If I do not mention Hazel it is not because I have ceased to love her, but because I have nothing to report. I wish she could be got away from her father, whose cynical influence is bad for her. Detached, she might soon come to see things more romantically and then would be my chance.—I am, yours sincerely,
Horace Mun-Brown
LXX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
My Dear, I am deeply interested in your desire to spend money at once, while living. Personally, I expect you do a great deal more with it than you know, or at any rate than you led me to understand. I happen to be acquainted with your character.
The question is, are you strong enough to go into this matter?—for the best almsgiving, I take it, is that which has not been asked, but comes unexpectedly, dropping like gentle dew from a clear sky; and this needs imagination and the willingness to enter into all kinds of investigating trouble. It is in essence the very antithesis of facile cheque-writing; but so irksome, and unlocking so much distress and squalor, that most of us shy at it and reach for the cheque-book again in self-defence. My friend Pagnell, who is all logic, insists that philanthropists are of necessity busy-bodies, and mischievously self-indulgent ones too, and that the broken and the helpless should go to the wall. That, he holds, is Nature’s plan, which meddling man disturbs and frustrates. But the English character is not sufficiently scientifically de-sentimentalized for that.
One of the things that I should like to see done with money is to reform education. This you could easily do at a very trifling cost, at once,—and have the fun of watching it go on—by endowing certain experiments in your own village. If they were successful there, their fame would be noised abroad and others would copy and gradually the seed would fructify. The smallness of the seed never matters. The interest on a thousand pounds would do it—fifty pounds a year to an associate teacher whose duty it was to fit the children for the world they are to live in. Reading, writing and arithmetic would go on as usual, but concurrently with them there would be instruction in life: directed chiefly at the girls, who are to be the wives and mothers and home upholders of the future. If the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, the hand should be better trained. One of the first things to be taught is the amount of tea required in a tea-pot. The old story about the wealth of mustard-makers being derived from our wastefulness with their commodity is probably far more true of the wealth of tea-merchants.
The difficulty would be to find the teacher. That always is the difficulty—finding the right person to carry out one’s ideas. And, imagination being the rarest quality in human nature, the difficulty is not likely to decrease. The best way would be to interest some cultured and well-to-do resident to take it on—someone like your Mrs. Carlyon—but, then you would be up against the village schoolmaster, who, not having any imagination, would resent her rival influence, and so the scheme would end where so many others equally sensible have ended; in the realm where, I am told, the battles of the future are to be fought—in the air.
One of the reasons why progress is so piecemeal is that the thinkers have to delegate, whereas it is usually only the man that thought of a thing who is really capable of carrying it out. We saw enough of that in the War, where most of the muddles and scandals were the result of delegation; and most of them, for that reason, were unavoidable.
R. H.