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ESSAYS
ON
SOCIAL REFORM

Crown 8vo, price 5s.

AN INQUIRY INTO SOCIALISM.

By THOMAS KIRKUP,
Author of the Article on ‘Socialism’ in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’

‘A very thoughtful and sympathetic study of the modern socialistic movement, with the history of which the author has a very thorough acquaintance.’—Contemporary Review.

‘We have no hesitation in describing this as the clearest statement we have read of the aims and methods of Socialism.’—Westminster Review.

London: LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.

PRACTICABLE SOCIALISM
ESSAYS ON SOCIAL REFORM

BY THE

REV. AND MRS. SAMUEL A. BARNETT

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16^th STREET
1888

All rights reserved

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

INTRODUCTION.

The following Essays have been written at different intervals during our fifteen years’ residence in East London. They were written out of the fulness of the moment with a view of giving a voice to some need of which we had become conscious. They do not, therefore, pretend to set forth any system for dealing with the social problem; they are simply the voice of the dumb poor, of whose mind it has been our privilege to get some understanding. They are published now in response to the requests of many to whom they have been some guide in the ways of service, and in the hope that the experience they offer may bring rich and poor together. It will be noticed that two or three great principles underlie all the reforms for which we ask. The equal capacity of all to enjoy the best, the superiority of quiet ways over those of striving and crying, character as the one thing needful are the truths with which we have become familiar, and on these truths we take our stand. Although the Essays do not pretend to form a connected whole, it will be seen that their arrangement is subject to some order. Those placed first set forth the poverty of the poor. Those which follow suggest some means by which such poverty may be met (1) by individual and (2) by united action, with some of the dangers to which charitable effort seems to be liable. As we look back over the experience which these Essays recall, we are conscious of shortcomings and failure, but they are due to our own want of wisdom and of faith, and we still believe that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven, and that the doing of His will means at last health and wealth. Each Essay is signed by the writer, but in either case they represent our common thought, as all that has been done represents our common work.

Samuel A. Barnett and Henrietta O. Barnett.

St. Jude’s, Whitechapel: May 1888.

CONTENTS.

PRACTICABLE SOCIALISM.

I.
THE POVERTY OF THE POOR.[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the National Review of July 1886.

It is useless to imagine that the nation is wealthier because in one column of the newspaper we read an account of a sumptuous ball or of the luxury of a City dinner if in another column there is the story of ‘death from starvation.’ It is folly, and worse than folly, to say that our nation is religious because we meet her thousands streaming out of the fashionable churches, so long as workhouse schools and institutions are the only homes open to her orphan children and homeless waifs. The nation does not consist of one class only; the nation is the whole, the wealthy and the wise, the poor and the ignorant. Statistics, however flattering, do not tell the whole truth about increased national prosperity, or about progress in development, if there is a pauper class constantly increasing, or a criminal class gaining its recruits from the victims of poverty.

The nation, like the individual, is set in the midst of many and great dangers, and, after the need of education and religion has been allowed, it will be agreed that all other defences are vain if it be impossible for the men and women and children of our vast city population to reach the normal standard of robustness.

The question then arises, Why cannot and does not each man, woman, and child attain to the normal standard of robustness? The answers to this question would depend as much on the answerer as they do in the game of ‘Old Soldier.’ The teetotallers would reply that drink was the cause, but against this sweeping assertion I should like to give my testimony, and it has been my privilege to live in close friendship and neighbourhood of the working classes for nearly half my life. Much has been said about the drinking habits of the poor, and the rich have too often sheltered themselves from the recognition of the duties which their wealth has imposed on them by the declaration that the poor are unhelpable while they drink as they do. But the working classes, as a rule, do not drink. There are, undoubtedly, thousands of men, and, alas! unhappy women too, who seek the pleasure, or the oblivion, to be obtained by alcohol; but drunkenness is not the rule among the working classes, and, while honouring the work of the teetotallers, who give themselves up to the reclamation of the drunken, I cannot agree with them in their answer to the question. Drink is not the main cause why the national defence to be found in robust health is in such a defective condition.

Land reformers, socialists, co-operators, democrats would, in their turn, each provide an answer to our question; but, if examined, the root of each would be the same—in one word, it is Poverty, and this means scarcity of food.

Let us now go into the kitchen and try and provide, with such knowledge as dietetic science has given us, for a healthily hungry family of eight children and father and mother. We must calculate that the man requires 20 oz. of solid food per day, i.e. 16 oz. of carbonaceous or strength-giving food and 4 oz. of nitrogenous or flesh-forming food. (The army regulations allow 25 oz. a day, and our soldiers are recently declared on high authority to be underfed.) The woman should eat 12 oz. of carbonaceous and 3 oz. of nitrogenous food; though if she is doing much rough, hard work, such as all the cooking, cleaning, washing of a family of eight children necessitate, she would probably need another ounce per day of the flesh-repairing foods. For the children, whose ages may vary from four to thirteen, it would be as well to estimate that they would each require 8 oz. of carbonaceous and 2 oz. of nitrogenous food per day: in all, 92 of carbonaceous and 23 oz. of nitrogenous foods per day.[2]

[2]To those who have had experience of children’s appetites it may seem as if their daily food had been under-estimated. A growing lad of eleven or twelve will often eat more than his mother, but the eight children, being of various ages, will probably eat together about this quantity, and it is better, perhaps, to under- than over-state their requirements.

For the breakfast of the family we will provide oatmeal porridge with a pennyworth of treacle and another pennyworth of tinned milk. For dinner they can have Irish stew, with 1¼ lb. of meat among the ten, a pennyworth of rice, and an addition of twopennyworth of bread to obtain the necessary quantity of strength-giving nutriment. For tea we can manage coffee and bread, but with no butter and not even sugar for the children; and yet, simple fare as this is, it will have cost 2s. 5d. to feed the whole family and to obtain for them a sufficient quantity of strength-giving food, and even at this expenditure they have not been able to get that amount of nitrogenous food which is necessary for the maintenance of robust health.

A little table of exact cost and quantities might not be uninteresting:—

But note that the requisite quantities for the whole family are 92 oz. of carbonaceous and 23 oz. of nitrogenous substances.

Another day we might provide them with cocoa and bread for breakfast; lentil soup and toasted cheese for dinner; and rice pudding and bread for tea; but this fare presupposes a certain knowledge of cooking, which but few of the poor possess, as well as an acquaintance with the dietetic properties of food, which, at present, is far removed from even the most intelligent. This day’s fare compares favourably with yesterday’s meals in the matter of cost, being 2½d. cheaper, but it does not provide enough carbonaceous food, though it does not fall far short of the necessary 23 oz. of nitrogenous substances.

And how drear and uninteresting is this food compared to that on which people of another class normally live! No refreshing cups of afternoon tea; no pleasant fruit to give interest to the meal. Nothing but dull, keep-me-alive sort of food, and not enough of that to fulfil all Nature’s requirements.

But let us take another day’s meals, which can consist of hominy, milk, and sugar for breakfast; potato soup and apple-and-sago pudding for dinner; and fish and bread for tea; when fish is plentiful enough to be obtained at 3d. a pound, and when apples are to be got at 1½d. a pound, which economical housekeepers know is not often the case in London.

Again, however, we have spent 2s. 5d. on food, and even now have not got quite sufficient strength-giving or carbonaceous food.

An average of 2s. 4d. spent daily on food makes a total of 16s. 4d. at the week’s end, leaving the labourer earning his 1l. a week 3s. 8d. with which to pay rent (and decent accommodation of two rooms in London cannot be had for less than 5s. 6d. or 6s. a week); to obtain schooling and lighting; to buy coals, clothes, and boots; to bear the expense of breakages and necessary replacements; to subscribe to a club against sickness or death; and to meet the doctor’s bills for the children’s illnesses or the wife’s confinements. How is it possible? Can 3s. 8d. do so much? No, it cannot; and so food is stinted. The children have to put up with less than they need; the mother ‘goes without sooner than let the children suffer,’ and thus the new baby is born weakly and but half-nourished; the children develop greediness in their never-satisfied and but partly fed frames; and the father, too often insufficiently sustained, seeks alcohol, which, anyhow, seems to ‘pick him up and hold him together,’ though his teetotal mates assure him it is only a delusion.

And this is no fancy picture. I have now in my mind one Wilkins, a steady, rough, honest, sober labourer, fairly intelligent, and the father of thirteen children. The two eldest, girls of fourteen and fifteen, are already out at service; but the eleven younger, being under age, are still kept at school and supported by their father. He earns 1l. regularly. They rent the whole house at 12s. a week, and, letting off part, stand themselves at a weekly rent of 5s. for three small rooms. Less than that, as the mother says, ‘I could not nohow do with, what with all the washing for such a heavy family, and bathing the little ones, and him coming home tired of an evening, and needing a place to sit down in.’ The wife is a decent body, but rough and uncultured; and as she is ignorant of the proper proportions of nitrogenous and carbonaceous substance necessary for the preservation of healthy life, as well as of the kinds of food in which they can be best found, she feeds her family even less nutritiously than she could do if she were better informed. Still the whole wage could only feed them if it were all expended ever so wisely, leaving no margin for the requirements already mentioned.

Take Mrs. Marshall’s family and circumstances. Mrs. Marshall is, to all intents and purposes, a widow, her husband being in an asylum. She herself is a superior woman, tall and handsome, and with clean dapper ways and a slight hardness of manner that comes from bitter disappointment and hopeless struggling. She has four children, two of whom have been taken by the Poor Law authorities into their district schools—a better plan than giving out-door relief, but, at the same time, one that has the disadvantage of removing the little ones from the home influence of a very good mother. Mrs. Marshall herself, after vainly trying to get work, was taken as a scrubber at a public institution, where she earns 9s. a week and her dinner. She works from six in the morning till five at night, and then returns to her fireless, cheerless room to find her two children back from school and ready for their chief meal; for during her absence their breakfast and dinner can only have consisted of bread and cold scraps. We will not dwell on the hardship of having to turn to and light the fire, tidy the room, and prepare the meal after having already done ten hours’ scrubbing or washing. The financial question is now before us, and to that we will confine our thoughts. Out of her 9s. a week Mrs. Marshall pays 3s. 3d. for rent; 2d. for schooling; 1s. for light and firing (and this does not allow of the children having a morning fire before they go to school); 9d. she puts by for boots and clothing; and imagine what it must be to dress, so as to keep warm, three people on 1l. 19s. a year! and 6d. she pays for her bits of washing, for she cannot do them herself after all her heavy daily work. (Pause, though, for a moment to consider how Mrs. Marshall’s washerwoman must work when she does three changes of linen, aprons, sheets, and a table-cloth for 6d. a week.)

Deduct from the 9s. weekly wage—

and 3s. 4d. is left with which to provide breakfast and tea for a hard-working woman for seven days in the week, dinner for Sunday, and three meals daily for two growing children of ten and eleven. We have seen how, even with economy, knowledge, strength, and time, proper food cannot be obtained for less than 1d. or 1¼d. a meal, and this would make a weekly total of 5s. 11¼d. 3s. 4d., with no time, with little knowledge, and only the remnants of strength, which has been used up in earning the 3s. 4d., is all Mrs. Marshall has with which to meet these requirements.

And how do the rich look on these facts? ‘Well! nine shillings a week is very fair wage for an unskilled working woman,’ was the remark I heard after I had told these facts to mine host at a country house, where we were eating the usual regulation dinner—soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweets, and hot-house fruits, said with the complacency of satisfaction which follows a glass of good wine. ‘Yes, about the cost of your one dinner’s wine!’ replied one of the guests; but then he was probably one of those ill-balanced people who judge people by what they are rather than by what they have, and he may have thought that the sad, lone woman, with her noble virtues of industry, patience, and self-sacrificing love, had, despite her hard manners, more right to the good things of this world than the suave old man owning fourteen acres of lawn on which no children ever played, and stating, without shame, first, the fact that he used eighty-two tons of coal yearly to warm his own sitting-rooms, and then the opinion that 9s. a week was fair wage on which to support a good woman and bring up two children.

While this wage is considered a ‘fair wage,’ the children must remain half-nourished, and grow up incapable of honest toil and valuable effort. While this wage is accepted as a right and normal thing, it is useless to think that the nation will be guided through dangers by means of heavy subscriptions to schools, to hospitals, and sick-asylums. Robust health is impossible; so disease easily finds a home, and teachers vainly try to develop brains ill supplied with blood. By the doorway of semi-starvation disease is invited to enter and find a home among the masses of our wage-earning people.

Before me are the dietary tables of the Whitechapel Workhouse—an institution which stands (thanks to the self-devotion of its able Clerk) high on the list for careful management and economical administration. There are congregated the aged and infirm paupers, and among them are some of Nature’s gentlefolk, the old and tired, who, having learnt a few of life’s greatest lessons in their long walk through life, ought to be giving them to the young and untried, instead of wearying out their last days in the dull monotony of a useless and regulated existence. Their dietary table allows them for breakfast and supper one pint of tea (made of one ounce to a gallon of water) and five ounces of bread and a tiny bit of butter. For dinner they have meat three times a week, pea-soup and bread twice, suet pudding once, and Irish stew on the other day. For the sake of comparison I will make a food table of this diet, based on the same calculations of food value as those that have been previously made for the family.

Here we see that the total allowance comes only to 10½ oz. of carbonaceous food and 2¼ oz. of nitrogenous food, against the estimated quantity of 16 oz. carbonaceous and 4 oz. nitrogenous, which is the necessary allowance for ordinary people, and against the 25 oz. carbonaceous and 5 oz. nitrogenous, which is the regulation diet of the Royal Engineers during peace. It is true that these old folk do not need so much food, for their bodies have ceased to grow and develop, and in aged persons the wear of the frame does not require such replenishment as is the case with young and middle-aged people; but even with this partial diet we find that the cost of maintaining each of these old people is, for food alone, 3s. 11d. per head per week.

Here, then, we have a fact on which a calculation is easy to make, and which, when made, forces us to see that the workman cannot keep his family as well as the pauper is kept. Even on this simple fare it would cost him close on 8s. a week to support himself so as to give him the strength to earn his daily bread; while, if we imagine his family to consist of a wife and six children, we find that his weekly food-bills would amount to 1l. 8s., calculating his requirements on the same basis as in the previous instances.

If we take, therefore, the case of a skilled workman earning his 2l. a week, we still find that, even when adequately fed (and keep in mind the plainness and unattractiveness of the diet), he has only 12s. a week to supply all other necessaries and out of which to lay by, not only against old age and sickness, but against that ‘rainy day’ and ‘out of work from slackness’ which so often occur for weeks together in the weather chart of our artisan population.

Or take another case, that of Mr. and Mrs. Stoneman, excellent folk: the wife, a woman of such force and originality of character, such patience and sweet persistency, as would make her an ornament in any class; the husband an honest, steady man, not, perhaps, so clever as his wife, but loving and admiring her none the less for that. They have six children: the two eldest at work; the youngest a sweet tiny thing, as spotlessly clean as water and care can keep it in this mud-coloured atmosphere of Whitechapel. Her husband earns 23s. a week, excepting when bad illness, lasting sometimes six and eight weeks, reduces his wages to nothing; and then the sick man, his wife, and four children have to live, pay rent, firing, and ‘doctor’s stuff’ on the club-money of 14s. a week, for the boys’ earnings can only support themselves.

