A PROGRAMME OF HELPFULNESS
The Triumph over Blindness—The Professor’s Audience—Free Trade
and Protection—The Luxury of Light—The Malady of Poverty.
[Sidenote: The Triumph over Blindness.]
His election to a professorial chair meant much to Fawcett and helped
greatly to carry him successfully forward in the career which he had
mapped out for himself. It proved two points of much significance in his
life as a blind man: first, that his colleagues and the elder men in
authority at Cambridge thought that he had the intellectual training and
qualifications to develop the honourable post to which he was elected;
and secondly, that they did not feel that his blindness would hinder his
making the most of his knowledge or prevent his students reaping good
results from his lectures. Perhaps no less important was the added
buoyancy and confidence given to Fawcett by a knowledge of his ability
to control and lead men, even if they were only his pupils at Cambridge.
This was a step, even if a very small one, on his path towards his
election to Parliament. From that point of vantage he felt that he could
ultimately lead the hosts of the ignorant and oppressed and force great
issues for the national welfare.
The material advantages following his victory were also important: his
fellowship yielded from £250 to £300 a year, which, with his
professorship worth £300 a year, was sufficient for his needs. He
rejoiced that his professorship compelled him to be at Cambridge for
eighteen weeks each year, and for the rest of his life he continued to
give his annual course of lectures.
The attitude taken towards the duties of a professor at Cambridge at
that time seems to us now almost comic and Gilbertian. It was not
expected that the professor should have a voluntary attendance of
enthusiastic pupils at his lectures. When it was considered advisable
for him to have a larger audience, the lecture-rooms were filled by
forcing the ‘poll’ men, that is the undergraduates taking the Ordinary
Degree, to attend a certain number of lectures; and whilst this
arrangement remained in force Fawcett had a large share of these coerced
auditors. In 1876 the regulation was done away with, and his lectures
were nearly deserted, though in his later years he had again a
respectable audience.
[Sidenote: The Professor’s Audience.]
A friend who saw Fawcett lecturing at Cambridge after the repeal of
compulsory attendance says that the impression made upon him was
grotesque. On entering the lecture-room, which was practically deserted,
one saw the huge blind man holding forth with his ringing voice to
space. Fawcett, in answer to condolences on this weird phenomenon,
replied, with a merry laugh, that it was quite all right and he was used
to it.
Fawcett was practically the only professor who objected to the
withdrawal of compulsion; he said that he had been convinced by
experience that his hearers profited more than he had anticipated.
Examinations showed that they had really acquired useful knowledge. He
did not share the objections of his colleagues, who felt that they had
to lecture above the capacities of their enforced audiences. He should
not, he said, alter in any case the character of his own lectures. There
is something sublime and adamantine in this attitude; with his two feet
planted firmly, the blind man proposed not for a moment to lessen the
height of his intellectual stature, but by sheer force and
determination, derrick-like, to hoist even the lowest members of his
audience up to his own level. The impracticability of this point of view
is obvious, but it is intensely Fawcettian. He felt that the great
truths embodied in political economy were so simple and vital that he
could graft them painlessly and with good results on the most unfertile
mind.
[Sidenote: The Science of Helpfulness.]
He did not confine himself to elucidating the essential elements of his
science only, nor was he content to reiterate what he had said to former
audiences. He loved political economy as a living and helpful science.
His lectures were always fresh, earnest, and illustrated by the bearing
of the subject on history or current political events. He did not care
to teach subtleties, but to drill his pupils in a science which he
firmly believed would help them to deal intelligently and efficiently
with the great problems of inequality, poverty, ignorance, and misery
which were calling in vain to high Heaven to be solved.
Fawcett’s critics among the younger men often felt that he was too
conservative. He idealised Mill, and his friends maintained that he had
read no book except Mill’s _Political Economy_; it was true that he had
read no book so exhaustively. He urged his hearers at one of his
lectures to study some good book until they were prepared to give the
substance and fully to analyse the argument of every chapter, and then
having acted conscientiously on his advice himself, naïvely suggested
Mill’s _Political Economy_ as excellent for this purpose.
[Sidenote: Homely Political Economy.]
