If mind were the mere outcome of matter, science would long since have
discovered some tolerably constant relation between peculiarities of
physical development and manifestations of character; whereas every
step onward in the progress of research tends to disprove the existence
of any certain dependency or connection between morals and matter.
Even such links as compose the stock-in-trade of the physiognomist and
phrenologist are shown to be illusory, except in so far as they may be
the effects, rather than the causes, of character, and are produced by
culture—witness the effects of education on facial expression in the
case of criminals. The theory of a criminal conformation of cranium has
been abandoned like the silly affectation of being able to detect an
offender by his “hang-dog” or “murderous” look.
“Failings” must be studied in the light of the lessons these facts and
considerations combine to teach. The moral question involved is one of
responsibility for the use each individual may make of the brain-power
allotted to him. The neglect to employ gifts and capacities is as
grave an error, from an ethical point of view, as their application
to a bad purpose. The servant who buried his talent in the earth was
held accountable for the failure to use it, and thereby increase
its value. The parable sets forth a truth of the highest practical
interest. We are responsible for the development, by use, of the
faculties vouchsafed to us. If they are allowed to remain in abeyance,
or a rudimentary state, we are to blame for the deficiencies and the
failings to which this neglect gives rise, and are without excuse. The
obligation to act up to the level of known duty cannot be avoided. A
“failing” is an act of contempt for the law of development by use.
It is disobedience to an understood command. The fact that it is
recognized makes a failing an offence. There may be short-coming in the
performance of a good resolve. Few, if any, merely human efforts are
entirely successful; but the failure which occurs when an endeavor is
made in the energy of a resolute and well-aimed purpose is not so much
a fault as insufficiency. The rising tide reaches its highest level by
successive efforts. Self-improvement is effected in the same fashion.
The motive power of persistent good endeavor is accumulative—ever
advancing like the great tidal wave of the ocean—though the ground is
conquered by short and seemingly only half-successful advances.
Failings, however, as we are now regarding them, are excused faults in
the character which the individual makes no serious effort to repair.
Some defects, as we have seen, are inherited, and upon them it is the
custom to bestow great commiseration and little blame. Now, in truth,
these are the least pardonable, because, if they are known to have
been transmitted from parent to child, the latter has, generally, the
advantage of an example, ever present to memory, by which to correct
his personal deficiencies. If the “failing” be a vicious propensity,
he can recall its hideousness, and thus stimulate will and conscience
to aid him in eradicating the fault. If it be some form of deficiency,
as indolence, lack of perseverance, want of principle, or the like,
he can study, as in the pages of history, the evil consequences
entailed by the defect, and with diligence order his own conduct in
better courses. Inherited failings are the least excusable. Even the
materialist, who claims them as the fruit of physical peculiarities,
must concede that by special culture they can be remedied, the healthy
organism being susceptible of increased development in any particular
direction when the proper stimuli are intelligently applied with a
view to its improvement. The apologist for failings which have been
inherited can find no comfort in the philosophy of materialism.
Failings which are peculiar to the individual may be less easy to
detect, and the subject of these defects is, in a measure, dependent
upon experience and the monitions of those around him for the
information needed to correct them. This should keep the wise teachable
and apt to profit by the lessons life is ever reading for their
instruction. A self-reliant spirit is manly, and therefore commendable;
a self-sufficient spirit is unreasonable, and therefore despicable. It
is strange how few of us grow really wiser as we grow older. The work
of self-improvement is seldom commenced until forced upon the judgment
by some awakening experience, and this is rarely vouchsafed until the
ductile period of youth has gone by. Early in the adult age of man his
habits become rigidly formulated, and failings are then hard to mend. A
world of unhappiness and disappointment might be spared the later years
of life if the young would be warned to begin the business of training
the character before it is firmly set in the mould of circumstances,
with all the coarse elements—inherited and contracted—uneliminated, and
the errors of inconsistency and imperfect development uncorrected.
