investigation, co-operation on the part of your donors, thought and
time given by your wisest men. All these are essential, but I am not
going to dwell on them just now; the part of your work I am naturally
most interested in is your district visiting. I wonder whether you have
among you instances of the solitary, inexperienced district visitor,
and can feel for her difficulties? Do you know what I mean? A lady,
well born, highly cultivated, well nurtured, becomes convinced that
she has duties to the poor. Perhaps some great personal pain drives
her to seek refuge from it in Christian service of the poor; perhaps
some family loss darkens her whole horizon, and opens her eyes to
other forms of sorrow; perhaps some stirring sermon startles her in
the midst of triumphant pleasure, making her feel that she ought to
give some slight offering of time to the poor; perhaps weariness of all
superficial glitter of amusement makes her seek for deeper interests
in life. Be it what it may--desire to do good, or the urgent request
of a friend, or desire to escape pain, she determines to volunteer as
a district visitor. She is welcomed by the clergy, and requested to
take such and such a district--I really think she has often little
more preparation or instruction than that. She does not start with the
desire of knowing the poor, but of helping them; help being in her
mind synonymous in such cases with temporal help. She does not think
of them primarily as _people_, but as _poor_ people. But though her
ideas naturally therefore turn to questions of _relief_ as if these
were her main concerns, she has never studied what has been found to
be the effect of different ways of alms-giving, she knows little about
the earnings of the poor, little of their habits and expenses, little
about poor-law relief, little about the thousand and one societies for
granting various kinds of help, little about the individual donors at
work in the neighbourhood, little about distant fields of labour and
demands for workers in them. Now just pause and think of the effect
of her actions when she begins--as begin she must by the very fact of
her view of her duty--to deal practically with questions of relief;
questions which, to say the least, are so difficult to deal with wisely
that our most earnest, experienced, and thoughtful men pause in awe
before them, advance slowly to practical conclusions, and speak humbly
about them after years of study. Ladies would pause before they went in
and offered to help a house-surgeon at a hospital by undertaking a few
patients for him, yet are they not doing something like it when they
don't seek advice in district visiting? Gradually, after weeks, months,
perhaps years of worse than wasted labour, those who persevere begin
to realise the disastrous effect of their action; hundreds who do not
steadily persevere never even catch a glimpse of it, and go on blindly
scattering gifts to the destruction of the recipients. For just pause
and think what these gifts do to them. You or I go into a wretched
room; we see children dirty and without shoes, a forlorn woman tells us
a story of extreme poverty, how her husband can find no work. We think
it can do no harm to give the children boots to go to school; we give
them, and hear no more. Perhaps we go to Scotland the following week,
and flatter ourselves if we remember the children that that gift of
boots at least was useful. Yet just think what harm that may have done.
Perhaps the woman was a drunkard, and pawned the boots at once and
drank the money; or perhaps the man was a drunkard neglecting his home,
and the needs of it, which should have been the means of recalling
him to his duties, he finds partially met by you and me and others;
or perhaps the clergy have seen that the poor woman cannot support
the children and her husband, who is much too ill to find work, and
have felt that if she and they are not to die of starvation they must
go into the workhouse, for it is the only means of getting enough for
them; charity, not being organised in the district, cannot undertake to
do all that is wanted for them, and so had better do nothing. For gifts
so given may raise false hopes which you and I, now pleasantly enjoying
ourselves, never think of. Because we went in and gave those boots,
because others like us gave coal-tickets and soup-tickets last winter,
what may not turn up? the poor woman asks herself. That gambling,
desperate spirit enters into her heart, the stake being freedom and
home. She plays high: she wins, or loses. We charitable people first
of all never investigated the case to learn what it really was, what
the character of the people was, whether the home was worth keeping
together, whether with or without club-money it would cost more than
we were ready or able to give; we raised hopes which it is a chance
whether we fulfil; we met the want before us without thought; we forgot
to consider the influence of that action on the life. Such gifts are
uncertain, insufficient, based on no knowledge. Let us imagine that
in another case we give to a man whose income is small; what is the
effect on his character of these irregular doles? Do they not lead him
to trust to them, to spend up to the last penny what he earns, and hope
for help when work slackens or altogether fails? Does he try, cost
what it may, to provide for sickness, for times when trade is dull and
employment scarce? Yet though we have by our gifts encouraged him
in not making the effort to do this, are we quite sure to be at hand
when the need comes? Are we not most likely to be away? Trade is slack
when London is empty and district visitors away. Every man's riches
depend on his providence; they do so tenfold more markedly the nearer
poverty he is, yet we have undermined his providence by uncertain
action. Do not our doles encourage him to keep his big daughter at
home, earning a few pence in the street, where she has what she calls
"freedom," instead of training her for decent service? I believe our
irregular alms to the occupant of the miserable room, to the shoeless
flower-seller, are tending to keep a whole class on the very brink
of pauperism who might be taught self-control and foresight if we
would let them learn it. I believe too that our blanket charities,
soup-kitchens, free dormitories, old endowed charities distributing
inadequate doles, have a great tendency to keep down the rate of wages
of the very lowest class, partly because they come in like a rate in
aid of wages, not so regular as that of the old poor-law, yet still
appreciable--partly because they tempt large numbers who might raise
themselves to hang on to low callings, and make competition fiercer in
them and the chance of absolute want greater. The street-sellers and
low class desultory workers usually remain what they are by choice; a
little self-control would raise them into the ranks of those who are
really wanted, and who have made their way from the brink of pauperism
to a securer place, and one where they are under better influences.
