THE work that lies before us in every city waiting for the Helping Hand—the human wreckage, bankruptcy, age, sickness, poverty, which must always be forming anew however we may meet it and find alleviation—will certainly not decrease as the years roll on. The point for us to consider here is not the volume and variety of the forces which cause this wreckage, but the attempts which are now being made to find this alleviation and, if possible, a remedy.

The Helping Hand has a history, and it is very simple:

1. First of all it threw a penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.

2. Secondly, it offered free meals and free quarters in every monastic house to every beggar because he was a beggar.

3. It continued to give the penny and the free meals and the lodging to the beggar because he was a beggar, but it ordered the beggar to go back to work.

4. It arrested, imprisoned, branded, and flogged the beggar because he was a beggar. It continued also to give him a penny for the same reason.

5. It founded almshouses for some of the aged poor; those who could not get in continued to receive their penny and their flogging because they were beggars.

6. It founded workhouses, Bridewell, and houses of correction for the beggar. And it continued to give that penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.

7. It built houses for the reception of the poor who could no longer work, infirmaries for the sick, orphanages and homes for poor children, casual wards for the homeless. It made begging an offense in the eyes of the law. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a beggar.

8. It discovered that a multitude of rogues and people who will not work trade upon the charity and the pity of people, sending around letters asking for help. It therefore established an association, with branches everywhere, to expose the fraudulent. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a beggar.

In other words, the Helping Hand has never been able to refrain from giving that penny which encourages the “masterless” man, and the man who will not work, and the fraudulent, and the writer of the begging letter. Could the Helping Hand be persuaded to refuse that penny for a single fortnight, to turn a deaf ear resolutely to the starving family on the road, to the starving children on the pavement, to the starving woman who stands silent, mournful, appealing with mute looks of misery, only for a single fortnight, the existence of the beggar would come to a sudden end. This the Helping Hand can never be persuaded to do. Therefore we have with us not only the real misery caused by fate, by fortune, by the natural consequences of folly and weakness and crime, but also the pretended misery of those who live upon the pity of the world and trade on that strange self-indulgence which gives the dole to remove an unpleasant object out of sight and to awaken the glow which follows with the sense of charity.

I leave aside in this place the casual dole—the penny to the beggar because he is a beggar; it is illustrated for all time by the partition of the cloak between St. Martin and the beggar. The saint, then a gallant cavalryman, did not stop—or stoop—to inquire into the merits of the case; here was a beggar. Was he really starving? could he work? were his sufferings pretended? was he really cold? did he deserve any help at all? Was he, on the contrary, well fed and nourished, money in purse, food in wallet, a sufficiency of clothes on his back, a fire and a pot over it at home, with a well-fed family and a wife on the same “lay” at the other gate of the city? Let us leave the Bishop of LigugÉ as a type for all the centuries of the unthinking charity which gives the penny to the beggar because he is a beggar.

Let us turn to other and later developments. The Helping Hand has founded and endowed and now maintains by voluntary contributions hospitals of every kind for the sick; by rates and taxes, workhouses for the poor, schools for the children. Yet there has passed—there is now passing—over the work of charity a great and most remarkable revolution; it is a revolution characteristic of a time in which every theory of social life, social conditions, and social responsibilities has been completely changed. The old duties remain still; schools and hospitals have been multiplied; if almshouses have not increased, the workhouse system has become better organized. But we have become aware of other duties, of new responsibilities. It is now understood that it is not enough to put the children to school from one to fourteen; they must be looked after when they leave school; it is not enough to provide for the diseases of the body; we must make provision for the diseases, and the cause of the diseases, of the mind. The Helping Hand is at work in these days for the arrest of degeneracy; for the opening up of art, literature, music, science, culture of all kinds, to the better sort among the working-classes; for the wider extension of the area and the depth of culture; for the creation of that kind of public opinion which, more than anything else, makes for public order and the maintenance of law; for the care and safeguarding of young people at the perilous time of emancipation from school; for the rescue of those who can be rescued; for the cleansing of the slums; for the restoration to the world of those who, as we have seen, have dropped out; and for the prevention of pauperizing by ill-considered schemes of ill-informed benevolence.

These are general terms. In order to carry out its work in detail, the Helping Hand looks after the children in their homes, while the Board-school looks after their teaching; it provides cases for the hospital, and aids the parish authorities during sickness in the home; it introduces the social side into the lives of the better sort; it devises attractions for the young people who stand at the parting of the ways, where temptation is strong and the primrose path is bright with flowers; it teaches the lads a trade, and the girls a love for the quiet life; it wages war with the public house and the street; it endeavors to bring back the lowest strata to a sense of religion which they have come to think the peculiar and rather unaccountable property of “class”; it brings friendliness among folk who have only known the order of the policeman.

