THE pleasure, gentlemen and ladies, of addressing you here is mixed in my
mind with very solemn feelings; the honour which you have done me is
tempered by humiliating thoughts.
For it was in this very city of Bristol, twenty-seven years ago, that I
received my first lesson in what is now called Social Science; and yet,
alas! more than ten years elapsed ere I could even spell out that lesson,
though it had been written for me (as well as for all England) in letters
of flame, from the one end of heaven to the other.
I was a school-boy in Clifton up above. I had been hearing of political
disturbances, even of riots, of which I understood nothing, and for which
I cared nothing. But on one memorable Sunday afternoon I saw an object
which was distinctly not political. Otherwise I should have no right to
speak of it here.
It was an afternoon of sullen autumn rain. The fog hung thick over the
docks and lowlands. Glaring through that fog I saw a bright mass of
flame—almost like a half-risen sun.
That, I was told, was the gate of the new gaol on fire. That the
prisoners in it had been set free; that—But why speak of what too many
here recollect but too well? The fog rolled slowly upward. Dark
figures, even at that great distance, were flitting to and fro across
what seemed the mouth of the pit. The flame increased—multiplied—at one
point after another; till by ten o’clock that night I seemed to be
looking down upon Dante’s Inferno, and to hear the multitudinous moan and
wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro amid that sea of fire.
Right behind Brandon Hill—how can I ever forget it?—rose the great
central mass of fire; till the little mound seemed converted into a
volcano, from the peak of which the flame streamed up, not red alone,
but, delicately green and blue, pale rose and pearly white, while crimson
sparks leapt and fell again in the midst of that rainbow, not of hope,
but of despair; and dull explosions down below mingled with the roar of
the mob, and the infernal hiss and crackle of the flame.
Higher and higher the fog was scorched and shrivelled upward by the
fierce heat below, glowing through and through with red reflected glare,
till it arched itself into one vast dome of red-hot iron, fit roof for
all the madness down below—and beneath it, miles away, I could see the
lonely tower of Dundie shining red;—the symbol of the old faith, looking
down in stately wonder and sorrow upon the fearful birth-throes of a new
age. Yes.—Why did I say just now despair? I was wrong. Birth-throes,
and not death pangs, those horrors were. Else they would have no place
in my discourse; no place, indeed, in my mind. Why talk over the signs
of disease, decay, death? Let the dead bury their dead, and let us
follow Him who dieth not; by whose command
The old order changeth, giving place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways.
If we will believe this,—if we will look on each convulsion of society,
however terrible for the time being, as a token, not of decrepitude, but
of youth; not as the expiring convulsions of sinking humanity, but as
upward struggles, upward toward fuller light, freer air, a juster,
simpler, and more active life;—then we shall be able to look calmly,
however sadly, on the most appalling tragedies of humanity—even on these
late Indian ones—and take our share, faithful and hopeful, in supplying
the new and deeper wants of a new and nobler time.
But to return. It was on the Tuesday or Wednesday after, if I recollect
right, that I saw another, and a still more awful sight. Along the north
side of Queen Square, in front of ruins which had been three days before
noble buildings, lay a ghastly row, not of corpses, but of
corpse-fragments. I have no more wish than you to dilate upon that
sight. But there was one charred fragment—with a scrap of old red
petticoat adhering to it, which I never forgot—which I trust in God that
I never shall forget. It is good for a man to be brought once at least
in his life face to face with fact, ultimate fact, however horrible it
may be; and have to confess to himself, shuddering, what things are
possible upon God’s earth, when man has forgotten that his only welfare
lies in living after the likeness of God.
Not that I learnt the lesson then. When the first excitement of horror
and wonder were past, what I had seen made me for years the veriest
aristocrat, full of hatred and contempt of these dangerous classes, whose
existence I had for the first time discovered. It required many
years—years, too, of personal intercourse with the poor—to explain to me
the true meaning of what I saw here in October twenty-seven years ago,
and to learn a part of that lesson which God taught to others thereby.
And one part at least of that lesson was this: That the social state of a
city depends directly on its moral state, and—I fear dissenting voices,
but I must say what I believe to be truth—that the moral state of a city
depends—how far I know not, but frightfully, to an extent as yet
uncalculated, and perhaps incalculable—on the physical state of that
city; on the food, water, air, and lodging of its inhabitants.
But that lesson, and others connected with it, was learnt, and learnt
well, by hundreds. From the sad catastrophe I date the rise of that
interest in Social Science; that desire for some nobler, more methodic,
more permanent benevolence than that which stops at mere almsgiving and
charity-schools. The dangerous classes began to be recognised as an
awful fact which must be faced; and faced, not by repression, but by
improvement. The “Perils of the Nation” began to occupy the attention
not merely of politicians, but of philosophers, physicians, priests; and
the admirable book which assumed that title did but re-echo the feeling
of thousands of earnest hearts.