Above all is this true of the children. A little self-control would
enable the daughters of most of these people to rise into the class of
domestic servants; and their sons, instead of remaining street-sellers,
would soon learn a trade or go to sea if they cared to do regular
work. We are largely helping, by our foolish gifts, to keep them
herded together in crowded, dirty, badly-built rooms, among scenes of
pauperism, crime, and vice. And we each of us think it is only the two
shillings and sixpence, only the shilling for this or that perfectly
justifiable object we have given. I have sometimes wanted to move some
widow and her children to the North, where the children would learn a
trade and support themselves well, where the woman would find much more
work at washing and charring, and where the family would have a cottage
healthy and spacious, instead of the one close room. The widow has
been a little fearful of making so important a step. If the guardians,
if the clergy, if, above all, the visitors, have let the need of work
teach its own natural lesson, that family has removed and has been
happy and independent. I have now several such well established in the
North. But if the various donors have broken in with their miserable
pittances of fixed or desultory relief, the family, in poverty and
uncertainty of income, have dragged on here in London. In nearly every
case requiring help there is some such step of _self_-help which ought
to be taken by the family itself, or some member of it; some girl ought
to go to service, some boy to get a place, some member of the family
to begin learning a trade, some cheaper lodging to be found. Depend on
it, you cannot wisely help a family, you cannot tell whether help at
all is needed, till the circumstances and character of each member has
been well investigated. Lay this to heart as a fact--I am certain of
it. Let it be with any of you who desire to do good a strict rule to
yourselves to have the case of every family you want to help thoroughly
scrutinised. If you can make up your mind not to give anything pending
the receipt of a report, so much the better. But if you can't (I think
you soon will), at any rate never give a sixpence without sending for
a report on the case; it will guide your future action in that and
other instances. It is not much I ask of you. The Charity Organisation
Society in every district in London will do the work for you free
of charge. I am afraid I cannot yet promise you that it will always
advise you as to efficient treatment; some of the committees could, and
all that could would. But it is even more difficult to advise as to
suitable treatment than to investigate a case, and it is not easy to
find members for thirty-eight committees yet who know very much of the
subject. But every Charity Organisation Committee will know _far_ more
than inexperienced visitors, and I should strongly advise all visitors
to consult the Committee about families in their district apparently
needing relief.
