on the case of an applicant. When the facts respecting his condition
and character are ascertained, the problem is simply this. How can he
be so helped that the help may soon be needed no longer; how placed
speedily out of the reach of want, in an honourable useful place where
he can help himself? Or if his need be necessarily chronic, how can he
be provided for adequately and regularly--so regularly that he shall
be tempted neither to begging nor extravagance? It is very difficult
to set a man up again in the world; and the main hope of doing it is
to pause deliberately over his case, to bring to bear upon it all the
collected information, all the practised experience, and intelligent
thought of men and women accustomed to think out such problems, and
to watch the results of many attempts to solve them. The ordinary
district visitor has no qualifications for forming an opinion on the
best way of meeting the difficulties of the case, nor usually has the
busy clergyman much more. The visitor has very rarely even a glimmering
notion that there is such a way of dealing with the poverty she pities,
she hardly dreams that it is possible to attack it at its roots, and
so she gives the ticket or the shilling. The clergyman usually feels
that this is an unsatisfactory way of treating the matter; but he knows
probably no more than the visitor, in what part of the country there
may be an opening for work for the man whose trade is slack in London;
nor what training would enable the invalid girl who can only use her
hands, and lies bed-ridden and helpless, to contribute something
to the common income; nor what institution would receive, and how
the guardians might pay for, the cripple who is made an excuse for
begging for the whole family, and how he might learn a trade, and in
the future honourably support himself. It is only a body accustomed to
deal with many such cases, to devote attention to practical questions
mainly, that acquires the knowledge of what measures can be taken under
different circumstances, and knows the latest news as to the labour
market, and the opportunities open to the needy.
I am far from saying that the Charity Organisation Society has, as yet,
in each of the thirty-eight divisions of London, a committee capable of
giving a valuable opinion on a case; nor even that in every district
the committee has realised that to give such an opinion is its real
end and aim. But I do say that this is the intention of the Society,
and that on the committee, if anywhere, you will in each neighbourhood
find the men and women most alive to the importance of fulfilling this
duty; for more and more of the district committees are finding members
who set before themselves the necessity of learning to execute it.
I know little of your own Charity Organisation Committee, but I would
ask you to remember that it is not a separate society coming from afar
and settling down among you. It is what you workers among the poor make
it; it is you who ought to form it. And that which I said above you
separately were not able to do, collectively you, and none but you, can
do--decide what help it is wise to give to every poor man or woman who
comes before you at a crisis in life. A representative from every local
charity, a few men conversant with the work of every great metropolitan
charity, two or three active guardians, the clergy and ministers of all
denominations, or some leading member of their staff or congregations,
these should form your district committee. After careful investigation
by a skilled paid officer, the case of an applicant for charity, when
it comes before such a committee as that, has a fair chance of really
effectual treatment. Either someone present will know of work that
needs to be done; or, if the applicant's wants can only be met by
distinct gift, then, all the givers or their representatives being
present, the gift can after due deliberation be made without chance of
overlapping, with certainty that it is sufficient and its object well
thought out.
District visitors will find it valuable to study with the district
committee many questions respecting relief. The work of visitors is
one in which I have long taken the deepest interest; their gentle
influence in their informal visits is just what is wanted to bridge
over the great chasm which lies open between classes. Rich and poor
should know one another simply and naturally as friends, and the more
visitors can enter into such real friendship the better. When, however,
they attempt to deal with cases of relief, I feel that they possess
few of the qualifications requisite for doing it wisely, and I would
most seriously urge them, either to leave this branch of help entirely
to others, or with deliberate purpose to set themselves to learn all
that it is essential to them to know before they can do it well. For
there is more at stake, a great deal more, than the wasting of their
own or their friends' money: that would matter comparatively little
if the effect of mistake in its use were not positively disastrous
to the poor. But it is disastrous. We go into the house of a young
working-man; we meet with ready gift the first need as it arises; we
do not pause to remember how the effort to meet that need was a duty
for the young husband and father. We discourage the quiet confidence,
the careful forethought which would have made a man of him; we diminish
his sense of responsibility; the way he spends his earnings begins to
appear to him a matter of smaller moment--he dissipates them in the
public-house; he gets into the habit of doing so; we, or succeeding
visitors, feel the hopelessness of help increase; not only does the
drag upon our purse become heavier and heavier, but it becomes clearer
to us that the money we give does not adequately feed the wife and
children, while it does lead the husband to hope that if he yields to
the strongly increased temptation to drink, some lady will help, some
charity interpose, the children won't quite starve. We have weakened
the natural ties, broken the appointed order, and the neat, tidy little
home has sunk into the drunkard's desolate room.
