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Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

by Charles Kingsley

February, 1999 [Etext #1637]

Project Gutenberg Etext Sanitary and Social Lectures by Kingsley

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This etext was prepared from the 1880 Macmillan and Co. edition

by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

Contents:

Woman's Work in a Country Parish

The Science of Health

The Two Breaths

Thrift

Nausicaa in London; or, the Lower Education of Women

The Air-Mothers

The Tree of Knowledge

Great Cities and their Influence for Good and Evil

Heroism

The Massacre of the Innocents

"A mad world, my masters."

WOMAN'S WORK IN A COUNTRY PARISH {1}

I have been asked to speak a few words to you on a lady's work in

a country parish. I shall confine myself rather to principles

than to details; and the first principle which I would impress on

you is, that we must all be just before we are generous. I must,

indeed, speak plainly on this point. A woman's first duties are

to her own family, her own servants. Be not deceived: if anyone

cannot rule her own household, she cannot rule the Church of God.

If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom she is in

contact all day long, she will not really sympathise with the poor

whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe

this is very great. It seems so much easier to women to do

something for the poor, than for their own ladies' maids, and

house-maids, and cooks. And why? Because they can treat the poor

as THINGS: but they MUST treat their servants as persons. A lady

can go into a poor cottage, lay down the law to the inhabitants,

reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell

them how to set things right, which, if she had the doing of them,

I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they.

She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a

shilling, as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go

out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs:

but with the servants it is not so. She knows their characters;

and, what is more, they know hers; they know her private history,

her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power,

and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work

with them, because, if she does, she will be forced to carry it

out; and it cannot be cold, dry, perfunctory, official: it must

be hearty, living, loving, personal. She must make them her

friends; and perhaps she is afraid of doing that, for fear they

should take liberties, as it is called--which they very probably

will do, unless she keeps up a very high standard of self-

restraint and earnestness in her own life--and that involves a

great deal of trouble, and so she is tempted, when she wishes to

do good, to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside,

who, as she fancies, know nothing about her, and will never find

out whether or not she acts up to the rules which she lays down

for them. Be not deceived, I say, in this case also. Fancy not

that they know nothing about you. There is nothing secret which

shall not be made manifest; and what you do in the closet is

surely proclaimed (and often with exaggeration enough and to

spare) on the house-top. These poor folks at your gate know well

enough, through servants and tradesmen, what you are, how you

treat your servants, how you pay your bills, what sort of temper

you have; and they form a shrewd, hard estimate of your character,

in the light of which they view all that you do and say to them;

and believe me, that if you wish to do any real good to them, you

must begin by doing good to those who lie still nearer to you than

them. And believe me, too, that if you shrink from a hearty

patriarchal sympathy with your own servants, because it would

require too much personal human intercourse with them, you are

like a man who, finding that he had not powder enough to fire off

a pocket-pistol, should try to better matters by using the same

quantity of ammunition in an eighty-four pound gun. For it is

this human friendship, trust, affection, which is the very thing

you have to employ towards the poor, and to call up in them.

Clubs, societies, alms, lending libraries are but dead machinery,

needful, perhaps, but, like the iron tube without the powder,

unable to send the bullet forth one single inch; dead and useless

lumber, without humanity; without the smile of the lip, the light

of the eye, the tenderness of the voice, which makes the poor

woman feel that a soul is speaking to her soul, a heart yearning

after her heart; that she is not merely a THING to be improved,

but a sister to be made conscious of the divine bond of her

sisterhood, and taught what she means when she repeats in her

Creed, "I believe in the communion of saints." This is my text,

and my key-note--whatever else I may say to-day is but a carrying

out into details of the one question, How may you go to these poor

creatures as woman to woman?

Your next duties are to your husband's or father's servants and

workmen. It is said that a clergyman's wife ought to consider the

parish as HER flock as well as her husband's. It may be so: I

believe the dogma to be much overstated just now. But of a

landlord's, or employer's wife (I am inclined to say, too, of an

officer's wife), such a doctrine is absolutely true, and cannot be

overstated. A large proportion, therefore, of your parish work

will be to influence the men of your family to do their duty by

their dependants. You wish to cure the evils under which they

labour. The greater proportion of these are in the hands of your

men relatives. It is a mockery, for instance, in you to visit the

fever-stricken cottage, while your husband leaves it in a state

which breeds that fever. Your business is to go to him and say,

"HERE IS A WRONG; RIGHT IT!" This, as many a beautiful Middle Age

legend tells us, has been woman's function in all uncivilised

times; not merely to melt man's heart to pity, but to awaken it to

duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest: that if

he will not repair the wrong by justice, she will, if possible (as

in those old legends), by self-sacrifice. Be sure this method

will conquer. Do but say: "If you will not new-roof that

cottage, if you will not make that drain, I will. I will not buy

a new dress till it is done; I will sell the horse you gave me,

pawn the bracelet you gave me, but the thing shall be done." Let

him see, I say, that you are in earnest, and he will feel that

your message is a divine one, which he must obey for very shame

and weariness, if for nothing else. This is in my eyes the second

part of a woman's parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind

when you hear, as I trust you will, lectures in this place upon

that SANITARY REFORM, without which all efforts for the bettering

of the masses are in my eyes not only useless, but hypocritical.

I will suppose, then, that you are fulfilling home duties in self-

restraint, and love, and in the fear of God. I will suppose that

you are using all your woman's influence on the mind of your

family, in behalf of tenants and workmen; and I tell you frankly,

that unless this be first done, you are paying a tithe of mint and

anise, and neglecting common righteousness and mercy. But you

wish to do more: you wish for personal contact with the poor

round you, for the pure enjoyment of doing good to them with your

own hands. How are you to set about it? First, there are clubs--

clothing-clubs, shoe-clubs, maternal-clubs; all very good in their

way. But do not fancy that they are the greater part of your

parish work. Rather watch and fear lest they become substitutes

for your real parish work; lest the bustle and amusement of

playing at shopkeeper, or penny-collector, once a week, should

blind you to your real power--your real treasure, by spending

which you become all the richer. What you have to do is to

ennoble and purify the WOMANHOOD of these poor women; to make them

better daughters, sisters, wives, mothers: and all the clubs in

the world will not do that; they are but palliatives of a great

evil, which they do not touch; cloaks for almsgiving, clumsy means

of eking out insufficient wages; at best, kindly contrivances for

tricking into temporary thriftiness a degraded and reckless

peasantry. Miserable, miserable state of things! out of which the

longer I live I see less hope of escape, saving by an emigration,

which shall drain us of all the healthy, strong, and brave among

the lower classes, and leave us, as a just punishment for our

sins, only the cripple, the drunkard, and the beggar.

Yet these clubs MUST be carried on. They make life a little more

possible; they lighten hearts, if but for a moment; they inculcate

habits of order and self-restraint, which may be useful when the

poor man finds himself in Canada or Australia. And it is a cruel

utilitarianism to refuse to palliate the symptoms because you

cannot cure the disease itself. You will give opiates to the

suffering, who must die nevertheless. Let him slip into his grave

at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use these

charitable societies, remembering all along what a fearful and

humbling sign the necessity for them is of the diseased state of

this England, as the sportula and universal almsgiving was of the

decadence of Rome.

However, the work has to be done; and such as it is, it is

especially fitted for young unmarried ladies. It requires no deep

knowledge of human nature. It makes them aware of the amount of

suffering and struggling which lies around them, without bringing

them in that most undesirable contact with the coarser forms of

evil which house-visitation must do; and the mere business habits

of accuracy and patience to which it compels them, are a valuable

practical schooling for them themselves in after-life. It is

tiresome and unsentimental drudgery, no doubt; but perhaps all the

better training on that account. And, after all, the magic of

sweetness, grace, and courtesy may shed a hallowing and humanising

light over the meanest work, and the smile of God may spread from

lip to lip, and the light of God from eye to eye, even between the

giver and receiver of a penny, till the poor woman goes home,

saying in her heart, "I have not only found the life of my hand--I

have found a sister for time and for eternity."

But there is another field of parish usefulness which I cannot

recommend too earnestly, and that is, the school. There you may

work as hard as you will, and how you will--provided you do it in

a loving, hearty, cheerful, HUMAN way, playful and yet earnest;

two qualities which, when they exist in their highest power, are

sure to go together. I say, how you will. I am no pedant about

schools; I care less what is taught than how it is taught. The

merest rudiments of Christianity, the merest rudiments of popular

instruction, are enough, provided they be given by lips which

speak as if they believed what they said, and with a look which

shows real love for the pupil. Manner is everything--matter a

secondary consideration; for in matter, brain only speaks to

brain; in manner, soul speaks to soul. If you want Christ's lost-

lambs really to believe that He died for them, you will do it

better by one little act of interest and affection, than by making

them learn by heart whole commentaries--even as Miss Nightingale

has preached Christ crucified to those poor soldiers by acts of

plain outward drudgery, more livingly, and really, and

convincingly than she could have done by ten thousand sermons, and

made many a noble lad, I doubt not, say in his heart, for the

first time in his wild life, "I can believe now that Christ died

for me, for here is one whom He has taught to die for me in like

wise." And this blessed effect of school-work, remember, is not

confined to the children. It goes home with them to the parents.

The child becomes an object of interest and respect in their eyes,

when they see it an object of interest and respect in yours. If

they see that you look on it as an awful and glorious being, the

child of God, the co-heir of Christ, they learn gradually to look

on it in the same light. They become afraid and ashamed (and it

is a noble fear and shame) to do and say before it what they used

to do and say; afraid to ill-use it. It becomes to them a

mysterious visitor (sad that it should be so, but true as sad)

from a higher and purer sphere, who must be treated with something

of courtesy and respect, who must even be asked to teach them

something of its new knowledge; and the school, and the ladies'

interest in the school, become to the degraded parents a living

sign that those children's angels do indeed behold the face of

their Father which is in heaven.

Now, there is one thing in school-work which I wish to press on

you; and that is, that you should not confine your work to the

girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more, and who

(paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and

freely--THE BOYS. I am not going to enter into the reasons WHY.

I only entreat you to believe me, that by helping to educate the

boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a class (as I have seen

done with admirable effect) of grown-up lads, you may influence

for ever not only the happiness of your pupils, but of the girls

whom they will hereafter marry. It will be a boon to your own sex

as well as to ours to teach them courtesy, self-restraint,

reverence for physical weakness, admiration of tenderness and

gentleness; and it is one which only a lady can bestow. Only by

being accustomed in youth to converse with ladies, will the boy

learn to treat hereafter his sweetheart or his wife like a

gentleman. There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in the heart

of every untutored clod; if it dies out in him (as it too often

does), it were better for him, I often think, if he had never been

born: but the only talisman which will keep it alive, much more

develop it into its fulness, is friendly and revering intercourse

with women of higher rank than himself, between whom and him there

is a great and yet a blessed gulf fixed.

I have left to the last the most important subject of all; and

that is, what is called "visiting the poor." It is an endless

subject; if you go into details, you might write volumes on it.

All I can do this afternoon is to keep to my own key-note, and

say, Visit whom, when, and where you will; but let your visits be

those of woman to woman. Consider to whom you go--to poor souls

whose life, compared with yours, is one long malaise of body, and

soul, and spirit--and do as you would be done by; instead of

reproving and fault-finding, encourage. In God's name, encourage.

They scramble through life's rocks, bogs, and thornbrakes,

clumsily enough, and have many a fall, poor things! But why, in

the name of a God of love and justice, is the lady, rolling along

the smooth turnpike-road in her comfortable carriage, to be

calling out all day long to the poor soul who drags on beside her

over hedge and ditch, moss and moor, bare-footed and weary-

hearted, with half-a-dozen children at her back: "You ought not

to have fallen here; and it was very cowardly to lie down there;

and it was your duty, as a mother, to have helped that child

through the puddle; while, as for sleeping under that bush, it is

most imprudent and inadmissible?" Why not encourage her, praise

her, cheer her on her weary way by loving words, and keep your

reproofs for yourself--even your advice; for SHE does get on her

way, after all, where YOU could not travel a step forward; and she

knows what she is about perhaps better than you do, and what she

has to endure, and what God thinks of her life-journey. The heart

knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with

its joy. But do not be a stranger to her. Be a sister to her. I

do not ask you to take her up in your carriage. You cannot;

perhaps it is good for her that you cannot. It is good sometimes

for Lazarus that he is not fit to sit at Dives's feast--good for

him that he should receive his evil things in this life, and be

comforted in the life to come. All I ask is, do to the poor soul

as you would have her do to you in her place. Do not interrupt

and vex her (for she is busy enough already) with remedies which

she does not understand, for troubles which you do not understand.

But speak comfortably to her, and say: "I cannot feel WITH you,

but I do feel FOR you: I should enjoy helping you, but I do not

know how--tell me. Tell me where the yoke galls; tell me why that

forehead is grown old before its time: I may be able to ease the

burden, to put fresh light into the eyes; and if not, still tell

me, simply because I am a woman, and know the relief of pouring

out my own soul into loving ears, even though in the depths of

despair." Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, I am convinced that

the only way to help these poor women humanly and really, is to

begin by confessing to them that you do not know how to help them;

to humble yourself to them, and to ask their counsel for the good

of themselves and of their neighbours, instead of coming proudly

to them, with nostrums ready compounded, as if a doctor should be

so confident in his own knowledge of books and medicine as to give

physic before asking the patient's symptoms.

Therefore, I entreat you to bear in mind (for without this all

visiting of the poor will be utterly void and useless), that you

must regulate your conduct to them, and in their houses, even to

the most minute particulars, by the very same rules which apply to

persons of your own class. Never let any woman say of you

(thought fatal to all confidence, all influence!): "Yes, it is

all very kind: but she does not behave to me as she would to one

of her own quality." Piety, earnestness, affectionateness,

eloquence--all may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a

poor woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering

her house, even at her own request, while she is at meals. She

may decline to sit; she may beg you to come in, all the more

reason for refusing utterly to obey her, because it shows that

that very inward gulf between you and her still exists in her

mind, which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you

know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with

a lady. Woman's heart is alike in all ranks, and the deepest

sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last and least. We

should not like anyone--no, not an angel from heaven, to come into

our houses without knocking at the door, and say: "I hear you are

very ill off--I will lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are

very careless of money, I will take your accounts into my own

hands;" and still less again: "Your son is a very bad,

profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I

intend to take him out of your hands and reform him myself."

Neither do the poor like such unceremonious mercy, such untender

tenderness, benevolence at horse-play, mistaking kicks for

caresses. They do not like it, they will not respond to it, save

in parishes which have been demoralised by officious and

indiscriminate benevolence, and where the last remaining virtues

of the poor, savage self-help and independence, have been

exchanged (as I have too often seen them exchanged) for organised

begging and hypocrisy.

I would that you would all read, ladies, and consider well the

traits of an opposite character which have just come to light (to

me, I am ashamed to say, for the first time) in the Biography of

Sidney Smith. The love and admiration which that truly brave and

loving man won from everyone, rich or poor, with whom he came in

contact, seems to me to have arisen from the one fact, that

without perhaps having any such conscious intention, he treated

rich and poor, his own servants and the noblemen his guests,

alike, and ALIKE courteously, considerately, cheerfully,

affectionately--so leaving a blessing and reaping a blessing

wheresoever he went.

Approach, then, these poor women as sisters, and you will be able

gradually to reverse the hard saying of which I made use just now:

"Do not apply remedies which they do not understand, to diseases

which you do not understand." Learn lovingly and patiently (aye,

and reverently, for there is that in every human being which

deserves reverence, and must be reverenced if we wish to

understand it)--learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by

that time they will have learnt to understand your remedies, and

they will appreciate them. For you HAVE remedies. I do not

undervalue your position. No man on earth is less inclined to

undervalue the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments,

manners--even physical beauty. All are talents from God, and I

give God thanks when I see them possessed by any human being; for

I know that they, too, can be used in His service, and brought to

bear on the true emancipation of woman--her emancipation, not from

man (as some foolish persons fancy), but from the devil, "the

slanderer and divider" who divides her from man, and makes her

live a life-long tragedy, which goes on in more cottages than in

palaces--a vie e part, a vie incomprise--a life made up half of

ill-usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited

martyrdom, instead of being (as God intended) half of the human

universe, a helpmeet for man, and the one bright spot which makes

this world endurable. Towards making her that, and so realising

the primeval mission by every cottage hearth, each of you can do

something; for each of you have some talent, power, knowledge,

attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager's wife has

not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet

says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must be drawn by

them alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the

treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ;

for they are not given in His name, which is that boundless

tenderness, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice, by which even

the cup of cold water is a precious offering--as God grant your

labour may be!

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH {2}

Whether the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if

it seem probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil?

How they can be, if not destroyed, at least arrested? These are

questions worthy attention, not of statesmen only and medical men,

but of every father and mother in these isles. I shall say

somewhat about them in this Essay; and say it in a form which

ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every class,

from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of

them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected

in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taught--the

rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, and

university.

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were

hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the

hardy lived. They may have been able to say of themselves--as

they do in a State paper of 1515, now well known through the pages

of Mr. Froude: "What comyn folk of all the world may compare with

the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and

all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in

the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have been fed on

"great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini

calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in

numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of

natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest,"

cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by

infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and

left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to

perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first

years of this century, steam and commerce produced an enormous

increase in the population. Millions of fresh human beings found

employment, married, brought up children who found employment in

their turn, and learnt to live more or less civilised lives. An

event, doubtless, for which God is to be thanked. A quite new

phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices and new dangers:

but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new noblenesses,

new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that duty

should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when our

soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms.

To murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at

the will of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.

The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take

care of the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in

like wise. And it may do so thus:

The rapid increase of population during the first half of this

century began at a moment when the British stock was specially

exhausted; namely, about the end of the long French war. There

may have been periods of exhaustion, at least in England, before

that. There may have been one here, as there seems to have been

on the Continent, after the Crusades; and another after the Wars

of the Roses. There was certainly a period of severe exhaustion

at the end of Elizabeth's reign, due both to the long Spanish and

Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced from abroad; an

exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the national weakness

which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts. But after

none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become

more easy; or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of

a colonial empire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings

and a fresh supply of food for them. Britain, at the beginning of

the nineteenth century, was in an altogether new social situation,

At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since

the beginning of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the

"war about Jenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the

most just, as it was one of the most popular, of all our wars;

after, too, the once famous "forty fine harvests" of the

eighteenth century, the British people, from the gentleman who led

to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of the mightiest

and most capable races which the world has ever seen, comparable

best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capable period.

That, at least, their works testify. They created--as far as man

can be said to create anything--the British Empire. They won for

us our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the

world. But at what a cost!

Their bones are scattered far and wide,

By mount, and stream, and sea.

Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle

only, but worse destroyers than shot and shell--fatigue and

disease--had been carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest

young men, each of whom represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried

at home, or married, in default, to a less able man. The

strongest went to the war; each who fell left a weaklier man to

continue the race; while of those who did not fall, too many

returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to injure, it

may be, generations yet unborn. The middle classes, being mostly

engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of

their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their

increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to

this very day. One cannot walk the streets of any of our great

commercial cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-

aged, whose whole bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour

of our middle class is anything but exhausted. In Liverpool,

especially, I have been much struck not only with the vigorous

countenance, but with the bodily size of the mercantile men on

'Change. But it must be remembered always, first, that these men

are the very elite of their class; the cleverest men; the men

capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost all of

them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and

perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young

volunteer who serves in the haberdasher's shop, country-bred men;

and that the question is, not what they are like now, but what

their children and grandchildren, especially the fine young

volunteer's, will be like? A very serious question I hold that to

be, and for this reason.

War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which

fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that

it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than

pestilence. For instead of issuing in the survival of the

fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and

therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn.

And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised,

humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same

ill effect.

In the first place, tens of thousands--who knows it not?--lead

sedentary and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing

as small a fraction of their bodies as of their minds. And all

this in dwellings, workshops, what not?--the influences, the very

atmosphere of which tend not to health, but to unhealth, and to

drunkenness as a solace under the feeling of unhealth and

depression. And that such a life must tell upon their offspring,

and if their offspring grow up under similar circumstances, upon

their offspring's offspring, till a whole population may become

permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that walks

through the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover,

and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern

civilisation has to deal--we interfere with natural selection by

our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If

war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who--looking

at them from a merely physical point of view--are most fit to die.

Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanitary

reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration

of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses,

workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every

cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has--so I am

told--increased the average length of life in these islands, by

nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life

insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of

this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have

died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical

and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power, who are thus

preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny.

Do I say that we ought not to save these people if we can? God

forbid. The weakly, the diseased whether infant or adult, is here

on earth; a British citizen; no more responsible for his own

weakness than for his own existence. Society, that is, in plain

English, we and our ancestors, are responsible for both; and we

must fulfil the duty, and keep him in life; and, if we can, heal,

strengthen, develop him to the utmost; and make the best of that

which "fate and our own deservings" have given us to deal with. I

do not speak of higher motives still; motives which, to every

minister of religion, must be paramount and awful. I speak merely

of physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience

of every man--the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or

woman to save life, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to

shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the

just and on the unjust.

But it is palpable that in doing so we must, year by year,

preserve a large percentage of weakly persons who, marrying freely

in their own class, must produce weaklier children, and they

weaklier children still. Must, did I say? There are those who

are of opinion--and I, after watching and comparing the histories

of many families, indeed of every one with whom I have come in

contact for now five-and-thirty years, in town and country, can

only fear that their opinion is but too well founded on fact--that

in the great majority of cases, in all classes whatsoever, the

children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again, to their

grand-parents of the beginning of the century; and that this

degrading process goes on most surely and most rapidly in our

large towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns,

and therefore in proportion to the number of generations during

which the degrading influences have been at work.

This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as

the years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward

them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in

France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for

their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common sense.

For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as

inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those

broad facts of human nature which every active parish priest,

medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his

life.

Society and British human nature are what they have become by the

indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct

the one than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by

theories than we can by coercion--to which, by-the-bye, almost all

these theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay.

We must teach men to mend their own matters, of their own reason,

and their own free-will. We must teach them that they are the

arbiters of their own destinies; and, to a fearfully large degree,

of their children's destinies after them. We must teach them not

merely that they ought to be free, but that they are free, whether

they know it or not, for good and for evil. And we must do that

in this case, by teaching them sound practical science; the

science of physiology as applied to health. So, and so only, can

we cheek--I do not say stop entirely--though I believe even that

to be ideally possible; but at least cheek the process of

degradation which I believe to be surely going on, not merely in

these islands, but in every civilised country in the world, in

proportion to its civilisation.

It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those

laws of hereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many

marriages disastrous to generations yet unborn. But much valuable

light has been thrown on this most mysterious and most important

subject during the last few years. That light--and I thank God

for it--is widening and deepening rapidly. And I doubt not that

in a generation or two more, enough will be known to be thrown

into the shape of practical and provable rules; and that, if not a

public opinion, yet at least, what is more useful far, a

widespread private opinion will grow up, especially among educated

women, which will prevent many a tragedy and save many a life.

But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than

enough, is known already, to be applied safely and easily by any

adults, however unlearned, to the preservation not only of their

own health, but of that of their children.

The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure

air and pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each

tends to make bone, fat, or muscle, provided only--provided only--

that the food be unadulterated; the value of various kinds of

clothing, and physical exercise, of a free and equal development

of the brain power, without undue overstrain in any one direction;

in one word, the method of producing, as far as possible, the

mentem sanam in corpore sano, and the wonderful and blessed

effects of such obedience to those laws of nature, which are

nothing but the good will of God expressed in facts--their

wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs of

hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system--

all this is known; known as fully and clearly as any human

knowledge need be known; it is written in dozens of popular books

and pamphlets. And why should this divine voice, which cries to

man, tending to sink into effeminate barbarism through his own

hasty and partial civilisation: "It is not too late. For your

bodies, as for your spirits, there is an upward, as well as a

downward path. You, or if not you, at least the children whom you

have brought into the world, for whom you toil, for whom you

hoard, for whom you pray, for whom you would give your lives,--

they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and have

all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical

advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give."--Ah, why is

this divine voice now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets,

and no man regarding her? I appeal to women, who are initiated,

as we men can never be, into the stern mysteries of pain, and

sorrow, and self-sacrifice;--they who bring forth children, weep

over children, slave for children, and, if they have none of their

own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee, for

the children of others--Let them say, shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly. That I

speak neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man

knows full well. Not only as a very humble student of physiology,

but as a parish priest of thirty years' standing, I have seen so

much unnecessary misery; and I have in other cases seen similar

misery so simply avoided; that the sense of the vastness of the

evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of the cure.

Why, then--to come to practical suggestions--should there not be

opened in every great town in these realms a public school of

health? It might connect itself with--I hold that it should form

an integral part of--some existing educational institute. But it

should at least give practical lectures, for fees small enough to

put them within the reach of any respectable man or woman, however

poor, I cannot but hope that such schools of health, if opened in

the great manufacturing towns of England and Scotland, and,

indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtain pupils in

plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what they hear.

The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomed

by their own trades to the application of scientific laws. To

them, therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a

fresh set of facts, would have nothing strange in it. They have

already something of that inductive habit of mind which is the

groundwork of all rational understanding or action. They would

not turn the deaf and contemptuous ear with which the savage and

the superstitious receive the revelation of nature's mysteries.

Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, the experiment be

tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, as supplementary

to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I am happy to

say, becoming more and more common? Why should not people be

taught--they are already being taught at Birmingham--something

about the tissues of the body, their structure and uses, the

circulation of the blood, respiration, chemical changes in the air

respired, amount breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption,

secretion, structure of the nervous system--in fact, be taught

something of how their own bodies are made and how they work?

Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, in some more civilised

age and country, be held a necessary element in the school course

of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, and

arithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that

"technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely,

the technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well.

But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition

of health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those

diseases specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of

townsfolk, exposed to an artificial mode of life. Surely young

men and women should be taught something of the causes of zymotic

disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania,

cerebral derangement, and such like. They should be shown the

practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet

and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, man or woman, who would

not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to his or her

neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about those

questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of

their children may every day depend? I say--women as well as men.

I should have said women rather than men. For it is the women who

have the ordering of the household, the bringing up of the

children; the women who bide at home, while the men are away, it

may be at the other end of the earth.

And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are

subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in public

lectures;" I rejoin--of course not, unless they are taught by

women--by women, of course, duly educated and legally qualified.

Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what

her parents will very properly object to her hearing from almost

any man. This is one of the main reasons why I have, for twenty

years past, advocated the training of women for the medical

profession; and one which countervails, in my mind, all possible

objections to such a movement. And now, thank God, we are seeing

the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised

nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I

first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save

in secret--the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred

office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from

which she was thrust out during the sixteenth century.

I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health

Society, {3} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my

readers, announces a "Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary

Physiology and Hygiene," by a lady, to which I am also most happy

to see, governesses are admitted at half-fees. Alas! how much

misery, disease, and even death might have been prevented, had

governesses been taught such matters thirty years ago, I, for one,

know too well. May the day soon come when there will be educated

women enough to give such lectures throughout these realms, to

rich as well as poor--for the rich, strange to say, need them

often as much as the poor do--and that we may live to see, in

every great town, health classes for women as well as for men,

sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught,

not only to take care of themselves and of their families, but to

exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions

in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.

There may be those who would answer--or rather, there would

certainly have been those who would have so answered thirty years

ago, before the so-called materialism of advanced science had

taught us some practical wisdom about education, and reminded

people that they have bodies as well as minds and souls--"You say,

we are likely to grow weaklier, unhealthier. And if it were so,

what matter? Mind makes the man, not body. We do not want our

children to be stupid giants and bravos; but clever, able, highly

educated, however weakly Providence or the laws of nature may have

chosen to make them. Let them overstrain their brains a little;

let them contract their chests, and injure their digestion and

their eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books. Intellect

is what we want. Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the

world. We would rather see our son a genius than a mere athlete."