Ever since that time, scheme on scheme of improvement has been not only
proposed but carried out. A general interest of the upper classes in the
lower, a general desire to do good, and to learn how good can be done,
has been awakened throughout England, such as, I boldly say, never before
existed in any country upon earth; and England, her eyes opened to her
neglect of these classes, without whose strong arms her wealth and genius
would be useless, has put herself into a permanent state of confession of
sin, repentance, and amendment, which I verily trust will be accepted by
Almighty God; and will, in spite of our present shame and sorrow, {192}
in spite of shame and sorrow which may be yet in store for us, save alive
both the soul and the body of this ancient people.
Let us then, that we may learn how to bear our part in this great work of
Social Reform, consider awhile great cities, their good and evil; and let
us start from the facts about your own city of which I have just put you
in remembrance. The universal law will be best understood from the
particular instance; and best of all, from the instance with which you
are most intimately acquainted. And do not, I entreat you, fear that I
shall be rude enough to say anything which may give pain to you, my
generous hosts; or presumptuous enough to impute blame to anyone for
events which happened long ago, and of the exciting causes of which I
know little or nothing. Bristol was then merely in the same state in
which other cities of England were, and in which every city on the
Continent is now; and the local exciting causes of that outbreak, the
personal conduct of A or B in it, is just what we ought most carefully to
forget, if we wish to look at the real root of the matter. If
consumption, latent in the constitution, have broken out in active
mischief, the wise physician will trouble his head little with the
particular accident which woke up the sleeping disease. The disease was
there, and if one thing had not awakened it some other would. And so, if
the population of a great city have got into a socially diseased state,
it matters little what shock may have caused it to explode. Politics may
in one case, fanaticism in another, national hatred in a third, hunger in
a fourth—perhaps even, as in Byzantium of old, no more important matter
than the jealousy between the blue and the green charioteers in the
theatre, may inflame a whole population to madness and civil war. Our
business is not with the nature of the igniting spark, but of the powder
which is ignited.
I will not, then, to begin, go as far as some who say that “A great city
is a great evil.” We cannot say that Bristol was in 1830 or is now, a
great evil. It represents so much realised wealth; and that, again, so
much employment for thousands. It represents so much commerce; so much
knowledge of foreign lands; so much distribution of their products; so
much science, employed about that distribution.
And it is undeniable, that as yet we have had no means of rapid and cheap
distribution of goods, whether imports or manufactures, save by this
crowding of human beings into great cities, for the more easy despatch of
business. Whether we shall devise other means hereafter is a question of
which I shall speak presently. Meanwhile, no man is to be blamed for the
existence, hardly even for the evils, of great cities. The process of
their growth has been very simple. They have gathered themselves round
abbeys and castles, for the sake of protection; round courts, for the
sake of law; round ports, for the sake of commerce; round coal mines, for
the sake of manufacture. Before the existence of railroads, penny-posts,
electric telegraphs, men were compelled to be as close as possible to
each other, in order to work together.
When the population was small, and commerce feeble, the cities grew to no
very great size, and the bad effects of this crowding were not felt. The
cities of England in the Middle Age were too small to keep their
inhabitants week after week, month after month, in one deadly vapour-bath
of foul gas; and though the mortality among infants was probably
excessive, yet we should have seen among the adult survivors few or none
of those stunted and etiolated figures so common now in England, as well
as on the Continent. The green fields were close outside the walls,
where lads and lasses went a-maying, and children gathered flowers, and
sober burghers with their wives took the evening walk; there were the
butts, too, close outside, where stalwart prentice-lads ran and wrestled,
and pitched the bar, and played backsword, and practised with the
long-bow; and sometimes, in stormy times, turned out for a few months as
ready-trained soldiers, and, like Ulysses of old,
Drank delight of battle with their peers,
and then returned again to the workshop and the loom. The very mayor and
alderman went forth, at five o’clock on the summer’s morning, with hawk
and leaping-pole, after a duck and heron; or hunted the hare in state,
probably in the full glory of furred gown and gold chain; and then
returned to breakfast, and doubtless transacted their day’s business all
the better for their morning’s gallop on the breezy downs.
But there was another side to this genial and healthy picture. A hint
that this was a state of society which had its conditions, its limit; and
if those were infringed, woe alike to burgher and to prentice. Every now
and then epidemic disease entered the jolly city—and then down went
strong and weak, rich and poor, before the invisible and seemingly
supernatural arrows of that angel of death whom they had been pampering
unwittingly in every bedroom.
They fasted, they prayed; but in vain. They called the pestilence a
judgment of God; and they called it by a true name. But they know not
(and who are we to blame them for not knowing?) what it was that God was
judging thereby—foul air, foul water, unclean backyards, stifling attics,
houses hanging over the narrow street till light and air were alike shut
out—that there lay the sin; and that to amend that was the repentance
which God demanded.
