The Good Old Times
What fallacies and sophistries are comprehended in that oft-repeated phrase, “The good old times.” There are still people who sigh for the grand old days of Good Queen Bess! Glorious days, truly, when the common people lived like swine and starving wretches were hung for stealing a loaf; when the filthy rushes on palace floors bred pestilence; when gluttony and drunkenness and brutality were masked under courtly manners; when conversation among the highest class was spiced with profanity and vulgarity; when the coin was clipped and debased; when the whole kingdom was overrun with thieves and highwaymen; when royal usurpations and proclamations assumed the force of law; and when the Crown compelled plunder of church property, iniquitous taxation, coercion of juries, and arbitrary imprisonment. In our daily life we are in the enjoyment of material comforts and conveniences, at home, in business, in travel, in distant communication, in the market, in commerce, in government, the cheapest of which the royal revenues of Queen Bess could not have purchased. Edmund Burke lamented that the age of chivalry passed away with Marie Antoinette. He forgot that her Court was itself grossly immoral, and the passionate admirers of chivalry seem to forget that the knights were not all Sidneys or Bayards. St. Palaye says in his “Memoirs of Chivalry” that never was there greater corruption of manners than in the times of knight-errantry,—never was the empire of debauchery more universal. St. Louis discovered a sink of iniquity close to his own tent in the most holy of the crusades. The intelligent reader of “Ivanhoe” knows full well that the thrilling scene between the Templar Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca, as she stood upon the verge of the parapet ready for the fatal plunge, is not a mere fancy sketch. How few ever stop to consider why the most honorable order of British knighthood is called the Order of the Bath. Dean Stanley says “it is because the knights who enlisted in the defense of right against wrong, truth against falsehood, honor against dishonor, were laid in a bath on the evening before they were admitted to the Order, and thoroughly washed, in order to show how bright and pure ought to be the lives of those who engage in a noble enterprise.” What gave the symbol special significance was the fact that it was the one wash of a lifetime. Dr. Playfair, in speaking of the causes of epidemics, says, “Think of 33 generations, who, like Oppian, never washed at all!”