Work amongst working men ..

PRINCETON, N. J.

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BV 3777 .E5 H66 1884 ^
Hopkins, Ellice, 1836-1904.
Work amongst working men . .

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WORK AMONGST WORKING MEN

PRESS NOTICES OF PREVIOUS
EDITIONS.

" In her biography of James Hinton, Miss Hopkins
proved that she possessed wide tolerance and high
culture. The book before us shows that she has
also an aptitude for that practical work among the
poor in which less gifted women are often so suc-
cessful. She has great sympathy with the poor,
and understands, as those only can who have lived
among them, their special trials and difficulties."
—Pall Mall Gazette.

" Miss Hopkins' book is not exclusively concerned
with her own work. It contains many valuable sug-
gestions upon other matters connected with the class
for which she has done so much ; and we advise
all who are interested in the poor to read it for
themselves." — Spectator.

t>f'■'^^^

WORK l^M&$^i^
WORKING MEN

By ELLICE* HOPKINS

AUTHOR OF ' LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES HINTON ' 'WORK IN
BRIGHTON,' ETC.

F/FTff EDITION

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE

1884

V9

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. MY FIRST VENTURE I

II. MY FIRST CONVERTS 1 6

III. INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE . 3 1

IV. MEN AND WOMEN 46

V. EVANGELIZATION 67^

VI. SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES 97

VIL THE SAVINGS QUESTION 1 38

VIII. OVERCROWDING . . , e . . 169

IX. CONCLUSION 174

CHAPTER L

MY FIRST 'iTENXiBRE.

.ELIGION is all

women ; ' from my earliest years
I have detested that maxim of the
great Emperor's. From a child I always
counted the bare heads in church, and esti-
mated the preacher's power according to their
number. From a girl I had the strongest
conviction that the Gospel of Christ was essen-
tially for men ; and that only so far as a man is
in Christ and like Christ can he be really a man.

It was, therefore, with no small dissatis-
faction and pain that I was constantly hearing
from a number of respectable girls of my
own age, whom I had gathered into a Bible-
class at my own house, that their fathers and
brothers, as a rule, went to no place of worship.

\l

J^:

2 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

Skirting one of the Universities is a large
and populous suburb where the mass of the
working people live, and which from time
immemorial had borne a most unenviable
character. I fear it was a practical comment
on the truth of that uncomfortable proverb,
' The nearer the church, the farther from God,*
that so bad a district should adjoin one of
the great head-quarters of the Church. I can
myself remember the time when it was not
considered safe, or proper, for a lady to pene-
trate its recesses alone. On one occasion my
mother, having to make some business in-
quiries, asked a man who was standing in one
of the main streets to direct her to a certain
' Gas Lane.' * Yau'U find it on your right/
he replied ; ' but it*s a rum lot you are going
among, old lady,' he added, with an uncom-
fortable stress on the pronoun, which is felt
in circumstances of dubious peril to appeal
forcibly to the imagination.

But having made up my mind to see if
something could not be done to influence men
as well as girls, it was this suburb, with its

MY FIRST VENTURE. 3

lawless population of roughs, that I chose as
the sphere of my efforts. Youthful heroism,
when combined with Christianity, even though
it can no longer culminate in a St. Theresa,
has still some few outlets left in these degene-
rate days, and is not quite reduced to the
melancholy career our great novelist, George
Eliot, accords it, as summed up in Miss Nightin-
gale's words, *of first marrying an elderly
literary impostor, and then quick after him,
an inferior sort of faun/

Accordingly, one Tuesday evening at half-
past five, I found myself seated in a cottage
•vith sixteen men. Two or three of the district
visitors, who had attended my Bible classes,
had set to work with the enthusiasm with which
only women can work, and, by dint of season-
ing all their meals and part of their evening
with my praises, had at last persuaded this
limited number, with great difficulty, to come
and hear me for themselves.

I suppose there is something essentially touch-
ing in a woman's speaking. I have rarely heard
a woman speak but I have felt a strong un-

4 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

reasoning impulse to tears. ' I cried like a calf/
CJ'ai pleure comme un veau/) said a leading
Protestant in France, on hearing a lady friend
of mine address some of the Paris chiffoniers in
their own language; and the friend who went
with me to my first meetings used laughingly
to declare that she always took with her a
large white pocket-handkerchief and spread it
out on her knees, ready for instant action the
moment I began. Perhaps it is that the woman's
voice keeps so many tender home-tones, and
has never been hoarsened at elections, nor in
political meetings, nor in the streets, but is like
an instrument on which only loving hands
have played, and all our mother pleads with
us in its gentleness. Certain it is, there were
few dry eyes in that cottage on that Sunday
evening.

I soon found out, however, that they did not
like coming to a private cottage; so, as my clergy-
man was as anxious as I was for the success
of the experiment, I decided to move at once
into his schoolrooms.

The following Sunday, rather to my dismay,

MV FIRST VENTURE. 5

I found the small room, which I had considered
large enough to accommodate my audience, full
to overflowing, and many men were obliged to
stand and listen outside. After the address was
over, I went up to one of my first hearers and
expressed my regret that he had not been able
to get into the room, adding that we would
meet in a larger room next time, when I hoped
he would be able to hear. * Oh, thank you,
Miss, I heard your 'scourse quite well through
the door,' he exclaimed, enthusiastically. From
which time we concluded that ' 'scourse ' must be
the feminine of discourse, a point of English
grammar which Murray has failed to notice,
owing, doubtless, to female speakers scarcely
existing in his days, or, at least, being
still subject to Dr. Johnson's opprobrious
remark, * Sir, a woman preaching is like
a dog standing on its hind legs ; the thing is
not well done, but the wonder is it can be done
at all.'

Seeing that the work was likely to outgrow
my single-handed powers, I made my first effort
to organize my meeting, and asked two or three

)^

6 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

Sunday-school teachers to work with me. At
first their work was chiefly to find out the
worst characters and bring them to the meet-
ing. One dapper little man, a Mr. B., was
greatly delighted at my asking him to work
with me, and promised he would do his best
at my very next, meeting.

The next Sunday, the friend who always
went with mt being ill, I started off alone,
adding to, rather than lessening, my alarm by
calling for a working-man on the way. This
man I knew had resisted all efforts to get him
inside a place of worship, or, alas ! but too
often, outside a public-house. But I had
reached that convenient stage of terror which
turns the corner and rounds upon courage,
and felt perfectly reckless what became of me-
Brought up, as I had been, in all the refined
and intellectual life of an University, which, I
sometimes think, more than any other separates
one from the life of the people, I doubt whether
at that time a sheeted spectre had the same
unknown terrors for me as a rough in the * too*
too solid flesh.' And I knew that many were

MY FIRST VENTURE, 7

beginning to look grave, and question whether
it was safe for a young lady to gather together
a mass of lawless men, with the certainty that,
if any outbreak took place, she would be
powerless to control it. But, on the other hand,
what was most evident to me was, that these
men would come to me on the Sundays, and,
as had been too well proved, would not go to
any church or chapel. One other lady besides
myself, a young clergyman's wife, had succeeded
lately in getting together a certain number on
a week-night, — her Sundays being fully engaged,
— and was doing good work among them. But
the worst men, the men who most want some
humanizing influence, cannot be got to week-
day meetings, they are too tired after their
work to make the effort to come to what pre-
sents no attraction to them ; while on the
Sunday time hangs heavy on their hands, and
to go to a meeting is a much less marked pro-
ceeding. Their uncared-for souls lay at my
door, not at the doors of those who criticised
me ; my clergyman, to whom, if to any one,
I owed obedience, urged the work upon me;

8 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

and, do what I would, I could not shut out the
duty of welcoming them in the name of Our
Lord. I had my earthly father's blessing, why
should I doubt my heavenly Father's ? If there
is one truth I have grasped more strongly than
another it is this : only be sure of your duty,
and there must be an infinite store of force
in God which you can lay hold of to do it
with, as an engineer lays hold of a force in
Nature and drives his engine right through the
granite bases of an Alp. If you are sure that
it is God's will you should do it, then * I can't '
must be a lie in the lips that repeat * I believe
in the Holy Ghost.'

* So nigh to grandeur is our dust,
So nigh is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, * Thou must/
The soul replies, * I can.'

As St. Theresa said, in answer to some objectors,
Avhen she set about founding a much needed
orphanage with only three halfpence in her
pocket, ' Theresa and three halfpence can do
nothing ; but God and three halfpence can do
all things.' I was but the three halfpence, but

MY FIRST VENTURE. 9

I might be used to redeem these men from the
slavery of sin.

When at last I emerged from the dark street
into the large well-lighted school-room, a scene
presented itself which could only be witnessed
in our own country, or that other great English-
speaking land, America. The room was full of
wild, rough men, some of them desperate
characters enough, men who had never been
known to come together in large numbers with-
out some row taking place. I was the only
woman in the room, entirely at their mercy,
a mere inexperienced girl with the love of her
Saviour at her heart, and wishful of saving
others, but with nothing to oppose to their wild
lawless strength but the invincible weakness
of the divine. Yet nothing could be more
orderly and devout than the simple service we
held together, and when it was over, and they
crowded around me to shake hands with me,
and thank me, my own brothers could not have
been more reverent and careful of me than these
rough men.

As soon as he could get at me, my dapper

10 , WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

little Sunday-school teacher bustled up to me,
and exclaimed, with a glow of self-satisfaction,
' I think I may say I was successful in my first
endeavours in your cause, Miss. I brought you
seven men, — all drunk,' he added, with a touch
of gentle pride, in remembrance of my injunc-
tion to get th€ worst. And sure enough he had
picked them out of a neighbouring public-
house, and shored them up one after the other
on a bench in a row, spending some hours and
much' patient ingenuity in this unprofitable
task. Fortunately they did not tumble back-
wards, nor, like Cassio, take to talking fustian
with their own shadow, nor in any other way
disturb the meeting ; enough of the man still
being left in those seven beer barrels to make
them feel thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
But they always went by the name of * little
Mr. B's. first contribution.*

From the Sunday of my escape from the
seven drunken men, my rough congregation
increased a hundred or so at a time. At first
I was for limiting the meeting to one large
room, but my clergyman, delighted that the

MV FIRST VENTURE. ii

men of his parish could be got to hear the
gospel, whether from man or woman, took the
matter into his own hands, and flung open the
folding-doors that separated the two large
school-rooms, and both rapidly filled. As the
fame of the meeting spread, men used to come
streaming in from the villages round, some
walking ten or twelve miles, till at last they
stood packed as close as herrings in a barrel,
from five to six hundred being crammed into
a space meant for not much more than half
that number. Most singular was the scene pre-
sented by the broad road leading to the Abbey
school-rooms at half-past five, when the women-
folk were mostly in-doors at tea; nothing but
the heavy tramp J tramp ! of men being heard,
all converging to one spot.

After a few brief struggles I had overcome
the great clothes difficulty. On the point of
getting men to be content to go to heaven in
their old jackets, my heart was much set. On
one occasion I asked the mother of a grown-
up son why he never came. She replied, ' He'd
like to come^ Miss^ but he's no trousers.' ' *But

12 WO-RK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

I don't want his trousers ; I want him ! *
I exclaimed, with an apparent fine indifference
as to whether he came with or without those
indispensable habiliments, which sorely tried
my companion's gravity.

But soon, as the meeting was only for men,
it became a sort of rough fashion to attend it.
Mr. Darwin tells us that male birds have their
bright plumage for the sole purpose of attract-
ing the more dowdily-clad female. Certainly
I found it so at my meeting. Their wives and
sweethearts were not there to look at them,
and the crowd was too great for me to see
them, so they used to come in their working
dress, and even sometimes in their shirt-sleeves.
One old drunkard, however, used regularly to
pay sixpence to get his clothes out of pawn on
Saturday night, and regularly return them to
durance vile as soon as the meeting was over.

But what a work it was! Truly, I had
need of a strong faith in God, for my diffi-
culties were great. In the first place, I knew
that, young as I was, if once undergraduates
were to take to coming to the meeting, it must

MV FIRST VENTURE. I^

come to an untimely end. On one occasion I
espied one among the crowd, and, walking up
to him, as courteously as I could I publicly
turned him out; but another, seeing what I was^
after, deftly whipped off his gown while my '
back was turned, and sat upon it, and so com-
pletely baffled me. But my wishes having been
thus strongly expressed, and the suburb being
some little distance from the University, that
peril soon came to an end ; though to the last
I was often amused by the wildest reports that
had reached some distant friend, — how forty
undergraduates had, on one occasion, come to
mock, but remained to pray, etc., which, in a
Dissenting organ, was magnified into a hope
that I might ' prove the feeble instrument of
bringing a knowledge of saving grace to a
godless and unbelieving University.' The idea
of that awful functionary, the Vice-Chancellor of
the University, accompanied by his beadles
and * bull-dogs,' attending the Abbey school
meeting, held by a young lady in that tabooed
suburb, is one the wild profanity of which it
requires a university-bred mind to appreciate.

14 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

But a far greater difficulty lay in the character
of the men I had to deal with. With large
numbers I was their only influence for good,
the only voice that spoke to them of God and
Christ. Out at their work all day, many ot
them never saw a clergyman or a district visitor.
A good many came from sheer curiosity, and
if I failed to make any impression on them
I knew not whether the opportunity would
ever come again, nor what desperate deed they
might do. In the first year of my work a
murder and a suicide took place not far from
the door of my school-room. On one occasion
six men came from a neighbouring village
to * hear the lady preach,' but as preach-
ing was dry work in general, they provided
themselves with a shilling a-piece, with the
intention of turning into a public-house on their
way back, and getting 'jolly drunk' in my
honour. I am thankful to say that the word
which met them was too strong for them, and
they returned perfectly sober with the shilling
safe in their pockets. Generally they took
my adventurous plain-speaking very well. Once

MV FIRST VENTURE,

15

after I had had to speak very plainly of the
sin and degradation of some of their lives, the
want of true manliness among them, two men
went away and walked side by side without
saying a word till they reached their garden
gates, when they turned and faced one another-
* Bill,' one was heard to say to the other, * for
the first time in my life I've been well licked,
and that by a woman.'

'So have I — good night,' laconically rejoined
the other, and bolted into his house.

But God only knows the unnecessary anguish
I went through lest I had not been earnest
enough ; lest some unthought-of word of mine
uttered more from the heart might have saved my
brother ; tormenting myself, like many another
young soldier in the fight, instead of asking God
for grace to do my best, and quietly leaving
the issues and increase with Him.

CHAPTER II.

MY FIRST CONVERTS.

EANTIME I was steadily going on
with the organization of my meeting,
and was slowly gathering round me a
band of earnest helpers, both men and women.
I was always reminding them that if I v/as the
head they were the limbs, and that the head
without the hands and feet would be helpless ;
so that they grew to feel that the meeting was
theirs as well as mine ; and we all worked with
a will. Their part was not only to recruit for
the meeting but also .to watch for any who were
impressed, and keep them back for the after
meeting, and talk and pray with them, as well
as to visit them in their own houses, or in some
cases bring them up to me. Ultimately I was
joined by Miss Macpherson, since well known in

MV FIRST CONVERTS, 17

connection with emigration, and found her most
helpful to my inexperience.

Very soon one of my right-hand helpers, a
working-man, who had stood for seven years
almost alone on the side of Christ in some
large brick-fields, but now found himself a sort
of spiritual father amongst his mates, who till
then had led him a life of constant petty per-
secution, told me that seven working-men wished
to lead a different life, and would like me to
talk and pray with them. So they came up
to my house, most of them, at the time I am
writing. Christian men of more than ten years
standing, but then in the glow of their first
faith and their first love, with that simple,
hearty, unreserved surrender of themselves to
God common to working-men, but rare, at least
in its outward manifestations, in more sophis-
ticated ranks of society. I remember now one
of those first prayers that welled out of a full
heart, rude in language but deep and pure in
feeling : — ' O Lord, you know how I have been
knocked about in the world, and grow'd up in
publics, and never had any one to care for my

2

IS WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

soul, till our blessed hand-maiden came to teach
us about our Saviour, and about our Father in
heaven.'

Few, indeed, of us can realize the rough un-
humanizin,g character of the lives of many of
our working-men. Some, like this man, had
lost their mother young. Many more, alas !
might as well ha/e been hatched by steam,
as far as any mother's care and tenderness go,
and would doubtless have echoed the young
street Arab's sentiment, 'He didn't see what
good mothers were, 'cept to wallop a fellow.'
And it is just this rough, motherless, uncared-
for side of their lives which makes the influence
of a refined and educated woman something
to them which the most tender-hearted man
can never supply. I would especially urge this
fact on those wno object to a woman working
among men. Would that I could only think
that these rough notes, written vears after I
have myself been laid aside from this work,
might be the means of stirring up some lady,
young or old, to try her influence over the
working-men of her neighbourhood, and be to

MV FIRST CONVERTS. 19

some dusty, hard-toiling lives Ci gracious dew
from heaven, ' twice blessed/ indeed ; blessing
her who gives and him who takes.

But my first prayer-meeting had its very
funny as well as its solemn, joyful side. One
man, with a strange grotesque gargoyle sort of
face, who was more influenced by his love for
me than by the deep spiritual change that had
began in the others, thinking that he would
certainly be called upon to ' make a prayer,'
had prepared himself beforehand for the emer-
gency. He learned an oration by heart, or
rather, in this instance, I should say by head,
and came into my presence with it at full cock,
warranted to go off at the least notice. So
when two or three of the others had given
vent to their few broken heartfelt utterances
he began with a flourish of Jewish trumpets,
*0 Thou that dwellest between the cherubims !'
There was a dead pause. Then turning his
queer face over his shoulder, he said, with a
piteous bleat to me, ' Oh, Miss, I'm stuck fast,
I can't get on ! '

Still on my knees, I solemnly answered, ' Never

20 . rVOJ^JT AMOAG WORKING-MEN.

mind, my brother, God will teach you another
time ; ' and at once began a few words of con-
cluding prayer. But alas for an unfortunately
keen sense of the ridiculous ! For a few moments
my voice quivered and wavered on the very
verge of laughter, and it was only by a super-
human effort that I managed to control my-
self When I rose from my knees I felt as
if my hair must have turned grey in the
struggle.

Not many Sundays had passed before I noticed
an old man who always sat in the same place,
and listened to me with a queer, perplexed look
on his weather-beaten face. I soon ascertained
that he was popularly known by the name of ' Old
Tom,' and was a well-sinker, who for seventy
years had led a wild and desperate life ; the
hair-breadth escapes he had met with in his dan-
gerous calling seeming only to have hardened
him and made him more reckless. Time after
time he had been dug out of the earth only to
come up from his living grave to resume his
wild courses. His only son had been struck
dead before his eyes on the line: nothing seemed

MV FIRST CONVERTS. 21

to make any impression on his hard old
heart. But as he sat and heard for the first
time of the love of his God ; how the Father
had never hardened His heart against His lost
child ; how the door of heaven was left on the
latch even for such as he ; how poor old Tom's
very place was kept up in heaven * prepared
for him/ if only he would arise and come home
to his Father, strange thoughts were stirred in
that dim old mind. But poor old Tom had
one difficulty, which always seemed to stand in
the way. ' I'm no scholard/ he used to say to
himself, scratching his grey head in a perplexed
sort of way; 'it ain't no manner of use, I don't
know how to make a prayer.'

At last he heard me give an account of how
a working-man they all knew and respected
came to be what he was. He was once a farm-
servant in a Christian family, when the mother
of the house died quite suddenly. The father
sent for his two sons ; and when they met,
they fell on one another's necks and .wept, and
comforted one another with the words of ever-
lasting life. And the young man felt how

22 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

beautiful a thing is family love in Him in
whom ail the families of the earth are blessed,
and turned away with a longing to be like
that father and his two sons. He crept up
into a hay-loft, and there and then, to use his
own words, 'for the first time I knelt down and
tried to pray. I didn't know a bit how, but
somehow or other I managed to blunder on,
and I blundered on that night and the next
morning, till somehow,' he added, with a sudden
smile, full of the peace of God, ' my blundering
on found me my Saviour.'

* Well,' thought old Tom, and a gleam of light
came into the dark perplexed face, ' I'm no
scholard ; I can't make a prayer, but I can
blunder on.'

The next day he was sinking a well a hun-
dred and twenty feet below the surface of the
earth. His 'fellow-workmen had left him alone
to finish his dangerous job. Suddenly all the
words he had heard and all his sinful life came
over him, and he felt he must pray there and
then. So, kneeling down by the side of his
old bucket, he put his rough, horny hands to-

MV FIRST CONVERTS. 23

gether, and, while the great tears streamed
down that rugged face, he prayed his first
prayer : * O Lord, I'm the biggest of sinners,
but you are a bigger Saviour. O Lord, save
poor old Tom from his sins, and give him a
new heart, for Jesus Christ's sake.' And at the
bottom of that deep well, a hundred and twenty
feet below the surface of the earth, the great
Saviour and the great sinner met together, and
when poor old Tom was pulled up to the sur-
face he was a new creature in his God.

He ca^j^e eleven miles away from his work,
and waited four hours outside my house, to tell
me of his conversion ; and I had to take him
in at eleven o'clock at night, when I got home,
to give thanks to the Father for him.

Poor old; Tom ! he never saw me without
asking me if I wanted a well sunk, that he
would be glad to do it ' gracious ' for me if I
did. I believe he would gladly have bored the
earth under my feet into a bottle-rack * gracious,'
if by so doing he could have testified the love
and gladness of which his old heart was full.

Another of my regular attendants I noticed

24 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

always sitting close to me, with one hand up
to his ear, listening with a look of rapt atten-
tion. I soon became acquainted with him, and
found he was an intelligent and well-educated
man, a gardener by trade, but placed in cir-
cumstances of great home unhappiness. His
wife had formed a sort of maniacal hatred to
him, which showed itself in persistent efforts
to injure him, and alienate the hearts of his
children from him. Always a moral man, he
had resisted the temptation to drown his sorrow
in intemperance, but he had never found any
comfort in religion. He had tried church after
church, but finding his deafness made it im-
possible for him to hear, he had latterly given
up going to any place of worship, and had shut
himself up in his miserable home. His heart
was beginning to darken down into a reckless
despair, when curiosity led him to the Abbey
school-meeting, to see what it was like. To
his surprise and delight he could hear my clear
penetrating woman's voice with ease ; and before
two or three Sundays had passed, he had found
the peace which passeth understanding in his

MY FIRST CONVERTS. 25

God, * the place of rest imperturbable, where
love is not forsaken if itself forsaketh not.' The
whole expression of his face changed ; he had
the look of those

... in this loud stunning tide

Of human care and crime,
With whom the melodies abide

Of th' everlasting chime ;
Who carry music in their heart
Thro' dusky lane and wrangling mart ; "

and his love and gratitude found radiant expres-
sion in the lovely flowers with which he filled
my drawing-room. His great natural beauty
of character grew perfected by divine grace,
and despite his deafness he became an earnest
worker. A year or two after his wife became
a Christian, and they were re-united in the love
that passeth knowledge. For both I have had
long since to give thanks as having departed in
God's holy faith and fear.