These are some of the functions which to-day are exercised by the Helping Hand. In East London we can see the hand at work with greater energy, wiser supervision, and in directions more varied than in any other city of Great Britain. I do not venture, for the obvious reason of ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere.

In this immense multitude there are many slums of the worst kind; but they are now much fewer, and they are much less offensive, than they were; the most terrible of the plague spots seem to have been improved away; to find the real old slum, the foul, indescribable human pigsty, one must no longer look for it in East London. That is to say, there are, I dare say, a few of the old slums left, but the places—there were then many of them—into which one peered, shuddering, twenty years ago, have now vanished. The police, the clergy, the ladies who go about the parish, can still take the visitor into strange courts and noisome tenements, but he who remembers the former state of things feels that light and air and a certain amount of public opinion, with some measure of cleanliness, have been brought to the old-fashioned slum by the modern Helping Hand.

If the American visitor to London desires to see a real old-fashioned slum—one where all the surroundings, physical and moral, are, to use the mild word of the day, absolutely “insanitary”—I would recommend him not to try East London, where he would have to search long for what he wants, but to pay a visit to Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the Thames and to seek the guidance of one of the students through the courts of crime and grime which still lie pretty thickly round that fortress of the army of health.

If you read novels of the day describing things brutal beyond belief, it will be well to suspect that the situations are a little mixed. Art must exaggerate; art must select; art must group. In this way it is quite possible that a picture tendered as of to-day may really belong to twenty years ago. There is still plenty of misery left in East London—we need, in fact, no exaggeration; I could fill these pages with lamentable histories; the people are still very much “down below”; some of them are a long way down; they are not only suffering for the sins of their fathers, they are busily piling up by their own sins sufferings for their children. Terrible has been their own inheritance; more terrible still will be the inheritance of the children.

Among these people, being such as they are, a whole army is at work continually. Let me now, in such short space as is at my command, consider in detail some of the more important methods by which this army is at work. It is not yet an army completely drilled and subdivided and commanded; some of their work overlaps, or hinders, other work. Perhaps it is not to be desired that this army should be completely drilled and organized. We do not ask for the crystallized methods of French education, or the iron drill of the Prussian sergeant. Let us leave some room for individual choice. Given certain principles of action, the element of personal freedom in carrying out these principles becomes of vital importance.

I have spoken of the revolution in opinion as to the responsibilities of the better educated and the wealthier toward those below them. Perhaps the situation may be illustrated by considering the change that has passed over us in our conception of what civilization should mean. The view of the eighteenth century was that civilization, culture, the pursuit of art, reading, learning of all kinds, science, the power, as well as the right, of government belonged essentially to the upper classes. When the good people of Spalding, for instance, in the year 1701, founded a literary society they called it the “Spalding Gentlemen’s Society”—only gentlemen, you see, could be expected to take any interest in things that belong to civilization. It was further considered that it was impossible to expect civilizing influences to bear upon the working-classes. They were kept in order by discipline, by the prison, and by the lash. To open the doors of education, to give them access to the tree of knowledge, would be a most dangerous, a most fatal, mistake. Even at the present day one hears, at times, the belated cry that the working-classes need no more than the barest elements of learning.

In certain circles the distinction between the cultured class and those outside was marked by artificial notes of manner and of speech. The limits were intolerably narrow; outside these circles there was no leadership, no statesmanship, possible.

But apart from the pretensions of the eighteenth-century aristocracy it was considered by the middle class and the professional class alike dangerous to interfere with Providence; the working-class were born to do service; let them learn to do it. Religion, of course, they could have if they wanted it; the church was there, the doors were open every Sunday, anybody might go in; the clergyman would visit the sick, if he were invited; the children were baptized in the church; some of the people were married in the church; all the people were buried in the churchyard, with the service of the church by law established. That was all; there were very few schools; education, even if the parents wished it, was not to be had, and the folk were left altogether to their own devices. They had been forced out of the City to make room for warehouses and offices; they lived in their own quarters, especially along the riverside and in Whitechapel, and they were left quite alone to their own devices.

There were no police; the hand of the law among these crowded streets was weak; they did what they pleased. There is a story belonging to the year 1790, or thereabouts, of a man living in Wapping, just outside the Tower of London, which was always garrisoned with troops. This man gave offense to his neighbors by complying with some obnoxious law. He heard that they were going to attack him, meaning that they were going to murder him. The man had the bulldog courage of his time; he sent away his wife and children; he got a friend as brave as himself to join him; he closed his lower shutters and barricaded his door; he laid in ammunition, and he brought in and loaded two guns, one for himself and one for his friend.

