chief demands. An agitator named Feargus O'Connor headed the demonstrations, which included the presentation of a petition alleged, though falsely, to contain five million signatures, which was to be carried to Parliament by a procession of a million persons. The measures taken by the Duke of Wellington to prevent mischief had the effect of exposing the hollowness of the affair; the procession dwindled down to half a dozen individuals, and the petition was shown to consist largely of bogus signatures. Yet the reforms demanded were really expedient, and several of them have since been granted.

More pressing was the distress caused by the Corn Laws, which exacted heavy duties on breadstuffs, in order to "protect" the British farmers. The low wages which prevailed made bread too dear to the working people, and hunger was felt all over England and Ireland. In the latter unhappy island, actual famine set in, precipitated by the failure of the potato crop; and no less than two million Irish people died of starvation or of disease due to hunger, or were driven out of the country to seek homes elsewhere. Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer, had already produced a deep effect by his simple and powerful poems on the situation, and the terrible object-lesson of the famine clinched the argument. Parliament voted fifty million dollars to relieve the immediate distress, and money and provisions were sent from America. The corn laws were repealed, and this concession led to the establishment of free-trade in Great Britain. In following years the tax on windows, which had deprived Englishmen of what little light their climate permitted them, was abolished; and the stamp duty on newspapers likewise disappeared. In 1851 the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was opened, with exhibits from all nations : another object-lesson, this time of a beneficent kind, as showing the world the benefits which might be realized by co-operation and reciprocity. To Prince Albert belongs the credit of having conceived this grand scheme, which has been constantly imitated ever since. This first World's Fair marked the beginning of the second half of the century. Already the people were gaining instruction far beyond what had seemed possible fifty years before, and their rulers were learning wisdom. The Conservative of the present was more advanced than the Liberal of the past. In 1858 the Atlantic cable was laid, forerunner of the notwork that now covers the globe.

But meanwhile there had been two wars. The first occurred two years after Victoria's accession, and its object had been to force the Chinese to use opium grown in India, instead of their home product. It was an iniquity on England's part, but it was successful, and of course immensely profitable to the victors. The other war was declared in 1854 by England and France in alliance against Russia, which had made war against Turkey in order to protect Christians in Turkey against the oppression of the sultan. England's excuse was that she believed Russia's true motive to be the occupation of Constantinople. The fortress of Sevastopol, in the Crimea, was taken after a long siege, and Russia was forced to conclude a peace in 1856. But the war was hardly more creditable to England than that with China. The following year came the Sepoy Rebellion, due to the discontent of India under British rule, precipitated by the forced use of greased cartridges by soldiers whose religion forbade them to touch the fat of cattle. The conflict was characterized by inhumanity on both sides; the rebellion was crushed, but again England had been in the wrong. The government of India, which had hitherto been chiefly administered by the East India Company, was now vested entirely in the crown; and twenty years later the queen was crowned Indian Empress. The English government administration of India has been uniformly just and beneficial; but the Hindoos and Mohammedans only need a leader who can unite them and lead them, and English rule would be at an end forever. The peoples which England has subjugated respect her, but do not love her.