It is in the period of youth and adolescence that the mind may be most
hopefully cultivated and the moral character intelligently formed. No
greater mistake can be made by a young and vigorous mind than to treat
the faculty of reason and the instinct of moral judgment as parts of
the being which may be left to their own devices. The young man bestows
some thought on his muscular system—he trains his eye, cultivates his
ear, and takes credit for prudence when he strives to develop the
vigor and to foster the healthy growth of his body. Is it wise—nay,
is it not rather the worst of folly and shortsightedness—to neglect
the ordinary development of those higher powers which man possesses in
a more exalted degree than any of the lower animals? Taking care for
the body while the mind is neglected is the worst of failings—the most
calamitous and the least excusable.
GONE!
By E. G. CHARLESWORTH.
Alas! and have I lost thy voice,
Lost the sweet face that in my youth
Shone from my breast on things to be—
Hope-making, changing hope to truth,
Thy face, sweet love,
That madest beautiful the plainest thing
Below, above?
No; like the priest in times of old,
Who drew the temple’s sacred veil,
Thou art gone into an inner fold;
And now, thy face turned heaven’s way,
A paler face, and yet not pale,
Looks for the sunset in the west;
Thy form appears with outspread wings,
I hear thee from thine altar say,
With angel-breath o’er former things,
_How beautiful is rest!_
—_London Sunday Magazine._
SOCIAL WRECKAGE.
By ELLICE HOPKINS.
Mr. Francis Peek has recently published a useful but saddening little
book, whose title I have attached to this article. Not that it tells
anything new to one who has studied deeply the pages of that terrible
book of modern life, with its gilded leaves, but its unutterably dark
contents; it only focuses the scattered knowledge into alarmingly
clear vision. Indeed, in reading it, it is difficult to resist the old
nightmare feeling, that after all this little planet may be the small
rotary Vaudeville theater of the universe, where we poor actors in
life’s scene are playing out a series of farces for the amusement of
the angels, or more probably of darker and more distant visitants. The
admirably logical social life that religiously shuts all the museums
and picture-galleries on the Lord’s Day, and opens all the gin-shops;
that is never tired of iterating that the proper sphere of woman is
home, and brings up its 20,000 female orphans in large pauper barracks,
from which the last touch of home-life has disappeared; that goes to
meetings and loudly preaches thrift to the people, and then gruffly
whispers in their ear by guardians of the poor, “Only be drunk and
spendthrift enough, and we will house you and provide for your old
age;” that goes to church and preaches that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost, and leaves the people to litter down like pigs at
night—men and women, girls and boys, together in tenements where no
rich man would think of stabling his horses; that goes to school and
teaches its children the three R’s, and leaves them in dens of infamy
to learn a fourth R, by every sight and sound of the day and night,
ruin of body and soul; that virtuously declaims against the harlot, yet
leaves its little girls to be brought up in brothels; that believes a
fatal disorder is undermining the national health, and shuts the doors
of its hospitals against it, and denies it the public means of cure;
that legally protects the heiress up to twenty-one, and refuses to
protect the poor man’s daughter, even at sixteen, from the trade of
vice; that holds that the man is the responsible head of the woman,
and throws the blame and disgrace on the woman—alas! alas! what a heap
of anomalies is here—what real cause to complain of the methods of our
moral life! No wonder that the poor Dissenting minister, much entangled
in our social difficulties, and led on all sides to contradictory
conclusions, threw in a deprecatory clause in his prayer, “Paradoxical
as it may seem to thee, O Lord, it is nevertheless true.”
And what are the results of such methods as these? What must be the
results?
That we read that in the wealthiest nation in the world, one in every
thirty-one of our countrymen is a pauper; this, moreover, without
including any of that vast number of destitute persons who are
maintained in charitable institutions or by private benevolence.
That in the richest city in the world there were in one year 101 deaths
from actual starvation, in full sight of well-stocked shops.
That there are about 180,000 apprehensions each year for drunkenness,
and over 15,000 persons yearly charged with indictable crimes, and over
half a million convicted summarily before the magistrates, of which
latter nearly 100,000 are guilty of personal assaults, about 2,500
being aggravated assaults upon women and children.
