THE    FIGHTING    FIFTIES	137
propagandist powers of Exeter Hall caused them quickly to
withdraw. A proposal in the same year to provide Sunday bands
in the dreary Manchester and Salford parks met with a like repulse.
At midnight on Saturday—a noisy drunken evening in any
working-class district—all movement and sound suddenly ceased.
As Big Ben's new dock chimed its last stroke a solemn hush
announced that the Sabbath had begun. Next morning the food
shops opened for a few hours, but at eleven, the time for divine
service, every shutter went up. For those with large houses and
affectionate families, the quiet scene had a familiar and reassuring
air: to those who lived in tiny tenement rooms and had no
playground but the drab streets it was less pleasing. Taine,
visiting England in 1860, found the prospect almost more than
he could bear:
"Sunday in London in the rain: the shops are shut, the
streets almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense
and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their
umbrellas, in the desert of squares and streets, have the look
of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is
appalling.
"I had no conception of such a spectacle which is said
to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact,
pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should
not continue to the end of all things; one's feet churn
water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated
with an odour of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air,
sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a
steamboat appears as spots upon blotting-paper. After an
hour's walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the
City, one has the spleen, one meditates suicide."1
«•«•*••*
The virtuous middle class had the franchise: the working-
dass majority had not It was the middle dass, therefore, that
enforced the new urban English Sabbath in conformity
with its own frugal virtues. But there was one point on which
the rough majority insisted: Jewish Sabbath or no, it would
drink when it pleased. Beer and gin, and plenty of them, were
the unspoken price with which the busy Gradgrinds and
Bounderbys recondled the proletariat to the social chaos and
1 Notes on England^ $.