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SANITARY AND SOCIAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS
SANITARY AND SOCIAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS CHARLES KINGSLEY Contents:
Woman's Work in a Country Parish
The Science of Health
The Two Breaths
Thrift
Nausicaa in London; or the Lower Education of Women
The Air-Mothers
The Tree of Knowledge
Great Cities and their Influence for Good and Evil
Heroism
The Massacre of the Innocents
"A mad world my masters."
WOMAN'S WORK IN A COUNTRY PARISH {1}
I have been asked to speak a few words to you on a lady's work in
a country parish. I shall confine myself rather to principles
than to details; and the first principle which I would impress on
you is that we must all be just before we are generous. I must
indeed speak plainly on this point. A woman's first duties are
to her own family her own servants. Be not deceived: if anyone
cannot rule her own household she cannot rule the Church of God.
If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom she is in
contact all day long she will not really sympathise with the poor
whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe
this is very great. It seems so much easier to women to do
something for the poor than for their own ladies' maids and
house-maids and cooks. And why? Because they can treat the poor
as THINGS: but they MUST treat their servants as persons. A lady
can go into a poor cottage lay down the law to the inhabitants
reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell
them how to set things right which if she had the doing of them
I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they.
She can give them a tract as she might a pill; and then a
shilling as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go
out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs:
but with the servants it is not so. She knows their characters;
and what is more they know hers; they know her private history
her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power
and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work
with them because if she does she will be forced to carry it
out; and it cannot be cold dry perfunctory official: it must
be hearty living loving personal. She must make them her
friends; and perhaps she is afraid of doing that for fear they
should take liberties as it is called--which they very probably
will do unless she keeps up a very high standard of self-
restraint and earnestness in her own life--and that involves a
great deal of trouble and so she is tempted when she wishes to
do good to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside
who as she fancies know nothing about her and will never find
out whether or not she acts up to the rules which she lays down
for them. Be not deceived I say in this case also. Fancy not
that they know nothing about you. There is nothing secret which
shall not be made manifest; and what you do in the closet is
surely proclaimed (and often with exaggeration enough and to
spare) on the house-top. These poor folks at your gate know well
enough through servants and tradesmen what you are how you
treat your servants how you pay your bills what sort of temper
you have; and they form a shrewd hard estimate of your character
in the light of which they view all that you do and say to them;
and believe me that if you wish to do any real good to them you
must begin by doing good to those who lie still nearer to you than
them. And believe me too that if you shrink from a hearty
patriarchal sympathy with your own servants because it would
require too much personal human intercourse with them you are
like a man who finding that he had not powder enough to fire off
a pocket-pistol should try to better matters by using the same
quantity of ammunition in an eighty-four pound gun. For it is
this human friendship trust affection which is the very thing
you have to employ towards the poor and to call up in them.
Clubs societies alms lending libraries are but dead machinery
needful perhaps but like the iron tube without the powder
unable to send the bullet forth one single inch; dead and useless
lumber without humanity; without the smile of the lip the light
of the eye the tenderness of the voice which makes the poor
woman feel that a soul is speaking to her soul a heart yearning
after her heart; that she is not merely a THING to be improved
but a sister to be made conscious of the divine bond of her
sisterhood and taught what she means when she repeats in her
Creed "I believe in the communion of saints." This is my text
and my key-note--whatever else I may say to-day is but a carrying
out into details of the one question How may you go to these poor
creatures as woman to woman?
Your next duties are to your husband's or father's servants and
workmen. It is said that a clergyman's wife ought to consider the
parish as HER flock as well as her husband's. It may be so: I
believe the dogma to be much overstated just now. But of a
landlord's or employer's wife (I am inclined to say too of an
officer's wife) such a doctrine is absolutely true and cannot be
overstated. A large proportion therefore of your parish work
will be to influence the men of your family to do their duty by
their dependants. You wish to cure the evils under which they
labour. The greater proportion of these are in the hands of your
men relatives. It is a mockery for instance in you to visit the
fever-stricken cottage while your husband leaves it in a state
which breeds that fever. Your business is to go to him and say
"HERE IS A WRONG; RIGHT IT!" This as many a beautiful Middle Age
legend tells us has been woman's function in all uncivilised
times; not merely to melt man's heart to pity but to awaken it to
duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest: that if
he will not repair the wrong by justice she will if possible (as
in those old legends) by self-sacrifice. Be sure this method
will conquer. Do but say: "If you will not new-roof that
cottage if you will not make that drain I will. I will not buy
a new dress till it is done; I will sell the horse you gave me
pawn the bracelet you gave me but the thing shall be done." Let
him see I say that you are in earnest and he will feel that
your message is a divine one which he must obey for very shame
and weariness if for nothing else. This is in my eyes the second
part of a woman's parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind
when you hear as I trust you will lectures in this place upon
that SANITARY REFORM without which all efforts for the bettering
of the masses are in my eyes not only useless but hypocritical.