At nightfall the attacking party arrived; they were armed with guns and stones. They began with a volley of the latter; the besieged paid no attention; they then fired at the windows; the besieged received their fire, and while they were loading again let fly among them, and killed or wounded two or three. They retired in confusion, but returned in larger numbers and with greater fury. All night long the unequal combat raged. When their ammunition was spent the two men dropped out of a back window into a timber yard, where they hid in a saw-pit. Observe that this battle lasted all the night, close to the Tower, and that no soldiers were sent out to stop it till the morning, when the mischief was done and the house was sacked. And no one was arrested, no one was punished, save the men who were shot. Can any story more clearly indicate the abandonment of the people to their own devices?

Reading these things, remembering how brutal, how ignorant, how degraded were whole masses of our people at that time, I am amazed that we came out of that long struggle of 1792–1815 without some awful outburst, some Jacquerie, like that of the Parisian mob, which might have drenched our land, as it did that of France, with blood and murder. And I think that when the social history of the nineteenth century, which we who have lived in it cannot grasp, save in parts, comes to be really and impartially considered, the chief feature, the redeeming point, will be that it began to recognize in practice the elementary truths that we are all responsible for each other, that each is his brother’s keeper, that no class can separate itself from the rest, and that no civilization is durable or safe unless it includes the whole people.

What, then, have we done? What have we attempted? What are our present aims? It is not my purpose either to defend or to attack. I have only to state what is being done. Nothing can be attempted in this direction that is not open to abuses of one kind or another. The relief of distress encourages the idle; help of every kind is seized upon by the fraud and the impostor; if we feed and clothe the children their parents have more money for drink; the most we can do is to choose the line that seems open to the fewest objections and to exercise the most unremitting vigilance, care, and caution. The worst feature in the whole chapter of modern charity is that love and forbearance the most unwearied, devotion the most unselfish, seem too often only to pauperize the people, to induce more impudent frauds. But not always; we must take the line of the greatest, not the least, resistance,—that which is hardest for the worker, and certainly most unpopular with the subjects,—and we must judge of results from what follows. All modern philanthropic effort must, in order to be successful, be based upon the people understanding quite clearly that such effort cannot, by any ingenuity or any lies and legends, be turned to the encouragement of those who will not work.

I begin with the parish. There is at the present moment no more active clergy in the world than our own; there is no organization more complete than that of a well-worked London parish. The young men who now take Holy Orders know, at the outset, that they must lead lives of perpetual activity. There are the services of the parish church, with outlying mission churches; there are Sunday-schools, there are clubs, there are mothers’ meetings, there are amusements for the people—concerts and entertainments for the winter; there is the supervision of the visiting ladies who go about the parish and learn the history of all the tenants in all the courts. There is the choir to be looked after, there are the sick to be cared for, there are always people in distress and in need of help—people for whom the vestry officers and workhouse officers can do nothing; the despairing young clergyman very soon finds out that the more you give to people who want help, the more people there are who clamor for help; he has to learn, you see, the great lesson that in certain social levels, where not to work should mean not to eat, no one will do a stroke of work if he can avoid it. Some of the clergy never do learn this lesson; they go on, all their lives, giving, doling, distributing, and pauperizing.

The organization of a London parish on the modern line is amazing in the extent of the aims and the variety of the work done. I have before me the annual report of a parish. From this document, which is like most of the other parochial annuals, it would seem the resolved endeavor of the clergy to make every kind of helpful and civilized work spring from the church and rest upon the church. In this report there are notices of seventy-five associations of various kinds; among them are gilds and fraternities, schools and classes; there are institutions purely religious and purely secular; with the Bible classes and the gilds we find the penny bank, the sharing club, the sale of clothes, the library, the maternity society, the mothers’ meetings, the cookery class, and the blanket society. All these associations are conducted by the vicar and his four curates, assisted by a voluntary staff of about twenty ladies. It is evident that without unpaid and voluntary assistance the work could not be even attempted. The remarkable point—the “note” of the time—is that this voluntary assistance is like the widow’s cruse—it never fails.

