611.  Reforms in Criminal Courts and in the Treatment of the Insane.

In criminal courts an equal reform was effected, and men accused of burglary and murder are now allowed to have counsel to defend them, and the right of appeal is secured; whereas, up to the era of Victoria, they were obliged to plead their own cases as best they might against skilled public prosecutors, who used every resource known to the law to convict them.

Great changes for the better have also taken place in the treatment of the insane.  Until near the close of the eighteenth century this unfortunate class was quite generally regarded as possessed by demons, and dealt with accordingly.  William Tuke, a member of the Society of Friends, inaugurated a better system (1792); but the old method continued for many years longer.  In fact, we have the highest authority for saying that down to a pretty late period in the nineteenth century the inmates of many asylums were worse off than the most desperate criminals.

They were shut up in dark, and often filthy, cells, where “they were chained to the wall, flogged, starved, and not infrequently killed."[2] Since then, mechanical restraints have, as a rule, been abolished, and the patients are generally treated with the care and kindness which their condition demands.

[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica (10th and 11th editions) under “Insanity.”

612.  Progress in the Education of the Masses.

We have seen that since 1837 the advance in popular education equaled that made in the extension of suffrage and in civil service reform.  When Victoria began her reign a very large proportion of the children of the poor were growing up in a stat bordering on barbarism.  Many of them knew little more of books or schools than the young Hottentots in Africa.

The marriage register shows that as late as 1840 forty per cent of the Queen’s adult subjects could not write their names in the book; by the close of her reign (1901) the number who had to “make their mark” in that interesting volume was only about one in ten.  This proves, as Lord Brougham said, that “the schoolmaster” has been “abroad” in the land.

The national system of education began, as we have already seen, in 1870 (S602).  Later, the Assisted Education Act (1891) made provision for those who had not means to pay even a few pence a week for instruction.  That law practically put the key of knowledge within reach of every child in England.

613.  Religious Toleration in the Universities; Payment of Church Rates
     abolished.

The universities felt the new impulse.  The abolition of religious tests for degrees at Oxford and Cambridge (1871) threw open the doors of those venerable seats of learning to students of every faith.  Since then colleges for women have been established at Oxford and in the vicinity of Cambridge, and the “university-extension” examinations, with “college settlements” in London and other large cities, have long been doing excellent work.