And numbers of other lines and verses and poems teach me day by day. Well! you ask what I mean about not singing. Simply that I sing out of tune and haven’t time to learn not to do so, having a bad ear; and so I think I’d better make up my mind to the fact.
Thanks, dearest, for all your sympathy; but don’t be unhappy about me for any reason. I am so happy; and more so day by day. Miss Rogers returns this week. Mrs. Yarnall[[39]] has a little daughter.
103, Milton Street,
July 24th, 1859.
To Miranda.
I want to ensure giving you some account of a speech of Kingsley’s. An Association of ladies has been formed to help sanitary reform; they have published tracts, etc. Their first public meeting was held on Thursday at Willis’s Rooms. Lord Shaftesbury made a speech as chairman, and urged ladies to attend to all the details of the question, as men could not. The legislative and theoretical was to be done only by them; the minute and much of the practical by ladies. Mr. Kingsley said: “After the excellent résumé of your intentions which we have just heard in your report, there seems nothing left for me to say, except to ask you to consider what will be the result, if you succeed in accomplishing your aims. Now just consider! very great aims, very important aims—very dangerous aims some people would tell you that they are; nothing less than saving alive of some four out of every five (?) children that die annually. If you believe the teaching of many great political economists, who think that England is in great danger of being over-populated, and who advocate preventive checks on the increase of population, you had better pause and think whether it wouldn’t be better on the whole, just to let the children die; whether we mayn’t have difficulty in finding work and food for them. But if you hold, as I confess I do, that a human being is precisely the most precious thing the earth can have; if you think that the English race is the very noblest race the world contains; that it has, moreover, a greater power of adapting itself to every kind of climate and mode of life than any other, except the old Roman, ever had; that, besides all this, it is, on the whole, a young race, showing no signs of decay; you will see that it is worth while for political economists to look on the map, and see that at least four-fifths of the world is uninhabited, and not cultivated even in the most ordinary way.”
KINGSLEY ON SANITARY REFORM
I ought to tell you that, before this he had shown us how he expected women principally to be of use, by saying that he looked upon this Association most thankfully because, for reasons which he wasn’t going to explain here, he looked upon the legislative part of sanitary reform with something more like despair than ever. They were not reasons connected with this Government, or with any possible Government, but resulted from his consideration of the character of the individuals, into whose possession small houses were passing more and more. He was not going into the question here; it would have to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off. Therefore he hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the possessors of the house, and influence people of “our own class.” “And it’s so easy,” he said; “there isn’t a woman in this room who couldn’t save the lives of four or five children within the next six months; and this, without giving up one of your daily duties, one of your pleasures, one even of your frivolities, if you choose.
“You ask me what is more terrible than a field of battle, and I tell you outraged nature. Nature issues no protocols, nor warning notes to bid you be on your guard. Silently, and without stepping out of her way, by the same laws by which she makes the grass grow, she will kill and kill and kill and kill. And more than this, we have our courtesies of war and our chivalries of war; a soldier will not kill an unarmed man, a woman or a child; but nature has no pity. By an awful law, but for some blessed purpose, she is allowed to have none; and she will strike alike the child in its cradle, the strong man or woman. I wish to God someone had pictorial power to set before the mothers of England what that means—100,000 (?) preventable deaths! Oh be in earnest. Remember that, as a live dog is better than a dead lion, so one of those little children in the kennel out there is worth saving. Try to remember that it is not the will of our Father that one of these little ones should perish.”
103, Milton St., Dorset Sq.,