In ability, in conscientious use of increased power; in education, in social position, in all the best guarantees of responsibility, the British press has improved immeasurably within the present age. Even now it shows signs of perceiving that a certain amount of political impartiality towards the great leaders of State and Church renders its praise, its censure, and its criticism the more effective because the less mechanical. The condition of things which has made so many great newspapers patriotic partizans instead of independent guides must in its nature be temporary. When it has gone by, and a more normal state of affairs is re-established, there will be perhaps no compensating disadvantages to the increasing influence with which the Victorian age has endowed and is yet endowing what is really a fourth estate.[97] CHAPTER XXVIII TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed. Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and curative medicine also entitled to credit. General course of medical progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors, with particular instances. Before the Victorian age, there had been no legislation for the purpose of helping the helpless, housing the homeless, providing for the health of those whose birth-right was the squalor, the starvation, the disease, that come from systematic neglect. Here, as in other things, the representative of the Crown, transformed from a political power into an agency of social good, led the way. The Prince Consort, moved by the condition and by the address of the ballast heavers in the East End of London took the initiative; the legislature gradually followed. Thus was the principle established and acted on that one of the prime duties of the State is to those for whom from any other quarter there is no help.