The Conservative Watershed

Abstract

Queen Victoria died at Osborne on 22 January 1901. Her funeral marked the end of a splendid epoch, ‘the most glorious one of English history’. Orators and leader-writers engaged in a wild outpouring of praise for the past and forebodings about the future. Their tone was shared by a wide section of the population whose mood represented a strange amalgam of optimism and pessimism. There were those who looked forward to a future when life would be easier and more prosperous for all. The believers in progress spoke of expanding trade, scientific and technological improvements, an enlarged imperial connection and the uplifting, both materially and spiritually, of those who lived in the ‘dark continents’. There was the vision of arbitration, international law and perpetual peace. But there were also the voices of doom, a swelling chorus in the year after the Queen’s death, warning of a less comfortable and peaceful future. The belief in progress had been shattered by the events of the preceding decades. The advance of democracy posed problems which were not easily solved by the repetition of old liberal clichés. The progress of science and technology, as Matthew Arnold and Lord Tennyson had foretold, might well prove to be a human disaster.