The tokens of gratitude I received were of
the most varied kinds, ranging, as may be seen,
from the offer of a well to a gift of flowers.
Fresh eggs, a chicken, a Bible, a hare — N.B. not

26 IVORA' AMOXG jrOKA'/XC-MEiV.

poached — a Church Service, posies of all sorts
and sizes, a ckister of field-birds shot at dawn,
whose tender little loosened throats and filmy
e\'es I nearl}' wept over as I held them up by
their pretty coral feet, but which nevertheless
made an excellent pie, a small ^old locket, etc.,
etc On one occasion, two very tall heads of
Erussel-sprouts were brought to the week-day
meeting, and duly presented after it was over,
when I disappeared in triumph with one under
either arm, like a modern Daphne, sprouting
cabbage instead of laurel, as befits this utilitarian
age.

At times, however, in my day and night visit-
ing among my rough people, my experiences
were by no means so satisfactory, and often
sharply taxed my mother wit how best to ex-
tricate myself from an awkward position. On
one occasion, I found myself between a drunken
husband and wife, in just that stage of inebriety
which makes a man quarrel with his shadow for
keeping close at his heels. Unfortunately this
man was not reduced to his shadow, being well
supplied with a substantial loud-tongued wife

MY FIRST CONVERTS. 27

to exercise upon, and very soon they got to
high words, drowning my feeble efforts to make
myself heard. They were so maddening one
another, that I saw in a very few moments
they would come to blows, utterly regardless
of my presence, and for all I could do to pre-
vent it, he might half kill her under my eyes.
What was to be done t My eyes fell on a tea-
tray, with some loose cups and saucers and
spoons upon it. In a moment I set to work,
and hammered on it with such inspired energy,
producing such a rattling fugue of cups and
saucers and tea-tray, as effectually drowned the
voices of my belligerents. For a few moments
they tried to go on shouting at one another, but,
bless you ! it did no harm, as neither could hear
the other, and soon they gave it up in despair.

Then I put in a few mild persuasive words,
till they began at one another again ; and
again I betook myself to my loud but peace-
ful drum till I gained myself another short hear-
ing. At last, between these * two voices,' mine
and the tea-tray's, I got them into a better frame
of mind, and the threatened danger was averted.

28 WORIC AMONG WORKING-MEN.

On another occasion, a drunken tailor, whom
his wife persisted in fetching out of a public-
house for me to exhort, greatly embarrassed
me by insisting on 'seeing me straight home/
. as he expressed it, with a ludicrous disregard
to facts, and the irregular curves and zig-zags
we should infallibly describe in his present
condition. However, as the choice lay between
having him as my escort or leaving him to
vent his ill-humour in beating his wife, I re-
signed myself to my fate. I believe I walked
miles before I reached home that night. I
never estimated before the force of the drunken
Irishman's exclamation, on being condoled with
on the length of way he had come, ' Och, yer
honour, it's not the length but the breadth.'

My difficulties during the first few months
of my work were further enhanced by a strong
opposition from without. The unreasoning feel-
ing against a woman fulfilling her Lord's in-
junction, *Go tell My brethren that I go unto
My Father and their Father, to My God and
their God,' was stronger then than it is now.
The old tendency to stick to the letter of

MY FIRST CONVERTS. 29

Scripture, and sin against its divine progressive
spirit, to bind women, after nineteen centuries
of freedom, with precisely the same bandages
and restrictions which were necessary to pre-
serve social order when first the equality of
the sexes was practically assumed by Chris-
tianity, was then in full force. Nay, the usual
tendency showed itself to extend these restric-
tions from their original use, as regulations for
the ecclesia, the public and autliorised services
of the church, to all cases whatever ; rendering
it unlawful, not only for me to teach my poor,
ignorant men, who were willing to be taught
about God and Christ by me, and by no one
else, but also for a mother to teach her grown-
up sons, a queen to address her parliament, a
woman to teach the public by her written
words. A storm accordingly raged for some
time against me, during which my own clergy-
man stood valiantly by me, quietly urging, on
all sides, that some of the worst drunkards and
blasphemers in his parish were now regular
and consistent communicants at his church; was
he to prefer their remaining drunkards and bias

30 IVOJ^J^ AMONG WORKING-MEN",

phemers to their being influenced by a lady,
and oppose what God had blessed ?

For some months the opposition lasted ; but
for the encouragement of all steady workers,
I gladly record that, even in one of the great
centres of ecclesiasticism, it gave way before
good work and practical results. The leading
Evangelical clergyman, who had begun by cut-
ting me in the streets, ended by presenting me
with four volumes of his sermons in token of
his esteem and sympathy Vv'ith my work. Being
of a placable disposition I built the bulky
tomes up into an altar of friendship in one
corner of my room, and I need scarcely say
that my sense of reverence forbade my ever
disturbing the sacred stones.

But what I most needed never failed me —
the support of my own clergyman, the friend-
ship and hearty co-operation of one of our
Indian missionaries, then working as a curate
in the same district as myself, and, what was
sweetest and best, the tender, wise sympathy
of my father.

CHAPTER III.

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE.

UT how did I get this influence over
working men ? perhaps some one will
ask. starting, as I did, with no know-
ledge of them as a class, or as individuals, and
finding myself in a few weeks with some thou-
sand on my hands. As the answer to this ques-
tion may be helpful to other workers, I will try
and reply to it in some detail.

The class I had to deal with were, with a
slight admixture of fossil-diggers, answering in
some respects to navvies, just the common
artizans of any non-manufacturing town, — brick-
layers, carpenters, shoemakers, gas-men, well-
sinkers, farm labourers, etc. Wild as they were
in their habits, I always say that for head and
heart you could scarcely match them. Their

32 WORK AMONG IVOR KING- MEN,

ignorance, in its depth and solidity, to the
last was a surprise to me ; the learned pig
would certainly have beaten them in a com-
petitive examination; but at the same time
they were possessed of a plenitude of mother
wit, which made them a delightful, but difficult,
audience to address. I remember one of the
members for the University, himself a noted
speaker, saying, that he would rather address
any other mob ; that if an accident did happen
to one's nominative, or one's feet got hopelessly
entangled in a broken construction, there was
no hope of its passing unobserved, — the speaker's
confusion was certain to be rendered worse
confounded by a perfect storm of banter and
rough jokes. The element of the clever, sceptical
mechanic was wholly wanting. I only met with
one case of intellectual doubt of the shallowest
kind, a fervent disciple of Shelley; but there
was a good deal of rough scepticism of a moral
kind among them. The rooted belief in a
good-natured, easy-going God, who would never
be hard on a poor fellow whatever his life
might be, and a consequent total disbelief in

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE. 33

His moral laws ; a conviction that all religion
was a sham ; much Pharisaism in fustian that
thanks God it is not as other men are ;
methodists, saints, cants, hypocrites ; * I give
tithes of all I possess to the devil, and get
fresh twice in the week ; ' a hatred of parsons ;
an ideal of manliness w^hich aimed alternately
at the beer barrel and the bull-dog ; and a
disbelief in punishment hereafter, — these were
the chief enemies to be contended ag-ainst.
and I found them quite enough.

In the first place it was quite useless to preach
ready-made doctrines to them. Justification by
faith, imputed righteousness, vicarious satisfac-
tion, election, sacramental grace, regeneration,
— all these things were simple Greek to them.
Perhaps it was fortunate that it was so ; for at
that time I was passing through the intellectual
difficulties which most thoughtful young minds of
the present day must encounter, and my hold on
received opinions, except so far as I could work
them out for myself, was loosened. It was evident
that they and I must begin from the beginning.

I have often thought that if some of our great

3

34 IVOJ^Jir AMONG WORKING-MEN.

thinkers could have my problem to solve, it
would be a very good thing for them. If only
once they could wake up one morning, and find
themselves with some thousand rough but shrewd
fellows on their hands to be saved somehow, saved
in that grossly intelligible sense of the word
salvation which even Mr. Voysey would accept
— saved from sin and degradation. There they
were ; I could not get rid of them, waiting with
their listening faces turned towards me; some in-
telligible theory of the universe I must give them
to get them to square their lives in obedience
to its laws. Would it be any use to tell them
* of a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which
makes for righteousness ? ' Alas ! the stream of
tendency with which they were most familiar, made
for the public-house and wife-beating. Or would
it be any good to preach to them the 'method
of Jesus,' the duty of self-abnegation, to these
men who were driven, by every wild passion of
their natures, to self-indulgence — passions that
would make short work of any abstract notions,
and could only be cast out by some other
passion of love and adoration, such as only a

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE. 35

living person can inspire ? Or was I to follow
Mr. Herbert Spencer, and rise with them from
the lower to the higher religion, and preach to
them the great inscrutable Power, to which
neither personality nor emotion can be as-
signed, and expect that the knowledge of It
would regulate their moral emotions, with which
It was out of all relation ? Or even preach a
moral and beneficent Being, the Ruler of all
things, far removed from them in the altitude
of His perfections and blessedness ; when the
misery and disorder of their lives was a proof
either that He did not mind, or if He did,
didn't much care ?

Alas ! I felt forlornly enough that my intel-
lectual gospels had but one fault when brought
into contact with the mass of humanity — they
would not work. The intellectual few might
be saved ; but as for this people that knoweth
not, on this showing we must say, with the
Pharisee of old, *They are cursed.* Only in
the Christianity of the Bible could I find what
I wanted ; could I not work out some simple
form of it for them and me ?

36 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

I took my stand at once on the great facts
of life and conscience. I never laid any doctrine
before them without first carefully verifying it
for them from their own life, their own con-
science, their own heart. If for one moment
I departed from this ground, I felt at once I
had lost my hold upon them. At one fell
swoop I had to get rid of all petrified dogmas,
and received opinions, and orthodox phraseology,
and stick to what I could in some measure prove.

My first effort was to get them to believe in
moral law ; that there are great inevitable laws
in the moral world as well as in the physical,
and what a man sows that will he also reap.
When they used to say to me, *I don't believe
in hell ; God is much too merciful to damn a
poor fellow Hke me,' I answered cheerfully, ' Of
course He is much too good and merciful. It
is not God that " damns you," as you say ; it
is you that condemn your own selves to a life
of sin and misery away from Him.' And I used
to illustrate it by what happened to Dr. Brown,
the author of ' Rab and his Friends,' in the
great cholera year. He was then a young man,

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE. 37

practising at Chatham, when one night he was
called up to go at once to a village down the
Thames, where the cholera had broken out.
The men rowed for their lives, for they were
pulling against Death. The first thing he did
after he had prescribed for the sick, was to call
all who were not already stricken together.
Not one would allow it, but he could see, by a
look in their faces, that they were all in for the
cholera. So he gave them a prescription which,
he assured them, if taken in time, would save
their lives. They all took it but one woman.
In vain he entreated ; she obstinately refused.
* She was not going to have the cholera — not
she.' They all had it ; but that woman was
the only one who died of it. *Now, then,' I
asked, ' was it the doctor's fault } *

'No, that it warn't; it was the woman's own
fault'

'Well, then, you have got a disease in your
soul called sin ; you may deny it in words,
but you know it ; and, what's more, God knows
it, and offers you a remedy. He offers you a
Saviour, and He says to the heart that loves

38 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

and receives Him, '' The blood of Jesus Chribt
cleanseth from all sin." But you won't take
the remedy, and you perish. Whose doing is it ;
God's or your own ? '

' Well, I know I am in the wrong way now ;
but before I die I mean to turn over a new
leaf.'

* You mean to say you will cry, " Lord, have
mercy upon me " on your death-bed, and then
you think you will be all right. My brother,
be sure of this, there's no such thing as running
up a bill all our lifetime with the devil, and then
sneaking out when pay-time comes. You are much
too honest yourself not to see that.'

Sometimes I used to put it differently to
them. ^Well, suppose you were to go to
Heaven, with your unchanged hearts, when
you die, what would you do there } Death it-
self won't change you. Death is no more than
birth. The child that is diseased before birth
is diseased after birth. Would you be happy ^
What ! no publics, no getting fresh, no loose talk
and jolly songs, nothing but good things, the
very mention of which makes you uncomfort-

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE. 39

able ? Why, you would be like a man a friend
of mine, a physician, was called in to see. He
was a farmer, who had lived a bad life all his
days, ruined his constitution by drinking, and
now all the doctors in the world could not save
him. So Dr. Bull said he had better send for*
a clergyman, and prepare himself for another
world, as his days in this were numbered. The
dying man accordingly turned to his wife, and
asked her to send for their minister, when she
burst out into a bitter laugh.. " What," she ex-
claimed, "are yoii thinking of going to Heaven
after all t And what will you do when you
get there } You'll be like a pig in a parlour ! "
* If it were possible to put a sinner into Heaven/
I used to urge, ' you could not put him in a hotter
hell.'

And little by little they came to see the
great Christian doctrine, that eternal sin must
be, in the very nature of things, eternal punish-
ment and eternal misery, and that salvation
means being saved from the guilt and power
of sin and selfishness, and not merely going to
Heaven. As to the speculative point, whether

40 WORIC AMONG WORKING- MEN:

moral evil is eternal, whether in that KoXaac^;
alcovLo^, the * chastisement of ages/ into which
the wicked are told to depart, there be ultimate
purification and deliverance from the worm that
dieth not and the fire that is not quenched, the
remorse and the suffering that eternally cling to
moral evil, I simply let that alone. It is with
the chances of this world, and not of the next,
that we are practically concerned.

But how to make them feel not only the
consequences of sin, but what sin is in itself
before God, its exceeding sinfulness, I frankly
confess I found but one means for doing this —
Christ and the Cross of Christ. In that perfect
manhood, so tender yet so strong, courageous
unto death for the truth ; pitilessly severe
against all sham and dishonesty, but opening
its arms for the weary and heavy-laden to rest,
and weep upon its breast ; cutting keen as
crystal through all false pretences, yet, Hke
crystal, yielding to the weakest beam of light,
and dyeing it with a thousand lovely hues, so
that the repentant harlot becomes, under that
gracious influence, a saint, and the rude fisher-

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE. 41

man an apostle of the world; in Him, taking
our children in His arms, feeling for all human
sorrow, weeping beside our open graves, healing
all who were oppressed, they grew ashamed of
their own low type of manhood. And in the
suffering, the blood, the agony, the death of
shame that the world's evil, that our sin cost
the Son of God, they began to realise the ex-
ceeding hatefulness of sin ; while in that God
spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him
up for us all, they were led to realise God's
love to the sinner, the heart of their Father
towards them. I troubled them with no theories,
I simply gave them the facts ; and I illustrated
those facts, not by foolish figments about a good
little boy bearing the punishment of a bad little
boy, or an impossible monarch who caused him-
self to be flogged in the stead of his rebellious
soldiers, but by all the most sweet and solemn
facts of life. For whatever difficulties may be
felt about the Atonement, the fact of it is woven
into the very warp and woof of human life.
Vicarious suffering meets us, pleading with
pierced hands, at every turn. We could not

42 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

enter into life but by the anguish of the One
who loves us best. The innocent beasts must
bleed and die that we may live. Our sin and
sorrow is for ever pressing on the hearts of those
that love us, and becoming their shame and
their pain. Love crowned with our thorns is
for ever atoning" for us, putting away our selfish-
ness, and making us ' at one ' with our better
selves. All human life is made up of fragments
of the true Cross ; and all things lead up to
Him, who loves us with more than a mother's
love, suffered for us more than a mother's pangs,
bears with us with more than a mother's patience.
And however men may dispute over the theory,
the Atonement did become a great fact in our
midst, j Beneath the power of the Cross of Christ,
I have seen four hundred rough, world-hardened,
reckless men, weeping and sobbing hke children
over their sins. I have seen, Sunday after
Sunday, bad men turned into good by it, men
who were drunkards, profligates, blasphemers,
fighters, gamblers, turned into good, devout,
tender-hearted men. For months I never spoke
but this change took place, two or three thus

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE. 43

receiving the word of life, and becoming com-
pletely changed men. How then can Christianity-
be anything but a great life-giving fact to me ?

One man in particular, I remember, so wild
a fellow that on taking his wages, he would
sometimes drink all Saturday night and Sunday,
and return to his work on the Monday morning,
never having set eyes on his starving wife and
children, and having spent all the money which
ought to have gone to their support. He came
into the Abbey school-room a drunken blas-
phemer; he left it a Christian man. His own
simple account of his sudden conversion was,
'I heard that my Saviour lived and died for
me ; now I mean to live and die for Him.'
That man, with all that force of evil habit in
him, never had a fall. I always think the hap-
piest moment of my life was one summer even-
ing when I went into his cottage. His wife
was out, but through the staircase door that
stood open, I could hear him praying with his
little child, as he put her to bed, the child's
soft voice following his as they trod that home-
ward path together. A few moments after he

44 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

appeared in his working dress, just as he had
come off the brickfields, with the peace of God
shining in his face.

But with these terrible struggles with evil
going on all around me, with some so bound
and tied with the chain of their sins that, though
they heard my voice and would fling themselves
down on their knees at my side, they seemed
powerless to break loose from the force of evil
habit; nay, by my own need of courage and
wisdom, and my own deep consciousness of its
being given in answer to prayer, I was literally
driven to the belief in a great spiritual force,
call it the Holy Spirit, or what you will, a divine
energizing power which we can lay hold of by
faith and make our own. More and more I
taught them that conversion is a gift from God,
to be had for the earnest asking; that the love
of God is poured out {kKKk'^QjraC) of His deep
heart into ours by the Holy Spirit which is
given us ; and if they would only surrender
themselves wholly to that mighty influence,
they had but to open the door of their hearts,
and that eternal sunshine would stream in;

INTELLECTUAL GOSPELS AND THE PEOPLE, 45

while, without Him, all my talking to them was
only so much physic poured down a dead
man's throat.

And so they and I together worked out a
simple theology for ourselves — faith in a Father
in heaven, who loves us ; in the cross of Christ,
revealing the sinfulness of sin, and the love of
God to the sinner, and the inmost meaning of
which is death unto sin and life unto God ;
faith in a divine energizing Spirit; a recognition
that, as long as we continue in a state of sin
and selfishness, we are and must be in a state
of punishment here and hereafter : and a belief
in our Father's home where sin and sorrow would
never enter. And for all practical purposes we
found this simple faith enough.

CHAPTER IV.

MEN AND WOMEN.

iT must not be supposed that my work
lay only among the men. In many
ways I worked quite as hard among
the women. Indeed, I am much disposed to
agree with a well-known working-man political
speaker, who, when I was suggesting carrying out
some plan of reform by the help of men alone,
exclaimed, ' Miss, you will do nothing without
our female brethren. One female is worth ten
males.' The women having chiefly the training
of the rising generation, the man being out at
work all day, her influence is necessarily the most
important. But I confess that my whole experi-
ence has been that the best way to get at the
women is to get at the men first, to recognise in
this, as in other things, the Divine order that the

MEN AND WOMEN. 47

man is the head of the woman, and while her
head goes one way, it is very hard for the rest
of her to go another ; whilst her husband goes to
the public-house and gets drunk, it is very hard
for her to go to church and get pious. Indeed,
I know no greater proof that with God all things
are possible, than a drunkard's wife who is a
Christian. But when the husband turned round,
it was the exception, and not the rule, when the
wife did not become earnest-minded as well.

My right-hand woman, to whom I always went
for comfort and counsel in difficulties, was a certain
old charwoman of the name of Phoebe Simpson.
I should be loth that any notes of my work
should go forth without embalming her precious
old memory ; like some sweet hedgerow flower
laid between the leaves, dim with common dust,
and yet touched with a beauty of the skies. I
can see her now, — the short thick-set figure, the
queer gentle old face, deeply lined with suffering
and sorrow, the writing of God's finger, which I
never see on an old face without a feeling 01
reverential awe ; and looking out from the midst
of it all, the dear old faded eyes, that seemed to

48 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN'.

have wept themselves dim with tears of pity.
How much ' sweetness and light ' lay hid behind
that dress of rusty widow's black ; what practical
wisdom, what deep womanly compassions, linking
the Divine with the human ; what kindly humour,
above all, what extraordinary moral and spiritual
elevation ! As long as Christianity can embody
itself in Phoebe Simpsons, I can't help thinking
it must be taken as its own evidence, and, in this
solid form at least, can defy our modern critical
acids.

Odd to say, Phoebe Simpson began her life in
Christ in a thunderstorm, — one of the most terrible
hail storms I believe on record having burst over
the eastern counties ; thinking the end of the world
had come and found her in her sins, she knelt
down and cast herself on her Saviour's love.
The storm passed, but the love remained. How
Phoebe Simpson got rid of her gossiping neigh-
bours, and took up her neglected home duties,
was most characteristic.

* How did you manage, Mrs. Simpson ? ' I
once asked. * For you know the Bible tells us to
be courteous ; and to turn folk out of our house,

MEN AND WOMEN. 4^

however much in the way they may be, is apt
to look very rude.'

' ril tell you how I managed that/ she an-
swered, with the funny humorous twinkle that
used to light up her quaint old face. * The first
thing I did was to get the brush and dust-pan
and lay them handy 'gainst any neighbour comed
in. Soon, in pops Mrs. Smith. ' Mrs. Smith,'
says I, 'you won't mind my doing a bit of dustin',
will you, whilst you're talkin' t ' Of course she
couldn't but be agreeable to that. So down on
my knees I goes, and begins to dust with all my
might. But somehow, it was a very curious thing,
but the dust alius would gather thickest just
under the chair my neighbour was a-sittin' on.
She'd shift, and shift ; but I'd alius be arter her
with my old dust-pan, and the dust 'ud get up
her nose, and she'd begin to sneeze ever so —
ketcher ! ketcher ! — and soon she'd say, " Well, I
think — ketcher! — I'll call in another day, Mrs.
Simpson, as I see you are — ketcher! — busy."
And so in less than a week I had dusted all my
neighbours out of my house.'

