Titus Salt (1803-76) was a BRADFORD wool merchant's son, and by the 1840s owned four mills in the city. But he became sickened by the filth, overcrowding and pollution there, and by the conditions, endured by working people. On a beautiful, green-field site outside Bradford, he built not only an extraordinary new mill, but a whole village for its workers, incorporating the newest ideas in planning, engineering and hygiene. He paid good pensions 36 years before government ones were introduced, and built a school for 750 pupils, an exquisite church, almshouses - even a boathouse and dining room on the river, with boats for hire. The village, Saltaire, remains almost as he built it.
The paternalism of Salt and Arkwright, deeply religious men like many others of their time, sprang from a belief that the possession of wealth imposed a moral duty to improve the lot of the workers who had helped to create it. It was an attitude increasingly affordable (although by no means universal) as Britain rapidly became the wealthiest nation on earth, and though aggressively pursuing the expansion and consolidation of empire, British developed a genuinely held conviction that they were bringing order and civilization to the territories they had explored or conquered. At the pinnacle of imperial power, in the closing years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, this was truly, as the slogans of the time proclaimed, 'an empire on which the sun never sets'.
Huge areas of the world atlas were coloured pink, denoting a British possession; a quarter of the world's population owed allegiance to the British Crown. Britain saw herself as presiding over a brotherhood of nations, an attitude that found ultimate expression after the First World War, when the dominions secured equality in the comity of nations by their admission to the League of Nations.
The first seal crack in the edifice appeared only three years later - on Britain's own doorstep. For most of the 19th century and up to 1922, the United Kingdom embraced the territories of four historic peoples - the English. Scots, Welsh and Irish. Then, after centuries of bitter and -often bloody strife, 26 of IRELAND'S 32 countries broke away to form the Irish Free State. By 1931, the Statute of Westminster was acknowledging the self-governing status of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa as 'freely associated members' of the Commonwealth. However, Britain's territories still included India, and lands in east and West Africa, the Far East, Central America and the Mediterranean.
"The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page", St. Augustine said. Here at www.travel-university.org we believe that every page must be read and explored. Travel is an avenue of learning that no text or classroom can teach. The world is a living classroom and you the student. We invite you to the www.travel-university.org library where you can read general interest and detail oriented articles.