If, on the other hand, it is asked how far the people respond to the assumption that everything is done by the church, it is necessary to reply that the church, as a rule, remains comparatively empty. We have seen elsewhere that the percentage of attendance at the Sunday services of the parish or the district church was, fourteen years ago, a little over three. Occasionally, however, when the vicar is a man of exceptional character, one who succeeds in winning the respect and the affection of the people so that they will follow him even into his church, the services are well attended, and in the evening crowded. There is, for example, a church in a district—a very poor and humble district near Shoreditch: the church was built through the exertions of the present vicar, who has succeeded in making the people attend. The history of the man partly explains the phenomenon. Fifteen years ago, when he went there, the place, consisting of a dozen miserable streets, was one of the vilest kind. Violence, robbery, drunkenness, murder, life in the most uncleanly forms imaginable prevailed in this slice of a large, crowded parish, which this man cut off to make a parish by itself. He sat down in the midst of them all, and he began. Observe that the first lesson he had to teach them was that he was not afraid of them; he was neither afraid of their threats nor of their proffered violence nor of their tongues; he went about among the women—the owners of those tongues—and opened up conversation with them; he spoke them friendly; they gave him the retort unfriendly; he replied readily and boldly, carrying the laugh against his adversaries; the common bludgeon of Billingsgate he met with the gentle rapier of “chaff,” insomuch that the women were first infuriated, then silenced, and then reduced to friendliness, and, in this more desirable frame of mind, so remain. He put up a temporary church; beside the church he started schools; he opened a club for lads and the younger men; he provided his club with things that attracted them—rough games and gymnastics; more than this, he gave them boxing-gloves and taught them how to fight according to the strict rules of the prize-ring. You think that this is not the ideal amusement for a clergyman—wait a bit. The rules of the prize-ring are rigid rules; they demand a good deal of study; they make boxing a duello conducted according to rules of honor and courtesy. Now, when a lad has learned to handle the gloves according to the rules he becomes a stickler for them. Like Mrs. Battle over a game of whist, he exacts the rigor of the game. As for the old methods—the stones in the knotted handkerchief, the club, the short iron rod, and the cowardly boot—he will have no more of them. Moreover, fifteen minutes with a stout adversary, two or three returns to earth, and a shake-hand at the end, knock the devil out of a lad—the devil of restlessness and of pugnacity—give him a standard of honor, and make the rough-and-tumble in the street no longer worthy of consideration.

Then the vicar built a “doss-house,” a place where men could sleep in peace and cleanliness. And he lived among his people, spending every evening of his life in club and doss-house and all day in the parish, so that the people trusted him more and more; and not only did his club overflow, but his church also began to fill—by this time it is no longer a temporary thing of iron, but a lovely church, with painted windows and carved work. In his services there is plenty of singing; he has processions, which the people like, with banners and crosses, the choir singing as they go. He also has incense, which I have never understood to be other than a barbaric survival. Nor can I understand how any one can endure the smell. Still, I suppose the people like it or he would not have it, and, after all, for those who do like the smell it is apparently harmless.

How many others have tried the same methods, but have failed! Why? Because the one thing necessary for success in such work as this—nine parts philanthropic and one part religious—is the magnetic power which we call, in practical work, sympathy, and, in art or literature, genius.

The clergy, with or without this magnetic power, work day and night. Never before has the Church of England possessed a clergy more devoted to practical work. Never before, alas! has the Church possessed so few scholars or so few preachers. Learning, save for a scholar here and there, has deserted the Church of England. Eloquence has passed from her pulpits to those of the Nonconformists. But the clergy work. Unfortunately, the parishes are large; even a district church has often ten thousand people or more, and those mostly poor, so that the struggle would be, if it were not supplemented, almost hopeless.

It is supplemented in many ways. To begin with, in its civilizing work, by the Board-school. The action of the London School Board is always subjected to the fiercest light of hostile criticism, especially that of the ratepayers, who have seen with disgust the rate mounting year by year. There is, however, a consensus of agreement that the influence of the schools has been to humanize the people in a manner actually visible to all. The results are before us. The children of to-day are, it is confessed even by opponents to the policy of the School Board, in every respect better than those of twenty years ago, and this although, despite laws and inspectors, there are still many children who escape the meshes of the school net. The mothers understand that the teachers demand certain things of them; that the children must present themselves with hands and faces washed and with some attempt at neatness in their dress; this gives rise to a certain shame at letting the children go unwashed; perhaps, also, the thought of the school tyranny makes the father remember on Saturday afternoon the responsibility of the children, even to knocking off a pint or so.

As for the children themselves, they love the school and the teachers and the lessons; this part of the day is their happiness. Whether in the after life they will remember much of the scraps they learned—crumbs of knowledge: the historical crumb, the geographical crumb—I know not, but the important lessons of order and obedience are not readily forgotten; they will remain; when these children grow up some of them will perhaps join the company of disorder; but they will be rebels, not untaught savages who know no law.

I have already spoken of the clubs for boys and girls. These clubs are simply invaluable. They take the young people at a time when habits are most easily formed, at a time of life when it is most desirable to give them occupation and pursuits which will take them away from the dangers of the streets.

For the better class of boys, those who should be taught the better trades, especially those which require a knowledge of drawing, designing, or machinery, there are the continuation schools, which are carried on in the evening, and the Polytechnics. A Polytechnic is to the young working lad what a public school or a college is to the upper class. It not only teaches him a trade, that by which he is to live, but it gives him discipline, obedience, responsibility, and the sense of duty. It makes a man of him; it gives him honor and self-respect. There are now lads in the London Polytechnics by thousands; many of them will go out to the colonies; whether they emigrate or whether they stay at home, they will become the very cream and flower of the working-people; they will stand up wherever fate leads them as lifelong champions for soberness and for industry. Not for them will be the wild dreams of anarchy; not for them the follies of an impossible socialism; not for them the derision of religion; not for them the hatred of the rich or the jealousy of class. Not the least among the benefits and advantages of the Polytechnic is the esprit de corps promoted among them; they are as proud of their “Poly” as any lad of Eton or any man of Balliol. And the latest arrival from the place, wherever he goes, is sure to find friends and advisers and helpers among the old boys of his “Poly.”