I will suppose then that you are fulfilling home duties in self-
restraint and love and in the fear of God. I will suppose that
you are using all your woman's influence on the mind of your
family in behalf of tenants and workmen; and I tell you frankly
that unless this be first done you are paying a tithe of mint and
anise and neglecting common righteousness and mercy. But you
wish to do more: you wish for personal contact with the poor
round you for the pure enjoyment of doing good to them with your
own hands. How are you to set about it? First there are clubs--
clothing-clubs shoe-clubs maternal-clubs; all very good in their
way. But do not fancy that they are the greater part of your
parish work. Rather watch and fear lest they become substitutes
for your real parish work; lest the bustle and amusement of
playing at shopkeeper or penny-collector once a week should
blind you to your real power--your real treasure by spending
which you become all the richer. What you have to do is to
ennoble and purify the WOMANHOOD of these poor women; to make them
better daughters sisters wives mothers: and all the clubs in
the world will not do that; they are but palliatives of a great
evil which they do not touch; cloaks for almsgiving clumsy means
of eking out insufficient wages; at best kindly contrivances for
tricking into temporary thriftiness a degraded and reckless
peasantry. Miserable miserable state of things! out of which the
longer I live I see less hope of escape saving by an emigration
which shall drain us of all the healthy strong and brave among
the lower classes and leave us as a just punishment for our
sins only the cripple the drunkard and the beggar.
Yet these clubs MUST be carried on. They make life a little more
possible; they lighten hearts if but for a moment; they inculcate
habits of order and self-restraint which may be useful when the
poor man finds himself in Canada or Australia. And it is a cruel
utilitarianism to refuse to palliate the symptoms because you
cannot cure the disease itself. You will give opiates to the
suffering who must die nevertheless. Let him slip into his grave
at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use these
charitable societies remembering all along what a fearful and
humbling sign the necessity for them is of the diseased state of
this England as the sportula and universal almsgiving was of the
decadence of Rome.
However the work has to be done; and such as it is it is
especially fitted for young unmarried ladies. It requires no deep
knowledge of human nature. It makes them aware of the amount of
suffering and struggling which lies around them without bringing
them in that most undesirable contact with the coarser forms of
evil which house-visitation must do; and the mere business habits
of accuracy and patience to which it compels them are a valuable
practical schooling for them themselves in after-life. It is
tiresome and unsentimental drudgery no doubt; but perhaps all the
better training on that account. And after all the magic of
sweetness grace and courtesy may shed a hallowing and humanising
light over the meanest work and the smile of God may spread from
lip to lip and the light of God from eye to eye even between the
giver and receiver of a penny till the poor woman goes home
saying in her heart "I have not only found the life of my hand--I
have found a sister for time and for eternity."
But there is another field of parish usefulness which I cannot
recommend too earnestly and that is the school. There you may
work as hard as you will and how you will--provided you do it in
a loving hearty cheerful HUMAN way playful and yet earnest;
two qualities which when they exist in their highest power are
sure to go together. I say how you will. I am no pedant about
schools; I care less what is taught than how it is taught. The
merest rudiments of Christianity the merest rudiments of popular
instruction are enough provided they be given by lips which
speak as if they believed what they said and with a look which
shows real love for the pupil. Manner is everything--matter a
secondary consideration; for in matter brain only speaks to
brain; in manner soul speaks to soul. If you want Christ's lost-
lambs really to believe that He died for them you will do it
better by one little act of interest and affection than by making
them learn by heart whole commentaries--even as Miss Nightingale
has preached Christ crucified to those poor soldiers by acts of
plain outward drudgery more livingly and really and
convincingly than she could have done by ten thousand sermons and
made many a noble lad I doubt not say in his heart for the
first time in his wild life "I can believe now that Christ died
for me for here is one whom He has taught to die for me in like
wise." And this blessed effect of school-work remember is not
confined to the children. It goes home with them to the parents.
The child becomes an object of interest and respect in their eyes
when they see it an object of interest and respect in yours. If
they see that you look on it as an awful and glorious being the
child of God the co-heir of Christ they learn gradually to look
on it in the same light. They become afraid and ashamed (and it
is a noble fear and shame) to do and say before it what they used
to do and say; afraid to ill-use it. It becomes to them a
mysterious visitor (sad that it should be so but true as sad)
from a higher and purer sphere who must be treated with something
of courtesy and respect who must even be asked to teach them
something of its new knowledge; and the school and the ladies'
interest in the school become to the degraded parents a living
sign that those children's angels do indeed behold the face of
their Father which is in heaven.
Now there is one thing in school-work which I wish to press on
you; and that is that you should not confine your work to the
girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more and who
(paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and
freely--THE BOYS. I am not going to enter into the reasons WHY.
I only entreat you to believe me that by helping to educate the
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