Well: and so would I. But what if intellect alone does not even

make money, save as Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, Sampson Brass, and

Montagu Tigg were wont to make it, unless backed by an able,

enduring, healthy physique, such as I have seen, almost without

exception, in those successful men of business whom I have had the

honour and the pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, or what is

now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest

wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of

nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only

an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like

that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of

brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink?

We must, in the great majority of cases, have the CORPUS SANEM if

we want the MENTEM SANEM; and healthy bodies are the only

trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Which is cause and which is

effect, I shall not stay to debate here. But wherever we find a

population generally weakly, stunted, scrofulous, we find in them

a corresponding type of brain, which cannot be trusted to do good

work; which is capable more or less of madness, whether solitary

or epidemic. It may be very active; it may be very quick at

catching at new and grand ideas--all the more quick, perhaps, on

account of its own secret malaise and self-discontent; but it will

be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake

capacity of talk for capacity of action, excitement for

earnestness, virulence for force, and, too often; cruelty for

justice. It will lose manful independence, individuality,

originality; and when men act, they will act from the

consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a

hedge, leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be

brave, and swaying about in mobs and masses. These were the

intellectual weaknesses which, as I read history, followed on

physical degradation in Imperial Rome, in Alexandria, in

Byzantium. Have we not seen them reappear, under fearful forms,

in Paris but the other day?

I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and

shall hold, to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me

to blame and to judge; because it tells me that these defects are

mainly physical; that those who exhibit them are mainly to be

pitied, as victims of the sins or ignorance of their forefathers.

But it tells me too, that those who, professing to be educated

men, and therefore bound to know better, treat these physical

phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy; who even

exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the weaknesses

of fallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most

dangerous of public enemies, let them cloak their quackery under

whatsoever patriotic, or scientific, or even sacred words.

There are those again honest, kindly, sensible, practical men,

many of them; men whom I have no wish to offend; whom I had rather

ask to teach me some of their own experience and common sense,

which has learned to discern, like good statesmen, not only what

ought to be done, but what can be done--there are those, I say,

who would sooner see this whole question let alone. Their

feeling, as far as I can analyse it, seems to be that the evils of

which I have been complaining, are on the whole inevitable; or, if

not, that we can mend so very little of them, that it is wisest to

leave them alone altogether, lest, like certain sewers, "the more

you stir them, the more they smell." They fear lest we should

unsettle the minds of the many for whom these evils will never be

mended; lest we make them discontented; discontented with their

houses, their occupations, their food, their whole social

arrangements; and all in vain.

I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise

deeply with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--

but are not people discontented already, from the lowest to the

highest? And ought a man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy,

sinful world as this is, and always has been, to be anything but

discontented? If he thinks that things are going all right, must

he not have a most beggarly conception of what going right means?

And if things are not going right, can it be anything but good for

him to see that they are not going right? Can truth and fact harm

any human being? I shall not believe so, as long as I have a

Bible wherein to believe. For my part, I should like to make

every man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with

themselves, even as I am discontented with myself. I should like

to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their

moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent, first

of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to

fulfil that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with

the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is

the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue. Men begin at

first, as boys begin when they grumble at their school and their

schoolmasters, to lay the blame on others; to be discontented with

their circumstances--the things which stand around them; and to

cry, "Oh that I had this!" "Oh that I had that!" But by that way

no deliverance lies. That discontent only ends in revolt and

rebellion, social or political; and that, again, still in the same

worship of circumstances--but this time desperate--which ends, let

it disguise itself under what fine names it will, in what the old

Greeks called a tyranny; in which--as in the Spanish republics of

America, and in France more than once--all have become the

voluntary slaves of one man, because each man fancies that the one

man can improve his circumstances for him.

But the wise man will learn, like Epictetus the heroic slave, the

slave of Epaphroditus, Nero's minion--and in what baser and uglier

circumstances could human being find himself?--to find out the

secret of being truly free; namely, to be discontented with no man

and no thing save himself. To say not--"Oh that I had this and

that!" but "Oh that I were this and that!" Then, by God's help--

and that heroic slave, heathen though he was, believed and trusted

in God's help--"I will make myself that which God has shown me

that I ought to be and can be."

Ten thousand a year, or ten million a year, as Epictetus saw full

well, cannot mend that vulgar discontent with circumstances which

he had felt--and who with more right?--and conquered, and

despised. For that is the discontent of children, wanting always

more holidays and more sweets. But I wish my readers to have, and

to cherish, the discontent of men and women.

Therefore I would make men and women discontented, with the divine

and wholesome discontent, at their own physical frame, and at that

of their children. I would accustom their eyes to those precious

heirlooms of the human race, the statues of the old Greeks; to

their tender grandeur, their chaste healthfulness, their

unconscious, because perfect might: and say--There; these are

tokens to you, and to all generations yet unborn, of what man

could be once; of what he can be again if he will obey those laws

of nature which are the voice of God. I would make them

discontented with the ugliness and closeness of their dwellings; I

would make them discontented with the fashion of their garments,

and still more just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion

of theirs; and with everything around them which they have the

power of improving, if it be at all ungraceful, superfluous,

tawdry, ridiculous, unwholesome. I would make them discontented

with what they call their education, and say to them--You call the

three Royal R's education? They are not education: no more is

the knowledge which would enable you to take the highest prizes

given by the Society of Arts, or any other body. They are not

education: they are only instruction; a necessary groundwork, in

an age like this, for making practical use of your education: but

not the education itself.

And if they asked me, What then education meant? I should point

them, first, I think, to noble old Lilly's noble old "Euphues," of

three hundred years ago, and ask them to consider what it says

about education, and especially this passage concerning that mere

knowledge which is nowadays strangely miscalled education. "There

are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man,

knowledge and reason. The one"--that is reason--"commandeth, and

the other"--that is knowledge--"obeyeth. These things neither the

whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor the deceitful cavillings

of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish."

And next I should point them to those pages in Mr. Gladstone's

"Juventus Mundi," where he describes the ideal training of a Greek

youth in Homer's days; and say--There: that is an education fit

for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his

life; the full, proportionate, harmonious educing-that is,

bringing out and developing--of all the faculties of his body,

mind, and heart, till he becomes at once a reverent yet self-

assured, a graceful and yet a valiant, an able and yet an eloquent

personage.

And if any should say to me--"But what has this to do with

science? Homer's Greeks knew no science;" I should rejoin--But

they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the

scientific instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye

and quick ear; the hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for

the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature in a word,

in its completeness, as the highest fact upon this earth.

Therefore they became in after years, not only the great

colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world--the most

practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the

parents of all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics.

Their very religion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward

their education, not in spite of, but by means of that

anthropomorphism which we sometimes too hastily decry. As Mr.

Gladstone says: "As regarded all other functions of our nature,

outside the domain of the life to Godward--all those functions

which are summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind,

the psychic and bodily life, the tendency of the system was to

exalt the human element, by proposing a model of beauty, strength,

and wisdom, in all their combinations, so elevated that the effort

to attain them required a continual upward strain. It made

divinity attainable; and thus it effectually directed the thought

and aim of man

Along the line of limitless desires.

Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the

government of the passions, and in upholding the standard of moral

duties, tended powerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a

large, free, and varied conception of humanity. It incorporated

itself in schemes of notable discipline for mind and body, indeed

of a lifelong education; and these habits of mind and action had

their marked results (to omit many other greatnesses) in a

philosophy, literature, and art, which remain to this day

unrivalled or unsurpassed."

So much those old Greeks did for their own education, without

science and without Christianity. We who have both: what might

we not do, if we would be true to our advantages, and to

ourselves?

THE TWO BREATHS {4}

Ladies,--I have been honoured by a second invitation to address

you, and I dare not refuse it; because it gives me an opportunity

of speaking on a matter, knowledge and ignorance about which may

seriously affect your health and happiness, and that of the

children with whom you may have to do. I must apologise if I say

many things which are well known to many persons in this room:

they ought to be well known to all: but it is generally best to

assume total ignorance in one's hearers, and to begin from the

beginning.

I shall try to be as simple as possible; to trouble you as little

as possible with scientific terms; to be practical; and at the

same time, if possible, interesting.

I should wish to call this lecture "The Two Breaths:" not merely

"The Breath;" and for this reason: every time you breathe you

breathe two different breaths; you take in one, you give out

another. The composition of those two breaths is different.

Their effects are different. The breath which has been breathed

out must not be breathed in again. To tell you why it must not

would lead me into anatomical details, not quite in place here as

yet; though the day will come, I trust, when every woman entrusted

with the care of children will be expected to know something about

them. But this I may say: Those who habitually take in fresh

breath will probably grow up large, strong, ruddy, cheerful,

active, clear-headed, fit for their work. Those who habitually

take in the breath which has been breathed out by themselves, or

any other living creature, will certainly grow up, if they grow up

at all, small, weak, pale, nervous, depressed, unfit for work, and

tempted continually to resort to stimulants, and become drunkards.

If you want to see how different the breath breathed out is from

the breath taken in, you have only to try a somewhat cruel

experiment, but one which people too often try upon themselves,

their children, and their workpeople. If you take any small

animal with lungs like your own--a mouse, for instance--and force

it to breathe no air but what you have breathed already; if you

put it in a close box, and while you take in breath from the outer

air, send out your breath through a tube, into that box, the

animal will soon faint: if you go on long with this process, it

will die.

Take a second instance, which I beg to press most seriously on the

notice of mothers, governesses, and nurses. If you allow a child

to get into the habit of sleeping with its head under the bed-

clothes, and thereby breathing its own breath over and over again,

that child will assuredly grow pale, weak, and ill. Medical men

have cases on record of scrofula appearing in children previously

healthy, which could only be accounted for from this habit, and

which ceased when the habit stopped. Let me again entreat your

attention to this undoubted fact.

Take another instance, which is only too common: If you are in a

crowded room, with plenty of fire and lights and company, doors

and windows all shut tight, how often you feel faint--so faint

that you may require smelling-salts or some other stimulant. The

cause of your faintness is just the same as that of the mouse's

fainting in the box; you and your friends, and, as I shall show

you presently, the fire and the candles likewise, having been all

breathing each other's breaths, over and over again, till the air

has become unfit to support life. You are doing your best to

enact over again the Highland tragedy, of which Sir James Simpson

tells in his lectures to the working-classes of Edinburgh, when at

a Christmas meeting thirty-six persons danced all night in a small

room with a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut. The

atmosphere of the room was noxious beyond description; and the

effect was, that seven of the party were soon after seized with

typhus fever, of which two died. You are inflicting on yourselves

the torments of the poor dog, who is kept at the Grotto del Cane,

near Naples, to be stupefied, for the amusement of visitors, by

the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and brought to life again by

being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you are inflicting upon

yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole of Calcutta:

and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some fresh air

could enter, the candles would soon burn blue, as they do, you

know, when ghosts appear; your brains become disturbed; and you

yourselves ran the risk of becoming ghosts, and the candles of

actually going out.

Of this last fact there is no doubt; for if, instead of putting a

mouse into the box, you will put a lighted candle, and breathe

into the tube as before, however gently, you will in a short time

put the candle out.

Now, how is this? First, what is the difference between the

breath you take in and the breath you give out? And next, why has

it a similar effect on animal life and a lighted candle?

The difference is this. The breath which you take in is, or ought

to be, pure air, composed, on the whole, of oxygen and nitrogen,

with a minute portion of carbonic acid.

The breath which you give out is an impure air, to which has been

added, among other matters which will not support life, an excess

of carbonic acid.

That this is the fact you can prove for yourselves by a simple

experiment. Get a little lime-water at the chemist's, and breathe

into it through a glass tube; your breath will at once make the

lime-water milky. The carbonic acid of your breath has laid hold

of the lime, and made it visible as white carbonate of lime--in

plain English, as common chalk.

Now I do not wish, as I said, to load your memories with

scientific terms: but I beseech you to remember at least these

two, oxygen gas and carbonic acid gas; and to remember that, as

surely as oxygen feeds the fire of life, so surely does carbonic

acid put it out.

I say, "the fire of life." In that expression lies the answer to

our second question: Why does our breath produce a similar effect

upon the mouse and the lighted candle? Every one of us is, as it

were, a living fire. Were we not, how could we be always warmer

than the air outside us? There is a process; going on perpetually

in each of us, similar to that by which coals are burnt in the

fire, oil in a lamp, wax in a candle, and the earth itself in a

volcano. To keep each of those fires alight, oxygen is needed;

and the products of combustion, as they are called, are more or

less the same in each case--carbonic acid and steam.

These facts justify the expression I just made use of--which may

have seemed to some of you fantastical--that the fire and the

candles in the crowded room were breathing the same breath as you

were. It is but too true. An average fire in the grate requires,

to keep it burning, as much oxygen as several human beings do;

each candle or lamp must have its share of oxygen likewise, and

that a very considerable one, and an average gas-burner--pray

attend to this, you who live in rooms lighted with gas--consumes

as much oxygen as several candles. All alike are making carbonic

acid. The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes up the

chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings

and the candles remains to poison the room, unless it be

ventilated.

Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet most

terrible, cases of want of ventilation--death by the fumes of

charcoal. A human being shut up in a room, of which every crack

is closed, with a pan of burning charcoal, falls asleep, never to

wake again. His inward fire is competing with the fire of

charcoal for the oxygen of the room; both are making carbonic acid

out of it: but the charcoal, being the stronger of the two, gets

all the oxygen to itself, and leaves the human being nothing to

inhale but the carbonic acid which it has made. The human being,

being the weaker, dies first: but the charcoal dies also. When

it has exhausted all the oxygen of the room, it cools, goes out,

and is found in the morning half-consumed beside its victim. If

you put a giant or an elephant, I should conceive, into that room,

instead of a human being, the case would be reversed for a time:

the elephant would put out the burning charcoal by the carbonic

acid from his mighty lungs; and then, when he had exhausted all

the air in the room, die likewise of his own carbonic acid.

Now, I think, we may see what ventilation means, and why it is

needed.

Ventilation means simply letting out the foul air, and letting in

the fresh air; letting out the air which has been breathed by men

or by candles, and letting in the air which has not. To

understand how to do that, we must remember a most simple chemical

law, that a gas as it is warmed expands, and therefore becomes

lighter; as it cools, it contracts, and becomes heavier.

Now the carbonic acid in the breath which comes out of our mouth

is warm, lighter than the air, and rises to the ceiling; and

therefore in any unventilated room full of people, there is a

layer of foul air along the ceiling. You might soon test that for

yourselves, if you could mount a ladder and put your heads there

aloft. You do test it for yourselves when you sit in the

galleries of churches and theatres, where the air is palpably more

foul, and therefore more injurious, than down below.

Where, again, work-people are employed in a crowded house of many

storeys, the health of those who work on the upper floors always

suffers most.

In the old monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, when the cages

were on the old plan, tier upon tier, the poor little fellows in

the uppermost tier--so I have been told--always died first of the

monkey's constitutional complaint, consumption, simply from

breathing the warm breath of their friends below. But since the

cages have been altered, and made to range side by side from top

to bottom, consumption--I understand--has vastly diminished among

them.

The first question in ventilation, therefore, is to get this

carbonic acid safe out of the room, while it is warm and light and

close to the ceiling; for if you do not, this happens: The

carbonic acid gas cools and becomes heavier; for carbonic acid, at

the same temperature as common air, is so much heavier than common

air, that you may actually--if you are handy enough--turn it from

one vessel to another, and pour out for your enemy a glass of

invisible poison. So down to the floor this heavy carbonic acid

comes, and lies along it, just as it lies often in the bottom of

old wells, or old brewers' vats, as a stratum of poison, killing

occasionally the men who descend into it. Hence, as foolish a

practice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards

the small hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor

is breathing carbonic acid.

And here one word to those ladies who interest themselves with the

poor. The poor are too apt in times of distress to pawn their

bedsteads and keep their beds. Never, if you have influence, let

that happen. Keep the bedstead, whatever else may go, to save the

sleeper from the carbonic acid on the floor.

How, then, shall we get rid of the foul air at the top of the

room? After all that has been written and tried on ventilation, I

know no simpler method than putting into the chimney one of

Arnott's ventilators, which may be bought and fixed for a few

shillings; always remembering that it must be. fixed into the

chimney as near the ceiling as possible. I can speak of these

ventilators from twenty-five years' experience. Living in a house

with low ceilings, liable to become overcharged with carbonic

acid, which produces sleepiness in the evening, I have found that

these ventilators keep the air fresh and pure; and I consider the

presence of one of these ventilators in a room more valuable than

three or four feet additional height of ceiling. I have found,

too, that their working proves how necessary they are, from this

simple fact: You would suppose that, as the ventilator opens

freely into the chimney, the smoke would be blown down through it

in high winds, and blacken the ceiling: but this is just what

does not happen. If the ventilator be at all properly poised, so

as to shut with a violent gust of wind, it will at all other

moments keep itself permanently open; proving thereby that there

is an up-draught of heated air continually escaping from the

ceiling up the chimney. Another very simple method of ventilation

is employed in those excellent cottages which Her Majesty has

built for her labourers round Windsor. Over each door a sheet of

perforated zinc, some eighteen inches square, is fixed; allowing

the foul air to escape into the passage; and in the ceiling of the

passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escape into the

roof. Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, by

piercing the windows, or otherwise. And here let me give one hint

to all builders of houses: If possible, let bedroom windows open

at the top as well as at the bottom.

Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not

only on parents and educators, but on those who employ workpeople,

and above all on those who employ young women in shops or in work-

rooms. What their condition may be in this city I know not; but

most painful it has been to me in other places, when passing

through warehouses or workrooms, to see the pale, sodden, and, as

the French would say, "etiolated" countenances of the girls who

were passing the greater part of the day in them; and painful,

also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! made them

unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air was

altogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the

seeds of death, not only in the present but future generations.

Why should this be? Everyone will agree that good ventilation is

necessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without

fresh air. Do they not see that by the same reasoning good

ventilation is necessary everywhere, because people cannot remain

well without fresh air? Let me entreat those who employ women in

workrooms, if they have no time to read through such books as Dr.

Andrew Combe's "Physiology applied to Health and Education," and

Madame de Wahl's "Practical Hints on the Moral, Mental, and

Physical Training of Girls," to procure certain tracts published

by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies' Sanitary

Association; especially one which bears on this subject: "The

Black-hole in our own Bedrooms;" Dr. Lankester's "School Manual of

Health;" or a manual on ventilation, published by the Metropolitan

Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.

I look forward--I say it openly--to some period of higher

civilisation, when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of

factories and workshops shall be largely extended, and made far

more stringent; when officers of public health shall be empowered

to enforce the ventilation of every room in which persons are

employed for hire: and empowered also to demand a proper system

of ventilation for every new house, whether in country or in town.

To that, I believe, we must come: but I had sooner far see these

improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free

country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the

Law; carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but

voluntarily, from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity. I

appeal, therefore, to the good feeling of all whom it may concern,

whether the health of those whom they employ, and therefore the

supply of fresh air which they absolutely need, are not matters

for which they are not, more or less, responsible to their country

and their God.

And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me:

"Why make all this fuss about ventilation? Our forefathers got on

very well without it"--I must answer that, begging their pardons,

our ancestors did nothing of the kind. Our ancestors got on

usually very ill in these matters: and when they got on well, it

was because they had good ventilation in spite of themselves.

First. They got on very ill. To quote a few remarkable instances

of longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on

the average in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of

fancying that savages were peculiarly healthy, because those who

were seen were active and strong. The simple answer is, that the

strong alone survived, while the majority died from the severity

of the training. Savages do not increase in number; and our

ancestors increased but very slowly for many centuries. I am not

going to disgust my audience with statistics of disease: but

knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state and of

the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no

hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far

greater then than it is now. Epidemics of many kinds, typhus,

ague, plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad

air--devastated this land and Europe in those days with a horrible

intensity, to which even the choleras of our times are mild. The

back streets, the hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps--

every place in which any large number of persons congregated, were

so many nests of pestilence, engendered by uncleanliness, which

defiled alike the water which was drunk and the air which was

breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables of insurance

companies assure us, the average of human life in England has

increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I.,

owing simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.

But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did

so because they got ventilation in spite of themselves. Luckily

for them, their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows

would not shut. They had lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in

one of which, as I can testify from long experience, is as

thoroughly ventilating as living in a lantern with the horn broken

out. It was because their houses were full of draughts, and still

more, in the early Middle Age, because they had no glass, and

stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that they sought

for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes had

too much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes,

such as that in which the old city of Winchester stands. Shelter,

I believe, as much as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to

occupy the rich alluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old

England choose the river-banks for the sites of their abbeys.

They made a mistake therein, which, like most mistakes, did not go

unpunished. These low situations, especially while the forests

were yet thick on the hills around, were the perennial haunts of

fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons, carried in

the carbonic acid given off by rotten vegetation. So there,

again, they fell in with man's old enemy--bad air. Still, as long

as the doors and windows did not shut, some free circulation of

air remained. But now, our doors and windows shut only too tight.

We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced the

draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its

wide corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves.

We have done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up

hermetically from the outer air, and to breath our own breaths

over and over again; and we pay the penalty of it in a thousand

ways unknown to our ancestors, through whose rooms all the winds

of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to shelter themselves

from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen round the

fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the four-

post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher

civilisation. We therefore absolutely require to make for

ourselves the very ventilation from which our ancestors tried to

escape.

But, ladies, there is an old and true proverb, that you may bring

a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. And in like

wise it is too true, that you may bring people to the fresh air,

but you cannot make them breath it. Their own folly, or the folly

of their parents and educators, prevents their lungs being duly

filled and duly emptied. Therefore the blood is not duly

oxygenated, and the whole system goes wrong. Paleness, weakness,

consumption, scrofula, and too many other ailments, are the

consequences of ill-filled lungs. For without well-filled lungs,

robust health is impossible.

And if anyone shall answer: "We do not want robust health so much

as intellectual attainment; the mortal body, being the lower

organ, must take its chance, and be even sacrificed, if need be to

the higher organ--the immortal mind"--To such I reply, You cannot

do it. The laws of nature, which are the express will of God,

laugh such attempts to scorn. Every organ of the body is formed

out of the blood; and if the blood be vitiated, every organ

suffers in proportion to its delicacy; and the brain, being the

most delicate and highly specialised of all organs, suffers most

of all, and soonest of all, as everyone knows who has tried to

work his brain when his digestion was the least out of order.

Nay, the very morals will suffer. From ill-filled lungs, which

signify ill-repaired blood, arise year by year an amount not

merely of disease, but of folly, temper, laziness, intemperance,

madness, and, let me tell you fairly, crime--the sum of which will

never be known till that great day when men shall be called to

account for all deeds done in the body, whether they be good or

evil.

I must refer you on this subject again to Andrew Combe's

"Physiology," especially chapters iv. and vii.; and also to

chapter x. of Madame de Wahl's excellent book. I will only say

this shortly, that the three most common causes of ill-filled

lungs, in children and in young ladies, are stillness, silence,

and stays.

First, stillness; a sedentary life, and want of exercise. A girl

is kept for hours sitting on a form writing or reading, to do

which she must lean forward; and if her schoolmistress cruelly

attempts to make her sit upright, and thereby keep the spine in an

attitude for which Nature did not intend it, she is thereby doing

her best to bring on that disease, so fearfully common in girls'

schools, lateral curvature of the spine. But practically the girl

will stoop forward. And what happens? The lower ribs are pressed

into the body, thereby displacing more or less something inside.

The diaphragm in the meantime, which is the very bellows of the

lungs, remains loose; the lungs are never properly filled or

emptied; and an excess of carbonic acid accumulates at the bottom

of them. What follows? Frequent sighing to get rid of it;

heaviness of head; depression of the whole nervous system under

the influence of the poison of the lungs; and when the poor child

gets up from her weary work, what is the first thing she probably

does? She lifts up her chest, stretches, yawns, and breathes

deeply--Nature's voice, Nature's instinctive cure, which is

probably regarded as ungraceful, as what is called "lolling" is.

As if sitting upright was not an attitude in itself essentially

ungraceful, and such as no artist would care to draw. As if

"lolling," which means putting the body in the attitude of the

most perfect ease compatible with a fully-expanded chest, was not

in itself essentially graceful, and to be seen in every reposing

figure in Greek bas-reliefs and vases; graceful, and like all

graceful actions, healthful at the same time. The only tolerably

wholesome attitude of repose, which I see allowed in average

school-rooms, is lying on the back on the floor, or on a sloping

board, in which case the lungs must be fully expanded. But even

so, a pillow, or some equivalent, ought to be placed under the

small of the back: or the spine will be strained at its very

weakest point.

I now go on to the second mistake--enforced silence. Moderate

reading aloud is good: but where there is any tendency to

irritability of throat or lungs, too much moderation cannot be

used. You may as well try to cure a diseased lung by working it,

as to cure a lame horse by galloping him. But where the breathing

organs are of average health let it be said once and for all, that

children and young people cannot make too much noise. The parents

who cannot bear the noise of their children have no right to have

brought them into the world. The schoolmistress who enforces

silence on her pupils is committing--unintentionally no doubt, but

still committing--an offence against reason, worthy only of a

convent. Every shout, every burst of laughter, every song--nay,

in the case of infants, as physiologists well know, every moderate

fit of crying--conduces to health, by rapidly filling and emptying

the lung, and changing the blood more rapidly from black to red,

that is, from death to life. Andrew Combe tells a story of a

large charity school, in which the young girls were, for the sake

of their health, shut up in the hall and school-room during play

hours, from November till March, and no romping or noise allowed.

The natural consequences were, the great majority of them fell

ill; and I am afraid that a great deal of illness has been from

time to time contracted in certain school-rooms, simply through

this one cause of enforced silence. Some cause or other there

must be for the amount of ill-health and weakliness which prevails

especially among girls of the middle classes in towns, who have

not, poor things, the opportunities which richer girls have, of

keeping themselves in strong health by riding, skating, archery,--

that last quite an admirable exercise for the chest and lungs, and

far preferable to croquet, which involves too much unwholesome

stooping.--Even a game of ball, if milliners and shop-girls had

room to indulge in one after their sedentary work, might bring

fresh spirits to many a heart, and fresh colour to many a cheek.

I spoke just now of the Greeks. I suppose you will all allow that

the Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which

the world ever saw. Every educated man knows that they were also

the cleverest of all races; and, next to his Bible, thanks, God

for Greek literature.

Now, these people had made physical as well as intellectual

education a science as well as a study. Their women practised

graceful, and in some cases even athletic, exercises. They

developed, by a free and healthy life, those figures which remain

everlasting and unapproachable models of human beauty: but--to

come to my third point--they wore no stays. The first mention of

stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dear old

Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about

four hundred years after the Christian era. He tells us how, when

he was shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the

rest of the passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there

was among them a slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched

wasp-waist, such as you may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and

such as you may see in any street in a British town. And when the

Greek ladies of the neighbourhood found her out, they sent for her

from house to house, to behold, with astonishment and laughter,

this new and prodigious, waist, with which it seemed to them it

was impossible for a human being to breathe or live; and they

petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a

giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners

had not enough to eat. So strange and ridiculous seemed our

present fashion to the descendants of those who, centuries before,

had imagined, because they had seen living and moving, those

glorious statues which we pretend to admire, but refuse to

imitate.

