The poor man of modern days has to live in a quarter of the town where he cannot even try to live with those superior to himself. Around him are thousands educated as he has been educated, with taste and with knowledge on a level with his own. The demand for low things has created a supply of low satisfactions. Thus it is that the amusements are unrecreative, the lectures uninstructive, and the religion uninspiring. It is not possible for the inhabitant of the poor quarter to come into casual intercourse with the higher manners of life and thought except at a cost which would constitute a large percentage of his income.
I am afraid that it is long before we can expect the rich and poor again to live as neighbours: for good or evil they have been divided, and other means must, for the present, be found for making common the property of knowledge. One such means is the University Settlement. Men who have knowledge may become friends of the poor and share that knowledge and its fruits as, day by day, they meet in their common rooms for talk or for instruction, for music or for play.
The settlers will be able to join in that which is done by other societies, while they share all their best with the poor, and in the highest sense make their property common. They may be some of the best charity agents, for they will have an experience out of the reach of others, which they will have accumulated through their different agencies. As members of various secular and religious organisations, they may be able to compare notes after the day’s work, and offer evidence as to how the poor live which, in days to come, might be invaluable. They may be some of the best educators, for, bringing ever-fresh stores of thought, they will see the weak spots in a routine which daily tires a child because it does so little to teach him, and they will have an opinion on national education better worth considering than the grumbles of those wearied with most things, or the congratulations of officials who judge by examinations. They may be the best Church reformers, for they will make more and more manifest how it is not institutions but righteousness which exalts a nation; how, one after another, all reforms fail because men tell lies and love themselves; and how, therefore, the first of all reforms is the reform of the Church, whose mission for the nation is that it create righteousness.
There is, then, for the settler of a University Settlement an ideal worthy of his sacrifice. He looks not to a Church buttressed by party spirit, nor to a community founded on self-helped respectability. He looks rather to a community where the best is most common, where there is no more hunger and misery, because there is no more ignorance and sin—a community in which the poor have all that gives value to wealth, in which beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised.
Samuel A. Barnett.
[This paper was read at a meeting at St. John’s College, Oxford, in November 1883, and resulted in the foundation of Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, and other University Settlements in poor districts of large towns.]
VII.
PICTURES FOR THE PEOPLE.[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Cornhill Magazine, March 1883.