Dear old Phoebe Simpson ! she had a great

4

50 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

objection to the running tongue which so often
goes with falling feet. I often think of her
definition of religion, * I think, Miss, religion is
doing things still.' The words might be taken in
their double sense, not only of that quietness and
confidence which was so emphatically dear old
Phoebe Simpson's strength, but of unweariedness
in well-doing. Like a star, she was always about
her silent tasks of light. Wherever there was a
sore heart to be comforted, or a sore hand to
be leeched or poulticed, among the neighbours
round, you might be sure that Phoebe Simpson
had been there before you. But to see her in
her glory, one ought to see her in the ragged
Sunday class of little waifs and strays she had
gathered about her, carolling like a hoarse old
lark at the top of her ancient voice, and followed
by a rabble of childish pipes and trebles, which
'wandered on as loth to die,' without quite the
sweetness of Wordsworth's echo, while she occa-
sionally applied the well-worn corners of her
hymn-book to a curly head that was not con-
ducting itself with due propriety. I often wonder
whether the present thriving Sunday-schools re-

MEN AND WOMEN, 51

member or even know of their humble parentage,
the sweet old heart that out of the depth
of her poverty, and the riches of her love,
gave them birth in the cottage room in Gas
Lane.

She was a much tried woman, plenteousness of
tears to drink was her portion. * Whom I ten-
derly love,* I rebuke and chasten.' Her only
son was a great trouble to her. I can see him
now, a great stalwart-looking fellow, but with a
constitution utterly broken down by his wild
drinking ways, pacing up and down my dining-
room, exclaiming in agony, —

'They call it pleasure. But look at me, a young
fellow of twenty-four, broken down with grinding
like an old blind hoss in the devil's mill. They
call it pleasure, but I call it hard work.'

I do not know whether his mother's prayers
have yet been heard for him, but I oijly know
with the Bishop of old, that the child of such
prayers and tears cannot be lost.

* The word used here for love is not the ordinary word
ayaTrao), but the more familiar word ^iXew used for the intimate
love between two friends.

52 WORK' AMONG WORKING-MEN.

Dear old Pha^bc worked with nic heart and
soul, in recruiting for my workinj^-mcn's meetings.
She would trot round fn^m door to door to tell
them I had returned from my summer holiday,
and the meeting would be held as usual next
Sunday, generally, however, being greeted with,
* We knowed that afore, missus. All right, we're
a-coming.* The missionary earnestness, however,
which the men inspired in her breast, and that
of some other women, was not founded 1 fear on
any high appreciation of the sex. I fear the
value attached to the nobler male was decidedly
low, and that the estimation in which he was held
was pretty much expressed in the response I met
with at one door, at which I had timidly knocked,
to know if there were any men there I could ask
to my meeting. ' No, thank God,' the woman
replied, ' wc have no males here ; * and the door
was banged in my face with a sharp snap, that
gave a singular emphasis to the thanksgiving.

One of my great difliculties at first was one
which I suppose all educated people feel, — how
to put my thoughts into an effective and telling
form, how, in one word, to speak to the people.

MEN AND WOMEN, 53

It is a mistake to suppose that plain and suit-
able commonplaces will go down with working-
men. Working-men emphatically want strong
meat, thoughts as racy as their own expres-
sions ; they reject sweet pap fit for children.
But if any one supposes that my power of
speaking to them was a gift that came naturally
to me, without any effort on my part, let them,
once for all, dispossess themselves of any such
idea. Gift, like genius, I often think, only means
an infinite capacity for taking pains. I served
a hard apprenticeship enough. My familiarity
with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson
had fortunately trained me in the use of good
Saxon English ; I could speak of * going to
bed,' without saying, * ere you resign yourself
to repose.' But how to put things forcibly and
clearly to uneducated men I set to work to
learn from those who had proved themselves
masters in the art; I carefully studied Spur-
geon's sermons, and any other preacher to the
people I could hear of; and I read many of
the old Puritan writers, such as old Gurnall's
' Christian's Complete Armour,' Brooks, and

54 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

writers even as late as Berridge, all of them
remarkable for Shakespearian force and quaint-
ness of expression ; and I diligently wrote out
any thought that might be useful to me, trans-
forming and adapting it for my own purposes.
I ransacked magazines, sermons, books of all
kinds, for good, strong illustrations, which we
must always remember are, to the mind of the
uneducated, what diagrams and pictures are to
the eye, explaining and embodying the meaning.
Often as not, my own work gave me the best
illustrations. I would take the next Sunday
some difficulty or objection which had been
suggested to me in conversation with some of
the men during the week, and discuss its bear-
ings for the good of all. When put before
them, not as an abstract truth, but in the form
of a talk with one of themselves, it came home
to them with far more power.

Some of the comphments my speaking re-
ceived were very funny. A farmer being asked
what he thought of an address I had given,
exclaimed, * Why, I had no idea a woman could
speak like that 1 It wasn't only what she said,

MEN AND WOMEN. 55

it was the noise she made. It was splendid
both ways ! '

But what I found still more trying, were the
wild renderings and transformations my words
underwent at the hands of my audience. One
dear old man, who, at the ripe age of seventy-
eight, became an humble child-like Christian,
and who twice in the week used to walk eight
miles to hear me, had one favourite version of
the words which caused his conversion, to which
he adhered with frightful fixity, and retailed to
every one he met. * There was three of us
old men a-settin' together, and you turned, and
you shook your little finger at us, and you said :
" You old men there, you are goin' to hell as
fast as your old legs can carry you ! " I never
felt so afeard in my life, and I have been a
changed man ever since.' Be it known, gentle
reader, I am naturally reverent of age, and the
utmost I could remember saying was, that I
hoped that as their heads whitened, their faith
brightened, and as all else grew dim to their
old eyes, their Saviour's face and their Father's
home grew clearer; so I can only suppose it

56 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

was the strength of the impression I made
which clothed itself in such terrific words.

A lady friend of mine who had won the next
place in his heart to myself, greatly delighted
him by presenting him with her photograph. He
came in from the neighbouring village, where his
small farm was situated, to tell me that he had
had it framed : ' And I've hoonged her up next
Mr. Spurgin ; and the neighbours they come in
and they say, "Well, they du look beautiful ! '"

This same friend of mine was the only one,
after they had lost their first friend, the clergy-
man's wife, who at all took her place by my
side in their affections, and who on the rare
occasions she could leave her own work to take
mine, managed to speak home to their inmost
hearts. * You see. Miss, her words do weigh so
heavy on the system,' as a working-man said
to me. One young man, a wild, thoughtless
fellow, became entirely changed under her in-
fluence, and his sister exclaimed to her, with
earnest thankfulness, ' There's our Jem, he didn't
even believe in the devil. But oh. Miss, he do
believe in him now since he has heard you

MEN AND WOMEN. 57

preach him.* If there was a weak point in my
friend's theology, I fear it was the personality
of the evil spirit, so the assurance was doubly
satisfactory to her.

We both met with the most curious instances
of the way in which, as in ancient prophesying,
we were able to ' make manifest the secrets ' of
the hearts before us. On one occasion my friend
said, * There are some of you young men who
think so lightly of coming into the presence of
your God in this meeting, that as you stood
outside the door you actually tossed up whether
you would come in here or go to yonder public'
A group of young men sitting right in front of
her, and who had come in late, had actually
done so, and received the ghostly guidance of
'tails' to decide them to hear the gospel in
preference to drinking in the public-house. On
another occasion, I said, * There are you men out
there,' — pointing in their direction, — ' you know
you have been sitting in the public-house drink-
ing up to the last moment. And one of you
looked up at the public-house clock, and said,
** Come, let's be off to hear the lady preach, or

S8 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

we sha'n't get a seat.'" Without knowing It, I
described a scene which had really taken place,
and the man who had pointed to the clock and
uttered the identical words, was so impressed
at being thus ^judged of all,' that he became
from that day an earnest-hearted man. At
times it produced no small awkwardness ; a
man would go to another, and accuse him in
great wrath of having told the lady all about
him ; and I had to step in and clear the sup-
posed tale-bearer with the assurance that he
had never mentioned the other's name.

But I soon found that you can make but
very little way with ignorant minds by mere
preaching. The ' after meeting,' which has since
grown so common, to which those who were
impressed might be asked to stay, and in which
you could sit down on a bench by some poor
ignorant fellow's side, and patiently get at his
inarticulate difficulties and sorrows, and talk to
him in plain brotherly fashion, became a neces-
sity. As many as two hundred used sometimes
to stay behind. We used to open it by prayer,
in which those who were anxious to lead a new

MEN AND WOMEN. 59

life were encouraged to make their first con-
fession of faith to their Father and their Saviour.
It was difficult at times to prevent an inward
smile at the quaint simplicity of their expres-
sions; and I remember my heart being refreshed,
but my gravity somewhat tried, by the fervency
with which one man prayed, * O Lord, bless this
here woman what preaches.' Prayer being con-
cluded, the whole meeting broke up into groups
of earnest talkers. Here again you must depend
on the number and earnestness of your helpers,
earnest working-men and women being especially
useful in this part of the work, from the fact
of their having overcome the same difficulties
and temptations as those they address. Many
a fleeting impression was riveted for time and
eternity, by being taken hold of at once in the
after meeting, and stamped in by earnest brotherly
talk and prayer.

The choice of door-keepers too is very im-
portant. I chose out two of the most gentle-
manly and good-looking of the earnest working-
men for this office ; and I was often amused at
the air with which they handed some poor

6o WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

ragged object, fresh from the public-house, to
his seat, with as much deference as if he had
been the Archbishop of Canterbury himself.
We may smile, but a respectful welcome is
never lost on the sensitive pride of working-
men.

By degrees I was also led to feel the absolute
necessity of some social reforms for any wide-
spread good to be effected. 'It's nothing of a
trade since this here woman has been preaching,'
a publican lamented to a policeman. But all
the more strongly I felt the need of some
substitute for the public-house. We too often
forget that men in that rank of life, however
much attached to their homes, require the society
of their fellows as much as men in our own
rank, some place in which they can see the
newspapers, and talk trade and politics. Their
own homes are too small to allow of their see-
ing their friends in them as we do; and while
the public-house formed a strong public opinion
on the side of evil, I saw the men who had been
influenced for good reduced to pious units in
the narrow circle of their own homes. So by

MEN AND WOMEN 6l

my dear father's influence, and by his giving his
scanty leisure from scientific pursuits to the
labour of raising funds, a Working-men's Club
and Institute was built, and has since proved
very successful, and is in itself a protest against
prevailing intemperance.

It is unnecessary for me to enter into the
causes which laid me aside after two or three
years in an illness which lasted many years,
causes, however, which had nothing to do with
overwork ; or to touch on the reasons which
have since reluctantly obliged me to take up
other work — work not of my own choice, but
which I feel has a greater claim on me as a
woman*

Though no one was found exactly to take
up my work, I learnt that God 'fulfils Himself
in many ways.' Earnest men and women have
devoted their lives to those back streets and
lanes and alleys; and the suburb where I
laboured has realized the wish of an Irish
speaker, embodied in an irresistible pun, that

* See *Work in Brighton;' with a Preface by Florence
Nightingale. Twelfth Edition. Price 6d. (Hatchards.)

62 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

Barnwell might soon become Barnbetter. For
many of my dear friends it has become too re-
spectable, and they have moved on to another
suburb ; thus awaking in my mind the old diffi-
culty which has always troubled me at times,
why the world is round. If it had only a brink,
so that we might be always improving the hope-
less ones in the rear, pushing them on gently
but irresistibly, till if they positively refused
to be bettered, w^e might improve them over
the edge, out of a world which no longer wants
them. As it is we too often push our worst
snail over into our neighbour's garden.

But even in this sphere that has no limiting
sides to it perhaps we gain the best image of
that Love which has no end, the love of the
Cross, * whose breadth is charity, whose length
is eternity, whose height is omnipotence, and
whose depth is unsearchable wisdom.'

CHAPTER V.

EVANGELIZATION.

ET me now dwell a little more
generally on some social questions
which especially affect the welfare of
the working classes, as well as enter a little
more in detail on the best general means of
getting hold of what Dr. Chalmers used to call
the * lapsed classes/ the masses of working-men
and women who, in the expressive elliptical
phrase that has coined itself for the occasion,
'go nowhere.'

In dealing with the religious difficulty, the
fact that so many working-men go to no place
of worship, and are in no vital union with any
section of the Christian Church, of course I
shall be met at the outset with the current
objection of comfortable middle-class wor-

64 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

shippers, that there are plenty of churches and
chapels open now-a-days, that these people live
within the sound of church bells, and if they
go nowhere it is their own fault.

There is a little paper of Nathanael Haw-
thorne's, in which he points out to us the
immense improvements this age of mechanical
inventions has introduced into the journey to
the Celestial City since Bunyan's day. Where
the original wicket gate stood, now stands a
commodious station, where each pilgrim takes
his ticket, labelled Anglican, Methodist, Baptist,
etc., according to the line he travels on, the
Slough of Despond having been long ago filled
in with German Rationalism and French novels,
and bridged over by modern science, for the
Celestial 'Bus to pass to and fro ; ApoUyon's
services have been engaged as stoker and engine-
driver; and we have tunnelled through the
Hill Difficulty and filled up the Valley of
Humiliation with the debris ; only, unfortunately,
quite at the last the writer's mind is darkened
with a doubt whether the destination is quite
the same, whether, after all, we shall not find

EVANGELIZATION. 65

ourselves at the wrong place. But it strikes me
that we have introduced modern improvements
into the parable of the Good Samaritan, as well
as into Bunyan's dear old-fashioned allegory,
of quite as fatal, though of a less extensive
kind. The * Good Samaritan' has no need to ^
get off his beast now-a-days, and go to the
wounded man ' where he is ; ' least of all to go
to the sensational length of giving up his own
beast to him, and himself trudging laboriously
on foot; he contents himself with the reflection
that the inn is close by where he can get
attended to, and it is his own fault if he doesn't
go to it. He needn't trouble himself any longer
with the question whether, as he is half-dead,
he isn't too far gone to care, or to get there, \i
he did care; but rides on, with the comfortable
reflection that so much is being done for people
of his class. Only, in this version of the parable,
one cannot help asking whether the Sam.aritan
has not reverted to the older and commoner
type of his race, those 'who feared the Lord,
and served their own idols.' /

Is it the fault of the bed-ridden cripple that

5

66 IVORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

he does not get up and go to the doctor who
lives close by ; or is it the doctor's fault who
leaves him to perish by refusing to go to him ?
Is it not just the malady of the people who,
perhaps, live in the next street to us, that their
wills are bed-ridden, that they cannot rise and
come, however many churches we may open for
them ? Is it not just this that constitutes their
claim to our help ? And if much is done for
them, before we can rest satisfied, does not the
further question remain, Is it done rightly ? Is
it done with a full understanding of their needs
and with the hearty human fellowship and
sympathy of man to man ?

For I go one step further. Are our Church
services adapted to them, if they did come ?
* What,* says Edward Denison, who went and
lived among the working people in the East
End of London, — *what is the use of telling
people to come to church when they know of
no rational reason why they should; when, if
they go, they find themselves among people
using forms of words which have never been
explained to them ; ceremonies performed which,

E VANG ELIZA TION. 67

to them, are entirely without meaning; sermons
preached which, as often as not, have no mean-
ing-, or, when they have, a meaning inteUigible
only to those who have studied religion all their
lives ? ' *

To us, who from our earliest childhood have
been familiar with the Church prayers, no service
can have quite the same hallowed charm. The
venerable forms, the occasional obsolete words,
the archaic modes of expression, are all to us
like old cathedral stones that bear the weather-
stains of centuries, and the swallow's nest of
yesterday, beautiful with the sorrows and adora-
tions of the past, yet from whence the fresh
aspirations of to-day take heavenward flight.
But do we realise the difficulties they may pre-
sent to uneducated minds, to whom they are
unfamiliar and unhallowed by association } I
remember having this forcibly brought home
to me by a working-man who became an earnest
Christian through my mission services. This
man had not been in any place of worship for

* Letters and Other Writings of the late Edward Denison,
p. 39.

68 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

eighteen years, — I do not mention it as any-
thing particularly unusual, — but as soon as he
had got a decent suit of clothes he went to the
parish church. From his first church-going he
came away in a state of the profoundest bewilder-
ment, and going straight to a friend of mine,
he asked her, ' Ma^am, what is that we says in
church when we all bow our 'eads ? Who was
that feller, Pontius Pilate, who went down into
'ell ? and I did think when a chap once went
there he never comed up again the third day.'-
Yet this man was an intelligent fellow enough,
only give him time to rub off the rust of
his wild and uncared-for life ; and, though I
don't think he ever got over the moral shock
of that unlooked-for coming up of Pontius
Pilate from the place of perdition, or took to
the Church service after it, he certainly be-
came a thoughtful and consistent member of a
chapel.

But apart from our Church service not being
adapted for a Mission-service, the great clothes
difficulty will always block the way in any
regular church or chapel with a well-clad middle-

E VANGELIZA TION, 69

class congregation.* The ordinary working-man,
who goes to no place of worship, has, generally
speaking, no suit of 'Sunday best;' often enough
he has only ' the clothes he stands upright in ; '
not infrequently, in his own expressive verna-
cular, he has drunk the shirt off his back, and
it is simply impossible to get him at once to
form part of a well-dressed congregation. He
feels himself a fustian patch on all that silk and
broad-cloth. The difficulty presses heavily
enough on even a Mission-service, without any
need to add to it ; and long ago, had my sex
permitted it, it would have reduced me to acting
on the energetic utterance of a minister at the
London Conference of clergy and working-men,
* If it is clothes that are your difficulty, I will
preach the gospel to you in my shirt-sleeves
any day.' It even evolves itself out of one's
very success ; what the connexion between

* It must be understood that, in these papers, I am
speaking of the lower substratum of working-men, siich as
exist in every town, not of respectable mechanics, nor of
the large and increasing body of total abstainers, — a great
proportion of whom are absorbed in various Christian deno-
minations.

70 WO/^Jir AMONG WORKING-MEN.

Christianity and broad-cloth is I know not, it
is hidden in the mystery which besets the caiisal
nexus in general ; but it must be a vital one.
In my own Mission-service conversion was always
marked by a suit of black. And nothing but
the excessive crowding, which hid all individual
shortcomings, especially about the nether man,
kept the dread of my heart from being realised,
of growing too respectable.

Such being the difficulties to be overcome,
if ever the Church is to regain her lost ground
with the people, it can only be by having some
simpler shorter service especially adapted to
their wants, and forming a nursery-ground for
both church and chapel. Let them be planted
down at regular intervals in the poorer neigh-
bourhoods, and held in school-rooms or any
large-enough room that offers itself. Let each
parish or congregation have its Mission-service
— as much part of its regular machinery as its
district-visiting, its Sunday-schools, its Bible-
classes, etc. — and let it be as carefully organised
and worked ; and we should soon see a marked
change for the better in our people. Those who

E VANGELIZA TION. 7 1

are aware of the remarkable work of evangeliza-
tion that is going on in Paris among the
working-classes by means of small earnest gather-
ings, held in almost every street, in the face
of all the difficulties presented by Roman
Catholicism, the religious apathy of the people,
and the law that forbids the assembling together
for Protestant worship of more than twenty
people, know all that may be effected by this
agency if made an earnest and thorough use of,
and not treated in the slipshod manner it too
often is.

The service must be held on Sunday. Week-
day services are little or no use for purposes
of evangelization. The very men who want it
most, the careless and indifferent, are much too
tired after their day's work to care to come to a
religious service, which has no attractions for
them. And, besides, so unusual a proceeding
exposes them to being unmercifully * chaffed,'
and therefore requires extra moral courage. It
should be held on Sunday evening, — not the
afternoon, when the men often lie down and have
a sleep, — or at any rate not earlier than half-past

72 WOJ^J^ AMONG WORKING-MEN.

three. And it should not be reduced, as mine
was, to an inconvenient hour from fear of inter-
fering with church hours. Church hours are not
interfered with in the case of those who never
go to church." We have made our ' church
hours ' Molochs long enough, to which the souls
of our people have been sacrificed. The service
itself may consist of the General Confession,
Thanksgiving, and Lord's Prayer — three hymns,
if possible with choruses for those who can't read
to follow, a very few verses of the Bible, not a
whole chapter — an address, and a short extem-
porary prayer, the whole lasting not more than
an hour. Everything should be short, prompt,
and hearty, with no di'agging, and plenty of
variety.

And now as to the speaking, the most impor-
tant point, and always the difficult one.

In the first place it must be good, simple,
hearty, and to the point. The Mission-service
must not be trusted to the first raw curate or
earnest lay stick who offers — men to whom the
incumbent of the parish would never think of
entrusting his own pulpit, knowing that he would

EVANGELIZATION. 73

empty his church if he did. The clergy must
disabuse themselves once for all of the idea that
anything will do for these poor people — they are
so ignorant. Anything will not do for working-
men. The more ignorant they are, the less
accustomed to reHgious forms of speech, the
better speaking they require, the greater the art
needed in the speaker to address them effectively.
Suitable commonplaces will emphatically not go
down with them. They require good strong racy
speaking, and, above all, stamped with the utmost
reality — no fighting with 'extinct Satans,' no
religious phraseology, no fossilized dogmas. The
brawny blacksmith who, wrestling in prayer, and
much perplexed in heart at the strength of evil,
cried out, ' O Lord, the devil is so strong ; but
Thou art stronger ; knock him down, O Lord ! O
Lord, in Thy great goodness, knock him down ! '
is no bad type of the earnestness and directness
and straight-hitting a speaker to working-men
needs, that speaking out of the heart and the
life, to which they never fail to respond.

Only, as old Gurnall says, he must not be
*fed with a spoon too large to go in at his

74 WORJ^ AMONG WORKING-MEN.

mouth,' with long words which he cannot possibly
understand.