The Helping Hand in education is of such great importance that one may dwell a little upon the machinery by which a clever and persevering lad may rise from the very lowest levels to any honor or distinction which the country has to offer. It is chiefly the Technical Education Board, a body which has been in existence for some ten years, which supplies the ladders. This Board is empowered by the London County Council to assist in supplying technical instruction to schools and institutions which are not conducted for private profit. The Board spends the sum of £170,000 a year in maintaining and developing classes for technical education. The most important of these institutions are the Polytechnics above mentioned. There are twelve of these in and about London, of which two are in our quarter of East London. The number of students in Polytechnics—all of them, it is needless to say, of the working-class—amounts to 45,000. The cost of maintaining them is £120,000, of which the Board of Technical Education contributes £30,000; a large sum is given by the City Charities Commission, and the rest is given by half a dozen rich City companies. It is evident we have here a very serious attempt at providing technical education for lads who are to become the skilled workmen of the future. Formerly they were apprenticed to various trades; the system of apprenticeship has fallen into disuse; but it is found highly necessary, if this country is to hold her own against foreign competition, to train the lads in workshops and laboratories where they may learn every branch of their own trade. There are excellent and fully equipped laboratories at the People’s Palace and one or two other Polytechnics. As for the trades taught, they are far too numerous to set down. All those trades which are connected with engineering, with metal work, with gold- and silver-smiths’ work, with enameling, wood engraving, bookbinding, decorating and painting, carpentry, furniture- and cabinet-making, and a hundred other trades are taught in these colleges of industry. There are art schools also for the teaching of design, decoration, and all the art requirements of the trades.

For the encouragement of the lads who have left school and are willing to carry on their work the continuation classes were formed. The Technical Board has established a system of scholarships by which a ladder is placed in readiness for any boy or girl who can climb it. There are six hundred small scholarships given every year by examination to boys and girls who have passed the sixth standard in the elementary schools; they are in value £8 for the first year, and £12 for the second year. After two years the second ladder is reached. The student who has shown, so far, that he is able to climb the ladder and would now give further proof of ability, must be under sixteen, and his parents must not be in the receipt of more than £400 a year. He may then gain by open competition a scholarship giving him free education at some recognized college of higher education, together with about £30 a year in money. After three years, if he is able to climb still higher,—the number of competitors now narrows,—he has a grand chance before him; he may win a scholarship giving him free education at any university he may choose, with £60 a year, tenable for three years. There are at present many such scholars in residence at Oxford, Cambridge, and other universities.

In addition to these, the Board gives scholarships for art, for science and technology, for horticulture, for sanitary science, and for domestic economy. Besides this industrial help, the Board provides lectures, especially for clerks, on commercial subjects.

It will be understood that by means of these scholarships a boy may work his way, at little or no cost to his friends, from the position of craftsman to that of a graduate in honors of Oxford and Cambridge. Think what this means! The boy is lifted straight from the life of manual labor, very likely monotonous labor, which is the lot of most, in which he can never attain to fortune, honor, or distinction, to the life of intellectual work; his companions will be those who stand in the very forefront of science, literature, and art. A fellowship at his college will enable him to be called to the bar; he may then aspire, with reasonable hopes of success, to the honors of Queen’s counsel, Judge, Solicitor-General, Chief Justice, or even Lord Chancellor. He may go into the Church, and look forward, if with learning he has acquired administrative power and preaching power, and, let us add, manners, to becoming a bishop; he may remain at the university, a lecturer and teacher of his own subject; he may become a professor of science, or he may become an expounder of history. He may become a physician or a surgeon. He may become a journalist, a dramatist, a novelist, a poet. Whatever line he enters upon, he has climbed, by means of these three ladders, up into the higher ranks, with all that the word means. He has become, if he chooses,—and he cannot help choosing,—a gentleman. The poor lad who climbs up does not always, it is true, become a gentleman. Sometimes there remain still clinging to him certain rusticities; sometimes ancestral traits, such as a thirst for strong drink, seize him. As a rule, however, the lad who has climbed remains, he and his children after him, in the rank, so dear to the British soul, of undoubted gentility. If the sins of the father are visited upon the children, then, surely the achievements and the virtues of the father shall bring their rewards to the children—yea, even unto the third and fourth generation.

