The San Juan islander. [volume] (Friday Harbor, Wash.) 1898-1914, 1902-02-06
CHAPTER /.
The State of England in 1880.


history.
The times were dark, and were grow
ing darker, clouds gathering and lower
ing on every hand, and, worse than
that. ominous tremors beginning to
make themselves felt in the very floor
and foundation of society itself. The
darkness was all the more appalling
that it had been preceded by a period
of unparalleled triumph and splendor.
Under Edward ILL.,, in the middle of
his long reign, England had been the
first nation in Europe, and the kings
court had been on corresponding scale
of magnificence. He had realized the
kingdom of the fabulous Arthur. The
kings of Scotland and France were pris-
oners together in his capital; his
dominion stretched literally from the
Orkneys to the Pyrenees; the chivalry
of Europe gathered to his feasts and
tournaments, and Christian potentates
in the East looked to him, as the first
prince in Christendom, for aid against
the Saracens. But few short years,
though they witnessed no falling off in
the magnitcence of the court and the
mobiles, had seen a woeful decline in
political power. The expansion had
gone too far; the English rule had been
spread over a wider surface than it's
essential strength warranted, into
film so thin that the parts could not
maintain their cohesion. In reaching
over into Spain, the Black Prince had
loosened his hold on Aquitaine, and
fortress after fortress, here little and
there little, Edwards inheritances
and conquests in France had been lost.
When the great contending parties
paused for short breathing space dur
ing the last three years of Edwards
reign, there was left to the English
crown, of all its Continental possess
sions, only few strong towns on the
northern and western coasts. The war
was renewed, but the record was still of
disappointment and disaster. Ill-luck
combined with bad management against
the success of the English arms. The
great captains of the prosperous time
were gone; John of Gaunt-an invet-
crate bungler in matters of war-was a
sorry substitute for the Black Prince;
and Knolles, Calverley, Harlstone and
Trivet, though valiant men of their
hands, did not, taken altogether, make
up for the loss of Sir John Chandos, the
greatest general of the age, the real
hero of Poictiers and Array and Najar-
ra, who had been slain in miserable
skirmish. Luck generally goes against
men when they play badly, and it
seemed as if the very wind and waves
had entered into the conspiracy to bring
England as low in her humiliation as
she had lately been high in her glory.
Relieving expeditions, calculated to
arrive in the nick of time without
day to spare, were shipwrecked by
storms, or detained in port, or beaten
back by contrary winds. Indignities
that twenty years before were never in
the dreams of the gloomiest prophets of
evil had become hard matters of fact,
stern and urgent. Scotch cruisers
chased the smacks of Filey and Scar
borough from their fishing grounds,
and French fleets ravaged the southern
coasts, menaced the mouth of the
Thames, and actually, in the autumn of
1880, the time when our story opens,
had the audacity to sail up the great
river, and burn and plundered as far as
Gravesend. The defense of London it
self had become subject of serious con-
sideration-a deplorable reverse from
the time when the most pressing con-
Germ for the English government was
the maintenance of the border fort
resses of Gascony.
Meantime, as in all periods of great
national reverse, discomfort with the
management of affairs was loud
throughout the kingdom. Charges of
incapacity, extravaganza, dishonesty,
were freely made. That larger sums
should be necessary for the exchequer
than had ever been heard of in Ed
wards most prosperous days, and that
yet there should be nothing to show
but fresh miscarriages and disasters, was
monstrous and bitterly unintelligible.
1t went hard with the great officers of
state and the minor collectors of reve-
nue.. They were accused of intercept
ing for their own use the money that
had been raised for the defense of the
realm. Frequent changes were tried,
while affairs still went from bad to
worse. The knights and burgesses,
summoned to Parliament again and
again to hear the same tale of urgent
dangers followed by requests for larger
and larger supplies, grew FESTIVE, and,
with all the care that could be used in
their selection, could not be kept from
open complaint and remonstrance
against 1.-THE outrageous cost of wars
that the country could in no manner