Which of us would consider that he could supply food and sick-luxuries for even one person on 14s. a week, the sum fixed by the rich as board wages for an unneeded man-servant?

On the face of it this family is perhaps exceptionally well-off, for the two big lads in it earn, the one 5s. the other 7s. a week, which brings the united weekly wage up to 35s. a week. Mrs. Stoneman is a friend of mine, and, in response to my request, she weighed all the food at every meal, and here is the result.

At the time, however, that this was done Mrs. Stoneman’s children had been sent by the Children’s Country Holiday Fund into the country for a fortnight’s holiday. We must therefore suppose the family to consist only of six, and the necessary quantity of food to sustain them in good healthy working condition would be 76 oz. of carbonaceous food and 19 oz. of nitrogenous food.

Sunday Meals.

Wednesday Meals

Saturday Meals.

This is the food-table of one of the best of managers. It could not well be simpler, and yet we see that it fails every day, sometimes to the extent of one-third, in providing sufficient nitrogenous or flesh-repairing food; but even so the cost for the three days makes a total of 8s. 8½d., or, say, on an average, 3s. a day. Thus it took 1l. 1s. a week to feed this family simply and wholesomely at a time when two of its hungry members of eight and eleven were away. The weekly rent to house it in two rooms takes 5s. 7d.; to educate the school-going members, 7d. a week must be paid; to keep the fire and lights going (and this, of course, is more expensive than if the fuel could be got in in large quantities) demands 2s. 6d. a week; and to provide washing materials another 1s. must be deducted.

When these outgoings are met there remains but 4s. 4d. with which to provide the food of the two then absent children, to pay club subscriptions for three people (because each of the working members is in a sick-club and burial club), to procure boots, clothes, and to lay by against the days of illness, slackness, and old age.

Now these are the facts which, summed up in a sentence, amount to this, that while wages are at the present rate the large mass of our people cannot get enough food to maintain them in robust health, and bodily health is here alone considered.

No mention has been made of the food a man requires to keep his whole nature in robust health; of the books, the means of culture, the opportunities of social intercourse, which are as necessary for his mental health and development as food and drink are for his bodily. No account has been taken of all that each human being needs to keep his spiritual nature alive. The quiet times in the country or by the sea, the knowledge of Nature’s mysteries, the opportunities for the cultivation of natural affection. ‘Yes, it is seven years since me and my daughter met,’ I heard a gentle old lady of sixty-nine say the other day, one of God’s aristocracy, the upper class in virtue and unselfishness. ‘You see, she lives a pretty step from here, and moving about is not to be thought of when money is so scarce.’

The body’s needs are the most exacting; they make themselves felt with daily recurring persistency, and, while they remain unsatisfied, it is hard to give time or thought to the mental needs or the spiritual requirements; but if our nation is to be wise and righteous, as well as healthy and strong, they must be considered. A fair wage must allow a man, not only to adequately feed himself and his family, but also to provide the means of mental cultivation and spiritual development. Indeed, some humanitarians assert that it should be sufficient to give him a home wherein he may rest from noise, with books, pictures, and society; and there are those who go so far as to suggest that it should be sufficient to enable him to learn the larger lessons which travellers gain from other nations, as well as the teaching which the great dumb teachers wait to impart to ‘those with ears to hear’ of fraternity, purity, and eternal hope.

Why is it that our wage-earners cannot get this? Why is it that, as we indulge in such dreams, they sound impossible and almost impracticable, though no reader of this Review will add undesirable? Is it because our nation has not fought Ignorance, with pointed weapons, and by its knights of proved prowess and valour? Or is it because our rulers have not recognised the Greed of certain classes or individuals as a national evil, and struggled against it with the strength of unity? It cannot be the want of money in our land which causes so many to be half-fed and cry silently from want of strength to make a noise. As we stand at Hyde Park Corner, or wander in among the miles of streets of ‘gentlemen’s residences’ in the West End, our hearts are gladdened at the sight of the wealth that is in our land; but they would be glad with a deeper gladness if Wilkins was not getting slowly brutalised by his struggle, if there were a chance of Alice and Johnnie Marshall growing up as Nature meant them to grow, or if clever Mrs. Stoneman’s patient efforts could be crowned with success. Money in plenty is in our midst, but cruel, blinding Poverty keeps her company, and our nation cannot boast herself of her wealth while half her people are but partly fed, and too poor to use their minds or to aspire after holiness.

By the optimist we may be told that all mention of charitable aid has been omitted; that in such a case as that of Wilkins, or of Mrs. Marshall, there would be aid from the philanthropic; that old clothes would do something to replenish the wardrobe, otherwise to be kept supplied by 1l. 19s. a year; and that scraps and broken victuals find their way from most back-doors into the homes of the poor. But, though this may be true when the poor are scattered among the rich, it is not true of that neighbourhood which I know best, where through miles of streets the income of each resident does not exceed thirty shillings a week, and where the four-roomed houses (as a rule, let out to two or three families) are unrelieved by a single house inhabited by only one family, or where they ‘keeps a servant.’

The advocates of children’s penny dinners may take these facts as a strong argument in favour of their scheme, and feel that in this simple method is the solution of the difficulty. But those who so think cannot have considered the question in all its bearings. If feeding the children enables us to limit the power of disease, it does so by putting fresh weapons into the hands of the Greed of certain classes or individuals, which is so ill-curbed and ineffectively conquered as to be nothing loth to take advantage of every opportunity of working its cruel will.

If the children are fed at school it enables the mother to go out to work. The supply of female labour is thus increased, and married women can offer their work at lower wages than widows or single ones, because their labour is only supplementary to that of their husbands. The consequence is that wages go down, because more women are in the labour market than are needed, and those get the work who will take it for the least remuneration. Thus, though Mrs. Harris may get work, her children being ‘now fed by the ladies round at the school,’ she does so at the expense of lowering Jane Metcalf’s wages; and, as Jane is working to help her widowed mother to keep the four younger children off the parish, the only result is that Tommie and Lizzie and the two baby Metcalfs get worse food, and Jane finds life harder, and sometimes sees temptation through magnifying-glasses.

Besides these economic results which must inevitably follow the plan of feeding the children on any large scale, there are others which ensue from the lightening of parental responsibility, and these everyone who knows the poor can foresee without the gift of prophecy; the idle father is made more idle, the gossiping mother less controlled, and from the drunken parent is taken the last feeble bond which binds him to sobriety and its hopeful consequences. But perhaps as important as any of these results is the evil which follows the taking the children from the home influence. In our English love of home is one of our hopes for the future; and not the least conspicuous as a moral training-ground is the family dinner-table. There the mother can teach the little lessons of good manners and neat ways, and the larger truths of unselfishness and thoughtfulness. There the whole family can meet, and from the talks over meals, during the time which, as things now are, is perhaps the only leisure of the busy mechanic, may grow that sympathy between the older and younger people which must refresh and gladden both. No; it is not by any charitable effort that this poverty must be fought. A national want must be met by a national effort, and the thought of the political economist, which has hitherto been devoted to the question of production and accumulation of wealth, must now turn its attention to the problem of its right use and distribution, recognising that ‘the wise use of wealth in developing a complete human life is of incomparably the greater moment both to men and nations.’ While more than half the English people are unable to live their best life or reach their true standard of humanity, it is useless to congratulate ourselves on our national supremacy or class our nation as wealthy.

Some economists will reply that these sad conditions are but the result of our freedom; that the boasted ‘liberty’ in our land must result in the few strong making themselves stronger, and in the many weak suffering from their weakness. But is this necessarily so? Is this the only result to be expected from human beings having the power to act as they please? Are not love, goodwill, and social instincts as truly parts of human character as greed, selfishness, and sulkiness; and may we not believe that human nature is great enough to care to use its freedom for the good of all? Men have done noble things to obtain this freedom. They have loved her with the ardour of a lover’s love, with the patience of a silver wedded life; and now that they have her, is she only to be used to injure the weak, and to make life cruel and almost impossible to the large majority? ‘What is the right use of freedom?’ The ancient answer was, ‘To love God.’ And can we love God whom we have not seen when we love not our brother whom we have seen?

Henrietta O. Barnett.

II.
RELIEF FUNDS AND THE POOR.[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Nineteenth Century of November 1886.

The poverty of the poor and the failure of the Mansion House Relief Fund are the facts which stand out from the gloom of a winter when dark weather, dull times, and discontent united to depress both the hopes of the poor and the energy of their friends. The memory of days full of unavailing complaint and of aimless pity is one from which all minds readily turn, quieting their fears with the assumption that the poverty was exaggerated or that the generosity of the rich is ample for all occasions.

The facts, however, remain that the poor are very poor, and that the fund failed as a means of relief; and these facts must be faced if a lesson is to be learnt from the past, and a way discovered through the perils of the future. The policies which occupy the leaders’ minds, the interests of business, the theologies, the fashions, are but webs woven in the trees while the storm is rising in the distance. Sounds of the storm are already in the air, a murmuring among those who have not enough, puffs of boasting from those who have too much, and a muttering from those who are angry because while some are drunken others are starving. The social question is rising for solution, and, though for a moment it is forgotten, it will sweep to the front and put aside as cobwebs the ‘deep’ concerns of leaders and teachers. The danger is lest it be settled by passion and not by reason, lest, that is, reforms be hurriedly undertaken in answer to some cry, and without consideration of facts, their weight, their causes, and their relation.

The study of the condition of the people receives hardly as much attention as that which Sir J. Lubbock gives to the ants and the wasps. Bold good men discuss the poor, and cheques are given by irresponsible benefactors; but there are few students who reverently and patiently make observations on social conditions, accumulate facts, and watch cause and effect. Scientific method is supreme everywhere except in those human affairs which most concern humanity.

Ten years ago Arnold Toynbee demanded a ‘body of doctrine’ from those who cared for the poor. He sought an intellectual basis for moral fervour, and yet to-day what a muck-heap is our social legislation, what a confusion of opinion there exists about the poor law, education emigration, and land laws! All reformers are driving on; but what is each driving at? Sometimes the same driver has aims obviously incompatible, as when the Lord Mayor one day signs a report which says that, ‘the spasmodic assistance given by the public in answer to special appeals is really useless,’ and another day himself inaugurates a relief fund by a special appeal.

One of the facts made evident last winter is the poverty of the poor, and it is a fact about which the public mind is uncertain.

The working men when they appear at meetings seem to be well dressed in black cloth, the statistics of trades-unions, friendly, co-operative, and building societies show the members to be so numerous, and the accumulated funds to be so far above thousands and so near to millions sterling, that the necessary conclusion is, ‘There is no poverty among the poor.’ But then the clergy or missionaries echo some ‘bitter cry,’ and tell how there are thousands of working folk in danger of starvation, thousands without warmth or clothing, and the necessary conclusion is, ‘All the poor are poverty-stricken.’ The public mind halts between these two conclusions and is uncertain.

The uncertainty is due partly to the vague use of the term ‘poor,’ by which is generally meant all those who are not tradespeople or capitalists, and partly to an inability to appreciate the size of London. The poor, it is obvious, form only a minority in the community, and a minority suggests something unimportant, and notwithstanding the size of London, it is regarded as a small and manageable body.

Last winter’s experience clears away all uncertainty, and shows that there is a vast mass of people in London who have neither black coats nor savings, and whose life is dwarfed and shortened by want of food and clothing. In Whitechapel there is a population of 70,000: of these some 20 per cent., exclusive of the Jewish population, applied at the office of the Mansion House Relief Fund during the three months it was opened. In St. George’s, East, there is a population of 50,000, and of these 29 per cent. applied. Among all who applied the number belonging to any trades-union or friendly society was very few. In Whitechapel only six out of 1,700 applicants were members of a benefit club. In St. George’s only 177 out of 3,578 called themselves artisans. In Stepney 1,000 men applied before one mechanic came, and only one member of a trades-union came under notice at all. In the Tower Hamlets division of East London out of a population of 500,000, 17,384 applied, representing 86,920 persons. It may be safely assumed that all in need did not apply, and that many thousands were assisted by other agencies. The reports of some of the visitors expressly state that the numbers they give are exclusive of many referred to the Jewish Board of Guardians, the clergy, and other agencies, while numbers of those who did apply either did not wait to have their names entered or were so manifestly beyond the reach of money help that they were not recorded among applicants. Especially noteworthy among the remarks of the visitors is one, that all who applied would at any season of the year apply in the same way and give the same evidence of poverty. ‘If a fund was advertised as largely as this fund has been in summer, and when trade was at its best, precisely the same people would apply.’ The truth of the remark has been put to the test, and during the summer a large number of those relieved in the winter have been visited, with the result that they have been found apparently in like misery and equally in need of assistance.

Of the poverty of those who made application there has been no question. Some may have brought it on themselves by drink or by vice, some may have been thriftless and without self-control; but all were poor, so poor as to be without the things necessary for mere existence. The men and women who crowded the relief offices had haggard and drawn faces, their worn and thin bodies shivered under their rags of clothing, and they gave no sign of strength or of hope. Their homes were squalid, the children ill-fed, ill-clad, and joyless, their record showed that for months they had received no regular wage, and that their substance was more often at the pawnbroker’s than in the home.

Last winter’s experience shows that outside the classes of regular wage-earning workmen, who are often included among ‘the poor,’ is a mass of people numbering some tens of thousands who are without the means of living. These are the poor, and their poverty is the common concern.

Statistics prove what has long been known to those whose business lies in poor places, and to them the reports of the increased prosperity of the country have been like songs of gladness in a land of sorrow. They know the streets in which every room is a home, the homes in which there is no comfort for the sick, no easy-chair for the weary, no bath for the tired, no fresh air, no means of keeping food, no space for play, no possibility of quiet, and to them the news of the national wealth and the sight of fashionable luxury seem but cruel satire. The little dark rooms may bear traces of the man’s struggle or of the woman’s patience, but the homes of the poor are sad, like the fields of lost battles, where heroism has fought in vain. By no struggle and by no patience can health be won in so few feet of cubic air, and no parent dares to hope that he can make the time of youth so joyful as to for ever hold his children to pleasures which are pure. The homes of the poor are a mockery of the name, but yet how many would think themselves happy if even such homes were secure, and if they were able to look to the future without seeing starvation for their children and the workhouse for themselves! One example will illustrate many. The Browns are a family of five; they occupy one room. The man is a labourer, London-born, quick-witted and slow-bodied, and, as many labourers do, he fills up slack time with hawking; the woman takes in her neighbours’ washing. Their room, twelve feet by ten feet, is crowded with two bedsteads, the implements for washing, the coal-bin, a table, a chest, and a few chairs; on the walls are some pictures, the human protest against the doctrine that the poor can ‘live by bread alone.’ The man earns sometimes 3s., often nothing, in the day; and his wife brings in sometimes 6d. or 9d. a day, but her work fills the room with damp and discomfort, and almost necessarily keeps the husband out of doors. Both man and woman are still young, but they look aged, and the children are thin and delicate. They seldom have enough to eat and never enough to wear, they are rarely healthy, and are never so happy as to thank God for their creation. Hard work will make these children orphans, or bad air, cold, and hunger will make these parents childless.