It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt

to fear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws

of nature and of science which are the will of God--it seems to

me, I say, that in those days the present fashion of tight lacing

will be looked back upon as a contemptible and barbarous

superstition, denoting a very low level of civilisation in the

peoples which have practised it. That for generations past women

should have been in the habit--not to please men, who do not care

about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to vie with each

other in obedience to something called fashion--that they should,

I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part

of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and

displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and

important organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on

themselves but on their children after them; that for forty years

past physicians should have been telling them of the folly of what

they have been doing; and that they should as yet, in the great

majority of cases, not only turn a deaf ear to all warnings, but

actually deny the offence, of which one glance of the physician or

the sculptor, who know what shape the human body ought to be,

brings them in guilty--this, I say, is an instance of--what shall

I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely of the

satirist, but of any theologian who really believes that God made

the physical universe. Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common

sense for a moment. When any one chooses a horse or a dog,

whether for strength, for speed, or for any other useful purpose,

the first thing almost to be looked at is the girth round the

ribs; the room for heart and lungs. Exactly in proportion to that

will be the animal's general healthiness, power of endurance, and

value in many other ways. If you will look at eminent lawyers and

famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age, you will see

that in every case they are men, like the late Lord Palmerston,

and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, not merely in

the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had,

therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to

clear the lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole

body. Now, it is just these lower ribs, across which the

diaphragm is stretched like the head of a drum, which stays

contract to a minimum. If you advised owners of horses and hounds

to put their horses or their hounds into stays, and lace them up

tight, in order to increase their beauty, you would receive, I

doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a very decided, refusal

to do that which would spoil not merely the animals themselves,

but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come. And if

you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no

doubt, again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply--if

he was a really educated man--that to comply with your request

would involve his giving up public work, under the probable

penalty of being dead within the twelve-month.

And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical,

is spoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and

other complaints which are the result of this habit of tight

lacing, is known partly to the medical men, who lift up their

voices in vain, and known fully to Him who will not interfere with

the least of His own physical laws to save human beings from the

consequences of their own wilful folly.

And now--to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts--What

becomes of this breath which passes from your lips? Is it merely

harmful; merely waste? God forbid! God has forbidden that

anything should be merely harmful or merely waste in this so wise

and well-made world. The carbonic acid which passes from your

lips at every breath--ay, even that which oozes from the volcano

crater when the eruption is past--is a precious boon to thousands

of things of which you have daily need. Indeed there is a sort of

hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the girl, from

whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for the

carbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the pure

carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a

diamond. Nay, it may go--in such a world of transformations do we

live--to make atoms of coal strata, which after being buried for

ages beneath deep seas, shall be upheaved in continents which are

yet unborn, and there be burnt for the use of a future race of

men, and resolved into their original elements. Coal, wise men

tell us, is on the whole breath and sunlight; the breath of living

creatures who have lived in the vast swamps and forests of some

primeval world, and the sunlight which transmuted that breath into

the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked up for ages in

that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light and

carbonic acid as it was at first. For though you must not breathe

your breath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will

allow the sun to transmute it for you into vegetables; or you may

enjoy its fragrance and its colour in the shape of a lily or a

rose. When you walk in a sunlit garden, every word you speak,

every breath you breathe, is feeding the plants and flowers

around. The delicate surface of the green leaves absorbs the

carbonic acid, and parts it into its elements, retaining the

carbon to make woody fibre, and courteously returning you the

oxygen to mingle with the fresh air, and be inhaled by your lungs

once more. Thus do you feed the plants; just as the plants feed

you: while the great life-giving sun feeds both; and the geranium

standing in the sick child's window does not merely rejoice his

eye and mind by its beauty and freshness, but repays honestly the

trouble spent on it; absorbing the breath which the child needs

not, and giving to him the breath which he needs.

So are the services of all things constituted according to a

Divine and wonderful order, and knit together in mutual dependence

and mutual helpfulness--a fact to be remembered with hope and

comfort: but also with awe and fear. For as in that which is

above nature, so in nature itself; he that breaks one physical law

is guilty of all. The whole universe, as it were, takes up arms

against him; and all nature, with her numberless and unseen

powers, is ready to avenge herself on him, and on his children

after him, he knows not when nor where. He, on the other hand,

who obeys the laws of nature with his whole heart and mind, will

find all things working together to him for good. He is at peace

with the physical universe. He is helped and befriended alike by

the sun above his head and the dust beneath his feet; because he

is obeying the will and mind of Him who made sun, and dust, and

all things; and who has given them a law which cannot be broken.

THRIFT {5}

Ladies,--I have chosen for the title of this lecture a practical

and prosaic word, because I intend the lecture itself to be as

practical and prosaic as I can make it, without becoming

altogether dull.

The question of the better or worse education of women is one far

too important for vague sentiment, wild aspirations, or Utopian

dreams.

It is a practical question, on which depends not merely money or

comfort, but too often health and life, as the consequences of a

good education, or disease and death--I know too well of what I

speak--as the consequences of a bad one.

I beg you, therefore, to put out of your minds at the outset any

fancy that I wish for a social revolution in the position of

women; or that I wish to see them educated by exactly the same

methods, and in exactly the same subjects, as men. British lads,

on an average, are far too ill-taught still, in spite of all

recent improvements, for me to wish that British girls should be

taught in the same way.

Moreover, whatever defects there may have been--and defects there

must be in all things human--in the past education of British

women, it has been most certainly a splendid moral success. It

has made, by the grace of God, British women the best wives,

mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, that the world, as far as I

can discover, has yet seen.

Let those who will, sneer at the women of England. We who have to

do the work and to fight the battle of life know the inspiration

which we derive from their virtue, their counsel, their

tenderness, and--but too often--from their compassion and their

forgiveness. There is, I doubt not, still left in England many a

man with chivalry and patriotism enough to challenge the world to

show so perfect a specimen of humanity as a cultivated British

woman.

But just because a cultivated British woman is so perfect a

personage; therefore I wish to see all British women cultivated.

Because the womanhood of England is so precious a treasure; I wish

to see none of it wasted. It is an invaluable capital, or

material, out of which the greatest possible profit to the nation

must be made. And that can only be done by Thrift; and that,

again, can only be attained by knowledge.

Consider that word Thrift. If you will look at "Dr. Johnson's

Dictionary," or if you know your "Shakespeare," you will see that

Thrift signified originally profits, gain, riches gotten--in a

word, the marks of a man's thriving.

How, then, did the word Thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality,

the opposite of waste? Just in the same way as economy--which

first, of course, meant the management of a household--got to mean

also the opposite of waste.

It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in

fact, men throve in proportion as they saved their capital, their

material, their force.

Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws

of nature--call them, rather, laws of God--which apply not merely

to political economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to

physiology, to society; to the intellect, to the heart, of every

person in this room.

The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much

work as possible done with the least expenditure of power, the

least jar and obstruction, least wear and tear.

And the secret of thrift is knowledge. In proportion as you know

the laws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it

easily, surely, rapidly, successfully; instead of wasting your

money or your energies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts,

which end in disappointment and exhaustion.

The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge. The more you know, the

more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can

do more work with less effort.

A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves

capital, enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater.

Knowledge of the electric telegraph saves time; knowledge of

writing saves human speech and locomotion; knowledge of domestic

economy saves income; knowledge of sanitary laws saves health and

life; knowledge of the laws of the intellect saves wear and tear

of brain; and knowledge of the laws of the spirit--what does it

not save?

A well-educated moral sense, a well-regulated character, saves

from idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and

excitement, those tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those

nobler aspirations of humanity, which are the heritage of the

woman far more than of the man; and which are potent in her, for

evil or for good, in proportion as they are left to run wild and

undisciplined; or are trained and developed into graceful,

harmonious, self-restraining strength, beautiful in themselves,

and a blessing to all who come under their influence.

What, therefore, I recommend to ladies in this lecture is thrift:

thrift of themselves and of their own powers: and knowledge as

the parent of thrift.

And because it is well to begin with the lower applications of

thrift, and to work up to the higher, I am much pleased to hear

that the first course of the proposed lectures to women in this

place will be one on domestic economy.

I presume that the learned gentleman who will deliver these

lectures will be the last to mean by that term the mere saving of

money; that he will tell you, as--being a German--he will have

good reason to know, that the young lady who learns thrift in

domestic economy is also learning thrift of the very highest

faculties of her immortal spirit. He will tell you, I doubt not--

for he must know--how you may see in Germany young ladies living

in what we more luxurious British would consider something like

poverty; cooking, waiting at table, and performing many a

household office which would be here considered menial; and yet

finding time for a cultivation of the intellect, which is,

unfortunately, too rare in Great Britain.

The truth is, that we British are too wealthy. We make money, if

not too rapidly for the good of the nation at large, yet too

rapidly, I fear, for the good of the daughters of those who make

it. Their temptation--I do not, of course, say they all yield to

it--but their temptation is, to waste of the very simplest--I had

almost said, if I may be pardoned the expression, of the most

barbaric--kind; to an oriental waste of money, and waste of time;

to a fondness for mere finery, pardonable enough, but still a

waste; and to the mistaken fancy that it is the mark of a lady to

sit idle and let servants do everything for her.

But it is not of this sort of waste of which I wish to speak to-

day. I only mention the matter in passing, to show that high

intellectual culture is not incompatible with the performance of

homely household duties, and that the moral success of which I

spoke just now need not be injured, any more than it is in

Germany, by intellectual success likewise. I trust that these

words may reassure those parents, if any such there be here, who

may fear that these lectures will withdraw women from their

existing sphere of interest and activity. That they should

entertain such a fear is not surprising, after the extravagant

opinions and schemes which have been lately broached in various

quarters.

The programme to these lectures expressly disclaims any such

intentions; and I, as a husband and a father, expressly disclaim

any such intention likewise.

"To fit women for the more enlightened performance of their

special duties;" to help them towards learning how to do better

what we doubt not many of them are already doing well; is, I

honestly believe, the only object of the promoters of this scheme.

Let us see now how some of these special duties can be better

performed by help of a little enlightenment as to the laws which

regulate them.

Now, no man will deny--certainly no man who is past forty-five,

and whose digestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef

and mutton which are the boast of a British kitchen, and to

prefer, with Justice Shallow, and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff

also, "any pretty little tiny kickshaws"--no man, I say, who has

reached that age, but will feel it a practical comfort to him to

know that the young ladies of his family are at all events good

cooks; and understand, as the French do, thrift in the matter of

food.

Neither will any parent who wishes, naturally enough, that his

daughters should cost him as little as possible; and wishes,

naturally enough also, that they should be as well dressed as

possible, deny that it would be a good thing for them to be

practical milliners and mantua-makers; and, by making their own

clothes gracefully and well, exercise thrift in clothing.

But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in

wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labour

misapplied, you will agree, is labour wasted; and as dress, I

presume, is intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making

a dress which only disfigures her may be considered as a plain

case of waste. It would be impertinent in me to go into any

details: but it is impossible to walk about the streets now

without passing young people who must be under a deep delusion as

to the success of their own toilette. Instead of graceful and

noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of colour at

once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic

laws of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to

the eye, and startling to common sense, till one would be hardly

more astonished, and certainly hardly more shocked, if in a year

or two, one should pass someone going about like a Chinese lady,

with pinched feet, or like a savage of the Amazons, with a wooden

bung through her lower lip. It is easy to complain of these

monstrosities: but impossible to cure them, it seems to me,

without an education of the taste, an education in those laws of

nature which produce beauty in form and beauty in colour. For

that the cause of these failures lies in want of education is

patent. They are most common in--I had almost said they are

confined to--those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least

educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do

not acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in

consequence, dress themselves blindly according to what they

conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand through

an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the

fact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are

invented now not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the

sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and

thereby increased employment; according to the strange system

which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity, at

least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday,

nailing up the head of the weather-glass to insure fine weather.

Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty

which are as eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be

seen fulfilled, as Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every

flower and every leaf, in every sweeping down and rippling wave;

and they will be able to invent graceful and economical dresses

for themselves, without importing tawdry and expensive ugliness

from France.

Let me now go a step farther, and ask you to consider this: There

are in England now a vast number, and an increasing number, of

young women who, from various circumstances which we all know,

must in after life be either the mistresses of their own fortunes,

or the earners of their own bread. And, to do that wisely and

well, they must be more or less women of business, and to be women

of business they must know something of the meaning of the words

Capital, Profit, Price, Value, Labour, Wages, and of the relation

between those two last. In a word, they must know a little

political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of

every household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift

of brain; freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds,

all of which eat out the health as well as the heart, by a little

sound knowledge of the principles of political economy.

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually

buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and

employing labour in the form of servants; and very often, into the

bargain, keeping her husband's accounts: I cannot but think that

her hard-worked brain might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire

to do her duty by every subject in her little kingdom, might be

more easily satisfied, had she read something of what Mr. John

Stuart Mill has written, especially on the duties of employer and

employed. A capitalist, a commercialist, an employer of labour,

and an accountant--every mistress of a household is all these,

whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for her,

in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust

merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate

power of ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly

through their work in simpler and less civilised societies.

And here I stop to answer those who may say--as I have heard it

said--That a woman's intellect is not fit for business; that when

a woman takes to business, she is apt to do it ill, and

unpleasantly likewise, to be more suspicious, more irritable, more

grasping, more unreasonable, than regular men of business would

be: that--as I have heard it put--"a woman does not fight fair."

The answer is simple. That a woman's intellect is eminently

fitted for business is proved by the enormous amount of business

she gets through without any special training for it: but those

faults in a woman of which some men complain are simply the

results of her not having had a special training. She does not

know the laws of business. She does not know the rules of the

game she is playing; and therefore she is playing it in the dark,

in fear and suspicion, apt to judge of questions on personal

grounds, often offending those with whom she has to do, and

oftener still making herself miserable over matters of law or of

business, on which a little sound knowledge would set her head and

her heart at rest.

When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great

household, of a great estate, of a great business, struggling

heroically, and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for

selfishness and ambition, while they were really sacrificing

themselves with the divine instinct of a mother for their

children's interest: I have stood by with mingled admiration and

pity, and said to myself: "How nobly she is doing the work

without teaching! How much more nobly would she have done it had

she been taught! She is now doing her work at the most enormous

waste of energy and of virtue: had she had knowledge, thrift

would have followed it; she would have done more work with far

less trouble. She will probably kill herself if she goes on;

while sound knowledge would have saved her health, saved her

heart, saved her friends, and helped the very loved ones for whom

she labours, not always with success."

A little political economy, therefore, will at least do no harm to

a woman; especially if she have to take care of herself in after

life; neither, I think, will she be much harmed by some sound

knowledge of another subject, which I see promised in these

lectures: "Natural philosophy, in its various branches, such as

the chemistry of common life, light, heat, electricity, etc. etc."

A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach

many women that by shutting themselves up day after day, week

after week, in darkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a

waste of health, destroying their vital energy, and diseasing

their brains, as if they were taking so much poison the whole

time.

A little knowledge of the laws of heat would teach women not to

clothe themselves and their children after foolish and

insufficient fashions, which in this climate sow the seeds of a

dozen different diseases, and have to be atoned for by perpetual

anxieties, and by perpetual doctors' bills; and as for a little

knowledge of the laws of electricity, one thrift I am sure it

would produce--thrift to us men, of having to answer continual

inquiries as to what the weather is going to be, when a slight

knowledge of the barometer, or of the form of the clouds and the

direction of the wind, would enable many a lady to judge for

herself, and not, after inquiry on inquiry, regardless of all

warnings, go out on the first appearance of a strip of blue sky,

and come home wet through, with what she calls "only a chill," but

which really means a nail driven into her coffin--a probable

shortening, though it may be a very small one, of her mortal life;

because the food of the next twenty-four hours, which should have

gone to keep the vital heat at its normal standard, will have to

be wasted in raising it up to that standard, from which it has

fallen by a chill.

Ladies, these are subjects on which I must beg to speak a little

more at length, premising them by one statement, which may seem

jest, but is solemn earnest--that, if the medical men of this or

any other city were what the world now calls "alive to their own

interests"--that is, to the mere making of money; instead of

being, what medical men are, the most generous, disinterested, and

high-minded class in these realms, then they would oppose by all

means in their power the delivery of lectures on natural

philosophy to women. For if women act upon what they learn in

those lectures--and having women's hearts, they will act upon it--

there ought to follow a decrease of sickness and an increase of

health, especially among children; a thrift of life, and a thrift

of expense besides, which would very seriously affect the income

of medical men.

For let me ask you, ladies, with all courtesy, but with all

earnestness--Are you aware of certain facts, of which every one of

those excellent medical men is too well aware? Are you aware that

more human beings are killed in England every year by unnecessary

and preventable diseases than were killed at Waterloo or at

Sadowa? Are you aware that the great majority of those victims

are children? Are you aware that the diseases which carry them

off are for the most part such as ought to be specially under the

control of the women who love them, pet them, educate them, and

would in many cases, if need be, lay down their lives for them?

Are you aware, again, of the vast amount of disease which, so both

wise mothers and wise doctors assure me, is engendered in the

sleeping-room from simple ignorance of the laws of ventilation,

and in the schoolroom likewise, from simple ignorance of the laws

of physiology? from an ignorance of which I shall mention no other

case here save one--that too often from ignorance of signs of

approaching disease, a child is punished for what is called

idleness, listlessness, wilfulness, sulkiness; and punished, too,

in the unwisest way--by an increase of tasks and confinement to

the house, thus overtasking still more a brain already overtasked,

and depressing still more, by robbing it of oxygen and of

exercise, a system already depressed? Are you aware, I ask again,

of all this? I speak earnest upon this point, because I speak

with experience. As a single instance: a medical man, a friend

of mine, passing by his own schoolroom, heard one of his own

little girls screaming and crying, and went in. The governess, an

excellent woman, but wholly ignorant of the laws of physiology,

complained that the child had of late become obstinate and would

not learn; and that therefore she must punish her by keeping her

indoors over the unlearnt lessons. The father, who knew that the

child was usually a very good one, looked at her carefully for a

little while; sent her out of the schoolroom; and then said, "That

child must not open a book for a month." "If I had not acted so,"

he said to me, "I should have had that child dead of brain-disease

within the year."

Now, in the face of such facts as these, is it too much to ask of

mothers, sisters, aunts, nurses, governesses--all who may be

occupied in the care of children, especially of girls--that they

should study thrift of human health and human life, by studying

somewhat the laws of life and health? There are books--I may say

a whole literature of books--written by scientific doctors on

these matters, which are in my mind far more important to the

schoolroom than half the trashy accomplishments, so-called, which

are expected to be known by governesses. But are they bought?

Are they even to be bought, from most country booksellers? Ah,

for a little knowledge of the laws to the neglect of which is

owing so much fearful disease, which, if it does not produce

immediate death, too often leaves the constitution impaired for

years to come. Ah the waste of health and strength in the young;

the waste, too, of anxiety and misery in those who love and tend

them. How much of it might be saved by a little rational

education in those laws of nature which are the will of God about

the welfare of our bodies, and which, therefore, we are as much

bound to know and to obey, as we are bound to know and obey the

spiritual laws whereon depends the welfare of our souls.

Pardon me, ladies, if I have given a moment's pain to anyone here:

but I appeal to every medical man in the room whether I have not

spoken the truth; and having such an opportunity as this, I felt

that I must speak for the sake of children, and of women likewise,

or else for ever hereafter hold my peace.

Let me pass on from this painful subject--for painful it has been

to me for many years--to a question of intellectual thrift--by

which I mean just now thrift of words; thrift of truth; restraint

of the tongue; accuracy and modesty in statement.

Mothers complain to me that girls are apt to be--not intentionally

untruthful--but exaggerative, prejudiced, incorrect, in repeating

a conversation or describing an event; and that from this fault

arise, as is to be expected, misunderstandings, quarrels, rumours,

slanders, scandals, and what not.

Now, for this waste of words there is but one cure: and if I be

told that it is a natural fault of women; that they cannot take

the calm judicial view of matters which men boast, and often boast

most wrongly, that they can take; that under the influence of

hope, fear, delicate antipathy, honest moral indignation, they

will let their eyes and ears be governed by their feelings; and

see and hear only what they wish to see and hear--I answer, that

it is not for me as a man to start such a theory; but that if it

be true, it is an additional argument for some education which

will correct this supposed natural defect. And I say deliberately

that there is but one sort of education which will correct it; one

which will teach young women to observe facts accurately, judge

them calmly, and describe them carefully, without adding or

distorting: and that is, some training in natural science.

I beg you not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth

of my theory by playing to-night at the game called "Russian

Scandal;" in which a story, repeated in secret by one player to

the other, comes out at the end of the game, owing to the

inaccurate and--forgive me if I say it--uneducated brains through

which it has passed, utterly unlike its original; not only

ludicrously maimed and distorted, but often with the most

fantastic additions of events, details, names, dates, places,

which each player will aver that he received from the player

before him. I am afraid that too much of the average gossip of

every city, town, and village is little more than a game of

"Russian Scandal;" with this difference that while one is but a

game, the other is but too mischievous earnest.

But now, if among your party there shall be an average lawyer,

medical man, or man of science, you will find that he, and perhaps

he alone, will be able to retail accurately the story which has

been told him. And why? Simply because his mind has been trained

to deal with facts; to ascertain exactly what he does see or hear,

and to imprint its leading features strongly and clearly on his

memory.

Now, you certainly cannot make young ladies barristers or

attorneys; nor employ their brains in getting up cases, civil or

criminal; and as for chemistry, they and their parents may have a

reasonable antipathy to smells, blackened fingers, and occasional

explosions and poisonings. But you may make them something of

botanists, zoologists, geologists.

I could say much on this point: allow me at least to say this: I

verify believe that any young lady who would employ some of her

leisure time in collecting wild flowers, carefully examining them,

verifying them, and arranging them; or who would in her summer

trip to the sea-coast do the same by the common objects of the

shore, instead of wasting her holiday, as one sees hundreds doing,

in lounging on benches on the esplanade, reading worthless novels,

and criticising dresses--that such a young lady, I say, would not

only open her own mind to a world of wonder, beauty, and wisdom,

which, if it did not make her a more reverent and pious soul, she

cannot be the woman which I take for granted she is; but would

save herself from the habit--I had almost said the necessity--of

gossip; because she would have things to think of and not merely

persons; facts instead of fancies; while she would acquire

something of accuracy, of patience, of methodical observation and

judgment, which would stand her in good stead in the events of

daily life, and increase her power of bridling her tongue and her

imagination. "God is in heaven, and thou upon earth; therefore

let thy words be few;" is the lesson which those are learning all

day long who study the works of God with reverent accuracy, lest

by misrepresenting them they should be tempted to say that God has

done that which He has not; and in that wholesome discipline I

long that women as well as men should share.

And now I come to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with

a waste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those

faculties which connect us with the unseen and spiritual world;

with humanity, with Christ, with God; thrift of the immortal

spirit. I am not going now to give you a sermon on duty. You

hear such, I doubt not, in church every Sunday, far better than I

can preach to you. I am going to speak rather of thrift of the

heart, thrift of the emotions. How they are wasted in these days

in reading what are called sensation novels, all know but too

well; how British literature--all that the best hearts and

intellects among our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is

neglected for light fiction, the reading of which is, as a lady

well said, "the worst form of intemperance--dram-drinking and

opium-eating, intellectual and moral."

I know that the young will delight--they have delighted in all

ages, and will to the end of time--in fictions which deal with

that "oldest tale which is for ever new." Novels will be read:

but that is all the more reason why women should be trained, by

the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to

distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the

immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the

sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled

plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn--and that she

can only learn by cultivation--to discern with joy, and drink in

with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn

with the fine scorn of a pure and strong womanhood from the bad,

the ugly, and the false.

And if any parent should be inclined to reply: "Why lay so much

stress upon educating a girl in British literature? Is it not far

more important to make our daughters read religious books?" I

answer--Of course it is. I take for granted that that is done in

a Christian land. But I beg you to recollect that there are books

and books; and that in these days of a free press it is

impossible, in the long run, to prevent girls reading books of

very different shades of opinion, and very different religious

worth. It may be, therefore, of the very highest importance to a

girl to have her intellect, her taste, her emotions, her moral

sense, in a word, her whole womanhood, so cultivated and regulated

that she shall herself be able to discern the true from the false,

the orthodox from the unorthodox, the truly devout from the merely

sentimental, the Gospel from its counterfeits.

I should have thought that there never had been in Britain, since

the Reformation, a crisis at which young Englishwomen required

more careful cultivation on these matters; if at least they are to

be saved from making themselves and their families miserable; and

from ending--as I have known too many end--with broken hearts,

broken brains, broken health, and an early grave.

Take warning by what you see abroad. In every country where the

women are uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is

French novels or translations of them--in every one of those

countries the women, even to the highest, are the slaves of

superstition, and the puppets of priests. In proportion as, in

certain other countries--notably, I will say, in Scotland--the

women are highly educated, family life and family secrets are

sacred, and the woman owns allegiance and devotion to no confessor

or director, but to her own husband or to her own family.

I say plainly, that if any parents wish their daughters to succumb

at least to some quackery or superstition, whether calling itself

scientific, or calling itself religious--and there are too many of

both just now--they cannot more certainly effect their purpose

than by allowing her to grow up ignorant, frivolous, luxurious,

vain; with her emotions excited, but not satisfied, by the reading

of foolish and even immoral novels.

In such a case the more delicate and graceful the organisation,

the more noble and earnest the nature, which has been neglected,

the more certain it is--I know too well what I am saying--to go

astray.

The time of depression, disappointment, vacuity, all but despair

must come. The immortal spirit, finding no healthy satisfaction

for its highest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to

an unhealthy and exciting superstition. Ashamed of its own long

self-indulgence, it is but too likely to flee from itself into a

morbid asceticism. Not having been taught its God-given and

natural duties in the world, it is but too likely to betake

itself, from the mere craving for action, to self-invented and

unnatural duties out of the world. Ignorant of true science, yet

craving to understand the wonders of nature and of spirit, it is

but too likely to betake itself to non-science--nonsense as it is

usually called--whether of spirit-rapping and mesmerism, or of

miraculous relics and winking pictures. Longing for guidance and

teaching, and never having been taught to guide and teach itself,

it is but too likely to deliver itself up in self-despair to the

guidance and teaching of those who, whether they be quacks or

fanatics, look on uneducated women as their natural prey.

You will see, I am sure, from what I have said, that it is not my

wish that you should become mere learned women; mere female

pedants, as useless and unpleasing as male pedants are wont to be.

The education which I set before you is not to be got by mere

hearing lectures or reading books: for it is an education of your

whole character; a self-education; which really means a committing

of yourself to God, that He may educate you. Hearing lectures is

good, for it will teach you how much there is to be known, and how

little you know. Reading books is good, for it will give you

habits of regular and diligent study. And therefore I urge on you

strongly private study, especially in case a library should be

formed here of books on those most practical subjects of which I

have been speaking. But, after all, both lectures and books are

good, mainly in as far as they furnish matter for reflection:

while the desire to reflect and the ability to reflect must come,

as I believe, from above. The honest craving after light and

power, after knowledge, wisdom, active usefulness, must come--and

may it come to you--by the inspiration of the Spirit of God.

One word more, and I have done. Let me ask women to educate

themselves, not for their own sakes merely, but for the sake of

others. For, whether they will or not, they must educate others.

I do not speak merely of those who may be engaged in the work of

direct teaching; that they ought to be well taught themselves, who

can doubt? I speak of those--and in so doing I speak of every

woman, young and old--who exercise as wife, as mother, as aunt, as

sister, or as friend, an influence, indirect it may be, and

unconscious, but still potent and practical, on the minds and

characters of those about them, especially of men. How potent and

practical that influence is, those know best who know most of the

world and most of human nature. There are those who consider--and

I agree with them--that the education of boys under the age of

twelve years ought to be entrusted as much as possible to women.