Yet we cannot blame them. They showed that the crowded city life can
bring out human nobleness as well as human baseness; that to be crushed
into contact with their fellow-men, forced at least the loftier and
tender souls to know their fellow-men, and therefore to care for them, to
love them, to die for them. Yes—from one temptation the city life is
free, to which the country life is sadly exposed—that isolation which,
self-contented and self-helping, forgets in its surly independence that
man is his brother’s keeper. In cities, on the contrary, we find that
the stories of these old pestilences, when the first panic terror has
past, become, however tragical, still beautiful and heroic; and we read
of noble-hearted men and women palliating ruin which they could not cure,
braving dangers which seemed to them miraculous, from which they were
utterly defenceless, spending money, time, and, after all, life itself
upon sufferers from whom they might without shame have fled.
They are very cheering, the stories of the old city pestilences; and the
nobleness which they brought out in the heart of many a townsman who had
seemed absorbed in the lust of gain—who perhaps had been really absorbed
in it—till that fearful hour awakened in him his better self, and taught
him, not self-aggrandisement, but self-sacrifice; begetting in him, out
of the very depth of darkness, new and divine light. That nobleness,
doubt it not, exists as ever in the hearts of citizens. May God grant us
to see the day when it shall awaken to exert itself, not for the
palliation, not even for the cure, but for the prevention, yea, the utter
extermination, of pestilence.
About the middle of the sixteenth century, as far as I can ascertain,
another and even more painful phenomenon appears in our great cities—a
dangerous class. How it arose is not yet clear. That the Reformation
had something to do with the matter, we can hardly doubt. At the
dissolution of the monasteries, the more idle, ignorant, and profligate
members of the mendicant orders, unable to live any longer on the alms of
the public, sunk, probably, into vicious penury. The frightful
misgovernment of this country during the minority of Edward the Sixth,
especially the conversion of tilled lands into pasture, had probably the
effect of driving the surplus agricultural population into the great
towns. But the social history of this whole period is as yet obscure,
and I have no right to give an opinion on it. Another element, and a
more potent one, is to be found in the discharged soldiers who came home
from foreign war, and the sailors who returned from our voyages of
discovery, and from our raids against the Spaniards, too often crippled
by scurvy, or by Tropic fevers, with perhaps a little prize money, which
was as hastily spent as it had been hastily gained. The later years of
Elizabeth, and the whole of James the First’s reign, disclose to us an
ugly state of society in the low streets of all our sea-port towns; and
Bristol, as one of the great starting-points of West Indian adventure,
was probably, during the seventeenth century, as bad as any city in
England. According to Ben Jonson, and the playwriters of his time, the
beggars become a regular fourth-estate, with their own laws, and even
their own language—of which we may remark, that the thieves’ Latin of
those days is full of German words, indicating that its inventors had
been employed in the Continental wars of the time. How that class sprung
up, we may see, I suppose, pretty plainly, from Shakespeare’s “Henry the
Fifth.” Whether Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph, Doll and Mrs. Quickly,
existed in the reign of Henry the Fifth, they certainly existed in the
reign of Elizabeth. They are probably sketches from life of people whom
Shakespeare had seen in Alsatia and the Mint.
To these merely rascal elements, male and female, we must add, I fear,
those whom mere penury, from sickness, failure, want of employment drove
into dwellings of the lowest order. Such people, though not criminal
themselves, are but too likely to become the parents of criminals. I am
not blaming them, poor souls; God forbid! I am merely stating a fact.
When we examine into the ultimate cause of a dangerous class; into the
one property common to all its members, whether thieves, beggars,
profligates, or the merely pauperised—we find it to be this loss of
self-respect. As long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on
heroically, pure amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when
self-respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the
fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in dens of physical and
moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, they must sink,
into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye, the very smells,
which surround them. It is not merely that the child’s mind is
contaminated, by seeing and hearing, in overcrowded houses, what he
should not hear and see: but the whole physical circumstances of his life
are destructive of self-respect. He has no means for washing himself
properly: but he has enough of the innate sense of beauty and fitness to
feel that he ought not to be dirty; he thinks that others despise him for
being dirty, and he half despises himself for being so. In all raged
schools and reformatories, so they tell me, the first step toward
restoring self-respect is to make the poor fellows clean. From that
moment they begin to look on themselves as new men—with a new start, new
hopes, new duties. For not without the deepest physical as well as moral
meaning, was baptism chosen by the old Easterns, and adopted by our Lord
Jesus Christ, as the sign of a new life; and outward purity made the
token and symbol of that inward purity which is the parent of
self-respect, and manliness, and a clear conscience; of the free
forehead, and the eye which meets boldly and honestly the eye of its
fellow-man.
But would that mere physical dirt were all that the lad has to contend
with. There is the desire of enjoyment. Moral and intellectual
enjoyment he has none, and can have none: but not to enjoy something is
to be dead in life; and to the lowest physical pleasures he will betake
himself, and all the more fiercely because his opportunities of enjoyment
are so limited. It is a hideous subject; I will pass it by very shortly;
only asking of you, as I have to ask daily of myself—this solemn
question: We, who have so many comforts, so many pleasures of body, soul,
and spirit, from the lowest appetite to the highest aspiration, that we
can gratify each in turn with due and wholesome moderation, innocently
and innocuously—who are we that we should judge the poor untaught and
overtempted inhabitant of Temple Street and Lewin’s Mead, if, having but
one or two pleasures possible to him, he snatches greedily, even foully,
at the little which he has?
