Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform

by S. A. Barnett; Mrs. S. A. Barnett

The poor need more than food: they need also the knowledge, the character, the happiness which are the gift of God to this age. The age has received His best gifts, but hitherto they have fallen mostly to the rich.

It is a moment of Peace. To-day there are no battles, but the returns of the dead and wounded from accidents with machinery and from diseases resulting from injurious trades show that there are countless homes in which there must still be daily uncertainty as to the father’s return, and many children and wives who become orphans and widows for their country’s good.

It is an age of Knowledge. But if returns were made either of the increased health due to the skill of doctors and sanitarians, or of the increased pleasures due to the greater knowledge of the thoughts and acts of other men in other times and countries, it would be shown that neither length of days nor pleasure falls to the lot of the poor. Few are the poor families where the mother will not say, ‘I have buried many of mine.’ Few are the homes where the talk has any subject beyond the day’s doings and the morrow’s fears.

It is an age of Travel, but the mass of the poor know little beyond the radius of their own homes. It is no unusual thing to find people within ten miles of a famous sight which they have never seen, and it is the usual thing to find complete ignorance of other modes of life, a thorough contempt for the foreigner and all his ways. The improved means of communication which is the boast of the age, and which has done so much to widen thought, tends to the enjoyment of the rich more than of the poor.

It is an age of the Higher Life. Higher conceptions of virtue, a higher ideal of what is possible for man, are the best gift to our day, but it is received only by those who have time and power to study. ‘They who want the necessaries of life want also a virtuous and an equal mind,’ says the Chinese sage; and so the poor, being without those things necessary to the growth of mind and feeling, jeopardise Salvation—the possession, that is, of a life at one with the Good and the True, at one with God.

Those who care for the poor see that the best things are missed, and they are not content with the hope offered by ‘scientific charity.’ They see that the best things might be shared by all, and they cannot stand aside and do nothing. ‘The cruellest man living,’ it has been said, ‘could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold,’ and those who see must do something. They may be weary of revolutionary schemes, which turn the world upside down to produce after anarchy another unequal division; they may be weary, too, of philanthropic schemes which touch but the edge of the question. They may hear of dynamite, and they may watch the failure of an Education Act, as the prophets watched the failure of teachers without knowledge. They may criticise all that philanthropists and Governments do, but still they themselves would do something. No theory of progress, no proof that many individuals among the poor have become rich, will make them satisfied with the doctrine of laissez faire; they simply face the fact that in the richest country of the world the great mass of their countrymen live without the knowledge, the character, and the fulness of life which are the best gift to this age, and that some thousands either beg for their daily bread or live in anxious misery about a wretched existence. What can they do which revolutions, which missions, and which money have not done?

It is in answer to such a question that I make the suggestion of this paper. I make it especially as a development of the idea which underlies a College Mission. These Missions are generally inaugurated by a visit to a college from some well-known clergyman working in the East End of London or in some such working-class quarter. He speaks to the undergraduates of the condition of the poor, and he rouses their sympathy. A committee is appointed, subscriptions are promised, and after some negotiations a young clergyman, a former member of the college, is appointed as a Mission curate of a district. He at once sets in motion the usual parochial machinery of district visiting, mothers’ meetings, clubs, &c. He invites the assistance of those of his old mates who will help; at regular intervals he makes a report of his progress, and if all goes well he is at last able to tell how the district has become a parish.

The Mission, good as its influence may be, is not, it seems to me, an adequate expression of the idea which moved the promoters. The hope in the College when the first sympathy was roused was that all should join in good work, and the Mission is necessarily a Churchman’s effort. The desire was that as University men they should themselves bear the burdens of the poor—and the Mission requires of them little more than an annual guinea subscription. The grand idea which moved the College, the idea which, like a new creative spirit, is brooding over the face of Society, and is making men conscious of their brotherhood, finds no adequate expression in the district church machinery with which, in East London, I am familiar. There is little in that machinery which helps the people to conceive of religion apart from sectarianism, or of a Church which is ‘the nation bent on righteousness.’ There is little, too, in the ordinary parochial mechanism which will carry to the homes of the poor a share of the best gifts now enjoyed in the University.

Imagine a man’s visit to the Mission District of his college. He has thought of the needs of the poor, and of the way in which those needs are being met. He has formed in his mind a picture of a district where loving supervision has made impossible the wretchedness of ‘horrible London’; he expects to find well-ordered houses, people interested in the thoughts of the day, gathering round their pastor to learn of men and of God. He finds instead an Ireland in England, people paying 3s. or 4s. a week for rooms smaller than Irish cabins, without the pure air of the Irish hill-side, and with vice which makes squalor hopeless. He finds a population dwarfed in stature, smugly content with their own existence, ignorant of their high vocation to be partners of the highest, where even the children are not joyful. He measures the force which the Mission curate is bringing to bear against all this evil. He finds a church which is used only for a few hours in the week, and which is kept up at a cost of 150l. a year. He finds the clergyman absorbed in holding together his congregation by means of meetings and treats, and almost broken down by the strain put upon him to keep his parochial organisation going. The clergyman is alone, his church work absorbs his power and attracts little outside help. What can he do to improve the dwellings and widen the lives of 4,000 persons? What can he do to spread knowledge and culture? What can he do to teach the religion which is more than church-going? What wonder if, when he is asked what help he needs, he answers, ‘Money for my church,’ ‘Teachers for my Sunday school,’ ‘Managers for my clothing club’? What wonder, too, if the visitor, seeing such things and hearing such demands, goes away somewhat discontented, somewhat inclined to give up faith in the Mission, and, what is worse, ready to believe that there is no way by which the best can be given to the poor?

It is to members of the Universities anxious to unite in a common purpose of improving the lives of the people that I make the suggestion that University Settlements will better express their idea. College Missions have done some of the work on which they have been sent, but in their very nature their field is limited. It is in no opposition to these Missions, but rather with a view to more fully cover their idea, that I propose the new scheme. The details of the plan may be shortly stated.