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Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

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




But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman's yielding before the
man is not altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to
allege who hated, and too often tortured, the sex whom they could
not enjoy. It is not to the woman's dishonour, if she felt,
before her husband, higher aspirations than those after mere
animal pleasure. To be as gods, knowing good and evil, is a vain
and foolish, but not a base and brutal, wish. She proved herself
thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, and not an animal. And
indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, her more vivid
emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical
weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special
source of temptation; which it is to her honour that she has
resisted so much better than the physically stronger, and
therefore more culpable, man.

As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for
us to waste our time in guessing. If it was not one plant, then
it was another. It may have been something which has long since
perished off the earth. It may have been--as some learned men
have guessed--the sacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race;
and that may have been a still existing narcotic species of
Asclepias. It certainly was not the vine. The language of the
Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacred use to which it is
consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notion utterly; at least
to those who know enough of antiquity to pass by, with a smile,
the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were not
intoxicating. And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am
trying to say--how fearfully has that noble gift to man been
abused for the same end as a hundred other vegetable products,
ever since those mythic days when Dionusos brought the vine from
the far East, amid troops of human Maenads and half-human Satyrs;
and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on Cithaeron, for daring
to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those historic days,
too, when, less than two hundred years before the Christian era,
the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria, and
thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia
Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must
speak, but which had to be put down with terrible but just
severity, by the Consuls and the Senate.

But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge
was. Was every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every
vegetable also from which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon
discover something else wherewith to satisfy the insatiate
craving. Has he not done so already? Has not almost every people
had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly than any distilled
liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the
opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons
wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the
knowledge of good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede
extracts in autumn a few days of brutal happiness, before the
setting in of the long six months' night? God grant that modern
science may not bring to light fresh substitutes for alcohol,
opium, and the rest; and give the white races, in that state of
effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which I sometimes fear
is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying themselves
delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.

It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this
island. I have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it
possible; for every cause of drunkenness seems on the increase.
Overwork of body and mind; circumstances which depress health;
temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the
streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of
uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often not the
means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures. These, it
seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or
not. And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must
lessen them, if we cannot eradicate them.

First, overwork. We all live too fast, and work too hard. "All
things are full of labour, man cannot utter it." In the heavy
struggle for existence which goes on all around us, each man is
tasked more and more--if he be really worth buying and using--to
the utmost of his powers all day long. The weak have to compete
on equal terms with the strong; and crave, in consequence, for
artificial strength. How we shall stop that I know not, while
every man is "making haste to be rich, and piercing himself
through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish and hurtful
lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition." How we
shall stop that, I say, I know not. The old prophet may have been
right when he said: "Surely it is not of the Lord that the people
shall labour in the very fire, and weary themselves for very
vanity;" and in some juster, wiser, more sober system of society--
somewhat more like the Kingdom of The Father come on earth--it may
be that poor human beings will not need to toil so hard, and to
keep themselves up to their work by stimulants, but will have time
to sit down, and look around them, and think of God, and God's
quiet universe, with something of quiet in themselves; something
of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind, as well as of
body.

But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when--as
it was once well put--"every one has stopped running about like
rats:"--that those who work hard, whether with muscle or with
brain, would not be surrounded, as now, with every circumstance
which tempts toward drink; by every circumstance which depresses
the vital energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence
itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells,
bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the chest,
disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from the
country--in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men,
more or less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or
through whole districts of the "black countries" of England; and
then ask himself: Is it the will of God that His human children
should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places
of the earth? Lot him ask himself: Can they live and toil there
without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without
contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which
craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own
stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain
parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces,
collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--
and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely,
that the main thing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those
abominable wastes care for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only
answer, that I am not surprised.