And this brings me to another, and a most fearful evil of great cities,
namely, drunkenness. I am one of those who cannot, on scientific
grounds, consider drunkenness as a cause of evil, but as an effect. Of
course it is a cause—a cause of endless crime and misery; but I am
convinced that to cure, you must inquire, not what it causes, but what
causes it? And for that we shall not have to seek far.
The main exciting cause of drunkenness is, I believe, firmly, bad air and
bad lodging.
A man shall spend his days between a foul alley where he breathes
sulphuretted hydrogen, a close workshop where he breathes carbonic acid,
and a close and foul bedroom where he breathes both. In neither of the
three places, meanwhile, has he his fair share of that mysterious
chemical agent without which health is impossible, the want of which
betrays itself at once in the dull eye, the sallow cheek—namely, light.
Believe me, it is no mere poetic metaphor which connects in Scripture,
Light with Life. It is the expression of a deep law, one which holds as
true in the physical as in the spiritual world; a case in which (as
perhaps in all cases) the laws of the visible world are the counterparts
of those of the invisible world, and Earth is the symbol of Heaven.
Deprive, then, the man of his fair share of fresh air and pure light, and
what follows? His blood is not properly oxygenated: his nervous energy
is depressed, his digestion impaired, especially if his occupation be
sedentary, or requires much stooping, and the cavity of the chest thereby
becomes contracted; and for that miserable feeling of languor and craving
he knows but one remedy—the passing stimulus of alcohol;—a passing
stimulus; leaving fresh depression behind it, and requiring fresh doses
of stimulant, till it becomes a habit, a slavery, a madness. Again,
there is an intellectual side to the question. The depressed nervous
energy, the impaired digestion, depress the spirits. The man feels low
in mind as well as in body. Whence shall he seek exhilaration? Not in
that stifling home which has caused the depression itself. He knows none
other than the tavern, and the company which the tavern brings; God help
him!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is easy to say, God help him; but it is not
difficult for man to help him also. Drunkenness is a very curable
malady. The last fifty years has seen it all but die out among the upper
classes of this country. And what has caused the improvement?
Certainly, in the first place, the spread of education. Every man has
now a hundred means of rational occupation and amusement which were
closed to his grandfather; and among the deadliest enemies of
drunkenness, we may class the printing-press, the railroad, and the
importation of foreign art and foreign science, which we owe to the late
forty years’ peace. We can find plenty of amusement now, beside the old
one of sitting round the table and talking over wine. Why should not the
poor man share in our gain? But over and above, there are causes simply
physical. Our houses are better ventilated. The stifling old four-post
bed has given place to the airy curtainless one; and what is more than
all—we wash. That morning cold bath which foreigners consider as Young
England’s strangest superstition, has done as much, believe me, to
abolish drunkenness, as any other cause whatsoever. With a clean skin in
healthy action, and nerves and muscles braced by a sudden shock, men do
not crave for artificial stimulants. I have found that, coeteris
paribus, a man’s sobriety is in direct proportion to his cleanliness. I
believe it would be so in all classes had they the means.
And they ought to have the means. Whatever other rights a man has, or
ought to have, this at least he has, if society demands of him that he
should earn his own livelihood, and not be a torment and a burden to his
neighbours. He has a right to water, to air, to light. In demanding
that, he demands no more than nature has given to the wild beast of the
forest. He is better than they. Treat him, then, as well as God has
treated them. If we require of him to be a man, we must at least put him
on a level with the brutes.
We have then, first of all, to face the existence of a dangerous class of
this kind, into which the weaker as well as the worst members of society
have a continual tendency to sink. A class which, not respecting itself,
does not respect others; which has nothing to lose and all to gain by
anarchy; in which the lowest passions, seldom gratified, are ready to
burst out and avenge themselves by frightful methods.
For the reformation of that class, thousands of good men are now working;
hundreds of benevolent plans are being set on foot. Honour to them all;
whether they succeed or fail, each of them does some good; each of them
rescues at least a few fellow-men, dear to God as you and I are, out of
the nether pit. Honour to them all, I say; but I should not be honest
with you this night, if I did not assert most solemnly my conviction,
that reformatories, ragged schools, even hospitals and asylums, treat
only the symptoms, not the actual causes, of the disease; and that the
causes are only to be touched by improving the simple physical conditions
of the class; by abolishing foul air, foul water, foul lodging,
overcrowded dwellings, in which morality is difficult and common decency
impossible. You may breed a pig in a sty, ladies and gentlemen, and make
a learned pig of him after all; but you cannot breed a man in a sty, and
make a learned man of him; or indeed, in the true sense of that great
word, a man at all.