That there are extensive districts in London, Liverpool, and all our
large towns, where our people are living in little more than half the
area of ground required for a corpse, and which they could claim if
they were dead, in tenements which are the graves of all decency and
chastity.
That “in Liverpool alone, by a rough estimate, there are some
10,000 or more children who are neither properly fed, clothed nor
housed, and surrounded by such evil associations at home, or in the
low lodging-houses where they herd, that there is small chance of
their leading afterwards a useful life, and we can predict with
certainty that many of them will enter our prisons, penitentiaries and
workhouses.”
Surely it must create an uneasy feeling in the most careless to realize
this mass of misery and sin on which the life of the well-to-do classes
in England is based—
“This deep dark underworld of woe,
That underlies life’s shining surfaces,
Dim populous pain and multitudinous toil,
Unheeded of the heedless world that treads
Its piteous upturned faces underfoot,
In the gay rout that rushes to its ends.”
It is impossible for me to deal adequately with the subject in the
narrow space of a short article, but let me touch on three of our
greatest problems—overcrowding, pauperism, and the care of the young.
First, as to overcrowding. This is a question that distinctly affects
the state, and with regard to which we have to “live in the whole,”
and to see that the welfare of the community is at stake, and that
the state must have an authoritative voice in it. Virtue, sobriety,
decency, are physically impossible in the conditions under which a
vast number of its citizens are living. The national health and morals
are in danger. All the arguments that justified the interference of
the state with the rights of the Irish landlord, apply equally to the
London landlords, and the artificial forcing up of rents, which has
resulted from the necessity many workmen are under of living near their
work. Yet this question has been the subject of permissive legislation!
The Artisans’ Dwellings Improvement Act, an honest attempt on the part
of Sir Richard Cross to deal with the problem, was rendered applicable
to all towns of 28,000 inhabitants or upward—that is to say, about
eighty towns—but it was entrusted to the municipalities to carry it
out, the town councils which we have left to be composed chiefly of
men of narrow education, largely swayed by self-interest, and probably
extensive owners of the very property to be demolished! It is exactly
as if the Irish Land Bill had been permissive, and entrusted to the
Irish landlords to put it into execution! Can we wonder that in about
sixty out of the eighty towns, it remains a dead letter? In eleven it
has led to discussion; in two or three it has led to the demolition of
buildings, but not to their erection. Is there not a want of ordinary
_seeing_ in our moral life? Could we hope to solve a single scientific
problem on the methods on which we are content to live?
“The commercial success,” as Mr. Peek observes, “that has been achieved
by several of the Artisans’ Dwellings Companies which, while providing
good houses, yet pay fair dividends, shows that the poorest pay rents
which give a fair interest on capital, so that the municipality will
not be compelled to embark in a ruinous undertaking, or one that will
not pay in the long run, to say nothing of the gain to the health and
morals of the nation.”
Secondly, let us take pauperism. First of all let us clearly recognize
that no system of paid officials, no mechanical workhouse will take the
place of human thought and human care. Nothing will do instead of love.
Indeed, there are already signs that we are working out a _reductio ad
absurdum_ with these portentous and ever-increasing warehouses of the
destitute and the vicious that are springing up, throwing the winter
support of whole dissolute families on hard-working rate-payers, and
systematically discouraging thrift. But the problem has been solved
satisfactorily on a small scale, and can be on a larger. The Elberfield
experiment, which in twelve years reduced the number of paupers from
4,800 to 1,800, notwithstanding that the population had increased from
50,000 to 64,000, and that great commercial depression existed, has
been too often described not to be familiar to all. But a remarkable
parallel movement among the Jews is scarcely so well known as it
deserves to be. When “Oliver Twist” was published, the leading Jews
were so mortally ashamed of the picture drawn by the popular novelist
of Fagan and the low Jewish quarters in London, that they formed
themselves at once into an organization to remedy so disgraceful a
state of things. The numbers to be dealt with amounted to those of a
populous town, with the additional difficulty afforded by immigrant
Jews arriving in large numbers from the Continent in a state of the
greatest destitution. The investigation of every case requiring relief
was undertaken by volunteer workers, assisted by skilled officers, and
was not in the steam pig-killing style, but patient and exhaustive
with true human brotherhood; in deserving cases the relief given was
sufficient to make a guardian’s hair stand on end, but was given with
the view to helping the man to a means of livelihood. Especially this
wise liberality was shown in the treatment of their widows. Whilst Mr.
