“Though personally unknown to you I take the liberty as a warm admirer of your writings, to which I owe so much both of intellectual entertainment and profoundest spiritual comfort, to send you herewith a copy of a Report upon the Public Charities of New South Wales, brought up by a Royal Commission of which I was the President. I may add that the document was written by me; and that my brother Commissioners did me the honour of adopting it without any alteration. As the views to which I have endeavoured to give expression have been so eloquently advocated by you, I have ventured to hope that my attempt to give practical expression to them in this Colony may not be without interest to you, as the first effort made in this young country to promulgate sounder and more philosophic views as to the training of pauper children.
“In your large heart the feeling Homo sum will, I think, make room for some kindly sympathy with those who, far off, in a small provincial way, try to rouse the attention and direct the energies of men for the benefit of their kind, and if any good comes of this bit of work, I should like you to know how much I have been sustained amidst much of the opposition which all new ideas encounter, by the convictions which you have so materially aided in building up and confirming. If you care to look further into our inquiry I shall be sending a copy of the evidence to the Misses Hill, whose acquaintance I had the great pleasure of making on their visit to this country, and they doubtless would show it to you if caring to see it, but I have not presumed to bore you with anything further than the Report.
“Believe me, your faithful servant,
“Will. C. Windeyer.”
I have since learned with great pleasure from an official Report sent from Australia to a Congress held during the World’s Fair of 1893 at Chicago, that the arrangement has been found perfectly successful, and has been permanently adopted in the Colony.
While earnestly advocating some such friendly care and guardianship of these Workhouse Girls as I have described, I would nevertheless enter here my serious protest against the excessive lengths to which one Society in particular—devoted to the welfare of the humbler class of girls generally—has gone of late years in the matter of incessant pleasure-parties for them. I do not think that encouragement to (what is to them) dissipation, conduces to their real welfare or happiness. It is always only too easy for all of us to remove the centre of our interest from the Business of life to its Pleasures. The moment this is done, whether in the case of poor persons or rich, Duty becomes a weariness. Success in our proper work is no longer an object of ambition, and the hours necessarily occupied by it are grudged and curtailed. Amusement usurps the foreground, instead of being kept in the background, of thought. This is the kind of moral dislocation which is even now destroying, in the higher ranks, much of the duty-loving character bequeathed to our Anglo-Saxon race by our Puritan fathers. Ladies and gentlemen do not indeed now “live to eat” like the old epicures, but they live to shoot, to hunt, to play tennis or golf; to give and attend parties of one sort or another; and the result, I think, is to a great degree traceable in the prevailing Pessimism. But bad as excessive Pleasure-seeking and Duty-neglecting is for those who are not compelled to earn their bread, it is absolutely fatal to those who must needs do so. The temptations which lie in the way of a young servant who has acquired a distaste for honest work and a passion for pleasure, require no words of mine to set forth in their terrible colours. Even too much and too exciting reading, and endless letter-writing may render wholesome toil obnoxious. A good maid I once possessed simply observed to me (on hearing that a friend’s servant had read twenty volumes in a fortnight and neglected meanwhile to mend her mistress’s clothes), “I never knew anyone who was so fond of books who did not hate her work!” It is surely no kindness to train people to hate the means by which they can honourably support themselves, and which might, in itself, be interesting and pleasant to them. But incessant tea-parties and concerts and excursions are much more calculated to distract and dissipate the minds of girls than even the most exciting story books, and the good folks who would be shocked to supply them with an unintermittent series of novels, do not see the mischief of encouraging the perpetual entertainments now in vogue all over the country. Let us make the girls, first safe; then as happy as we can. But it is an error to imagine that overindulgence in dissipation,—even in the shape of the most respectable tea-parties and excursions,—is the way to make them either safe or happy.
The following is an account which Miss Florence D. Hill has kindly written for me, of the details of her own work on behalf of pauper children which dovetailed with ours for Workhouse girls:—
“March 27th, 1894.
“I well remember the deep interest with which I learnt from your own lips the simple but effective plan by which you and Miss Elliot and her sister befriended the elder girls from Bristol Workhouse, and heard you read your paper, ‘Friendless Girls, and How to Help Them,’ at the meeting of the British Association in Dublin in 1861. Gradually another benevolent scheme was coming into effect, which not only bestows friends but a home and family affections on the forlorn pauper child, taking it in hand from infancy. The reference in your ‘Philosophy of the Poor Laws’ to Mr. Greig’s Report on Boarding-out as pursued for many years at Edinburgh, caused my cousin, Miss Clark, to make the experiment in South Australia, which has developed into a noble system for dealing under natural conditions with all destitute and erring children in the great Colonies of the South Seas. Meanwhile, at home the evidence of success attained by Mrs. Archer in Wiltshire and her disciples elsewhere, and by other independent workers, in placing orphan and deserted children in the care of foster parents, enabled the late Dr. Goodeve, ex-officio Guardian for Clifton, to obtain the adoption of the plan by his Board; his wife becoming President of one of the very first Committees formed to find suitable homes and supervise the children.
After my efforts above detailed on behalf of the little Girl-thieves, the Ragged street boys, the Incurables and other Sick in Workhouses, and finally for Befriending young Servants, there was another undertaking in which both Miss Elliot and I took great interest for some years after we had ceased to live at Bristol. This was the Housing of the poor in large Cities.