virile strength as well as womanly sweetness; for it was indeed a
cloudy and dark day when she was called to her post of lonely
grandeur and hard responsibility; and to fill that post rightly would
have overtasked and overwhelmed a feebler nature. It is true that the
peace of Europe, won at Waterloo, was still unbroken. But already,
within our borders and without them, there were the signs of coming
storm. The condition of Ireland was chronically bad; the condition of
England was full of danger; on the Continent a new period of
earth-shaking revolution announced itself not doubtfully.

It would be hardly possible to exaggerate the wretched state of the
sister isle, where fires of recent hate were still smouldering, and
where the poor inhabitants, guilty and guiltless, were daily living
on the verge of famine, over which they were soon to be driven. Their
ill condition much aggravated by the intemperate habits to which
despairing men so easily fall a prey. The expenditure of Ireland on
proof spirits alone had in the year 1829 attained the sum of
L6,000,000.

In England many agricultural labourers were earning starvation wages,
were living on bad and scanty food, and were housed so wretchedly
that they might envy the hounds their dry and clean kennels. A dark
symptom of their hungry discontent had shown itself in the strange
crime of rick-burning, which went on under cloud of night season
after season, despite the utmost precautions which the luckless
farmers could adopt. The perpetrators were not dimly guessed to be
half-famished creatures, taking a mad revenge for their wretchedness
by destroying the tantalising stores of grain, too costly for their
consumption; the price of wheat in the early years of Her Majesty's
reign and for some time previously being very high, and reaching at
one moment (1847) the extraordinary figure of a hundred and two
shillings per quarter.

There was threatening distress, too, in some parts of the
manufacturing districts; in others a tolerably high level of wages
indicated prosperity. But even in the more favoured districts there
was needless suffering. The hours of work, unrestricted by law, were
cruelly long; nor did there exist any restriction as to the
employment of operatives of very tender years. "The cry of the
children" was rising up to heaven, not from the factory only, but
from the underground darkness of the mine, where a system of pitiless
infant slavery prevailed, side by side with the employment of women
as beasts of burden, "in an atmosphere of filth and profligacy." The
condition of too many toilers was rendered more hopeless by the
thriftless follies born of ignorance. The educational provision made
by the piety of former ages was no longer adequate to the needs of
the ever-growing nation; and all the voluntary efforts made by clergy
and laity, by Churchmen and Dissenters, did not fill up the
deficiency--a fact which had only just begun to meet with State
recognition. It was in 1834 that Government first obtained from
Parliament the grant of a small sum in aid of education. Under a
defective system of poor-relief, recently reformed, an immense mass
of idle pauperism had come into being; it still remained to be seen
if a new Poor Law could do away with the mischief created by the old
one.

Looking at the earliest years of Her Majesty's rule, the first
impulse is to exclaim:

"And all this trouble did not pass, but grew."

It seemed as if poverty became ever more direful, and dissatisfaction
more importunate. A succession of unfavourable seasons and failing
crops produced extraordinary distress; and the distress in its turn
was fruitful first of deepened discontent, and then of political
disturbances. The working classes had looked for immediate relief
from their burdens when the Reform Bill should be carried, and had
striven hard to insure its success: it had been carried triumphantly
in 1832, but no perceptible improvement in their lot had yet
resulted; and a resentful feeling of disappointment and of being
victims of deception now added bitterness to their blind sense of
misery and injury, and greatly exasperated the political agitation of
the ten stormy years that followed.

No position could well be more trying than that of the inexperienced
girl who, in the first bloom of youth, was called to rule the land in
this wild transitional period. Her royal courage and gracious tact,
her transparent truthfulness, her high sense of duty, and her
precocious discretion served her well; but these young excellences
could not have produced their full effect had she not found in her
first Prime Minister a faithful friend and servant, whose loyal and
chivalrous devotion at once conciliated her regard, and who only used
the influence thus won to impress on his Sovereign's mind "sound
maxims of constitutional government, and truths of every description
which it behoved her to learn." The records of the time show plainly
that Lord Melbourne, the eccentric head of William IV's last Whig
Administration, was not generally credited with either the will or
the ability to play so lofty a part. His affectation of a lazy,
trifling, indifferent manner, his often-quoted remonstrance to
impetuous would-be reformers, "Can't you let it alone?" had earned
for him some angry disapproval, and caused him to be regarded as the
embodiment of the detested _laissez-faire_ principle. But under his
mask of nonchalance he hid some noble qualities, which at this
juncture served Queen and country well.

Considered as a frivolous, selfish courtier by too many of the
suffering poor and of their friends, he was in truth "acting in all
things an affectionate, conscientious, and patriotic part" towards
his Sovereign, "endeavouring to make her happy as a woman and popular
as a Queen," [Footnote] telling her uncourtly truths with a blunt