After the parish work and the work of education I had placed that of housing, but this has already been sufficiently considered.

The care of the sick comes next upon my list. There is a continual cry ascending to the regions of the rich concerning the insufficiency of hospital endowments. There is certainly no city better provided with hospitals than London, nor any city where more money is annually subscribed for their maintenance, nor any where the medical staff are paid so little and do so much. In East London there is the magnificent foundation of the London Hospital, which receives 11,500 in-patients every year, has an endowment of £20,000 a year, and an additional income, from voluntary subscriptions, of £40,000 a year. The story of the Children’s Hospital and its beginnings in the hamlet of Ratcliffe has been already told. And there are, in addition, “homes” of all kinds, crÊches for infants, nursing societies, and dispensaries. One mentions these in passing, but a catalogue of endowments is not necessary.

Among the organizations for help must not be forgotten the fraternities for mutual assistance, such as the Odd Fellows, the Foresters, and the Hearts of Oak. These associations do not belong exclusively to East London, but they have extensive branches here, and are, I believe, well managed and on sound principles. They offer assistance in times of misfortune, medical aid in sickness, and care of the widows and fatherless. In this place they can only be mentioned.

For the women, a very large society is that called the M.A.B.Y.S.—i.e., the “Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.” It began by befriending young servants from the workhouse—girls generally friendless and very forlorn—and has now extended its work to include all young servants. Every lady in the society undertakes the care of one or more servants, whom she visits or invites to her own house on the Sunday “out.” These friendships are often lifelong, and produce the best possible results.

The position of the workhouse girl is sometimes very pitiful. One such girl recently came to my knowledge. In this case the girl had been picked up as a baby in the streets; she had no family, no name, no friends, no birthday even. When she found a friend in the M.A.B.Y.S. she asked permission to take her friend’s birthday for her own, and to call her friend’s cook her aunt, so that she might feel that she too could enjoy, if only in imagination, what all the rest of the world possesses—a birthday and a family.

There are six or seven free libraries in East London. Who was the benefactor to humanity who first invented or discovered the free library? Who was the philanthropist who first advocated the free library? I do not know. But when one realizes what the free library means one is carried away by admiration and gratitude. By means of the free library we actually give to every person, however poor,—we give him, as a free gift,—the whole of the literature of the world. If he were a millionaire he could not acquire a greater gift that the poorest lad enjoys who lives near a good free library. He can take books home with him; he can study any subject he likes, if he is a student; or he may read for his own pleasure only, and for amusement. More than this, since none but good and worthy literature should be admitted to the free library the readers cannot use its treasures without forming, purifying, and elevating their taste. Now, taste in literature leads naturally, it is believed by some, to corresponding preferences as regards the major and the minor virtues and their opposites. For my own part, I regard the librarian of a free library as a guardian of morals, a censor, a teacher; those who receive books of him receive the continual admonitions of the wisest and the best of men. A course of Shakspere is in itself an education; a course of Scott may be said to teach history; and a course of the best fiction in our language teaches what is meant by the grand old name of gentleman. I look for the time when the demand for books by the mass of the public will be in itself a selection of the best and finest; when it will be impossible to reproach the people, as is done to-day, with buying the ephemeral trash that is offered at a penny, and neglecting the scholars and the poets and the wise ones of ancient days. The free library is doing for the working-people what the circulating library cannot do for its readers who go in broadcloth and in silk. In the time to come, in the immediate future, it will perhaps be the latter who read the rubbish and the former who will create the demand for the nobler and the higher work.

Mention has already been made of the Sunday afternoon lecture. Other attempts have been made to brighten the Sunday afternoon, always in winter a difficult time to get through. There are organ recitals at the People’s Palace, social meetings, with talk and sometimes lantern views, and short addresses.

Perhaps the work that is done in East London for the waifs and strays is the most remarkable, as it is certainly the most interesting.

Those who have read Defoe’s “Colonel Jack” will remember the wonderful picture which he presents of the London street boy. That boy has never ceased to live in and about the streets. Sometimes he sleeps in the single room rented by his father, but the livelong day he spends in the streets; he picks up, literally, his food; he picks it up from the coster’s barrow, from the baker’s counter, from the fishmonger’s stall, when nobody is looking. For such boys as these there are Barnardo’s Homes, where waifs and strays to any number are admitted, brought up, trained to a trade, and then sent out to the colonies. Five thousand children are in these homes. The history is very simple. Dr. Barnardo, a young Irish medical student, came to London with the intention of giving up his own profession and becoming a preacher. He began by preaching in the streets; he picked up a child, wandering, homeless and destitute, and took it home to his lodgings; he found another and another, and took them home too. So it began; the children became too many for his own resources; they still kept dropping in; he took a house for them, and let it be known that he wanted support. The rest was easy. He has always received as much support as he wanted, and he has already trained and sent out to the colonies nearly ten thousand children. There are also many less important homes and associations for indigent children, homes for homeless boys, homes, refuges, and societies for girls; industrial homes, female protection societies, orphanages, in long array. Most of these societies are, however, limited as to income; a great part of their funds goes in management expenses. If they would be persuaded to unite, a great deal more might be done, while each society, with its honorary officers, could be carried on in accordance with the intentions and ideas of its founders and supporters.