In the case of another family, where the wage is regular—the income is 1l. a week—the outlook is not much brighter. Here there is the same crowded room, for which 3s. a week is paid, the same weary, half-starved faces, the same want of air and water. Here, too, the parents dare not look forwards, because even if the income remains permanent, it cannot secure necessaries for sickness, it cannot educate or apprentice the children, and it cannot provide for their own old age. No income, however, does remain permanent, and the regular hand is always anxious lest a change in trade, or in his employer’s temper, may send him adrift.

In the cases where there is drink, carelessness, or idleness everything of course looks worse. The room is poorer and dirtier, the faces more shrunken, and the clothes thinner. Indignation against sin does not settle the matter. The poverty is manifest, and if the cause be in the weakness of human nature, then the greater and the harder is the duty of effecting its cure.

Cases of poverty such as these are common; they who by business, duty, or affection go among the poor know of their existence; but if those who hire a servant, employ workpeople, or buy cheap articles would think about what they talk, they could not longer content themselves with phrases about thrift as almighty for good, and intemperance as almighty for evil. Fourteen pounds a year, if a domestic servant has unfailing health and unbroken work from the age of twenty to fifty-five, will only enable her to save enough for her old age by giving up all pleasure, by neglecting her own family duties, and by impoverishing her life to make a livelihood. Very sad is it to meet in some back-room the living remains of an old servant. Mrs. Smith is sixty-five years old; she has been all her life in service, and saved over 100l. She has had but little joy in her youth, and now in her old age she is lonely. Her fear is lest, spending only 7s. a week, her savings may not last her life. She could hardly have done more, and what she did was not enough. A wage of 20s. or 25s. a week is called good wages, yet it leaves the earners unable to buy sufficient food or to procure any means of recreation. The following table[2] represents the necessary weekly expenditure of a family of eight persons, of whom six are children. It allows for each day no cheering luxuries, but only the bare amount of carbonaceous and nitrogenous foods which are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the body.

[2] This table is taken from a paper written by my wife in the National Review, July 1886, in which she illustrates by many examples that the average wage is insufficient to support life.

If to this 2s. a week be added for clothes (and what woman dressing on 100l. or 80l. a year could allow less than 5l. a year to clothe a working man, his wife, and six children) then the necessary weekly expenditure of the family is 1l. 4s. 10d. Few fathers or mothers are able to resist, or ought to resist, the temptation of taking or giving some pleasure; so even where work is regular, and paid at 1l. 5s. a week, there must be in the home want of food as well as of the luxuries which gladden life.

Those dwellers in pleasant places, without experience of the homes of the poor, who will resolutely set themselves to think about what they do know must realise that those who make cheap goods are too poor to do their duty to themselves, their neighbours, and their country. The mystery, indeed, remains, how many manage to live at all.

One solution is that there exists among these irregular workers a kind of communism. They prefer to occupy the same neighbourhood and make long journeys to work rather than go to live among strangers. They easily borrow and easily lend. The women spend much time in gossiping, know intimately one another’s affairs, and in times of trouble help willingly. One couple, whose united earnings have never reached 15s. a week, whose home has never been more than one small room, has brought up in succession three orphans. The old man, at seventy years of age, just earns a living by running messages or by selling wirework; but even now he spends many a night in hushing a baby whose desertion he pities, and whom he has taken to his care.

The poverty of the poor is understood by the poor, and their charity is according to the measure of Christ’s. The charity of the rich is according to another measure, because they do not know of poverty, and they do not know because they do not think. Only the self-satisfied Pharisee and the proud Roman could pass Calvary unmoved, and only the self-absorbed can be ignorant that every day the innocent and helpless are crucified. The selfishness of modern life is shown most clearly in this absence of thought. Absorbed in their own concerns, kindly people carelessly hear statements, see prices, and face sights which imply the ruin of their fellow-creatures. The rich would not be so cruel if they would think. Thought about the amount of food which ‘good wages’ can buy, about the hours spent in making matches or coats, about the sorrows behind the faces of those who serve them in shops or pass them in the streets; thought would make the rich ready to help; and the fact that there are among the 500,000 inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets 86,920 too poor to live is enough to make them think.

The failure of the relief fund is the other fact of the winter to stir thought.

Mansion House relief represents the mercies to which the wisdom and the love of the completest age have committed the needs of the poor. Never were needs so delicate left to mercies so clumsy; needs intertwined with the sorrows and sufferings with which no stranger could intermeddle have been met with the brutal generosity of gifts given often with little thought or cost. The result has been an increase of the causes which make poverty and a decrease of good-will among men.

The fund failed even to relieve distress. In St. George’s-in-the-East there were nearly 4,000 applicants, representing 20,000 persons. All of these were in distress—were, that is, cold and hungry. Of these there were 2,400 applicants, representing some 12,000 persons—whom the committee considered to be working people unemployed and within the scope of the fund. For their relief 2,000l. was apportioned; and if it had been equally divided each person would have had 3s. 4d. on which to support life during three months. Such sums might have relieved the givers, pleased by the momentary satisfaction of the recipient, but they would not have relieved the poor, who would still have had to endure days and weeks of want.

The fund was thus in the first place inadequate to relieve the distress. An attempt was made in some districts by discrimination to make it useful to those who were ‘deserving.’ Forms were given out to be filled in by applicants; visitors were appointed to visit the homes and to make inquiries; committees sat daily to consider and decide on applications. The end of all has been that in one district those assisted were found to be ‘improvident, unsober, and non-industrious,’ and in another the almoner can only say, ‘they are a careless, hard-living, hard-drinking set of people, and are so much what their circumstances have made them that terms of moral praise or blame are hardly applicable.’

An analysis of the decisions of the committees formed in the various parts of the Tower Hamlets shows that the decisions were according to different standards, and with different views of what was meant by ‘assistance.’ A half-crown a week was voted for the support of one family in which the man was a notorious drunkard. Twelve pounds were given to start a costermonger on one day, while at a subsequent committee meeting 10s. was voted for a family in almost identical circumstances. In one district casual labourers were given 20s. or 30s., but in the neighbouring district casual labourers were refused relief.

Methods of relief were as many as were the districts into which London was divided. In Whitechapel a labour test was applied. The labourers were offered street-sweeping; and those who were used only to indoor work were put to whitewashing, window-cleaning, or tailoring. The women were given needlework. When it was known to the large crowd brought to the office by the advertisement of the fund that work was to be offered to the able-bodied, there was among the ne’er-do-weels great indignation. ‘Call this charity!’ ‘We will complain to the Lord Mayor, we will break windows,’ and addressing the almoners, ‘It is you fellows who are getting 1l. a day for your work.’ Many ‘finding they could not get relief without doing work did not persist in their application,’ and they were not entered as applicants, but work was actually offered to 850 men and accepted by only 339. Of these the foreman writes, ‘The labour test was a sore trial for a great many of them. I repeatedly had it said to me by them, “The Fund is a charity, and we ought not to work for it.”’

In St. George’s there was no labour test, and there 1,689 men and 682 women received assistance in food or in materials for labour. In Stepney the conditions under which the Fund was collected were strictly observed, and only those ‘out of employment through the present depression’ were assisted. The consequence was that casual labourers, the sick, the aged, all known to be frequently out of work, were refused, and much of the Fund was spent in large sums for the emigration of a few. In this district the committee was largely composed of members of friendly societies, men who, by experience, were familiar both with the habits of the poor and with the methods of relief. Their co-operation was invaluable, both in itself and also for the confidence which it won for the administration.

In Mile End the committee had another standard of character and another method of inquiry. No record was kept of the number of applications, and those relieved have been differently described as ‘good men’ and ‘loafers’ by different members of the committee. 2,539l. were spent among 2,133 families, an average of 4s. 10d. a person. The Poplar Committee has published no report, but one of its members writes: ‘Relief was often given without investigation to old, chronic, sick, and poor-law cases, without distinction as to character; the rule was, Give, give! spend, spend!’ and another states the opinion ‘that the whole neighbourhood was demoralised by the distribution of the Fund.’ As a result of their experiences, some of those engaged in relief in this district are now making efforts to unite workmen, and the members of benefit societies, in the administration of future funds.

The sort of relief given was as various as the methods of relief. Sometimes money, sometimes tickets, sometimes food; the variety is excused by one visitor, who says, ‘We were ten days at work before instructions came from the Mansion House, and then it was too late to change our system.’ Discrimination utterly broke down, and with all the appliances it was chance which ruled the decision. The gifts fell on the worthy and on the unworthy, but as they fell only in partial showers, none received enough and many who were worthy went empty away.

Discrimination of desert is indeed impossible. The poor-law officials, with ample time and long experience, cannot say who deserves or would be benefited by out-relief. Amateurs appointed in a hurry, and confused by numbers, vainly try to settle desert. Systems must adopt rules; friendship alone can settle merit.

The Fund failed to relieve distress, and further developed some of the causes which make poverty.

Prominent among such causes are (1) faith in chance; (2) dishonesty in its fullest sense; (3) the unwisdom of so-called charity.

(1) The big advertisement of ‘70,000l. to be given away’ offered a chance which attracted idlers, and relaxed in many the energies hitherto so patiently braced to win a living for wife or children. The effect is frequently noticed in the reports. The St. George’s-in-the-East visitors emphasise the opinion that it was ‘the great publicity of the Fund which made its distribution so difficult.’ A visitor in Poplar thinks ‘the publicity was tempting to bad cases and deterrent of good ones.’ The chance of a gift out of so big a sum was too good to be missed for the sake of hard work and small wages.

Faith in chance was further encouraged by the irregular methods of administration. Refusals and relief followed no law discoverable by the poor. In the same street one washerwoman was set up with stock, while another in equal circumstances was dismissed. In adjoining districts such various systems were adopted that of three ‘mates’ one would receive work, another a gift, and the third nothing. ‘The power of chance’ was the teaching of the Fund, started through the accidental emotions of a Lord Mayor, and they who believe in chance give up effort, become wayward, and lose power of mind and body. Chance leads her followers to poverty, and the increase of the spirit of gambling is not the least among the causes of distress.

(2) The remark is sometimes made that ‘the righteous man is never found begging his bread,’ or, in other words, that there is always work for the man who can be trusted. Honesty in its fullest sense, implying absolute truth, thoroughness, and responsibility, has great value in the labour market, and agencies which increase a trust in honesty increase wealth. The tendency of the Fund has been to create a trust in lies. Its organisation of visitors and committees offered a show of resistance to lies, but over such resistance lies easily triumphed, and many notorious evil-livers got by a good story the relief denied to others. Anecdotes are common as to the way in which visitors were deceived, committees hoodwinked, and money wrongly gained, while the better sort of poor, failing to understand how so much money could have had so little effect, hold the officials to have been smart fellows who took care of themselves. The laughter roused by such talk is the laughter which demoralises, it is the praise of the power of lies, and the laughers will not be among those who by honesty do well for themselves and for others.

(3) The mischief of foolish charity is a text on which much has been written, but no doubt exists as to the power of wise charity. The teaching which fits the young to do better work or to find resource in a bye-trade, the influence by which the weak are strengthened to resist temptation, the application of principles which will give confidence, and the setting up of ideals which will enlarge the limits of life—this is the charity which conquers poverty. In East London there are many engaged in such charity, and to their work the action of the Fund was most prejudicial. Some of them, carried away by the excitement, relaxed their patient, silent efforts, while they tried to meet a thousand needs with no other remedy than a gift. Others saw their work spoiled, their lessons of self-help undone by the offer of a dole, their teaching of the duty of helping others forgotten in the greedy scramble for graceless gifts. They devoted themselves to do their utmost and bore the heavy burden of distributing the Fund, but most of them speak sadly of their experience. They laboured sometimes for sixteen hours a day, but their labour was not to do good but to prevent evil—a labour of pain—and one, speaking the experience of his fellows, says ‘their labours had the appearance of a hurried and spasmodic effort.’ The fund of charity, like a torrent, swept away the tender plants which the stream of charity had nourished.

In the face of all this experience it is not extravagant to say that the means of relief used last winter developed the causes of poverty. It may be that if all the poor were self-controlled and honest, and if all charity were wise, poverty would still exist; but self-indulgence, lies, and unwise charity are causes of poverty, and these causes have been strengthened. One visitor’s report sums up the whole matter when it says:—

They (the applicants) have received their relief, and they are now in much the same position as they were before, and as they will be found, it is feared, in future winters, until more effectual and less spasmodic means of improving their condition can be devised, for the causes of distress are chronic and permanent. The foundation of such independence of character as they possessed has been shaken, and some of them have taken the first step in mendicancy, which is too often never retraced.

Examples, of course, may be found where the relief has been helpful, and some visitors, in the contemplation of the worthy family relieved from pressure and set free to work, may think that one such result justifies many failures. It is not, though, expedient that many should suffer for one, or that a population should be demoralised in order that two or three might have enough.

The Fund as a means of relief has failed: it is condemned by the recipients, who are bitter on account of disappointed hopes; by the almoners, whose only satisfaction is that they managed to do the least possible mischief; and by the mechanics, whose name was taken in vain by the agitators who went to the Lord Mayor, and who feel their class degraded by a system of relief which assumes improvidence and imposition among working men.

The failure of the latest method of relief has been made as manifest as the poverty, and no prophet is needed to tell that bad times are coming. The outlook is most gloomy. The August reports of trades societies characterise trade as ‘dull’ or ‘very slack.’ The pawnbrokers report in the same month that they are taking in rather than handing out pledges, and all those who have experience of the poor consider poverty to be chronic. If not in the coming winter, still in the near future there must be trouble.

Poverty in London is increasing both relatively and actually. Relative poverty may be lightly considered, but it breeds trouble as rapidly as actual poverty. The family which has an income sufficient to support life on oatmeal will not grow in good-will when they know that daily meat and holidays are spoken of as ‘necessaries’ for other workers and children. Education and the spread of literature have raised the standard of living, and they who cannot provide boots for their children, nor sufficient fresh air, nor clean clothes, nor means of pleasure, feel themselves to be poor, and have the hopelessness which is the curse of poverty, as selfishness is the curse of wealth.

Poverty, however, in East London, is increasing actually. It is increased (1) by the number of incapables: ‘broken men, who by their misfortunes or their vices have fallen out of regular work,’ and who are drawn to East London because chance work is more plentiful, ‘company’ more possible, and life more enlivened by excitement. (2) By the deterioration of the physique of those born in close rooms, brought up in narrow streets, and early made familiar with vice. It was noticed that among the crowds who applied for relief there were few who seemed healthy or were strongly grown. In Whitechapel the foreman of those employed in the streets reported that ‘the majority had not the stamina to make even a good scavenger.’ (3) By the disrepute into which saving is fallen. Partly because happiness (as the majority count happiness) seems to be beyond their reach, partly because the teaching of the example of the well-to-do is ‘enjoy yourselves,’ and partly because ‘the saving man’ seems ‘bad company, unsocial and selfish’; the fact remains that few take the trouble to save—only units out of the thousands of applicants had shown any signs of thrift. (4) By the growing animosity of the poor against the rich. Good-will among men is a source of prosperity as well as of peace. Those bound together consider one another’s interests, and put the good of the ‘whole’ before the good of a class. Among large classes of the poor animosity is slowly taking the place of good-will, the rich are held to be of another nation, the theft of a lady’s diamonds is not always condemned as the theft of a poor man’s money, and the gift of 70,000l. is looked on as ransom and perhaps an inadequate ransom. The bitter remarks sometimes heard by the almoners are signs of disunion, which will decrease the resources of all classes. The fault did not begin with the poor; the rich sin, but the poor, made poorer and more angry, suffer the most.

