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Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays



This etext was prepared from the 1880 Macmillan and Co. edition
by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays




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
boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a class (as I have seen
done with admirable effect) of grown-up lads, you may influence
for ever not only the happiness of your pupils, but of the girls
whom they will hereafter marry. It will be a boon to your own sex
as well as to ours to teach them courtesy, self-restraint,
reverence for physical weakness, admiration of tenderness and
gentleness; and it is one which only a lady can bestow. Only by
being accustomed in youth to converse with ladies, will the boy
learn to treat hereafter his sweetheart or his wife like a
gentleman. There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in the heart
of every untutored clod; if it dies out in him (as it too often
does), it were better for him, I often think, if he had never been
born: but the only talisman which will keep it alive, much more
develop it into its fulness, is friendly and revering intercourse
with women of higher rank than himself, between whom and him there
is a great and yet a blessed gulf fixed.

I have left to the last the most important subject of all; and
that is, what is called "visiting the poor." It is an endless
subject; if you go into details, you might write volumes on it.
All I can do this afternoon is to keep to my own key-note, and
say, Visit whom, when, and where you will; but let your visits be
those of woman to woman. Consider to whom you go--to poor souls
whose life, compared with yours, is one long malaise of body, and
soul, and spirit--and do as you would be done by; instead of
reproving and fault-finding, encourage. In God's name, encourage.
They scramble through life's rocks, bogs, and thornbrakes,
clumsily enough, and have many a fall, poor things! But why, in
the name of a God of love and justice, is the lady, rolling along
the smooth turnpike-road in her comfortable carriage, to be
calling out all day long to the poor soul who drags on beside her
over hedge and ditch, moss and moor, bare-footed and weary-
hearted, with half-a-dozen children at her back: "You ought not
to have fallen here; and it was very cowardly to lie down there;
and it was your duty, as a mother, to have helped that child
through the puddle; while, as for sleeping under that bush, it is
most imprudent and inadmissible?" Why not encourage her, praise
her, cheer her on her weary way by loving words, and keep your
reproofs for yourself--even your advice; for SHE does get on her
way, after all, where YOU could not travel a step forward; and she
knows what she is about perhaps better than you do, and what she
has to endure, and what God thinks of her life-journey. The heart
knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with
its joy. But do not be a stranger to her. Be a sister to her. I
do not ask you to take her up in your carriage. You cannot;
perhaps it is good for her that you cannot. It is good sometimes
for Lazarus that he is not fit to sit at Dives's feast--good for
him that he should receive his evil things in this life, and be
comforted in the life to come. All I ask is, do to the poor soul
as you would have her do to you in her place. Do not interrupt
and vex her (for she is busy enough already) with remedies which
she does not understand, for troubles which you do not understand.
But speak comfortably to her, and say: "I cannot feel WITH you,
but I do feel FOR you: I should enjoy helping you, but I do not
know how--tell me. Tell me where the yoke galls; tell me why that
forehead is grown old before its time: I may be able to ease the
burden, to put fresh light into the eyes; and if not, still tell
me, simply because I am a woman, and know the relief of pouring
out my own soul into loving ears, even though in the depths of
despair." Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, I am convinced that
the only way to help these poor women humanly and really, is to
begin by confessing to them that you do not know how to help them;
to humble yourself to them, and to ask their counsel for the good
of themselves and of their neighbours, instead of coming proudly
to them, with nostrums ready compounded, as if a doctor should be
so confident in his own knowledge of books and medicine as to give
physic before asking the patient's symptoms.