I hope you will notice that I have dwelt on the need of restraining
yourselves from alms-giving on the sole ground that such restraint is
the only true mercy to the poor themselves. I have no desire to protect
the purses of the rich, no hard feeling to the poor. I am thinking
continually and only of what is really kindest to them--kindest in
the long run, certainly, but still kindest. I think small doles unkind
to them, though they bring a momentary smile to their faces. First of
all, I think they make them really poorer. Then I think they degrade
them and make them less independent. Thirdly, I think they destroy the
possibility of really good relations between you and them. Surely when
you go among them you have better things to do for them than to give
them half-crowns. You want to know them, to enter into their lives,
their thoughts, to let them enter into some of your brightness, to
make their lives a little fuller, a little gladder. You who know so
much more than they might help them so much at important crises of
their lives; you might gladden their homes by bringing them flowers,
or, better still, by teaching them to grow plants; you might meet them
face to face as friends; you might teach them; you might collect their
savings; you might sing for and with them; you might take them into
the parks, or out for quiet days in the country in small companies,
or to your own or your friends' grounds, or to exhibitions or picture
galleries; you might teach and refine and make them cleaner by merely
going among them. What they would do for you I will not dwell on, for
if the work is begun in the right spirit you will not be thinking of
that; but I do believe the poor _have_ lessons to teach us of patience,
vigour, and content, which are of great value to us. We shall learn
them instinctively if we are among them as we ought to be as friends.
It is this side of your relation to them, that of being their friends,
which has given all the value to your work as district visitors; it has
been because you have been friends, in as far as you have been friends,
that the relation between you has been happy and good. The gift has
often darkened this view of you, and prevented the best among the poor
from wishing to know you; when it has absolutely been the expression
of friendship, its evil has been reduced to a great extent. But the
gift you have to make to the poor, depend upon it, is the greatest of
all gifts you can make--that of yourselves, following in your great
Master's steps, whose life is the foundation of all charity. The form
of it may change with the ages, the great law remains, "Give to him
that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not
thou away;" but see that thou give him bread, not a stone--bread, the
nourishing thing, that which wise thought teaches you will be to him
helpful, not what will ruin him body and soul; else, while obeying
the letter of the command, you will be false to its deep everlasting
meaning. My friends, I have lived face to face with the poor for now
some years, and I have not learned to think gifts of necessaries,
such as a man usually provides for his own family, helpful to them. I
have abstained from such, and expect those who love the poor and know
them individually will do so more and more in the time to come. I
have sometimes been asked by rich acquaintances when I have said this
whether I do not remember the words, "Never turn your face from any
poor man." Oh, my friends, what strange perversion of words this seems
to me. I may deserve reproach; I may have forgotten many a poor man,
and done as careless a thing as anyone, but I cannot help thinking that
to give _oneself_ rather than one's _money_ to the poor is not exactly
turning one's face from him. If I, caring for him and striving for him,
do in my inmost heart believe that my money, spent in providing what he
might by effort provide for himself, is harmful to him, surely he and I
may be friends all the same. Surely I am bound to give him only what I
believe to be best. He may not always understand it at the moment, but
he will feel it in God's own good time.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Read at Westminster, June 23rd, 1876.
IV.
A MORE EXCELLENT WAY OF CHARITY.[4]
You have asked me to speak to you to-night, though I am a stranger
to your parish, and know nothing of its special needs or special
advantages. Why, then, am I here? I suppose I may safely assume
that it is mainly because I represent those who have deep care for
the poor, and _also_ strong conviction that organisation and mature
thought are necessary to any action which shall be really beneficial
to them. I fancy your parish, like many another--like most others that
have not passed through the stage and answered the problem--is just
now questioning itself as to whether investigation, organisation,
deliberate and experienced decision, which it feels to be essential if
wise relief is to be secured, are, or are not, compatible with gentle
and kindly relief; whether charity can be fully of the heart, if it is
also of the head. If so, how are you to get the full strength of head
and heart. If this is impossible, what in the world you are to do,
for you cannot give up either. You ask practically, I fancy, when you
invite me here, what I think on these points.
I answer, then, emphatically and decidedly, that my experience confirms
me entirely in the belief that charity loses nothing of its lovingness
by being entirely wise. Now it cannot be wise without full knowledge
of the circumstances of those to be dealt with--hence the necessity
of investigation; it cannot come to satisfactory conclusions on those
facts unless it employs the help of experienced men--hence the need
of a committee for decision; it will not be gracious and gentle, nor
fully enter into individual needs, unless it secures the assistance of
a good body of visitors. I do not wish to draw your attention to any
special form of organisation, but I believe you will find, the more you
think of it, that some form is needed, and that whatever it be, it will
have to secure those three as essentials--good investigation, decision
by a wise committee, and the help of a staff of visitors.
