Mrs. S. A. Barnett

“ It can tell how minds and souls are dwarfed for want of outlook, how pathetic is the longing for beauty shown in the coloured print on the wall of the little dark tenement, how hard it is to make a home of a dwelling exactly like a hundred other dwellings, how often it is the dullness of the street which encourages carelessness of dirt and resort to excitement—how, in fact, it is the mean house and mean street which prepare the way for poverty and vice. The voice of joy and health is not heard even in the dwellings of the righteous. ”

“ You, though, are familiar with East London, and here you see sin without its trappings; you know that intemperance—over-eating and over-drinking—means a brutalised nature; you know that greed is cruelty, and that impurity is destructive both of reason and of feeling. You have seen the victims of sin, that drunkard’s home, the gambler’s hell, and the sweater’s shop. You know that the wages of sin is death, and that no culture can give to Mammon any nobility or warm his heart with any spark of unselfish joy.
Poverty, Ignorance, Sin—these threaten the city. ”

“ Do not all of us who know our parishes know that woman? Her poverty, her strenuousness, her patience, her fatigue, her hopefulness, her periods of hopelessness, and above, below, around all her Mother-love and her faith in God—and what is the result of her efforts, her heroism? Children strong, healthy, skilled, able to support her in her old age and themselves rear a family worthy of such noble moral ancestry? No! her reward will be to see her children weakly men and undergrown girls, all alike in having no stamina, among the first to be pushed out of the labour market. ”

“ The poverty which has to be cured is the poverty which degrades human nature, and makes impossible for the ordinary man his enjoyment of the powers and the tastes with which he was endowed at his birth. This is the poverty familiar in our streets, more familiar, we are told, than in the streets of any foreign town. This is the poverty by which men and women and children are kept from nourishment and sent out to work weak in body and open to every temptation to drink. This is the poverty which makes men slaves to work and uninterested in the magnificent drama of nature or life. ”

“ You have met poverty, ignorance, and sin.
You have met Poverty. You know families whose weekly income is under the price of a bottle of good wine; men dwarfed in stature, crippled in body, the inmates of a hospital for want of sufficient food; women aged and hardened, broken in spirit because their homes are too narrow for cleanliness or for comfort; children who die because they cannot have the care which preserves the children of the rich. ”

“ It is for reformers in every town to direct all their force on the Town Councils, to turn aside to no scheme, and to start no new society, but to urge, in season and out of season, that the care of the people is the care of the community, and not of any philanthropic section—is, indeed, the care of Society, and not of societies. ‘The People, not Politics,’ should be their cry; and they should see that the power is in the hands of men, irrespective of party or of class, who care for the people. ”

“ To the oratorios men and women have come, some of them from the low haunts kept around the city by its carelessly administered charity, all of them of the class which, working for its daily bread, has no margin of time for study. Amid those who are generally so independent of restraint, who cough and move as they will, there has been a death-like stillness as they have listened to some fine solo of Handel’s. On faces which are seldom free of the marks of care, except in the excitement of drink, a calm has seemed to settle and tears to flow, for no reason but because “it is so beautiful!” ”

“ The rich do not realize the meaning of poverty, its wounds to human nature, or its dangers to the nation.
Poverty, I would submit is at the root of our present discontent, not the poverty which the Poor Law and charity are to relieve, but the poverty of the great mass of the workers. Out of this poverty rises the enemy which threatens our peace and our greatness, and this poverty is due not to want of trade or work or wealth, but to the want of thought as to the distribution of our enormous national income. ”

“ Unequal Laws.—Is a man wholly unfettered in his choice of life when his country’s laws have allowed him to become a victim to unsanitary dwellings—when they permit him to sin, by providing that his wrong should (on himself) be resultless—when its ministers of justice, interpreting its laws, declare in the strong tones of action that bread-stealing is more wicked than wife-beating? Or is the highest life made more possible by laws that allow so much of our great mother earth—God-blessed for the use of mankind—to be reserved for the exclusive benefit and enjoyment of the upper classes? ”

“ The man who has won an honourable place, who by punctuality, honesty, and truthfulness has become the trusted servant of his employer, is often weary with the very monotony of his successful life. He has bread in abundance, but, unsatisfied, he dreams of filling quite another place in the world, perhaps as the leader daring much for others, perhaps as the patriot suffering much for his class and country, or perhaps as the poet living in others’ thoughts. There flits before him a vision of a fuller life, and the vision stirs in him a longing to share such life. ”

“ In every locality there might be a hall where music, or pictures, or the talk of friends would call into action sleeping powers, and by admiration arouse the deadened to life. The best things gain nothing by being made private property; a fine picture possessed by the State will give the individual who looks at it as much pleasure as if he possessed it. It is no idle dream that the Crystal Palace might become a national institution, open free for the enjoyment of all, dedicated to the service of the people, for the recreation of their lives, by means of music, knowledge, and beauty. ”