Homes and schools for the boys and girls, hospitals for the adult, there remain the aged. Dotted about all over London there are about a hundred and fifty almshouses; of these about half are situated in and about East London. Not that the people of East London have been more philanthropic in their endowments than those of the west, but, before there was any city of East London, almshouses were planted here on account of the salubrity and freshness of the air and the cheapness of the ground. Some of these have been moved farther afield, their original sites being built over. The People’s Palace, for instance, is built upon the site of the Bancroft almshouses, founded in 1728 for the maintenance and education of one hundred poor. Their original house has gone, but the charity is still maintained.

I have always been astonished to think that this most excellent form of charity, one least of all liable to be abused, has gone out of fashion. If I were rich I should rejoice in creating and founding an almshouse for the admission and maintenance of as many old men and old women as I could afford, or as the college which I should build would admit. There are still some delightful almshouses left in London, although so many have been removed; those that remain stand beside the crowded thoroughfares, each one a lesson in charity and pity; there is the stately Trinity Almshouse in the Whitechapel road, with its two courts and its chapel and its statue of the founder and the good old men, the master mariners, who live there; and close beside, unless it has been lately removed, an almshouse of the humbler kind, but quite homely and venerable. My almshouse, if I were privileged to build and endow one, should have its refectory, as well as its chapel; my old people should have their dinner together, and their common hall for society in the winter evenings; they should have, as well, their gardens and their quadrangle and the sense of belonging to a foundation beautiful in its buildings, as well as charitable in its objects.

The existing almshouses by themselves go very little way toward keeping the aged out of the workhouse; but there are other aids which carry us on a little farther, societies which give annuities and pensions to various persons. On the list more than a hundred different trades are represented. Among them is one for flower girls and water-cress venders. This, however, despite its unpretending title, has grown into a very large and important society. Under this title are conducted industrial and servants’ training homes, a cottage hospital, a home for waif girls, an orphanage, a shelter and clubroom for street flower-sellers, and a seaside holiday home for blind and helpless and crippled girls, ineligible for ordinary homes—the whole with an income of over £7000, and giving assistance to 12,000 girls a year. This, like the association for befriending young servants, has grown gradually out of small beginnings, and in a space of thirty years has attained to its present dimensions.

So numerous are the societies and the charities of every kind that one thinks there ought not to be any distress, any destitution, any vice in this City of London. Alas! It is a city of five millions, and out of this multitude there are many who will not work, many who deliberately desire the life of vice and crime, and still more who, if the Helping Hand offers relief without question or condition, will swell the numbers of those who are wilfully helpless and deliberately destitute. The power of working is easily lost, and with difficulty regained. The administration of charitable funds is a most difficult task.

Fourteen years ago, in a time of exceptional distress, the Lord Mayor, in the kindness of his unreflecting heart, opened a subscription for the relief of the unemployed. A very large sum was collected in a few days. Of course this became known not only over all London, but over the whole country. Then there began a mighty migration; wave after wave of hungry applicants arrived by every train; the glorious prospect of obtaining a gift of money without doing anything for it attracted thousands; they gave up work in order to be eligible; they magnified the amount of the gift, in anticipation; when the day of distribution arrived they fought for admission, they threatened to brain the distributors, they took tickets which entitled them to food and sold them at the public house; in the end that act of charity developed and strengthened the pauper spirit in hundreds of thousands; those who had been working for the better exercise of charity were in despair; to this day the memory of that day of free gifts, without question and without conditions, lies in the mind of the working-man who will not work, and nerves him for another spell of idleness and starvation.

In this attempt to stay the hand that grants the unthinking dole the Charity Organization Society stands in the forefront. It has offices and branches everywhere; it intervenes between the rich man and the poor; it says to the former, “Never give him money, you will only keep him poor; make him understand that money means conditions of work and effort; do not turn the unemployed into a pauper.” To the workhouses the Charity Organization Society says, “Do not give outdoor relief; do not accustom the sturdy poor to look for doles of bread and orders on the butcher. Make them go into the house if they want help.” It is better to be cruel when kindness means weakness, and doles mean pauperizing. The temptation to give is like the temptation to take opiates. To give relieves the discomfort of knowing how others are suffering. To give brings food to the children, fire to the hearth; it also enables the breadwinner to spend in drink what he should take home to his wife, and it makes the wives and children accustomed to receive alms, and to look to alms for the supplies which are only deficient through their own improvidence and vice. The Charity Organization Society is known and detested by every thriftless loafer, every beggar, every impostor, every begging-letter writer in the country; it is also known and detested by that large class of sentimentalists who give money wherever there is none, who bribe the women by doles to come to church, and who interpret certain words of our Lord, as they were interpreted by the monastic houses, into an injunction to give without question and to relieve without condition.