Let me ask--of what period of youth and manhood does not the same

hold true? I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who

fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women.

I should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in

the highest sense, the educator of man from infancy to old age;

that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities

of women pointed; for which they were to be educated to the

highest pitch. I should have thought that it was the glory of

woman that she was sent into the world to live for others, rather

than for herself; and therefore I should say--Let her smallest

rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed: but let her

never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to

teach man--what, I believe, she has been teaching him all along,

even in the savage state--namely, that there is something more

necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing

of duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual

days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is--

purity and virtue. Let her never be persuaded to forget that her

calling is not the lower and more earthly one of self-assertion,

but the higher and the diviner calling of self-sacrifice; and let

her never desert that higher life, which lives in others and for

others, like her Redeemer and her Lord.

And if any should answer that this doctrine would keep woman a

dependent and a slave, I rejoin--Not so: it would keep her what

she should be--the mistress of all around her, because mistress of

herself. And more, I should express a fear that those who made

that answer had not yet seen into the mystery of true greatness

and true strength; that they did not yet understand the true

magnanimity, the true royalty of that spirit, by which the Son of

man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give

His life a ransom for many.

Surely that is woman's calling--to teach man: and to teach him

what? To teach him, after all, that his calling is the same as

hers, if he will but see the things which belong to his peace. To

temper his fiercer, coarser, more self-assertive nature, by the

contact of her gentleness, purity, self-sacrifice. To make him

see that not by blare of trumpets, not by noise, wrath, greed,

ambition, intrigue, puffery, is good and lasting work to be done

on earth: but by wise self-distrust, by silent labour, by lofty

self-control, by that charity which hopeth all things, believeth

all things, endureth all things; by such an example, in short, as

women now in tens of thousands set to those around them; such as

they will show more and more, the more their whole womanhood is

educated to employ its powers without waste and without haste in

harmonious unity. Let the woman begin in girlhood, if such be her

happy lot--to quote the words of a great poet, a great

philosopher, and a great Churchman, William Wordsworth--let her

begin, I say -

With all things round about her drawn

From May-time and the cheerful dawn;

A dancing shape, an image gay,

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

Let her develop onwards -

A spirit, yet a woman too,

With household motions light and free,

And steps of virgin liberty.

A countenance in which shall meet

Sweet records, promises as sweet;

A creature not too bright and good

For human nature's daily food;

For transient sorrows, simple wiles,

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.

But let her highest and her final development be that which not

nature, but self-education alone can bring--that which makes her

once and for ever -

A being breathing thoughtful breath;

A traveller betwixt life and death.

With reason firm, with temperate will

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.

A perfect woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, and command.

And yet a spirit still and bright

With something of an angel light.

NAUSICAA IN LONDON; OR, THE LOWER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

Fresh from the Marbles of the British Museum, I went my way

through London streets. My brain was still full of fair and grand

forms; the forms of men and women whose every limb and attitude

betokened perfect health, and grace, and power, and self-

possession and self-restraint so habitual and complete that it had

become unconscious, and undistinguishable from the native freedom

of the savage. For I had been up and down the corridors of those

Greek sculptures, which remain as a perpetual sermon to rich and

poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, and it may be decaying

pseudo-civilisation, saying with looks more expressive than all

words--Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and

such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too

often only boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful

and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and

its kindred temples. And these, or such as these, I thought to

myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and

Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom

Xenophon led back from Babylon to the Black Sea shore; the

ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander's

host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab. And were these

women mere dolls? These men mere gladiators? Were they not the

parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts? We talk

of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient

Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical,

intellectual, or aesthetic, and I may say moral likewise--

religious education, of course, in our sense of the world, they

had none--but do we know anything about education of which they

have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are there not some

branches of education which they perfected, once and for ever;

leaving us northern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow,

their example? To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy,

proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and body--that was

their notion of education. To produce that, the text-book of

their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of--But I am

treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that the seafaring

Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his

sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for

this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the

Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented

on the Athenian stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could

not--for he had no voice--himself take a speaking part, he was

content to do one thing in which he specially excelled; and

dressed and masked as a girl, to play at ball amid the chorus of

Nausicaa's maidens.

That drama of Nausicaa is lost; and if I dare say so of any play

of Sophocles', I scarce regret it. It is well, perhaps, that we

have no second conception of the scene, to interfere with the

simplicity, so grand, and yet so tender, of Homer's idyllic

episode.

Nausicaa, it must be remembered, is the daughter of a king. But

not of a king in the exclusive modern European or old Eastern

sense. Her father, Alcinous, is simply primus inter pares among a

community of merchants, who are called "kings" likewise; and Mayor

for life--so to speak--of a new trading city, a nascent Genoa or

Venice, on the shore of the Mediterranean. But the girl Nausicaa,

as she sleeps in her "carved chamber," is "like the immortals in

form and face;" and two handmaidens who sleep on each side of the

polished door "have beauty from the Graces."

To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less

than Pallas Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her

favourite, the shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go

forth--and wash the clothes. {6}

Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear

Child so forgetful? This long time doth rest,

Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair.

Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest,

And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best.

These are the things whence good repute is born,

And praises that make glad a parent's breast.

Come, let us both go washing with the morn;

So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn.

Know that thy maidenhood is not for long,

Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo,

Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung.

Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew,

For wain and mules thy noble father sue,

Which to the place of washing shall convey

Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue,

This for thyself were better than essay

Thither to walk: the place is distant a long way.

Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her

parents -

One by the hearth sat, with the maids around,

And on the skeins of yarn, sea-purpled, spent

Her morning toil. Him to the council bound,

Called by the honoured kings, just going forth she found.

And calling him, as she might now, Pappa phile, Dear Papa, asks

for the mule-waggon: but it is her father's and her five

brothers' clothes she fain would wash, -

Ashamed to name her marriage to her father dear.

But he understood all--and she goes forth in the mule-waggon, with

the clothes, after her mother has put in "a chest of all kinds of

delicate food, and meat, and wine in a goatskin;" and last but not

least, the indispensable cruse of oil for anointing after the

bath, to which both Jews, Greeks, and Romans owed so much health

and beauty. And then we read in the simple verse of a poet too

refined, like the rest of his race, to see anything mean or

ridiculous in that which was not ugly and unnatural, how she and

her maids got into the "polished waggon," "with good wheels," and

she "took the whip and the studded reins," and "beat them till

they started;" and how the mules, "rattled" away, and "pulled

against each other," till

When they came to the fair flowing river

Which feeds good lavatories all the year,

Fitted to cleanse all sullied robes soever,

They from the wain the mules unharnessed there,

And chased them free, to crop their juicy fare

By the swift river, on the margin green;

Then to the waters dashed the clothes they bare

And in the stream-filled trenches stamped them clean.

Which, having washed and cleansed, they spread before

The sunbeams, on the beach, where most did lie

Thick pebbles, by the sea-wave washed ashore.

So, having left them in the heat to dry,

They to the bath went down, and by-and-by,

Rubbed with rich oil, their midday meal essay,

Couched in green turf, the river rolling nigh.

Then, throwing off their veils, at ball they play,

While the white-armed Nausicaa leads the choral lay.

The mere beauty of this scene all will feel, who have the sense of

beauty in them. Yet it is not on that aspect which I wish to

dwell, but on its healthfulness. Exercise is taken, in measured

time, to the sound of song, as a duty almost, as well as an

amusement. For this game of ball, which is here mentioned for the

first time in human literature, nearly three thousand years ago,

was held by the Greeks and by the Romans after them, to be an

almost necessary part of a liberal education; principally,

doubtless, from the development which it produced in the upper

half of the body, not merely to the arms, but to the chest, by

raising and expanding the ribs, and to all the muscles of the

torso, whether perpendicular or oblique. The elasticity and grace

which it was believed to give were so much prized, that a room for

ball-play, and a teacher of the art, were integral parts of every

gymnasium; and the Athenians went so far as to bestow on one

famous ball-player, Aristonicus of Carystia, a statue and the

rights of citizenship. The rough and hardy young Spartans, when

passing from boyhood into manhood, received the title of ball-

players, seemingly from the game which it was then their special

duty to learn. In the case of Nausicaa and her maidens, the game

would just bring into their right places all that is liable to be

contracted and weakened in women, so many of whose occupations

must needs be sedentary and stooping; while the song which

accompanied the game at once filled the lungs regularly and

rhythmically, and prevented violent motion, or unseemly attitude.

We, the civilised, need physiologists to remind us of these simple

facts, and even then do not act on them. Those old half-barbarous

Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on

them.

But fair Nausicaa must have been--some will say--surely a mere

child of nature, and an uncultivated person?

So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture

of the very highest sort, full of "sweetness and light."--

Intelligent and fearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her

strange and sudden adventure, quick to perceive the character of

Ulysses, quick to answer his lofty and refined pleading by words

as lofty and refined, and pious withal;--for it is she who speaks

to her handmaids the once so famous words:

Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus;

And alms, though small, are sweet.

Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour,

shrinking from the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not

ashamed, when Ulysses, bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to

whisper to her maidens her wish that the Gods might send her such

a spouse.--This is Nausicaa as Homer draws her; and as many a

scholar and poet since Homer has accepted her for the ideal of

noble maidenhood. I ask my readers to study for themselves her

interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsley's translation, or rather in

the grand simplicity of the original Greek, {7} and judge whether

Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imagined her--

or, it may be, drew her from life--must have been a perfect

gentleman; both complete in those "manners" which, says the old

proverb, "make the man:" but which are the woman herself; because

with her--who acts more by emotion than by calculation--manners

are the outward and visible tokens of her inward and spiritual

grace, or disgrace; and flow instinctively, whether good or bad,

from the instincts of her inner nature.

True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write. No more, most

probably, could the author of the Odyssey. No more, for that

matter, could Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly,

both in mind and manners, most highly-cultivated men. Reading and

writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and

are to be given to every human being, that he may start fair in

the race of life. But I am not aware that Greek women improved

much, either in manners, morals, or happiness, by acquiring them

in after centuries. A wise man would sooner see his daughter a

Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, or even an

Hypatia.

Full of such thoughts, I went through London streets, among the

Nausicaas of the present day; the girls of the period; the

daughters and hereafter mothers of our future rulers, the great

Demos or commercial middle class of the greatest mercantile city

in the world: and noted what I had noted with fear and sorrow,

many a day, for many a year; a type, and an increasing type, of

young women who certainly had not had the "advantages,"

"educational" and other, of that Greek Nausicaa of old.

Of course, in such a city as London, to which the best of

everything, physical and other, gravitates, I could not but pass,

now and then, beautiful persons, who made me proud of those

grandes Anglaises aux joues rouges, whom the Parisiennes ridicule-

-and envy. But I could not help suspecting that their looks

showed them to be either country-bred, or born of country parents;

and this suspicion was strengthened by the fact that, when

compared with their mothers, the mother's physique was, in the

majority of cases, superior to the daughters'. Painful it was, to

one accustomed to the ruddy well-grown peasant girl, stalwart,

even when, as often, squat and plain, to remark the exceedingly

small size of the average young woman; by which I do not mean mere

want of height--that is a little matter--but want of breadth

likewise; a general want of those large frames, which indicate

usually a power of keeping strong and healthy not merely the

muscles, but the brain itself.

Poor little things. I passed hundreds--I pass hundreds every day-

-trying to hide their littleness by the nasty mass of false hair--

or what does duty for it; and by the ugly and useless hat which is

stuck upon it, making the head thereby look ridiculously large and

heavy; and by the high heels on which they totter onward, having

forgotten, or never learnt, the simple art of walking; their

bodies tilted forward in that ungraceful attitude which is called-

-why that name of all others?--a "Grecian bend;" seemingly kept on

their feet, and kept together at all, in that strange attitude, by

tight stays which prevented all graceful and healthy motion of the

hips or sides; their raiment, meanwhile, being purposely misshapen

in this direction and in that, to hide--it must be presumed--

deficiencies of form. If that chignon and those heels had been

taken off, the figure which would have remained would have been

that too often of a puny girl of sixteen. And yet there was no

doubt that these women were not only full grown, but some of them,

alas! wives and mothers.

Poor little things.--And this they have gained by so-called

civilisation: the power of aping the "fashions" by which the

worn-out "Parisienne" hides her own personal defects; and of

making themselves, by innate want of that taste which the

"Parisienne" possesses, only the cause of something like a sneer

from many a cultivated man; and of something like a sneer, too,

from yonder gipsy woman who passes by, with bold bright face, and

swinging hip, and footstep stately and elastic; far better

dressed, according to all true canons of taste, than most town-

girls; and thanking her fate that she and her "Rom" are no house-

dwellers and gaslight-sightseers, but fatten on free air upon the

open moor.

But the face which is beneath that chignon and that hat? Well--it

is sometimes pretty: but how seldom handsome, which is a higher

quality by far. It is not, strange to say, a well-fed face.

Plenty of money, and perhaps too much, is spent on those fine

clothes. It had been better, to judge from the complexion, if

some of that money had been spent in solid wholesome food. She

looks as if she lived--as she too often does, I hear--on tea and

bread-and-butter, or rather on bread with the minimum of butter.

For as the want of bone indicates a deficiency of phosphatic food,

so does the want of flesh about the cheeks indicate a deficiency

of hydrocarbon. Poor little Nausicaa:- that is not her fault.

Our boasted civilisation has not even taught her what to eat, as

it certainly has not increased her appetite; and she knows not--

what every country fellow knows--that without plenty of butter and

other fatty matters, she is not likely to keep even warm. Better

to eat nasty fat bacon now, than to supply the want of it some few

years hence by nastier cod-liver oil. But there is no one yet to

tell her that, and a dozen other equally simple facts, for her own

sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which she is to bring

into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy in

body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if

body and brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism,

is but too likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, or of

modern Paris.

Ay, but her intellect. She is so clever, and she reads so much,

and she is going to be taught to read so much more.

Ah well--there was once a science called Physiognomy. The Greeks,

from what I can learn, knew more of it than any people since:

though the Italian painters and sculptors must have known much;

far more than we. In a more scientific civilisation there will be

such a science once more: but its laws, though still in the

empiric stage, are not altogether forgotten by some. Little

children have often a fine and clear instinct of them. Many

cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clear instinct of

them likewise. And some such would tell us that there is

intellect in plenty in the modern Nausicaa: but not of the

quality which they desire for their country's future good. Self-

consciousness, eagerness, volubility, petulance in countenance, in

gesture, and in voice--which last is too often most harsh and

artificial, the breath being sent forth through the closed teeth,

and almost entirely at the corners of the mouth--and, with all

this, a weariness often about the wrinkling forehead and the

drooping lids;--all these, which are growing too common, not among

the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs, they think, of

the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual. At

least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the

same race can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in

those old Greek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and,

it must be said, in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough,

Copley, and Romney. Not such, one thinks, must have been the

mothers of Britain during the latter half of the last century and

the beginning of the present; when their sons, at times, were

holding half the world at bay.

And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she

goes to the seaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but

herself in salt--the very salt-water, laden with decaying

organisms, from which, though not polluted further by a dozen

sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself, anointing, too, with oil,

ere he was fit to appear in the company of Nausicaa of Greece?

She dirties herself with the dirty saltwater; and probably chills

and tires herself by walking thither and back, and staying in too

long; and then flaunts on the pier, bedizened in garments which,

for monstrosity of form and disharmony of colours, would have set

that Greek Nausicaa's teeth on edge, or those of any average

Hindoo woman now. Or, even sadder still, she sits on chairs and

benches all the weary afternoon, her head drooped on her chest,

over some novel from the "Library;" and then returns to tea and

shrimps, and lodgings of which the fragrance is not unsuggestive,

sometimes not unproductive, of typhoid fever. Ah, poor Nausicaa

of England! That is a sad sight to some who think about the

present, and have read about the past. It is not a sad sight to

see your old father--tradesman, or clerk, or what not--who has

done good work in his day, and hopes to do some more, sitting by

your old mother, who has done good work in her day--among the

rest, that heaviest work of all, the bringing you into the world

and keeping you in it till now--honest, kindly, cheerful folk

enough, and not inefficient in their own calling; though an

average Northumbrian, or Highlander, or Irish Easterling, beside

carrying a brain of five times the intellectual force, could drive

five such men over the cliff with his bare hands. It is not a sad

sight, I say, to see them sitting about upon those seaside

benches, looking out listlessly at the water, and the ships, and

the sunlight, and enjoying, like so many flies upon a wall, the

novel act of doing nothing. It is not the old for whom wise men

are sad: but for you. Where is your vitality? Where is your

"Lebens-gluckseligkeit," your enjoyment of superfluous life and

power? Why you cannot even dance and sing, till now and then, at

night, perhaps, when you ought to lie safe in bed, but when the

weak brain, after receiving the day's nourishment, has roused

itself a second time into a false excitement of gaslight pleasure.

What there is left of it is all going into that foolish book,

which the womanly element in you, still healthy and alive,

delights in; because it places you in fancy in situations in which

you will never stand, and inspires you with emotions, some of

which, it may be, you had better never feel. Poor Nausicaa--old,

some men think, before you have been ever young.

And now they are going to "develop" you; and let you have your

share in "the higher education of women," by making you read more

books, and do more sums, and pass examinations, and stoop over

desks at night after stooping over some other employment all day;

and to teach you Latin, and even Greek!

Well, we will gladly teach you Greek, if you learn thereby to read

the history of Nausicaa of old, and what manner of maiden she was,

and what was her education. You will admire her, doubtless. But

do not let your admiration limit itself to drawing a meagre half-

mediaevalised design of her--as she never looked. Copy in your

own person; and even if you do not descend as low--or rise as

high--as washing the household clothes, at least learn to play at

ball; and sing, in the open air and sunshine, not in theatres and

concert-rooms by gaslight; and take decent care of your own

health; and dress not like a "Parisienne"--nor, of course, like

Nausicaa of old, for that is to ask too much: --but somewhat more

like an average Highland lassie; and try to look like her, and be

like her, of whom Wordsworth sang:

A mien and face

In which full plainly I can trace

Benignity, and home-bred sense,

Ripening in perfect innocence.

Here scattered, like a random seed,

Remote from men, thou dost not need

The embarrassed look of shy distress

And maidenly shamefacedness.

Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear

The freedom of a mountaineer.

A face with gladness overspread,

Soft smiles, by human kindness bred,

And seemliness complete, that sways

Thy courtesies, about thee plays.

With no restraint, save such as springs

From quick and eager visitings

Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach

Of thy few words of English speech.

A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife

That gives thy gestures grace and life.

Ah, yet unspoilt Nausicaa of the North; descendant of the dark

tender-hearted Celtic girl, and the fair deep-hearted Scandinavian

Viking, thank God for thy heather and fresh air, and the kine thou

tendest, and the wool thou spinnest; and come not to seek thy

fortune, child, in wicked London town; nor import, as they tell me

thou art doing fast, the ugly fashions of that London town, clumsy

copies of Parisian cockneydom, into thy Highland home; nor give up

the healthful and graceful, free and modest dress of thy mother

and thy mother's mother, to disfigure the little kirk on Sabbath

days with crinoline and corset, high-heeled boots, and other

women's hair.

It is proposed, just now, to assimilate the education of girls

more and more to that of boys. If that means that girls are

merely to learn more lessons, and to study what their brothers are

taught, in addition to what their mothers were taught; then it is

to be hoped, at least by physiologists and patriots, that the

scheme will sink into that limbo whither, in a free and tolerably

rational country, all imperfect and ill-considered schemes are

sure to gravitate. But if the proposal be a bona-fide one: then

it must be borne in mind that in the Public schools of England,

and in all private schools, I presume, which take their tone from

them, cricket and football are more or less compulsory, being

considered integral parts of an Englishman's education; and that

they are likely to remain so, in spite of all reclamations:

because masters and boys alike know that games do not, in the long

run, interfere with a boy's work; that the same boy will very

often excel in both; that the games keep him in health for his

work; and the spirit with which he takes to his games when in the

lower school, is a fair test of the spirit with which he will take

to his work when he rises into the higher school; and that nothing

is worse for a boy than to fall into that loafing, tuck-shop-

haunting set, who neither play hard nor work hard, and are usually

extravagant, and often vicious. Moreover, they know well that

games conduce, not merely to physical, but to moral health; that

in the playing-field boys acquire virtues which no books can give

them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still, temper,

self-restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of

another's success, and all that "give and take" of life which

stand a man in such good stead when he goes forth into the world,

and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and

partial.

Now: if the promoters of higher education for women will compel

girls to any training analogous to our public-school games; if,

for instance, they will insist on that most natural and wholesome

of all exercises, dancing, in order to develop the lower half of

the body; on singing, to expand the lungs and regulate the breath;

and on some games--ball or what not--which will ensure that raised

chest, and upright carriage, and general strength of the upper

torso, without which full oxygenation of the blood, and therefore

general health, is impossible; if they will sternly forbid tight

stays, high heels, and all which interferes with free growth and

free motion; if they will consider carefully all which has been

written on the "half-time system" by Mr. Chadwick and others; and

accept the certain physical law that, in order to renovate the

brain day by day, the growing creature must have plenty of fresh

air and play, and that the child who learns for four hours and

plays for four hours, will learn more, and learn it more easily,

than the child who learns for the whole eight hours; if, in short,

they will teach girls not merely to understand the Greek tongue,

but to copy somewhat of the Greek physical training, of that

"music and gymnastic" which helped to make the cleverest race of

the old world the ablest race likewise; then they will earn the

gratitude of the patriot and the physiologists, by doing their

best to stay the downward tendencies of the physique, and

therefore ultimately of the morale, in the coming generation of

English women.

I am sorry to say that, as yet, I hear of but one movement in this

direction among the promoters of the "higher education of women."

{8} I trust that the subject will be taken up methodically by

those gifted ladies, who have acquainted themselves, and are

labouring to acquaint other women, with the first principles of

health; and that they may avail to prevent the coming generations,

under the unwholesome stimulant of competitive examinations, and

so forth, from "developing" into so many Chinese--dwarfs--or

idiots.

October, 1873.

THE AIR-MOTHERS--1869--Die Natur ist die Bewegung

Who are these who follow us softly over the moor in the autumn

eve? Their wings brush and rustle in the fir-boughs, and they

whisper before us and behind, as if they called gently to each

other, like birds flocking homeward to their nests.

The woodpecker on the pine-stems knows them, and laughs aloud for

joy as they pass. The rooks above the pasture know them, and

wheel round and tumble in their play. The brown leaves on the oak

trees know them, and flutter faintly, and beckon as they pass.

And in the chattering of the dry leaves there is a meaning, and a

cry of weary things which long for rest.

"Take us home, take us home, you soft air-mothers, now our fathers

the sunbeams are grown dull. Our green summer beauty is all

draggled, and our faces are grown wan and wan; and the buds, the

children whom we nourished, thrust us off, ungrateful, from our

seats. Waft us down, you soft air-mothers, upon your wings to the

quiet earth, that we may go to our home, as all things go, and

become air and sunlight once again."

And the bold young fir-seeds know them, and rattle impatient in

their cones. "Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and

shake us from our prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin

away north-eastward, each on his horny wing. Help us but to touch

the moorland yonder, and we will take good care of ourselves

henceforth; we will dive like arrows through the heather, and

drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and rise again as green trees

toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs."

They never think, bold fools, of what is coming to bring them low

in the midst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell

them, and the saw which will shape them into logs; and the trains

which will roar and rattle over them, as they lie buried in the

gravel of the way, till they are ground and rotted into powder,

and dug up and flung upon the fire, that they too may return home,

like all things, and become air and sunlight once again.

And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: but

faintly; for they themselves are tired and sad.

Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their gardens rent and wan.

Look at them as they stream over the black forest, before the dim

south-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey,

stained with dull yellow or dead dun. They have come far across

the seas, and done many a wild deed upon their way; and now that

they have reached the land, like shipwrecked sailors, they will

lie down and weep till they can weep no more.

Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to

mortal eyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand

miles across the sea! Out of the blazing caldron which lies

between the two New Worlds, they leapt up when the great sun

called them, in whirls and spouts of clear hot steam; and rushed

of their own passion to the northward, while the whirling earth-

ball whirled them east. So north-eastward they rushed aloft,

across the gay West Indian isles, leaving below the glitter of the

flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruel sharks; above the

cane-fields and the plantain-gardens, and the cocoa-groves which

fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed with

earthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while,

far beneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon

the north-east breeze.

Wild deeds they did as they rushed onward, and struggled and

fought among themselves, up and down, and round and backward, in

the fury of their blind hot youth. They heeded not the tree as

they snapped it, nor the ship as they whelmed it in the waves; nor

the cry of the sinking sailor, nor the need of his little ones on

shore; hasty and selfish even as children, and, like children,

tamed by their own rage. For they tired themselves by struggling

with each other, and by tearing the heavy water into waves; and

their wings grew clogged with sea-spray, and soaked more and more

with steam. But at last the sea grew cold beneath them, and their

clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each other

wrapped in dull rain-laden clouds. Then they drew their white

cloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame;

and said: "We have been wild and wayward; and, alas! our pure

bright youth is gone. But we will do one good deed yet ere we

die, and so we shall not have lived in vain. We will glide onward

to the land, and weep there; and refresh all things with soft warm

rain; and make the grass grow, the buds burst; quench the thirst

of man and beast, and wash the soiled world clean."

So they are wandering past us, the air-mothers, to weep the leaves

into their graves; to weep the seeds into their seed-beds, and

weep the soil into the plains; to get the rich earth ready for the

winter, and then creep northward to the ice-world, and there die.

Weary, and still more weary, slowly and more slowly still, they

will journey on far northward, across fast-chilling seas. For a

doom is laid upon them, never to be still again, till they rest at

the North Pole itself, the still axle of the spinning world; and

sink in death around it, and become white snow-clad ghosts.

But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers? Yes, they

must live again. For all things move for ever; and not even

ghosts can rest. So the corpses of their sisters, piling on them

from above, press them outward, press them southward toward the

sun once more; across the floes and round the icebergs, weeping

tears of snow and sleet, while men hate their wild harsh voices,

and shrink before their bitter breath. They know not that the

cold bleak snow-storms, as they hurtle from the black north-east,

bear back the ghosts of the soft air-mothers, as penitents, to

their father, the great sun.

But as they fly southwards, warm life thrills them, and they drop

their loads of sleet and snow; and meet their young live sisters

from the south, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal. And,

please God, before many weeks are over, as we run Westward-Ho, we

shall overtake the ghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back

toward their father, the great sun. Fresh and bright under the

fresh bright heaven, they will race with us toward our home, to

gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forth about their work

once more. Men call them the south-west wind, those air-mothers;

and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, and

rightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the

sea. But wise men, and little children, should look on them with

more seeing eyes; and say, "May not these winds be living

creatures? They, too, are thoughts of God, to whom all live."

For is not our life like their life? Do we not come and go as

they? Out of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came;

through selfish, stormy youth and contrite tears--just not too

late; through manhood not altogether useless; through slow and

chill old age, we return from Whence we came; to the Bosom of God

once more--to go forth again, it may be, with fresh knowledge, and

fresh powers, to nobler work. Amen.

Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the

south-western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable

evening. And it was fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-

mothers could fulfil it, for foolish man.

There was a roaring in the woods all night;

The rain came heavily and fell in floods;

But now the sun is rising calm and bright,

The birds are singing in the distant woods;

Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,

The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,

And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as

that, I stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and

watched the water run, with something of a sigh? Or if, when the

schoolboy beside me lamented that the floods would surely be out,

and his day's fishing spoiled, I said to him--"Ah, my boy, that is

a little matter. Look at what you are seeing now, and understand

what barbarism and waste mean. Look at all that beautiful water

which God has sent us hither off the Atlantic, without trouble or

expense to us. Thousands, and tens of thousands, of gallons will

run under this bridge to-day; and what shall we do with it?