I shall say nothing further on the first head, Investigation, except
that I consider it is done best by a good paid officer. A great deal of
the preliminary work is quickly and well done by an experienced person,
which it would be difficult for a volunteer to do; neither is it a sort
of work which it is worth while for a volunteer to undertake. I refer
to verifying statements as to residence, earnings, employment, visiting
references, and employers. The finishing touches of investigation, the
little personal facts, the desires and hopes, and to a certain extent
the capacities of the applicant, no doubt a volunteer visitor would
learn more thoroughly, but that can always be done separately from the
preliminary and more formal inquiry.
And now to turn to the consideration of the visitors--those who must be
the living links binding your committee with the poor, the interpreters
of their decision, the bearers of their alms, the perpetual guardians
to prevent renewed falling into want. I have spoken in so many other
places of the extreme value of such a body working in concert with
a wise committee, and of the mistakes they are likely to make where
undirected, that I am unwilling to dwell on either point in much
detail here. I will only briefly reiterate that I think no committee
can do its work with real individual care unless it contains those who
will watch over each family with continuous interest, interpret its
decisions intelligently and kindly, and learn all personal detail which
may assist the committee in judging rightly. Unhappily, visitors have
very seldom any special training for their work, nor is the need of it
pointed out to them. I earnestly wish we could get this recognised;
not that any should be deterred from working from want of training,
but that in every district some plans for advising and helping the
inexperienced visitors, and binding all visitors more together, should
be adopted. I have, in a paper read elsewhere, given a sketch of a
practical scheme for securing this end. But even without the help
there spoken of, visitors might try to look a little farther into the
result of their action. They think of the immediate effect, and very
little of the future one. Now in all things we must beware of hasty
action. It is not well, in the desire to alleviate an immediate want,
to produce worse want in the future. I do not know the poor of your
district: there may be many more of them, and they may be poorer, than
I suppose; but in really populous poor parishes I have found, and
surely you should find here, that an immense deal more might be done
by the people for themselves than has been done hitherto. Whatever may
be the difficulties of finding work for them, aim at that first. Try
to get them to bring up their children to callings requiring skill,
and which will raise them to the higher ranks of labour; help them to
save; encourage them to join clubs; lend them books; teach them to
cultivate and care for flowers. These and other like influences will
indirectly help them far more even as to outward comforts, than any
gifts of necessaries. But do not, when a family wants help, hesitate to
give largely, if adequate help will secure permanent good. Remember, if
you establish people in life so that they can be self-supporting, it is
well worth while to do it, cost what it may.
I know little of your parish. But if it be, as I fancy, one in which
the rich are many and the poor few compared to other places, I should
like to add a word or two to such residents as are in good health
and working here, urging them to consider the needs of more desolate
districts, and pause to think whether or not they could transfer some
of their time to them. I know it is a difficult question, and one to
be judged in each case on its merits. I know well what may be urged
on the ground of individual friendships formed with dwellers in your
neighbourhood, on the score of want of strength and time, and the
claims of your own parish. Weigh these by all means, but think of
the other side too, if by chance you can realise it. Friendship with
poor old women in your district! Respect its claims; but are there no
times when it may be worth while to make a change in work, even if
it cause one to see less of friends? Have you ever seen the ward of
an East End workhouse, where from year's end to year's end the old
women live without any younger life round them, no sons or daughters
whose strength may make their feebleness more bearable, no little
grandchildren to be cared for, and make the old which is passing forget
itself in the young which is coming into vigour! Is your bright young
presence not asked for by the gray, monotonous, slowly-ebbing life of
those wards? If your strength does not allow you to visit in remote
districts, I grant that an unanswerable argument; for strength is meant
to be temperately used and not thrown away. Time! Well, it takes time
to go backwards and forwards; but isn't one hour where the need is
great and the workers very few worth more than many hours in a more
favoured district?
Have you ever realised what those acres and acres of crowded, heated,
badly-built houses, over which you pass so quickly by train when you
go in and out of London, mean? What kind of homes they make? What sort
of human beings live and die there? Have you asked yourselves whether
your presence, your companionship, is needed there? Whether the little
children want your teaching? Whether your gentleness, your refinement,
your gaiety, your beauty, are wanted there? Neighbourhood! Oh yes, it
has strong claims--some of the best possible; but then we must take
care that we let our neighbours come round us naturally, rich _and_
poor. I only know this neighbourhood as I see it from the station, and
it is possible it is otherwise inside, for I know quarters where the
poor lodge often escape the eye of a casual observer; but I do know
districts which _are_ very like what yours _looks_, where the villas
cover all the ground, and there is no place for the poor man's cottage.