Therefore, I entreat you to bear in mind (for without this all
visiting of the poor will be utterly void and useless), that you
must regulate your conduct to them, and in their houses, even to
the most minute particulars, by the very same rules which apply to
persons of your own class. Never let any woman say of you
(thought fatal to all confidence, all influence!): "Yes, it is
all very kind: but she does not behave to me as she would to one
of her own quality." Piety, earnestness, affectionateness,
eloquence--all may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a
poor woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering
her house, even at her own request, while she is at meals. She
may decline to sit; she may beg you to come in, all the more
reason for refusing utterly to obey her, because it shows that
that very inward gulf between you and her still exists in her
mind, which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you
know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with
a lady. Woman's heart is alike in all ranks, and the deepest
sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last and least. We
should not like anyone--no, not an angel from heaven, to come into
our houses without knocking at the door, and say: "I hear you are
very ill off--I will lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are
very careless of money, I will take your accounts into my own
hands;" and still less again: "Your son is a very bad,
profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I
intend to take him out of your hands and reform him myself."
Neither do the poor like such unceremonious mercy, such untender
tenderness, benevolence at horse-play, mistaking kicks for
caresses. They do not like it, they will not respond to it, save
in parishes which have been demoralised by officious and
indiscriminate benevolence, and where the last remaining virtues
of the poor, savage self-help and independence, have been
exchanged (as I have too often seen them exchanged) for organised
begging and hypocrisy.

I would that you would all read, ladies, and consider well the
traits of an opposite character which have just come to light (to
me, I am ashamed to say, for the first time) in the Biography of
Sidney Smith. The love and admiration which that truly brave and
loving man won from everyone, rich or poor, with whom he came in
contact, seems to me to have arisen from the one fact, that
without perhaps having any such conscious intention, he treated
rich and poor, his own servants and the noblemen his guests,
alike, and ALIKE courteously, considerately, cheerfully,
affectionately--so leaving a blessing and reaping a blessing
wheresoever he went.

Approach, then, these poor women as sisters, and you will be able
gradually to reverse the hard saying of which I made use just now:
"Do not apply remedies which they do not understand, to diseases
which you do not understand." Learn lovingly and patiently (aye,
and reverently, for there is that in every human being which
deserves reverence, and must be reverenced if we wish to
understand it)--learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by
that time they will have learnt to understand your remedies, and
they will appreciate them. For you HAVE remedies. I do not
undervalue your position. No man on earth is less inclined to
undervalue the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments,
manners--even physical beauty. All are talents from God, and I
give God thanks when I see them possessed by any human being; for
I know that they, too, can be used in His service, and brought to
bear on the true emancipation of woman--her emancipation, not from
man (as some foolish persons fancy), but from the devil, "the
slanderer and divider" who divides her from man, and makes her
live a life-long tragedy, which goes on in more cottages than in
palaces--a vie e part, a vie incomprise--a life made up half of
ill-usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited
martyrdom, instead of being (as God intended) half of the human
universe, a helpmeet for man, and the one bright spot which makes
this world endurable. Towards making her that, and so realising
the primeval mission by every cottage hearth, each of you can do
something; for each of you have some talent, power, knowledge,
attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager's wife has
not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet
says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must be drawn by
them alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the
treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ;
for they are not given in His name, which is that boundless
tenderness, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice, by which even
the cup of cold water is a precious offering--as God grant your
labour may be!



THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH {2}



Whether the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if
it seem probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil?
How they can be, if not destroyed, at least arrested? These are
questions worthy attention, not of statesmen only and medical men,
but of every father and mother in these isles. I shall say
somewhat about them in this Essay; and say it in a form which
ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every class,
from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of
them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected
in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taught--the
rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, and
university.

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were
hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the
hardy lived. They may have been able to say of themselves--as
they do in a State paper of 1515, now well known through the pages
of Mr. Froude: "What comyn folk of all the world may compare with
the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and
all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in
the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have been fed on
"great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini
calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in
numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of
natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest,"
cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by
infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and
left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to
perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first
years of this century, steam and commerce produced an enormous
increase in the population. Millions of fresh human beings found
employment, married, brought up children who found employment in
their turn, and learnt to live more or less civilised lives. An
event, doubtless, for which God is to be thanked. A quite new
phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices and new dangers:
but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new noblenesses,
new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that duty
should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when our
soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms.
To murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at
the will of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.


The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.


Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take
care of the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in
like wise. And it may do so thus:

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