Nothing. And yet: think only of the mills which that water would

have turned. Think how it might have kept up health and

cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of

the nearest town, or even in London itself. Think even how

country folks, in many parts of England, in three months' time,

may be crying out for rain, and afraid of short crops, and fever,

and scarlatina, and cattle-plague, for want of the very water

which we are now letting run back, wasted, into the sea from

whence it came. And yet we call ourselves a civilised people."

It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys. And yet, sometimes, a

man must speak his heart; even, like Midas's slave, to the reeds

by the river side. And I had so often, fishing up and down full

many a stream, whispered my story to those same river-reeds; and

told them that my Lord the Sovereign Demos had, like old Midas,

asses' ears in spite of all his gold, that I thought I might for

once tell it the boy likewise, in hope that he might help his

generation to mend that which my own generation does not seem like

to mend.

I might have said more to him: but did not. For it is not well

to destroy too early the child's illusion, that people must be

wise because they are grown up, and have votes, and rule--or think

they rule--the world. The child will find out how true that is

soon enough for himself. If the truth be forced on him by the hot

words of those with whom he lives, it is apt to breed in him that

contempt, stormful and therefore barren, which makes revolutions;

and not that pity, calm and therefore helpful, which makes

reforms.

So I might have said to him, but did not -

And then men pray for rain:

My boy, did you ever hear the old Eastern legend about the

Gipsies? How they were such good musicians, that some great

Indian Sultan sent for the whole tribe, and planted them near his

palace, and gave them land, and ploughs to break it up, and seed

to sow it, that they might dwell there, and play and sing to him.

But when the winter arrived, the Gipsies all came to the Sultan,

and cried that they were starving. "But what have you done with

the seed-corn which I gave you?" "O Light of the Age, we ate it

in the summer." "And what have you done with the ploughs which I

gave you?" "O Glory of the Universe, we burnt them to bake the

corn withal."

Then said that great Sultan--"Like the butterflies you have lived;

and like the butterflies you shall wander." So he drove them out.

And that is how the Gipsies came hither from the East.

Now suppose that the Sultan of all Sultans, who sends the rain,

should make a like answer to us foolish human beings, when we

prayed for rain: "But what have you done with the rain which I

gave you six months since?" "We have let it run into the sea."

"Then, ere you ask for more rain, make places wherein you can keep

it when you have it." "But that would be, in most cases, too

expensive. We can employ our capital more profitably in other

directions."

It is not for me to say what answer might be made to such an

excuse. I think a child's still unsophisticated sense of right

and wrong would soon supply one; and probably one--considering the

complexity, and difficulty, and novelty, of the whole question--

somewhat too harsh; as children's judgments are wont to be.

But would it not be well if our children, without being taught to

blame anyone for what is past, were taught something about what

ought to be done now, what must be done soon, with the rainfall of

these islands; and about other and kindred health-questions, on

the solution of which depends, and will depend more and more, the

life of millions? One would have thought that those public

schools and colleges which desire to monopolise the education of

the owners of the soil; of the great employers of labour; of the

clergy; and of all, indeed, who ought to be acquainted with the

duties of property, the conditions of public health, and, in a

word, with the general laws of what is now called Social Science--

one would have thought, I say, that these public schools and

colleges would have taught their scholars somewhat at least about

such matters, that they might go forth into life with at least

some rough notions of the causes which make people healthy or

unhealthy, rich or poor, comfortable or wretched, useful or

dangerous to the State. But as long as our great educational

institutions, safe, or fancying themselves safe, in some enchanted

castle, shut out by ancient magic from the living world, put a

premium on Latin and Greek verses: a wise father will, during the

holidays, talk now and then, I hope, somewhat after this fashion:

"You must understand, my boy, that all the water in the country

comes out of the sky, and from nowhere else; and that, therefore,

to save and store the water when it falls is a question of life

and death to crops, and man, and beast; for with or without water

is life or death. If I took, for instance, the water from the

moors above and turned it over yonder field, I could double, and

more than double, the crops in that field, henceforth."

"Then why do I not do it?"

"Only because the field lies higher than the house; and if--now

here is one thing which you and every civilised man should know--

if you have water-meadows, or any 'irrigated' land, as it is

called, above a house, or, even on a level with it, it is certain

to breed not merely cold and damp, but fever or ague. Our

forefathers did not understand this; and they built their houses,

as this is built, in the lowest places they could find: sometimes

because they wanted to be near ponds, from whence they could get

fish in Lent; but more often, I think, because they wanted to be

sheltered from the wind. They had no glass, as we have, in their

windows, or, at least, only latticed casements, which let in the

wind and cold; and they shrank from high and exposed, and

therefore really healthy, spots. But now that we have good glass,

and sash windows, and doors that will shut tight, we can build

warm houses where we like. And if you ever have to do with the

building of cottages, remember that it is your duty to the people

who will live in them, and therefore to the State, to see that

they stand high and dry, where no water can drain down into their

foundations, and where fog, and the poisonous gases which are

given out by rotting vegetables, cannot drain down either. You

will learn more about all that when you learn, as every civilised

lad should in these days, something about chemistry, and the laws

of fluids and gases. But you know already that flowers are cut

off by frost in the low grounds sooner than in the high; and that

the fog at night always lies along the brooks; and that the sour

moor-smell which warns us to shut our windows at sunset, comes

down from the hill, and not up from the valley. Now all these

things are caused by one and the same law; that cold air is

heavier than warm; and, therefore, like so much water, must run

down-hill."

"But what about the rainfall?"

"Well, I have wandered a little from the rainfall: though not as

far as you fancy; for fever and ague and rheumatism usually mean--

rain in the wrong place. But if you knew how much illness, and

torturing pain, and death, and sorrow arise, even to this very

day, from ignorance of these simple laws, then you would bear them

carefully in mind, and wish to know more about them. But now for

water being life to the beasts. Do you remember--though you are

hardly old enough--the cattle-plague? How the beasts died, or had

to be killed and buried, by tens of thousands; and how misery and

ruin fell on hundreds of honest men and women over many of the

richest counties of England: but how we in this vale had no

cattle-plague; and how there was none--as far as I recollect--in

the uplands of Devon and Cornwall, nor of Wales, nor of the Scotch

Highlands? Now, do you know why that was? Simply because we

here, like those other up-landers, are in such a country as

Palestine was before the foolish Jews cut down all their timber,

and so destroyed their own rainfall--a 'land of brooks of water,

of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.'

There is hardly a field here that has not, thank God, its running

brook, or its sweet spring, from which our cattle were drinking

their health and life, while in the clay-lands of Cheshire, and in

the Cambridgeshire fens--which were drained utterly dry--the poor

things drank no water, too often, save that of the very same

putrid ponds in which they had been standing all day long, to cool

themselves, and to keep off the flies. I do not say, of course,

that bad water caused the cattle-plague. It came by infection

from the East of Europe. But I say that bad water made the cattle

ready to take it, and made it spread over the country; and when

you are old enough I will give you plenty of proof--some from the

herds of your own kinsmen--that what I say is true."

"And as for pure water being life to human beings: why have we

never fever here, and scarcely ever diseases like fever--zymotics,

as the doctors call them? Or, if a case comes into our parish

from outside, why does the fever never spread? For the very same

reason that we had no cattle-plague. Because we have more pure

water close to every cottage than we need. And this I tell you:

that the only two outbreaks of deadly disease which we have had

here for thirty years, were both of them, as far as I could see,

to be traced to filthy water having got into the poor folks'

wells. Water, you must remember, just as it is life when pure, is

death when foul. For it can carry, unseen to the eve, and even

when it looks clear and sparkling, and tastes soft and sweet,

poisons which have perhaps killed more human beings than ever were

killed in battle. You have read, perhaps, how the Athenians, when

they were dying of the plague, accused the Lacedaemonians outside

the walls of poisoning their wells; or how, in some of the

pestilences of the Middle Ages, the common people used to accuse

the poor harmless Jews of poisoning the wells, and set upon them

and murdered them horribly. They were right, I do not doubt, in

their notion that the well-water was giving them the pestilence:

but they had not sense to see that they were poisoning the wells

themselves by their dirt and carelessness; or, in the case of poor

besieged Athens, probably by mere overcrowding, which has cost

many a life ere now, and will cost more. And I am sorry to tell

you, my little man, that even now too many people have no more

sense than they had, and die in consequence. If you could see a

battle-field, and men shot down, writhing and dying in hundreds by

shell and bullet, would not that seem to you a horrid sight?

Then--I do not wish to make you sad too early, but this is a fact

that everyone should know--that more people, and not strong men

only, but women and little children too, are killed and wounded in

Great Britain every year by bad water and want of water together,

than were killed and wounded in any battle which has been fought

since you were born. Medical men know this well. And when you

are older, you may see it for yourself in the Registrar-General's

reports, blue-books, pamphlets, and so on, without end."

"But why do not people stop such a horrible loss of life?"

"Well, my dear boy, the true causes of it have only been known for

the last thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King

Alfred found us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to

move, even when we see a thing ought to be done. Let us hope that

in this matter--we have been so in most matters as yet--we shall

be like the tortoise in the fable, and not the hare; and by moving

slowly, but surely, win the race at last."

"But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to save

these people from being poisoned by bad water. Remember that the

plain question is this: The rain-water comes down from heaven as

water, and nothing but water. Rain-water is the only pure water,

after all. How would you save that for the poor people who have

none? There; run away and hunt rabbits on the moor: but look,

meanwhile, how you would save some of this beautiful and precious

water which is roaring away into the sea."

"Well? What would you do? Make ponds, you say, like the old

monks' ponds, now all broken down. Dam all the glens across their

mouths, and turn them into reservoirs."

"'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings'--Well, that will have

to be done. That is being done more and more, more or less well.

The good people of Glasgow did it first, I think; and now the good

people of Manchester, and of other northern towns, have done it,

and have saved many a human life thereby already. But it must be

done, some day, all over England and Wales, and great part of

Scotland. For the mountain tops and moors, my boy, by a beautiful

law of nature, compensate for their own poverty by yielding a

wealth which the rich lowlands cannot yield. You do not

understand? Then see. Yon moor above can grow neither corn nor

grass. But one thing it can grow, and does grow, without which we

should have no corn nor grass, and that is--water. Not only does

far more rain fall up there than falls here down below, but even

in drought the high moors condense the moisture into dew, and so

yield some water, even when the lowlands are burnt up with

drought. The reason of that you must learn hereafter. That it is

so, you should know yourself. For on the high chalk downs, you

know, where farmers make a sheep-pond, they never, if they are

wise, make it in a valley or on a hillside, but on the bleakest

top of the very highest down; and there, if they can once get it

filled with snow and rain in winter, the blessed dews of night

will keep some water in it all the summer through, while the ponds

below are utterly dried up. And even so it is, as I know, with

this very moor. Corn and grass it will not grow, because there is

too little 'staple,' that is, soluble minerals, in the sandy soil.

But how much water it might grow, you may judge roughly for

yourself, by remembering how many brooks like this are running off

it now to carry mere dirt into the river, and then into the sea."

"But why should we not make dams at once; and save the water?"

"Because we cannot afford it. No one would buy the water when we

had stored it. The rich in town and country will always take

care--and quite right they are--to have water enough for

themselves, and for their servants too, whatever it may cost them.

But the poorer people are--and therefore usually, alas! the more

ignorant--the less water they get; and the less they care to have

water; and the less they are inclined to pay for it; and the more,

I am sorry to say, they waste what little they do get; and I am

still more sorry to say, spoil, and even steal and sell--in London

at least--the stop-cocks and lead-pipes which bring the water into

their houses. So that keeping a water-shop is a very troublesome

and uncertain business; and one which is not likely to pay us or

anyone round here."

"But why not let some company manage it, as they manage railways,

and gas, and other things?"

"Ah--you have been overhearing a good deal about companies of

late, I see. But this I will tell you; that when you grow up, and

have a vote and influence, it will be your duty, if you intend to

be a good citizen, not only not to put the water-supply of England

into the hands of fresh companies, but to help to take out of

their hands what water-supply they manage already, especially in

London; and likewise the gas-supply; and the railroads; and

everything else, in a word, which everybody uses, and must use.

For you must understand--at least as soon as you can--that though

the men who make up companies are no worse than other men, and

some of them, as you ought to know, very good men; yet what they

have to look to is their profits; and the less water they supply,

and the worse it is, the more profit they make. For most water, I

am sorry to say, is fouled before the water companies can get to

it, as this water which runs past us will be, and as the Thames

water above London is. Therefore it has to be cleansed, or partly

cleansed, at a very great expense. So water companies have to be

inspected--in plain English, watched--at a very heavy expense to

the nation by Government officers; and compelled to do their best,

and take their utmost care. And so it has come to pass that the

London water is not now nearly as bad as some of it was thirty

years ago, when it was no more fit to drink than that in the

cattle-yard tank. But still we must have more water, and better,

in London; for it is growing year by year. There are more than

three millions of people already in what we call London; and ere

you are an old man there may be between four and five millions.

Now to supply all these people with water is a duty which we must

not leave to any private companies. It must be done by a public

authority, as is fit and proper in a free self-governing country.

In this matter, as in all others, we will try to do what the Royal

Commission told us four years ago we ought to do. I hope that you

will see, though I may not, the day when what we call London, but

which is really nine-tenths of it, only a great nest of separate

villages huddled together, will be divided into three great self-

governing cities, London, Westminster, and Southwark; each with

its own corporation, like that of the venerable and well-governed

city of London; each managing its own water-supply, gas-supply,

and sewage, and other matters besides; and managing them, like

Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and other great northern

towns, far more cheaply and far better than any companies can do

it for them."

"But where shall we get water enough for all these millions of

people? There are no mountains near London. But we might give

them the water off our moors."

"No, no, my boy,

"He that will not when he may,

When he will, he shall have nay.

Some fifteen years ago the Londoners might have had water from us;

and I was one of those who did my best to get it for them: but

the water companies did not choose to take it; and now this part

of England is growing so populous and so valuable that it wants

all its little rainfall for itself. So there is another leaf torn

out of the Sibylline books for the poor old water companies. You

do not understand: you will some day. But you may comfort

yourself about London. For it happens to be, I think, the

luckiest city in the world; and if it had not been, we should have

had pestilence on pestilence in it, as terrible as the great

plague of Charles II.'s time. The old Britons, without knowing in

the least what they were doing, settled old London city in the

very centre of the most wonderful natural reservoir in this

island, or perhaps in all Europe; which reaches from Kent into

Wiltshire, and round again into Suffolk; and that is, the dear old

chalk downs."

"Why, they are always dry."

"Yes. But the turf on them never burns up, and the streams which

flow through them never run dry, and seldom or never flood either.

Do you not know, from Winchester, that that is true? Then where

is all the rain and snow gone, which falls on them year by year,

but into the chalk itself, and into the green-sands, too, below

the chalk? There it is, soaked up as by a sponge, in quantity

incalculable; enough, some think, to supply London, let it grow as

huge as it may. I wish I too were sure of that. But the

Commission has shown itself so wise and fair, and brave likewise--

too brave, I am sorry to say, for some who might have supported

them--that it is not for me to gainsay their opinion."

"But if there was not water enough in the chalk, are not the

Londoners rich enough to bring it from any distance?"

"My boy, in this also we will agree with the Commission--that we

ought not to rob Peter to pay Paul, and take water to a distance

which other people close at hand may want. Look at the map of

England and southern Scotland; and see for yourself what is just,

according to geography and nature. There are four mountain-

ranges; four great water-fields. First, the hills of the Border.

Their rainfall ought to be stored for the Lothians and the extreme

north of England. Then the Yorkshire and Derbyshire Hills--the

central chine of England. Their rainfall is being stored already,

to the honour of the shrewd northern men, for the manufacturing

counties east and west of the hills. Then come the Lake

mountains--the finest water-field of all, because more rain by far

falls there than in any place in England. But they will be wanted

to supply Lancashire, and some day Liverpool itself; for Liverpool

is now using rain which belongs more justly to other towns; and

besides, there are plenty of counties and towns, down into

Cheshire, which would be glad of what water Lancashire does not

want. At last come the Snowdon mountains, a noble water-field,

which I know well; for an old dream of mine has been, that ere I

died I should see all the rain of the Carnedds, and the Glyders,

and Siabod, and Snowdon itself, carried across the Conway river to

feed the mining districts of North Wales, where the streams are

now all foul with oil and lead; and then on into the western coal

and iron fields, to Wolverhampton and Birmingham itself: and if I

were the engineer who got that done, I should be happier--prouder

I dare not say--than if I had painted nobler pictures than

Raffaelle, or written nobler plays than Shakespeare. I say that,

boy, in most deliberate earnest. But meanwhile, do you not see

that in districts where coal and iron may be found, and fresh

manufactures may spring up any day in any place, each district has

a right to claim the nearest rainfall for itself? And now, when

we have got the water into its proper place, let us see what we

shall do with it."

"But why do you say 'we'? Can you and I do all this?"

"My boy, are not you and I free citizens; part of the people, the

Commons--as the good old word runs--of this country? And are we

not--or ought we not to be in time--beside that, educated men? By

the people, remember, I mean, not only the hand-working man who

has just got a vote; I mean the clergy of all denominations; and

the gentlemen of the press; and last, but not least, the

scientific men. If those four classes together were to tell every

government--'Free water we will have, and as much as we reasonably

choose;' and tell every candidate for the House of Commons:

'Unless you promise to get us as much free water as we reasonably

choose, we will not return you to Parliament:' then, I think, we

four should put such a 'pressure' on Government as no water

companies, or other vested interests, could long resist. And if

any of those four classes should hang back, and waste their time

and influence over matters far less important and less pressing,

the other three must laugh at them, and more than laugh at them;

and ask them: 'Why have you education, why have you influence,

why have you votes, why are you freemen and not slaves, if not to

preserve the comfort, the decency, the health, the lives of men,

women, and children--most of those latter your own wives and your

own children?'"

"But what shall we do with the water?"

"Well, after all, that is a more practical matter than

speculations grounded on the supposition that all classes will do

their duty. But the first thing we will do will be to give to the

very poorest houses a constant supply, at high pressure; so that

everybody may take as much water as he likes, instead of having to

keep the water in little cisterns, where it gets foul and putrid

only too often."

"But will they not waste it then?"

"So far from it, wherever the water has been laid on at high

pressure, the waste, which is terrible now--some say that in

London one-third of the water is wasted--begins to lessen; and

both water and expense are saved. If you will only think, you

will see one reason why. If a woman leaves a high-pressure tap

running, she will flood her place and her neighbour's too. She

will be like the magician's servant, who called up the demon to

draw water for him; and so he did: but when he had begun he would

not stop, and if the magician had not come home, man and house

would have been washed away."

"But if it saves money, why do not the water companies do it?"

"Because--and really here there are many excuses for the poor old

water companies, when so many of them swerve and gib at the very

mention of constant water-supply, like a poor horse set to draw a

load which he feels is too heavy for him--because, to keep

everything in order among dirty, careless, and often drunken

people, there must be officers with lawful authority--water-

policemen we will call them--who can enter people's houses when

they will, and if they find anything wrong with the water, set it

to rights with a high hand, and even summon the people who have

set it wrong. And that is a power which, in a free country, must

never be given to the servants of any private company, but only to

the officers of a corporation or of the Government."

"And what shall we do with the rest of the water?"

"Well, we shall have, I believe, so much to spare that we may at

least do this: In each district of each city, and the centre of

each town, we may build public baths and lavatories, where poor

men and women may get their warm baths when they will; for now

they usually never bathe at all, because they will not--and ought

not, if they be hard-worked folk--bathe in cold water during nine

months of the year. And there they shall wash their clothes, and

dry them by steam; instead of washing them as now, at home, either

under back sheds, where they catch cold and rheumatism, or too

often, alas! in their own living rooms, in an atmosphere of foul

vapour, which drives the father to the public-house and the

children into the streets; and which not only prevents the clothes

from being thoroughly dried again, but is, my dear boy, as you

will know when you are older, a very hot-bed of disease. And they

shall have other comforts, and even luxuries, these public

lavatories; and be made, in time, graceful and refining, as well

as merely useful. Nay, we will even, I think, have in front of

each of them a real fountain; not like the drinking-fountains--

though they are great and needful boons--which you see here and

there about the streets, with a tiny dribble of water to a great

deal of expensive stone: but real fountains, which shall leap,

and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle; and fill the place with life,

and light, and coolness; and sing in the people's ears the

sweetest of all earthly songs--save the song of a mother over her

child--the song of 'The Laughing Water.'"

"But will not that be a waste?"

"Yes, my boy. And for that very reason, I think we, the people,

will have our fountains; if it be but to make our governments, and

corporations, and all public bodies and officers, remember that

they all--save Her Majesty the Queen--are our servants, and not we

theirs; and that we choose to have water, not only to wash with,

but to play with, if we like. And I believe--for the world, as

you will find, is full not only of just but of generous souls--

that if the water-supply were set really right, there would be

found, in many a city, many a generous man who, over and above his

compulsory water-rate, would give his poor fellow-townsmen such a

real fountain as those which ennoble the great square at

Carcasonne and the great square at Nismes; to be 'a thing of

beauty and a joy for ever.'"

"And now, if you want to go back to your Latin and Greek, you

shall translate for me into Latin--I do not expect you to do it

into Greek, though it would turn very well into Greek, for the

Greeks know all about the matter long before the Romans--what

follows here; and you shall verify the facts and the names, etc.,

in it from your dictionaries of antiquity and biography, that you

may remember all the better what it says. And by that time, I

think, you will have learnt something more useful to yourself,

and, I hope, to your country hereafter, than if you had learnt to

patch together the neatest Greek and Latin verses which have

appeared since the days of Mr. Canning."

I have often amused myself, by fancying one question which an old

Roman emperor would ask, were he to rise from his grave and visit

the sights of London under the guidance of some minister of state.

The august shade would, doubtless, admire our railroads and

bridges, our cathedrals and our public parks, and much more of

which we need not be ashamed. But after awhile, I think, he would

look round, whether in London or in most of our great cities,

inquiringly and in vain, for one class of buildings, which in his

empire were wont to be almost as conspicuous and as splendid,

because, in public opinion, almost as necessary, as the basilicas

and temples: "And where," he would ask, "are your public baths?"

And if the minister of state who was his guide should answer: "Oh

great Caesar, I really do not know. I believe there are some

somewhere at the back of that ugly building which we call the

National Gallery; and I think there have been some meetings lately

in the East End, and an amateur concert at the Albert Hall, for

restoring, by private subscriptions, some baths and wash-houses in

Bethnal Green, which had fallen to decay. And there may be two or

three more about the metropolis; for parish vestries have powers

by Act of Parliament to establish such places, if they think fit,

and choose to pay for them out of the rates." Then, I think, the

august shade might well make answer: "We used to call you, in old

Rome, northern barbarians. It seems that you have not lost all

your barbarian habits. Are you aware that, in every city in the

Roman empire, there were, as a matter of course, public baths

open, not only to the poorest freeman, but to the slave, usually

for the payment of the smallest current coin, and often

gratuitously? Are you aware that in Rome itself, millionaire

after millionaire, emperor after emperor, from Menenius Agrippa

and Nero down to Diocletian and Constantine, built baths, and yet

more baths; and connected with them gymnasia for exercise,

lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticoes, wherein the people might

have shade, and shelter, and rest? I remark, by-the-bye, that I

have not seen in all your London a single covered place in which

the people may take shelter during a shower. Are you aware that

these baths were of the most magnificent architecture, decorated

with marbles, paintings, sculptures, fountains, what not? And yet

I had heard, in Hades down below, that you prided yourselves here

on the study of the learned languages; and, indeed, taught little

but Greek and Latin at your public schools?"

Then, if the minister should make reply: "Oh yes, we know all

this. Even since the revival of letters in the end of the

fifteenth century a whole literature has been written--a great

deal of it, I fear, by pedants who seldom washed even their hands

and faces--about your Greek and Roman baths. We visit their

colossal ruins in Italy and elsewhere with awe and admiration; and

the discovery of a new Roman bath in any old city of our isles

sets all our antiquaries buzzing with interest."

"Then why," the shade might ask, "do you not copy an example which

you so much admire? Surely England must be much in want, either

of water, or of fuel to heat it with?"

"On the contrary, our rainfall is almost too great; our soil so

damp that we have had to invent a whole art of subsoil drainage

unknown to you; while, as for fuel, our coal-mines make us the

great fuel-exporting people of the world."

What a quiet sneer might curl the lip of a Constantine as he

replied: "Not in vain, as I said, did we call you, some fifteen

hundred years ago, the barbarians of the north. But tell me, good

barbarian, whom I know to be both brave and wise--for the fame of

your young British empire has reached us even in the realms below,

and we recognise in you, with all respect, a people more like us

Romans than any which has appeared on earth for many centuries--

how is it you have forgotten that sacred duty of keeping the

people clean, which you surely at one time learnt from us? When

your ancestors entered our armies, and rose, some of them, to be

great generals, and even emperors, like those two Teuton peasants,

Justin and Justinian, who, long after my days, reigned in my own

Constantinople: then, at least, you saw baths, and used them; and

felt, after the bath, that you were civilised men, and not

'sordidi ac foetentes,' as we used to call you when fresh out of

your bullock-waggons and cattle-pens. How is it that you have

forgotten that lesson?"

The minister, I fear, would have to answer that our ancestors were

barbarous enough, not only to destroy the Roman cities, and

temples, and basilicas, and statues, but the Roman baths likewise;

and then retired, each man to his own freehold in the country, to

live a life not much more cleanly or more graceful than that of

the swine which were his favourite food. But he would have a

right to plead, as an excuse, that not only in England, but

throughout the whole of the conquered Latin empire, the Latin

priesthood, who, in some respects, were--to their honour--the

representatives of Roman civilisation and the protectors of its

remnants, were the determined enemies of its cleanliness; that

they looked on personal dirt--like the old hermits of the Thebaid-

-as a sign of sanctity; and discouraged--as they are said to do

still in some of the Romance countries of Europe--the use of the

bath, as not only luxurious, but also indecent.

At which answer, it seems to me, another sneer might curl the lip

of the august shade, as he said to himself: "This, at least, I

did not expect, when I made Christianity the state religion of my

empire. But you, good barbarian, look clean enough. You do not

look on dirt as a sign of sanctity?"

"On the contrary, sire, the upper classes of our empire boast of

being the cleanliest--perhaps the only perfectly cleanly--people

in the world: except, of course, the savages of the South Seas.

And dirt is so far from being a thing which we admire, that our

scientific men--than whom the world has never seen wiser--have

proved to us, for a whole generation past, that dirt is the

fertile cause of disease and drunkenness, misery, and

recklessness."

"And, therefore," replies the shade, ere he disappears, "of

discontent and revolution: followed by a tyranny endured, as in

Rome and many another place, by men once free; because tyranny

will at least do for them what they are too lazy, and cowardly,

and greedy, to do for themselves. Farewell, and prosper; as you

seem likely to prosper, on the whole. But if you wish me to

consider you a civilised nation: let me hear that you have

brought a great river from the depths of the earth, be they a

thousand fathoms deep, or from your nearest mountains, be they

five hundred miles away; and have washed out London's dirt--and

your own shame. Till then, abstain from judging too harshly a

Constantine, or even a Caracalla; for they, whatever were their

sins, built baths, and kept their people clean. But do your

gymnasia--your schools and universities, teach your youth naught

about all this?"