It is a curious and most uncomfortable anomaly
that the language chosen to convey eternal realities
is the most unreal and Latinised language there
is, — language in which it would never occur to us
to address one we love, or obtain the necessaries
of existence, or do any of the real work of life.
Pulpit English is the most vicious English in
existence. I have myself heard a clergyman
instinctively do into Latin the Saxon account
of the Demoniac in St. Mark, ' There met Him
a man coming out of the tombs,* which in the
course of his remarks he rendered, 'They were
immediately encountered by an individual pro-
ceeding from the tombs ; * and I have heard
another clergyman inform his congregation of
village clodhoppers that ' our Lord did not in-
dulge in nugatory predictions,' by way of bringing
home to them that He is the faithful and true.
During the Irish famine, the shifts the clergy
were reduced to to avoid any indecorous mention
of the potato in the pulpit were curious, though
why a potato should be more profane than the

E VANGELIZA TlOISf. 75

* hyssop on the wall '• I cannot conceive, since the
same God made them both. Some called it * the
succulent esculent ; ' others alluded distantly tc
it as ' that useful edible which forms so important
a staple of food ; ' while only one Irish clergy-
man was found who, in a kind of Celtic reaction,
courageously informed his congregation that their
contributions had provided thirty starving families
with *good Irish stoo/

Now, cannot we speak to the people in the
English in which Tennyson and Wordsworth
write ? Does it show any real culture to say,
' Ere you resign yourself to repose,' instead of

* Before you go to bed ' ? Cannot we call a
spade a spade, and not 'an agricultural instru-
ment ' ? Not so very long ago I heard an
address in a Mission-service of the very poorest,
from a speaker appointed by a clergyman, which
began thus: 'The note, my fellow-townsmen, I
mean to strike to-night is one of expostulation,*
and the discourse went on to allude to the
transit of Venus, which the people probably set
down as some new kind of cheese, or the last
superfine tea, — the worthy speaker was a grocer

76 WORJC AMONG WORKING-MEN.

by worldly calling, — and ended with a good thick
layer of doctrine, which might have been living
at some remote geological period, probably before
man had made his appearance on the earth, but
which so far as having any vital connexion with
heart, life, or conscience might have been dug
out of the old red sandstone. As the long
words rolled out, I was irresistibly reminded of
a medical man in the north who was noted for
his Johnsonian English. Having on one occa-
sion to prescribe for a dying labourer, he sent
him a draught, labelled *to be taken in a recum-
bent posture.' As to what this might be the
relatives of the dying man were utterly at fault.
They sent over to the linen-draper, to know if
he had a recumbent posture. No, he had never
heard of such a thing. Perhaps it might be
something in the bladder line. Did the butcher
chance to have one } No, he had never heard
of such a thing either. At last, they worked
their way round to an old woman, who never
would allow herself at fault in anything. So she
said, ' Yes, she had one ; but, most unfortunately,
she had just lent itl'

EVANGELIZATION. 77

Now, my one advice to speakers at Mission-
services is, like the old woman, to lend or sell
their ' recumbent postures/ and speak good plain
English. And if good effective speaking does
not come to them by nature, like Dogberry's
reading and writing, why not study those who
are masters of the art, the well-known preachers
of the day, who have gained the ear of the
people ? Why not read some of the old Puritan
writers — Gurnall, Brooks, Flavel, etc. — for racy,
powerful thoughts, or Spurgeon's ' Commentary
on the Psalms/ especially prepared for village
preachers, or Eugene Stock's * Lessons on the
Life of our Lord.'

Perhaps you say you don't like the theology
of the old Puritans or Spurgeon. What does
that matter } You may equally learn from their
way of putting things ; you may borrow their
pitcher, even though you may fill it higher up
the stream where you think the water flows
clearer. Good speaking needs learning, at least
as much as making shoes. And if some good
folk are inclined to say, ' God does not want our
learning/ still less, I would urge, does He want

78 WORK- AMONG WORKING-MEN:

our laziness, if the Divine fire must come from
above, — and no one can lay more stress than I
do that spiritual power is essentially supernatural,
and must be won by prayer and self-surrender to
God, — yet the fuel must come from below, not
without much digging and hewing.

I believe that one reason why working-men, as
a rule, prefer the speaking of ladies, why they
can always be got hold of at least in some
measure by that agency when all others have
failed, is in part that women never wrong their
thoughts with pulpit English, but preserve the
strength and sweetness of their mother tongue ;
and that they speak not from theological systems,
but from the heart and the life, and from that
deep understanding of the wants of the people,
which comes from close and loving contact of
their woman's heart with theirs.

But till we learn like our Master to give the
working-men our best, and not merely the leav-
ings of our middle-class congregations, till we
carefully search out the best speakers for the
Mission-service, without regard to the possibility
of the susceptibilities of excellent Mr. Dryasdust

E VANG ELIZA TIOJST, 79

being wounded by his being passed over, — in one
word, till the good of the working-men becomes
our first thought, tJey will never be won, the
Mission-service will consist, as it so often does,
of a few harmless old women ; and those ribs of
death, empty benches, will everywhere protrude
to prove that it is not a living thing.

Good speaking alone, however, is not enough.
A Mission-service, to be effective, as I have
already said, should be carefully organized, ^Ise
the best speaker is only a head without limbs.
Not only does it need a body of earnest helpers
to create an atmosphere of prayer and fervour,
as well as to follow up any who are impressed,
either at the after-meeting or at their own homes,
but the task of bringing the people in ought to
belong to them. The Mission-service has fortu^
nately no church bells to whose cold iron throats
we can depute the work of saying ' Come,' till
we almost forget how to say it with our tender
human throats, beneath which beats a human
heart. The district visitors and a certain num-
ber of earnest working-men and women should
meet their clergyman once a month in connexion

8o WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

with the Mission-service, for the appointment of
speakers, — if there be no one effective speaker
who will undertake it, — for the apportioning of
work, for hearing of any cases that need his
own visitation, and for earnest prayer. The dis-
trict visitors should be required to know and
report what men and women in their district go
to no place of worship, and, if possible, to see
them personally, and earnestly invite them to the
Mission-service, not merely leaving a message for
the man through his wife, which is of no manner
of use. And the back streets should be appor-
tioned among men and women who will undertake
to go round on the Sunday before the service
and personally ask the people to come, promising
to be there to meet them, and give them a
welcoming smile ; and, in the case of some poor
shy and reluctant fellows, to call for them and
go with them. Many a man will be too shy to
come alone, who will gladly come with another.
I used to tell my working-men, * Don't stick your
arm out like a sign-post, and point a poor fellow
to the meeting ; your arm and mine has got this
bend at the elbow, on purpose that it may

evangelization: %i

bring our lost brother to Christ, link itself
lovingly in with his in true brotherly fashion, and
set him to come along with us.' The streets should
be constantly interchanged at the monthly meet-
ing, so that the invitation may come from a fresh
voice. An illustrated leaflet, with an invitation
to the meeting printed in red ink across the
letter-press, forms a good excuse for knocking
at the door and asking the people to come.

The terrible obstacle to the effective working
of this vital part of a Mission-service lies in that
curious anomaly which is eating out the heart
of our middle-class Christianity, — religious selfish-
ness. So far from our being wiUing to lay down
our lives for the brethren, we are often not
willing to lay down so much as one religious
service, to give up one meal out of many for
the sake of those who are perishing with hunger
so, while the church is crowded, the Mission-
service is too often left with only one or two
to help it with their presence and their prayers.
Here, alas ! is, I fear, the root of the sterility of
much of our Christianity.

But in the difficult work of getting at those

6

82 WORK- AMONG WORKING-MEN.

who are untouched by church or chapel we
must not trust to any one agency. No one
thing will do the work. Fresh agencies must
always be coming in and taking the place of
those that are getting worn out through the
deadening influence of habit.

An earnest letter from the clergyman of the
parish, or from the habitual speaker at the
Mission-service, printed, but enclosed in an enve-
lope,— for the poor are particularly sensitive to any
little mark of respect and individual considera-
tion,— left at every door at the beginning of the
winter's work, will often bring many, and is also a
source of communication between clergy and people.

Singing hymns in procession, if it be well and
reverently done, and not so as to obstruct the
more public thoroughfares when the authorities
may object, forms a sweet and musical peal of
church bells to call the people in. No one
knows the full beauty of that grand old hymn, —

* Onward, Christian soldiers— onward,
Marching as to war,'

till they have pealed it out under the winter stars.
But one of the most effective, yet I must

EVANGELIZATION, 83

confess the most disagreeable way of getting at
the lowest substratum, which must always be
the aim and end of a Mission-service, is Saturday
evening public-house visitation. It was the only
part of my work to which I never could over-
come my intense repugnance ; but 1 would urge
it on any one who is endeavouring to reach our
home heathen. I used to do it in company
with another lady every Saturday evening,
devoting an hour and a half to it, from six to
half-past seven ; later than eight o'clock it would
not be safe for ladies, — alas that it should be
so in a Christian and civilized land ! — besides
being of no use, that terrible law of reversion
to the original type — if we are to accept Mr.
Darwin's theories of the descent of man — which
obtains in the public-house, having taken place
at any later hour, the man having gone back
to the larger short-tailed ape, from which accord-
ing to the great naturalist he originally sprang,
deprived of God's great gift of speech and
reason. But even at the earlier hour we chose,
it was by no means pleasant. We used to call
it going to evening service ; the men are generally

84 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

in that initial stage of drunkenness which makes
a man awfully religious. The sermons I have
had preached to me in the public-house, and
always on the two texts, the shortness of human
life and the necessity of serving God ! It is
not pleasant work, but speaking from my own
wide experience, I can only positively say that
ladies may trust working-men not to insult
them under any circumstances, if they are
making an effort for their good. I cannot quite
promise for the publicans, as probably they do
not consider it an effort for their good ; but I
must say as often as not I have found them most
civil and polite. But even when the contrary, if
it is sharp work, it is also short. One need
only stay long enough to give out a few papers,
with an earnest invitation to the meeting. But
the mere sense that any one loves them and
cares about them enough to xome like the good
Samaritan 'where they are' works wonders, and
makes them think that there must be some-
thing in it after all. * Blow'd if I don't come
and see what it is like for myself,' as a working-
man said in answer -to one of my invitations.

E VANGELIZA TION, 85

A free tea might be given once a year to
the men who, being out at work all day, and
altogether removed from contact with clergy
or district visitor, cannot be got at otherwise, —
a free tea, with much hymn-singing of a loud
cheerful sort, and plenty of good strong speak-
ing of a kind that remembers Sydney Smith's
warning, that * sin is not got out of a man, as
Eve was out of Adam, by casting him into a
deep sleep ; ' not a dreary set-out of funereal
meats, with which our people are too often
regaled, but hearty, humorous speaking, that is
not afraid of shaking off a man's stolid indiffer-
ence by a good laugh, leaving him twice as
ready to receive the graver truths, to gain an
entrance for which must be the speaker's real
aim, — speaking which can hide a good deal of
straight hitting under a racy humorous saying.
I can remember once, however, hitting a little
too hard. I had been extremely annoyed at
the bestial behaviour in the public-house of some
of the drinking men who, I knew, were present ;
and having spoken with much warmth of my
love for working-men, and of all I had learnt

86 WOJ^IC AMONG WORKING-MEISr.

from them, I couldn't help making an exception,
and saying, that there was one place where I
did not like working-men at all, and that was
in the public-house. ' Out of a public-house a
working-man always knows how to behave to
a lady ; he would never think of demeaning him-
self by begging. I'd trust myself anywhere else
to the care of working-men. But in the public-
house, if a lady ventures in and gives them a
few papers, or asks them to meet her on a
Sunday, what is the first thing they have to
say to her } " Gi'e us twopence for a pot of
beer." Just like,' I added, with some asperity,
' a pig beginning to grunt for his wash the
moment you approach his sty!' Up rose a
hoary-headed doctor, and said, * I think that's
rather hard.' He paused. There was a sup-
pressed stamping of feet and clapping of hands
from the drinking men, — then he went on in
the same dry, quiet tone, — ' hard, I mean, on the
pig' Sudden fall of countenance in the audi-
ence. * Did you ever see a pig go into a gin-
shop at all ."* and did you ever see a pig take
a drop too much ? and, above all, did you ever

E VANG ELIZA TION. 87

see a pig go home and knock about his sow ? '
This last question proved irresistible ; a roar
of laughter greeted it, the drinking men felt
they had got the worst of it, and nine of them
joined the temperance club that night.

Only I would urge that free teas should not be
used as a regular incentive to bring the people
together to hear the gospel. This has been done
in the East-end of London, and in other places,
to a degree that has disgusted the more indepen-
dent working-men and turned them against religion.
Our Lord fed the people after they had endured
fatigue and hunger to hear the gospel ; He did
not feed them as an inducement to get them to
hear. Great as is the temptation to have constant
recourse to that energetic organ, the human
stomach, that never knows any religious deadness,
but through all the changes and chances of this
mortal life makes its voice heard the same, I can-
not but believe a systematic appeal to the animal
appetites must be debasing, and must act in the
nature of a bribe, making the very ground rotten
under one's feet.

In addition to these agencies I wish we made

88 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

more use of the children and all the fatherly love
and pride which lurks in a working-man's heart,
even where it seems most absent. I wish the
clergy would adopt that pretty picturesque custom
which still, I believe, obtains in the north, of
marching all the Sunday-school children on Whit-
Sunday in bright procession through the streets,
all clad in their Sunday best, with banners flying,
and singing hymns at the top of their glad young
voices. Surely the sight of all those round and
happy faces turned heavenward, the way of life
strewn with fresh spring flowers, might awaken
many a heart trodden down by toil and monoto-
nous days from its sleep of indifference, and be the
glad chimes to summon together a large gathering
of the fathers and mothers to be held in the
church after service time, or in the mission-room
if spacious enough. Why should there be so
little brightness and beauty in our Protestantism,
so little to break through the monotonous ugli-
ness of back streets }

In conclusion, I would earnestly point out what
is one radical defect of the Church of England
with regard to the working-man, what more than

EVANGELIZATIOA. 89

even her long words, long services, and pulpit
English, led so many of my working-men to
leave the branch of the Christian Church that
had called them to Christ, and join Dissenting
bodies, — a defect which, if it cannot be remedied,
will always prevent the Established Church from
being, what every one who loves her services must
long to see her, the Church of the people. The
Church of England, in one word, gives the work-
ing-man nothing to do. He feels he forms no
integral part of her, that he is in no vital con-
nection with her, that he is not built into her
structure, but is left a loose stone, lying about
for any one to tumble over. Methodism, on the
contrary, lays hold of him, and makes him her
own. He becomes a local preacher or a tract
distributor, a class leader or a Sunday-school
teacher, or has the care of a Band of Hope, or
works in connection with a Mission-service, or the
temperance cause, while he has a voice in the
affairs of the chapel and in the choice of his
minister. Is it any wonder, then, that, as a rule,
our earnest working-men leave the church and
join the chapel ?

90 WORIC AMONG WORKING-MEN:

It is curious to see how this vital defect in-
fects all the relations of the clergy with the
working-man. For instance, it is a common thing
in some parishes to gather together the fathers
of the children who are being educated in the
Church schools for a social meal, followed by a
general meeting. I was present at one such
meeting, where there were some four to five
hundred working-men. Had it been a political
meeting, any man with a grievance would have
felt he had a right to stand up and speak ; a good
many would have joined in with some rough com-
ments on the speeches made, possibly greatly to
the speaker's embarrassment, but still with at
least the admirable result of making the men feel
that the political institutions of their country are
their own, that they have a voice in them even
when they have no vote, that the member who
addresses them is emphatically their member.
But as it was only a meeting got up by the
Church — the Church in which, in theory at least, a
man has a still closer ownership than in the State,
the Church of which the individual stones purport
o be the man himself — not one of those five

E VANGELIZA TION. 9 1

hundred men were expected, or allowed, to take
the smallest part in the meeting. Some four or
five clergymen addressed them. One, being a
Scotciiman, exhorted them to form habits of
scientific observation, and collect facts, after the
example of Hugh Miller, while his hearers, being
very ignorant, were probably ransacking their
memories to try and recollect what part of the
Bible Hugh Miller came in. But though one or
two spoke admirably, not one of those five clergy-
men ever thought of saying to those men, * Come
now, you are the fathers of the children we are
educating ; you stand up and criticise our work.
Let us have your opinion on it. Tell us any way
•you think it could be better done. How do you
think your child is getting on t How do you
think we could get the children to be more
regular } We are trying to educate them for
God ; tell us where you think we fail, and how
you think we could turn out better work ' — so
getting the men to feel that they had a voice in it
all, and clergy, and fathers, and teachers were all
engaged in a common work. No ; there they sat,
as dumb as sheep, rows and rows of patient buckets

92 WORK' AMONG IVOR KING- MEN".

to be pumped into. One man, a good speaker, told
me he did get on his legs to move a vote of thanks,
but he was immediately collared by a church-
warden, and cold water thrown on his laudable
endeavour, as if he were a dangerous explosive.

Now, I can only say that this kind of thing will
not do for working-men. If the Church of Eng-
land will insist on making herself an exclusively
aristocratic institution, where only broadcloth is
allowed a voice and a work, she must expect to
lose the democracy. Yet, surely such a Church
is in a most anomalous position ; recognizing a
Working-man as her Lord and Head, yet tacitly
excluding working-men. Surely no Christian
Church would wish to find her prototype in a.
tailor's dog, whose master assured me he never
would lie down on cloth at less than nine shillings
a yard, and always flew at fustian ! Must not
the note of every true Christian Church be that
to the poor the Gospel is preached, and among
her evangelists and workers, as of old, are some
who are chosen out of the people .-* Working-
men are, by the necessities of their birth, demo-
cratic men, and as men, not as babies, must they

EVANGELIZATION. 93

be treated. They stoutly refuse to be strapped
up in ecclesiastical perambulators and trundled
along the way of salvation by either lay or clerical
nurses. They hate ecclesiasticism in all its forms.
But let the clergy treat them as brother men, let
them give them their two great desiderata, work
and a voice, speak to them in plain English,
preach to them the human Christ, and show them
hearty human fellowship, and they will find no
more attached members of the Church of England
than they would become.

Perhaps I shall be asked, What work "i Surely
there is no difficulty in finding, now-a-days, for
every man his work. The Church of England
Temperance movement, with the Working-men's
Clubs and Bands of Hope that should belong to
it, alone affords a wide field for work. On work
in connexion with Mission-services I have already
spoken. Where, as is frequently the case, an
earnest, consistent working-man shows himself a
good speaker, a working-man's mission to the
neighbouring villages, with tract distribution,
might be undertaken, or they might take a few
back streets as their field of labour.

94 IVOJ^A^ AMONG WORKING-MEN.

Do we not practically ignore the fact that our
Lord chose the Apostles of the world mainly from
working-men ; that, probably, He had some good
reason for this choice ; and that, therefore, an
immense, and, so far as the Established Church
goes, an unused evangelistic power may be hidden
away in our working-men ? Surely it would be
possible to organise the earnest working-men in
every parish, and give them Church-work, and
make them realise their Christian priesthood.

Another valuable agency, in which the help of
our earnest working-men would be wanted, and
which I should like to see adopted by the Church,
is Adult Sunday-schools. These have been
turned to admirable account by the Society of
Friends. An Adult Sunday-school at Birming-
ham numbers a thousand men, meeting at half-
past seven in the morning. One at Hitchin
numbers some three hundred men, meeting at
half-past two in the afternoon. Reading and
writing are taught, the lower classes by working-
men, the higher by educated men and women.
Many a man who is too tired to learn on the
week nights, thankfully embraces the opportunity

EVANGELIZATION, 95

presented by the long unoccupied Sunday hours,
which he would otherwise have spent in the public-
house. The school concludes with a short reli-
gious address and prayer. I trust I shall not
have to meet any objection to writing being taught
on the Sunday. As a grave mild-eyed Quaker
replied to such a foolish Judaizing objector,
'Friend, does thee not think that pot-hooks are
better than the pot-house on the Lord's day } '
When a man has written six times down in his
copy-book, with much labour of his horny palms,
and much unwonted attitude of his whole person,
* Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with
good ; ' or, ' No drunkard shall inherit the king-
dom of heaven ; ' there is not much fear of his
forgetting that text.

At Birmingham the movement has been taken
up by the Dissenting bodies, thousands of work-
ing-men being thus under religious and secular
instruction. But I am not aware of the Esta-
blised Church having adopted this valuable agency.

The real difficulty lies of course in the want of
workers, our earnest capable ones being already
used up for Sunday-schools and Bible-classes.

96 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN

But surely many middle-class men would under-
take work of this kind, who do not feel at all
called to Sunday-school teaching or district-
visiting ; while the additional Board-schools would
furnish us the buildings, hours being so arranged
that the school might adjourn for the address, as
at Hitchin, to some more spacious building, or
perhaps to the church after afternoon service.

CHAPTER VI.

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES.

HAVE often been struck of late by the
truth of the observation made by one
of our most original but litcle-known
thinkers,* how far our moral faculties have lagged
behind our intellectual ; and how little we have
as yet learnt to introduce the intellectual methods
into our moral life, to act on the same methods
as we think.

At the very time I was conducting my moral
experiment with my rough working-men, my dear
father was conducting some scientific experiments
for Government, on the effect of pressure on heat.
But on what curiously different methods we
started ! To have a due regard not to some, but

* See 'Life and Letters of James Hinton. Edited by
Ellice Hopkins. With an Introduction by Sir William Gull.'
Second edition. C. Kegan Paal & Co.

98 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

to all the facts, to see everything not isolated,
but in its relations, to bring every conclusion again
to the test of facts — in one word, accuracy of
regard, this is the fundamental principle of modern
science. Had my father only attended to the
small class of facts in which he had a personal
interest as telling for him, and tending to confirm
some mathematical calculations he had made, not
only would his character as a scientific man have
been destroyed, but such a procedure, we see at
once in the intellectual life, would lead to disaster
and certain wrong result. But though this is often
precisely what we do in the moral life, attending
only to the small class of facts that make for our
own self-interest, and disregarding all others, it is
not as clearly recognized that this must lead to
disaster and wrong result there as well as in our
intellectual life. As long as we regard a few
abstract moral laws, as long as we try and love
God, and pay our debts, and speak the truth, and
don't take things that do not belong to us, we
think we may centre our lives as much as we
like about ourselves, and the facts that belong
especially to us, and leave out of consideration

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 99

the facts of the lives of others as that which does
not concern us. We do not recognize that we
must live in some sort of relation with the lives
in the next back street ; that our moral world,
humanity itself, is as much an organic whole
as the physical world of science, of which
every part is dependent on every other ; and
in which, therefore, any element left out must
produce wrong result or moral disorder. So far
from recognizing this, we look upon a regard to
the facts of the poorer lives around us, as a sort of
superfluous goodness which it may be very nice
to have, but which the majority of people may
be excused for being wholly without. ' I have no
taste for that kind of thing,' is the usual remark,
without any of that sense of shame which a
scientific man would feel in allowing that he was
habitually violating the very conditions of in-
tellectual order. Yet Christianity has but one
voice, not. Save your own soul, not. Take care of
your own goodness, — but, love, have a response to
every claim upon you whether of God, of your
own soul, or of others ; take in all the facts, corre-
late your own life to the lives around you, be

loo WORK AMONG WORKING-MEJST.

serving them directly or indirectly. How is it
we put aside this voice, and so often substitute
for it the traditions of men ? We know that
nothing will do instead of truth to fact in our
intellectual life ; but we think that other things
— domestic virtues, punishments, poor laws, culture
— will do instead of love, which is the truth to
fact of the moral world.

