jgo ENGLISH SAGA

Cumberland and Albert gates, the fine ladies with their glaring
coloured silks, crinolines and parasols gossiping and quizzing
under the chestnuts, the Dundreary-whiskered gentlemen with
their white top hats and silvei>topped malacca canes, who leant
over the iron railings of Rotten Row to chat with elegant, long-
skirted, veiled equestrians or lolled on the fashionable grass slope
by Lancaster Gate. To a poor man who had ventured into the
park at such an hour amid all this splendour, the spectacle might
well have seemed to represent the wealth of the entire world
assembled in the persons of a few thousand fabulously favoured
creatures in this little space of English earth.

Foreigners in that age never ceased to wonder at the wealth
of England Taine recorded that if one took a cab from Sydenham,
where the re-created Crystal Palace stood, one could travel for
five continuous miles past houses representing an annual outlay
of £1,500. In this feast of property, the professional as well as
the commercial dasses had their share. While a professor at the
Sorbonne had to content himself with the equivalent of £500 a
year, the Head of an Oxford or Cambridge College could look for
several thousands. The Headmasters of Eton and Harrow, the
poet Tennyson and the novelist Thackeray all enjoyed incomes
of £5000 or more. And successful lawyers and doctors made far
more in days when income tax stood at yd. in the pound. Yet
even their comfortable emoluments paled into insignificance
when set against the princely incomes of the great industrial
manufacturing and engineering masters of the north. The Whit-
worths, Platts, Kitsons, Fairbairns, Hawthorns, Stephensons
constituted a new millionaire aristocracy of effort whose, title
deeds of wealth and power were their own revolving wheels of
iron.

• ••••«••

This commercial aristocracy looked far beyond the boundaries
of the little misty island which their works and warehouses
enriched. There was scarcely any place on earth capable of
trade where their representatives were not established. In dis-
tant Shanghai and JIong-Kong one met the English merchant
princes of the China trade, men of almost fabulous wealth made
out of tea, silk and opium. Every year the tea-clippers—the fastest
sailing ships ever made by human hands—took part in the famous
race from Foochow to London river to win the £600 bonus for
the first cargo of the season to reach the English market. John