Peek has no better suggestion to offer than that the widows’ children
should be removed to the pauper barrack-schools to herd with the
lowest children of casuals, a system which Mr. Peek himself strongly
condemns, the Jews recognized that the mother, if well conducted, was
the proper person to have the care of them, and that her place was at
home. They therefore either provided their widows with indoor work,
or, when that was impossible, relieved them on a sufficient scale to
enable them to look after their children at home; the consequence being
that instead of feeding the outcast class, as the neglected children
of our widows too often do, they grew up productive and well-conducted
members of the community. If, however, a family was found overcrowding,
all relief was steadily refused till they consented to live a human
life, assistance being given to move into a larger tenement. By these
wise and thoughtful methods in the course of a single generation the
Jews have worked up the people from a considerably lower level to one
decidedly above our own. To be sure the Jew does not drink. Give the
most destitute Jew five pounds down, and at the end of the year you
will find him a small capitalist, having considerably despoiled the
Egyptians meanwhile. But the intemperance of our people is largely
caused by overcrowding, and by their amusements and recreation-rooms
being in the hands of those who make their profit not by the
entertainment but by the drink traffic, and indefinite improvement may
be brought about by wiser regulations that have the good of the people,
and not the fattening of publicans and brewers at heart. Surely the
success of the Jewish and Elberfeld efforts prove that the problem
of the reduction of pauperism and the inducing of healthy habits of
thrift and self-helping in the people is soluble, and with that army of
devoted Christian workers in our midst, to whose untiring efforts we
owe it that social disaster has not already overtaken us, it must be
possible for us to carry on the same movement, if Birmingham or one of
our public-spirited towns would lead the way.
Lastly, we come to the vast, hopeful field, presented by greater care
for the young, and better methods of embodying it.
First, let the law protect the young of both sexes up to the legal age
of majority from all attempts to lead them into a dissolute life. In
most continental countries the corruption of minors is an indictable
offense. The English penal code recognizes this principle in property;
it is felony to abduct an heiress up to twenty-one, and a young man’s
debts, except for bare necessaries, are null and void till he is of
age; but, as usual, our English law leaves the infinitely more precious
moral personality unprotected. There is no practical protection at any
age for an English child from the trade of vice. An unruly child of
fifteen or sixteen, or even younger, quarrels with her mother or with
her employer, and runs off in a fit of temper. Even if she leaves her
parents’ roof, it can not be brought under the law against abduction.
No one abducts her; the child abducts herself. Yet the keeper of the
lowest den of infamy can harbor that child for an infamous purpose, and
he or she commits no indictable offence. It is no wonder, therefore,
that the open profligacy of the young forms the very gravest feature
of our large towns. Thankful as we are for the honest effort to deal
with this monstrous anomaly in English law, shown by Lord Rosebery’s
bill, we can not but regret the extreme inadequacy of its provisions,
or that the legislature should refuse to extend legal protection from
even the trade of vice, to the most dangerous age of a girl’s life, the
age of sixteen—the age when, as the medical faculty are agreed, a girl
is least morally responsible, and most liable to sexual extravagances,
and when we can statistically prove that the greatest number of those
who go wrong are led astray. The country will not rest till the legal
protection from the trade of vice is extended to twenty-one.
