Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform

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

The place of settlement must of course first be fixed. It will be in some such poor quarter as that of East London, where a house can be taken in which there shall be both habitable chambers and large reception-rooms. A man must be chosen to be the chief of the Settlement; he must receive a salary which, like that of the Mission curate, will be guaranteed by the College, and he must make his home in the house. He must have taken a good degree, be qualified to teach, and be endowed with the enthusiasm of humanity. Such men are not hard to find; under a wiser Church government they would be clergymen, and serve the people as the nation’s ministers; but, under a Church government which in an age of reform has remained unreformed, they are kept outside, and often fret in other service. One of these, qualified by training to teach, qualified by character to organise and command, qualified by disposition to make friends with all sorts of men, would gladly accept a position in which he could both earn a livelihood and fulfil his calling. He would be the centre of the University Settlement. Men fresh from college or old University men would come to occupy the chambers as residents. Lecturers in connection with the University Extension Society would be his fellow-lecturers in the reception-rooms, and as the head of such a Settlement he would extend a welcome to all classes in his new neighbourhood.

The old Universities exercise a strange charm: the Oxford or Cambridge man is still held to possess some peculiar knowledge, and the fact that three of the most democratic boroughs are represented by University professors has its explanation. ‘He speaks beautiful German, but of course those University gentlemen ought to,’ was a man’s reflection to me after a talk with a Cambridge professor. Those, too, who may be supposed to know what draws in an advertising poster, are always glad to print after the name of a speaker his degree and college.

Thus it would be that the head of the Settlement would find himself as closely related to his new surroundings as to his old. The same reputation, which would draw to him fellow-scholars or old pupils, would put him in a position to discover the work and thought going on around him. He would become familiar with the teachers in the elementary and middle-class schools, he would measure the work done by clergy and missionaries, he would be in touch with the details of local politics; and, what is most important of all, he would come into sympathy with the hope, the unnamed hope, which is moving in the masses.

The Settlement would be common ground for all classes. In the lecture-room the knowledge gathered at the highest sources would, night after night, be freely given. In the conversation rooms the students would exchange ideas and form friendships. At the weekly receptions of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ the residents would mingle freely in the crowd.

The internal arrangements would be simple enough. The Head would undertake the domestic details and fix the price which residents would pay for board and lodging. He would admit new members and judge if the intentions of those who offered were honest. Some would come for their vacations; others occupied during the daytime would come to make the place their home. University men, barristers, Government clerks, curates, medical students, or business men each would have opportunity both for solitary and for associated life, and the expense would be various to suit their various means. The one uniting bond would be the common purpose, ‘not without action to die fruitless,’ but to do something to improve the condition of the people. It would be the duty of the Head to keep alive among his fellows the freshness of their purpose, ‘to recall the stragglers, refresh the outworn, praise and reinspire the brave.’ He would have, therefore, to judge of the powers of each to fill the places to which he could introduce them. To some he would recommend official positions, to some teaching, to some the organisation of relief, to some the visiting of the sick, and thus new life would be infused into existing churches, chapels, and institutions. Others he would introduce as members of Co-operative Societies, Friendly Societies, or Political and Social Clubs. He would so arrange that all should occupy positions in which they would become friends of his neighbours, and discover, perhaps as none have yet discovered, how to meet their needs.

In such an institution it is easy to see that development might be immeasurable. A born leader of men surrounded by a group of intelligent and earnest friends, pledged not ‘to go round in an eddy of purposeless dust,’ and placed face to face with the misery and apathy they know to be wrong, would of necessity discover means beyond our present vision. They would bind themselves by sympathy and service to the lives of the people; they would bring the light and strength of intelligence to bear on their government, and they would give a voice both to their needs and their wrongs. It is easy to imagine what such settlers in a great town might do, but it will be more to the point to consider how they may express the idea which underlies the College Mission—the interest, that is, of centres of education in the centres of industry, and the will of University men to acknowledge their brotherhood with the people.

If it be that the Missionary’s account of his Mission district fails at last to rouse the interest of his hearers, and if his work seems to be absorbed in the effort to keep going his parochial machinery amid a host of like machines, the same cannot be the fate of the Settlement.

Some of the settlers will settle themselves for longer periods, and those who are occupied during the daytime will find it as possible to live among the poor as among the rich; but there must also be room for those who can spend only a few weeks or months in the Settlement, so that men may come, as some already have come, to East London to spend part of a vacation in serving the people. This interchange of life between the University and the Settlement will keep up between the two a living tie. Each term will bring, not a set speech about the work of the Mission, but the many chats on the wonders of human life. The condition of the English people will come to be a fact more familiar than that of the Grecian or Roman, and the history of the College Settlement will be better known than that of the boat or the eleven. On the other side, thoughts and feelings which are now often spent in vain talks at debating societies will go up to town to refresh those who are spent by labour, or to find an outlet in action.

There is no fear that the College Settlement will fail to rouse interest. Its life will be the life of the College. As long as both draw their strength from the common source, from the same body of members, the sympathy of the College will be with the people. Nor is there any fear lest the work of the settlers become stereotyped, as is often the case with the work of Missions and Societies. Each year, each term, would alter the constitution of the Settlement as other settlers brought in other characters and the results of other knowledge, or as their ideas became modified by common work with the various religious and secular organisations of the neighbourhood. The danger, indeed, would not be from uniformity of method or narrowness of aim; rather would it be the endeavour of the Head to limit the diversity which many minds would introduce, and restrain a liberality willing to see good in every form of earnestness. The variety of work which would embrace the most varied effort, and enlist its members in every movement for the common good, would keep about the Settlement the beauty of a perpetual promise.

If we go further, and ask how this plan reaches deeper than others which have gone before, the question is not so easily answered, because it is impossible to prophesy that a University Settlement will make the poor rich or give them the necessaries of true life. Inasmuch, though, as poverty—poverty in its true sense, including poverty of the knowledge of God and man—is largely due to the division of classes, a University Settlement does provide a remedy which goes deeper than that provided by popular philanthropy.