THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1832-1901 When the great Reform bill had sailed safely into port, leaving the storms of popular riot and constitutional crisis behind it, a new epoch had begun. That epoch may be said to end with the conquest of the Dutch Republics in South Africa, the death of Queen Victoria, and the end of the century, three events that came almost together. We call the age Victorian, for the Queen's reign covered all but five years of it. It was an age remarkably free, in England, from sudden revolutions and violent catastrophes such as France, Germany, Italy, and the United States expe rienced. None the less, in Britain quite as much as in those other countries, it was an age of unprecedentedly rapid change and development. The population of England and Wales rose from 14,000,00o to over 3 2,000,000, and wealth increased faster than population. Overseas trade was multiplied sixfold. The number of paupers in receipt of relief was reduced by one-third; the num ber of criminals in prison was halved. Railways were a novelty and an experiment in 1832; in Igor the novelty was the motor car. In 1832 the tonnage of vessels served by steam was less than I oo,000 tons; in Igor it was 13, 700,00o tons, more than four times the total mercantile tonnage of the country at the earlier date. In 1832 electricity had no commercial uses; in Igor electric light, telegraphy, and traction were all taken for granted.
The great Reform Bill had extended the electorate, but even so there were less than a million voters in the whole country; it was a middle-class electorate. By 19o1 the control of the government belonged to the wage-earning males. In 1832 only about a quarter of the children of England and Wales received any school educa tion; in I 901 education was compulsory and free of charge. In 1832 there was a four-penny tax on newspapers. The taxed and legal newspapers catered only for an educated and prosperous class, and the untaxed and illegal papers led a precarious and gen erally disreputable existence. By 19o1 the half-penny Daily Mail had a circulation of a million copies. In 1832 trade unions had only been legalized eight years before, and their membership was probably well under 100,000. In Igor there were close on two million trade unionists, and the Labour members had sat in the House of Commons.
If we turn to Britain overseas we find that, in 1832, Canada consisted of two small colonies, soon to be in rebellion against the government provided for them ; Australia was still used as a place for convict settlements; New Zealand was not yet British territory ; Cape Colony was rent by the Anglo-Dutch rivalries which resulted soon after in the Great Trek, the exodus of the discontented Dutch to found new communities north of the Orange and the Vaal rivers. By Igor that quarrel had reached its climax in the South African War, and troops from the other three "colonies," by that time self-governing dominions, were volun tarily assisting the mother-country in the South African War. The British population in the dominions, a mere handful in 1 83 2, was by Igor nearly equal to the population of England and Wales at the earlier date.