I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say it
again--that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that
engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of
disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can
produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population
striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against
those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled
civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave. I
may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily.
I know it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that
the fenman drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens
were drained? why but to keep off the depressing effects of the
malaria of swamps and new clearings, which told on them--who
always settled in the lowest grounds--in the shape of fever and
ague? Here it may be answered again that stimulants have been,
during the memory of man, the destruction of the Red Indian race
in America. I reply boldly that I do not believe it. There is
evidence enough in Jacques Cartier's "Voyages to the Rivers of
Canada;" and evidence more than enough in Strachey's "Travaile in
Virginia"--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove
that the Red Indians, when the white man first met with them,
were, in North and South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all
their traditions confess, decreasing race. Such a race would
naturally crave for "the water of life," the "usquebagh," or
whisky, as we have contracted the old name now. But I should have
thought that the white man, by introducing among these poor
creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all, horses
wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds, which they could never
follow on foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them
alive, than he has done towards destroying them by giving them the
chance of a week's drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to
his forts to sell the skins which, without his gifts, they would
never have got.

Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for
stimulants. But if the stimulants, and not the original want of
vitality, combined with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only
of the gallows--and here I know what I say, and dare not tell what
I know, from eye-witnesses--have been the cause of the Red
Indians' extinction, then how is it, let me ask, that the Irishman
and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as
much whisky--and usually very bad whisky--not merely twice a year,
but as often as they could get it, during the whole Iron Age, and,
for aught anyone can tell, during the Bronze Age, and the Stone
Age before that, and yet are still the most healthy, able,
valiant, and prolific races in Europe? Had they drunk less whisky
they would, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and
perhaps even MORE prolific, than they are now. They show no sign,
however, as yet, of going the way of the Red Indian.

But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of
deficient vitality, then the deadliest foe of that craving, and
all its miserable results, is surely the Sanatory Reformer; the
man who preaches, and--as far as ignorance and vested interests
will allow him, procures--for the masses, pure air, pure sunlight,
pure water, pure dwelling-houses, pure food. Not merely every
fresh drinking-fountain, but every fresh public bath and wash-
house, every fresh open space, every fresh growing tree, every
fresh open window, every fresh flower in that window--each of
these is so much, as the old Persians would have said, conquered
for Ormuzd, the god of light and life, out of the dominion of
Ahriman, the king of darkness and of death; so much taken from the
causes of drunkenness and disease, and added to the causes of
sobriety and health.

Meanwhile one thing is clear: that if this present barbarism and
anarchy of covetousness, miscalled modern civilisation, were tamed
and drilled into something more like a Kingdom of God on earth,
then we should not see the reckless and needless multiplication of
liquor shops, which disgraces this country now.

As a single instance: in one country parish of nine hundred
inhabitants, in which the population has increased only one-ninth
in the last fifty years, there are now practically eight public-
houses, where fifty years ago there were but two. One, that is,
for every hundred and ten--or rather, omitting children, farmers,
shop-keepers, gentlemen, and their households, one for every fifty
of the inhabitants. In the face of the allurements, often of the
basest kind, which these dens offer, the clergyman and the
schoolmaster struggle in vain to keep up night schools and young
men's clubs, and to inculcate habits of providence.

The young labourers over a great part of the south and east, at
least of England--though never so well off, for several
generations, as they are now--are growing up thriftless,
shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in
everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their
grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth
clothes, instead of their grandfathers' smock-frocks.

And if it be so in the country, how must it be in towns? There
must come a thorough change in the present licensing system, in
spite of all the "pressure" which certain powerful vested
interests may bring to bear on governments. And it is the duty of
every good citizen, who cares for his countrymen, and for their
children after them, to help in bringing about that change as
speedily as possible.

Again: I said just now that a probable cause of increasing
drunkenness was the increasing material prosperity of thousands
who knew no recreation beyond low animal pleasure. If I am right-
-and I believe that I am right--I must urge on those who wish
drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of providing more, and more
refined, recreation for the people.

Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply
exhaustion, not merely to drive away care; but often simply to
drive away dulness. They have nothing to do save to think over
what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to-
morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought
in liquor or narcotics. There are still those, by no means of the
hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who drink
heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to
recreate their over-burdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are
far less common than they were fifty years ago: but why? Is not
the decrease of drinking among the richer classes certainly due to
the increased refinement and variety of their tastes and
occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man's nature;
in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the
truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture,
physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and
literal sense of that word, namely, the re-creating and mending of
the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now
neglect, either for himself, his children, or his workpeople.