/ And so it comes to pass, that side by side with
that magnificent intellectual order which we call
modern science, with its ever-widening achieve-
ments, there rises up the intolerable disorder of
our moral and social life. The left-out elements
spread confusion and wrong through the whole.
The vast outcast class of lost women and children
which exists at the very heart of our Christian
civilizations, and whom we pure and educated
Christian women carefully shutter and curtain out
of our homes and very thoughts, corrupts our own
sons, debases our manhood, poisons our national
health, and degrades our legislation. Our selfish
absorption in our own interests, caught up and
echoed by the working classes, gives rise to a
strife between labour and capital which perpetually

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. loi

threatens our trade, and engenders hatred and
bitterness ; while the huddled-up Hves in our
courts and back streets originate the germs of
disease which visit impartially the rich man's
house and the poor man's hovel, and indirectly
give rise to drunkenness and crime, which burden
us with heavy calendars and poor-rates, and darken
and sadden our moral world. "^

And so also it was that, brought up as we all
are more or less to disregard the facts of the lives
of others, and have our eyes turned inward to
certain great moral principles and religious truths,
rather than outward to the conditions which must
determine the application and working of those
principles and truths, my father and I worked at
our two experiments on wholly different methods.
While he was not content with laying down some
great well-known physical laws, and then, finding
the facts not in accordance with them, laying the
blame on the disorder of the physical world and
the corruption of the universe, but patiently set
to work to find out the disturbing causes, I found
myself preaching the great truths of Christianity,
and the fundamental principles of morality, very

102 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEJSr.

much surprised at the wrong results I came to in
the lives of my hearers, but never giving a glance
to the disturbing causes, or patiently searching
out the unrecognized influences which were shap-
ing those lives to evil. I am well aware that there
is an arbitrary element in the moral world, in 'the
unruly wills and affections of sinful men,' which
there is not in the physical world ; but that does
not excuse us from the additional disorder and
confusion we bring in by not recognizing the true
method that might reduce much of the arbitrary
element to the necessity which is perfect freedom,
of moral law, of righteousness and holiness ; by
not recognizing the right aim, by not training our
moral emotions by every gift of divine grace,
every human endeavour, first of all to respond to
every legitimate claim, and then to take in all
the facts which must determine the form of the
response in action ; by not endeavouring to see
things in their relations in the world of conduct,
as well as in the world of science and intellect,
and get rid of the non-regard * out of our moral

* I follow Mr. Hinton's example in using this rather out-
landish word, as being the only word common to both the

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 103

life, as, since the rise of inductive science, we have
already got rid of it out of our intellectual life.

Accordingly, in my first efforts to live in some
sort of helpful relation with these rough men
around me, I found myself in the position of a
child who goes on perpetually doing a sum which
is copied down wrong, and perpetually comes to
a wrong result ; while the great Master was ever
saying to me, * Look, my child, look, see if the
conditions are right' At length, by dint of much
suffering over wrong results, I began to open my
eyes and look at the facts of these men's lives,
and to feel the absolute necessity of some social
reforms before any wide-spread good could be
effected. It was not much use preaching that
their bodies were temples of the Holy Ghost,
when the outer courts of that temple were the
public-house every Saturday night. It is up-hill
work inculcating thrift and saving habits on our
English working-men, when they have no greater

intellectual and moral life, denoting want of truth and
accuracy in the one, and selfishness in the other, selfishness
being not a positive thing, but simply not looking, not
regarding any facts but those that personally regard us.

104 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

inducements to save than two-and-a-half per cent.,
or the risks of a but too often insolvent benefit-
club, with the forfeiture of parish relief as an ad-
ditional stimulus to those whose aims and tradi-
tions are low. It is mockery to enforce chastity,
and decent habits, and reverence for womanhood,
on those who are huddled up like pigs in one
room every night.

It is, therefore, on these social questions that I
want to offer a few remarks and suggestions before
concluding these notes on work.

First in order comes the great drinking question.
My experience was the same as that of every
other worker, that the public-house is the open
grave of all our efforts for the good of the people.

Perhaps my friend the publican who wailed
to the policeman that * it was nothing of a trade
since this here woman has been preaching,' might
have comforted his heart had he known how com-
pletely the victorious enemy felt worsted by ' the
trade.' I knew but too well that when the wave of
religious enthusiasm had passed, the public-house
was there to resume its fatal influence. And,
alas ! men with too often hereditary drinking

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 105

habits in their blood, under the pressure of con-
stant temptation suppHed by nearly a hundred
public-houses, were but too often falling back
into their old vice.

I am most anxious on this difficult social pro-
blem, which at present is so completely baffling
the wisest heads and strongest hearts, not to seem
as if I wished to discourage any efforts that are
being made, or to deny the wisdom and necessity
of ' diversity of operations ' animated by one spirit
of love to our people, and a common desire to get
rid of our national enemy. But I cannot help
questioning whether we have as yet fully mastered
the conditions of the problem, whether we have a
due regard to all the facts, whether there are not
left out elements which are reducing all our efforts
at solving the problem to confusion.

One thing at least is certain. The public-house
in some form or other is a necessity. Let us at
least so far realise the conditions of a working-
man's life as to recognize this. Working-men, I
repeat, are not differently constituted from other
men ; however domestic a man may be, he requires
the society of his fellows, he needs some place

106 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

where he can see the papers, and where he can talk
trade and politics. In our own rank, a man can
see society in his own house, or in those of his
friends, while most professional work is more or
less social in its character. But the working-man
cannot receive his friends in the narrow limits of
his own house, and manual labour , is generally
accompanied by conditions unfavourable to inter-
course. The public-house is the only place where
he can see the more expensive public prints, keep
himself au coiirant with public affairs, where he
can transact the business of clubs, etc., where he
can hear of jobs of work. The club-house, though
not ranking above a convenient luxury in our
class, is an absolute necessity to working-men.

But can the public-house as at present con-
stituted ever be reformed, even by that potent
moraliser of the British mind — an Act of Parlia-
ment } Even if, in the face of the enormous
vested interests, we could get a really effective
legislation, is it not radically vicious, a decayed
tooth in the social organization, only capable of
the drastic remedy of extraction }

Not only is a man forced to take alcoholic

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES, 107

drinks for the good of the house, — tea, coffee, and
other unintoxicating beverages not being pro-
vided ; not only are all its traditions and its public
opinion on the side of drunkenness, so that no
one feels disgraced if a man exceeds, but its tenure
is too often hopelessly bad. The majority of
public-houses are owned by brewers, which in itself
secures the drink traffic being doubly and arti-
ficially stimulated. Some of the largest public-
houses in the place where I worked, were on what
is called ' barrel rent,' that is, the publican had the
house rent-free on condition of his consuming a
certain number of barrels of beer. In Liverpool
the public-houses are getting more and more into
the hands of a few wealthy brewers, whose profits
are so enormous, that even if they and not their
managers were made responsible, they would still
be beyond the reach of a system of legislative
fines, and can afford to snap their fingers at the
law. At present they are practically irresponsible ;
they offer up their managers as a scape-goat to
the claims of the law, and put in another who does
the same thing, only with a little more caution.
If flying from this evil we take refuge in the

a_

io8 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

Gothenburg system, and advocate the public-
houses being bought up and vested in the town
council, — to say nothing of the enormous outlay
to begin with, it places what one cannot but feel
to be a dangerous power in the hands of that
body, involving for its right exercise an incorrup-
tibility, a disinterested public spirit, and a practical
wisdom which have not proved universally charac-
teristic of corporations, with that want of individual
responsibility which Sydney Smith characterized
in his caustic remark, that ' they had neither a
body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned/

Turn which way you will — that is to say if the
vested interests permitted us to turn at all, which
at present they do not — one gets gored by one or
the other horn of a dilemma : make your licensing
system strict, and you throw the trade into the
hands of a few wealthy monopolists, who have
capital enough to render their sumptuous gin-
palaces irresistibly attractive, power enough to
defy or evade the law. On the other hand make
your licensing system loose, give up restrictive
measures, and go in for free trade, and you have
the multiplication of public-houses, which wrung

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 109

the cry from the poor wife endeavouring to shep-
herd her husband home from his work, ' I could
get him past two, but, oh, sir, I can't get him
past ten ! '

To the permissive bill I do not allude. If the
story of the Kilkenny cats be, indeed, the great
epic of humanity under a figure, then let us go in
for it — the two tails I presume representing two
empty beer-pots, which will survive the destruction
of our race. If an internecine conflict renewed
every year, with the hatred, the party spirit, the
corruption that belongs to internecine conflicts,
will add to the beauty and dignity of human
life ; if a remedy so drastic that its only cure is
amputation, without the power of palliation if
amputation is impossible, is the last and most
enlightened outcome of moral therapeutics ; if a
system so partial in its operation that, in closing
the public-houses of one district, it must neces-
sarily glut the public-houses of the next, com-
mends itself as likely to conduce to public order,
or minister to the good of the part unenlightened
as well as part enlightened whole — let us have it.
If there is no alternative it may possibly be our

no WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

duty to go in for it, as better on the whole than
the present state of things ; but it certainly will
not be with a * light heart ' on the part of those
who reflect, or who are endowed with less irre-
pressible spirits than Sir Wilfrid Lawson *

I would, therefore, urge that the public-house
is vicious in principle, that it contains no moral
element, which, in dealing with so powerful an
agent as intoxicants, is an absolutely necessary
factor, and one which cannot be supplied by

^ Since writing the above Sir Wilfrid Lawson and his
supporters have offered to unite in supporting some more
moderate and workable measure, in the hope that it may-
prove a step towards ultimately passing their Permissive
Bill ; so we may now hope that some common platform may
be devised which will unite our scattered forces against the
common enemy. Surely the success of the school-board in
dealing with the vast question of elementary education points
to some sort of licensing-board elected by the ratepayers,
and not involved, like the Town Council, in a multitude of
other interests and the mazes of local politics, but brought
into existence solely for grappling with the difficulties that
beset the regulation of the liquor traffic. Why should not
some wealthy public-spirited town like Birmingham, which
can re-create a pubhc library in a few days, be empowered
by Parliament to try the experiment, and work out useful
results for the rest of England ?

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. . in

legislative enactments from without. Practically
it seems to be constantly overlooked that the old
tavern bore precisely the same fruits in our own
class as it is now bearing in the lower classes :
that fifty or sixty years ago our class was as given
to drinking habits as the working-classes are now ;
and not till the club took the place of the tavern
did a better state of public opinion arise, and a
consequent diminution of drunkenness.

I cannot, therefore, but feel that the energy of
the country has gone too much into a direct attack
upon 'the drink,' without sufficiently considering
its causes, leading to a considerable waste of
energy in the endeavour to make all men total
abstainers, which seems to me a wholly visionary
enterprise ; and giving rise to that curious modern
Manichaeism which places the sin in the drink
itself, in what Milton calls the * matter of the sin,'
leading even educated men to commit themselves
in public to such an absurdly identical proposition
as * the cause of drunkenness is the drink,' which
conveys about as much valuable information as
if I were to say the cause of shoes is the shoe-
maker.

112 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEISf.

Let me not be misunderstood. I believe our
debt to total abstinence is immense. It has led to
a searching investigation of the uses of alcohol
that would not have taken place under the pres-
sure of a less extreme system, and which has
already introduced the most extensive modifi-
cations into medical practice and private habits,
and will probably work a good deal further in
this direction. It has convinced us of the utter
absurdity of our drinking customs, of the daily
excess we are often guilty of in amount even
when considering ourselves patterns of sobriety,
and of the extreme danger of having recourse to
alcohol on ordinary occasions of nervous exhaus-
tion and fatigue, instead of adopting Sir William
Gull's simple plan of taking a few raisins when
too tired for ordinary food. But however great
a work total abstinence is doing in hygiene,
always so closely allied to our moral life, and
with whatever loving reverence I look on the
personal sacrifice, in countless cases not for them-
selves but for others, which has given rise to so
large a body of total abstainers, as a cure for the
great moral evil of drunkenness, it has the same

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 113

inherent weakness as all restrictive systems, and
while conferring much partial benefit, will fail in
its wider aim, as celibacy in the middle ages failed
as a cure for the evils of licentiousness. Intem-
perance now increases in the teeth of all its efforts,
admirable as these efforts have been. It will
always remain, I believe, a useful factor in that
exceedingly complex thing, human life, necessary
for some, and often a help, even though rather an
ascetic help, towards realising that * plain living
and high thinking,' in which modern life, in its
rebound from asceticism, is so grievously wanting.
As a protest against the present excess, and as
an expression of fellowship and sympathy with
those who are trying to overcome their drinking
habits, thoughtful people might do well to adopt
it, if they are able ; but exalted into a system, and
looked upon not as a cure, but as the only cure
of intemperance, I fear it is doomed to disappoint-
ment. It is for this reason I regret so much of
the energy of the country having gone so exclu-
sively into this channel, and a direct attack upon
* the drink,' instead of on the causes of the drink.

To take an instructive simile from Herbert

8

114 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

Spencer: — ^You see that this wrought iron plate
is not flat ; it sticks up a little towards the left,
" cockles," as we say. How shall we flatten it ?
Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the
part that is prominent. Well, here is a hammer,
and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder,
you say. Still no effect. Another stroke. Well,
there is one, and another, and another. The
prominence remains, you see : the evil is as great
as ever, greater, indeed. But this is not all. Look
at the warp which the plate has got near the
opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now
curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it.
Instead of curing the original defect we have
produced a second. Had we asked an artizan
practised in " planishing," as it is called, he would
have told us that no good was to be done, but
only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting
part. He would have taught us how to give
variously directed and specially adjusted blows
with a hammer elsewhere, so attacking the evil
not by direct, but indirect actions. The required
process is less simple than you thought. Even a
sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES, 115

after those common-sense methods in which you
have so much confidence.' * '

Now, have we not, in Herbert Spencer's words,
hit down too directly at drunkenness, aiming
directly at the results, instead of indirectly at the
causes, so that, as in the iron plate, the evil has
grown and is growing in the very face of all our
efforts ? Should we not meet with more success if
we were steadily to recognize these three points:
first, that the public-house of entertainment is a
necessity in the working-man's life, and cannot be
suppressed ; secondly, that the public-house, the
tavern, as presenting no moral element, except an
evil one, is radically defective, and subject to
abuses; thirdly, that the club, with its absence
of vicious self-interest enlisted in the drink traffic,
with its esprit de co7'ps, and its character to sustain,
does present, both positively and negatively, the
necessary moral influences to control the use of
intoxicants, or to dispense with them altogether,
as may be thought best ; and if, while still endea-
vouring to procure an amendment of our licensing
laws, we were to throw our chief energies into
Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology, chap, xi., 271.

Ii6 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

getting the club substituted for the public-
house ?

With regard to the basis on which these clubs
are established, whether on total abstinence prin-
ciples or not, I can only state that so far as in-
temperance is concerned it is not a vital question.
The majority of the working-men's clubs, now
amounting to upwards of eight hundred, are not
teetotal ; but there is no drunkenness among their
members. Even when spirits as well as beer are
admitted this is the case ; the consumption in one
London club, for many hundreds of men, only
amounting to two or three bottles a week. The
large club-house which was raised by my dear
father's exertions in connection with my work, was
at first opened on total abstinence principles, but
beer has been since admitted with no evil results.
Indeed, Mr. Hodgson Pratt, the Chairman of the
Working-Men's Club and Institute Union, states
that their almost invariable experience is that the
quantity of intoxicants consumed steadily dimi-
nishes after the first opening of a club. In one large
club in the North they doubled their members and
halved their consumption of beer by the end of the

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES, 117

first year. On a rough north-country fellow being
asked the reason of this anomalous result, 'Well,
sir, I dunno' how it is ; but ye see we've so mooch
a gooin' on with lectures, and singin', and readin's,
and entertainments, that somehoo we've no time
to think aboot the beer.* The beer was in fact,
as our American friends say, fairly 'crowded out.'
In another very large club lately formed in the
East End of London among the lowest coster-
mongers, the members are possessed with a raging
desire to improve their minds, while at the same
time they greatly object to being preached at.
Amongst other distinguished men, they sent a
deputation to Cardinal Manning to request him to
come and address them on Sunday, but added
that they made only two stipulations with His
Eminence, that he must not talk to them about
religion, and he must not talk to them about
temperance! Like a wise man, he at once cor-
dially accepted their invitation, and was listened
to by a most attentive and appreciative audience,
the men sitting with their pots of beer before
them in case His Eminence proved a thought
dry, their wives sitting peacefully by their sides

Ji8 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

with the last baby at their breast; and I have
no doubt no one would have suspected from
the nature of the discourse the severe surgical
operation the eloquent cardinal had submitted
to at their hands, of having both his legs
cut off.

Of course, where the rough and costermonger
element is large, some time must be allowed for
their gradually working up to the standard of
sobriety and choice language we should like ; but
at the same time, let us be thankful that the
drunkenness that fills the mouth with oaths and
obscenity, and vents itself in kicks to the wife
and blows to the child, is got rid of. The mere
fact that they get pure undrugged beer goes a
long way in itself to secure this result. At first
they don't quite know what to make of it, but
they soon grow very much to prefer it. And the
sense of esprit de corps, of the character of the
club to keep up, and the growing feeling that
drunkenness is disgraceful and wasteful, does the
rest. Indeed the sooner we disabuse ourselves of
the idea that a working-man cannot control him-
self unless he be bandaged up with pledges and

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 119

restrictions the better. Once rid them of a vicious
public-house system, it will be found that their
clubs are, as a rule, as sober and well-conducted
as ours.

* But why not advocate the establishment of
coffee-palaces, which are open to all, and where
any one could go and get good coffee when he
pleases, just as freely as he can go to a public-
house } ' perhaps some one will ask ; * why restrict
/t to the members of a club } why not throw the
building open to the public } *

Do you quite understand the problem you
have got to solve ? I answer to those who talk
thus. Doubtless coffee-palaces are admirable
things, and I not only advocate them, but ad-
vocate their being multiplied tenfold in every
large town. They will do much to educate all
classes alike out of our present ridiculous de-
pendence on alcoholic drinks, as if they were
the necessary concomitant of every social and
kindly feeling. But however important is the
function coffee-palaces may fulfil, they will
not prove a substitute for the pubHc-house, in
other words, they may take the outworks of

120 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

intemperance, but they will leave its citadel un-
touched. As a rule working-men do not use
them as an evening resort, for the simple reason
that they do not afford quiet separate rooms
where they can feel at home, and where they
can smoke their pipes and do as they like. And
I would earnestly point out it is the evening
resort that must ever be the stronghold of
drunkenness. Men don't go to the public-house
on purpose to get drunk. In all my wide
experience I have only known one case of a
man who went with the deliberate intention of
getting drunk, who sat down all by himself
and went steadily at it. It is the company
and good fellowship that lead to it, and what
we want is something that takes hold of this
company and good fellowship feeling, and makes
it a force on the side of decent behaviour, as
the public-house takes hold of it and makes it
a force on the side of indecent behaviour; that
makes it a principle of orderly conduct, instead
of a principle of disorderly rows ; and this the
club element, and that element alone, does,
with suitable premises necessary to its develop-

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 121

ment, and of which the club must have the
exclusive ownership.

But even in those rare cases where the upper
premises of a coffee-palace are let off for the
exclusive use of a working-man's club, there is
the great disadvantage of the club being forced
to adopt total abstinence principles, whether they
wish it or not, since intoxicants are not allowed
on the premises. In the case of voluntary-
teetotalers, this would lead to no evil ; but with
those who are not, it leads to their going to
the public-house to get the glass of beer which
they cannot procure at their club. And I would
again urge that you will never attack drunken-
ness in the mass on principles of total absti-
nence. Admirable and successful as its efforts
are with the individual, the mass will never
come under its influence. Why, the mass of
the clergy and ministers of religion, certainly
taking their small pay and hard work, the most
self-denying class of men we have, are not total
abstainers. Why do we expect of working-men
a self-denial which in the mass we do not practise
ourselves ? Are God's ten commandments so

122 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

very easy to keep that we must be perpetually
adding an eleventh of our own ? Let us master
the ten first before we go on to an eleventh,
which makes it a sin for a working-man, not for
ourselves, to take a glass of small beer in his
club.

But, at the risk of wearisome repetition, I
must again say, that when you admit intoxicants
you must also secure a moral element, the social
esprit de corps of a well-organized club, to con-
trol them. The admission of beer into coffee-
palaces and British-Workmen, would, I fear, in
the end, generate the old abuses of the public-
house over again.