On account of these and other causes it may be expected that poverty will be increased. The poorer quarters will become still poorer, the sight of squalor, misery, and hunger more painful, the cry of the poor more bitter. For their relief no adequate means are proposed. The last twenty years have been years of progress, but for lack of care and thought the means of relief for poverty remain unchanged. The only resource twenty years ago was a Mansion House Fund, and the only resource available in this enlightened and wealthy year of our Lord is a similar gift thrown—not brought—from the West to the East.

The paradise in which a few theorists lived, listening to the talk at social science congresses, has been rudely broken. Lord Mayors, merchant princes, prime ministers, and able editors have no better means for relief of distress than that long ago discredited by failure. One of the greatest dangers possible to the State has been growing in the midst, and the leaders have slumbered and slept. The resources of civilisation, which are said to be ample to suppress disorder and to evolve new policies, have not provided means by which the chief commandment may be obeyed, and love shown to the poor neighbour.

The outlook is gloomy enough, and the cure of the evil is not to be effected by a simple prescription. The cure must be worked by slow means which will take account of the whole nature of man, which will consider the future to be as important as the present, and which will win by waiting.

Generally it is assumed that the chief change is that to be effected in the habits of the poor. All sorts of missions and schemes exist for the working of this change. Perhaps it is more to the purpose that a change should be effected in the habits of the rich. Society has settled itself on a system which it never questions, and it is assumed to be absolutely within a man’s right to live where he chooses and to get the most for his money.

It is this practice of living in pleasant places which impoverishes the poor. It authorises, as it were, a lower standard of life for the neighbourhoods in which the poor are left; it encourages a contempt for a home which is narrow; it leaves large quarters of the town without the light which comes from knowledge, and large masses of the people without the friendship of those better taught than themselves. The precept that ‘every one should live over his shop’ has a very direct bearing on life, and it is the absence of so many from their shops, be the shop ‘the land’ or ‘a factory,’ which makes so many others poorer.

Absenteeism is an acknowledged cause of Irish troubles, and Mr. Goldwin Smith has pointed out that ‘the greatest evils of absenteeism are—first, that it withdraws from the community the upper class, who are the natural channels of civilising influences to the classes below them; and, secondly, that it cuts off all personal relations between the individual landlord and his tenant.’ He further adds that it was ‘natural the gentry should avoid the sight of so much wretchedness ... and be drawn to the pleasures of London or Dublin.’ The result in Ireland was heartbreaking poverty which relief funds did not relieve, and there is no reason why in East London absenteeism should have other results.

In the same way the unquestioned habit by which every one thinks himself justified in getting the most for his money tends to make poverty. In the competition which the habit provokes many are trampled underfoot, and in the search after enjoyment wealth is wasted which would support thousands in comfort.

The habits of the people are in the charge of the Church, so that by its ministers (conformist and nonconformist) God’s Spirit may bend the most stubborn will. Those ministers have a great responsibility. God’s Spirit has been imprisoned in phrases about the duty of contentment and the sin of drink; the stubborn will has been strengthened by the doctor’s opinion as to the necessity of living apart from the worry of work, and by the teaching of a political economy which assumes that a man’s might is a man’s right. The ministers who would change the habits of the rich will have to preach the prophet’s message about the duty of giving and the sin of luxury, and to denounce ways of business now pronounced to be respectable and Christian. Old teaching will have to be put in new language, giving shown to consist in sharing, and earning to be sacrifice. For some time it may be the glory of a preacher to empty rather than to fill his church as he reasons about the Judgment to come, when ‘twopence a gross to the match-makers will be laid alongside of the twenty-two per cent. to the shareholders,’ and penny dinners for the poor compared with the sixteen courses for the rich—when the ‘seamy’ side of wealth and pleasures will be exposed.[3] For some time the ministers who would change habits may fail to attract congregations. It is not until they are able again to lift up the God whose presence is dimly felt, and whose nature is misunderstood, that they will succeed. In the knowledge of God is eternal life. When all know God as the Father who requires rich and poor to be perfect sharers in His gifts of virtue, forgiveness, and peace, then none will be satisfied until they are at one with Him, and His habit has become their habit.

[3] Prices paid according to the Mansion House report are: Making of shirts, ¾d. each; making soldiers’ leggings, 2s. a dozen; making lawn-tennis aprons, elaborately frilled, 5½d. a dozen to the sweater, the actual worker getting less.

It may, however, be well here to suggest in a few words what may be done while habits remain the same by laws or systems for the relief of poverty.

It would be wise (1) to promote the organisation of unskilled labour. The mass of applicants last winter belonged to this class, and in one report it is distinctly said that the greater number were ‘born within the demoralising influence of the intermittent and irregular employment given by the Dock Companies, and who have never been able to rise above their circumstances.’ It is in evidence that the wages of these men do not exceed 12s. a week on an average in a year. If, by some encouragement, these men could be induced to form a union, and if by some pressure the Docks could be induced to employ a regular gang, much would be gained. The very organisation would be a lesson to these men in self-restraint and in fellowship. The substitution of regular hands at the Docks for those who now, by waiting and scrambling, get a daily ticket would give to a large number of men the help of settled employment and take away the dependence on chance, which makes many careless. Such a change might be met by a non possumus of the directors, but it is forgotten that to the present system a weightier non possumus would be urged if the labourers could speak as shareholders now speak. A possible loss of profit is not comparable to an actual loss of life, and the labourers do lose life and more than life as they scramble for a living that the dividend or salaries may be increased.

(2) The helpers of the poor might be efficiently organised. The ideal of co-operating charity has long hovered over the mischief and waste of competing charity. Up to the present, denominational jealousy, or the belief in crochets, or the self-will which ‘dislikes committees’ has prevented common work. If all who are serving the poor could meet and divide—meet to learn one another’s object and divide each to do his own work—there would be a force applied which might remove mountains of difficulty. Abuse would be known, wise remedies would be suggested, and foolish remedies prevented. Indirect means would be brought to the support of direct, and those concerned to reform the land laws, to teach the ignorant, and beautify the ugly would be recognised as fellow-workers with those whose object is the abolition of poverty. Money would be amply given, and the high motives of faith and love applied to the reform of character. The ideal is in its fulness impossible until there be a really national Church, in which the denominations will each preach their truth, and in which ‘the entire religious life of the nation will be expressed.’ Such a Church, extending into every corner of the land and drawing to itself all who love their neighbours, would realise the ideal of co-operative charity, and so order things that no one would be in sorrow whom comfort will relieve, and no one in pain whom help can succour.

(3) Lastly, the qualification for a seat on a board of guardians might be removed and the position opened to working men.[4] The action of the poor-law has a very distinct effect on poverty, and intelligent experience is on the side of administration by rule rather than by sentiment. In poor-law unions, where it is known that ‘indoors’ all that is necessary for life will be provided, but that ‘outdoors’ nothing will be given, the poor feel they are under a rule which they can understand. They are able to calculate on what will happen in a way which is impossible when ‘giving goes by favour or desert,’ and they do not wait and suffer by trusting to a chance. Public opinion, however, does not support such administration, and as public opinion is largely now that of the working men, it is necessary that these men should be admitted on to boards of guardians, where by experience they would learn how impossible it is to adjust relief to desert, and how much less cruel is regular sternness than spasmodic kindness. A carefully and wisely administered poor-law is the best weapon in hand for the troubles to come, and such is impossible without the sympathy of all classes.

[4] It might be necessary at the same time to abolish ‘the compounder,’ so that the tenant of every tenement might himself pay the rates and feel their burden.

By some such means preparation may be made for dealing with poverty, but even these would not be sufficient and would not be in order at a moment of emergency.

If next winter there be great distress, what, it may be asked, can possibly be done? The chief strain must undoubtedly be borne by the poor-law, and the poor-law must follow rules—hard-and-fast lines. The simplest rule is indoor relief for all applicants, and if for able-bodied men the relief take the form of work which is educational, its helpfulness will be obvious. The casual labourer, whose family is given necessary support on condition that he enters the House, may, during his residence, learn something of whitewashing, woodwork, and baking, or, better yet, that habit of regularity which will do much to keep up the home which has been kept together for him.

The poor-law can thus help during a time of pressure without any break in its established system. If more is necessary, perhaps the next best form of relief would be an extension of that adopted by the Whitechapel Committee of the Mansion House Fund. By co-operation with other local authorities the guardians might offer more work at street sweeping, or cleaning—which in poor London is never adequately done—under such conditions of residence or providence as would prevent immigration, but would be free of the degrading associations of the stone-yards. The staff at the disposal of the guardians would enable them to try the experiment more effectively than was possible when a voluntary committee without experience, time, or staff had to do everything.

By some such plans relief could be afforded to all who belong to what may be called the lowest class; for the assistance of those who could be helped by tools, emigration, or money, the great Friendly Societies, the Society for Relief of Distress, and the Charity Organisation Society might act in conjunction. These societies are unsectarian, are already organised, and may be developed in power and tenderness to any extent by the addition of members and visitors.

These means and all means which are suggested seem sadly inadequate, and in their very setting forth provoke criticism. There are no effectual means but those which grow in a Christian society. The force which, without striving and crying, without even entering into collision with it, destroyed slavery will also destroy poverty. When rich men, knowing God, realise that life is giving, and when poor men, also knowing God, understand that being is better than having, then there will be none too rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and none too poor to enjoy God’s world.

Samuel A. Barnett.

III.
PASSIONLESS REFORMERS.[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Fortnightly Review of August 1882.

The mention of the poor brings up to most people’s minds scenes of suffering, want, and misery. The vast number of people who, while poor in money, are rich in life’s good, who live quiet, thoughtful, dignified lives, are forgotten, and the word ‘poor’ means to many the class which we may call degraded. But the first class is by far the largest, and the wide East End of London (which the indolent think of only as revolting) contains at a rough calculation, say, twenty of the worthy poor to one of the degraded poor. It is curious how widely spread is the reverse idea. Many times have I been asked if I am not ‘afraid to walk in East London,’ and an article on the People’s Entertainment Society aroused, not unjustly, the anger of the East London people at the writer’s descriptions of them and of her fears for her personal safety while standing in the Mile End Road! One lady, after a visit to St. George’s-in-the-East and Stepney, expressed great astonishment to find that the people lived in houses. She had expected that they abode, not exactly in tents, but in huts, old railway carriages, caravans, or squatted against a wall. East Londoners will be glad to know that she went back a wiser and not a sadder woman, having learnt that riches are not necessary to refinement, that some of the noblest characters are developed under the enforced self-control of an income of a pound or thirty shillings a week, that love lived side by side with poverty without thought of exit by the window though poverty had trodden a beaten path through the door, and that books and ideas, though not plentiful enough to become toys, were read, loved, and lived with until they became part of the being of their possessors.

But distinct from this class—among whom may be counted some of the noblest examples of life—there is the class of degraded poor. Here the want is not so much a want of money (some of the trades, such as hawking, flower-selling, shoe-blacking, occasionally bringing in as much as from ten to twenty shillings a day) as the want of the common virtues of ordinary life. In many of these poor, the mere intellectual conception of principle, as such, is absent; they have no moral ideal; spirituality to them is as little understood in idea as in word. Sinning (sensual low brutal sins) is the most common, the to-be-expected course. The standard has got reversed, and those who have turnings towards, and vague aspirations for, better things too often find it impossible to give these feelings practical expression in a society where wrong is upheld by public opinion; where the only test of right is the avoidance of being ‘nabbed’ by the police; and the highest law is that expressed by the magistrate.

How can these people be raised to enjoy spiritual life? Too often the symptoms are mistaken for the disease. In times of illness, bad weather, or depression of their particular trade, their poverty is the one apparent fact about them, and tender-hearted people rush eagerly to relieve it. That poverty was but the natural result of their sinful, self-indulgent lives; and by it they might have learnt great lessons. The hands of the charity-giver too often, in such cases, act as a screen between a man and his Almighty Teacher. The physical suffering which should have recalled to him his past carelessness or sin is thus made of no avail. Mistaken love! gifts cannot raise these people. Better houses, provident clubs, savings banks, &c. are all useful and do necessary work in forming a good ground in which the seed can grow, but thought must be given lest such efforts leave the people in the condition of more comfortable animals. Materialism is already so strong a force in the world that those who look deeper than the material part of man should beware lest they accentuate what is, in whatever form it appears—whether in the low sensuality of the degraded or the enervating luxury of the æsthete—a circumscribed, ungodly life.

The stimulus of ‘getting on’ is also used, but it is a dangerous influence, sapping ofttimes the one virtue which is strong and beautiful in the lives of these people, their communistic love; and if adopted by minds empty of principle may become a new source of wrong. ‘Getting on’ regardless of the means is but another way of going back.

Influences calling themselves religious are tried, and chiefly, all honour be to them, by the evangelicals who, filled with horror at what they hold to be the ultimate fate of such masses, go fearlessly and perseveringly among them, preaching earnestly, if not always rationally, their special tenets. Heaven, as a material place, they still paint in the poetic terms which represented to the Oriental mind the highest spiritual happiness, and is offered as a reward to men imbued with the materialistic spirit of the age, and living coarse and sensual lives. Hell, as a place of physical suffering, is so often threatened that it becomes to many people the most likely thing that they shall go there. The story is perfectly true of the clergyman who, preaching to one of these oft-threatened congregations, tried to show them that sin (according to his explanation removal from God) was hell, and that the awfulness of hell did not consist in being a place where the body would be uncomfortable, but in being a state from which all good and God were absent. Walking behind some of his hearers afterwards, he overheard, ‘Parson says there be’ant no hell, Dick. Where be you and I to go then?’ Imagine feeling homeless because there may be no hell!

But even if the talk of hell still awakens some fear and dread, it is again only a material horror—it but exaggerates the importance of the body, and projects into an after-death sphere the selfish animal life already being led. This will not cultivate spirituality. No! religion thus materialised is a dead-letter; it will not feed the spiritual needs of the people. We have forgotten the words of the Divine Teacher about casting pearls before the swine, and the swine have turned again and rent us. As an old Cornish coachman said the other day in answer to a question about the services of a church which we happened to be passing, ‘Ay, yes, there’s a great advance in church activity, no doubt of that, but little in spirituality somehow. The people’s souls have been preached to death.’

The religionists have taught until the people know all and feel nothing; they have talked about religion till it palls in the hearer’s ears. They have blasphemed by asking pity for our Lord’s physical sufferings when His thoughts and being were at one with God; when He was exulting (as only noble souls can faintly conceive of exultation) in His finished work.