But how little of all this is open to the masses, all should know
but too well. How little opportunity the average hand-worker, or
his wife, has of eating of any tree of knowledge, save of the very
basest kind, is but too palpable. We are mending, thank God, in
this respect. Free libraries and museums have sprung up of late
in other cities beside London. God's blessing rest upon them all.
And the Crystal Palace, and still later, the Bethnal Green Museum,
have been, I believe, of far more use than many average sermons
and lectures from many average orators.

But are we not still far behind the old Greeks, and the Romans of
the Empire likewise, in the amount of amusement and instruction,
and even of shelter, which we provide for the people? Recollect
the--to me--disgraceful fact, that there is not, as far as I am
aware, throughout the whole of London, a single portico or other
covered place, in which the people can take refuge during a
shower: and this in the climate of England! Where they do take
refuge on a wet day the publican knows but too well; as he knows
also where thousands of the lower classes, simply for want of any
other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings, spend as
much as they are permitted of the Sabbath day. Let us put down
"Sunday drinking" by all means, if we can. But let us remember
that by closing the public-houses on Sunday, we prevent no man or
woman from carrying home as much poison as they choose on Saturday
night, to brutalise themselves therewith, perhaps for eight-and-
forty hours. And let us see--in the name of Him who said that He
had made the Sabbath for man, and not man for the Sabbath--let us
see, I say, if we cannot do something to prevent the townsman's
Sabbath being, not a day of rest, but a day of mere idleness; the
day of most temptation, because of most dulness, of the whole
seven.

And here, perhaps some sweet soul may look up reprovingly and say:
"He talks of rest. Does he forget, and would he have the working
man forget, that all these outward palliatives will never touch
the seat of the disease, the unrest of the soul within? Does he
forget, and would he have the working man forget, who it was who
said--who only has the right to say: "Come unto Me, all ye who
are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? Ah no,
sweet soul. I know your words are true. I know that what we all
want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong,
self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no stimulants,
for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it
has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for
it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the
character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or
food merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from
the wild lusts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, and,
seeking for light and life by means forbidden, found thereby
disease and death. Yes, I know that; and know, too, that that
rest is found only where you have already found it.

And yet, in such a world as this, governed by a Being who has made
sunshine, and flowers, and green grass, and the song of birds, and
happy human smiles, and who would educate by them--if we would let
Him--His human children from the cradle to the grave; in such a
world as this, will you grudge any particle of that education,
even any harmless substitute for it, to those spirits in prison
whose surroundings too often tempt them, from the cradle to the
grave, to fancy that the world is composed of bricks and iron, and
governed by inspectors and policemen? Preach to those spirits in
prison, as you know far better than we parsons how to preach; but
let them have besides some glimpses of the splendid fact, that
outside their prison-house is a world which God, not man, has
made; wherein grows everywhere that tree of knowledge, which is
likewise the tree of life; and that they have a right to some
small share of its beauty, and its wonder, and its rest, for their
own health of soul and body, and for the health of their children
after them.



GREAT CITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE FOR GOOD AND EVIL {9}



The pleasure, gentlemen and ladies, of addressing you here is
mixed in my mind with very solemn feelings; the honour which you
have done me is tempered by humiliating thoughts.

For it was in this very city of Bristol, twenty-seven years ago,
that I received my first lesson in what is now called Social
Science; and yet, alas! more than ten years elapsed ere I could
even spell out that lesson, though it had been written for me (as
well as for all England) in letters of flame, from the one end of
heaven to the other.

I was a school-boy in Clifton up above. I had been hearing of
political disturbances, even of riots, of which I understood
nothing, and for which I cared nothing. But on one memorable
Sunday afternoon I saw an object which was distinctly not
political. Otherwise I should have no right to speak of it here.

It was an afternoon of sullen autumn rain. The fog hung thick
over the docks and lowlands. Glaring through that fog I saw a
bright mass of flame--almost like a half-risen sun.

That, I was told, was the gate of the new gaol on fire. That the
prisoners in it had been set free; that-- But why speak of what
too many here recollect but too well? The fog rolled slowly
upward. Dark figures, even at that great distance, were flitting
to and fro across what seemed the mouth of the pit. The flame
increased--multiplied--at one point after another; till by ten
o'clock that night I seemed to be looking down upon Dante's
Inferno, and to hear the multitudinous moan and wail of the lost
spirits surging to and fro amid that sea of fire.