I trust, however, because I advocate the club
principle as a good one, I shall not be accused
of the folly of looking upon clubs as a com-
plete panacea. Clubs are no ideal institutions,
they are liable to abuse like everything else.
One may drink condemnation out of the chalice
itself, if one be so minded. Many working-
men's clubs are, I have no doubt, low and
secularist in tone, and a few may be accom-
panied with grave abuses, though these latter

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 123

are the exception. But I contend that the want
of a higher tone is in great part owing to the
life of the Christian Church, and the efforts ol
educated men having flowed almost exclusively
into other channels. Had there been earnest
co-operation, on the part of the clergy especially,
with the working-men in their movement for
securing some respectable substitute for the
public-house, had there been that hearty min-
gling of educated and uneducated on Club Com-
mittees, the tone of the existing clubs would
unquestionably be higher, and working-men
would not have once more discovered that
modern Christianity is out of sympathy with
them and their difficulties, that it has no keen
understanding of them and their wants, and how
best to meet them, and would not have learned
a fresh lesson in their favourite thesis, that
they 'don't see the good of religion/

I would, therefore, have every clergyman feel
that the parish is simply disgraced that offers no
substitute for the public-house; that he has no
right to preach the gospel while leaving his people
hopelessly exposed to a sure and deadly evil, any

1^4 IVORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

more than he would have to preach the laws of
health over an open drain. Meetings of working-
men should be at once held, some well-known and
popular speaker should be secured, bills being
distributed at all the public-houses, and left at
each door ; some local doctor should display
gorgeously-coloured diagrams of the results of
drinking to the internal organs, the inflammation
being emphasized by much expenditure of ver-
milion ; statistical statements should be made, both
general and local, of the amount of money spent
in drink, and what the money might effect if spent
on their own homes, and an earnest appeal made
to the better man in them, while an offer of help
should be made to meet the expenses of starting
a club of their own in some temporary room or
existing public-house, if such can be found.* It
is a curious fact, and one that is a source of
some anxiety to those who are interested in the
club movement, and see in it one of the most

* Any one wishing to start a Working-Men's Club has only
to apply to the Secretary of the Working-Men's Club and
Institute Union, 150, Strand, and he will be at once supplied
with every possible information of the most valuable and
practical kind.

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 125

hopeful and practical ways of getting rid of in-
temperance, that owing to the want of public
interest and co-operation, wealthy brewers are
beginning to offer to advance the funds for esta-
bhshing the proper premises for a working-man's
club, on condition, of course, of securing the custom
of the club in addition to a fair rate of interest on
their money. I do not myself think this a fatal
arrangement by any means, the brewer having no
tool like the publican to exalt his interests at the
price of the public good ; and as brewers are born
with consciences like other men, there are many
who would doubtless very much prefer to carry on
a profitable business without the sense of bringing
wide-spread misery and ruin into so many homes,
which must occasionally visit the owners of public-
houses. But I think we must be all agreed that
it is most undesirable that the club should have
any direct connexion with the drinking trade;
and it is for public-spirited men and women to
prevent this, by coming forward and offering the
capital needed for securing suitable premises.

With regard to the basis adopted, whether total
abstinence or moderation, it should be left to the

126 WORK' AMONG WORKING-MEN.

members of the club when formed to decide, all
attempts at meddling and dictation being simply-
fatal with anything to do with working-men.
Brotherly help from a man or a woman of superior
station to their own they are in general most
grateful for ; and their defect of jealousy and dis-
trust of one another, which belongs to all unedu-
cated people, makes such co-operation peculiarly^
valuable to them ; but freedom to manage their
own affairs in their way, not perhaps ours, they
will and must have.

To those who fear the encroachment of the
club on the homes, I would suggest it is useless
fearing what already exists; the worst, the most
hopeless encroachment on the home is the public-
house. I used to tell the public-house men that
they were unworthy of the grand old English
name of husbands ; they were house-breakers, not
house-bands, squandering on the publican and his
wife the time and money wanted at home. But I
believe all custodians of clubs would pretty much
echo the experience of one who told me that
at first he was much discouraged by observing
that his new members after a time ceased to come

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 127

every evening, and only turned up once or twice
in the week. But on asking the reason, he was
told, 'Well, don't ye see when I went to the public
I used never to think of stopping at home, but
now that we have got things a bit comfortable-
like, why I likes to sit with my old missus some-
times when I comes in tired.'

Clubs for big lads up to the age when they can
safely be admitted among the men, are of the
utmost importance, but if established under the
same roof, they must have a separate room and
separate entrances. Any attempt to mix them is
always fatal.

A club-house might also be so arranged as to
have a public bar where coffee and other non-in-
toxicants and light refreshments might be supplied
to the general public, without interfering with the
comfort and privacy of the club.

But no one specific will ever cure our great
national evil. In our moral 'planishing,' our blows
must be variously directed. Merely to sweep and
to do up the house, if it be left empty, is not
enough to expel the evil spirit. Doubtless one of
the great causes of drunkenness is the dulness,

128 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

the monotony of life, the daily grind which
presses heavily on us all at times, but especially
on those engaged in manual labour, particularly
arnong the more shut-up people of the north, that
pathetic longing that poor human nature has to
be a little jolly under the adverse conditions the
world affords, to dance even though it be on a
rotten plank. Education will doubtless be a great
help to us here, in placing a wider range and a
better class of amusements within the reach of
the people. But let us not put a superstitious
trust in its efficacy. Let us not forget that educa-
tion is nothing in itself, only an added capacity
for good or for evil. If we look not wisely on the
sun himself, he smites us into darkness, says
Milton ; and the good of education, like light,
depends on what use we put it to. Scotland is
better educated than the English people can hope
to be in two generations, yet Scotland is more
drunken than England. And may not the Puri-
tanic feeling against amusements, which is more
rife in Scotland even than in England, be much
to blame here ? If Wesley could not see why the
devil should have all the good tunes, still les

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 129

should we be able to see why he should have all
the good amusements. That some have been put
to a bad use is no reason for rejection. It is no
use quarrelling with hemp because some men
hang themselves with it. We need to claim every
amusement which can be carried on without bet-
ting, gambling, and drinking, and yield a little
pleasurable excitement which does not end like
the excitement of the drink, in what has been
called the ' foot and mouth disease,' the excite-
ment that goes in at the mouth and comes out at
the heavy boots, in kicking wife or child. Billiards,
bagatelle, skittles, cricket, croquet, chess, draughts,
dominoes, — nay, I believe my soul is stout enough
to contemplate even beggar-m.y-neighbour without
quailing, provided there be no gambling, — anything
that may innocently fill the empty place of the
beer pot ; let us claim and make good use of
them all.

A good deal more might be done with music,
especially in the direction of brass bands. The
expense of the instruments is a difidculty, of course,
but this might be paid partly in instalments, partly
by subscriptions.

9

130 IVOJ^JiT AMONG WORKING-MEN".

And might we not make some use of one of the
most powerful recreations of the human mind in
all ages — acting, from dumb crambo and charades
up to simple little plays, illustrative of temperance,
or happy home life. I shall be told at once that
this would be most dangerous, as giving a taste
for the theatre ; but in the same way music may
give a taste for the low music-halls. Would it not
be wiser to recognize that these tastes do exist
with or without us, and that if we won't give them
wholesome food, they will get unwholesome?
* Empty by filling ' is the motto of Christianity.
Place the worst pig-wash under the well-head, and
it disappears of itself. And surely that which
afforded the noblest education to the people in
ancient times that the world has ever seen ; and
that which in a more private form has found its
way into our Bible, in the exquisite little love-
drama of the Shulamite and her shepherd lover, —
unquestionably a dramatic performance, and pro-
bably acted at wedding-feasts and private enter-
tainments,— cannot be hopelessly bad, nor deserve
the indiscriminate stigma the religious world has
fastened upon it.

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 131

Few things, I think, fill one with a deeper
melancholy than the contemplation of the amuse-
ments of our English people, as they at present
exist, or the apathy and the impenetrable narrow-
ness of the religious world with regard to this
vital question. If we denied to ourselves what
we deny to the people, the spectacle we present
on this point would be more bearable. But
though our educated lives are far less monotonous
in their wider interests than the uneducated, we
are careful enough to secure our own share of
amusement, and pleasant occasional breaks to the
monotony of life. We have our tours abroad, our
pleasant seaside change, our agreeable visits at
a friend's house, shooting, fishing, music, lectures,
entertainments of all kinds. But Professor Stanley
Jevons, in his admirable article on the ' Amuse-
ments of the People,'* scarcely exaggerates when
he remarks, * It is hardly too much to say that
the right to dwell in a grimy street, to drink
freely in the neighbouring public-houses, and to
walk freely between the high-walled parks, and
the jealously preserved estates of our landowners,
* See Conte?nporary Review ^ October 1878.

132 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN'.

IS all that the just and equal laws of England
secure to the mass of the population.'

The consequence of this selfish indifference of
the higher and educated classes has been in
England a steady degradation of the amusements
of the people, which perhaps reaches its culmi-
nating point in the ordinary music hall, desecrat-
ing the very name of music, it being impossible
for language to describe, as Professor Jevons
observes, ' the mixture of inane songs, of senseless
burlesques, and of sensational acrobatic tricks,
which make the staple of a music-hall entertain-
ment, to say nothing of the far graver moral
drawbacks.'

Why should these things be ? Is our English
nation, which gave birth to Shakespeare and
Milton, more degraded by nature than any other ?
Why should our noble people present on this
one point such a humiliating contrast to other
nations ? I remember a German doctor tellinof
me that when he was a boy at school, he and
his schoolfellows went for a walking tour in the
Tyrol, and on one occasion they had all to litter
down on the floor of a little village inn, where

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 133

they were kept awake till twelve o'clock by the
blacksmith, the shoemaker, the baker, and one
or two other village functionaries, performing
admirably string quartets, and quintets from
Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn ! Or take the
American lady, whose butcher lingers on the
threshold after delivering the last joint at her
door, to discuss the merits of Tennyson's last
poem. Or by way of contrast on a still wider
scale, take Professor Jevons's description of the
Tivoli gardens at Copenhagen, with a large
partially open music pavilion, and a fine string
orchestra, and semi-classical concerts every evening
throughout the summer, attended by the Royal
Family, and all classes down to artizans, and
decent working folk, the seats being purposely
priced very low. Why should not this kind of
thing be possible in England, gradually educating
our people's tastes to better and higher things t
The climate of Denmark is not better than our
own, nor are the people more musical. Why
should not the London parks, and the public
grounds of our large towns, have each their music
pavilion, and their outdoor concerts in the summer

134 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

evenings, well supplied with light unintoxicating
beverages ? Why should not Professor Jevons's
suggestion be acted on, of turning the Columbia
Hall into a place of recreation for the people,
with a good supply of swings, merry-go-rounds,
and the like ? Why should lawn-tennis, croquet,
golf, and other harmless games, be the exclusive
property of the rich, so that the outdoor amuse-
ments of the people are reduced to squirting at
one another with detestable metal pipes, and play-
ing at kiss-in-the-ring ? We have taken a few first
steps in the right direction. The Crystal Palace,
of which the Manager boasts with just pride that
not one person in a million among visitors is
charged with drunken and disorderly conduct,
the Brighton and Westminster Aquariums, have
proved that our people are just as capable of
good and undebased amusements as any other;
all we now want is that the necessity for it should
be recognised, and the means for procuring it,
under the higher forms and good moral regula-
tions which will secure the union of all classes,
should be provided in all our towns and villages.
There is an obvious practical measure which

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 135

at least we might embark in without seriously
irritating that sensitive but much-enduring organ,
the pocket of ratepayers, and that is, providing
the suburbs of London with seats. At present
there are millions and miUions of people traversing
hundreds of miles of streets without a chance of
sitting down, except in or just outside a public-
house, where they must drink to pay for the rest,
and poison their stomachs to relieve their legs.

*Only think,' says an East End worker, 'that
to these millions the streets are their recreation
ground, their drawing-room, the only place where
they meet their sweethearts, or talk with their
friends ; the place they call home is too often
only a corner to sleep and eat in ; all the rest of
their life is passed in the work-shop or the street.
Yet we won't let them sit down ! Surely there is
no sin in sitting out of doors. Look at an un-
occupied house or shop anywhere in East London,
and see how its doorsteps are crowded. Many
respectable householders throw a pail of water on
their steps to prevent their being sat upon. Yet
our public thoroughfares, notably Bow Road, are
broad enough to admit seats without the least

136 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

inconvenience, and seem planted with trees on
purpose ; and there are waste corners, often
under the dead wall that bounds a work-shop,
where very sheltered seats might stand, annoying
nobody. In fact, I fancy these seats would rather
tend to public order, and prevent groups of people
standing against houses to conduct business or
arguments, often a cause of much annoyance.'

Of the higher influences, of that which pre-
eminently empties by filling, filling with higher
instincts, higher aims, higher hopes, till there is
no place found for the low and the animal, I have
already spoken. Where there is a great indiffer-
ence to religion, a debating or Mutual Improve-
ment Society, in which one of the subjects for
discussion should be religion, the working-men
giving their own views on it, is one of the best
agencies for awakening an interest, and may lead
on to a Bible-class. It is no use thrusting the
Bible down their throats ; but they should be
led to look upon it, as it is, as eminently the
working-men's book, chiefly the inspired sayings
and doings of working-men ; from David the
shepherd, and Amos the herdsman, Peter and

SOCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 137

John the fishermen, up to One chosen out of the
people, of Whom it was said in contempt, Is not
this the carpenter ? A simple service held in
their own club-room on Sundays, if the members
do not object, is often better than any Mission-
room.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SAVINGS QUESTION.

LOSELY allied with the great drink-
ing question, comes the question of the
people's savings. *Good husbandry/
says De Foe, * is no English virtue. It may have
been brought over, and in some places where it
has been planted, it has thriven well enough ; but
it is a foreign species; it neither loves, nor is
beloved by, Englishmen/ From De Foe down-
wards, we have been apt to contemplate our
national spendthrift habits with a sort of wasteful
fatalism, as though there were an inherent ten-
dency in English nature to squander. Some of
our leading men have even maintained that thrift
cannot be expected to form an attribute of a
bold and progressive type of national character
like our own. But modern science is teaching

THE SAVINGS QUESTION. 139

US to look with suspicion on all specific ten-
dencies, as only another name for our own
ignorance and want of patient observation.
Here, again, instead of indulging in abstract
considerations of national character, would it not
be better patiently to regard the facts ?

The first fact that strikes one is unquestionably
a very grave one : that so few of the working-men,
so far fewer in proportion than in other countries,
are possessed of capital. England, the wealthiest
country in the world, also has the largest
proletariat. Two-thirds of the population, it
has been computed, are dependent on wages,
and the mass of them live hterally from hand
to mouth.

The fact is soon stated ; but perhaps it is im-
possible to estimate the evils and dangers that
lie hidden in it. Not only does it keep the mass
of the wage-receiving class for ever living on
the verge of disaster, liable by the inherent
fluctuations of trade to be reduced to want of
the necessaries of life, and to dependence on
public or private aid ; not only does it place
the working-classes in that disastrous anta-

I40 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

gonism with the capital in which they have no
share which threatens the prosperity of our
trade, but it forms an element of instability
both in the national history and in individual
character which it is difficult to estimate.

A great contractor for foreign railways, on
being asked by Professor Fawcett which he pre-
ferred employing, English or Italian navvies,
replied that, on the whole, he preferred Italian
navvies ; for though the English navvy could
do double and even treble the day's work, he
lost so much time, and gave so much trouble in
drinking and fighting, that as a rule the sober,
industrious Italian answered the best. On being
asked why there should be this difference of
conduct, he answered at once, * Oh, the Italian
is saving up his money to buy a little bit of
land, — the one ambition of his heart, — and he
has none to waste. The Englishman has no-
thing to look forward to, he has no particular
inducement to save, and everything goes in
drink.'

In a rich manufacturing country like England,
where the land is of limited extent, and great

THE SA VINGS (QUESTION. 141

wealth accumulates in the hands of a few capi-
talists, land, as conferring some social distinction,
must gain an artificial value, which, do away
with the law of primogeniture and all legal tying-
up and complexities to-morrow, would still
interfere with peasant proprietorship in England,
and have a tendency to mass the land in the
hands of a few wealthy proprietors. Nor, indeed,
with the more lucrative avenues of trade open
to him, would our EngUsh working-man be
content to exercise the extreme frugality, thrift,
and hard living involved in peasant proprietor-
ship. The ItaUan labourer's inducement to save
is therefore not to be had for the Englishman.
But land is not the only investment. Why
should there not be a proportionate number
in England of peasant proprietors of capital.?
Why have the labouring classes no share in the
capital which has been called * crystallized
labour'? It was not always so; both the
yeoman and the weaver were possessed of
capital in the form of a small holding, or a
hand-loom; but with the merging of small
holdings into large properties, and of hand-

142 WOJ^A^ AMONG WORKING-MEN,

looms into larger mills, there has been a steady
deterioration in this respect. As Mr. Frederic
Seebohm observes in an able article in the
Edinburgh Review ^^ * With the loss of the heredi-
tary nest-egg of capital, has come the loss of
the hereditary habit of thrift and saving.'

But has not the same want of seeing, which I
complain of in the moral life, the same want of
one-tenth of the careful observation and taking
in of all the facts of the moral problem which
would be bestowed as a matter of course on a
problem in chemistry, been largely at fault here
as elsewhere } Not only is our poor law a gigantic
discouragement of saving, a systematic recognition
that the able-bodied labourer, subject to no par-
ticular disaster, for which exceptional provision
could be made, cannot save, but must be provided
for by the State in his old age or sickness, though
it is a statistical fact that the working-classes spend
;^30,ooo,ooo per annum in drink and tobacco ; but
the efforts of the State to work in an opposite direc-
tion have been singularly unfortunate. The whole

* The Savings of the People : Edinburgh Review^ July
1873.

THE SAVINGS QUESTION, 143

influence of both Government and individuals, till
lately, has gone into encouraging benefit clubs,
the one form of saving which accumulates no
capital, and which is most exposed to miscalcu-
lation and fraud. The very endeavour on the
part of the State to save the funds from the
latter, by offering Government security with the
additional bait of \\ per cent, proved most
injurious in the end, as the gradual reduction
of the interest in itself produced the danger of
insolvency to the clubs, while the Exchequer
suffered a loss of not much less than ;£" 1,000,000.
Indeed, so precarious is this form of investment
both from the extreme complexity of the calcu-
lation in compound interest it requires to regulate
the rate of payment, and also from the liability
to fraud, that it is calculated that some 70 per
cent, of the benefit clubs are insolvent. Unquestion-
ably the breaking-up of so many has given a most
grievous check to saving on the part of the people.
But already matters have taken a more hopeful
turn, and the conditions are being realized for the
creation of capital in the hands of the working-
classes.

144 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

First in order and importance comes the Post
Office Savings Bank, which has formed the most
valuable elementary school in thrift of modern times.

*As early as the year 1807/ a writer in the
British Quarterly* narrates, 'Mr. Whitbread in
the House of Commons foreshadowed the present
Post Office Savings Bank scheme, in a remark-
able speech on the Poor Laws Amendment Bill.
He recommended the institution of a Government
Savings Bank, to be worked with the Post Office
machinery, the money received to be invested in
Government stock, the annual limit of deposits
to be ;^20 and the total limit £200. But Mr.
Whitbread lived in advance of his time ; the idea
was feebly praised by the few, pooh-poohed by
an overwhelming majority, and was at last aban-
doned. In course of time, however, it was
revived, and put to more definite uses by one
of the most notable of all the labourers in this
field of philanthropy, Mr. Sikes of Huddersfield.
Mr. Whitbread had laboured, Mr. Sikes entered
into his labours, and carried them forward with
such pertinacity and unflagging zeal that he

* On Savinsrs Banks : British Quarterly ,]2Xi\x2iXy 1878.

THE SA VINGS QUESTION. 145

forced his views into prominence, and demon-
strated so clearly the possibility of establishing
successful Government Savings Banks through
the intervention of the Money-order department
of the Post Office, that there was no resisting
him or his arguments. But Mr. Sikes could not
master the whole details of the scheme, and it
was reserved for Mr. Chetwynd, at that time a
staff officer in the Money-order department of
the General Post Office, to bring his thorough
practical knowledge to shape the theories of the
philanthropist into a compact and workable form.
Even then it needed wheel within wheel to put
the machinery in motion ; and the finishing
strokes and minor details were supplied by Mr.
Scudamore, the receiver and accountant-general
of the Post Office. In building and launching
this new ship of State, it may be said that Mr.
Whitbread collected the raw material, — the wood
and iron, the planks and the masts; Mr. Sikes
put them into shape, and reared the ship upon
the stocks ; Mr. Chetwynd supplied the ropes
and sails, the rudder and compass ; and Mr.

Scudamore marked out the vessel's course and

10

146 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

noted in the chart all rocks and reefs and
dangerous tides and eddies.'

On September i6th, 1862, the ship thus built
was launched, and, in the language of a con-
temporary Times, 'the country soon recognized
the universal boon of a bank maintained at the
public expense, secured by the public respon-
sibility, with the whole empire for its capital,
with a branch in every town, open at almost
all hours, and, more than all, giving a fair
amount of interest.*

On referring to the last report of the Post-
master-General, issued in September 1878, we
see at once the extraordinary progress that has
been made in educating the people to save by
this one agency alone. During the sixteen years
that Post Office Savings Banks have been in
existence, the total sum standing to their credit
on the books of the National Debt Commis-
sioners at the close of the year, was in 1862
;^i,659,032, and in 1877 ;^29,7i3,529, while the
number of depositors in the old Savings Banks
and Post Office Savings Banks combined, has
risen from 1,732,555 to 3,301,087.

THE SAVINGS QUESTION. I47

In 1877 the proportion of depositors to popu-
lation was one to nineteen in the United King-
dom, or one to fifteen in England and Wales, one
to seventy-four in Scotland, and one to eighty-
two in Ireland.

A far greater number of deposits are made
in December and January than in any other time
of the year. The largest amount received in any
one day during the year 1877 was on the 31st of
December, when the total was 25,857, amounting
tO;^83,590 6s. id. The average daily number of
deposits is 10,659.

These statistics will give our readers some idea
of the enormous mass of business that is carried
on in connection with our Post Office Savings
Banks. To conduct it there are no less than
493 officers and clerks, of whom ninety are
women, in the Central Savings Banks Depart-
ment, London, exclusive of clerks for extra
duty, writers, sorters, messengers, porters, etc. ;
and the total expenses for working the whole
of the vast machinery of the Post Office Saving?
Bank is given in the revenue estimates for the
year ending March 31st, 1878, as ;^ 134,05 7.

148 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

It is a striking instance of the hour-hand-like
slowness with which the British mind moves,
that so obvious an anomaly as the difference
of interest between the old trustee Savings
Banks and the new Post Office Savings Banks
has never been removed. As long ago as 1866,
Mr. Lewin writes in his admirable * History of
Savings Banks : ' * The old Savings Banks de-
posit their funds with Government, and are
allowed interest on their money at the rate of
£2f 5i". per cent. The Post Office Banks of
course deposit their money with Government,
and are allowed interest at the rate of ;^2 los.
per cent. Out of the 15^". per cent, difference
between the two rates, an average of half of it
is given by the old banks to their depositors.