Religion has been degraded by these teachers until it is difficult to gain the people’s ears to hear it. I have often watched congregations who, keenly interested so long as personal narratives are told, books discussed, or allegories pictured, relax their attention so soon as religion is reverted to, with an air which is told in every muscle of ‘knowing all that.’ The story once humorously told by the lamented Leonard Montefiore of his experience as a Sabbath-school teacher is a little straw showing withal the way of the stream. Feeling somewhat at a loss as to what to teach, the class being a strange one, he thought he would be safe in telling them a Bible story; so he began on Moses’ history, painting, as only he could paint for children’s minds, the conditions of the times, making Egypt, with its gorgeous palaces and age-defying temples, live again, showing the princess as a very fairy one, and letting them see through his well-cultivated mind the very age of Rameses. All went well, the children breathless with interest, until he came to the familiar incident of the little ark and the crying babe—‘Oh! ’tis only Moses again!’ cried one boy, and their interest vanished; they half felt they had been ‘taken in,’ and for the remainder of the lesson they gave him a bad time.

The experience of many a popular preacher would, if he confessed honestly, be much the same as Mr. Montefiore’s. One body of evangelists, in order to attract the people, started a band which, playing loud, blatant marches or swinging hymn tunes, brought hundreds of people, who sat and listened with interest to the music. On its stopping and the preacher rising to speak, the people got up and poured out through the large open gate. The preacher paused, and on a sign the music recommenced and the audience sat down again. Three times was the effort made. No! though the preacher was advertised as the converted swindler or gipsy, or some such attractive title, it was of no avail. The people would not listen to the ‘old, old story’—‘Bless you, my children,’ said he, at last, sitting down in despair, ‘but I wish you’d mend yer manners.’ It was a larger rent than their manners which wanted mending. These people’s lives are already too full of excitement. There is no rest nor repose in them. Dignity has given way to hurry. To attract them to religion, further excitement is often resorted to, and sensationalism with all its vulgarity is brought to play upon the buried soul which we are told we should ‘possess in quietness.’

I was once present at a religious meeting where the preacher narrated, with much gusto, accounts of sudden and unexpected deaths and the ultimate fate of the dead ones, making the ignorant audience feel fearful that their every breath might be their last. Finding that even this did not sufficiently stir the people, he pleaded that God in His mercy ‘would shut the doors of hell—aye, even with a bang!’—for a few moments until he had saved the souls before him. After the word ‘bang’ he paused in an attitude of attention as if listening to hear the slamming doors. The excitement was intense; many weak-minded people went into hysterics and others hastened to be converted and ‘made safe’ while the hell-doors were shut. To such means have some religionists reverted to teach the people the Gospel!

No, alas! the old channels are no longer available for the water of life; without it the people are dead, live they ever so comfortably. A spiritual life is the true life; as men become spiritualised, as the moral ideal becomes the source of action, the old words and forms may regain meaning. Phrases now to them meaning nothing or only superstition will then express their very being; but without a belief in the ideal they are but empty words, like ‘the sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.’

How can these degraded people be given these priceless gifts? The usual religious means have failed, the unusual must be tried; we must deal with the people as individuals, being content to speak, not to the thousands, but to ones and twos; we must become the friend, the intimate of a few; we must lead them up through the well-known paths of cleanliness, honesty, industry, until we attain the higher ground whence glimpses can be caught of the brighter land, the land of spiritual life.

Hitherto the large number of the degraded people have appalled the philanthropist; they have been spoken of as the ‘lapsed masses’; and efforts to reach them have not been considered successful unless the results can be counted by hundreds. But there is the higher authority for the individual teaching; He whom all men now delight to honour, whose life, words, and actions are held up for imitation; He chose twelve only to especially influence; He spent long hours in conversation with single persons; He thought no incident too trivial to inquire into, no petty quarrel beneath His interference. We must know and be known, love and be loved, by our less happy brother until he learn, through the friend whom he has seen, knowledge of God whom he has not seen. All this must be done, and not one stone of practical helpfulness left unturned, and

God’s passionless reformers, influences

That purify and heal and are not seen,

must be summoned also to give their aid. Among these are flowers, not given in bundles nor loose, but daintily arranged in bouquets, brought by the hand of the friend who will stop to carefully dispose them in the broken jug or cracked basin, so that they should lose none of their beauty as long as the close atmosphere allows them to live: flowers (without text-cards) left to speak their own message, allowed to tell the story of perfect work without speech or language; all the better preachers because so lacking in self-consciousness.

Not second among such reformers may be placed high-class music, both instrumental and vocal, given in schoolrooms, mission-rooms, and, if possible, in churches where the traditions speak of worship, where the atmosphere is prayerful, and where the arrangement of the seats suggests kneeling; just the music without a form of service, nor necessarily an address, only a hymn sung in unison and a blessing from the altar at the close. To hear oratorios—St. Paul, the Messiah, Elijah, Spohr’s Last Judgment—I have seen crowds of the lowest class, some shoeless and bonnetless, and all having the ‘savour of the great unwashed,’ sit in church for two hours at a time quietly and reverently, the long lines of seated folk being now and then broken by a kneeling figure, driven to his knees by the glorious burst of sound which had awakened strange emotions; while the almost breathless silence in the solos has been occasionally interrupted by a heart-drawn sigh.

To trace the result is impossible and not advisable; but who can doubt that in those moments, brief as they were, the curtain of the flesh was raised and the soul became visible, perhaps by the discovery startling its possessor into new aspirations?

One man came after such a service for help, not money help, but because he was a drunkard, saying if ‘I could hear music like that every night I should not need the drink.’ It was but a feeble echo of St. Paul’s words, ‘Who can deliver me from the body of this death?’ a cry—a prayer—which given to music might be borne by the sweet messenger through heaven’s gate to the very throne beyond.

Then there are country visits; quiet afternoons in the country, not ‘treats’ where numbers bring wild excitement, and only the place, not the sort of amusement, is changed; but where a few people spend an afternoon quietly in the country, perhaps entertained at tea by a kindly friend; parties at which there is time to feel the quiet; where the moments are not so full of external and active interests that there is no opportunity to ‘possess the soul’; parties at which there is a possibility of ‘hush,’ in which, helped by Nature’s ritual, perfect in sound, scent, and colour, silent worship can go on.

For people spending long years in the close courts and streets of ugly towns, the mere sight of nature is startling, and may awaken longings, to themselves strange, to others indescribable, but which are the stirrings of the life within.

The stories of great lives, and of other religions, very simply told, as far as possible leaving out the foreign conditions which confuse the ignorant mind, are sometimes helpful. It is generally considered wise to hide from children and untutored people the knowledge of other religions, for fear it should awaken doubts concerning their own; but in those cases where their own is so very negative, it is often helpful to learn of faiths held by the large masses of mankind. To hear that the great fundamental ideas of all worships are similar would perhaps suggest to the hearer that there might be more in it than ‘just parson stuff’ and lead him to inquire further; or, if it did not do this, it would be some gain to remove the ignorance which, more than familiarity, breeds contempt of the despised foreigner.

Once, after a talk about Egypt and its old religion, the Osiris worship, the beautiful story of the virgin Isis, and her son Horus, who was slain by Set, the King of Evil, and rose again from the bosom of the Nile, I heard it said, ‘They thought the same then, did they? only called them different names.’ The largeness of the idea caught the hearer; its universality bore testimony to its truth. Would it not be helpful if our religious teachers, instead of spending their precious time denouncing the errors of other religions, would take the truths running through the great stories common to them all, and in an historical attitude of mind show the growth of thought, the development of spirituality till his hearers are brought face to face with the Founder of our religion, who set the noblest example; taught the purest doctrine; lived the highest spiritual life; was in Himself, to use the Bible words, ‘the way, the truth, and the life’?

Again, to be quiet, to be alone are among influences that purify. Every one when abroad has, I suppose, felt the privilege of being able to go into the churches whenever they wished. In our great towns the privilege is equally needed, and, where the poor live, doubly so. When one room has to be shared by the whole family, sometimes including a lodger, there can be no quiet, and loneliness is impossible. Some of the clergy are recognising this want, and open their churches at other than service times, but the practice is still rare. A notice outside our church tells how those may enter who ‘wish to think or pray in quietness.’ About ten a day use the permission, some of them kneeling shyly in the side aisle, as if their attitude were unwonted and caused shame; others sitting quietly for a long time, as if weary of the grind and noise outside; while sometimes men come to make their mid-day prayer. Here again is a means with invisible results; but quiet and loneliness are possessions to which every one has a right, without which it is difficult, almost impossible, to ‘commune with God,’ and the gift of which is still to be given to the poor.

Then there is the beauty of Art, now almost entirely absent from the dwellings of the poor, and yet by them so felt as a pleasure; the beauty of form and colour, which it is possible to show in schoolroom and church decoration; the beauty of light and brightness, the beauty of growth to be seen in gardens and churchyards. Outside our church are planted two Virginia creepers; poor things they are, hardly to be recognised by their relations in kindlier soil. But once, in a third-class carriage, I was surprised to hear the church described as the one ‘where the jennies growed.’

It is easier now (thanks to the Kyrle Society and Miss Harrison’s generous gifts of work) to make school and mission rooms pretty. A beautiful workroom is a very strong, though invisible, influence. One girl, who had to leave our school on account of moving from the neighbourhood, said quite naturally, among her regrets at leaving and her description of the new school, ‘It is so ugly it makes one not care.’

The pictures in a schoolroom should be various, and, if possible, often changed. Pictures of action or of historical incidents are the most generally appreciated, but pictures of flowers, fairy tales, landscapes, and sea are suggestive.

Picture galleries have hitherto been thought of chiefly as pleasure places for the educated, or as schools for the student. They can become mission-halls for the degraded. It is easy to arrange visits with a few people to the National Gallery, to the Kensington or Bethnal Green Museums; it is not an unpleasant afternoon’s work to guide little groups of people, just pointing out this beautiful picture, or putting in a few words to explain this or that historical allusion. I once took a girl—a merry lassie, light-hearted, fond of pleasure, but in danger of taking it at the expense of her character—to the National Gallery. The little picture of Raphael’s, where the women acting as the angels stand over the sleeping knight, offering him the protecting shield, opened to her a new truth. Here was a fresh possible relation between man and woman, not the one of rough jokes and doubtful fun, but a new connection not to be despised, either, where the province of the woman was to keep the man safe; a large lesson taught by dumb lips and dead hands.

When Sir Richard Wallace lent his pictures to the Bethnal Green Museum, he not only brightened the eyes of many used only to the drear monotony of East London, but he taught one poor wretched woman with a whining baby hanging on her thin breast a large lesson. Dirt on child and mother showed her condition, and was a dreary contrast to the Madonna with lovely crowing baby before whom the little group paused. ‘Ah, yer could easy enough “mother” such a baby as that now,’ was her apologetic remark, showing that the picture had conveyed the rebuke, and that the reverence born of faith in the painter’s heart had not yet finished bearing fruit.

It is but feebly that I have tried to show how such means could be used to teach spirituality to the lowest classes. It is not necessary to speak of school-lessons, lending libraries, mothers’ meetings, night-schools, temperance societies, and clubs; agencies for the good of the people which are at work in every well-organised parish; neither has mention been made of the communicants’ meetings, prayer assemblies, church services, which are food to feed and build up many of those who already recognise their true life, and strive bravely, amid adverse circumstances, to live it. We can all work at these in gladness and thanksgiving. They are not so hard to persevere with, for some result attends them. In meetings and classes there is encouragement in the regularity and the appreciation of the attendants. In services and prayer-meetings there is the knowledge that they help and strengthen the faint-hearted; but in the indirect means of helping the degraded there is little encouragement, for there can be no results. The highest work is often apparently resultless, bringing no personal thanks, no world’s applause; a failure, worthless labour, if judged by the world’s standard of work; a success, worth doing, if it open to a few, whom the usual means have failed to reach, the great secret of true being, their spiritual life; a buried life, buried but not dead.

Henrietta O. Barnett.

IV.
TOWN COUNCILS AND SOCIAL REFORM.[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Nineteenth Century of November 1883.

Mr. Bright has stated that in Glasgow 41,000 families occupy single rooms. The statement caused no surprise to those familiar with the poor quarters of our great towns; their surprise has been that the statement should cause surprise in any section of the community. It is, indeed, surprising that people should think so little about what they daily see, and should go on talking as if 20s. or 30s. a week were enough to satisfy the needs of a family’s life, and should be surprised that many persons still occupy one room, endure hardship and die, killed by the struggle to exist. It is surprising that reflection on such subjects is not more common because, when facts are stated, no defence is made for the present condition of the people.

Alongside of the growth of wealth during this age there has been growth of the belief in the powers of human nature, of the belief that in all men, independent of rank and birth, there exist great powers of being. ‘Nothing can breed such awe and fear as fall upon us when we look into our minds, into the mind of man,’ expresses the experience of many who do not use the poet’s words.

Those who are conscious of what men may be and do cannot be satisfied while the majority of Englishmen live, in the midst of wealthy England, stinted and joyless lives because they are poor.

When facts, therefore, such as that referred to by Mr. Bright are stated, no defence is made; and such facts are common. Here are some:—(1) The death-rate among the children of the poor is double that among the children of the rich. Born in some small room, which serves as the sleeping and living room of the family; hushed to sleep by discordant noises from neighbouring factories, refreshed by air laden with smoke and evil odours, forced to find their play in the streets; without country holiday or adequate medical skill, without sufficient air, space, or water, the children die, and the mothers among the poor are always weeping for their children and cannot be comforted. (2) The occupants of the prisons are mostly of one class—the poor. The fact for its explanation needs no assumption that ‘the poor in a lump are bad’; it is the natural result of their condition. It is because children are ill developed or unhealthily developed by life in the streets that they become idlers, sharpers, or thieves. It is because families are crowded together that quarrels begin and end in fights. It is because they have not the means to hide their vices under respectable forms that the poor go to prison and not the rich. (3) The lives of the people are joyless. The slaves of toil, worn by anxiety lest the slavery should end, they have not leisure nor calm for thought; they cannot therefore be happy, living in the thought of other times, as those are happy who, in reading or travel, have gathered memories to be the bliss of solitude, or as those who, ‘by discerning intellect,’ have found the best to be ‘the simple product of the common day.’ When work ceases, the one resource is excitement; and thus their lives are joyless. Anxiety consumes their powers in pleasure as in work, the faces of the women lose their beauty, and a woman of thirty looks old.

These are facts patent to those who know our great towns—the facts of life, not among a few of their degraded inhabitants, but facts of the life of the majority of the people. Let any one who does not know how his neighbours live set himself the following sum. Given 20s. or 40s. a week wages, how to keep a family, pay rent of 2s. 6d. a week for each room, and lay up an adequate amount for times of bad trade, sickness, and old age. As the sum is worked out, as it is seen how one after another the things which seem to make life worth living have to be given up, and as it is seen how many ‘necessaries’ are impossible, how many of the poor must put up with a diet more scanty than that allowed to paupers, how all must go without the leisure and the knowledge which transmute existence into life—faith will be shaken in many theories of social reform.

Teetotal advocates will preach in vain that drunkenness is the root of all evil, and that a nation of abstainers will be either a healthy, a happy, or a thoughtful nation. Thrift will be seen to be powerless to do more than to create a smug and transient respectability, and even those who are ‘converted’ will not claim to be raised by their faith out of the reach of early death and poverty into a life which belongs to their nature as members in the human family.

