Cricket-clubs, quoit-clubs, bowling-clubs, even skittle-clubs ad libitum, in summer; ballad concerts, dramatic performances, &c., in winter, under the same auspices. Membership extended to all comers, fee payable one shilling per annum in monthly instalments; the expulsion or suspension for a longer or shorter term—according to the more or less heinous nature of the offence—of any member for bad language, intoxication, or other misbehaviour; the gradual unbending of the rich and the cultured, and their condescending to grace the sports with their occasional presence, thereby infusing a spirit of refinement into them; the prohibition of betting or over-drinking,—these are, shortly and imperfectly stated, the remedies I would suggest.
To conclude the whole matter. We, the industrious poor of this realm—the hard-working classes—are in pressing need of help now, in this present time. This, I believe, is confessed on all hands, diverse and contradictory as the theories how such help could best be given may be. The question at issue is not whether ameliorations are desirable or the contrary, but in what manner to bring them about, and how to be certain that it is bread which is bestowed, and not a stone.
I do not claim to have solved this enigma, or to have invented a millennium. I simply assert my belief that some of my propositions may contain germs capable of being nurtured into hopeful possibilities.
As I have selected four principal points in which improvements are required—health, pocket, mind, and amusements—so have I striven to indicate four principal modes which I think best calculated to attain the desired end, and which for the most part must come from without our borders—namely, sympathy, earnestness, money, and centralized organization—all being essential; the last-named especially being so, for it may be regarded as an irrefragable verity that every movement to be really efficacious must be national, and not parochial.
I look for many objections on both sides of the temperate zone, on the waters of which alone I elect to voyage. The frigid will aver that I expect too much, that my notions are Utopian and chimerical to the last degree, and the nostrums prescribed empirical and baneful; that it is not to be supposed sensible people will take all this trouble, and rush into such reckless expenditure in a project so visionary. To such my only answer is,—Where the return is to be great the investment must be great also. The torrid, on the other hand, will say I am not sufficiently thorough; that the only means of elevating the poor is by lugging the wealthy down to their level, abrogating dignities, distributing riches, abolishing ownership in lands and corporeal hereditaments. To these my reply will be,—Evil will the day be which shall dawn on such devil’s-sabbath employments as these. Levelling upwards is laudable; levelling downwards is execrable. I would in nowise interfere with the least of these institutions. The overthrow of dynasties will not advantage us, nor will a general scramble conduce to our lasting welfare. I am a sceptic as to the benefits to be derived from revolution, although professing myself a warm admirer of reformation, as I understand the word—re-formation.
Neither do I anticipate that the time will ever come, under the best devised systems, when poverty will altogether cease out of the land. Evil will there be, and good also, while the world stands. This, however, should be no excuse for indifferentism in the work of lessening the sum-total of the evil, and increasing the sum-total of the good.
And so Lazarus unmoors his fragile boat, and launches it, unmanned and untended, on the bosom of the stream,—to meet its fate.
Henry J. Miller.