* Now it is well known that the average cost
of each transaction in the Post Office Banks is
little more than half the average cost of a
transaction in the ordinary Savings Banks.* If

* The writer in the British Quarterly states that the
average cost of a transaction in the Post Office Savings
Banks during the whole period of their existence has
been 6tV^-) as compared with is, in the old Savings
Banks.

THE SA VINGS QUESTION. 149

Government can still afford to pay the old
Savings Banks the higher rate of interest, it
might afford at the least computation to give
\os. per 'cent, more to depositors in the Post
Office Savings Banks. If Government cannot
afford to pay the higher rate, it ought to dis-
continue its charity, which, like all other charit-
able doles, excites discontent among those who
think they have, and really have the right de
facto, if not de jurey to share it. That the rate
should be equalized in one way or the other
admits, we think, of little question ; but that the
Government should pay more than it can pay
without loss, admits of less.'

Equalize the rate of interest, and the old
trustee Savings Banks, with their liability to
fraud, and their greater expense of manage-
ment, would be quickly absorbed into the more
economical and safer system of the Post Office
Savings Banks. It has been calculated that the
Government might effect an ultimate saving of
;^28o,ocxD by closing the old Savings Banks alto-
gether. I question whether any other civilized
Government but England's would calmly display

ISO WORIC AMONG WORKING-MEN.

for upwards of sixteen years such an anomaly as
a bounty offered to the poor out of the public
funds to induce them to invest their savings in
a less perfect security, when it offers them a
perfect security at the hands of its own officials
and at no loss to itself!

Another reform which is urgently needed, and
which would add greatly to the value of the
Post Office Bank, is the extension of the narrow
limit of the annual deposit. At present the de-
positor is limited to ;^30 per annum, and to
;^I50 in all. On this point bankers have per-
sistently opposed their selfish interest to the
public good; but the example of other countries
shows how little justice there is in the opposi-
tion they have maintained in England. In
France the limit is £40 \ in Belgium, ;^I20; in
Denmark there is no limit ; in some parts of
Prussia, ;^i5o; in Switzerland, it varies from a
very small sum to ;£"400 ; and in Austria, from
^50 to ;^ 1,500. If the statutory limit in Eng-
land were even raised to £^0, it would be a
great gain, that being a convenient sum to
invest.

THE SA VINGS Q UESTION. r 5 1

The Post Office Savings Bank is doing good
service in affiliating Penny Banks. In 1877 no less
than 293 Penny Banks received authority to in-
vest their funds in the Post Office Savings Bank,
showing an increase of 121 over the previous year.
The establishment of Penny Banks, in connection
especially with Board Schools, following the pre-
cedent of a successful movement first set on foot
in Belgium, * is destined,* writes the Postmaster-
General, * to play a very important part in develop-
ing thrift and saving habits, judging by the results
already attained.' As an example of the success
of these banks, the forty penny banks in operation
in the London Board Schools received in the year
ending 31st December, 1877, i^ deposits, ^3,007,
from 9,611 children. The remarkable increase
in the total amount of deposits in French savings
banks within the last three years, from ;^20,6oo,ooo
to ;^3 2,360,000, though partly attributable to the
material prosperity of France, is supposed to be
mainly due to the extraordinary development in
the three last years of penny and school savings
banks brought about by the efforts of M. Auguste
de Malarce.

152 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

As Working-Men's Clubs multiply, the esta-
blishment of penny banks, and other methods
of saving which are their invariable adjuncts,
will probably produce a still more remarkable
increase in English savings.

But if the Post Office Savings Bank has done
and is doing so much to educate the people in
those habits of saving and thrift which form
the elementary school for the accumulation of
capital in the hands of the working-classes, Build-
ing Societies have taken us a step further, and
taught the working-man not only the value of
saving, but the meaning of investment, with the
potent inducement to save which it presents.
Hitherto they have been the greatest and most
successful agent in creating 'peasant proprietors'
of capital, with all that would spring from their
wide extension, — the hereditary thrift and sobriety,
the conservative instincts of order, the better
understanding of economic laws, the indepen-
dence and power of holding their own with-
out having recourse to the ruinous expedients of
strikes and unions, necessary adjuncts of 'the
freebooters of labour,' and the increased sense of

THE SAVINGS QUESTION: 153

family affection and duty which would come
with the sense of some provision having been
made for wife and family on the father's death,
instead of his savings dying with him except a
small sum for funeral expenses, as in the case of
a benefit club, leaving his family to the tender
mercies of the Poor Law.

But might not the movement be immensely
helped on if the importance of it, economic and
moral, were duly recognized ?

Mr. Seebohm, who as a banker opposes the
extension of the limits imposed on the deposits
at Post Office Savings Banks, contending that
* they are only intended to bring down the
system of banking within reach of the working-
class, not to provide them with a mode of per-
manent investment on a false economical principle,
and therefore at a lower rate of interest than an
investment on Government security ought in th^^
open market to receive,' contends at the same
time that Government can aid the people in
the permanent investment of their savings, by
placing its own public funds fairly within their
reach, through the same agency of the Post

154 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

Office, which it has employed with such effect.
* It can do this/ he says, * by acting simply as
broker for the working-classes without incurring
one-tenth part of the risk which is involved in
acting as their bankers/ To quote his own
words : * The deposit of money by the working-
classes to be returned in money to them on
demand involves that the State should keep
large floating balances uninvested to meet cur-
rent demands. Recent experience has shown how
apt such balances are to lie too long uninvested,
and in the meantime to be temporarily, with the
best intentions, misapplied. There would be no
such danger in connexion with Consols. The
price of ;£"i of Consols would be telegraphed
from day to day to the various post-offices
and posted up in their windows. " The price of
£i of Consols to-day is iZs. 6d'* By each night's
post the purchases and sales all over England
would be advised to the head office in London.
The difference between the total purchased and
the total sold would be the amount which had
to be sold or purchased by the Postmaster-
General on the next day on the Post Office

THE SAVINGS QUESTION. 155

account. The purchases and sales of the work-
ing-classes would be matters of account in the
books of the Post Office Consols department,
and the whole amount under investment through
the Post Office would stand in the name of the
Postmaster-General in the books of the Bank of
England. In the same way the dividends on
the total sum would be handed over to the
Postmaster- General, and distributed by him to
the several holders. The Act of Parliament
conferring on the Postmaster-General the neces-
sary powers to carry out the object would, of
course, have to fix the limits within which
transactions were to be restricted.*

' As matters stand now Consols are not within
reach of the working-classes. Dealings in Con-
sols, through brokers, by powers of attorney and
transfers v/ith the addition of stamps and fees,
are so surrounded with practical difficulties — so
tied up with red tape — that they are practically

* A brokerage of one penny in the pound would pro-
bably pay expenses, and be a self-acting check upon the
undue use of the Post Office for too large sums. The
ordinary brokerage on ;^ioo is only 2^. 6^.

156 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

out of the reach of the working classes for small
amounts even in London. In very few country-
places are there any brokers at all, and unless a
working man has access to a banker, he can
hardly make a small investment in Consols.
Whereas if Consols were placed within easy
reach of the Post Office of every little town,
the working-classes would invest their money in
Consols, and get 3J per cent, with Government
security as easily as they now get 2j- in the Post
Office Savings Bank.'

But is there not here a field for private co-
operation, as well as Government aid } Taking
the rate of interest given at the Post Office, do
we realize how hard it would be for us to save
with only 2 J per cent, as an inducement } There
are plenty of business men who have no wish to
live selfish lives, with that egoism a deux, d irois,
a quatre which our family life so plentifully
supplies us with ; they would gladly go beyond
this narrow circle, and give some brotherly help
to the working-men, on whose service all the
material wants of their own life rest for theii
fulfilment, if they knew how. District-visiting,

THE SA VINGS QUESTION. 157

Sunday-school teaching, lecturing, teetotalism, —
these are not in their line. In what better way-
could they help the working-classes than in aid-
ing the accumulation of capital in their hands ?

* It is not perhaps realized by persons who
wish to help the working-classes in their savings,*
writes Mr. Frederic Seebohm, in the article from
which I have already quoted, 'how easily by
means of co-operation any sound investment may
be placed within their reach. A few well-to-do
persons might place, say ;^ 1,000 of the debenture
stock or preference shares of a first-class railway
in their joint names as trustees of a co-operative
investment society, and offer to sell it to small
investors at the market price of the day. In
the ledger of the society they would at first be
entered as owners of the whole amount. As
fast as investors came in they would buy from
the trustees at the market price of the day small
portions of the stock, until by degrees the whole
;£"i,000 was purchased and transferred into the
purchaser's names in the ledger. In the mean-
time the dividends would be divided among the
owners, according to the amounts of stock stand-

158 WORI^ AMONG WORKING-MEN,

ing in their names. With the exception of the
small inconvenience of receiving the purchase-
money in instalments, the whole transaction
would be one of perfect safety to the original
owners of the ;^ 1,000 stock, and at any time they
could wind up, if needful, and get rid of further
responsibility by having the amounts all trans-
ferred into the names of the purchasers in the
books of the railway company, retaining the
small remainder, if any, for themselves. There
would be none of the risk attending a bank.
The investors would have invested in railway
stock paying 4 per cent, or 4J per cent., instead
of depositing their money at a savings bank at
2j per cent, or 3 per cent. In larger places,
where there might be more intelligence and
business knowledge, any hundred working-men,
by throwing their savings together, might soon
on the same principle (without the aid of others)
make co-operative investments in any security
they like, and in a few years' time, when the
amount of their individual investments reaches
a sufficient sum, have their shares transferred
into their own names,*

THE SAVINGS QUESTION. 159

The latter suggestion has been already carried
out in some of our large manufacturing towns
among our more intelligent artizans. But when
the intelligence is wanting, I know of no more
effective way of giving brotherly help than in
developing a principle of thrift which, unlike
benefit-club saving, does not die with the man,
but, strengthened by all that is unselfish in family
feeling, transmits an hereditary nest-egg to the
next generation.

But surely one of the best and readiest methods
of educating our people in thrift would be the
establishment of a co-operative store, not upon
the degenerate but familiar methods of London
co-operation, but on the Rochdale plan. London
co-operation only aims at saving somewhat the
pockets of its customers, without affording them
the inducement to acquire the habit of saving
and the facility of so doing. These societies,
organized chiefly to supply goods at a cheap
rate, and make a large profit for the share-
holders, are not co-operative in the complete
sense of that term, since the managers have an
interest distinct from the shareholders, and the

i6o WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

shareholders an interest distinct from the pur-
chasers. In Mr. George J. Holyoake's words, 'The
common principle of managers, shareholders, and
purchasers is that of all competitive commerce, —
"each for himself and the devil take the hinder-
most ; " and such is the activity of the devil in
business that he commonly does it. Co-operation
on the Rochdale method, on the other hand, is a
concerted arrangement for keeping the devil out
of the affair. A scheme of equity has no foremost
and no hindermost for the devil to take.' * This
scheme, as devised by the ' Equitable Pioneers '
of Rochdale, consists in the profits made by sales,
instead of being absorbed by the few who are
shareholders, being divided among all the mem-
bers who make purchases at the stores, in pro-
portion to the amount they spend there ; the
share of the profits coming due to them remaining
in the hands of the Directors until it amounts to
^5. Of this amount they are registered as share-
holders, and receive five per cent, interest. The
store thus saves their shares for them, and they

* The ' History of Co-operation in England,' by George
J. Holyoake, vol. ii., p. 136.

THE SAVINGS QUESTION. i6i

become shareholders without it costing them
anything. If the concern fails, they lose nothing ;
but if the store flourishes, and they stick like
sensible men to it, they may save in the same
way other five pounds which they are allowed
to draw out if they please.

By this scheme the store ultimately obtains
;^ 1 00 of capital from every twenty members. The
original capital with which to obtain the first
stock was obtained, in the case of the Rochdale
Pioneers, now possessing a capital of upwards of
;^2 54,000, by weekly subscriptions of twopence!
For every pound so subscribed interest at the rate
of 5 per cent, was promised, if the day of profits
ever came. Interest was somewhat arbitrarily
fixed at this rate, in order that there might be
the more profit to divide among customers, as a
means of attracting more members, and alluring
purchasers to the store by the prospect of a
quarterly dividend of profits upon their outlay.
Of course those who had the largest families had
the largest dealings, and the pleasing and profit-
able illusion was produced, that the more they ate,
the more they saved.

II

i62 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

* In commencing such a store,' says Mr. Holy-
cake, himself one of the bravest and most
self-denying pioneers of Co-operation, and the
-most thorough master of its principles, *the first
thing to do is for two or three persons to call a
meeting of those likely to care for the object in
view and able to advance it. The callers of the
meeting should be men who have clear notions of
what they want to do, and how it is to be done,
and why it should be attempted. Capital for the
store is usually provided by each person putting
down his or her name for twopence, threepence, or
sixpence a week, or more, as each may be able,
towards the payment of five shares of ;^i each.
If the store be a small one, a hundred members
subscribing a one-pound share each may enable
a beginning to be made. In a sound store, each
member is called upon to hold five one-pound
shares. It is safest for the members to subscribe
their own capital. Borrowed money is a dangerous
thing to deal with. Interest has to be paid often
before any profits are made. Sometimes the
lenders become alarmed, and call it in suddenly,
which commonly breaks up the store ; or the

THE SAVINGS QUESTION'. 163

directors have to become guarantees for its repay-
ment, and then the sole control of the store neces-
sarily falls into their hands. . . . By commencing upon
the system of the intending co-operators subscribing
their own capital, a larger number of members
is obtained, and all have an equal and personal
interest in the store, and give it their custom that
their money may not be lost. This plan of divid-
ing profits on purchases secures not only a com-
mon interest, but a large and permanent custom.'*
A secretary and treasurer should be of course
appointed ; but perhaps the most important officers
at this early stage of proceedings are two or three
energetic, good-tempered collectors, who will go
round and personally collect the subscriptions
which are not brought to the appointed place
on the appointed day. * There is a deal of human
nature in man,' as Sam Slick says, and human
nature will always be slack in its stipulated pay-
ments, unless screwed up to the mark by those
who have the cause sufficiently at heart to bestow
much self-sacrificing labour upon it.

* The ' History of Co-operation in England,* by George
J. Holyoake^ vol. ii., p. loi.

1 64 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

If, when started, the store goes into the grocery
business, or the meat trade, or tailoring, or shoe-
making, or drapery, it is apparently not so hopeless
as at first sight it would seem, to find a disin-
terested friendly grocer, or butcher, or tailor, or
cordwainer, or draper, to put the co-operators
into the right way of laying in and selling and
preserving stock. * Such friendly persons,' Mr.
Holyoake assures us, *are always to be found if
looked for.' At first, it seems, wholesale dealers
were suspicious of co-operators, and refused to
deal with them. But now they are honoured
customers at such firms as Messrs. J. McKenzie
of Glasgow, wholesale tea-merchants ; Messrs.
Constable & Henderson of London, wholesale
sugar-dealers ; Messrs. Ward & Co. of Leeds,
provision merchants. There is also a branch of
the North of England's Wholesale open at 1 1 8,
Minories, London, which enables a young society
to offer at once to its customers goods of first-rate
quality ; in fact, * to obtain West End provisions
at East End prices.'

Mr. Holyoake has also some wise remarks on
the necessity of treating the servanf-i, when once

THE SAVINGS QUESTION, 165

appointed, with confidence and respect, never
distrusting them on mere rumour or hearsay or
suspicion, or on anything short of actual evidence
of dishonesty. As John Stuart Mill said to the
London Co-operators, ' Next to the misfortune to
a society of having bad servants, is to have good
servants and not know it ; ' and the proverbial
distrust and jealousy of one another among
working men forms a very serious difficulty in
the successful working of a co-operative store,
and many a good manager has been led by it
to throw up his work in despair and disgust.

In a properly constituted store, the funds are
portioned out quarterly in seven ways : (i) ex-
penses of management ; (2) interest due on all
loans, if any; (3) an amount equivalent to ten
per cent, of the value of the fixed stock, set apart
to cover its annual reduction in worth owing to
wear and tear ; (4) dividends on subscribed capital
of the members ; (5) such sum as may be required
for extension of business ; (6) two and a half per
cent, of the remaining profit, after all the above
items are provided for, to be applied to educational
purposes; (7) the residue, and that only, is then

i66 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN

divided among all the persons employed and
members of the store, in proportion to the amount
of their wages or of their respective purchases
during the quarter, varying from is. 6d, to 2s. 6d.
in the pound.*

On these methods, a Co-operative store, with its
ready money payments, its capitalizing of profits
and its two and a half per cent, on profits laid by
for educational purposes, may be made a potent
educator of the people in the all-important lessons
of integrity, thrift, and self-improvement.

Into the far deeper questions of the true relations
of labour and capital, whether industry is as yet
organized on its right basis ; whether the rise and
spread of socialism does not point to left-out
elements which must be brought into our social
organization before our industrial problems can be
solved; whether the working classes have at all
their due share in the wealth of the country, I
do not intend to enter, as it forms too wide a
question to discuss exhaustively in these brief
notes of work. But surely these questions in their

♦ The * History of Co-operation in England,' by George
J. Holyoake, pp. 104-5.

THE SAVINGS QUESTION: 167

moral aspect are those in which the Christian
Church should take a profound interest, and
make herself a living voice. Whether the present
principle of unlimited competition, which * writ
large' is, 'every man for himself, and the devil
take the hindermost,' on which trade is based, with
the inevitable slow deterioration of the quality of
the work turned out, and the necessary * scamping *
it leads to, is the ' good tree ' which is likely to
bear good fruit ; whether the conflict between
capital and labour, and the selfish antagonism it
leads to between identical interests, and the
ruinous industrial waste of strikes, and bitter
class feeling it results in, is in accordance with
the great social principle of Christianity, that
we are one body, and only through the co-opera-
tion of the members for the good of the organic
whole can we escape from the social disorders and
convulsions that must result from any schism in the
body ; whether the principle on which retail trade
is at present based, of making the honest man pay
for the knave, paying for the bad debts caused
by the one with the ready money supplied by the
other, is likely to educate the people in integrity

1 68 WORIC AMONG WORKING-MEN.

and uprightness, and the habit of paying their
way instead of going on trust ; surely these are
all vital questions relating to the kingdom of
God upon earth, and which should not be left
to Positivists and Secularists to take the lead in.
May it not be that modern Christianity is so full
of other- worldliness, has so little living grip of
the rude forces that are at work in this world,
so little will or knowledge to direct and control,
and mould them into the living forces that make
for a kingdom of God on earth, — may it not be in
part owing to this, that men now-a-days go other-
where than to church, to find help and guidance
in the real difficulties of life?

CHAPTER VIII.

OVERCROWDING.

N the inevitable moral evils of over-
crowding and their cure, I need not
dwell at such length as I have done
on the drinking and the savings questions, as the
Acts for the Improvement of Artizans' Dwellings
have at last placed the power of dealing with it in
the hands of municipal authorities. But as these
Acts must be very slow in coming into operation,
cannot we do something to remedy, or at least
to keep in check, present evils ? I ask, how is it
possible for a young girl to grow up in modesty
and decency, when she has been in the habit
of sleeping in the same room with her father, or,
worse still, her grown-up brother ? Must not
the outworks of a girl's chastity be fatally broken
down by such practices ? and have we not here-

170 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

the fertile germs of that immorality which is
so apt to gravitate in its turn into the still
graver evils, moral and sanatory, of prostitution ?
How is it, I ask, that the most devoted Sunday-
school teachers, who carefully visit their children,
never think of finding out whether the conditions
of their homes are such as to make it possible
for them to practise the Christian modesty
and purity they inculcate ? How is it that at
mothers' meetings, professedly intended to help
women to a higher standard and a better practice
in their maternal duties, this care for their girls'
modesty is never mentioned ? Too much stress
cannot be laid with mothers on two things, —
decency in their girls' sleeping arrangements, and
not allowing them to play with loose boys in the
street. When through extreme poverty, or over-
crowding, there is inevitable paucity of room,
often an earnest talk with the mother on the
subject, and a little friendly contrivance, the
gift of a curtain or a screen from the district
visitor, or the lady who holds the mothers'
meeting, would obviate the worst consequences.
One of our most noted temperance speakers stated
to a friend of mine that he was one of eight

OVERCROWDING. 171

children, the mother, a widow in great poverty,
and only able to afford one bedroom. * It is mere
nonsense/ he said, *to talk of indecency and
immodesty being necessitated by want of room.
My mother hung up a curtain right across the
room, and the boys slept on one side, and she
and the girls on the other ; and I'll venture to say
we were brought up in as much modesty and
decency as richer folk with a bedroom apart for
each. The poor, in the terrible pressure of exist
ence, necessarily get careless on these points ; and
for what else was the higher moral training which
circumstances have made possible to us, given
us but to help them up to our standard, as they
in their turn help us in patience and faith ?
Something, too, might be done by reporting any
case of overcrowding, and by bringing moral
pressure to bear on the landlord, through the
clergyman or some other influential person. Any
flagrant case can be brought under the power
of the law to deal with it.

Nothing, I think, forms a much sadder spec-
tacle, nothing more conclusively proves how little
thought and care we bestow on one another, than

172 WORJ^ AMONG WORKING-MEN,

the way in which railway companies and othei
agencies have been allowed to sweep away the
dwellings of the poor without an attempt to
furnish them with any substitute, though with
the knowledge that their work would involve
their living in or about the same place, with
only half the accommodation, and that over-
crowding and bad air must bring immorality and
drinking in its train. When shall we learn in
our churches and chapels that we are no more
at liberty to preach the laws of moral health
while all its conditions are being violated, than
we are to preach the laws of physical health
whilst we stop up our drains and empty our
refuse into the streets ? How can our moral
life be anything but the mass of disorder that
it is when we do not so much as attempt to
train the moral emotions to a response to the
most ordinary facts, when facts that simply make
moral evil inevitable to the mass of men
and women take place, and we do not so
much as note their existence ? I ask, could
we solve a single scientific problem on the
methods which we apply to our far more im-

OVERCROWDING, i73

portant and complex moral problems? If
Dr. Tyndall had contented himself with simply
saying that there ought to be no life in his solu-
tions at the end of a certain period, without
paying the least heed to the conditions to which
they were exposed in the interim, where would
be the solution of the problem of biogenesis ?
And when I read that he performed exactly
960 experiments in sterilising his bottles of dirty
water, I exclaim, where are the 960 careful ob-
servations of all the conditions necessary for
sterilising one of our moral cesspools ? Where
is the careful training of our moral feelings to
respond to the facts that have a claim on them,
as Dr. Tyndall has carefully trained his intellect
to respond to the facts that appeal to it, to
respond with a nicety of observation which would
be an impossibility to a less cultivated mind ?
Can there be anything but moral confusion and
disaster in such methods and such neglect in
training the faculties which have been given us
to guide us in conduct, a neglect which we should
not think of indulging in with the faculties that
are given to us to guide us in thought ?