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

The more I have contemplated that ancient story of the Fall, the

more it has seemed to me within the range of probability, and even

of experience. It must have happened somewhere for the first

time; for it has happened only too many times since. It has

happened, as far as I can ascertain, in every race, and every age,

and every grade of civilisation. It is happening round us now in

every region of the globe. Always and everywhere, it seems to me,

have poor human beings been tempted to eat of some "tree of

knowledge," that they may be, even for an hour, as gods; wise, but

with a false wisdom; careless, but with a frantic carelessness;

and happy, but with a happiness which, when the excitement is

past, leaves too often--as with that hapless pair in Eden--

depression, shame, and fear. Everywhere, and in all ages, as far

as I can ascertain, has man been inventing stimulants and

narcotics to supply that want of vitality of which he is so

painfully aware; and has asked nature, and not God, to clear the

dull brain, and comfort the weary spirit.

This has been, and will be perhaps for many a century to come,

almost the most fearful failing of this poor, exceptional, over-

organised, diseased, and truly fallen being called Man, who is in

doubt daily whether he be a god or an ape; and in trying wildly to

become the former, ends but too often in becoming the latter.

For man, whether savage or civilised, feels, and has felt in every

age, that there is something wrong with him. He usually confesses

this fact--as is to be expected--of his fellow-men, rather than of

himself; and shows his sense that there is something wrong with

them by complaining of, hating, and killing them. But he cannot

always conceal from himself the fact that he, too, is wrong, as

well as they; and as he will not usually kill himself, he tries

wild ways to make himself at least feel--if not to be--somewhat

"better." Philosophers may bid him be content; and tell him that

he is what he ought to be, and what nature has made him. But he

cares nothing for the philosophers. He knows, usually, that he is

not what he ought to be; that he carries about with him, in most

cases, a body more or less diseased and decrepit, incapable of

doing all the work which he feels that he himself could do, or

expressing all the emotions which he himself longs to express; a

dull brain and dull senses, which cramp the eager infinity within

him; as--so Goethe once said with pity--the horse's single hoof

cramps the fine intelligence and generosity of his nature, and

forbids him even to grasp an object, like the more stupid cat, and

baser monkey. And man has a self, too, within, from which he

longs too often to escape, as from a household ghost; who pulls

out, at unfortunately rude and unwelcome hours, the ledger of

memory. And so when the tempter--be he who he may--says to him,

"Take this, and you will 'feel better.' Take this, and you shall

be as gods, knowing good and evil:" then, if the temptation was,

as the old story says, too much for man while healthy and

unfallen, what must it be for his unhealthy and fallen children?

In vain we say to man:

'Tis life, not death, for which you pant;

'Tis life, whereof your nerves are scant;

More life, and fuller, that you want.

And your tree of knowledge is not the tree of life: it is in

every case, the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery.

He prefers the voice of the tempter: "Thou shalt not surely die."

Nay, he will say at last: "Better be as gods awhile, and die:

than be the crawling, insufficient thing I am; and live."

He--did I say? Alas! I must say she likewise. The sacred story

is only too true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling,

not merely at the same time as the man, but before the man. Only

let us remember that it represents the woman as tempted; tempted,

seemingly, by a rational being, of lower race, and yet of superior

cunning; who must, therefore, have fallen before the woman. Who

or what the being was, who is called the Serpent in our

translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say. We have

absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinical

traditions need trouble no man much. But I fancy that a

missionary, preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them

plainly that the "Serpent" meant the first Obeah man; and then

comparing the experiences of that hapless pair in Eden, with their

own after certain orgies not yet extinct in Africa and elsewhere,

would be only too well understood: so well, indeed, that he might

run some risk of eating himself, not of the tree of life, but of

that of death. The sorcerer or sorceress tempting the woman; and

then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be, certainly among

savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilised peoples also,

the usual course of the world-wide tragedy.

But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman's yielding before the

man is not altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to

allege who hated, and too often tortured, the sex whom they could

not enjoy. It is not to the woman's dishonour, if she felt,

before her husband, higher aspirations than those after mere

animal pleasure. To be as gods, knowing good and evil, is a vain

and foolish, but not a base and brutal, wish. She proved herself

thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, and not an animal. And

indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, her more vivid

emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical

weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special

source of temptation; which it is to her honour that she has

resisted so much better than the physically stronger, and

therefore more culpable, man.

As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for

us to waste our time in guessing. If it was not one plant, then

it was another. It may have been something which has long since

perished off the earth. It may have been--as some learned men

have guessed--the sacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race;

and that may have been a still existing narcotic species of

Asclepias. It certainly was not the vine. The language of the

Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacred use to which it is

consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notion utterly; at least

to those who know enough of antiquity to pass by, with a smile,

the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were not

intoxicating. And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am

trying to say--how fearfully has that noble gift to man been

abused for the same end as a hundred other vegetable products,

ever since those mythic days when Dionusos brought the vine from

the far East, amid troops of human Maenads and half-human Satyrs;

and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on Cithaeron, for daring

to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those historic days,

too, when, less than two hundred years before the Christian era,

the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria, and

thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia

Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must

speak, but which had to be put down with terrible but just

severity, by the Consuls and the Senate.

But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge

was. Was every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every

vegetable also from which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon

discover something else wherewith to satisfy the insatiate

craving. Has he not done so already? Has not almost every people

had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly than any distilled

liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the

opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons

wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the

knowledge of good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede

extracts in autumn a few days of brutal happiness, before the

setting in of the long six months' night? God grant that modern

science may not bring to light fresh substitutes for alcohol,

opium, and the rest; and give the white races, in that state of

effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which I sometimes fear

is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying themselves

delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.

It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this

island. I have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it

possible; for every cause of drunkenness seems on the increase.

Overwork of body and mind; circumstances which depress health;

temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the

streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of

uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often not the

means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures. These, it

seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or

not. And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must

lessen them, if we cannot eradicate them.

First, overwork. We all live too fast, and work too hard. "All

things are full of labour, man cannot utter it." In the heavy

struggle for existence which goes on all around us, each man is

tasked more and more--if he be really worth buying and using--to

the utmost of his powers all day long. The weak have to compete

on equal terms with the strong; and crave, in consequence, for

artificial strength. How we shall stop that I know not, while

every man is "making haste to be rich, and piercing himself

through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish and hurtful

lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition." How we

shall stop that, I say, I know not. The old prophet may have been

right when he said: "Surely it is not of the Lord that the people

shall labour in the very fire, and weary themselves for very

vanity;" and in some juster, wiser, more sober system of society--

somewhat more like the Kingdom of The Father come on earth--it may

be that poor human beings will not need to toil so hard, and to

keep themselves up to their work by stimulants, but will have time

to sit down, and look around them, and think of God, and God's

quiet universe, with something of quiet in themselves; something

of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind, as well as of

body.

But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when--as

it was once well put--"every one has stopped running about like

rats:"--that those who work hard, whether with muscle or with

brain, would not be surrounded, as now, with every circumstance

which tempts toward drink; by every circumstance which depresses

the vital energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence

itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells,

bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the chest,

disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from the

country--in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men,

more or less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or

through whole districts of the "black countries" of England; and

then ask himself: Is it the will of God that His human children

should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places

of the earth? Lot him ask himself: Can they live and toil there

without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without

contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which

craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own

stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain

parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces,

collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--

and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely,

that the main thing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those

abominable wastes care for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only

answer, that I am not surprised.

I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say it

again--that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that

engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of

disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can

produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population

striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against

those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled

civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave. I

may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily.

I know it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that

the fenman drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens

were drained? why but to keep off the depressing effects of the

malaria of swamps and new clearings, which told on them--who

always settled in the lowest grounds--in the shape of fever and

ague? Here it may be answered again that stimulants have been,

during the memory of man, the destruction of the Red Indian race

in America. I reply boldly that I do not believe it. There is

evidence enough in Jacques Cartier's "Voyages to the Rivers of

Canada;" and evidence more than enough in Strachey's "Travaile in

Virginia"--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove

that the Red Indians, when the white man first met with them,

were, in North and South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all

their traditions confess, decreasing race. Such a race would

naturally crave for "the water of life," the "usquebagh," or

whisky, as we have contracted the old name now. But I should have

thought that the white man, by introducing among these poor

creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all, horses

wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds, which they could never

follow on foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them

alive, than he has done towards destroying them by giving them the

chance of a week's drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to

his forts to sell the skins which, without his gifts, they would

never have got.

Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for

stimulants. But if the stimulants, and not the original want of

vitality, combined with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only

of the gallows--and here I know what I say, and dare not tell what

I know, from eye-witnesses--have been the cause of the Red

Indians' extinction, then how is it, let me ask, that the Irishman

and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as

much whisky--and usually very bad whisky--not merely twice a year,

but as often as they could get it, during the whole Iron Age, and,

for aught anyone can tell, during the Bronze Age, and the Stone

Age before that, and yet are still the most healthy, able,

valiant, and prolific races in Europe? Had they drunk less whisky

they would, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and

perhaps even MORE prolific, than they are now. They show no sign,

however, as yet, of going the way of the Red Indian.

But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of

deficient vitality, then the deadliest foe of that craving, and

all its miserable results, is surely the Sanatory Reformer; the

man who preaches, and--as far as ignorance and vested interests

will allow him, procures--for the masses, pure air, pure sunlight,

pure water, pure dwelling-houses, pure food. Not merely every

fresh drinking-fountain, but every fresh public bath and wash-

house, every fresh open space, every fresh growing tree, every

fresh open window, every fresh flower in that window--each of

these is so much, as the old Persians would have said, conquered

for Ormuzd, the god of light and life, out of the dominion of

Ahriman, the king of darkness and of death; so much taken from the

causes of drunkenness and disease, and added to the causes of

sobriety and health.

Meanwhile one thing is clear: that if this present barbarism and

anarchy of covetousness, miscalled modern civilisation, were tamed

and drilled into something more like a Kingdom of God on earth,

then we should not see the reckless and needless multiplication of

liquor shops, which disgraces this country now.

As a single instance: in one country parish of nine hundred

inhabitants, in which the population has increased only one-ninth

in the last fifty years, there are now practically eight public-

houses, where fifty years ago there were but two. One, that is,

for every hundred and ten--or rather, omitting children, farmers,

shop-keepers, gentlemen, and their households, one for every fifty

of the inhabitants. In the face of the allurements, often of the

basest kind, which these dens offer, the clergyman and the

schoolmaster struggle in vain to keep up night schools and young

men's clubs, and to inculcate habits of providence.

The young labourers over a great part of the south and east, at

least of England--though never so well off, for several

generations, as they are now--are growing up thriftless,

shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in

everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their

grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth

clothes, instead of their grandfathers' smock-frocks.

And if it be so in the country, how must it be in towns? There

must come a thorough change in the present licensing system, in

spite of all the "pressure" which certain powerful vested

interests may bring to bear on governments. And it is the duty of

every good citizen, who cares for his countrymen, and for their

children after them, to help in bringing about that change as

speedily as possible.

Again: I said just now that a probable cause of increasing

drunkenness was the increasing material prosperity of thousands

who knew no recreation beyond low animal pleasure. If I am right-

-and I believe that I am right--I must urge on those who wish

drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of providing more, and more

refined, recreation for the people.

Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply

exhaustion, not merely to drive away care; but often simply to

drive away dulness. They have nothing to do save to think over

what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to-

morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought

in liquor or narcotics. There are still those, by no means of the

hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who drink

heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to

recreate their over-burdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are

far less common than they were fifty years ago: but why? Is not

the decrease of drinking among the richer classes certainly due to

the increased refinement and variety of their tastes and

occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man's nature;

in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the

truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture,

physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and

literal sense of that word, namely, the re-creating and mending of

the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now

neglect, either for himself, his children, or his workpeople.

But how little of all this is open to the masses, all should know

but too well. How little opportunity the average hand-worker, or

his wife, has of eating of any tree of knowledge, save of the very

basest kind, is but too palpable. We are mending, thank God, in

this respect. Free libraries and museums have sprung up of late

in other cities beside London. God's blessing rest upon them all.

And the Crystal Palace, and still later, the Bethnal Green Museum,

have been, I believe, of far more use than many average sermons

and lectures from many average orators.

But are we not still far behind the old Greeks, and the Romans of

the Empire likewise, in the amount of amusement and instruction,

and even of shelter, which we provide for the people? Recollect

the--to me--disgraceful fact, that there is not, as far as I am

aware, throughout the whole of London, a single portico or other

covered place, in which the people can take refuge during a

shower: and this in the climate of England! Where they do take

refuge on a wet day the publican knows but too well; as he knows

also where thousands of the lower classes, simply for want of any

other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings, spend as

much as they are permitted of the Sabbath day. Let us put down

"Sunday drinking" by all means, if we can. But let us remember

that by closing the public-houses on Sunday, we prevent no man or

woman from carrying home as much poison as they choose on Saturday

night, to brutalise themselves therewith, perhaps for eight-and-

forty hours. And let us see--in the name of Him who said that He

had made the Sabbath for man, and not man for the Sabbath--let us

see, I say, if we cannot do something to prevent the townsman's

Sabbath being, not a day of rest, but a day of mere idleness; the

day of most temptation, because of most dulness, of the whole

seven.

And here, perhaps some sweet soul may look up reprovingly and say:

"He talks of rest. Does he forget, and would he have the working

man forget, that all these outward palliatives will never touch

the seat of the disease, the unrest of the soul within? Does he

forget, and would he have the working man forget, who it was who

said--who only has the right to say: "Come unto Me, all ye who

are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? Ah no,

sweet soul. I know your words are true. I know that what we all

want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong,

self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no stimulants,

for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it

has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for

it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the

character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or

food merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from

the wild lusts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, and,

seeking for light and life by means forbidden, found thereby

disease and death. Yes, I know that; and know, too, that that

rest is found only where you have already found it.

And yet, in such a world as this, governed by a Being who has made

sunshine, and flowers, and green grass, and the song of birds, and

happy human smiles, and who would educate by them--if we would let

Him--His human children from the cradle to the grave; in such a

world as this, will you grudge any particle of that education,

even any harmless substitute for it, to those spirits in prison

whose surroundings too often tempt them, from the cradle to the

grave, to fancy that the world is composed of bricks and iron, and

governed by inspectors and policemen? Preach to those spirits in

prison, as you know far better than we parsons how to preach; but

let them have besides some glimpses of the splendid fact, that

outside their prison-house is a world which God, not man, has

made; wherein grows everywhere that tree of knowledge, which is

likewise the tree of life; and that they have a right to some

small share of its beauty, and its wonder, and its rest, for their

own health of soul and body, and for the health of their children

after them.

GREAT CITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE FOR GOOD AND EVIL {9}

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, {10} 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 employes

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.

HEROISM

It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralising

us; and that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the

perfection of justice and safety, the complete "preservation of

body and goods," may not reduce the educated and comfortable

classes into that lap-dog condition in which not conscience, but

comfort, doth make cowards of us all. Our forefathers had, on the

whole, to take care of themselves; we find it more convenient to

hire people to take care of us. So much the better for us, in

some respects; but, it may be, so much the worse in others. So

much the better; because, as usually results from the division of

labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to take

care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast

amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially

to the weak; for which last reason we will acquiesce in the

existence of policemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of

arbitration, as the lesser of two evils. The odds in war are in

favour of the bigger bully, in arbitration in favour of the bigger

rogue; and it is a question whether the lion or the fox be the

safer guardian of human interests. But arbitration prevents war;

and that, in three cases out of four, is full reason for employing

it.

On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in

men, is certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher

virtues. Safety and comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for

the brave, the self-originating, the earnest. They give to such a

clear stage and no favour, wherein to work unhindered for their

fellow-men. But for the majority, who are neither brave, self-

originating, nor earnest, but the mere puppets of circumstance,

safety and comfort may, and actually do, merely make their lives

mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Therefore their hearts must

be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise enough for

health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and importunately,

of what a certain great philosopher called, "whatsoever things are

true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;" "if

there be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such

things."

This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps

alive our stage, to which people go to see something a little less

petty, a little less dull, than what they see at home. It is,

too, the cause of--I had almost said the excuse for--the modern

rage for sensational novels. Those who read them so greedily are

conscious, poor souls, of capacities in themselves of passion and

action for good and evil, for which their frivolous humdrum daily

life gives no room, no vent. They know too well that human nature

can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or in flowers

and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a

well-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of

human nature is, after all, that which is nearest to everyone and

most interesting to everyone, therefore they go to fiction, since

they cannot go to fact, to see what they themselves might be had

they the chance; to see what fantastic tricks before high heaven

men and women like themselves can play, and how they play them.

Well, it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say

that there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or,

indeed, any novels at all, just because they see so many

sensational novels being enacted round them in painful facts of

sinful flesh and blood. There are those, too, who have looked in

the mirror too often to wish to see their own disfigured visage in

it any more; who are too tired of themselves and ashamed of

themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want to

hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able,

and just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to

converse with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an

heroic act, bathe their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel

themselves thereby, if but for an hour, more fair.

If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to

consider with me that one word Hero, and what it means.

Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human

nature, the capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is

as startling and as interesting in its manifestations as any, and

which is always beautiful, always ennobling, and therefore always

attractive to those whose hearts are not yet seared by the world

or brutalised by self-indulgence.

But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use

talking about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use

it as a cant phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate

and persecute our fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have

clearly settled in our own minds what a word means, it will do for

fighting with, but not for working with. Socrates of old used to

tell the young Athenians that the ground of all sound knowledge

was--to understand the true meaning of the words which were in

their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser man than we

shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in praise of

heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism is.

Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by

getting at its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first. And

if heroism means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems

to me, not merely what a hero may happen to mean just now, but

what it meant in the earliest human speech in which we find it.

A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a

man or woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness,

stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and

men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we

meet more than once or twice. Those grand old Greeks felt deeply

the truth of the poet's saying -

Unless above himself he can

Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.

But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or

other, partakers of a divine nature; akin to the gods; usually,

either they, or some ancestor of theirs, descended from a god or

goddess. Those who have read Mr. Gladstone's "Juventus Mundi"

will remember the section (cap. ix. 6) on the modes of the

approximation between the divine and the human natures; and

whether or not they agree with the author altogether, all will

agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was a

godlike man or godlike woman.

A godlike man. What varied, what infinite forms of nobleness that

word might include, ever increasing, as men's notions of the gods

became purer and loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions

became degraded. The old Greeks, with that intense admiration of

beauty which made them, in after ages, the master-sculptors and

draughtsmen of their own, and, indeed, of any age, would, of

course, require in their hero, their god-like man, beauty and

strength, manners too, and eloquence, and all outward perfections

of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities. Neglect, I say, but

not ignore. The hero, by virtue of his kindred with the gods, was

always expected to be a better man than common men, as virtue was

then understood. And how better? Let us see.

The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men

to those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society

he might enjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his

own high lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and

self-will; he might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and

wounded pride till his rage ended in shameful madness and suicide.

He might rebel against the very gods, and all laws of right and

wrong, till he perished his [Greek text] -

Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to

mortals.

But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of

Hero, justice, self-restraint, and [Greek text]--that highest form

of modesty, for which we have, alas! no name in the English

tongue; that perfect respect for the feelings of others which

springs out of perfect self-respect. And he must have too--if he

were to be a hero of the highest type--the instinct of

helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were a kinsman of the gods,

he must fight on their side, through toil and danger, against all

that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them. Who loves

not the old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature of

any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the

destroyer of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and

delivering it from the yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be

devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing

Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles with his twelve famous

labours against giants and monsters; and all the rest -

Who dared, in the god-given might of their manhood,

Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests

Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated brood of the giants;

Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired

rulers.

These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the

hearts, not merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women

who suffered and who feared; the memory of them, fables though

they may have been, ennobled the old Greek heart; they ennobled

the heart of Europe in the fifteenth century, at the re-discovery

of Greek literature. So far from contradicting the Christian

ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost said they supplemented--

that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had sprung up

during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and actually gave

a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had grown up

in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and

manly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister.

They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a

literature both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three

elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have

become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and

all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto,

in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and

other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but

which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's "Fairy Queen"--

perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by

mortal man.

And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though

they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What--though they have no

body, and, perhaps, never had--has given them an immortal soul,

which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?

What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but

still there--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the

perfection of heroism, of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and

the highest joy of him who claims a kindred with the gods?

Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice.

Those stories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern,

which the hearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the

poorest and the most ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the

highest form of moral beauty--the highest form, and yet one

possible to all.

Grace Darling rowing out into the storm towards the wreck. The

"drunken private of the Buffs," who, prisoner among the Chinese,

and commanded to prostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name

of his country's honour: "He would not bow to any China-man on

earth:" and so was knocked on the head, and died surely a hero's

death. Those soldiers of the Birkenhead, keeping their ranks to

let the women and children escape, while they watched the sharks

who in a few minutes would be tearing them limb from limb. Or, to

go across the Atlantic--for there are heroes in the Far West--Mr.

Bret Harte's "Flynn of Virginia," on the Central Pacific Railway--

the place is shown to travellers--who sacrificed his life for his

married comrade:

There, in the drift,

Back to the wall,

He held the timbers

Ready to fall.

Then in the darkness

I heard him call:

"Run for your life, Jake!

Run for your wife's sake!

Don't wait for me."

And that was all

Heard in the din -

Heard of Tom Flynn -

Flynn of Virginia.

Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer

caught fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the

bank, till every soul save he got safe on shore:

Through the hot black breath of the burning boat

Jim Bludso's voice was heard;

And they all had trust in his cussedness,

And knew he would keep his word.

And sure's you're born, they all got off

Afore the smokestacks fell;

And Bludso's ghost went up alone

In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren't no saint--but at the judgment

I'd run my chance with Jim

'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn't shake hands with him.

He'd seen his duty--a dead sure thing -

And went for it there and then;

And Christ is not going to be too hard

On a man that died for men.

To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay's--and he has written

many gallant and beautiful poems--I have but one demurrer: Jim

Bludso did not merely do his duty but more than his duty. He did

a voluntary deed, to which he was bound by no code or contract,

civil or moral; just as he who introduced me to that poem won his

Victoria Cross--as many a cross, Victoria and other, has been won-

-by volunteering for a deed to which he, too, was bound by no code

or contract, military or moral. And it is of the essence of self-

sacrifice, and therefore of heroism, that it should be voluntary;

a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man; an act

to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is

above though not against duty.

Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I

will not grudge the epithet "heroic," which my revered friend Mr.

Darwin justly applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his

life did that which was above his duty; who lived in continual

terror of the great baboon, and yet, when the brute had sprung

upon his friend the keeper, and was tearing out his throat,

conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of instant death,

sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and shrieked till

help arrived.

Some would nowadays use that story merely to prove that the

monkey's nature and the man's nature are, after all, one and the

same. Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a

monkey-nature in man, as there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-

nature, and a wolf-nature--of all which four I see every day too

much. The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as

far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin

than people fancy. Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the ox,

and the lion--and not unwisely--as the three highest types of

human capacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep

for their master's death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth-

-like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable--glide insensibly into

speech and reason. Birds--the most wonderful of all animals in

the eyes of a man of science or a poet--are sometimes looked on as

wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man. The Norseman--the

noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history

can tell us--was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native

forests that he had "ten men's strength and eleven men's wisdom."

How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle

Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating

theorem--that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole,

guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower

animals? I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan:

Unless above himself he can

Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many

a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted

the monkey's heroism from quite a different point of view; and

would have said that the poor little creature had been visited

suddenly by some "divine afflatus"--an expression quite as

philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic

formulas which I read nowadays--and had been thus raised for the

moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man

requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to a

philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will

have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.

And now, if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe,

identical, I must protest against the use of the word "sacrifice"

which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are

told of an "enormous sacrifice of life;" an expression which means

merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite

against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever; no

sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance,

cupidity, or mismanagement.

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such

words, who, when asked, "In what sense might Charles the First be

said to be a martyr?" answered, "In the same sense that a man

might be said to be a martyr to the gout."

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words

"hero." "heroism," "heroic," which is becoming too common, namely,

applying them to mere courage. We have borrowed the misuse, I

believe, as we have more than one beside, from the French press.

I trust that we shall neither accept it, nor the temper which

inspires it. It may be convenient for those who flatter their

nation, and especially the military part of it, into a ruinous

self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as this: "Courage is

heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous: therefore

every Frenchman is a hero." But we, who have been trained at once

in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts,

and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I

hope, not to trifle thus with that potent and awful engine--human

speech. We shall eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the

word "moral," which has crept from the French press now and then,

not only into our own press, but into the writings of some of our

military men, who, as Englishmen, should have known better. We

were told again and again, during the late war, that the moral

effect of such a success had been great; that the MORALE of the

troops was excellent; or again, that the MORALE of the troops had

suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised. But when

one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, one

discovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which they

expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by

the animal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal

passion of fear. This abuse of the word "moral" has crossed, I am

sorry to say, the Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must

excuse, though we must not imitate, when some one had been blazing

away at him with a revolver, he being unarmed, is said to have

described his very natural emotions on the occasion, by saying

that he felt dreadfully demoralised. We, I hope, shall confine

the word "demoralisation," as our generals of the last century

would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including, of

course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by

the word "heroism," in like manner, whether applied to a soldier

or to any human being, not mere courage, not the mere doing of

duty, but the doing of something beyond duty; something which is

not in the bond; some spontaneous and unexpected act of self-

devotion.

I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to

this sound distinction in her golden little book of "Golden

Deeds," and said, "Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very

essence of a soldier's life. It has the solid material, but it

has hardly the exceptional brightness, of a golden deed."

I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere

obedience to duty and express heroism. I know also that it would

be both invidious and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage

like me, to try to draw that line; and to sit at home at ease,

analysing and criticising deeds which I could not do myself; but--

to give an instance or two of what I mean:

To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is

simple duty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even

to die in so doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an

advantage is to be gained thereby for one's own side. Then,

indeed, it rises towards, if not into, the heroism of self-

sacrifice.

Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the

conduct of those Spartans at Thermopylae, when they sat "combing

their yellow hair for death" on the sea-shore? They devoted

themselves to hopeless destruction; but why? They felt--I must

believe that, for they behaved as if they felt--that on them the

destinies of the Western World might hang; that they were in the

forefront of the battle between civilisation and barbarism,

between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that vast

mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were

driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of

the old heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat

and death, was a mightier and a nobler man than they. And they

did their work. They produced, if you will, a "moral" effect,

which has lasted even to this very day. They struck terror into

the heart, not only of the Persian host, but of the whole Persian

empire. They made the event of that war certain, and the

victories of Salamis and Plataea comparatively easy. They made

Alexander's conquest of the East, one hundred and fifty years

afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came;

and thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole

world.

They did not, of course, foresee all this. No great or inspired

man can foresee all the consequences of his deeds; but these men

were, as I hold inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty

stake for which they played; and to count their lives worthless,

if Sparta had sent them thither to help in that great game.

Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German

cavalry regiments who, in the battle of Mars-la-Tour, were bidden

to hurl themselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the

unbroken French infantry, and went to almost certain death, over

the corpses of their comrades, on and in and through, reeling man

over horse, horse over man, and clung like bull-dogs to their

work, and would hardly leave, even at the bugle-call, till in one

regiment thirteen officers out of nineteen were killed or wounded?

And why?

Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a

quarter of an hour. A respite must be gained for the exhausted

Third Corps. And how much might be done, even in a quarter of an

hour, by men who knew when, and where, and why to die! Who will

refuse the name of heroes to these men? And yet they, probably,

would have utterly declined the honour. They had but done that

which was in the bond. They were but obeying orders after all.

As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic persons: "'I have but done

that which it was my duty to do,' is the natural answer of those

capable of such actions. They have been constrained to them by

duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act otherwise; and

did not once think of themselves in the matter at all."

These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: its

simplicity. Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected,

boastful, wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic

character of a deed; because all these faults spring out of self.