Or we take up the case of a widow, and instead of once for all
considering how much she can do for her own and her children's support,
and deliberately uniting our forces to relieve her once for all of that
part of the cost which she cannot meet, we let her come up to our house
whenever she cannot fulfil her engagements, and we give her, when her
story or tears move us, a few shillings. We ease our own feelings by
doing this, but what besides have we done. We have not fortified her
for the battle of life; we have not cultivated in her the habit of
deliberate arrangement as to the best expenditure of her scanty means.
We have done something to teach her how easy it is, if she gets into
debt and the brokers are put in, to go round to one house after another
and get a few shillings from each, and having met the difficulty for
the moment to begin involving herself in another. Look at her a few
years later. The sincere grief of the widowed mother has been degraded
into a means of begging; the ready tears come, or appear to come, at
call; the sacred grief is for everyone to see in hopes someone may
alleviate it with half-a-crown. The sense of a right to be helped has
grown, the sense of her own duty has diminished. Work has not paid
so well that it has been steadily persevered in. The easily begged
money has been easily spent; the powers of endurance, the habits of
industry are gone; grief is her stock-in-trade; its frequent use has
diminished the power of feeling strongly and sincerely. Perhaps she has
discovered that professions of piety are rewarded with half-crowns, and
expressions, once sincere, have become cant phrases. We are shocked
at her; we say we were glad enough to help her when she was working,
and was feeling simply and strongly, but now it is different. My
friends, who made it different? God gave her the sacred sorrow and the
difficulties of her life to soften and to train her. It might have
been well that we should like true friends have stood by her, and so
far diminished her difficulty as to make it just within her power to
meet it; it might have been well for us to support one child, to pay
school-fees, or to help in some other way by some one distinct payment,
so regular as to become very natural to her, but in some way we ought
to have left her responsibilities to have been met by her own energies.
Then we should have been able to take and keep the position of friends;
she would not have learned to watch our faces to see what expression
on her part extorted pity or shillings best, but would have come to us
when the memories of the past were too heavy to bear alone, and the
words of hope in God's mercy and wisdom would have been spoken from the
heart to the heart.
Let visitors be friends, and nothing else, leaving money help to
others; or else study seriously all wise effectual ways of help,
that they may not be driven to miserable doles of half-crowns and
bread-tickets, which are surely destructive of vigorous life in the
poor, and of natural healthy relation between friends. I could, you
could yourselves, multiply instances of this a hundredfold. It will be
more profitable to study how in the future they may be avoided.
A marked advantage of district committees is that, while doing nothing
to weaken local action, they present a larger area to the sympathy
of their members. When parishes were first constituted, each parish
must in general have had its own rich and poor. But this has ceased
to be so in many cases, owing to the large population dwelling in a
small area. The tendency of late has been to subdivide ecclesiastical
districts. The rich are not anxious to have the poor living in very
close proximity to them, and every class is more and more driven into
quarters appropriated exclusively to itself. The consequence of this
is--and increasingly--that if a rich man says, "I will help in my own
parish," there are vast numbers of poor living perhaps near to him,
probably within what in the country would be considered easy walking
distance, and certainly in the same town, whose lives he does not
touch. I cannot tell you how terrible to me appear these vast spaces
of ground covered with houses inhabited by persons at one dead level
of poverty; sometimes the tracts appropriated to the houses of the
wealthy seem to me in another way more terrible. All good gifts, for
which we are bound to lift our hearts in praise to God, seem to retain
their sanctity only when they are shared; and it seems to me often as
if the luxury, the ease, the splendour, yes, even the fair spaces of
lawn and terrace were almost ghastly when they are enjoyed by those who
never consider the poor, in whom no spirit of self-sacrifice leads to
resolute appropriation of some large share of the good things to those
who are out of the way. There are few who do not recognise the duty of
giving or sharing in some measure; but the subdivision of districts,
leaving one poor and another rich, the ever-extending size of London
making the poor farther and farther off from the rich, has a tendency
to shut out many poor from this sympathy.
The Charity Organisation Society has done something to mitigate this
evil, to make you feel that you are parts of a larger whole than your
ecclesiastical parish. The poor-law has compulsorily made you feel it.