Where the idea of building for him would be mentioned with awed
abhorrence by the comfortable residents, and they would talk about the
unpleasantness of the poor living so near, chances of infection, &c.
&c. Where the few persons required to serve the needs of the residents
live, in a somewhat pampered and very respectful dependence, in small
districts decently withdrawn from view, visited and over-visited by
ladies who haven't far to go--where the poor say there isn't a house to
be had, and the rich say they get everything from a distance.
While you are determined to have the _rich_ neighbourhoods, you
must have the poor ones elsewhere. When you have gathered the poor
round you, built for them, taught them, purified their houses and
habits by your near presence, by all means talk about the claims of
neighbourhood. But till then you must, I believe, take a wider outlook,
and think of the neighbourhoods you have left, where moreover those who
indirectly serve you earn their bread. You who are merchants' wives
and daughters, nay, even those of you who buy the merchants' goods,
have the dock-labourers no claims upon you? If the question, Who is my
neighbour? is asked by you, how do you think God answers it from heaven
when He looks down and sees the vast multitudes of undisciplined poor
by whose labour you live, and the few heroic workers whose lives are
being spent for those poor almost forsaken by you?
And if some of you went there to give what little of leisure, what
little of strength, you have to spare, would your own neighbourhood
suffer? I fancy not. For it seems as if usually where there are few
poor and many rich living near together, the former become dependent
in fat unenergetic comfort on the latter; and if this be such a
neighbourhood, a few finding a call for their sympathy and help
elsewhere might do good to all. It might be a real blessing to the
place where you live to transfer to other and needier districts some of
the superfluous wealth and unneeded care which from its very abundance
may be spoiling and pampering your native poor. What a good thing it
might be if each of your congregation here would undertake to help with
money and with workers some poor district where wise principles were
being strenuously and faithfully worked out. Only remember, though
you may send your money, and send it to those who use it wisely, the
gift is a very poor one compared with that of yourselves. It is _you_
who are wanted there, your love, your knowledge, your sympathy, your
resolution--above all, your knowledge; for if you saw, you could not
leave things as they are. For instance, on a summer evening sultry as
this, there are thousands of families who have no place to sit in but
one close room, in which the whole family has eaten, slept, washed,
cooked. It is stifling. They go to the doorstep; their neighbours are
at their steps. It gets hotter, the children swarm in the narrow court;
the dust flies everywhere; the heat, the thirst is insufferable, the
noise deafening, the crowd bewildering; they go to the public-house:
do you wonder? It may be there are a few spaces unbuilt over close
by, but who will open the gates for them, plant a few flowers, put
a few seats? The garden of Lincoln's Inn Fields is certainly kept
very lovely; but how few eyes are allowed to see it; Red Lion Square
is a howling ugliness; the Board School playgrounds are closed on
Saturday;[5] the little graveyard in Drury Lane[6]--half the graveyards
in London--are close locked and barred, and left in ugliness too; the
Quakers are actually deciding to sell for building purposes their
ancient burial-ground near Bunhill Fields.[7] Can they not afford to
let the place allotted to their dead be consecrated to the poor and
become a place of rest to the weary living before their pilgrimage is
over? Money, money, money, to spend where we see its effect in parks,
or villas, or cosy suburban houses, and not a glimpse of what we might
do with it in the districts where the poor live and die.
Of course this is only one side of the truth, and no one knows the
converse better than I. I know how people are coming forward year by
year to do and to feel more and more of their duty to the poor. The
interest deepens and spreads, and that rapidly. Haven't I myself such
a body of fellow-workers as makes me hardly know how to be thankful
enough? And doubtless many of you here are doing exactly what I urge,
or better things than I have thought of. But forgive me if the sight of
all that is needed sometimes makes me a little impatient, and urge the
point with some implied reproach towards those who delay to come and do
what it looks as if they might. I daresay they may many of them have
better reasons than I know for holding aloof: all have not the same
duties; but sure I am that the need is urgent, and that to many such
work would add new and deeper interests to life. I only say, "Look for
yourselves what the need is, consider what your duty may be, and when
seen do it resolutely, quietly, hopefully."