[11] 1832-1880. [12] They had an excellent sense of reality as regards their own affairs, and there between them covered a fairly wide area; but they were singularly lacking either in sympathy or imagination with regard to the affairs of other nations and classes. Their interest in the poor was confined for the most part to criticism of _one another_ with regard to conditions of labour. The millowners thought that the oppression of the peasantry was a scandal; while the landowners considered that the state of things prevailing in factories was much worse than slavery. Cf. Disraeli's _Sybil_. [13] _I.e._ curtailment of the powers of the House of Lords and its reform. Only the first was proceeded with. {207} CHAPTER II THREE GOVERNING IDEAS At the death of Queen Victoria the development of the British Commonwealth entered upon a new phase. The epoch which followed has no precedent in our own previous experience as a nation, nor can we discover in the records of other empires anything which offers more than a superficial and misleading resemblance to it. The issues of this period presented themselves to different minds in a variety of different lights; but to all it was clear that we had reached one of the great turning-points in our history. The passengers on a great ocean liner are apt to imagine, because their stomachs are now so little troubled by the perturbation of the waves, that it no longer profits them to offer up the familiar prayer 'for those in peril on the sea.' It is difficult for them to believe in danger where everything appears so steady and well-ordered, and where they can enjoy most of the distractions of urban life, from a cinematograph theatre to a skittle-alley, merely by descending a gilded staircase or crossing a brightly panelled corridor. But this agreeable sense of safety is perhaps due in a greater degree to fancy, than to the changes which have taken place in the essential facts. As dangers have been diminished in one direction {208} risks have been incurred in another. A blunder to-day is more irreparable than formerly, and the havoc which ensues upon a blunder is vastly more appalling. An error of observation or of judgment--the wrong lever pulled or the wrong button pressed--an order which miscarries or is overlooked--and twenty thousand tons travelling at twenty knots an hour goes to the bottom, with its freight of humanity, merchandise, and treasure, more easily, and with greater speed and certainty, than in the days of the old galleons--than in the days when Drake, in the _Golden Hind_ of a hundred tons burden, beat up against head winds in the Straits of Magellan, and ran before the following gale off the Cape of Storms. Comfort, whether in ships of travel or of state, is not the same thing as security. It never has been, and it never will be.