Theories of reform which do not touch the conditions in which the people live, which do not make possible for them fuller lives in happier circumstances, are not satisfactory. The conversion of sinners—at any rate while the sinners are sought chiefly among the poor—the emigration of children, the spread of thrift and temperance among the workpeople, will still leave families occupying single rooms and the sons of men the joyless slaves of work; a state of society for which no defence can be made.

It is only a larger share of wealth which can increase comfort and relieve men from the pressure brought on them by the close atmosphere of great towns; which can, in a word, give to all the results of thought and open to all the life which is possible. If it be that the return for fair land laid waste by mines and engines is wider knowledge of men and things, it is only the rich who now enjoy this return and it is only wealth which can make it common. And since any distribution of wealth in the shape of money relief would be fatal to the independence of the people, the one satisfactory method of social reform is that which tends to make more common the good things which wealth has gained for the few. The nationalisation of luxury must be the object of social reformers.

The presence of wealth is so obvious that the attempts to distribute its benefits both by individuals and by societies have been many. Individuals have given their money and their time; their failure is notorious, and societies have been formed to direct their efforts. The failure of these societies is not equally notorious, but few thinkers retain the hope that societies will reform Society and make the conditions of living such that people will be able to grow in wisdom and in stature to the full height of their manhood. If it were a sight to make men and angels weep to see one rich man struggling with the poverty of a street, making himself poor only to make others discontented paupers, it is as sad a sight to see societies hopelessly beaten and hardened into machines with no ‘reach beyond their grasp.’ The deadness of these societies or their ill-directed efforts has roused in the shape of Charity Organisation workers a most striking missionary enterprise. The history of the movement as a mission has yet to be written; the names of its martyrs stand in the list of the unknown good; but the most earnest member of a Charity Organisation Society cannot hope that organised almsgiving will be powerful so to alter conditions as to make the life of the poor a life worth living.

Societies which absorb much wealth, and which relieve their subscribers of their responsibility, are failing; it remains only to adopt the principle of the Education Act, of the Poor Law, and of other socialistic legislation, and call on Society to do what societies fail to do. There is much which may be urged in favour of such a course. It is only Society, or, to use the title by which Society expresses itself in towns, it is only Town Councils, which can cover all the ground and see that each locality gets equal treatment. It is by common action that a healthy spirit becomes common, and the tone of public opinion may be more healthy when the Town Council engages in good-doing than when good-doing is the monopoly of individuals or of societies. If nations have been ennobled by wars undertaken against an enemy, towns may be ennobled by work undertaken against the evils of poverty.

Through the centuries the sense of the duties of Society has been growing. Some earnest men may regret the limit placed on individual action and the failure of societies, but the change they regret is more apparent than real. The Town Councils are, indeed, the modern representatives of the Church and of other societies, through which in older times individuals expressed their hope and work, and to these bodies falls the duty of effecting that social reform which will help the poor to grow to the stature of the life of men.

The problem before them is one much more of ways than of means. If poverty is depressing the lives of the people, the wealth by which it may be relieved is superabundant. On the one side, there is disease for the want of food and doctors; on the other side there is disease because of food and doctors. In one part of the town the women cease to charm for want of finery; in the other they cease to please from excess of finery. It is for want of money that the streets in which the poor live are close, ill-swept, and ill-lighted; that the ‘East Ends’ of towns have no grand meeting-rooms and no beauty. It is through superfluity of money that the entertainments of the rich are made tiresome with music, and their picture galleries made ugly with uninteresting portraits. There is no want of means for making better the condition of the people; and there has ever been sufficient good-will to use the means when the way has been clear. To discover the way is the problem of the times.

Some way must be found which, without pauperising, without affecting the spirit of energy and independence, shall give to the inhabitants of our great towns the surroundings which will increase joy and develop life.

The first need is better dwellings. While the people live without adequate air, space, or light in houses where the arrangements are such that privacy is impossible, it is hopeless to expect that they will enjoy the best things. The need has been recognised, and, happily without going to Parliament, Town Councils may do much to meet the need. It is in their power to enforce sanitary improvements, to make every house healthy and clean, and to provide common rooms which will serve as libraries or drawing-rooms. If it is not in their power to reduce rents, it is possible for them to pull down unfit buildings, and sell the ground to builders at a low price, on condition that such builders shall provide extra appliances for the health and pleasure of the people.

Insanitary conditions and high rents are the points to which consideration must be directed. Builders to-day build houses on the fiction that each house will be occupied by one family. The fact that two or three families will at once take possession is kept out of sight, while the parlour, drawing-room, and single set of offices are finished off to suit the requirements of an English home. The fiction ends in the creation of evils on which medical officers write reports, and of other evils which, like Medusa’s head, are best seen by the shadow they cast on Society.

The insanitary conditions constitute one difficulty connected with the dwellings of the poor; the rent for adequate accommodation which absorbs one quarter of an irregular income constitutes another. To cure the insanitary conditions ample power exists; to even suggest a means for lowering rents is not so easy. Perhaps it might be possible for the community to sell the ground it acquires at some low price, on condition that the rents of the newly built houses should never exceed a certain rate, and that the occupier should always have the right of purchase. Such a condition is not, however, at present legal, and is of doubtful expediency. It is now possible for Town Councils to acquire land under the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, and to sell it cheaply on condition that the rooms are of a certain size and provided with certain appliances; that special arrangements are made for washing and cleaning, and that a common room is at the disposal of a certain number of families.

The improvement cannot be made without what is called a loss—that is to say, the Town Councils cannot sell land for the building of fit dwellings at the same price for which the land had been acquired. Money will in one sense be lost; and this phrase has such power that, though the need is recognised, the Act by which the need could be met has in most towns remained a dead letter. In Liverpool, where, according to official reports, the state of the dwellings is productive of fever and destructive of common decency, the Act has never been applied. In Manchester, where it is acknowledged to be the object of the Town Council to protect the health of the people, it is stated in the last report that the Act involves too great an outlay to be workable. The London Metropolitan Board of Works, which spends its millions wisely and unwisely, has striven to show that the application of the Act would lay too great a burden on the ratepayers. It is impossible, it is said, to house the poor at such a cost. It would not seem impossible if it were recognised that to spend money in housing the poor is a way of making the wealth of the town serve the needs of the town. It would not seem impossible if Town Councils recognised that on them has come the care of the people, and that money is not lost which is returned in longer and better life.

Other needs exist, hardly second to that of better dwellings, and these it is in the power of local authorities to meet, in a way of which few reformers seem to be aware. The Town Councils may provide means of recreation and instruction—libraries, playgrounds, and public baths. School Boards may provide, not only elementary instruction, but give a character to education, and use their buildings as centres for the meetings, classes, and recreation of the old scholars. Boards of Guardians may make their relief, not only a means of meeting destitution, but a means of educating the independence of the strong and of comforting the sorrows of the weak. We can imagine these boards, the councils of the town, endowed with greater powers; but with those they already possess they could change the social conditions and remove abuses for which Englishmen make no defence.

Wise Town Councils, conscious of the mission they have inherited, could destroy every court and crowded alley and put in their places healthy dwellings; they could make water so cheap and bathing-places so common that cleanliness should no longer be a hard virtue; they could open playgrounds, and take away from a city the reproach of its gutter-children; they could provide gardens, libraries, and conversation-rooms, and make the pleasures of intercourse a delight to the poor, as it is a delight to the rich; they could open picture galleries and concerts, and give to all that pleasure which comes as surely from a common as from a private possession; they could light and clean the streets of the poor quarters; they could stamp out disease, and by enforcing regulations against smoke and all uncleanness limit the destructiveness of trade and lengthen the span of life; they could empty the streets of the boys and girls, too big for the narrow homes, too small for the clubs and public-houses, by opening for them playrooms and gymnasia; they could help the strong and hopeful to emigrate; they could give medicine to heal the sick, money to the old and poor, a training for the neglected, and a home for the friendless.

With this power in the hands of Town Councils, and with our great towns in such a state that a fact as to their condition shocks the nation, there is no need to wait for parliamentary action. The course on which the authorities are asked to enter is no untried one.

There are local bodies which have applied the Artisans’ Dwellings Act and cleared away houses or hovels, of which the medical officers’ descriptions are not fit for repetition in polite society. There are those who have built, and more who are ready to build, houses which shall at any rate give the people healthy surroundings, possibilities of home life and of common pleasures, even when a family can afford only a single room. And, although the London School Board’s buildings and playgrounds are occupied only during a few hours in each week, there are schools which are used for meetings, for classes in higher education, and for Art Exhibitions, and there are playgrounds which are open all day and every day to all comers. The way in which Guardians have in some unions made the system of relief in the highest sense educational is now an old tale. It has been shown that out-relief, with its demoralising results, may be abolished; it is being shown that a workhouse with trade masters and ‘mental instructors’ may be a reformatory; and it is not beyond the hope of some Boards that a system of medical relief may be developed adequate to the needs of the people. Public bodies here and there are showing what it is in their power to do, but at present their efforts hardly make any mark; they must become general.

The first practical work is to rouse the Town Councils to the sense of their powers; to make them feel that their reason of being is not political but social, that their duty is not to protect the pockets of the rich, but to save the people. It is for reformers in every town to direct all their force on the Town Councils, to turn aside to no scheme, and to start no new society, but to urge, in season and out of season, that the care of the people is the care of the community, and not of any philanthropic section—is, indeed, the care of Society, and not of societies. ‘The People, not Politics,’ should be their cry; and they should see that the power is in the hands of men, irrespective of party or of class, who care for the people. This is the first practical work, one in which all can join, whether he serves as elector or elected. It may be that efficient administration will show that without an increase of rating a sufficient fund may be found to do all that needs doing; but, if this is not the case, the social interest which is aroused will act on Parliament, and that body will be diverted from its party politics to consider how, by some change in taxation, by progressive rating, by a land-tax, or by some other means, the money can be raised to do what must be done.

The means, I repeat, is a matter for the future; the battle is to be won at the municipal elections; it is there the cry ‘The People, not Politics’ must be raised, and it is the councils of the town which can work the social reform. If it be urged that when Town Councils do for social reform all which can be done, the condition will still be unsatisfactory, I agree. Wealth cannot supply the needs of life, and many who have all that wealth can give are still without the life which is possible to men. The town in which houses shall be good, health general, and recreation possible, may be but a whited sepulchre. No social reform will be adequate which does not touch social relations, bind classes by friendship, and pass, through the medium of friendship, the spirit which inspires righteousness and devotion.

If, therefore, the first practical work of reformers be to rouse Town Councils, their second is to associate volunteers who will work with the official bodies. We may here regret the absence of a truly National Church. If in every parish Church Boards existed representative of every religious opinion and expressive of every form of philanthropy, they would be the centres round which such volunteers would gather and prove themselves to be an agency ready to their hand. While we hope for such boards there is no need to wait to act.

As a rule, it may be laid down that the voluntary work is most effective when it is in connection with official work. The connection gives a backbone, a dignity to work, which has lost something in the hands of Sunday-school teachers and district visitors. In every town volunteers in connection with official work are wanted. It is doubtful, indeed, if the tenements occupied by the least instructed classes could be kept in order, or the people made to live up to their better surroundings, if the rent collecting were not put in the hands of volunteers with the time to make friends and the will to have patience with the tenants. At any rate, wherever official work is done there will be something for volunteers to supply.

Guardians want those who will consider the poor; men who will visit the workhouse to rouse those too idle or too depressed to work, and to find help for those who by sickness or ill-chance have lost their footing in the rush for living. They want those who, knowing what wages can do and cannot do, will serve on relief committees, will see the poor in their distress, and, giving or not giving, will try to make them understand that care does not cease. They want also women who will be friends to the sick and, more than that, befriend the girls who drift wretched to the workhouse, or go out lonely from the pauper schools. School Boards want those who, visiting the schools, will seek out the children who are fit for country holidays, visit the homes, and do something to follow up the education between the years of thirteen and twenty-one.

Wherever there is an institution, a reading-room, a club, or a playground there is work for volunteers. It may not be that the volunteers will seem to do much; they will be certain to do something. They will be certain to make links between the classes, and lead both rich and poor to give up habits which keep them apart. They will be certain to add strength to the public opinion, which by the bye will relieve those whose higher life is destroyed by excess or by want. They will be certain to do something, and if they carry into their work a spirit of devotion, a faith in the high calling of the human race, and a love for its weakest members, there is no limit which can be placed on what they will do. They will put into the sound body the sound mind; into the well-ordered town citizens who ‘feel deep, think clear, and bear fruit well.’

Samuel A. Barnett.

V.
‘AT HOME’ TO THE POOR.[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Cornhill Magazine of May 1881.

Few people realise the extreme dulness of the lives of the poor. Cut off from the many interests which education or the possession of money gives, they have little left but the ‘trivial round, the common task,’ which indeed furnishes them with ‘room to deny themselves,’ but is hardly, in their case at least, ‘the road to bring them daily nearer God.’

‘People must be amuthed,’ is the caricatured statement of a true human need, and the terrible and often deplored attraction of the public-house has its root not so much in the love of strong drink as in the want of interest and desire for amusement felt by the lower classes of the poor. This is especially true with regard to the women and to those men who cannot read. Unable to comprehend the ever-living interest of watching public affairs, prevented by ignorance from following, even in outline, the actions of the nations, they are thrown back on the affairs of their neighbours, and centre all their interest in the sayings and doings of quarrelsome Mr. Jones or much-abused Mrs. Smith.

It is difficult for those of us to whom the world seems almost too full of interests to realise the deadening dulness of some of these lives. Let us imagine, for an instant, all knowledge of history, geography, art, science, and language blotted out; all interests in politics, social movements, and discoveries obliterated; no society pleasures to anticipate; no trials of skill nor tests of proficiency in work or play to look forward to; no money at command to enable us to plan some pleasure for a friend or dependent; no books always at hand, the old friends waiting silently till their acquaintance is renewed, the new ones standing ready to be learnt and loved; no opportunities of getting change of scene and idea; no memories laden with pleasures of travel; no objects of real beauty to look at. What would our lives become? And yet this is a true picture of the lives of thousands of the poorer classes, whose time is passed in hard, monotonous work, or occupied in the petty cares of many children, and in satisfying the sordid wants of the body. In some cases precarious labour adds the element of uncertainty to the other troubles, an element which, by the fact of its bringing some interest, is enjoyed by the men, but which adds tenfold to the many cares of the housewife.

It is not easy to see how the poor themselves can get out of this atmosphere of dulness. They can hardly give parties, even if the cost of entertaining were not a sufficient barrier; the extreme smallness of the rooms entirely prevents social intercourse, not to mention the hindrance caused by the necessity for putting the children to bed in the course of the evening, and by all the many discomforts consequent on the one room being bedroom, parlour, kitchen, and scullery. But even supposing there are two rooms, or few children, the difficulties of entertaining are not yet over. With minds so barren, conversation can hardly be the source of much amusement, and music and dancing are almost impossible with no instrument to help and no space where even the little feet can patter.