And remember, that these physical influences of great cities, physically
depressing and morally degrading, influence, though to a less extent, the
classes above the lowest stratum.
The honest and skilled workman feels their effects. Compelled too often
to live where he can, in order to be near his work, he finds himself
perpetually in contact with a class utterly inferior to himself, and his
children exposed to contaminating influences from which he would gladly
remove them; but how can he? Next door to him, even in the same house
with him, may be enacted scenes of brutality or villainy which I will not
speak of here. He may shut his own eyes and ears to them; but he cannot
shut his children’s. He may vex his righteous soul daily, like Lot of
old, with the foul conversation of the wicked; but, like Lot of old, he
cannot keep his children from mixing with the inhabitants of the wicked
city, learning their works, and at last being involved in their doom.
Oh, ladies and gentlemen, if there be one class for whom above all others
I will plead, in season and out of season; if there be one social evil
which I will din into the ears of my countrymen whenever God gives me a
chance, it is this: The honest and the virtuous workman, and his
unnatural contact with the dishonest and the foul. I know well the
nobleness which exists in the average of that class, in men and in
wives—their stern uncomplaining, valorous self-denial; and nothing more
stirs my pity than to see them struggling to bring up a family in a moral
and physical atmosphere where right education is impossible. We lavish
sympathy enough upon the criminal; for God’s sake let us keep a little of
it for the honest man. We spend thousands in carrying out the separation
of classes in prison; for God’s sake let us try to separate them a little
before they go to prison. We are afraid of the dangerous classes; for
God’s sake let us bestir ourselves to stop that reckless confusion and
neglect which reign in the alleys and courts of our great towns, and
which recruit those very dangerous classes from the class which ought to
be, and is still, in spite of our folly, England’s strength and England’s
glory. Let us no longer stand by idle, and see moral purity, in street
after street, pent in the same noisome den with moral corruption, to be
involved in one common doom, as the Latin tyrant of old used to bind
together the dead corpse and the living victim. But let the man who
would deserve well of his city, well of his country, set his heart and
brain to the great purpose of giving the workmen dwellings fit for a
virtuous and a civilised being, and like the priest of old, stand between
the living and the dead, that the plague may be stayed.
Hardly less is the present physical state of our great cities felt by
that numerous class which is, next to the employer, the most important in
a city. I mean the shopmen, clerks, and all the men, principally young
ones, who are employed exclusively in the work of distribution. I have a
great respect, I may say affection, for this class. In Bristol I know
nothing of them; save that, from what I hear, the clerks ought in general
to have a better status here than in most cities. I am told that it is
the practice here for merchants to take into their houses very young
boys, and train them to their business; that this connection between
employer and employed is hereditary, and that clerkships pass from father
to son in the same family. I rejoice to hear it. It is pleasant to find
anywhere a relic of the old patriarchal bond, the permanent nexus between
master and man, which formed so important and so healthful an element of
the ancient mercantile system. One would gladly overlook a little
favouritism and nepotism, a little sticking square men into round holes,
and of round men into square holes, for the sake of having a class of
young clerks and employés who felt that their master’s business was their
business, his honour theirs, his prosperity theirs.
But over and above this, whenever I have come in contact with this clerk
and shopman class, they have impressed me with considerable respect, not
merely as to what they may be hereafter, but what they are now.
They are the class from which the ranks of our commercial men, our
emigrants, are continually recruited; therefore their right education is
a matter of national importance.
The lad who stands behind a Bristol counter may be, five-and-twenty years
hence, a large employer—an owner of houses and land in far countries
across the seas—a member of some colonial parliament—the founder of a
wealthy family. How necessary for the honour of Britain, for the welfare
of generations yet unborn, that that young man should have, in body,
soul, and spirit, the loftiest, and yet the most practical of educations.
His education, too, such as it is, is one which makes me respect him as
one of a class. Of course, he is sometimes one of those “gents” whom
Punch so ruthlessly holds up to just ridicule. He is sometimes a vulgar
fop, sometimes fond of low profligacy—of betting-houses and casinos.
Well—I know no class in any age or country among which a fool may not be
found here and there. But that the “gent” is the average type of this
class, I should utterly deny from such experience as I have had. The
peculiar note and mark of the average clerk and shopman, is, I think, in
these days, intellectual activity, a keen desire for self-improvement and
for independence, honourable, because self-acquired. But as he is
distinctly a creature of the city; as all city influences bear at once on
him more than on any other class, so we see in him, I think, more than in
any class, the best and the worst effects of modern city life. The
worst, of course, is low profligacy; but of that I do not speak here. I
mean that in the same man the good and evil of a city life meet. And in
this way.