“ Should the business man divide his social reforming self from his business self, and keep, as he would say, his charity and his business apart?
The world is rich in examples of devoted men and women who have given up pleasure and profit to serve others’ needs. The modern Press gives every day news of both the benefactions and the good deeds of business men who, as business men, think first, not of the kingdom of heaven, but of business profits. This specialization of effort—as the specialization of a class—has its good results; but is it the best, the only way of social reform? ”

“ Great Poverty.—Can a man live the highest life when the preservation of his stunted, unlovely body occupies all his thoughts—from whose life pleasure is crushed out by ever-wearying work—to whom thought is impossible (the brain needs food and leisure to set it going) —to whom knowledge, one of the prophets of the nineteenth century and a revealer of the Most High, is denied? ”

“ There are, it must be evident, few signs of rational enjoyment in the vastly increased pleasure-seeking of to-day. The people crowd into the country, but only a few people find anything in nature which is theirs. They pass by the memorials of great men and great events, and seldom feel a thrill of national pride. They wander aimlessly, helplessly through museums and picture-galleries, the things they see calling out little response in their minds. They have a limited and often perverted taste for music, and have so little conversation that on holidays they are silent or shout senseless songs. ”

“ With wages at their present rate I can yet imagine the houses made strong and healthy, education and public baths made free, and the possibility of investing in land made easy. I can imagine that, without increase of their private wealth, the poor might have in libraries, music-halls, and flower gardens that on which wealth is spent. I can imagine the youth of the nation made strong by means of fresh air and the doctor’s care, the aged made restful by means of honourable pensions. ”

“ But how can the men and women have such knowledge who have been driven by the poverty of their homes to go to work as children, and have had no leisure in which to read history or to dream dreams? Of course they vacillate and of course they fall victims to shallow philosophy.
The people, in a word, because of poverty, are not free. They are “cogs in a great machine which uses human lives as the raw stuff out of which to fashion material wealth”. They are by fear of starvation compelled to be instruments of production almost as much as if they were under a law of slavery. ”

“ It is for want of money that the streets in which the poor live are close, ill-swept, and ill-lighted; that the ‘East Ends’ of towns have no grand meeting-rooms and no beauty. It is through superfluity of money that the entertainments of the rich are made tiresome with music, and their picture galleries made ugly with uninteresting portraits. There is no want of means for making better the condition of the people; and there has ever been sufficient good-will to use the means when the way has been clear. To discover the way is the problem of the times. ”

“ It opens up a whole realm of matters for reflection: the baby not dragged hither and thither in arms too small and weak for its comfort, and then plumped down on cold or damp stones while its over-burdened nurse snatches a brief game or indulges in a scamper; the clouding of the elder child’s life by unremitting responsibilities, and the effortful labour which sometimes wears out love, though not so often as could be expected, so marvellous is human nature, and its capacity for care and tenderness. ”

“ The condition of the people is one not to be long endured, but the answer to the question, ‘What can the State do?’ must be a practicable one, or we shall waste time, make mistakes, rouse up anarchy, and destroy much that is good.
Facing, then, the whole position, we see that among the majority of Englishmen life is poor; that among the few life is made rich. The thoughts stored in books, the beauty rescued from nature and preserved in pictures, the intercourse made possible by means of steam locomotion, stir powers in the few which lie asleep in the many. ”

“ The voice of the times—would that it had a Gladstone for its interpreter—is one that calls every one, be he patriot or business man, or even a pleasure-lover, to set himself to help in the eviction of poverty. If there be any fighting spirit—any chivalry left, here is the object for its attack; if there be any enlightened selfishness, here is the field for its exercise. Poverty, if it be not destroyed, will destroy the England of our hopes and our dreams. ”

“ East Londoners will be glad to know that she went back a wiser and not a sadder woman, having learnt that riches are not necessary to refinement, that some of the noblest characters are developed under the enforced self-control of an income of a pound or thirty shillings a week, that love lived side by side with poverty without thought of exit by the window though poverty had trodden a beaten path through the door, and that books and ideas, though not plentiful enough to become toys, were read, loved, and lived with until they became part of the being of their possessors. ”

“ Men and women are what their holidays have made them, and a nation’s use of its holidays may almost be said to determine its position in the world’s order of greatness. A nation whose pleasures are coarse and brutal, whose people delight in the excitement of their senses by actions in which their minds take no part, and where solitude is unendurable, can hardly do great things. It is not likely that it will be remembered, as the poets are remembered, by its care for any principle of action. It will hardly be generous in its foreign policy or happy in its homes. ”

“ For the pretence of work, the business about trifles, the everlasting money changing, the service of fashion, the gathering and squandering, the ‘aimless round in an eddy of purposeless dust’—for these there would be work which would leave men wiser and the world cleaner. Instead of scandal there would be interchange of thought, and instead of ‘bold print posters,’ calm statement of fact. The drunkards would give up drink, the indolent their ease, and no one again ‘would beat a horse or curse a woman.’ Men would become honest and quiet, they would give up envying and strife. ”