But it is possible for the ignorant as well as the cultured to enjoy Nature. And it is often a subject of wonder why the poor living in such close streets or alleys, surrounded with such unlovely objects, do not take more trouble to get out into the country or enjoy the parks. ‘Only sixpence, you say,’ said a hard-working pale body to me one day when I was urging her to go on one of her enforced idle afternoons to get air and see some refreshing beauty at Hampstead. ‘Well, yer see, I could hardly go without the three children, and that’s 1s. 3d.; besides they’d be a deal hungrier when they came home than perhaps I could manage for.’

What could be said to the last argument? Just fancy having to consider, otherwise than pleasurably, the increased appetite of one of our young ones fresh from a day by the sea or in the country?

But, apart from the money question, the desire to go into the country after a time wears off, even among those who have before lived in pure air and among country sights and scenes; people get used to their dull, sordid surroundings; the memory of fairer sights grows dim, and the imagination is not strong enough to conjure them up again.

‘Shure, I ain’t been in the country this fifteen year,’ an old woman once startled me by saying at a country party; ‘and if it hadn’t been for your note ’ere it would ha’ been another fifteen year afore I’d ha’ seen it.’

And she was not so poor, this old lady; 7s. a week, perhaps, and 2s. 6d. to pay for rent. It was not her poverty which prevented her seeing the fifteen fair springs which had passed since she came from the Green Isle. No! it was just the want of power to make the effort—a loss to her far more serious than the loss of the sight of the country. As the late James Hinton used to say, ‘The worst thing is to be in hell and not know it is hell’; perhaps the best thing one can do for another is to give him the glimpse of heaven, which, letting in the light, shows the blackness of hell.

‘Don’t you think green is God’s favourite colour?’ asked an old lady, the thought being suggested as we stood together in a forest of soft green. ‘Well, I can’t say,’ was the answer; ‘look at the sky; how blue that is.’ ‘Yes, but that isn’t always blue, and the earth is ’most always green.’

Does it not seem a pity that this old poet soul, so fit to teach God’s lessons, should live all through the summer days in one room, shared by four other people, seeing only the mud colours of London, which certainly are not God’s favourite colours. It was this same old lady who said on receiving her first invitation, ‘All the years I’ve lived in London I was never asked to go into the country before you asked me.’

But the want of pleasure and change is no newly discovered need of the poor. School-treats and excursions and bean-feasts have been organised and carried out almost since Sunday-schools have existed and congregations had a corporate life. Every summer sees the columns of the newspapers used to ask for money to give 900, 1,000, 2,000 children ‘one day in the country,’ and when the money is obtained and the day arrives, the children are packed into vans or a special train and turned into the woods or fields to enjoy themselves (and tease the frogs) until tea, buns, and hymns bring the ‘’appy day’ to an end. Good days these, full of pleasure and health-giving exercise, but perhaps mixed with too large an element of excitement to teach the children to enjoy the country for its own sake, to enable them to learn in Dame Nature’s lap ‘that we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness.’

Neither have the clergy overlooked this need as existing among their grown people, and most of those working in poor neighbourhoods organise an annual ‘Treat,’ each person paying, say, 1s., to be met by the 6d. from the Pastor’s Fund. These treats sometimes assume the enormous proportions of 2,000 or 3,000 persons. All carry their mid-day meal to be eaten when and how they like. The assembling for tea and a few speeches by the rector and those in authority are the only means taken to bring the people together and to introduce the sense of host and guest. And with the memory of the 1s. paid, this sense is very difficult either to arouse or maintain. But, good as in many ways these treats are, they do not do all they might. They do not introduce fresh experiences, an acquaintance with other lives, the interest of new knowledge.

We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live,

as Coleridge puts it; and such sadly empty minds want the interpretation of the friendly eye to make them see what they went out ‘for to see.’

Struck with these ideas, we determined to try another method of entertaining our neighbours; and believing that they had the same need of social intercourse as that felt by the rich, and taking for granted that the kind of country entertainment most prevalent among the rich was that most enjoyed, we based our parties on the same foundation, remembering always that the minds of the poor being emptier, more active entertainment was needed, and that the party to which we invited them was perhaps the one day’s outing in the whole year, the one glimpse that they had (apart from divorce suits) into the lives and habits of the richer classes.

On talking over our plan with friends who, living in the suburbs of London, had the necessary garden, it was not long before we received kindly invitations to take thirty, forty, fifty, of our neighbours to spend the afternoon in the country. The day and hour fixed, it was left with us to decide which guests should be invited, and to pass on the invitation. Sometimes our hosts particularly wish to entertain children as well as grown people; and if so, we include the children in the invitation; but on the whole, experience has taught that those parties are most thoroughly enjoyed from which the children are omitted. This will not be misunderstood when it is remembered that these mothers and fathers have their children, perhaps seven, all small together, constantly with them for 365 days in the year, both day and night; that the children become noisy and excited in the country, and that each child’s noise, though it may be music in the ear of its mother, can hardly be anything but what it is, disagreeable sounds, in the ears of its mother’s neighbour. Another objection to the presence of the children is the extreme difficulty of entertaining them and the grown people together. To the social gatherings of other classes it is not the rule to invite children with their parents, and the taste or feeling which forbids such a rule is common to the poor.

It is not difficult, knowing many people who would be glad of a day’s outing, to pass on such invitations; but it is pleasanter, if it can be so arranged, that the guests should beforehand be acquainted with each other. For that reason it is better to invite together the members of a mothers’ meeting and their husbands, the habitués of a club, the inhabitants of one block of buildings, the denizens of a particular court, the singing-class, the members of any society who worship, work, or learn together—in short, those who unite for any purpose.

There are other advantages in this plan besides the obvious one of the guests being already acquainted. Those who have hitherto seen each other’s character from the work point of view only now get another standpoint, and the day’s pleasure, together with the hearty laugh and the many-voiced songs, does more than many a pastoral address can do to teach forgiveness and break down barriers raised by quarrels—quarrels which more often owe their origin to close neighbourhoods than to bad tempers. ‘Now she ain’t such a bad ’un as one would think, considering the way she behaved to my Billy—is she now?’ is a true remark illustrating what I would say.

The guests chosen, the invitations go out in the usual form: ‘Mrs. So-and-So,’ mentioning our hostess’s name, ‘hopes to have the pleasure of seeing Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So on Monday, 14th, to spend the afternoon in the country,’ and then follow the time of the train and the name of the station where the rendezvous is to be held. Added to these the friends connected in any way with the expected guests, the district visitor, the superintendent of the mothers’ meeting, the lady rent-collector are also invited; as well as those who have gifts of entertaining or those to whom we wish to introduce our neighbours. A train is generally chosen between one and two o’clock, so as to enable the man to get a half-day’s work and the woman to see to necessary household duties and give the children their dinner before she starts.

On reaching the country station the party rambles through the lanes, picking grasses and flowers, taking, if possible, a détour before arriving at the host’s house. ‘Why, the trees smell,’ exclaimed one town-bred woman in almost awe-struck astonishment, standing under a lilac-tree. ‘Don’t it make one feel gentle-like!’ was another remark made more to himself than to anyone else, which came from a rough one-legged board-man, as he stood overlooking a quiet, far-stretching scene near Wimbledon.

Unless one has lived in close streets and amid noise and grinding hurry, it is difficult to understand the pleasures of these walks. The sweetness of the air, the quiet which can be felt, the very fact of strolling in the road without looking out to avoid being run over, are a relief, and the absence of the ever-present anxiety of the care of the children is a great addition to the irresponsible enjoyment of the day.

The destination reached, it is a great help if the host and hostess will come out to meet and welcome the party, as is customary towards guests of other classes. By this simple courtesy the tone is at once given, and the people feel themselves not brought out to a ‘treat’ but invited and welcomed as guests. I have seen men, among whom we were told when we first went to Whitechapel it was not ‘safe’ to go alone, entirely changed by the bearing of their hosts to them, and the determination with which they set out, to have a ‘lark,’ at whatever inconvenience to others, gradually melt away under the influence of being treated as gentlemen. ‘Why, she said she was glad to see me,’ said a low, coarse fellow, taking as a personal compliment to himself the conventional form of expression.

The duty of introducing and welcoming over, we are glad if we find tables on a shady lawn or under a tent ready spread and waiting for us. In the excitement of getting off, the midday meal taken hurriedly has probably been a slight one, and the walk and unwonted fresh air have given good appetites. Sometimes our hostess has made arrangements that all the party should take their food together, and this is the better plan if it can be managed. ‘Why, the gentry is sitting down with us. Now I do call that comfortable like,’ was overheard on one occasion when this arrangement had been followed. If the one class waits on the other it but emphasises the painful class distinctions so sadly prominent in the ordinary affairs of life, and the feeling aroused in the minds of the people as they see the richer members of the party taken by the hostess to the house to have ‘something to eat’ is not always amiable, the ‘something’ being interpreted as better, anyhow other than that provided for them, or why should it not have been taken together?

The repast given by our many kindly hosts during these eight summers of parties has been various. Some add eggs and bacon to the tea and cakes; others give a large joint, which is even more enjoyed, a cut off a good 14 lb. sirloin of beef being a rare luxury in the ordinary dietary of the working classes, while others again offer tea, differing only in quantity from the ordinary afternoon meal which is commonly taken between lunch and dinner. Some of our hosts give every variety of cake, such as Scotch housewives delight in making, though I remember one lady who, while most kind and anxious to give pleasure, told me, as if it were an additional advantage, that she had ‘had all the cakes made very plain, and that they were all baked the day before yesterday.’

The meal over, the real pleasure of the day begins, and this must entirely depend on the capabilities of the hostess for entertaining and on the possibilities of the garden. If it is large, there is nothing townpeople like better than to saunter about, to wander in the shrubberies, to see the hothouses, conservatories, ferneries, especially if some one will be the guide and point out what is interesting, this spot where the best view is to be obtained, that curious flower, and tell the story hanging on this queerly shaped tree. ‘Aye, aye, ma’am, it’s all very beautiful, but to my mind you’re the beautifullest flower of the lot,’ was the spontaneous compliment elicited from a weather-beaten costermonger to the stately old lady who had taken pains to show him her garden, and though the remark was greeted with shouts of laughter from the surrounding group, the ‘Well, he ain’t far wrong, I’m sure,’ showed that the words had only spoken out the thoughts of many.

Sometimes the men go off to play cricket or bowls, to see the puppies or horses, or some other beasts particularly interesting to the masculine mind; or perhaps the interminable game of rounders occupies all the time. Sometimes swings, see-saws, or a row on the pond are great amusements. ‘Oh dear, I think I’ve only just learnt to enjoy myself,’ gasped one buxom woman of fifty, breathless with swinging her neighbour, whose face told that her life’s holidays could without difficulty be counted; while, to a few, the fact of sitting still and looking out and feeling the quiet is pleasure enough. ‘I seem to see further than ever I saw before,’ murmured a pale young mother, sitting on the Upper Terrace at Hampstead, and as she said it she looked as if the sight of the country just then, when her eyes were reopened by her new motherhood, might, in another sense, make her see farther than she had ever seen before.

If the garden is small and its resources soon ended, games must be resorted to, and such games as ‘tersa,’ where running and motion are enjoyed; the ‘ring and the string,’ when eyes and ears must be on the alert; or ‘blow the candle blindfold’; all cause hearty fun, especially when the unconscious blindfold, having walked crookedly, energetically blows, as he thinks, at the candle, which is still burning steadily a yard or two from him. On some of these occasions the hostess has had her carriage out, and by taking four or five of the guests at a time all have been able to have a short drive, and see from a higher elevation something more of the country, ‘Well, I don’t know that I was ever in a carriage before,’ said one woman, who could hardly be said to have been in one then, as she dismounted from the box. ‘Except at funerals,’ corrected her neighbour. Might not some of the extraordinary liking, which is so common among the poor, for attending funerals be partly for the sake of the rare event of a drive? Occasionally it is possible to get up a dance, with the help of a fiddle or piano, and many a pale, worn face has lost, for the time at least, its stamp of weariness as it grew interested in the ups and downs of ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’ ‘Bless me, if I ever thought to do any dancing, except the dancing of babbies,’ was an unexpected comment from my partner on one occasion; and many times have I since been referred to to confirm the fact that ‘You did see me dancing, didn’t you, ma’am?’

Besides these active pleasures, there is the enjoyment of music, the love and appreciation of which is so deep and warm in these uncultured minds; music which more than anything else helps to smooth away class as well as other inequalities. I have seen rough low-class men and women leave their active games or the swing for which they had been waiting and cluster round the singer or musician begging for another and yet ‘another bit.’ What they like best is a song with a chorus, or historical songs where they can hear the words, and next to these solemn music on a harmonium or organ; but any music charms them, and the hostess who is either musical herself or who invites her musical friends to help her finds the task of entertaining much easier. An oft-repeated mistake is that the poor like comic songs about themselves, and ‘Betsy Waring’ has been suggested and sung at our parties more often than I like to remember. A moment’s sympathetic thought will show, however, that the poor want other and wider interests, and it can hardly be the kindliest method of amusing them to sing them a song, the joke of which lies in imitations and ‘take-offs’ of their mispronunciation. It is, too, generally thought that the uneducated cannot appreciate what is commonly understood as ‘good music,’ but this, too, is a mistake. Long years ago I remember Mrs. Nassau Senior coming to a night-school of rough girls, held in a rough court. That evening some street row was more attractive than A B C, and our scholars were clustered around the heroine of the fight. I can still see the picture made by Mrs. Senior as she stood and sang in the doorway of the schoolroom, which opened directly on to the court, and among such surroundings it was a deep-sighted sympathy which led her to choose ‘Angels ever bright and fair.’ For long afterwards she was remembered as ‘the lady who came and sang about the angels, and looked like one herself.’

It is well if the hostess can bring her instrument to the window, so that the people can hear as they sit on the lawn outside and enjoy the air; perhaps she may find it possible to ask two or three of her guests who can sing, with strong, sweet, though untrained voices, to join her in a duet or glee, and helping, they enjoy the pleasure with the helper’s joy. Occasionally one of the party may have brought an accordion with which to aid the impromptu concert, or some one will recall the piece of poetry committed to memory long years ago, and then we have a recitation, which pleases none the less because it is ‘Jim Straw’s one bit,’ and has been heard a few times before. If it be wet or windy the hostess may ask her guests into the drawing-room. ‘You did not see the drawing-room, did you, mum?’ asked one of the guests after a party which I had been obliged to leave early; ‘it was lovely, and we all sat there quite friendly-like and listened to the music. I did like the look of that room.’ Very pregnant of influence are these introductions into a house scrupulously clean and tastily furnished—a house kept as the dwelling of every human being should be kept. Do we not know ourselves, if we go to visit a friend with a higher standard of art, morals, or culture, how subtle is the influence; how from such visits (albeit unconsciously, or at least hardly with deliberate resolve) is dated the turning towards the new light, the intention to be more perfect?