He proved the teachings of Ricardo and Mill by what he had learned from
the conditions of the country folk about Salisbury and Cambridge. He was
wont to base his arguments on some homely, definite fact as illustration
for his plain, home-made reasoning; for instance, he objected to a
certain increased tax because it meant that every old woman in England
would have a lump of sugar the less in her tea. That was the concrete
thing on which he based his policy; and surely it is not one to be
overlooked by a true statesman. He supplemented his knowledge by
studying inexhaustibly the political, financial and economic movements
of his time, and delighted in spending a quiet Sunday reading through
all the newspapers he could collect. His appetite for them was
insatiable, and he felt that he had been defrauded if his friends, when
reading the Parliamentary debates, skipped any of even ‘the blow off,’
as they called the peroration.
He enriched his mind less by a pre-occupation with the abstract theory
of Political Economy than by keeping constantly in touch with the
affairs which were in actual course of transaction.
[Sidenote: _Free Trade and Protection._]
He was keenly interested in all those questions where political economy
borders on finance. His book, _Free Trade and Protection_, published
fifteen years after his first, assailed the tariff fetish dear to his
generation. Terse and masterly, his publication became popular, and was
regarded by many of the critics of his day as conclusive. In it he
limited the problem to what he deemed its practical viewpoint. To him
this was purely a commercial one, a question of profit and loss. Was
protection profitable or not? He found that, sporadic evidence at times
to the contrary, protection was not a paying business, and that it would
only be maintained in the long run by a loss to the community, and
therefore he considered it an obstruction in the way of progress,
capital, and the general weal.
[Sidenote: The Luxury of Light.]
He was impressed by the fact that the evil of the day was the hopeless
poverty of the mass of the people. He felt that the only way to help
them was to understand the principles that govern ‘the conditions and
consequences of money making and money spending,’ and so discover how
best to make it possible for them to earn more money, that is, to have
more power in exchange. He felt that men should be less content with
their lot, and that schools and savings banks to replace the
public-house would be great factors for regeneration. He used to tell
the following anecdote, which touched his friend Mill deeply. Fawcett
knew a Wiltshire man who was in the habit of going to bed at dusk. The
man explained that this was his custom because he could not afford a
candle, and added that, even if he could, he could not read, so why
should he have the expense or luxury of light? How was it possible to
change this labourer’s horizon, to lift him beyond the degrading
pressure of sordid poverty, and to fill him with ambition, when he had
to support his wife and himself on nine shillings a week? ‘Let us
endeavour,’ Fawcett says, ‘to understand the true causes of poverty.
That is the vital problem.’
[Sidenote: Malady of Poverty.]
As a Professor of Political Economy he tries, like a careful doctor,
painstakingly to study and understand the symptoms of the malady of
poverty and misery, refusing to accept any superficial diagnosis. He
wants to discover the cause of the disturbance which, like a malignant
tumour, vitiates the whole social system. While coping with these
problems he kept his mind cool, critical, and impersonal, refusing all
quack remedies, and seized every detail that helped him to his goal. In
all simplicity he once asked Leslie Stephen why Carlyle called political
economy the ‘dismal Science’—not a difficult question for the average
man! But Fawcett loved budgets and balance-sheets; they brought to his
mind vivid, concrete pictures that could never be dull, and he studied
them industriously; industriously enough to realise thoroughly the
fallibility of figures and the old truth so often quoted (can the reader
bear it again?) that there are three kinds of lies, ‘Lies, Damned Lies,
and Statistics.’ Though his respect for his forerunners was great, his
beliefs were fearlessly his own.
His warm personal relations with country labourers, many of whom he
called his intimate friends, never lessened. Once, after a day’s fishing
at Salisbury with Wright, he had some beer with a farmer, who told him
that the labourers’ wages were to be lowered after the harvest. Fawcett,
after vainly protesting, refused more beer and walked home. On his way
he met one of his labouring friends, who accounted for his best clothes
by saying that he was going to a harvest-home celebration at the church.
Fawcett fell into a long reverie, and at last asked Wright how he would
like to give thanks for a bountiful harvest when his wages were to be
docked of a shilling a week.
[Sidenote: Co-operation.]
Such facts touched him deeply and set him pondering and writing on how
best they could be changed. Co-operation seemed to him to be the cure
for these ills; he felt that it would bind together the interests of the
capitalists and the working men, and would ultimately do away with the
friction between them. An article he published on this subject attracted
the notice of George Eliot, and his proposals were put into practice at
a colliery near Leeds.