When it became clear that it was intolerably unjust to throw the burden
of the largest number of paupers on the poorest ratepayers, poor-law
areas were enlarged so as to unite rich and poor neighbourhoods;
also, certain expenditure was charged to a metropolitan rate. That
poor-law arrangement, however, never touched your hearts. It is
doubtful whether the dwellers in Fitzroy Park feel more united with
those in Somer's Town because they are both in St. Pancras parish,
nor much added tenderness for the sick man in Poplar, because if he
has small-pox he is carried to a hospital supported by a metropolitan
rate. The alteration has done good because it has equalised burdens,
and enforced the fulfilment of a duty. But the Charity Organisation
Society does more--it asks you to accept this duty as a privilege, and
voluntarily and gladly to help, remembering the less favoured districts
which are near you, or which, though farther off, still belong to the
same city. It has taken the poor-law boundary to mark its area; it
has asked all charitable people within that area to meet and consult
about their charities; it has arranged that the working expenses of
office and agent shall be shared by a large district, it has formed a
meeting-place, where workers for the poor shall be able to learn each
what the other is doing, even at the farther extremes of a long parish
like this. You will certainly enlarge your sympathies if thus you meet;
for when there come before you the stories of living men and women
wanting help in districts where funds are not abundant, when you learn
to know the clergy and others labouring in poorer places, you will
begin to interpret the word "neighbour" in a large and liberal sense.
Do you realise how limited is our notion of it now, and what it has
brought us to? Have you any picture before you of the parts of London
where for acres and acres the ground is covered with the dwellings
of the poor alone, where no landlord can afford many feet of space
unbuilt over at the back of his house; where the clergyman toils on
almost singlehanded, for unrefreshed year after unrefreshed year;
where curates will hardly go and work; where no gay life enlivens the
monotony of toil, which is interrupted only by the wild unholy carousal
of a Bank holiday; where the clergyman's wife can hardly sleep because
of the wild mirth of the surrounding streets? We talk of the claims of
parish and neighbourhood, and they should be seriously remembered; but
are they not sometimes urged rather from a lazy desire not to take the
trouble to go farther, or from the easy agreeable wish to oblige the
neighbouring minister, who calls to ask a new resident for help in the
Sunday school or district? If, indeed, the decision is a deliberate
choice of a near duty distinctly seen, rather than of a far off one
less realised, one may respect it. But we must remember there are other
claims than those arising out of proximity, and that it may be our
duty to realise what is not brought under our eyes. We live upon the
labours of the poor in districts far from our homes. Our fathers and
brothers may have chambers, factories, offices right down among them.
We are content to draw our wealth from these. Does this imply no duty?
Is the whole duty fulfilled when the head of a firm draws a cheque
for donations to the local charity, and are the gentle ministrations
of the ladies of the family to be confined to the few pampered
poor near their house? It is our withdrawal from the less pleasant
neighbourhood to build for ourselves substantial villas with pleasant
gardens, which has left these tracts what they are. Even when there
is nothing sensationally terrible in the wickedness or destitution of
a place, when it is covered with little houses of laundresses or small
shopkeepers, are we who have advantages of education or refinement not
needed there? Have we no bright flowers to take to the people, no books
to lend, no sweet sympathy and young brightness to carry among them?
Ought we not to be accumulating those memories which will give us a
place near them as real friends if the time of loss and trial comes?
I would urge you all who are inhabitants of a large parish, markedly
divided into poor and rich districts, as citizens of a city fearfully
so divided, to weigh well your duties; and, never forgetting the near
ones to home and neighbourhood, to remember also that when Europe is
sacrificed to England, England to your own town, your own town to your
parish, your parish to your family, the step is easy to sacrifice
your family to yourself. Whereas if you try to accept the duty as
our Lord showed it, and to carry with you joyfully in such acceptance
those who are nearest and dearest to you, you will find that a large
and true imagination will show you the place which every duty should
hold in your lives; you will not find any human being so away but
that your sympathy will reach, and your desire to help will tell in
due degree if the need of help comes. Your life, be it shadowed ever
so much by individual loss or pain, will be full and blessed; for all
God's children will be dear to you, and His earth sacred; you will
have no real conflict of duties, nor long doubt about their relative
importance; no pain shall overwhelm, nor doubt confound you; for the
blessing of guidance shall be yours, and you will assuredly learn what
those words mean, "When thou passest through the waters I will be with
thee, and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee." "Though the
Lord give thee the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction,
yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more; but thine
eyes shall see thy teachers, and thine ears shall hear a word saying,
This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand or when
ye turn to the left."
FOOTNOTE:
[9] Paper read at a meeting of the Charity Organisation Society, at
Highgate, June 18th, 1877.
VIII.
THE FUTURE OF OUR COMMONS.
The question of the appropriation of the common land of England is
one which is of great importance now, and which will be of increasing
importance as time goes on. The matter is not simply one of providing a
public park or common in the near neighbourhood of cities which are now
large and rapidly increasing, nor of securing a cricket or recreation
ground and an acre or two of cottage gardens to a few villagers. The
question before the country--and it is well we should realise its
magnitude before important decisions are made--is whether, consistently
with all private rights, there is still any land in England which can
be preserved for the common good; and, secondly, in what way such land
can best be used. Is it best to parcel it out amongst various owners,
and increase the building or corn-growing area? Is it best to let the
largest possible amount of it in allotments to the poor? Is it well to
devote any portion of it, in rural as well as suburban districts, to
the public, to be by them enjoyed in common, in the form of beautiful,
wild, open space?