Secondly, let us recognize it as an axiom that parental rights do
not exist when wholly severed from parental duties; or, in other
words, that the child has its rights as well as the parent, and that
its indefeasible right is, in South’s strong words, “to be born and
not damned into the world.” Let it be recognized, then, that no
child of either sex is to be brought up in a den of infamy, and to
attend school from thence to the contamination of the children of the
respectable poor, the magistrates being no longer allowed to defeat
this beneficent provision of the Industrial Schools Act, and parental
responsibility being recognized by the parent being compelled to
pay toward the Christian and industrial training of the child; all
children living in, or frequenting, thieves’ dens and disorderly houses
to be at once removed. Let day industrial schools be formed for the
lowest class of children, so as to introduce some classification in
our board schools, the want of which is one of their gravest defects.
Let us adopt emigration to our colonies for our pauper and destitute
children, whenever possible. Any one who has gone into the question
can corroborate Mr. Samuel Smith’s statement in his able article in
the May number of the _Nineteenth Century_, that “£15 per head covers
all expenses, including a few months’ preparatory training, outfit,
passage, etc.” The average cost of each child in the metropolitan
district schools is nearly £25 per annum. About 11,000 pauper children
are brought up in these large establishments at a cost to the
ratepayers of London of £250,000 per annum. Probably each child is
kept, on the average, five years, costing, say, £120 in all. Truly Mr.
Smith may well add, “with a blindness that is incomprehensible, the
guardians have preferred herding them together at a vast expense, and
refused till quite lately to allow emigration to be tried.” And for
those children who through bad health, or any other disability, are
unable to emigrate, and can not be boarded out, as well as children
whose drunken and dissolute parents are bringing them up to crime, let
there be an order of teaching deaconesses instituted, and a state-aided
training college, where educated ladies may receive training in the
management of an industrial school, and from which the guardians can
supply themselves with mothers for cottage homes on the plan of the
Village Homes of Ilford, where the cost of a child is £14, instead of
£25. By this arrangement the children would come under higher influence
than the uneducated workhouse officials. Hundreds of ladies are wanting
remunerative employment, and would gladly undertake this, if they
could be put in the way of the work by a little preliminary training,
and freed from the necessity of “doing the washing” in the cottage
home. And, lastly, let it be a recognized theory that every Christian
household has one respectable but rough little girl to train under
its own upper class servants, to give her a good start in life, that
our houses, with all their culture and refinement, may no longer be
strongholds of _l’egoisme à plusieurs_, but centers for teaching good
work, high character, and fine manners—organs for the public good.
And those social atomists who raise their vehement cry about personal
rights and the liberty of the subject over all compulsory measures for
saving children, I would remind that the question is not of compulsion
or non-compulsion; but whether the natural guardians of a child shall
be compelled to pay toward its Christian and industrial training, or
whether they and I, as ratepayers, shall be compelled to pay for its
degradation in prisons, in infirmary beds, and workhouses. Compulsion
there is anyhow: but surely no reasonable mind can doubt which
compulsion is most in accordance with the true right and true liberty.
And how can I better close than with the impassioned words of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, apostrophizing our material splendor, as shown in the
great Exhibition of 1851, by the side of our moral squalor:
“O Magi of the East and of the West,
Your incense, gold and myrrh are excellent!
What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest?
Your hands have worked well: is your courage spent
In handiwork only? Have you nothing best
Which generous souls may perfect and present
And He shall thank the givers for? No light
Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor
Who sit in darkness when it is not night?
No cure for wicked children? Christ—no cure!
No help for women sobbing out of sight
Because men made the laws? No brothel lure
Burnt out by popular lightnings? Hast thou found
No remedy, my England, for such woes?
* * * * *
Alas! great nations have great shames, I say.
* * * * *
O gracious nations, give some ear to me!
You all go to your fair, and I am one
Who at the roadside of humanity
Beseech your alms,—God’s justice to be done!”
—_The Contemporary Review._
AT REST.
By SARAH DOUDNEY.
Ah, silent wheel, the noisy brook is dry,
And quiet hours glide by
In this deep vale, where once the merry stream
Sang on through gloom and gleam;
Only the dove in some leaf-shaded nest
Murmurs of rest.
Ah, weary voyager, the closing day
Shines on that tranquil bay,
Where thy storm-beaten soul has longed to be;
Wild blast and angry sea
Touch not this favored shore, by summer blest,
A home of rest.