You have met Ignorance. You know men and women gifted with divine powers, powers of clear sight and deep feeling, you have seen such people taking shallow rhetoric for reason, delighting in exaggeration, clamouring for force as a remedy, adopting swindlers as leaders, making a game—a Sunday afternoon’s excitement—of matters which should tear their hearts, killing time which might have been fruitful in thought and joy and love. ‘The future belongs to the man who refuses to take himself seriously,’ says the mocking philosopher. The ignorance which accepts the teaching, and which goes with a light heart to agitate or to repress agitation, is a sight to destroy anyone’s ease of mind.
You have met Sin, the degradation which comes of selfishness. In West London it often hides under fine trappings. Culture covers a multitude of sins. In the exquisitively ordered banquet intemperance and self-indulgence are unnoticed; in the phraseology of the office greed and selfishness pass as political economy; and in the polished talk of books and of society impurity loses its true colour. You, though, are familiar with East London, and here you see sin without its trappings; you know that intemperance—over-eating and over-drinking—means a brutalised nature; you know that greed is cruelty, and that impurity is destructive both of reason and of feeling. You have seen the victims of sin, that drunkard’s home, the gambler’s hell, and the sweater’s shop. You know that the wages of sin is death, and that no culture can give to Mammon any nobility or warm his heart with any spark of unselfish joy.
Poverty, Ignorance, Sin—these threaten the city. Your common longing is to avert its doom. Our fathers nourished a like longing. They hoped in Free Trade, the Suffrage, the National Education, and they have been disappointed.
Free Trade has, indeed, greatly increased wealth; the number of the comfortable has been multiplied, but it is a question whether, in the same proportion, the number of the uncomfortable has not also been multiplied. Our England is larger than the England of fifty years ago, but a larger body—like a giraffe’s throat—may only provide a larger space for pain! At any rate, Free Trade, which has given us cheap bread, has not solved the problem of the unemployed.
The extension of the Suffrage, again, for which our fathers strove, has had good results; but the example of later parliaments and the growing tendency to legislate by demonstration hardly justifies their hopes. Our fathers held that the possession of the Suffrage would be effective to destroy Ignorance; they thought that responsibility would develop the seriousness which is necessary to knowledge. They—like other good men who need God’s forgiveness—fed Ignorance with abuse of opponents; with exaggerations, with party cries, they bribed Ignorance to establish its own executioner; and now Ignorance is too much puffed up by flattery, too much enriched by bribes, to yield to the voice which from the register and polling booth says, ‘England expects every man’ to vote according to his conscience, and then to submit to the common will.
Lastly, the passing of the Education Act seemed to many to be the beginning of a new age. Schools were rapidly built, money was freely voted, and the children were compelled to attend. The Education Act has not, however, taught the people what is due to themselves or to others. Greed is not eradicated because its form is changed, and, though criminals may be fewer, gambling is as degrading as thieving, and oppression legally exerted over the weak is as cruel as the illegal blow. The children do not leave school with the self-respect born of consciousness of powers of heart and brain and hand, nor with the humanity born of knowledge of others’ burdens. It seems, indeed, as if their chief belief was in the value of competition, and their chief aptitude a skill in satisfying an inspector with the least possible amount of work. At any rate, at the end of twenty years, when a generation has been through the schools, our streets are filled with a mob of careless youths, and our labour market is overstocked with workers whose work is not worth 4d. an hour.
Poverty, Ignorance and Sin threaten the city. Free Trade, the Suffrage, the Education Act have been tried, and the doom still impends. What is to be done? The principle of true action lies, I think, imbedded in the old Jewish tale. It is not laws and institutions which save a city—it is persons. Institutions are good, just in so far as they are vivified by personal action; laws are good just in so far as they allow for the free play of person on person. There may be need of reform in institutions and in laws, so as to give to all an open career and equality of opportunity, but it is persons who save; and if to-day fifty—a company of righteous—men could be found in London, the city might be spared and saved.
In support of this position I would offer two considerations. (1) The common mind is now scientific. Professor Huxley, in summing up the results of fifty years of science, claims the creation of a new habit of thought as a greater achievement than any material invention. The common man in the street no longer expects a miracle or worships a theory as men once worshipped the theory of social contract; he asks for a fact. The fact, therefore, that a neighbour is righteous does most to extend righteousness. He who knows a just man is likely to give a fair day’s wage and do a fair day’s work, to live simply and tell the truth, and it is bad pay and bad work, luxury and lying, which do most to make poverty. He who knows a wise man is likely to search after what is hidden in thought and things, and it is carelessness of what is out of sight which makes ignorance. He who knows a good man is likely to have a passion for honour, for purity, for humanity, and it is the want of higher passion which makes sin.
The righteous man is in a real sense the master of the city. He, as Browning says, who ‘walked about and took account of all thought, said and acted’ was ‘the town’s true master.’ Were there in London a company of such righteous men, the power of Poverty, Ignorance, and Sin would be broken.
(2) I am often led to observe that taste is more powerful than interest. People remain on in situations, hold opinions, and adopt habits which are against their interests, because they are more in accordance with their tastes. They like the surroundings, they like the life, and liking is an armour which resists the strong lance of the economist. Now why is it that taste overpowers interest, and that habit is stronger than law? It is because taste comes through persons and is spread by contact. The habits or tastes, therefore, which lie at the root of Poverty, Ignorance, and Sin may best be met by the formation of other habits, which come through the example of persons, by the contact of man with man. Righteous men are therefore necessary—men who would live simply and share their luxury, whose gain would not mean another’s loss, who would work for their bread, who would do justice on wrong-doers, show mercy to the weak, and walk humbly before God. The habits of respectable people, the waste, the idleness, the sensuousness are writ large in the poverty, ignorance, and sin of the disreputable. Fifty—a company of righteous men, rich or poor, setting an example of generosity and honesty, living Christ’s life in contact with others—might create habits in them which would take the place of the old bad habits.