In a countryman like me, coming up out of wild and silent moorlands into
a great city, the first effect of the change is increased intellectual
activity. The perpetual stream of human faces, the innumerable objects
of interest in every shop-window, are enough to excite the mind to
action, which is increased by the simple fact of speaking to fifty
different human beings in the day instead of five. Now in the city-bred
youth this excited state of mind is chronic, permanent. It is denoted
plainly enough by the difference between the countryman’s face and that
of the townsman. The former in its best type (and it is often very
noble) composed, silent, self-contained, often stately, often listless;
the latter mobile, eager, observant, often brilliant, often
self-conscious.
Now if you keep this rapid and tense mind in a powerful and healthy body,
it would do right good work. Right good work it does, indeed, as it is;
but still it might do better.
For what are the faults of this class? What do the obscurantists (now,
thank God, fewer every day) allege as the objection to allowing young men
to educate themselves out of working hours?
They become, it is said, discontented, conceited, dogmatical. They take
up hasty notions, they condemn fiercely what they have no means of
understanding; they are too fond of fine words, of the excitement of
spouting themselves, and hearing others spout.
Well. I suppose there must be a little truth in the accusation, or it
would not have been invented. There is no smoke without fire; and these
certainly are the faults of which the cleverest middle-class young men
whom I know are most in danger.
But—one fair look at these men’s faces ought to tell common sense that
the cause is rather physical than moral. Confined to sedentary
occupations, stooping over desks and counters in close rooms, unable to
obtain that fair share of bodily exercise which nature demands, and in
continual mental effort, their nerves and brain have been excited at the
expense of their lungs, their digestion, and their whole nutritive
system. Their complexions show a general ill-health. Their mouths, too
often, hint at latent disease. What wonder if there be an irritability
of brain and nerve? I blame them no more for it than I blame a man for
being somewhat touchy while he is writhing in the gout. Indeed less; for
gout is very often a man’s own fault; but these men’s ill-health is not.
And, therefore, everything which can restore to them health of body, will
preserve in them health of mind. Everything which ministers to the
_corpus sanum_, will minister also to the _mentem sanam_; and a walk on
Durham Downs, a game of cricket, a steamer excursion to Chepstow, shall
send them home again happier and wiser men than poring over many wise
volumes or hearing many wise lectures. How often is a worthy fellow
spending his leisure honourably in hard reading, when he had much better
have been scrambling over hedge and ditch, without a thought in his head
save what was put there by the grass and the butterflies, and the green
trees and the blue sky? And therefore I do press earnestly, both on
employers and employed, the incalculable value of athletic sports and
country walks for those whose business compels them to pass the day in
the heart of the city; I press on you, with my whole soul, the excellency
of the early-closing movement; not so much because it enables young men
to attend mechanics’ institutes, as because it enables them, if they
choose, to get a good game of leap-frog. You may smile; but try the
experiment, and see how, as the chest expands, the muscles harden, and
the cheek grows ruddy and the lips firm, and sound sleep refreshes the
lad for his next day’s work, the temper will become more patient, the
spirits more genial; there will be less tendency to brood angrily over
the inequalities of fortune, and to accuse society for evils which as yet
she knows not how to cure.
There is a class, again, above all these, which is doubtless the most
important of all; and yet of which I can say little here—the capitalist,
small and great, from the shopkeeper to the merchant prince.
Heaven forbid that I should speak of them with aught but respect. There
are few figures, indeed, in the world on which I look with higher
satisfaction than on the British merchant; the man whose ships are on a
hundred seas; who sends comfort and prosperity to tribes whom he never
saw, and honourably enriches himself by enriching others. There is
something to me chivalrous, even kingly, in the merchant life; and there
were men in Bristol of old—as I doubt not there are now—who nobly
fulfilled that ideal. I cannot forget that Bristol was the nurse of
America; that more than two hundred years ago, the daring and genius of
Bristol converted yonder narrow stream into a mighty artery, down which
flowed the young life-blood of that great Transatlantic nation destined
to be hereafter, I believe, the greatest which the world ever saw.
Yes—were I asked to sum up in one sentence the good of great cities, I
would point first to Bristol, and then to the United States, and say,
That is what great cities can do. By concentrating in one place, and
upon one object, men, genius, information, and wealth, they can conquer
new-found lands by arts instead of arms; they can beget new nations; and
replenish and subdue the earth from pole to pole.
Meanwhile, there is one fact about employers, in all cities which I know,
which may seem commonplace to you, but which to me is very significant.
Whatsoever business they may do in the city, they take good care, if
possible, not to live in it. As soon as a man gets wealthy nowadays, his
first act is to take to himself a villa in the country. Do I blame him?
Certainly not. It is an act of common sense. He finds that the harder
he works, the more he needs of fresh air, free country life, innocent
recreation; and he takes it, and does his city business all the better
for it, lives all the longer for it, is the cheerfuller, more genial man
for it. One great social blessing, I think, which railroads have
brought, is the throwing open country life to men of business. I say
blessing; both to the men themselves and to the country where they
settle. The citizen takes an honest pride in rivalling the old country
gentleman, in beating him in his own sphere, as gardener, agriculturist,
sportsman, head of the village; and by his superior business habits and
his command of ready money, he very often does so. For fifty miles round
London, wherever I see progress—improved farms, model cottages, new
churches, new schools—I find, in three cases out of four, that the author
is some citizen who fifty years ago would have known nothing but the
narrow city life, and have had probably no higher pleasures than those of
the table; whose dreams would have been, not as now, of model farms and
schools, but of turtle and port-wine.
