This bad physique is a real evil. The lack of room for cricket and football, the remoteness of the fields and woods, the ugliness of the grey streets, the lack of quiet, added to the humid factories and the smoke, have produced this. Parks and playgrounds and all sorts of open spaces, including extensive fields and woods and ponds accessible on a half-holiday, should be provided far more than they have been, and should be less doctored by parks’ superintendents.
Then there is a great sphere of service open to the familiar agencies for good. The Drink traffic should be curtailed, and put out of the reach of private profit, and better opportunities for sociability, music and dancing, provided, not as part of the bait of the drink seller, but by a democratic municipality. The usefulness of picture galleries will not be fully reached till oral teaching about the pictures is added, and the great educational value of comparatively cheap coloured reproductions is perceived. Into the work of founding the Art Museum in Ancoats, a working class district of Manchester, on exactly these lines, Mr. Ruskin threw himself heartily. It was indeed an inspiration derived from his writings by Mr. T. C. Horsfall which caused that Museum to be founded. It has recently been taken over by the Corporation.
Solemnly, then, and with due fear and doubt, considering the horror and difficulty of the case, let us resolutely set ourselves to see if, under the world of machinery, we can live good and healthy lives. The present products of our civilization are far from satisfactory to any of us. Are the crowds of girls who rush forth from the factory when the hour of freedom strikes, having pieced threads in a hot damp atmosphere, and shouted across the whirl of wheels all day to one another—are they on the way to make fit, self-respecting and physically strong wives and mothers and trainers of children? There are some three hundred thousand of these girls in the Lancashire factories, who will be mothers of a million English babies. Or take the young men. Go by a football train on a Saturday afternoon, when holiday is written on every bloomless and vulgar and swaggering young face:—what do you hear and see as you crowd fifteen to a carriage? Bets, ribaldry, ill nature, the carriage floor a mess, the whole scene an explosion of pent-up spirits of self-assertion and banal hilarity.[127]
These young people are undoubtedly products of the age of machinery; but for machine production they would never have been born, nor their surroundings formed; but the question is, cannot their tastes and characters be reformed even while they remain machine-hands? Are not excellent lives possible, and healthy surroundings obtainable, in industrial England? For factory life we can confidently point to such. Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, and of an earlier date, Saltaire, Bessbrook, and some other centres which have not a special local name, show that the thing can be done. For colliers the case is harder. There are colliery villages on the Tyne which once ran extension lectures; but the villages themselves are horrible. There are good colliery villages near Doncaster, one built round a private Park. Collieries have special difficulties. The coal mine will not last for ever; and when it is worked out the houses may become useless. They are therefore built to last only for from thirty to fifty years. They are erected all at one time; and large rows of houses exactly alike are the cheapest. They are often outside any municipality with its possibly watchful surveyor and inspectors. They are completely owned by the colliery company, which has no competitor as landlord. It is the classic case in England of the failure of pure competition to care for human welfare.
EPILOGUE
I AM kindly permitted by the Council of the Society for Psychical Research to reprint here the beautiful tribute by F. W. H. Myers, which appeared in their Journal for March, 1900; and has been reprinted in Mr. Myers’s Fragments of Prose and Poetry, pp. 89-94.
Ω οὗτος, οὗτος, Οίδίπους, τί μέλλομεν
χωρείν; πάλαι δἠ τάπὀ σοῦ βραδύνεται
Ruskin, then, has sunk to rest. The bracken and bilberries of the Lake-land which he loved so well have hidden the mortal shape of the greatest man of letters, the loftiest influence which earth still retained;—have enwrapped “the man dear to the Muses, and by the Nymphs not unbeloved"—
τὀν Μώσαις ϕίλον ἀνδρα, τὀν οὐ Νὐμϕαίσιν ἀπεϰθῆ