Those games should not be overlooked which are of a manly kind, and likely to be continued in after life. This brings us naturally to think of the playgrounds for children of a larger growth. Hitherto there has been a sad deficiency in this matter in our manufacturing towns, and almost everywhere else. Can any thing be more lamentable to contemplate than a dull, grim, and vicious population, whose only amusement is sensuality? Yet, what can we expect, if we provide no means whatever of recreation; if we never share our own pleasures with our poorer brethren; and if the public buildings which invite them in their brief hours of leisure are chiefly gin palaces? As for our cathedrals and great churches, we mostly have them well locked up, for fear any one should steal in and say a prayer, or contemplate a noble work of art, without paying for it: and we shut people up by thousands in dense towns with no outlets to the country, but those which are guarded on each side
by dusty hedges. Now an open space near a town is one of nature’s churches: and it is an imperative duty to provide such things. Nor, indeed, should we stop at giving breathing places to crowded multitudes in great towns. To provide cheap locomotion, as a means of social improvement, should be ever in the minds of legislators and other influential persons. Blunders in legislating about railroads, and absurd expenditure in making them, are a far greater public detriment than they may seem at first sight. Again, without interfering too much, or attempting to force a “Book of Sports” upon the people, who in that case, would be resolutely dull and lugubrious, the benevolent employer of labour might exert himself in many ways to encourage healthful and instructive amusements amongst his men. He might give prizes for athletic excellence or skill. He might aid in establishing zoological gardens, or music-meetings, or exhibitions of pictures, or mechanics’ institutes. These are things in which some of the great employers of labour have already set him the example. Let him remember how much his workpeople are deprived
of by being almost confined to one spot; and let him be the more anxious to enlarge their minds by inducing them to take interest in any thing which may prevent the “ignorant present,” and its low cares, from absorbing all their attention. He has very likely some pursuit, or some art, in which he takes especial pleasure himself, and which gives to his leisure, perhaps, its greatest charm: he may be sure that there are many of his people who could be made to share in some degree that pleasure, or pursuit, with him. It is a large, a sure, and certainly a most pleasurable beneficence, to provide for the poor such opportunities of recreation, or means of amusement, as I have mentioned above. Neither can it be set down as at all a trifling matter. Depend upon it, that man has not made any great progress in humanity who does not care for the leisure hours and amusements of his fellow-men.
While we are upon this matter, I will mention something which borders closely upon it, though it applies to the consumer rather than the manufacturer. Most men would think it much, if it were brought home
to them, that from any carelessness of theirs, some person had suffered unnecessary imprisonment, if only for a day. And yet any one, who encourages unreasonably late hours of business, does what he can to uphold a system of needless confinement, depriving thousands of that healthful change of pursuit which is one of the main aliments both for body and soul, and leaving little time or opportunity for any thing to grow up in their minds beyond the rudest and most trivial cares and objects.
4. The Workman’s Home.
That the workman should have a home, which, however humble it may be, should yet afford room and scope for the decencies, if not for some of the comforts and refinements of civilized life, is manifestly essential, if we wish to preserve the great body of the people from a state of savageness. There is an important and original remark on this subject in the Hand Loom Weavers Report of 1841:
“The man who dines for 6d. and clothes himself during the year for £5. is probably as healthily fed, and as healthily clad, as if his dinner cost two guineas a day, and his dress £200 a year. But this is not the case with respect to habitation. Every increase of accommodation, from the corner of a cellar to a mansion, renders the dwelling more healthy, and, to a considerable extent, the size and goodness of the dwelling tends to render its inmates more civilized.”
Indeed, if civilization does not show itself in a man’s home, where else is it likely to take much root with him? Make his home comfortable, and you do more towards making him a steady and careful citizen, than you could by any other means. Now only look around, and see how entirely this has been neglected, at least, until within a recent date. Our workers are toiling all day long, or, if they have leisure, it is mostly accompanied by pecuniary distress: and can you expect in either case that they will busy themselves about those primary structural arrangements without which it is scarcely possible to have a comfortable home? Many of the things, too, which are needful for this end, require capital, or, at least, such conjoint enterprise as can hardly be expected from the poor. Take any individual workman. Suppose there is defective drainage in his street, or,
as often happens, no drainage at all, what can one such man do, even if at all alive to the evil? When you consider the dependent condition of the labouring classes, and how little time they have for domestic arrangements of any kind, does it not behove the employer of labour to endeavour that his workmen should have opportunities of getting places to live in, fit for human beings in a civilized country? I use the phrase “employer of labour,” in its widest sense; and at once say, that there are many things bearing upon the comfort of the habitations of the poor, which both the local authorities and the imperial government ought to look to. Is there not a strange mockery in the fact, stated in the Sanitary Report, that “the annual slaughter in England and Wales from preventible causes of typhus which attacks persons in the vigour of life, appears to be double the amount of what was suffered by the allied armies in the battle of Waterloo?” Must we not say again that the careless cruelty of the world almost outweighs the rest?