On the other hand, wherever you find a perfectly simple, frank,

unconscious character, there you have the possibility, at least,

of heroic action. For it is nobler far to do the most commonplace

duty in the household, or behind the counter, with a single eye to

duty, simply because it must be done--nobler far, I say, than to

go out of your way to attempt a brilliant deed, with a double

mind, and saying to yourself not only--"This will be a brilliant

deed," but also--"and it will pay me, or raise me, or set me off,

into the bargain." Heroism knows no "into the bargain." And

therefore, again, I must protest against applying the word

"heroic" to any deeds, however charitable, however toilsome,

however dangerous, performed for the sake of what certain French

ladies, I am told, call "faire son salut"--saving one's soul in

the world to come. I do not mean to judge. Other and quite

unselfish motives may be, and doubtless often are, mixed up with

that selfish one: womanly pity and tenderness; love for, and

desire to imitate, a certain Incarnate ideal of self-sacrifice,

who is at once human and divine. But that motive of saving the

soul, which is too often openly proposed and proffered, is utterly

unheroic. The desire to escape pains and penalties hereafter by

pains and penalties here; the balance of present loss against

future gain--what is this but selfishness extended out of this

world into eternity? "Not worldliness," indeed, as a satirist

once said with bitter truth, "but other-worldliness."

Moreover--and the young and the enthusiastic should also bear this

in mind--though heroism means the going beyond the limits of

strict duty, it never means the going out of the path of strict

duty. If it is your duty to go to London, go thither: you may go

as much farther as you choose after that. But you must go to

London first. Do your duty first; it will be time after that to

talk of being heroic.

And therefore one must seriously warn the young, lest they mistake

for heroism and self-sacrifice what is merely pride and self-will,

discontent with the relations by which God has bound them, and the

circumstances which God has appointed for them. I have known

girls think they were doing a fine thing by leaving uncongenial

parents or disagreeable sisters, and cutting out for themselves,

as they fancied, a more useful and elevated line of life than that

of mere home duties; while, after all, poor things, they were only

saying, with the Pharisees of old, "Corban, it is a gift, by

whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;" and in the name of

God, neglecting the command of God to honour their father and

mother.

There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave

their children unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are

spending their money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of

their own. It is ill to take the children's bread and cast it to

the dogs; or even to the angels. It is ill, I say, trying to make

presents to God, before we have tried to pay our debts to God.

The first duty of every man is to the wife whom he has married,

and to the children whom she has brought into the world; and to

neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the conceit that a

man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will actually allow

him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man's

invaluable services. Be sure that every motive which comes not

from the single eye, every motive which springs from self, is by

its very essence unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent

as it may.

But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of

approbation--the desire for the love and respect of our fellow-

men. That must not be excluded from the list of heroic motives.

I know that it is, or may be proved to be, by victorious analysis,

an emotion common to us and the lower animals. And yet no man

excludes it less than that true hero, St. Paul.

If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of whom I spoke

just now, knew that their memories would be wept over and

worshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would

become watchwords to children in their fatherland, what is that to

us, save that it should make us rejoice, if we be truly human,

that they had that thought with them in their last moments to make

self-devotion more easy, and death more sweet?

And yet--and yet--is not the highest heroism that which is free

even from the approbation of our fellowmen, even from the

approbation of the best and wisest? The heroism which is known

only to our Father who seeth in secret? The Godlike deeds alone

in the lonely chamber? The Godlike lives lived in obscurity?--a

heroism rare among us men, who live perforce in the glare and

noise of the outer world: more common among women; women of whom

the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would

only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts,

and entreat to be left alone with God. True, they cannot always

hide. They must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would

lose the golden lesson. But, nevertheless, it is of the essence

of the perfect and womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual

forces the woman transcends the man, that it would hide if it

could.

And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the

golden deeds of women in Miss Yonge's book--it was a pleasant

thought to me, that I could say to myself--Ah! yes. These

heroines are known, and their fame flies through the mouths of

men. But if so, how many thousands of heroines there must have

been, how many thousands there may be now, of whom we shall never

know. But still they are there. They sow in secret the seed of

which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not that we

pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble, ill-

dressed woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance. She

who nurses a bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the

workhouse. She who spends her heart and her money on a drunken

father, a reckless brother, on the orphans of a kinsman or a

friend. She who--But why go on with the long list of great little

heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comes in contact daily--

and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of a clergyman's

high calling that he does come in contact with them--why go on, I

say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism--

the commonest, and yet the least remembered of all--namely, the

heroism of an average mother? Ah, when I think of that last broad

fact, I gather hope again for poor humanity; and this dark world

looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more-

-because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least

full of mothers.

While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his

ridicule, at the managing mother trying to get her daughters

married off her hands by chicaneries and meannesses, which every

novelist knows too well how to draw--would to heaven he, or

rather, alas! she would find some more chivalrous employment for

his or her pen--for were they not, too, born of woman?--I only say

to myself--having had always a secret fondness for poor Rebecca,

though I love Esau more than Jacob--Let the poor thing alone.

With pain she brought these girls into the world. With pain she

educated them according to her light. With pain she is trying to

obtain for them the highest earthly blessing of which she can

conceive, namely, to be well married; and if in doing that last,

she manoeuvres a little, commits a few basenesses, even tells a

few untruths, what does all that come to, save this--that in the

confused intensity of her motherly self-sacrifice, she will

sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscience and her own

credit? We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-driven soul

when we meet her in society; our duty, both as Christians and

ladies and gentlemen, seems to me to be--to do for her something

very different indeed.

But to return. Looking at the amount of great little heroisms,

which are being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one

has a right to say, what we are all tempted to say at times: "How

can I be heroic? This is no heroic age, setting me heroic

examples. We are growing more and more comfortable, frivolous,

pleasure-seeking, money-making; more and more utilitarian; more

and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals, in our

religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more and

more of loss and gain. I am born into an unheroic time. You must

not ask me to become heroic in it."

I do not deny that it is more difficult to be heroic, while

circumstances are unheroic round us. We are all too apt to be the

puppets of circumstances; all too apt to follow the fashion; all

too apt, like so many minnows, to take our colour from the ground

on which we lie, in hopes, like them, of comfortable concealment,

lest the new tyrant deity, called Public Opinion, should spy us

out, and, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, cast us into a burning fiery

furnace--which public opinion can make very hot--for daring to

worship any god or man save the will of the temporary majority.

Yes, it is difficult to be anything but poor, mean, insufficient,

imperfect people, as like each other as so many sheep; and, like

so many sheep, having no will or character of our own, but rushing

altogether blindly over the same gap, in foolish fear of the same

dog, who, after all, dare not bite us; and so it always was and

always will be.

For the third time I say,

Unless above himself he can

Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.

But, nevertheless, any man or woman who WILL, in any age and under

any circumstances, can live the heroic life and exercise heroic

influences.

If any ask proof of this, I shall ask them, in return, to read two

novels; novels, indeed, but, in their method and their moral,

partaking of that heroic and ideal element, which will make them

live, I trust, long after thousands of mere novels have returned

to their native dust. I mean Miss Muloch's "John Halifax,

Gentleman," and Mr. Thackeray's "Esmond," two books which no man

or woman ought to read without being the nobler for them.

"John Halifax, Gentleman," is simply the history of a poor young

clerk, who rises to be a wealthy mill-owner in the manufacturing

districts, in the early part of this century. But he contrives to

be an heroic and ideal clerk, and an heroic and ideal mill-owner;

and that without doing anything which the world would call heroic

or ideal, or in anywise stepping out of his sphere, minding simply

his own business, and doing the duty which lies nearest him. And

how? By getting into his head from youth the strangest notion,

that in whatever station or business he may be, he can always be

what he considers a gentleman; and that if he only behaves like a

gentleman, all must go right at last. A beautiful book. As I

said before, somewhat of an heroic and ideal book. A book which

did me good when first I read it; which ought to do any young man

good who will read it, and then try to be, like John Halifax, a

gentleman, whether in the shop, the counting-house, the bank, or

the manufactory.

The other--an even more striking instance of the possibility, at

least, of heroism anywhere and everywhere--is Mr. Thackeray's

"Esmond." On the meaning of that book I can speak with authority.

For my dear and regretted friend told me himself that my

interpretation of it was the true one; that this was the lesson

which he meant men to learn therefrom.

Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century;

living in a coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether

unheroic age. He is--and here the high art and the high morality

of Mr. Thackeray's genius is shown--altogether a man of his own

age. He is not a sixteenth-century or a nineteenth-century man

born out of time. His information, his politics, his religion,

are no higher than of those round him. His manners, his views of

human life, his very prejudices and faults, are those of his age.

The temptations which he conquers are just those under which the

men around him fall. But how does he conquer them? By holding

fast throughout to honour, duty, virtue. Thus, and thus alone, he

becomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-

century hero. This was what Mr. Thackeray meant-- for he told me

so himself, I say--that it was possible, even in England's lowest

and foulest times, to be a gentleman and a hero, if a man would

but be true to the light within him.

But I will go farther. I will go from ideal fiction to actual,

and yet ideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most

unheroic age which the civilised world ever saw was also the most

heroic; that the spirit of man triumphed most utterly over his

circumstances at the very moment when those circumstances were

most against him.

How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest

sense of that word. The fact of his having done so is matter of

history. Shall I solve my own riddle?

Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there

a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even

children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in

infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never

seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage-

-rather say, a whole heaven--higher than before; and that wherever

the tale of their great deeds spread, men accepted, even if they

did not copy, those martyrs as ideal specimens of the human race,

till they were actually worshipped by succeeding generations,

wrongly, it may be, but pardonably, as a choir of lesser deities?

But is there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which

they were heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were

bred, lived, and died, under the most debasing of materialist

tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national

life dying, or dead around them, and in cities the corruption of

which cannot be told for very shame--cities, compared with which

Paris is the abode of Arcadian simplicity and innocence? When I

read Petronius and Juvenal, and recollect that they were the

contemporaries of the Apostles; when--to give an instance which

scholars, and perhaps, happily, only scholars, can appreciate--I

glance once more at Trimalchio's feast, and remember that within a

mile of that feast St. Paul may have been preaching to a Christian

congregation, some of whom--for St. Paul makes no secret of that

strange fact--may have been, ere their conversion, partakers in

just such vulgar and bestial orgies as those which were going on

in the rich freedman's halls; after that, I say, I can put no

limit to the possibility of man's becoming heroic, even though he

be surrounded by a hell on earth; no limit to the capacities of

any human being to form for himself or herself a high and pure

ideal of human character; and, without "playing fantastic tricks

before high heaven," to carry out that ideal in every-day life;

and in the most commonplace circumstances, and the most menial

occupations, to live worthy of--as I conceive--our heavenly

birthright, and to imitate the heroes, who were the kinsmen of the

gods.

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS {11}

Let me begin by asking the ladies who are interesting themselves

in this good work, whether they have really considered what they

are about to do in carrying out their own plans? Are they aware

that if their Society really succeeds, they will produce a very

serious, some would think a very dangerous, change in the state of

this nation? Are they aware that they would probably save the

lives of some thirty or forty per cent. of the children who are

born in England, and that therefore they would cause the subjects

of Queen Victoria to increase at a very far more rapid rate than

they do now? And are they aware that some very wise men inform us

that England is already over-peopled, and that it is an

exceedingly puzzling question where we shall soon be able to find

work or food for our masses, so rapidly do they increase already,

in spite of the thirty or forty per cent. which kind Nature

carries off yearly before they are five years old? Have they

considered what they are to do with all those children whom they

are going to save alive? That has to be thought of; and if they

really do believe, with some political economists, that over-

population is a possibility to a country which has the greatest

colonial empire that the world has ever seen; then I think they

had better stop in their course, and let the children die, as they

have been in the habit of dying.

But if, on the other hand, it seems to them, as I confess it does

to me, that the most precious thing in the world is a human being;

that the lowest, and poorest, and the most degraded of human

beings is better than all the dumb animals in the world; that

there is an infinite, priceless capability in that creature,

fallen as it may be; a capability of virtue, and of social and

industrial use, which, if it is taken in time, may be developed up

to a pitch, of which at first sight the child gives no hint

whatsoever; if they believe again, that of all races upon earth

now, the English race is probably the finest, and that it gives

not the slightest sign whatever of exhaustion; that it seems to be

on the whole a young race, and to have very great capabilities in

it which have not yet been developed, and above all, the most

marvellous capability of adapting itself to every sort of climate

and every form of life, which any race, except the old Roman, ever

has had in the world; if they consider with me that it is worth

the while of political economists and social philosophers to look

at the map, and see that about four-fifths of the globe cannot be

said as yet to be in anywise inhabited or cultivated, or in the

state into which men could put it by a fair supply of population,

and industry, and human intellect: then, perhaps, they may think

with me that it is a duty, one of the noblest of duties, to help

the increase of the English race as much as possible, and to see

that every child that is born into this great nation of England be

developed to the highest pitch to which we can develop him in

physical strength and in beauty, as well as in intellect and in

virtue. And then, in that light, it does seem to me, that this

Institution--small now, but I do hope some day to become great and

to become the mother institution of many and valuable children--is

one of the noblest, most right-minded, straightforward, and

practical conceptions that I have come across for some years.

We all know the difficulties of sanitary legislation. One looks

at them at times almost with despair. I have my own reasons, with

which I will not trouble this meeting, for looking on them with

more despair than ever: not on account of the government of the

time, or any possible government that could come to England, but

on account of the peculiar class of persons in whom the ownership

of the small houses has become more and more vested, and who are

becoming more and more, I had almost said, the arbiters of the

popular opinion, and of every election of parliament. However,

that is no business of ours here; that must be settled somewhere

else; and a fearfully long time, it seems to me, it will be before

it is settled. But, in the meantime, what legislation cannot do,

I believe private help, and, above all, woman's help, can do even

better. It can do this; it can improve the condition of the

working man: and not only of him; I must speak also of the middle

classes, of the men who own the house in which the working man

lives. I must speak, too, of the wealthy tradesman; I must speak-

-it is a sad thing to have to say it--of our own class as well as

of others. Sanitary reform, as it is called, or, in plain

English, the art of health, is so very recent a discovery, as all

true physical science is, that we ourselves and our own class know

very little about it, and practise it very little. And this

society, I do hope, will bear in mind that it is not simply to

seek the working man, not only to go into the foul alley: but it

is to go to the door of the farmer, to the door of the shopkeeper,

aye, to the door of ladies and gentlemen of the same rank as

ourselves. Women can do in that work what men cannot do. The

private correspondence, private conversation, private example, of

ladies, above all of married women, of mothers of families, may do

what no legislation can do. I am struck more and more with the

amount of disease and death I see around me in all classes, which

no sanitary legislation whatsoever could touch, unless you had a

complete house-to-house visitation by some government officer,

with powers to enter every dwelling, to drain it, and ventilate

it; and not only that, but to regulate the clothes and the diet of

every inhabitant, and that among all ranks. I can conceive of

nothing short of that, which would be absurd and impossible, and

would also be most harmful morally, which would stop the present

amount of disease and death which I see around me, without some

such private exertion on the part of women, above all of mothers,

as I do hope will spring from this institution more and more.

I see this, that three persons out of every four are utterly

unaware of the general causes of their own ill-health, and of the

ill-health of their children. They talk of their "afflictions,"

and their "misfortunes;" and, if they be pious people, they talk

of "the will of God," and of "the visitation of God." I do not

like to trench upon those matters here; but when I read in my book

and in your book, "that it is not the will of our Father in Heaven

that one of these little ones should perish," it has come to my

mind sometimes with very great strength that that may have a

physical application as well as a spiritual one; and that the

Father in Heaven who does not wish the child's soul to die, may

possibly have created that child's body for the purpose of its not

dying except in a good old age. For not only in the lower class,

but in the middle and upper classes, when one sees an unhealthy

family, then in three cases out of four, if one will take time,

trouble, and care enough, one can, with the help of the doctor,

who has been attending them, run the evil home to a very different

cause than the will of God; and that is, to stupid neglect, stupid

ignorance, or what is just as bad, stupid indulgence.

Now, I do believe that if those tracts which you are publishing,

which I have read and of which I cannot speak too highly, are

spread over the length and breadth of the land, and if women--

clergymen's wives, the wives of manufacturers and of great

employers, district visitors and schoolmistresses, have these

books put into their hands, and are persuaded to spread them, and

to enforce them, by their own example and by their own counsel--

that then, in the course of a few years, this system being

thoroughly carried out, you would see a sensible and large

increase in the rate of population. When you have saved your

children alive, then you must settle what to do with them. But a

living dog is better than a dead lion; I would rather have the

living child, and let it take its chance, than let it return to

God--wasted. O! it is a distressing thing to see children die.

God gives the most beautiful and precious thing that earth can

have, and we just take it and cast it away; we toss our pearls

upon the dunghill and leave them. A dying child is to me one of

the most dreadful sights in the world. A dying man, a man dying

on the field of battle--that is a small sight; he has taken his

chance; he is doing his duty; he has had his excitement; he has

had his glory, if that will be any consolation to him; if he is a

wise man, he has the feeling that he is dying for his country and

his queen: and that is, and ought to be, enough for him. I am

not horrified or shocked at the sight of the man who dies on the

field of battle; let him die so. It does not horrify or shock me,

again, to see a man dying in a good old age, even though the last

struggle be painful, as it too often is. But it does shock me, it

does make me feel that the world is indeed out of joint, to see a

child die. I believe it to be a priceless boon to the child to

have lived for a week, or a day: but oh, what has God given to

this thankless earth, and what has the earth thrown away; and in

nine cases out of ten, from its own neglect and carelessness!

What that boy might have been, what he might have done as an

Englishman, if he could have lived and grown up healthy and

strong! And I entreat you to bear this in mind, that it is not as

if our lower or our middle classes were not worth saving: bear in

mind that the physical beauty, strength, intellectual power of the

middle classes--the shopkeeping class, the farming class, down to

the lowest working class--whenever you give them a fair chance,

whenever you give them fair food and air, and physical education

of any kind, prove them to be the finest race in Europe. Not

merely the aristocracy, splendid race as they are, but down and

down and down to the lowest labouring man, to the navigator--why,

there is not such a body of men in Europe as our navigators; and

no body of men perhaps have had a worse chance of growing to be

what they are; and yet see what they have done! See the

magnificent men they become, in spite of all that is against them,

dragging them down, tending to give them rickets and consumption,

and all the miserable diseases which children contract; see what

men they are, and then conceive what they might be! It has been

said, again and again, that there are no more beautiful race of

women in Europe than the wives and daughters of our London

shopkeepers; and yet there are few races of people who lead a life

more in opposition to all rules of hygiene. But, in spite of all

that, so wonderful is the vitality of the English race, they are

what they are; and therefore we have the finest material to work

upon that people ever had. And, therefore, again, we have the

less excuse if we do allow English people to grow up puny,

stunted, and diseased.

Let me refer again to that word that I used; death--the amount of

death. I really believe there are hundreds of good and kind

people who would take up this subject with their whole heart and

soul if they were aware of the magnitude of the evil. Lord

Shaftesbury told you just now that there were one hundred thousand

preventable deaths in England every year. So it is. We talk of

the loss of human life in war. We are the fools of smoke and

noise; because there are cannon-balls, forsooth, and swords and

red coats; and because it costs a great deal of money, and makes a

great deal of talk in the papers, we think: What so terrible as

war? I will tell you what is ten times, and ten thousand times,

more terrible than war, and that is outraged Nature. War, we are

discovering now, is the clumsiest and most expensive of all games;

we are finding that if you wish to commit an act of cruelty and

folly, the most costly one that you can commit is to contrive to

shoot your fellow-men in war. So it is; and thank God that so it

is; but Nature, insidious, inexpensive, silent, sends no roar of

cannon, no glitter of arms to do her work; she gives no warning

note of preparation; she has no protocols, nor any diplomatic

advances, whereby she warns her enemy that war is coming.

Silently, I say, and insidiously she goes forth; no! she does not

even go forth; she does not step out of her path; but quietly, by

the very same means by which she makes alive, she puts to death;

and so avenges herself of those who have rebelled against her. By

the very same laws by which every blade of grass grows, and every

insect springs to life in the sunbeam, she kills, and kills, and

kills, and is never tired of killing; till she has taught man the

terrible lesson he is so slow to learn, that, Nature is only

conquered by obeying her.

And bear in mind one thing more. Man has his courtesies of war,

and his chivalries of war; he does not strike the unarmed man; he

spares the woman and the child. But Nature is as fierce when she

is offended, as she is bounteous and kind when she is obeyed. She

spares neither woman nor child. She has no pity; for some awful,

but most good reason, she is not allowed to have any pity.

Silently she strikes the sleeping babe, with as little remorse as

she would strike the strong man, with the spade or the musket in

his hand. Ah! would to God that some man had the pictorial

eloquence to put before the mothers of England the mass of

preventable suffering, the mass of preventable agony of mind and

body, which exists in England year after year; and would that some

man had the logical eloquence to make them understand that it is

in their power, in the power of the mothers and wives of the

higher class, I will not say to stop it all--God only knows that--

but to stop, as I believe, three-fourths of it.

It is in the power, I believe, of any woman in this room to save

three or four lives--human lives--during the next six months. It

is in your power, ladies; and it is so easy. You might save

several lives apiece, if you choose, without, I believe,

interfering with your daily business, or with your daily pleasure;

or, if you choose, with your daily frivolities, in any way

whatsoever. Let me ask, then, those who are here, and who have

not yet laid these things to heart: Will you let this meeting to-

day be a mere passing matter of two or three hours' interest,

which you may go away and forget for the next book or the next

amusement? Or will you be in earnest? Will you learn--I say it

openly--from the noble chairman, how easy it is to be in earnest

in life; how every one of you, amid all the artificial

complications of English society in the nineteenth century, can

find a work to do, a noble work to do, a chivalrous work to do--

just as chivalrous as if you lived in any old magic land, such as

Spenser talked of in his "Faerie Queene;" how you can be as true a

knight-errant or lady-errant in the present century, as if you had

lived far away in the dark ages of violence and rapine? Will you,

I ask, learn this? Will you learn to be in earnest; and to use

the position, and the station, and the talent that God has given

you to save alive those who should live? And will you remember

that it is not the will of your Father that is in Heaven that one

little one that plays in the kennel outside should perish, either

in body or in soul?

"A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS." {12}

The cholera, as was to be expected, has reappeared in England

again; and England, as was to be expected, has taken no sufficient

steps towards meeting it; so that if, as seems but too probable,

the plague should spread next summer, we may count with tolerable

certainty upon a loss of some ten thousand lives.

That ten thousand, or one thousand, innocent people should die, of

whom most, if not all, might be saved alive, would seem at first

sight a matter serious enough for the attention of

"philanthropists." Those who abhor the practice of hanging one

man would, one fancies, abhor equally that of poisoning many; and

would protest as earnestly against the painful capital punishment

of diarrhoea as against the painless one of hempen rope. Those

who demand mercy for the Sepoy, and immunity for the Coolie women

of Delhi, unsexed by their own brutal and shameless cruelty,

would, one fancies, demand mercy also for the British workman, and

immunity for his wife and family. One is therefore somewhat

startled at finding that the British nation reserves to itself,

though it forbids to its armies, the right of putting to death

unarmed and unoffending men, women, and children.

After further consideration, however, one finds that there are, as

usual, two sides to the question. One is bound, indeed, to

believe, even before proof, that there are two sides. It cannot

be without good and sufficient reason that the British public

remains all but indifferent to sanitary reform; that though the

science of epidemics, as a science, has been before the world for

more than twenty years, nobody believes in it enough to act upon

it, save some few dozen of fanatics, some of whom have (it cannot

be denied) a direct pecuniary interest in disturbing what they

choose to term the poison-manufactories of free and independent

Britons.

Yes; we should surely respect the expressed will and conviction of

the most practical of nations, arrived at after the experience of

three choleras, stretching over a whole generation. Public

opinion has declared against the necessity of sanitary reform:

and is not public opinion known to be, in these last days, the

Ithuriel's spear which is to unmask and destroy all the follies,

superstitions, and cruelties of the universe? The immense

majority of the British nation will neither cleanse themselves nor

let others cleanse them: and are we not governed by majorities?

Are not majorities, confessedly, always in the right, even when

smallest, and a show of hands a surer test of truth than any

amount of wisdom, learning, or virtue? How much more, then, when

a whole free people is arrayed, in the calm magnificence of self-

confident conservatism, against a few innovating and perhaps

sceptical philosophasters? Then surely, if ever, vox populi is

vox coeli.

And, in fact, when we come to examine the first and commonest

objection against sanitary reformers, we find it perfectly

correct. They are said to be theorists, dreamers of the study,

who are ignorant of human nature; and who in their materialist

optimism, have forgotten the existence of moral evil till they

almost fancy at times that they can set the world right simply by

righting its lowest material arrangements. The complaint is

perfectly true. They have been ignorant of human nature; they

have forgotten the existence of moral evil; and if any religious

periodical should complain of their denying original sin, they can

only answer that they did in past years fall into that folly, but

that subsequent experience has utterly convinced them of the truth

of the doctrine.

For, misled by this ignorance of human nature, they expected help,

from time to time, from various classes of the community, from

whom no help (as they ought to have known at first) is to be

gotten. Some, as a fact, expected the assistance of the clergy,

and especially of the preachers of those denominations who believe

that every human being, by the mere fact of his birth into this

world, is destined to endless torture after death, unless the

preacher can find an opportunity to deliver him therefrom before

he dies. They supposed that to such preachers the mortal lives of

men would be inexpressibly precious; that any science which held

out a prospect of retarding death in the case of "lost millions"

would be hailed as a heavenly boon, and would be carried out with

the fervour of men who felt that for the soul's sake no exertion

was too great in behalf of the body.

A little more reflection would have quashed their vain hope. They

would have recollected that each of these preachers was already

connected with a congregation; that he had already a hold on them,

and they on him; that he was bound to provide for their spiritual

wants before going forth to seek for fresh objects of his

ministry. They would have recollected that on the old principle

(and a very sound one) of a bird in the hand being worth two in

the bush, the minister of a congregation would feel it his duty,

as well as his interest, not to defraud his flock of his labours

by spending valuable time on a secular subject like sanitary

reform, in the hope of possibly preserving a few human beings,

whose souls he might hereafter (and that again would be merely a

possibility) benefit.

They would have recollected, again, that these congregations are

almost exclusively composed of those classes who have little or

nothing to fear from epidemics, and (what is even more important)

who would have to bear the expenses of sanitary improvements. But

so sanguine, so reckless of human conditions had their theories

made them, that they actually expected that parish rectors,

already burdened with over-work and vestry quarrels--nay, even

that preachers who got their bread by pew-rents, and whose life-

long struggle was, therefore, to keep those pews filled, and those

renters in good humour--should astound the respectable house-

owners and ratepayers who sat beneath them by the appalling words:

"You, and not the 'Visitation of God,' are the cause of epidemics;

and of you, now that you are once fairly warned of your

responsibility, will your brothers' blood be required." Conceive

Sanitary Reformers expecting this of "ministers," let their

denomination be what it might--many of the poor men, too, with a

wife and seven children! Truly has it been said, that nothing is

so cruel as the unreasonableness of a fanatic.

They forgot, too, that sanitary science, like geology, must be at

first sight "suspect" in the eyes of the priests of all

denominations, at least till they shall have arrived at a much

higher degree of culture than they now possess.