I come next to a form of philanthropic endeavor concerning which it is difficult to speak unless in terms of extravagant admiration.

I mean the Settlement, which is spreading and taking root in all great cities both in America and in Great Britain.

The Settlement very properly began in East London, as the place which stood most in need of it. There are now some thirteen or fourteen Settlements in London, of which six, I believe, belong to East London. There are Settlements in Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester, and Edinburgh. There are, I believe, speaking under correction, more than twenty in the greater cities of the United States.

It is now fifteen years since the first creation of the Settlement. What is it? What was at first proposed? What has it done? We may answer these questions by the help of Canon Barnett, its real founder. (See “University and Social Settlements,” chapter ii.)

The Settlement sprang out of a profound distrust of the machinery by which the Helping Hand could reach the people. It seemed to many that this machinery hindered rather than helped. The Charity Organization Society was proving with pitiless statistics and cruel logic that the widespread system of doles was crushing the spirit of independence in the poor; the experience of the present, as well as that of the past taught them that laws cannot touch the restless and the improvident; they saw that refuges might receive the unhappy, but could not touch or remove the cause of unhappiness; they discovered that societies for relieving the poor were too often machines which blindly acted by a hard-and-fast rule, maintained many officials, and made no attempt at prevention or improvement. Also they saw that with all the machinery of the parish and despite the self-denying work of the clergy there had been little less than a complete failure in inspiring among the people the faith and hope of religion and its self-restraining powers.

There was also, thanks to certain influences which it would take us long to discuss, a growing recognition of certain evils, such as the separation of the rich from the poor, the withholding from the poor of so many things enjoyed by the rich, the condescension of rich to poor, an exclusive spirit on the one side and a natural resentment on the other, and a conviction that something should be done to resist these evils. In other words, the feeling was gradually growing, especially among certain groups of young men of Oxford and Cambridge, that civilization should belong not to one class but to all classes; that the things which we believe to be the most important—knowledge, art, manners, beauty, purity, unselfishness—should be made possible for the working-man, if he will accept them, as well as for the rich. The root idea, therefore, of a Settlement is the example, the teaching and the maintenance of what we call the life of culture among the working-classes.

By example—for the members of the Settlement live among them, go about with them, live in the sight of all The working-man dines with them, spends the evening with them, talks with them. He finds that their mode of life is simple; that the luxury he has been taught to believe as the common rule among the easy class does not exist among these members of that class; that cleanliness, using the word to cover everything—the home, the meals, the person, the daily habit—is the first thing necessary; that knowledge may be pursued for its own sake, and not because it has a commercial value and is saleable; and that these men and women have come to live in his quarter without the least intention of giving him any money or of taking off his shoulders any one of his own responsibilities.

Next, by teaching. The Settlement has its library, its class-rooms, its lecture-room, and its fifteen hundred students—yet it is not a college. The residents do not all teach. The visitor thinks perhaps that if they are not come to teach, their object is to preach temperance and to get a hold over the criminal classes. Nothing of the kind; the Settlement is not a mission. Nor, again, is it a Polytechnic, despite the manifold studies that are carried on. The lads of the Polytechnic learn a trade by which to live; the students at the Settlement make a study of some science. Nor is it in the narrow sense a charitable institution. In a Settlement every resident carries on his own life in his own way; he does not stoop to the ways of the people around; he is not their benefactor; he is not a superior person; he is just one man among the men all round him into whose interests he enters and whose ideas he endeavors to understand.

In all countries governed by our institutions or by those which have our institutions as their basis the duty of the individual citizen to his town and to his state is assumed as essential for the government of the people by the people. A man who deliberately abstains from exercising the right to vote, who leaves to any who please to snatch it the government of his own city, is little less than a traitor to the cause of freedom; he enjoys rights which have been won for him by his fathers, but refuses to watch over and to defend those rights. It is the work of the Settlement to teach this duty and to set the example. The constitution of a municipality assumes that citizens will give, freely and without pay, such time as is wanted for the conduct of the municipal affairs. In local government the Settlement carries on a quiet work which is perhaps more effective than its classes and its lectures. The members become guardians and vestrymen; they sit on school boards, they are school visitors, they inspire every branch of local government with the sense of duty and of principle. For the members themselves the Settlement teaches and requires, as Canon Barnett points out, “the surrender of self-will and of will worship.”

Mile End Almshouses.