One lady, with the real feeling of hostess-ship, took her Whitechapel guests, as she would any others, into a bedroom to take their outdoor things off. Touching, if amusing, was the remark of a girl of fifteen or thereabouts who, turning to her mother, said, ‘Look, mother, here’s a bed with a room all to itself!’ ‘Has any one really slept in this white bed?’ was asked by another of that same party. While to others of a rather higher class, who have been servants before marriage, the reintroduction to such a house is a great pleasure, though to them not such a revelation as it is to those who have passed all their lives in factories or workshops. It is a welcome reminder of their past, and often suggests little improvements in the arrangement of their homes. It is a means also of diffusing a love of beauty, a sense of harmony, and an artistic taste, not to be despised among those who feel that the ‘Beauty of Holiness’ constitutes its attraction to the right living which leads to Righteousness.

In various ways, too many to describe, but which every hostess can devise, the hours between half-past four and eight can be pleasantly filled, until the drawing in of the long summer evening brings the party to a close. The announcement of supper is generally greeted with, ‘What, go home already?’ or, ‘The time don’t go so fast working days,’ but garden parties must necessarily end with daylight, and for folk up at six in the morning ten or eleven o’clock is a late enough bed hour. Supper is generally a small meal—cake, buns, or pastry, with lemonade, fruit, or cold coffee—simply a light refreshment taken standing; but some of the friends who entertain us like better to give the light meal on the arrival of the guests, and the more substantial one later. The first plan, though, is perhaps better, as the people leave their homes early, and many of them miss their dinner altogether, amid the necessary preparation for the long absence.

‘Good-night, sir, and God bless you for this day!’ was the farewell of one of his guests to his silver-haired host, words which struck him deeply. ‘Dear me, dear me! why did I never think of it before?’ he exclaimed; and really this means of doing good seems so simple and self-evident that it is to be wondered at that those working among the poor should often not know where to take their people for a day’s outing. London suburbs abound with families hardly one of whom does not give a garden party in the course of the summer, and yet how few of these parties are to guests ‘who cannot bid again!’ The expense of such a party is certainly not the reason of its rarity. An entertainment such as I have told about, even when meat is given, does not cost more than a shilling or eighteenpence a head. The trouble cannot be the deterrent motive, for that is nothing to be compared to the trouble of a dinner-party, nor even of any ordinary ‘at home.’ ‘The servants would not like it’ is sometimes urged as a reason, but it is certainly not the experience of those who, having overcome the objections of their servants, have tried it, and found that they entered thoroughly into the spirit of a party at which they had the pleasant duty of entertaining joined to their usual one of serving, and on more than one occasion the hearty welcome given by the servants has added much to the success of our day.

Perhaps, amid the many difficulties to which modern civilisation has brought us, one of the saddest is the mutual ignorance of the lives and minds of members of the same household—an ignorance often leading to division. It may not, I think, be the least important good of these parties that they afford a subject regarding which master and servants can be, anyhow for one day, of one mind and purpose.

Neither does it require the possession of a mansion or park before such an invitation can be sent; in fact, some of the pleasantest parties have been given in the smallest gardens, where kindliness and genial welcome have made up for want of space. One lady, indeed, who was staying for the summer in lodgings in the country gave happy afternoons and pleasant memories to more than eighty people. She asked them in little groups of twelve or fourteen, took them long country rambles, or obtained permission to saunter in a neighbour’s garden, and when the evenings drew in (it was in August) brought them back to her rooms, where a good tea-supper and a few songs brought the entertainment to a close.

The guests need not always be grown people. It is, perhaps, even more important to give the growing girl or the boy just entering into manhood a taste for simple pleasures. Very delightful is the interest and enjoyment of these young things in the country life and wonders. The evening sewing-class, consisting of big girls at work every day in factories; the Bible class of young men; the discussion club; the children-servants (so numerous and so joyless in our great cities)—such little groups can be found around every place of worship, or are known to every one living among or busying himself for the good of the poor. All are open to invitations, and these can be entertained even more easily than their elders. ‘Don’t you remember this or that?’ my young friends often ask about some trivial incident long since vanished from my memory, and when, demurring, I ask ‘When?’ the unfailing answer, varying in form but monotonous in substance, is ‘Why, that day when you took us into the country. You can’t forget. It was grand.’

Strangely ignorant are some of these town-bred folk of things which seem to us always to have been known and never to have been taught. They call every flower a rose, and express wonder at the commonest object. ‘Law! here’s straw a-growing!’ I once heard in a corn-field, and emerging into a fir-wood soon after, we all joined in a laugh at the remark, ‘Why, here’s hundreds of Christmas trees all together.’ Anything, provided it is joined to active movement, without which young things never seem quite happy, serves to amuse and to pass the time. A competition to see which girls shall gather the best nosegays, the proposal to the boys to search for some animal, queer plant, or odd stone, have helped to carry the guests over many miles and through long afternoons. Perhaps one of the nicest things which any young lady can do, even if she is not able or allowed to attempt the larger undertaking of a party, is to take some ten or twelve school boys and girls for a walk on their Saturday afternoon holiday. She need keep them, perhaps, only three or four hours, when milk or lemonade and buns, got at any milk-shop, will serve as a substitute for the usual tea.

But, besides these country parties which town-dwellers are quite unable to give, there is still left to us Londoners the possibility (not to say duty) of inviting the poor to our own houses. Our poor neighbours have not been asked to many such parties, but the few to which they have been bidden have been very pleasant. At one our hostess, but lately returned from the East, had arranged tableaux-vivants introducing Oriental costumes in her drawing-room, and the guests were delighted at seeing the people of the one foreign nation of which they knew anything—the Bible having been the literature which made them conversant with that—as large as life, and all ‘real men and solid women.’ Another time a little charade was got up, and proud was the mother whose baby was pressed into early service as a play-actor. Other friends have entertained us after a visit to the Kensington Museum or Zoological Gardens, while some evenings have been passed in much the same way as by other people who meet for social pleasure; with talk, music, strange foreign things, portfolios, and puzzles, though games may, perhaps, have occupied a somewhat longer time than is usual among guests with more conversational interests. To all of us have these parties given much pleasure—pleasure which is, in truth, healthful and refreshing amid the sorrow and pain so liberally mingled in the life’s cup of the poor. ‘This evening I’ve forgot all the winter’s troubles,’ followed the ‘Good-night’ from the lips of a pain-broken woman; and considering the ‘winter’s troubles’ included the death of a child and the semi-starvation resulting from the almost constant out-of-work condition of the husband, the party seemed a strangely inadequate means of producing even temporarily so large a result.

The efforts made to attend are one of the signs of how much these and the country parties are enjoyed. One woman came, with her puling, pink ten-days-old baby, and both men and women constantly get up from a sick-bed to return to it again as soon as the pleasure is over. ‘We can’t afford to lose it, yer see; they don’t come too often,’ is the sort of answer one usually receives in reply to remonstrance.

But this paper will accomplish its object if ‘they do come oftener,’ and if not only the poor of our big London, to whom we owe special duties, but if the poor of all great cities are more thought of in the light of guests.

The duty once recognised, the method becomes plain. Every one, even those whose work does not take them among the poor, can manage to be introduced to some who are leading pleasure-barren lives, and to employers of labour in factories or trades it is especially easy. The introduction made, the rest follows naturally, and though pleasure is in itself so great a good that I would hold the thing worth doing if this alone were obtained, yet I think a prophet’s eye is not needed to see the other possible good resulting from such gatherings. The wider interests, the seeds of culture, the introduction to simple recreations, the suggestion of ideal beauty, the possession of happy memories, the class relationships, are the advantages one can rapidly count off as accruing to the entertained, and as important are the gains of the entertainers. The rich, coming face to face with the poor, have seen patience which puts their restlessness to shame; endurance about which poems have yet to be written; hope which is deep and springing from the roots of their being; charity which never faileth, including, as it often does, the adoption of the orphan child or the sharing of the room with a lone woman, compared to which the biggest subscription is as nothing; kindliness which, though unthinking, spareth not itself. Each class has its virtues, but, as yet, they are unknown to each other. It is for the rich to take the first step towards knowing and being known; it is for them to say if the class hatreds, which like other ‘warfare comes from misunderstanding,’ shall exist in our midst. It is for them to make the way of friendship through the wall of gold now dividing the rich from the poor. It is for them to give fellowship which, crushing envy, takes the sting out of poverty. And all this can be done, by spending some thought, a little money, and some afternoons in being ‘At Home’ to the poor.

Great ends these to follow the small trouble and expense of a garden party. It will not, though, be the first time in history that good has been done by means which seemed contemptible, and it will not seem strange to those who have learnt that it is a Life and not a law, friendships and not organisations, which have taught the world its greatest lessons.

Henrietta O. Barnett.

VI.
UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENTS.[1]

[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Nineteenth Century of February 1884.

Once more, as happens in crises of history, rich and poor have met. ‘Scientific charity,’ or the system which aims at creating respectability by methods of relief, has come to the judgment, and has been found wanting. Societies which helped the poor by gifts made paupers, churches which would have saved them by preaching made hypocrites, and the outcome of scientific charity is the working man too thrifty to pet his children and too respectable to be happy.

Those who have tried hardest at planning relief and at bringing to a focus the forces of charity, those who have sacrificed themselves to stop the demoralising out-relief and restore to the people the spirit of self-reliance, will be the first to confess dissatisfaction if they are told that the earthly paradise of the majority of the people must be to belong to a club, to pay for a doctor through a provident dispensary, and to keep themselves unspotted from charity or pauperism. There is not enough in such hope to call out efforts of sacrifice, and a steady look into such an earthly paradise discloses that the life of the thrifty is a sad life, limited both by the pressure of continuous toil and by the fear lest this pressure should cease and starvation ensue.

The poor need more than food: they need also the knowledge, the character, the happiness which are the gift of God to this age. The age has received His best gifts, but hitherto they have fallen mostly to the rich.

It is a moment of Peace. To-day there are no battles, but the returns of the dead and wounded from accidents with machinery and from diseases resulting from injurious trades show that there are countless homes in which there must still be daily uncertainty as to the father’s return, and many children and wives who become orphans and widows for their country’s good.

It is an age of Knowledge. But if returns were made either of the increased health due to the skill of doctors and sanitarians, or of the increased pleasures due to the greater knowledge of the thoughts and acts of other men in other times and countries, it would be shown that neither length of days nor pleasure falls to the lot of the poor. Few are the poor families where the mother will not say, ‘I have buried many of mine.’ Few are the homes where the talk has any subject beyond the day’s doings and the morrow’s fears.

It is an age of Travel, but the mass of the poor know little beyond the radius of their own homes. It is no unusual thing to find people within ten miles of a famous sight which they have never seen, and it is the usual thing to find complete ignorance of other modes of life, a thorough contempt for the foreigner and all his ways. The improved means of communication which is the boast of the age, and which has done so much to widen thought, tends to the enjoyment of the rich more than of the poor.

It is an age of the Higher Life. Higher conceptions of virtue, a higher ideal of what is possible for man, are the best gift to our day, but it is received only by those who have time and power to study. ‘They who want the necessaries of life want also a virtuous and an equal mind,’ says the Chinese sage; and so the poor, being without those things necessary to the growth of mind and feeling, jeopardise Salvation—the possession, that is, of a life at one with the Good and the True, at one with God.

Those who care for the poor see that the best things are missed, and they are not content with the hope offered by ‘scientific charity.’ They see that the best things might be shared by all, and they cannot stand aside and do nothing. ‘The cruellest man living,’ it has been said, ‘could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold,’ and those who see must do something. They may be weary of revolutionary schemes, which turn the world upside down to produce after anarchy another unequal division; they may be weary, too, of philanthropic schemes which touch but the edge of the question. They may hear of dynamite, and they may watch the failure of an Education Act, as the prophets watched the failure of teachers without knowledge. They may criticise all that philanthropists and Governments do, but still they themselves would do something. No theory of progress, no proof that many individuals among the poor have become rich, will make them satisfied with the doctrine of laissez faire; they simply face the fact that in the richest country of the world the great mass of their countrymen live without the knowledge, the character, and the fulness of life which are the best gift to this age, and that some thousands either beg for their daily bread or live in anxious misery about a wretched existence. What can they do which revolutions, which missions, and which money have not done?

It is in answer to such a question that I make the suggestion of this paper. I make it especially as a development of the idea which underlies a College Mission. These Missions are generally inaugurated by a visit to a college from some well-known clergyman working in the East End of London or in some such working-class quarter. He speaks to the undergraduates of the condition of the poor, and he rouses their sympathy. A committee is appointed, subscriptions are promised, and after some negotiations a young clergyman, a former member of the college, is appointed as a Mission curate of a district. He at once sets in motion the usual parochial machinery of district visiting, mothers’ meetings, clubs, &c. He invites the assistance of those of his old mates who will help; at regular intervals he makes a report of his progress, and if all goes well he is at last able to tell how the district has become a parish.

The Mission, good as its influence may be, is not, it seems to me, an adequate expression of the idea which moved the promoters. The hope in the College when the first sympathy was roused was that all should join in good work, and the Mission is necessarily a Churchman’s effort. The desire was that as University men they should themselves bear the burdens of the poor—and the Mission requires of them little more than an annual guinea subscription. The grand idea which moved the College, the idea which, like a new creative spirit, is brooding over the face of Society, and is making men conscious of their brotherhood, finds no adequate expression in the district church machinery with which, in East London, I am familiar. There is little in that machinery which helps the people to conceive of religion apart from sectarianism, or of a Church which is ‘the nation bent on righteousness.’ There is little, too, in the ordinary parochial mechanism which will carry to the homes of the poor a share of the best gifts now enjoyed in the University.

Imagine a man’s visit to the Mission District of his college. He has thought of the needs of the poor, and of the way in which those needs are being met. He has formed in his mind a picture of a district where loving supervision has made impossible the wretchedness of ‘horrible London’; he expects to find well-ordered houses, people interested in the thoughts of the day, gathering round their pastor to learn of men and of God. He finds instead an Ireland in England, people paying 3s. or 4s. a week for rooms smaller than Irish cabins, without the pure air of the Irish hill-side, and with vice which makes squalor hopeless. He finds a population dwarfed in stature, smugly content with their own existence, ignorant of their high vocation to be partners of the highest, where even the children are not joyful. He measures the force which the Mission curate is bringing to bear against all this evil. He finds a church which is used only for a few hours in the week, and which is kept up at a cost of 150l. a year. He finds the clergyman absorbed in holding together his congregation by means of meetings and treats, and almost broken down by the strain put upon him to keep his parochial organisation going. The clergyman is alone, his church work absorbs his power and attracts little outside help. What can he do to improve the dwellings and widen the lives of 4,000 persons? What can he do to spread knowledge and culture? What can he do to teach the religion which is more than church-going? What wonder if, when he is asked what help he needs, he answers, ‘Money for my church,’ ‘Teachers for my Sunday school,’ ‘Managers for my clothing club’? What wonder, too, if the visitor, seeing such things and hearing such demands, goes away somewhat discontented, somewhat inclined to give up faith in the Mission, and, what is worse, ready to believe that there is no way by which the best can be given to the poor?

It is to members of the Universities anxious to unite in a common purpose of improving the lives of the people that I make the suggestion that University Settlements will better express their idea. College Missions have done some of the work on which they have been sent, but in their very nature their field is limited. It is in no opposition to these Missions, but rather with a view to more fully cover their idea, that I propose the new scheme. The details of the plan may be shortly stated.