Practicable Socialism, New Series

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

That the Church should be reformed to make it the servant of all who would lead the higher life, was the hope he cherished throughout many years spent in strenuous efforts to obtain a social betterment. He writes: “The great mass of the people, because they stand apart from all religious communions, may have in them a religious sense, but their thought of God is not worked through their emotions into their daily lives. They do not know what they worship, and so do not say with the psalmist, ‘My soul is athirst for the living god,’ or say with Joseph, ‘How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?’ The spiritualization of life being necessary to human peace and happiness, the problem which is haunting this generation is how to spiritualize the forces which are shaping the future.”

My husband urged that the reform of the Church would tend to solve that problem. “The Church by its history and organization has a power no other agency can wield. If more freedom could be given to its system of government and services, if it could be made directly expressive of the highest aspirations of the people, it is difficult to exaggerate the effect it might have. In every parish a force would be brought to bear which might kindle thought, so that it would reach out to the highest object; which might stir love, so that men would forget themselves in devotion to the whole; and which might create a hope wherein all would find rest. The first need of the age is an increase of Spirituality, and the means of obtaining it is a Reformed Church.”

The papers under [Recreation] might almost as well have been placed in the Education Section, so strongly did my husband feel that recreation should educate. Only a few months before his illness he wrote: “The claim of education is now primarily to fit a child to earn a living, and therefore he is taught to read and write and learn a trade. But if it were seen that it is equally important to fit a child to use well his leisure, many changes would be made.” And such changes he argued would increase, not lessen, the joy of holidays, an opinion which my experience as Chairwoman of the Country-side Committee of the Children’s Country Holiday Fund abundantly supports.

In the Section for [Settlements] and their work, only three papers will be found, for so much has been written and spoken of Toynbee Hall and kindred centres of usefulness, that it seems almost unnecessary to reproduce the same thoughts. Yet in view of the fact that questions are often asked as to the genesis of the idea, I have put in [one of the first papers] (1884) that my husband wrote after we had had nine years’ experience of the work of University men among the poorest and saddest people, in which he suggested the scheme of Toynbee Hall, and also a paper of mine written nine years after its foundation, in which I chat of the [Beginnings of Toynbee Hall].

Between the first and the [third paper] there is a stretch of twenty-one busy years, 1884-1905, and the article bears the marks of Canon Barnett’s intense realization of the need of higher education, and his almost passionate demand for it on behalf of the industrial classes. “Social Reform,” he writes, “will soon be the all-absorbing interest as the modern realization of the claims of human nature and the growing power of the people will not tolerate many of the present conditions of industrial life.... The well-being of the future depends on the methods by which reform proceeds. Reforms in the past have often been disappointing. They have been made in the rights of one class, and have ended in the assertion of rights over another class. They have been made by force, and produced reaction. They have been done for the people, not by the people, and have never been assimilated. The method by which knowledge and industry may co-operate has yet to be tried, and one way in which to bring about such co-operation is the way of University Settlements.”

So many are the changes which affect [Poverty and Labour], so rapidly have they come about, and so keen and living an interest did Canon Barnett feel with every step that the great army of the disinherited took towards social justice, that it has been difficult to select which papers on which subject to reprint, but I have chosen the most characteristic, and also those connected with the reforms which most influenced character and life. In this Section also some of the many papers which Canon Barnett wrote on Poor Law Reform have been admitted. I know that the activities of the Fabian Society and the “Break up of the Poor Law” organization have rendered some of the ideas familiar, but many of the Reforms he advocated are not yet accomplished, and to those who are conversant with the subject, his large, sane, unsensational statement of the case, as it appeared to him, will be welcome,—all the more so because for nearly thirty years he was a member of the Whitechapel Board of Guardians, the Founder of the Poor Law Conferences, and had both initiated and carried out large administrative reforms. He also had a very deep and probing tenderness for the character of individual paupers, and a sensitive shrinking from wounding their self-respect or lowering the dignity of their humanity, an attitude of mind which influenced his relation to schemes sometimes made by paper legislators who considered the poor in “the lump” instead of “one by one”.

Of the [Social Service Section] there is but little to say. [The Real Social Reformer] contains guiding principles, [The Mission of Music] is an interesting and curious output from a man with no ear for tune or time or harmony, and [The Church on Town Planning] is but an example of how eagerly he desired that the Church should guide as well as minister to the people. [Where Charity Fails] is another plea that the kindly intentioned should not injure the character of the recipient, and that the crucial question, “Is our aim the self-extinction of our organization,” should be borne in mind by the Governors and enthusiastic supporters of even the best philanthropic agencies.

The [Educational] Section might have been much larger, but the papers selected bear on the three sides of the subject which my husband in recent years thought to be the most important. [The Equipment of the Teachers] but carried on the ideals towards which he ever pressed, from the days when as a Curate at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, he taught the monitors of the Church Schools, through the days when the first London Pupil Teachers’ Centre had its birthplace in Toynbee Hall, through the days when he established the Scholarship Committee whose work was to select suitable pupil teachers and support them through their University careers in Oxford and Cambridge, through the days when he rejoiced at the abandonment of the vast system of pupil teachers,—to the days when he demanded that teachers for the poorest children should be called from the cultivated classes, and take their calling as a mission, to be recognized and remunerated, as an honoured profession undertaken by those anxious to render Social Service.

The article [Justice to Young Workers] deals with the vexed question of Continuation Schools, attendance at which Canon Barnett thought should be compulsory, since he believed that economic conditions would more readily change to meet legally established educational demands than was possible, when, in the interwoven complexity of business, one unwilling or ten indifferent employers could throw any complicated voluntary organization out of gear.

The two articles on [Oxford and the Working People] and [A Race between Education and Ruin] only inadequately represent the thought he gave to the matter, or the deeply rooted, great branched hopes he had entwined round the reform of the University,—but for many reasons he felt it wiser to stand aside and watch younger men wield the sword of the pen. So his writings on this subject are few, but that matters less than otherwise it would have done, because the group of friends who have decided to establish “Barnett House” in his memory are among those in Oxford who shared his work, cared for his plans, and believed in his visions, created as they were on knowledge of the industrial workers and the crippling conditions of their lives. So as “Barnett House” is established and grows strong, and in conjunction with the Toynbee Hall Social Service Fellowship will bring the University and Industrial Centres into closer and ever more sympathetic relationship, it is not past the power of a faith, however puny and wingless, to imagine that the reforms my husband saw “darkly” may be seen “face to face,” and in realization show once more how “the Word can be made flesh”.