CHAPTER IX.

CONCLUSION.

ANY of us are familiar with that
magnificent opening chapter of De
Tocqueville's 'Democracy/ in which
he traces the gradual but irresistible progress of
democracy throughout modern European history.
He points out how the most contradictory events,
the most opposed discoveries, have alike mini-
stered to the growth of the power of the people.
The crusades, which decimated and impoverished
the great feudatory families ; the invention of
gunpowder, that makes the common soldier a
more destructive power than the Homeric chief;
the invention of the printing press, which placed
knowledge within reach of the humblest ; in
England the Wars of the Roses, which consumed
the nobility ; in France the policy of the kings,
which in alliance with the people, humbled and

CONCLUSION, 175

subjected the nobles ; the Reformation, with its
vindication of the priesthood and personal re-
sponsibility of every man ; — all alike ministered
to the silent rise of democracy, the steady accu-
mulation of power in the hands of the people ; a
process which is still silently and irresistibly going
on. Whether we look on democracy as an evil
or a good, whether we like it or not, the power
of the people is the great inevitable fact of the
future, and whether it is a Christianized fact, a
power that owns that obedience to moral law
which is the bond of rule, on this, in De Tocque-
ville's estimation, depends the future welfare of
our race.

If, on the other hand, we look at Christianity
with unprejudiced eyes, we are struck by the same
fact, of which all European history is the evolu-
tion, hidden in the germ, and stored up, as it were,
for some future use, like —

' the soul of the wide world
Dreaming of things to come.'

It IS very difficult for us to get rid of all
adventitious associations, the traditions and

176 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN:

ecclesiasticism of the ages, and get a glimpse of
Christianity as it came fresh from the Mind and
Hand of Christ, and realize its intensely demo-
cratic character. To many of us it seems irreve-
rent even to say that He, whom we call Master
and Lord, was born in an outhouse, and had only
sweet-smelling hay for his first infant bed, and that
for thirty of the three or four and thirty years of
His life, He was only known as a thoughtful,
high-minded working-man ; the hands that raised
the dead, and were laid in healing on the sick,
being labour-hardened palms, brown with years
of toil. It is difficult for us so to translate ancient
forms into modern terms as to have any idea oi
the intensely democratic and levelling character
of our Lord's teaching ; how He did not hesitate
to read an ecclesiastical casuist a lesson in a story
in which a parson and a deacon are represented
as only taking care of their own skins, but a poor
infidel as risking his life and spending his money
to save another, and bade the Church lawyer take
the infidel for his example ; how He informed an
eminent member of the religious world that the
poor prostitute, whose very touch he had thou?^^ l'

CONCLUSION, 177

defilement, had gained, through her depth of sin
and anguish, a depth of love that placed her far
above his self-righteous respectability; and how,
on another occasion. He taught that a moral
outcast of society was nearer to God than an
eminently religious man noted for his attention
to all his religious duties ; how He once addressed
the religious world as, * Ye generation of vipers,
how shall ye escape the damnation of hell ? ' but
for the tempted, and sinful, and heavy laden
people, the poor lost girls, the social outcasts,
whom we respectable classes are apt to call de-
graded wretches. He had but the cry of yearning
love, ' Come unto me, ye weary and heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.' Nor is it altogether
possible for us, with the glow of sacred association
and passion of adoration that gathers round the
Christian sacraments, to realize their true charac-
ter, that dismissing all the burdensome rites and
ceremonies which have ever pressed so heavily on
the people, the Founder of Christianity took the
two commonest actions of life, washing and eat-
ing, and made them the symbols of the awful
and divine, of the very indwelling Presence of

12

178 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

God Himself; thereby embodying the teaching
of all modern science as to the mystery, the
wonder, and glory of even the natural elements
of our life, of the matter which in our ignorance
we used to call 'dead,' and 'brute,' and 'gross,'
and making the whole of man's life sacramental,
the visible sign of an inward and divine meaning.
Could we better realize the democratic character
of Christianity, its absolute and unique assertion
of the dignity, the spiritual priesthood of man as
man, apart from all social and ecclesiastical dis-
tinctions, its ecclesiastically levelling character, we
should better understand how it was that the
whole religious world ranged itself against Jesus
Christ ; that the Primate of Judea condemned
Him for blasphemy, and the State, while feebly
endeavouring to protect Him, at length surren-
dered Him to an illegal condemnation. If we do
not go so far as M. Renan and say that Chris-
tianity was the inauguration of the principles of
the first French Revolution, since in its reverence
for law, its recognition of the great historioal
sources of authority even when represented by
bad men, and its constant teaching that the king-

CONCLUSION. 179

dom of God is within, and cannot be secured by
mere external means, but only by moral methods,
it is widely opposed to the violence and exter-
nalism which has too often characterised the
action of the people, yet at least we must allow
that in its very nature it was the consecration of
the fact of democracy, the inauguration of the
fundamental principle of representative govern-
ment, as opposed to the Divine right of kings
and the inherent rights of aristocracies : ' He that
would be chief among you, let him be the servant
of all/

If then we find Christianity and the people are
in a measure separated, if an * hospital Saturday '
for the working-man has been instituted on the
plea that so many of them attend neither Chris-
tian church nor chapel, if so few of them meet
us at the family table of all God's children, must
there not be some fault somewhere ? If the in-
tensely democratic character of Christianity is
such as I have pointed out; if it was the very
nature of Christ's religion that the common people
heard Him gladly, and to the poor the gospel is
preached ; if some, like myself, have seen for

iSo WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN.

themselves that it has lost none of its ancient
power over the people, it suggests the grave ques-
tion whether there is not something inherently-
lacking in our middle-class Christianity which fails
to attract the working-man.

I do not think anyone much given to reflect
and observe can have worked extensively among
working-men without being struck by a certain
difference of type which Christianity in them pre-
sents to the prevailing type of Christianity among
the middle classes. Roughly delineated, the great
central fact of the Christianity of the educated
middle classes is personal salvation. Christianity
assumes more or less the form of a Life Insurance
Office, at which in return for a certain amount of
faith and goodness you insure yourself against the
risk of perdition hereafter. Its two factors are
God and the soul ; the third and equally necessary
factor in primitive Christianity, the world, human-
ity, is almost entirely omitted, or comes in as a
sort of loose after-thought, as something whose
claims ought to be recognised out of gratitude for
one's own personal salvation. Fortunately this
feeling is so strong as often to secure the utmost

CONCLUSION. l8l

devotion, at least from individuals. But it does
not alter the fact that our ordinary Christianity
is characterized by intense individualism, the em-
phatically social and corporate character of early
Christianity, 'the kingdom of God,' as it was
called, shrinking to the narrow limits of the
individual soul, or of some particular ecclesiastical
organization. Its strength lies in beauty of indi-
vidual character, in what in modern times would
be called moral and spiritual culture, in ancient
phraseology * edification ; ' its weakness, in a
certain unconscious selfishness it engenders, the
not very lofty ideal of getting on in this world
and the next, and doing the best for yourself in
both ; and its inherent inability to work out any
salvation for the world. The rise of Positivism,
or the service of humanity, on ground which was
once covered by the full tides of Christian love,
but which has long been left bare and unoccupied,
I think points to the truth in its broad outlines
of what I say.

On the other hand, the great central fact of the
Christianity of working-men is, what after all
must ever be the central fact of Christianity

iSa WORIC AMONG WORKING-MEN,

whatever else we may make of it, a life poured
out for the good of others, and personal salvation
as a means to that. The conditions of their lives,
the constant service in which they live, their
individual weakness, and the necessity of com-
bining into some sort of organization or body to
be a power, makes them unconsciously realize
Christianity under this form even in the teeth of
the teaching they often receive. All the influences
of their lives are opposed to individualism ; their
very selfishness is of a corporate character, which
requires the good of the individual to be subor-
dinated to the good of his class, and is only
distinctly selfish in its action towards other classes.
When once a working-man embraces Christianity,
remaining as he often does very defective in moral
and spiritual culture, I have often been amazed
at the unconscious devotion and self-sacrifice with
which he pours himself out for the public good.
No fatigue after his long day's work, no excuse
of late dinners or interrupted home evenings,
interferes with his undertaking night after night
some work to benefit his fellow-men. I remember
being somewhat perplexed at recognising in the

CONCLUSION, 183

midst of much crude theology the same type of
Christianity in the American evangehst, Moody,
the same living grasp of that third factor * the
world,' the dutv we owe those outside our own
immediate circle, the same assertion that the
motto of every living Christian is that of the
Heir-apparent, ' I serve ; * that holiness, as the
word denotes, is but spiritual health, and, like
health, is an end that is only a larger means, an
end to be attained in order to be used. My per-
plexity to know how he came by this type of
Christianity was cut short on opening his bio-
graphy, and finding that he was by birth and
bringing up a working-man pure and simple.

Now if what I have said is true, not with
regard to exceptional individuals, but to classes,
it is no wonder that middle-class Christianity
should have so little attraction for working-men.
It is not their Christianity. It does not possess
the features to which they respond. They miss
any living voice and guidance in the difficulties
which the world presents to them, any keen
sense even of the problems which they are often
blunderingly endeavouring to solve, and which

i84 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN;

press so heavily upon them, — problems which, from
their individual importance being weaker than
ours, always take more or less a social form.
They miss any intelligent sympathy, any real
living help towards the solution of their problems,
and towards establishing a kingdom of righteous-
ness on the earth, — they miss sacrifice taken as
the one foundation, the life poured out for the
good of the world.

But is it not possible for these two types of
Christianity, each imperfect without the other,
to coalesce, for the moral and spiritual culture
of the one to take up into itself the service,
the self-devotion, and self-spending of the other,
and so from the broken light of true Christianity
to orb into the perfect * bright and morning'
star, which would herald a new dawn, not only
for the working-classes, but for all classes alike }
Cannot each of us do much to bring in a fuller,
truer Christianity, which will draw all men unto
it, a Christianity that possesses the three essential
factors, God, the individual soul, and the world }

Those of us who have the care and training
of boys, cannot we bring them up from the

CONCLUSION. i8s

earliest years, not with the one idea of getting
on in life, and making money, taking care to
save their own souls if they can in the process ;
but with the sense that they were sent into the
world for a purpose, for a work, not merely
*to be born red and die grey,' but to leave the
world a little the better for a noble life and a
work well done ? Cannot we bring them up to
realize that all good and conscientious work
is Church work, work done for the kingdom of
God, — that the lawyer serves the Just One, the
physician fulfils His command, * Heal the sick,'
the scientific man reveals Him as the faithful
and true, in whom is no shadow of variableness
or turning ? Surely we need not fall into that
melancholy confusion, that because we like our
work, or make a good thing out of it, therefore
we do it for ourselves, and not for the world.
This seems to me to be the very dregs of
asceticism, with all that is high and noble in it
left out. Man is so made for service that he
must find pleasure in his work. The pleasure
and profit are thrown in as the tradesman throws
in the paper and the twine that enfold some

1 86 WORJ^ AMONG WORKING-MEN'.

precious thing. But to say that the paper and
twine is all we care about is surely false. Con-
sidering the strength of the social instincts in
man, considering the absolute self-devotion to
the most unworthy ends which has been success-
fully inculcated, surely I am not visionary in
believing that the noblest of all ends — the
service of humanity — might be so inculcated
from earliest boyhood, so bound up with the
thought of God in the soul, so fortified by all
the internal and external sanctions that life
affords, that it might become the ruling passion,
absorbing into itself all lower passions, and
giving those wider horizons to our most circum-
scribed work which impart to all life something
of the exhilaration of a mountain climb. It is
that our Christianity is so feeble, so negative, so
self-circumscribed, so peeping and peering, and
full of fears for itself, so wanting in bold heroic
outlines and strong passions, that it has so little
power over young men either in our own class
or among working-men.

And our girls, with their fair culture, their
pretty homes, their graceful accomplishments

CONCLUSION. 187

with their amusements, and their pleasant excur-
sions abroad, or by the seaside, and all the
charm of social intercourse ; with all the good
influences, and tender care, and sheltered purity
which have surrounded them ; all the delights
of happy girlhood which * fetch the day about
from sun to sun, and rock the year as in a
"delightsome dream,' — cannot we wake up in their
hearts the question, 'What right have I to all
this ? what right, when other girls as young and
fair, and with the same thought in their hearts,
that they can be young only once, have to stand
week in week out at the washtub, or toil in
crowded factories or stifling work-rooms ? ' Can-
not we teach them what a young, generous heart
is so quick to learn, that they hold all their
advantages as a trust for those who have none,
and that their lot is so bright to enable them
to let a little of its pleasant sunshine flow over
into some dark young heart, whose pleasures, the
street and the dancing saloon, are even sadder
than its griefs ; or even into those monotonous
lives of toil so many good girls are leading around
them ?

1 83 WO/^A- AMONG WORKING-MEN,

That we so utterly fail to teach this to so many
of our girls, may it not be that we have forgotten
it in some measure ourselves — forgotten the fact
which one of our poets has so exquisitely ex-
pressed for us, speaking of the people —

* Our lives are beautiful thro' drudgeries
Of theirs which left them rest and space to grow
Thro' generations to the perfect curve ;
Our hair has got the gold because the dust
Of the world's highways never soiled the feet
Of our forefathers ; and the blue-veined hands
Were moulded to their tenderness of touch
By centuries of service rude and hard.'

Too often in the selfish isolation of our well-to-do
homes and family life, we do not recognize that the
blue-veined hands were thus moulded ' by centuries
of service rude and hard ' that they might be the
whiter and the tenderer to lift the poor lost girl
out of the mire of her sins, and be laid in healing
touches on all human sorrow ; that if through the
drudgeries of the people we have had rest and
space to grow to our full moral and intellectual
stature, it must be that we might be the stronger
to help up the debased and the ignorant ; that if
on us is the fine gold of refinement and culture.

CONCLUSION, 189

through the leisure purchased for us by their toil,
it must be that we should have more to give, more
wherewith to enrich their lives and ours, than if
we all were dirty, and ignorant, and ugly, in back
streets together. But alas ! we lose sight of the
relation of our lives to other lives ; we leave out
the facts which have determined our condition in
the present, and should shape them to noble uses
in the future ; we spend our trust money, regard-
ing only the coin, and disregarding the trust.
We first surround ourselves with every comfort
and refinement, and then stretch out our hands
to help others with what we may chance to have
left, placing as an ornament at the top what
should be as a base at the foundation ; and then
we wonder that our good life is such a failure,
that our Christianity has so little power to draw
all men to it.

I believe myself that an immense movement
is already setting in towards a more organic
Christianity, a Christianity that will recognise
generally what, thank God, many individuals have
already recognised, that we are members of one
organic whole, and that the limb can only attain

190 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

to its true health and joyous activity by losing
itself in serving the whole, in other words by
bringing in that very factor, the world, humanity,
which we have left out, a Christianity which would
build up a moral order on somewhat the same
methods as science has built up an intellectual
order in our life, by training the moral emotions
to respond to fact, as men have already trained
the intellectual faculties. It will not be left
to Positivism to teach that we are each one
born under a load of obligations of every kind,
obligations to our predecessors, to our successors,
to our contemporaries ; that after our birth these
obligations increase and accumulate, since it is
some time before we can render any service, but
have to be supported at the expense of others.
Even when we are old enough to take our place
in the world, whatever our work and whatever oui
success in that work, such success depends in the
main on the co-operation of others, without which
we should be left naked and hungr}-, and home-
less and helpless ; and that to Hve for others,
therefore, is for all of us a constant duty, the
rigorous logical consequence of an indisputable

CONCLUSION, 191

fact, the fact, viz., that we live by others. I be-
lieve we shall not leave it to Positivism to recog-
nize that the facts of our life deprive us of all
individual rights but one, the right to do our duty,
the right that enables us to do our appointed
service in the world. I believe that the time is
coming when * duty,' not selfish ' rights,' will
become the watchword of humanity ; and when a
fuller Christianity will be able so to mould public
opinion that the man who lives simply for his own
pleasure and amusement, in enjoyment of the
rights of property, will be branded as a man who
has lived a pauper at the public expense, and died
without an attempt to pay his debts ; a time when
it will be as much ground into a man by education
and religious influences that he has got to fulfil his
obligations to humanity, to others, as it now is that
he has got to fulfil his obligations to himself and
to his own soul. In one word, I believe a Chris-
tianity is coming which will teach us not only our
relations to God, but our relations to His world, —
not only our relations through Christ to God, but
also our relations through Christ to humanity, of
whom He is equally the representative; a Chris-

192 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

tianity which will base itself less upon theological
dogma and more upon the facts of life.

I can only earnestly beseech parents not to
stand in the way of this higher life for their
children, a joy which the world can neither give
nor take away. I would humbly and earnestly
remind them 'whose they are and whom they
serve,' even One who spared not His own Son,
but freely gave Him up for us all ; and beseech
them not to refuse to give up their children
in return to God. So far from really giving
them up, parents too often will not let their
children give up a single convenance of the world,
or put them to the least inconvenience or privation
for the sake of Him who gave up His well-beloved
Son to shame and stripes and nakedness and
death for them. Many a girl would have thank-
fully lived a less frivolous, objectless life, but her
parents objected to her walking alone to the place
where her help is wanted, not for fear of any real
harm befalling her, as far more unprotected work-
ing-class girls go safely to and fro to their work,
but simply from fear of the world and what will
be said. Or it is not convenient to give up a room

CONCLUSION. 193

in the house where she might invite some of the
poor tempted girls in the neighbourhood, and be
an untold blessing to them as a friend and com-
panion ; it would put the family out, and therefore
it is out of the question. Or the girls of the house
are not to take any evening work, because they
are wanted at home to play and sing and look
pretty, or it would interfere with the late dinner.
Or perhaps, having been the companion of hei
brothers, a girl feels she knows more about boys,
and while she does not care about girls, she would
thankfully undertake a class of rough lads, to
whom she, with her refinement, her purity, her
devotion, would be literally an angel from heaven.
But service being scarcely thought of, and the
world being with us early and late, and it being
a received though unexpressed maxim that no
risk must be run for the kingdom of God, such a
thing cannot be heard of for a moment. Is there
not at least some truth in James Hinton's sarcastic
observation that 'the devil always comes to an
Englishman in the shape of his wife and family ' ?
From the very strength of our family instincts,
our family selfishness is the hardest thing we have

13

194 WORK AMONG WORKING-MEN,

to overcome. The hardest thing is not to give
up ourselves, but to give up our dear ones to God,
to let them run counter to the world, and be talked
about, and encounter evil and impurity with only
the God we profess to believe in to keep them safe
while they are about their Father's business.

Yet what is the result of our thinking that we
can keep them safer in our homes than God can
in His service ? Some of us who are set apart by
some unconscious influence to be the confessors of
our kind know all that goes on in many of our
outwardly pure and cultured homes, — the envy,
the jealousies, the spite, the hidden impurity,
which like a moral smallpox is ravaging many a
fair young soul, simply from want of any higher
passion to cast out and consume the lower. Were
it not better to use the evils without to destroy
the evils within i* — not to insist on their living in
a sheltered dreamland, nor try to

* build up about their soothed sense a world
That is not God's, and wall them up in dreams,
So their young hearts may cease to beat with His,
The great world-heart, whose blood for ever shed
Is human life, whose ache is man's dumb pain ;*

CONCLUSION. 195

but believing that God's world must be better than
our dreamland, and will work out in them a better
goodness than we can, with bold faith to send
them out to do battle in it for the kingdom of
God, and to help, to serve, and to save, suffering
its mighty forces to mould them to heroic shape,
and give them both joys and sorrows deeper and
more blessed than any we can give.

May I not plead the example of my own
father, who, occupying a prominent position in
the University, and in the world of science,
which necessarily made those who belonged to
him more or less conspicuous, yet in a place
where it was confessedly more objectionable for
a girl to be talked about than in any other,
gave up his only unmarried daughter to the
service of the rough men about us, suffered me
to go alone into public-houses, and to beat about
the streets at night, voluntarily foregoing the
companionship he loved, and only holding him-
self in readiness to counsel and uphold me in
every difBculty and opposition I encountered ?
It was a great sacrifice made for God, far greater
than sacrificing himself. But it brought life from

196 MVI?Jir AMONG WORKING-MEN.

the dead to many of those rough men, and
Christian influences to many a little child ; it
brought an untold blessing to my own soul ; and
it has ever made that one word ' Father ' that
in which I can best utter my highest love and
adoration. May I not plead with parents to go
and do likewise ?

And to any young folk who may read these
brief notes and suggestions on work, I would
say, try this joyous life of service. Do not rush
into any great undertaking at first. I did not
begin with six hundred working-men, but with
six girls of my own age. But let there be no
bounds to your devotion and earnestness in
what you do undertake, remembering that ' I
can't ' is a lie on the lips that repeat ' I believe
in the Holy Ghost.' Pray, and all things in the
line of God's will shall be possible to you. And
don't mind being in a fright ; I don't think any
one can have endured greater agonies of terror
than I have ; and a good thing too, as it casts
one more entirely on God's strength. To girls
I would say, if you are perplexed how to begin^
begin as I did, with asking six or seven respect-

CONCLUSION. 197

able girls, daughters of washerwomen, or young
dressmakers, to tea on Sunday, to read your
Bible together ; don't preach to them, but share
your upward struggles with them, and get to
know them and try to be their friend. You will
find, through being their own age, you can help
them better than we older folk. Or, if you are
of a more adventurous disposition, get together
some of the back-street girls, or rough lads, and
see whether, by gaining their affections, you
cannot get them into shape. Trust me, you
will find scope enough for any amount of heroism
that may be in you, in overcoming your diffi-
culties, till at last you are able to rejoice before
the Eternal with the joy of angels.

And years and years hence, when you have
grown old, and sit with your faded hands folded
in the twilight musing over your past life, see
if the fairest, sweetest, most lasting joy is not
that early labour of love that first swept you
out of yourself into the very life of God, which
is the redemption of the world.

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