Right behind Brandon Hill--how can I ever forget it?--rose the
great central mass of fire; till the little mound seemed converted
into a volcano, from the peak of which the flame streamed up, not
red alone, but, delicately green and blue, pale rose and pearly
white, while crimson sparks leapt and fell again in the midst of
that rainbow, not of hope, but of despair; and dull explosions
down below mingled with the roar of the mob, and the infernal hiss
and crackle of the flame.

Higher and higher the fog was scorched and shrivelled upward by
the fierce heat below, glowing through and through with red
reflected glare, till it arched itself into one vast dome of red-
hot iron, fit roof for all the madness down below--and beneath it,
miles away, I could see the lonely tower of Dundie shining red;--
the symbol of the old faith, looking down in stately wonder and
sorrow upon the fearful birth-throes of a new age. Yes.--Why did
I say just now despair? I was wrong. Birth-throes, and not death
pangs, those horrors were. Else they would have no place in my
discourse; no place, indeed, in my mind. Why talk over the signs
of disease, decay, death? Let the dead bury their dead, and let
us follow Him who dieth not; by whose command


The old order changeth, giving place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways.


If we will believe this,--if we will look on each convulsion of
society, however terrible for the time being, as a token, not of
decrepitude, but of youth; not as the expiring convulsions of
sinking humanity, but as upward struggles, upward toward fuller
light, freer air, a juster, simpler, and more active life;--then
we shall be able to look calmly, however sadly, on the most
appalling tragedies of humanity--even on these late Indian ones--
and take our share, faithful and hopeful, in supplying the new and
deeper wants of a new and nobler time.

But to return. It was on the Tuesday or Wednesday after, if I
recollect right, that I saw another, and a still more awful sight.
Along the north side of Queen Square, in front of ruins which had
been three days before noble buildings, lay a ghastly row, not of
corpses, but of corpse-fragments. I have no more wish than you to
dilate upon that sight. But there was one charred fragment--with
a scrap of old red petticoat adhering to it, which I never forgot-
-which I trust in God that I never shall forget. It is good for a
man to be brought once at least in his life face to face with
fact, ultimate fact, however horrible it may be; and have to
confess to himself, shuddering, what things are possible upon
God's earth, when man has forgotten that his only welfare lies in
living after the likeness of God.

Not that I learnt the lesson then. When the first excitement of
horror and wonder were past, what I had seen made me for years the
veriest aristocrat, full of hatred and contempt of these dangerous
classes, whose existence I had for the first time discovered. It
required many years--years, too, of personal intercourse with the
poor--to explain to me the true meaning of what I saw here in
October twenty-seven years ago, and to learn a part of that lesson
which God taught to others thereby. And one part at least of that
lesson was this: That the social state of a city depends directly
on its moral state, and--I fear dissenting voices, but I must say
what I believe to be truth--that the moral state of a city
depends--how far I know not, but frightfully, to an extent as yet
uncalculated, and perhaps incalculable--on the physical state of
that city; on the food, water, air, and lodging of its
inhabitants.

But that lesson, and others connected with it, was learnt, and
learnt well, by hundreds. From the sad catastrophe I date the
rise of that interest in Social Science; that desire for some
nobler, more methodic, more permanent benevolence than that which
stops at mere almsgiving and charity-schools. The dangerous
classes began to be recognised as an awful fact which must be
faced; and faced, not by repression, but by improvement. The
"Perils of the Nation" began to occupy the attention not merely of
politicians, but of philosophers, physicians, priests; and the
admirable book which assumed that title did but re-echo the
feeling of thousands of earnest hearts.

Ever since that time, scheme on scheme of improvement has been not
only proposed but carried out. A general interest of the upper
classes in the lower, a general desire to do good, and to learn
how good can be done, has been awakened throughout England, such
as, I boldly say, never before existed in any country upon earth;
and England, her eyes opened to her neglect of these classes,
without whose strong arms her wealth and genius would be useless,
has put herself into a permanent state of confession of sin,
repentance, and amendment, which I verily trust will be accepted
by Almighty God; and will, in spite of our present shame and
sorrow, {10} in spite of shame and sorrow which may be yet in
store for us, save alive both the soul and the body of this
ancient people.

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