By some such plans relief could be afforded to all who belong to what may be called the lowest class; for the assistance of those who could be helped by tools, emigration, or money, the great Friendly Societies, the Society for Relief of Distress, and the Charity Organisation Society might act in conjunction. These societies are unsectarian, are already organised, and may be developed in power and tenderness to any extent by the addition of members and visitors.
These means and all means which are suggested seem sadly inadequate, and in their very setting forth provoke criticism. There are no effectual means but those which grow in a Christian society. The force which, without striving and crying, without even entering into collision with it, destroyed slavery will also destroy poverty. When rich men, knowing God, realise that life is giving, and when poor men, also knowing God, understand that being is better than having, then there will be none too rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and none too poor to enjoy God’s world.
Samuel A. Barnett.
III.
PASSIONLESS REFORMERS.[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Fortnightly Review of August 1882.
The mention of the poor brings up to most people’s minds scenes of suffering, want, and misery. The vast number of people who, while poor in money, are rich in life’s good, who live quiet, thoughtful, dignified lives, are forgotten, and the word ‘poor’ means to many the class which we may call degraded. But the first class is by far the largest, and the wide East End of London (which the indolent think of only as revolting) contains at a rough calculation, say, twenty of the worthy poor to one of the degraded poor. It is curious how widely spread is the reverse idea. Many times have I been asked if I am not ‘afraid to walk in East London,’ and an article on the People’s Entertainment Society aroused, not unjustly, the anger of the East London people at the writer’s descriptions of them and of her fears for her personal safety while standing in the Mile End Road! One lady, after a visit to St. George’s-in-the-East and Stepney, expressed great astonishment to find that the people lived in houses. She had expected that they abode, not exactly in tents, but in huts, old railway carriages, caravans, or squatted against a wall. East Londoners will be glad to know that she went back a wiser and not a sadder woman, having learnt that riches are not necessary to refinement, that some of the noblest characters are developed under the enforced self-control of an income of a pound or thirty shillings a week, that love lived side by side with poverty without thought of exit by the window though poverty had trodden a beaten path through the door, and that books and ideas, though not plentiful enough to become toys, were read, loved, and lived with until they became part of the being of their possessors.
But distinct from this class—among whom may be counted some of the noblest examples of life—there is the class of degraded poor. Here the want is not so much a want of money (some of the trades, such as hawking, flower-selling, shoe-blacking, occasionally bringing in as much as from ten to twenty shillings a day) as the want of the common virtues of ordinary life. In many of these poor, the mere intellectual conception of principle, as such, is absent; they have no moral ideal; spirituality to them is as little understood in idea as in word. Sinning (sensual low brutal sins) is the most common, the to-be-expected course. The standard has got reversed, and those who have turnings towards, and vague aspirations for, better things too often find it impossible to give these feelings practical expression in a society where wrong is upheld by public opinion; where the only test of right is the avoidance of being ‘nabbed’ by the police; and the highest law is that expressed by the magistrate.