Like geology, it interferes with that Deus e machina theory of

human affairs which has been in all ages the stronghold of

priestcraft. That the Deity is normally absent, and not present;

that he works on the world by interference, and not by continuous

laws; that it is the privilege of the priesthood to assign causes

for these "judgments" and "visitations" of the Almighty, and to

tell mankind why He is angry with them, and has broken the laws of

nature to punish them--this, in every age, has seemed to the

majority of priests a doctrine to be defended at all hazards; for

without it, so they hold, their occupation were gone at once. {13}

No wonder, then, if they view with jealousy a set of laymen

attributing these "judgments" to purely chemical laws, and to

misdoings and ignorance which have as yet no place in the

ecclesiastical catalogue of sins. True, it may be that the

Sanitary Reformers are right; but they had rather not think so.

And it is very easy not to think so. They only have to ignore, to

avoid examining, the facts. Their canon of utility is a peculiar

one; and with facts which do not come under that canon they have

no concern. It may be true, for instance, that the eighteenth

century, which to the clergy is a period of scepticism, darkness,

and spiritual death, is the very century which saw more done for

science, for civilisation, for agriculture, for manufacture, for

the prolongation and support of human life than any preceding one

for a thousand years and more. What matter? That is a "secular"

question, of which they need know nothing. And sanitary reform

(if true) is just such another; a matter (as slavery has been seen

to be by the preachers of the United States) for the legislator,

and not for those whose kingdom is "not of this world."

Others again expected, with equal wisdom, the assistance of the

political economist. The fact is undeniable, but at the same time

inexplicable. What they could have found in the doctrines of most

modern political economists which should lead them to suppose that

human life would be precious in their eyes, is unknown to the

writer of these pages. Those whose bugbear has been over-

population, whose motto has been an euphuistic version of

The more the merrier; but the fewer the better fare -

cannot be expected to lend their aid in increasing the population

by saving the lives of two-thirds of the children who now die

prematurely in our great cities; and so still further overcrowding

this unhappy land with those helpless and expensive sources of

national poverty--rational human beings, in strength and health.

Moreover--and this point is worthy of serious attention--that

school of political economy, which has now reached its full

development, has taken all along a view of man's relation to

Nature diametrically opposite to that taken by the Sanitary

Reformer, or indeed by any other men of science. The Sanitary

Reformer holds, in common with the chemist or the engineer, that

Nature is to be obeyed only in order to conquer her; that man is

to discover the laws of her existing phenomena, in order that he

may employ them to create new phenomena himself; to turn the laws

which he discovers to his own use; if need be, to counteract one

by another. In this power, it has seemed to them, lay his dignity

as a rational being. It was this, the power of invention, which

made him a progressive animal, not bound as the bird and the bee

are, to build exactly as his forefathers built five thousand years

ago.

By political economy alone has this faculty been denied to man.

In it alone he is not to conquer nature, but simply to obey her.

Let her starve him, make him a slave, a bankrupt, or what not, he

must submit, as the savage does to the hail and the lightning.

"Laissez-faire," says the "Science du neant," the "Science de la

misere," as it has truly and bitterly been called; "Laissez-

faire." Analyse economic questions if you will: but beyond

analysis you shall not step. Any attempt to raise political

economy to its synthetic stage is to break the laws of nature, to

fight against facts--as if facts were not made to be fought

against and conquered, and put out of the way, whensoever they

interfere in the least with the welfare of any human being. The

drowning man is not to strike out for his life lest by keeping his

head above water he interfere with the laws of gravitation. Not

that the political economist, or any man, can be true to his own

fallacy. He must needs try his hand at the synthetic method

though he forbids it to the rest of the world: but the only

deductive hint which he has as yet given to mankind is, quaintly

enough, the most unnatural "eidolon specus" which ever entered the

head of a dehumanised pedant--namely, that once famous "Preventive

Check," which, if a nation did ever apply it--as it never will--

could issue, as every doctor knows, in nothing less than the

questionable habits of abortion, child-murder, and unnatural

crime.

The only explanation of such conduct (though one which the men

themselves will hardly accept) is this--that they secretly share

somewhat in the doubt which many educated men have of the

correctness of their inductions; that these same laws of political

economy (where they leave the plain and safe subject-matter of

trade) have been arrived at somewhat too hastily; that they are,

in plain English, not quite sound enough yet to build upon; and

that we must wait for a few more facts before we begin any

theories. Be it so. At least, these men, in their present temper

of mind, are not likely to be very useful to the Sanitary

Reformer.

Would that these men, or the clergy, had been the only bruised

reed in which the Sanitary Reformers put their trust. They found

another reed, however, and that was Public Opinion; but they

forgot that (whatever the stump-orators may say about this being

the age of electric thought, when truth flashes triumphant from

pole to pole, etc.) we have no proof whatsoever that the

proportion of fools is less in this generation than in those

before it, or that truth, when unpalatable (as it almost always

is), travels any faster than it did five hundred years ago. They

forgot that every social improvement, and most mechanical ones,

have had to make their way against laziness, ignorance, envy,

vested wrongs, vested superstitions, and the whole vis inertiae of

the world, the flesh, and the devil. They were guilty indeed, in

this case, not merely of ignorance of human nature, but of

forgetfulness of fact. Did they not know that the excellent New

Poor-law was greeted with the curses of those very farmers and

squires who now not only carry it out lovingly and willingly to

the very letter, but are often too ready to resist any improvement

or relaxation in it which may be proposed by that very Poor-law

Board from which it emanated? Did they not know that Agricultural

Science, though of sixty years' steady growth, has not yet

penetrated into a third of the farms of England; and that hundreds

of farmers still dawdle on after the fashion of their forefathers,

when by looking over the next hedge into their neighbour's field

they might double their produce and their profits? Did they not

know that the adaptation of steam to machinery would have

progressed just as slowly, had it not been a fact patent to babies

that an engine is stronger than a horse; and that if cotton, like

wheat and beef, had taken twelve months to manufacture, instead of

five minutes, Manchester foresight would probably have been as

short and as purblind as that of the British farmer? What right

had they to expect a better reception for the facts of Sanitary

Science?--facts which ought to, and ultimately will, disturb the

vested interests of thousands, will put them to inconvenience,

possibly at first to great expense; and yet facts which you can

neither see nor handle, but must accept and pay hundreds of

thousands of pounds for, on the mere word of a doctor or inspector

who gets his living thereby. Poor John Bull! To expect that you

would accept such a gospel cheerfully was indeed to expect too

much!

But yet, though the public opinion of the mass could not be

depended on, there was a body left, distinct from the mass, and

priding itself so much on that distinctness that it was ready to

say at times--of course in more courteous--at least in what it

considered more Scriptural language: "This people which knoweth

not the law is accursed." To it therefore--to the religious

world--some over-sanguine Sanitary Reformers turned their eyes.

They saw in it ready organised (so it professed) for all good

works, a body such as the world had never seen before. Where the

religions public of Byzantium, Alexandria, or Rome numbered

hundreds, that of England numbered its thousands. It was divided,

indeed, on minor points, but it was surely united by the one aim

of saving every man his own soul, and of professing the deepest

reverence for that Divine Book which tells men that the way to

attain that aim is, to be good and to do good; and which contains

among other commandments this one--"Thou shaft not kill." Its

wealth was enormous. It possessed so much political power, that

it would have been able to command elections, to compel ministers,

to encourage the weak hearts of willing but fearful clergymen by

fair hopes of deaneries and bishoprics. Its members were no

clique of unpractical fanatics--no men less. Though it might

number among them a few martinet ex-post-captains, and noblemen of

questionable sanity, capable of no more practical study than that

of unfulfilled prophecy, the vast majority of them were

landowners, merchants, bankers, commercial men of all ranks, full

of worldly experience, and of the science of organisation, skilled

all their lives in finding and in employing men and money. What

might not be hoped from such a body, to whom that commercial

imperium in imperio of the French Protestants which the edict of

Nantes destroyed was poor and weak? Add to this that these men's

charities were boundless; that they were spending yearly, and on

the whole spending wisely and well, ten times as much as ever was

spent before in the world, on educational schemes, missionary

schemes, church building, reformatories, ragged schools,

needlewomen's charities--what not? No object of distress, it

seemed, could be discovered, no fresh means of doing good devised,

but these men's money poured bountifully and at once into that

fresh channel, and an organisation sprang up for the employment of

that money, as thrifty and as handy as was to be expected from the

money-holding classes of this great commercial nation.

What could not these men do? What were they not bound by their

own principles to do? No wonder that some weak men's hearts beat

high at the thought. What if the religious world should take up

the cause of Sanitary Reform? What if they should hail with joy a

cause in which all, whatever their theological differences, might

join in one sacred crusade against dirt, degradation, disease, and

death? What if they should rise at the hustings to inquire of

every candidate: "Will you or will you not, pledge yourself to

carry out Sanitary Reform in the place for which you are elected,

and let the health and the lives of the local poor be that 'local

interest' which you are bound by your election to defend? Do you

confess your ignorance of the subject? Then know, sir, that you

are unfit, at this point of the nineteenth century, to be a member

of the British Senate. You go thither to make laws 'for the

preservation of life and property.' You confess yourself ignorant

of those physical laws, stronger and wider than any which you can

make, upon which all human life depends, by infringing which the

whole property of a district is depreciated." Again, what might

not the "religious world," and the public opinion of "professing

Christians," have done in the last twenty--ay, in the last three

years?

What it has done, is too patent to need comment here.

The reasons of so strange an anomaly are to be approached with

caution. It is a serious thing to impute motives to a vast body

of men, of whom the majority are really respectable, kind-hearted,

and useful; and if in giving one's deliberate opinion one seems to

blame them, let it be recollected that the blame lies not so much

on them as on their teachers: on those who, for some reasons best

known to themselves, have truckled to, and even justified, the

self-satisfied ignorance of a comfortable moneyed class.

But let it be said, and said boldly, that these men's conduct in

the matter of Sanitary Reform seems at least to show that they

value virtue, not for itself, but for its future rewards. To the

great majority of these men (with some heroic exceptions, whose

names may be written in no subscription list, but are surely

written in the book of life) the great truth has never been

revealed, that good is the one thing to be done, at all risks, for

its own sake; that good is absolutely and infinitely better than

evil, whether it pay or not to all eternity. Ask one of them:

"Is it better to do right and go to hell, or do wrong and go to

heaven?"--they will look at you puzzled, half angry, suspecting

you of some secret blasphemy, and, if hard pressed, put off the

new and startling question by saying, that it is absurd to talk of

an impossible hypothesis. The human portion of their virtue is

not mercenary, for they are mostly worthy men; the religious part

thereof, that which they keep for Sundays and for charitable

institutions, is too often mercenary, though they know it not.

Their religion is too often one of "Loss and Gain," as much as

Father Newman's own; and their actions, whether they shall call

them "good works" or "fruits of faith," are so much spiritual

capital, to be repaid with interest at the last day.

Therefore, like all religionists, they are most anxious for those

schemes of good which seem most profitable to themselves and to

the denomination to which they belong; and the best of all such

works is, of course, as with all religionists, the making of

proselytes. They really care for the bodies, but still they care

more for the souls, of those whom they assist--and not wrongly

either, were it not that to care for a man's soul usually means,

in the religious world, to make him think with you; at least to

lay him under such obligations as to give you spiritual power over

him. Therefore it is that all religious charities in England are

more and more conducted, just as much as those of Jesuits and

Oratorians, with an ulterior view of proselytism; therefore it is

that the religious world, though it has invented, perhaps, no new

method of doing good; though it has been indebted for educational

movements, prison visitations, infant schools, ragged schools, and

so forth, to Quakers, cobblers, even in some cases to men whom

they call infidels, have gladly adopted each and every one of

them, as fresh means of enlarging the influence or the numbers of

their own denominations, and of baiting for the body in order to

catch the soul. A fair sample of too much of their labour may be

seen anywhere, in those tracts in which the prettiest stories,

with the prettiest binding and pictures, on the most secular--

even, sometimes, scientific--of subjects, end by a few words of

pious exhortation, inserted by a different hand from that which

indites the "carnal" mass of the book. They did not invent the

science, or the art of story-telling, or the woodcutting, or the

plan of getting books up prettily--or, indeed, the notion of

instructing the masses at all; but finding these things in the

hands of "the world," they have "spoiled the Egyptians," and fancy

themselves beating Satan with his own weapons.

If, indeed, these men claimed boldly all printing, all

woodcutting, all story-telling, all human arts and sciences, as

gifts from God Himself; and said, as the book which they quote so

often says: "The Spirit of God gives man understanding, these,

too, are His gifts, sacred, miraculous, to be accounted for to

Him," then they would be consistent; and then, too, they would

have learnt, perhaps, to claim Sanitary Science for a gift divine

as any other: but nothing, alas! is as yet further from their

creed. And therefore it is that Sanitary Reform finds so little

favour in their eyes. You have so little in it to show for your

work. You may think you have saved the lives of hundreds; but you

cannot put your finger on one of them: and they know you not;

know not even their own danger, much less your beneficence.

Therefore, you have no lien on them, not even that of gratitude;

you cannot say to a man: "I have prevented you having typhus,

therefore you must attend my chapel." No! Sanitary Reform makes

no proselytes. It cannot be used as a religious engine. It is

too simply human, too little a respecter of persons, too like to

the works of Him who causes His sun to shine on the evil and the

good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and is

good to the unthankful and to the evil, to find much favour in the

eyes of a generation which will compass sea and land to make one

proselyte.

Yes. Too like the works of our Father in heaven, as indeed all

truly natural and human science needs must be. True, to those who

believe that there is a Father in heaven, this would, one

supposes, be the highest recommendation. But how many of this

generation believe that? Is not their doctrine, the doctrine to

testify for which the religious world exists, the doctrine which

if you deny, you are met with one universal frown and snarl--that

man has no Father in heaven: but that if he becomes a member of

the religious world, by processes varying with each denomination,

he may--strange paradox--create a Father for himself?

But so it is. The religious world has lost the belief which even

the elder Greeks and Romans had, of a "Zeus, Father of gods and

men." Even that it has lost. Therefore have man and the simple

human needs of man, no sacredness in their eyes; therefore is

Nature to them no longer "the will of God exprest in facts," and

to break a law of nature no longer to sin against Him who "looked

on all that He had made, and behold, it was very good." And yet

they read their Bibles, and believe that they believe in Him who

stood by the lake-side in Galilee, and told men that not a sparrow

fell to the ground without their Father's knowledge--and that they

were of more value than many sparrows. Do those words now seem to

some so self-evident as to be needless? They will never seem so

to the Sanitary Reformer, who has called on the "British Public"

to exert themselves in saving the lives of thousands yearly; and

has received practical answers which will furnish many a bitter

jest for the Voltaire of the next so-called "age of unbelief," or

fill a sad, but an instructive chapter in some future enlarged

edition of Adelung's "History of Human Folly."

All but despairing, Sanitary Reformers have turned again and again

to her Majesty's Government. Alas for them! The Government was

ready and willing enough to help. The wicked world said: "Of

course. It will create a new department. It will give them more

places to bestow." But the real reason of the willingness of

Government seems to be that those who compose it are thoroughly

awake to the importance of the subject.

But what can a poor Government do, whose strength consists (as

that of all English Governments must) in not seeming too strong;

which is allowed to do anything, only on condition of doing the

minimum? Of course, a Government is morally bound to keep itself

in existence; for is it not bound to believe that it can govern

the country better than any other knot of men? But its only

chance of self-preservation is to know, with Hesiod's wise man,

"how much better the half is than the whole," and to throw over

many a measure which it would like to carry, for the sake of

saving the few which it can carry.

An English Government, nowadays, is simply at the mercy of the

forty or fifty members of the House of Commons who are crotchety

enough or dishonest enough to put it unexpectedly in a minority;

and they, with the vast majority of the House, are becoming more

and more the delegates of that very class which is most opposed to

Sanitary Reform. The honourable member goes to Parliament not to

express his opinions, (for he has stated most distinctly at the

last election that he has no opinions whatsoever), but to protect

the local interests of his constituents. And the great majority

of those constituents are small houseowners--the poorer portion of

the middle class. Were he to support Government in anything like

a sweeping measure of Sanitary Reform, woe to his seat at the next

election; and he knows it; and therefore, even if he allow the

Government to have its Central Board of Health, he will take good

care, for his own sake, that the said Board shall not do too much,

and that it shall not compel his constituents to do anything at

all.

No wonder, that while the attitude of the House of Commons is such

toward a matter which involves the lives of thousands yearly, some

educated men should be crying that Representative institutions are

on their trial, and should sigh for a strong despotism.

There is an answer, nevertheless, to such sentimentalists, and one

hopes that people will see the answer for themselves, and that the

infection of Imperialism, which seems spreading somewhat rapidly,

will be stopped by common sense and honest observation of facts.

A despotism doubtless could carry out Sanitary Reform: but

doubtless, also, it would not.

A despot in the nineteenth century knows well how insecure his

tenure is. His motto must be, "Let us eat and drink, for to-

morrow we die;" and, therefore, the first objects of his rule will

be, private luxury and a standing army; while if he engage in

public works, for the sake of keeping the populace quiet, they

will be certain not to be such as will embroil him with the middle

classes, while they will win him no additional favour with the

masses, utterly unaware of their necessity. Would the masses of

Paris have thanked Louis Napoleon the more if, instead of

completing the Tuileries, he had sewered the St. Antoine? All

arguments to the contrary are utterly fallacious, which are drawn

from ancient despotisms, Roman, Eastern, Peruvian, or other; and

for this simple reason, that they had no middle class. If they

did work well (which is a question) it was just because they had

no middle class--that class, which in a free State is the very

life of a nation, and yet which, in a despotism, is sure to be the

root of its rottenness. For a despot who finds, as Louis Napoleon

has done, a strong middle class already existing, must treat it as

he does; he must truckle to it, pander to its basest propensities,

seem to make himself its tool, in order that he may make it his.

For the sake of his own life, he must do it; and were a despot to

govern England tomorrow, we should see that the man who was shrewd

enough to have climbed to that bad eminence, would be shrewd

enough to know that he could scarcely commit a more suicidal act

than, by some despotic measure of Sanitary Reform, to excite the

ill-will of all the most covetous, the most stupid, and the most

stubborn men in every town of England.

There is another answer, too, to "Imperialists" who talk of

Representative institutions being on their trial, and let it be

made boldly just now.

It will be time to talk of Representative institutions being good

or bad, when the people of England are properly represented.

In the first place, it does seem only fair that the class who

suffer most from epidemics should have some little share in the

appointment of the men on whose votes extermination of epidemics

now mainly depends. But that is too large a question to argue

here. Let the Government see to it in the coming session.

Yet how much soever, or how little soever, the suffrage be

extended in the direction of the working man, let it be extended,

at least in some equal degree, in the direction of the educated

man. Few bodies in England now express the opinions of educated

men less than does the present House of Commons. It is not chosen

by educated men, any more than it is by proletaires. It is not,

on an average, composed of educated men; and the many educated men

who are in it have, for the most part, to keep their knowledge

very much to themselves, for fear of hurting the feelings of "ten-

pound Jack," or of the local attorney who looks after Jack's vote.

And therefore the House of Commons does not represent public

opinion.

For, to enounce with fitting clearness a great but much-forgotten

truth, To have an opinion, you must have an opinion.

Strange: but true, and pregnant too. For, from it may be deduced

this corollary, that nine-tenths of what is called Public Opinion

is no opinion at all; for, on the matters which come under the

cognizance of the House of Commons (save where superstition, as in

the case of the Sabbath, or the Jew Bill, sets folks thinking--

generally on the wrong side), nine people out of ten have no

opinion at all; know nothing about the matter, and care less;

wherefore, having no opinions to be represented, it is not

important whether that nothing be represented or not.

The true public opinion of England is composed of the opinions of

the shrewd, honest, practical men in her, whether educated or not;

and of such, thank God, there are millions: but it consists also

of the opinions of the educated men in her; men who have had

leisure and opportunity for study; who have some chance of knowing

the future, because they have examined the past; who can compare

England with other nations; English creeds, laws, customs, with

those of the rest of mankind; who know somewhat of humanity, human

progress, human existence; who have been practised in the

processes of thought; and who, from study, have formed definite

opinions, differing doubtless in infinite variety, but still all

founded upon facts, by something like fair and scientific

induction.

Till we have this class of men fairly represented in the House of

Commons, there is little hope for Sanitary Reform: when it is so

represented, we shall have no reason to talk of Representative

institutions being on their trial.

And it is one of the few hopeful features of the present time,

that an attempt is at last being made to secure for educated men

of all professions a fair territorial representation. A memorial

to the Government has been presented, appended to which, in very

great numbers, are the names of men of note, of all ranks, all

shades in politics and religion, all professions--legal, clerical,

military, medical, and literary. A list of names representing so

much intellect, so much learning, so much acknowledged moderation,

so much good work already done and acknowledged by the country,

has never, perhaps, been collected for any political purpose; and

if their scheme (the details of which are not yet made public)

should in anywise succeed, it will do more for the prospects of

Sanitary Reform than any forward movement of the quarter of a

century.

For if Sanitary Reform, or perhaps any really progressive measure,

is to be carried out henceforth, we must go back to something like

the old principle of the English constitution, by which intellect,

as such, had its proper share in the public councils. During

those middle ages when all the intellect and learning was

practically possessed by the clergy, they constituted a separate

estate of the realm. This was the old plan--the best which could

be then devised. After learning became common to the laity, the

educated classes were represented more and more only by such

clever young men as could be thrust into Parliament by the private

patronage of the aristocracy. Since the last Reform Bill, even

that supply of talent has been cut off; and the consequence has

been, the steady deterioration of our House of Commons toward such

a level of mediocrity as shall satisfy the ignorance of the

practically electing majority, namely, the tail of the middle

class; men who are apt to possess all the failings with few of the

virtues of those above them and below them; who have no more

intellectual training than the simple working man, and far less

than the average shopman, and who yet lose, under the influence of

a small competence, that practical training which gives to the

working man, made strong by wholesome necessity, chivalry,

endurance, courage, and self-restraint; whose business morality is

made up of the lowest and narrowest maxims of the commercial

world, unbalanced by that public spirit, that political knowledge,

that practical energy, that respect for the good opinion of his

fellows, which elevate the large employer. On the hustings, of

course, this description of the average free and independent

elector would be called a calumny; and yet, where is the member of

Parliament who will not, in his study, assent to its truth, and

confess, that of all men whom he meets, those who least command

his respect are those among his constituents to secure whom he

takes most trouble; unless, indeed, it be the pettifoggers who

manage his election for him?

Whether this is the class to whose public opinion the health and

lives of the masses are to be entrusted, is a question which

should be settled as soon as possible.

Meanwhile let every man who would awake to the importance of

Sanitary questions, do his best to teach and preach, in season and

out of season, and to instruct, as far as he can, that public

opinion which is as yet but public ignorance. Let him throw, for

instance, what weight he has into the "National Association for

the Advancement of Social Science." In it he will learn, as well

as teach, not only on Sanitary Reforms, but upon those cognate

questions which must be considered with it, if it is ever to be

carried out.

Indeed, this new "National Association" seems the most hopeful and

practical move yet made by the sanitarists. It may be laughed at

somewhat at first, as the British Association was; but the world

will find after a while that, like the British Association, it can

do great things towards moulding public opinion, and compel men to

consider certain subjects, simply by accustoming people to hear

them mentioned. The Association will not have existed in vain, if

it only removes that dull fear and suspicion with which Englishmen

are apt to regard a new subject, simply because it is new. But

the Association will do far more than that. It has wisely not

confined itself to any one branch of Social Science, but taken the

subject in all its complexity. To do otherwise would have been to

cripple itself. It would have shut out many subjects--Law Reform,

for instance--which are necessary adjuncts to any Sanitary scheme;

while it would have shut out that very large class of benevolent

people who have as yet been devoting their energies to prisons,

workhouses, and schools. Such will now have an opportunity of

learning that they have been treating the symptoms of social

disease rather than the disease itself. They will see that vice

is rather the effect than the cause of physical misery, and that

the surest mode of attacking it is to improve the physical

conditions of the lower classes; to abolish foul air, fouled

water, foul lodging, and overcrowded dwellings, in which morality

is difficult, and common decency impossible. They will not give

up--Heaven forbid that they should give up!--their special good

works; but they will surely throw the weight of their names, their

talents, their earnestness, into the great central object of

preserving human life, as soon as they shall have recognised that

prevention is better than cure; and that the simple and one method

of prevention is, to give the working man his rights. Water, air,

light. A right to these three at least he has. In demanding

them, he demands no more than God gives freely to the wild beast

of the forest. Till society has given him them, it does him an

injustice in demanding of him that he should be a useful member of

society. If he is expected to be a man, let him at least be put

on a level with the brutes. When the benevolent of the land (and

they may be numbered by tens of thousands) shall once have learnt

this plain and yet awful truth, a vast upward step will have been

gained. Because this new Association will teach it them, during

the next ten or twenty years, may God's blessing be on it, and, on

the noble old man who presides over it. Often already has he

deserved well of his country; but never better than now, when he

has lent his great name and great genius to the object of

preserving human life from wholesale destruction by unnecessary

poison.

And meanwhile let the Sanitary Reformer work and wait. "Go not

after the world," said a wise man, "for if thou stand still long

enough the world will come round to thee." And to Sanitary Reform

the world will come round at last. Grumbling, scoffing, cursing

its benefactors; boasting at last, as usual, that it discovered

for itself the very truths which it tried to silence, it will

come; and will be glad at last to accept the one sibylline leaf,

at the same price at which it might have had the whole. The

Sanitary Reformer must make up his mind to see no fruit of his

labours, much less thanks or reward. He must die in faith, as St.

Paul says all true men die, "not having received the promises;"

worn out, perhaps, by ill-paid and unappreciated labour, as that

truest-hearted and most unselfish of men, Charles Robert Walsh,

died but two years ago. But his works will follow him--not, as

the preachers tell us, to heaven--for of what use would they be

there, to him or to mankind?--but here, on earth, where he set

them, that they might go on in his path, after his example, and

prosper and triumph long years after he is dead, when his memory

shall be blessed by generations not merely "yet unborn," but who

never would have been born at all, had he not inculcated into

their unwilling fathers the simplest laws of physical health,

decency, life--laws which the wild cat of the wood, burying its

own excrement apart from its lair, has learnt by the light of

nature; but which neither nature nor God Himself can as yet teach

to a selfish, perverse, and hypocritical generation.

Footnotes:

{1} This lecture was one of a series of "Lectures to Ladies,"

given in London in 1855, at the Needlewoman's Institution.

{2} The substance of this Essay was a lecture on Physical

Education, given at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, in 1872.

{3} 9, Adam Street, Adelphi, London.

{4} A Lecture delivered at Winchester, May 31, 1869.

{5} Lecture delivered at Winchester, March 17, 1869.

{6} I quote from the translation of the late lamented Philip

Stanhope Worsley, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

{7} Odyssey, book vi. 127-315; vol. i. pp. 143-150 of Mr.

Worsley's translation.

{8} Since this essay was written, I have been sincerely delighted

to find that my wishes had been anticipated at Girton College,

near Cambridge, and previously at Hitchin, whence the college was

removed: and that the wise ladies who superintend that

establishment propose also that most excellent institution--a

swimming-bath. A paper, moreover, read before the London

Association of School-mistresses in 1866, on "Physical Exercises

and Recreation for Girls," deserves all attention. May those who

promote such things prosper as they deserve.

{9} Lecture delivered at Bristol, October 5, 1857.

{10} This was spoken during the Indian Mutiny.

{11} Speech in behalf of Ladies' Sanitary Association. Delivered

at St. James's Hall, London, 1859.

{12} Fraser's Magazine, No. CCCXXXVII. 1858.

{13} We find a most honourable exception to this rule in a sermon

by the Rev. C. Richson, of Manchester, on the Sanitary Laws of the

Old Testament, with notes by Dr. Sutherland.

End of Project Gutenberg Etext Sanitary and Social Lectures by Kingsley