My only regret when I see so pleasant a sight is: Oh that the good man
could have taken his workmen with him!
Taken his workmen with him?
I assure you that, after years of thought, I see no other remedy for the
worst evils of city life. “If,” says the old proverb, “the mountain will
not come to Muhammed, then Muhammed must go to the mountain.” And if you
cannot bring the country into the city, the city must go into the
country.
Do not fancy me a dreamer dealing with impossible ideals. I know well
what cannot be done; fair and grand as it would be, if it were done, a
model city is impossible in England. We have here no Eastern despotism
(and it is well we have not) to destroy an old Babylon, as that mighty
genius Nabuchonosor did, and build a few miles off a new Babylon,
one-half the area of which was park and garden, fountain and
water-course—a diviner work of art, to my mind, than the finest picture
or statue which the world ever saw. We have not either (and it is well
for us that we have not) a model republic occupying a new uncleared land.
We cannot, as they do in America, plan out a vast city on some delicious
and healthy site amid the virgin forest, with streets one hundred feet in
breadth, squares and boulevards already planted by God’s hand with
majestic trees; and then leave the great design to be hewn out of the
wilderness, street after street, square after square, by generations yet
unborn. That too is a magnificent ideal; but it cannot be ours. And it
is well for us, I believe, that it cannot. The great value of land, the
enormous amount of vested interests, the necessity of keeping to ancient
sites around which labour, as in Manchester, or commerce, as in Bristol,
has clustered itself on account of natural advantages, all these things
make any attempts to rebuild in cities impossible. But they will cause
us at last, I believe, to build better things than cities. They will
issue in a complete interpenetration of city and of country, a complete
fusion of their different modes of life, and a combination of the
advantages of both, such as no country in the world has ever seen. We
shall have, I believe and trust, ere another generation has past, model
lodging-houses springing up, not in the heart of the town, but on the
hills around it; and those will be—economy, as well as science and good
government, will compel them to be—not ill-built rows of undrained
cottages, each rented for awhile, and then left to run into squalidity
and disrepair, but huge blocks of building, each with its common
eating-house, bar, baths, washhouses, reading-room, common conveniences
of every kind, where, in free and pure country air, the workman will
enjoy comforts which our own grandfathers could not command, and at a
lower price than that which he now pays for such accommodation as I
should be ashamed to give to my own horses; while from these great blocks
of building, branch lines will convey the men to or from their work by
railroad, without loss of time, labour, or health.
Then the city will become what it ought to be; the workshop, and not the
dwelling-house, of a mighty and healthy people. The old foul alleys, as
they become gradually depopulated, will be replaced by fresh warehouses,
fresh public buildings; and the city, in spite of all its smoke and dirt,
will become a place on which the workman will look down with pride and
joy, because it will be to him no longer a prison and a poison-trap, but
merely a place for honest labour.
This, gentlemen and ladies, is my ideal; and I cannot but hope and
believe that I shall live to see it realised here and there, gradually
and cautiously (as is our good and safe English habit), but still
earnestly and well. Did I see but the movement commenced in earnest, I
should be inclined to cry a “Nunc Domine dimittis”—I have lived long
enough to see a noble work begun, which cannot but go on and prosper, so
beneficial would it be found. I tell you, that but this afternoon, as
the Bath train dashed through the last cutting, and your noble vale and
noble city opened before me, I looked round upon the overhanging crags,
the wooded glens, and said to myself: There, upon the rock in the free
air and sunlight, and not here, beneath yon pall of smoke by the lazy
pools and festering tidal muds, ought the Bristol workman to live. Oh
that I may see the time when on the blessed Sabbath eve these hills shall
swarm as thick with living men as bean-fields with the summer bees; when
the glens shall ring with the laughter of ten thousand children, with
limbs as steady, and cheeks as ruddy, as those of my own lads and lasses
at home; and the artisan shall find his Sabbath a day of rest indeed, in
which not only soul but body may gather health and nerve for the week’s
work, under the soothing and purifying influences of those common natural
sights and sounds which God has given as a heritage even to the gipsy on
the moor; and of which no man can be deprived without making his life a
burden to himself, perhaps a burden to those around him.
But it will be asked: Will such improvements pay? I respect that
question. I do not sneer at it, and regard it, as some are too apt to
do, as a sign of the mercenary and money-loving spirit of the present
age. I look on it as a healthy sign of the English mind; a sign that we
believe, as the old Jews did, that political and social righteousness is
inseparably connected with wealth and prosperity. The old Psalms and
prophets have taught us that lesson; and God forbid that we should forget
it. The world is right well made; and the laws of trade and of social
economy, just as much as the laws of nature, are divine facts, and only
by obeying them can we thrive. And I had far sooner hear a people asking
of every scheme of good, Will it pay? than throwing themselves headlong
into that merely sentimental charity to which superstitious nations have
always been prone—charity which effects no permanent good, which, whether
in Hindostan or in Italy, debases, instead of raising, the suffering
classes, because it breaks the laws of social economy.