It must be observed that the nation as a nation is not held to
possess the open, uncultivated, unappropriated land of England. True,
generation after generation has passed over much of it freely, but it
seems that the people are not thereby held to have acquired a right
to do so. Perhaps this is because such right has no money value, for
rights of way, rights of light, rights of possession of soil, even
rights on these very open spaces of pasturing cattle, cutting furze
and of playing games are recognised by law when they have been long
enjoyed. Had the right to wander freely, and to enjoy the beauty of
earth and sky, been felt to be a more distinct possession, it may be
that these rights also would have been legally recognised; but it has
not hitherto been so. It is, therefore, lords of manors and commoners
who have mainly the control of such waste places. When, however, they
come to Parliament to ask to have their respective rights settled, and
to get leave to inclose, Parliament has, under the Inclosure Acts,
distinctly a voice in deciding the appropriation of the land. What
ought its decision to be, having in view the future life of the nation
as well as the present one?
That æsthetic considerations govern individuals in the disposition of
their own estates is clear. When a gentleman possesses an estate he
apportions it to various uses. He asks himself how much of it he will
devote to arable land and kitchen garden; some small part he may set
aside for his children, that they may dig in it and plant it in their
spare time; and a part of it he will devote probably to a flower-garden
or a park; for he knows that the family has need of enjoyment and of
rest, and that beauty sustains in them some higher life than the mere
material one. Are we as a nation to have any flower-garden at all? Can
we afford it? Do we care to set aside ground for it, or will we have
beet-root and cabbages only? In other words, is all the land, so far as
the people are concerned, from sea to sea, to be used for corn-growing,
or building over only? Are those who own estates to have their gardens,
and the people to have none? or, if any, how many and how pretty may
they be? Is there only land enough for exercise near the big city, or
can we have any for beauty far away from it?
Surely we want some beauty in our lives; they cannot be all labour,
they cannot be all feeding. When the work is done, when the eating
is finished, the soul and spirit of men ask for rest; they want air,
they want the sense of peace, they want the sense of space, they
want the influence of beauty. Men seek it on the rocky sea-shore, on
the peaks of the mountains, by the streams in the valleys, or on the
heather-covered moorlands. Over-excited in the cities, over-strained
by toil, they need, if it were but once in their lives, that wonderful
sense of pause and peace which the near presence of the great creations
of God gives. The silence brings them marvellous messages, the clouds
seem their companions, the lights which pass over the heather-covered
hills fill them with an immeasurable joy. Old cares seem so far away
as hardly to be real; and in the great peace which surrounds them the
whole spirit is brought into harmony with grander music, tuned to
nobler imaginings, and nerved for mightier struggles. "Man does not
live by bread alone." And the words God speaks to us on the moorlands
proceed, indeed, from His mouth with audible power, and memories of
them haunt us with ennobling and consoling thought in the bustle, the
struggle, and the pain to which we must return. This as individuals we
know. There are signs that, as a Nation, we are beginning to see it.
A very remarkable change with regard to the relative value of different
uses of land has taken place in England during the last thirty years,
as the course taken by the Legislature sufficiently proves. Mr. Cross,
in introducing the Commons Act of last year, laid stress upon this
change. He pointed out that the Inclosure Act of 1845 was framed when
the notion of statesmen was that England must depend, at any rate in
case of war, wholly on herself for the wheat which her people needed.
The Corn Laws were not then repealed; the country was not nearly so
thickly populated; space was far more abundant; and the production of
wheat seemed the best possible use to which land could be devoted.
It was far different now. Corn reached our shores untaxed; our
population had so vastly increased that it necessarily depended largely
on imported wheat; we had learned much more about the importance to
health of fresh air and exercise, and we felt increasingly the value
of space as well as food for our people. The needs of the nation in
1845 demanded inclosure for purposes of cultivation, and the Act of
that year was accordingly specially drawn to facilitate it. But now the
case was different, and Mr. Cross stated that his Bill was specially
intended to promote regulation to meet the growing need of open space.
Further proof of the change in public opinion is afforded by the course
taken by Parliament with regard to the New Forest. In 1851 no public
objection was raised to an Act which was passed, empowering the Crown
to plant formal and monotonous plantations of fir-trees, valuable as
timber, in such a manner as eventually to cover the whole expanse of
forest; while in 1876 this Act was repealed in favour of one which
provided that the ancient trees and wild undergrowth should be left
henceforward undisturbed; thus showing that the nation is now willing
to sacrifice the profits accruing from fast-growing timber in order to
preserve forest glades and heathery slopes, valuable only for their
beauty.