No, let us still believe that if a thing is right, it will sooner or
later pay; and in social questions, make the profitableness of any scheme
a test of its rightness. It is a rough test; not an infallible one at
all, but it is a fair one enough to work by.
And as for the improvements at which I have hinted, I will boldly answer
that they will pay.
They will pay directly and at once, in the saving of poor-rates. They
will pay by exterminating epidemics, and numberless chronic forms of
disease which now render thousands burdens on the public purse;
consumers, instead of producers of wealth. They will pay by gradually
absorbing the dangerous classes; and removing from temptation and
degradation a generation yet unborn. They will pay in the increased
content, cheerfulness, which comes with health in increased goodwill of
employed towards employers. They will pay by putting the masses into a
state fit for education. They will pay, too, in such fearful times as
these, by the increased physical strength and hardihood of the town
populations. For it is from the city, rather than from the country, that
our armies must mainly be recruited. Not only is the townsman more ready
to enlist than the countryman, because in the town the labour market is
most likely to be overstocked; but the townsman actually makes a better
soldier than the countryman. He is a shrewder, more active, more
self-helping man; give him but the chances of maintaining the same
physical strength and health as the countryman, and he will support the
honour of the British arms as gallantly as the Highlander or the
Connaughtman, and restore the days when the invincible prentice-boys of
London carried terror into the heart of foreign lands. In all ages, in
all times, whether for war or for peace, it will pay. The true wealth of
a nation is the health of her masses.
It may seem to some here that I have dealt too much throughout this
lecture with merely material questions; that I ought to have spoken more
of intellectual progress; perhaps, as a clergyman, more also of spiritual
and moral regeneration.
I can only answer, that if this be a fault on my part, it is a deliberate
one. I have spoken, whether rightly or wrongly, concerning what I
know—concerning matters which are to me articles of faith altogether
indubitable, irreversible, Divine.
Be it that these are merely questions of physical improvement. I see no
reason in that why they should be left to laymen, or urged only on
worldly grounds and self-interest. I do not find that when urged on
those grounds, the advice is listened to. I believe that it will not be
listened to until the consciences of men, as well as their brains, are
engaged in these questions; until they are put on moral grounds, shown to
have connection with moral laws; and so made questions not merely of
interest, but of duty, honour, chivalry.
I cannot but see, moreover, how many phenomena, which are supposed to be
spiritual, are simply physical; how many cases which are referred to my
profession, are properly the object of the medical man. I cannot but
see, that unless there be healthy bodies, it is impossible in the long
run to have a generation of healthy souls; I cannot but see that mankind
are as prone now as ever to deny the sacredness and perfection of God’s
physical universe, as an excuse for their own ignorance and neglect
thereof; to search the highest heaven for causes which lie patent at
their feet, and like the heathen of old time, to impute to some
capricious anger of the gods calamities which spring from their own
greed, haste, and ignorance.
And, therefore, because I am a priest, and glory in the name of a priest,
I have tried to fulfil somewhat of that which seems to me the true office
of a priest—namely, to proclaim to man the Divine element which exists in
all, even the smallest thing, because each thing is a thought of God
himself; to make men understand that God is indeed about their path and
about their bed, spying out all their ways; that they are indeed
fearfully and wonderfully made, and that God’s hand lies for ever on
them, in the form of physical laws, sacred, irreversible, universal,
reaching from one end of the universe to the other; that whosoever
persists in breaking those laws, reaps his sure punishment of weakness
and sickness, sadness and self-reproach; that whosoever causes them to be
broken by others, reaps his sure punishment in finding that he has
transformed his fellow-men into burdens and curses, instead of helpmates
and blessings. To say this, is a priest’s duty; and then to preach the
good news that the remedy is patent, easy, close at hand; that many of
the worst evils which afflict humanity may be exterminated by simple
common sense, and the justice and mercy which does to others as it would
be done by; to awaken men to the importance of the visible world, that
they may judge from thence the higher importance of that invisible world
whereof this is but the garment and the type; and in all times and
places, instead of keeping the key of knowledge to pamper one’s own power
or pride, to lay that key frankly and trustfully in the hand of every
human being who hungers after truth, and to say: Child of God, this key
is thine as well as mine. Enter boldly into thy Father’s house, and
behold the wonder, the wisdom, the beauty of its laws and its organisms,
from the mightiest planet over thy head, to the tiniest insect beneath
thy feet. Look at it, trustfully, joyfully, earnestly; for it is thy
heritage. Behold its perfect fitness for thy life here; and judge from
thence its fitness for thy nobler life hereafter.