Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
the agricultural poor which I had gained at home. It was at this time
that I first read _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_. The living voice of Ruskin
taught us the sanctity of work for others. A fascinating but awful book
called _Modern Christianity a Civilized Heathenism_ laid compelling
hands on some young hearts; and in 1875 Dr. Pusey made that book the
subject of a sermon before the University, in which he pleaded the cause
of the poor with an unforgettable solemnity.[56]
For two or three years, illness and decrepitude interfered with my
active service, but the ideal was still enthroned in my heart; and, as
health returned, the shame of doing nothing for others became
intolerable. Return to activity was a very gradual process, and, if one
had ever "despised the day of small things," one now learned to value
it. When I came up to London, two or three of us, who had been
undergraduate friends at Oxford, formed a little party for
workhouse-visiting. One of the party has since been a Conservative
Minister, one a Liberal Minister, and one a high official of the Central
Conservative Association. Sisters joined their brothers, and we used to
jog off together on Saturday afternoons to the Holborn Workhouse,
which, if I remember right, stood in a poetically-named but
prosaic-looking street called "Shepherdess Walk." The girls visited the
women, and we the men. We used to take oranges and flowers to the wards,
give short readings from amusing books, and gossip with the bedridden
about the outside world. We always had the kindest of welcomes from our
old friends; and great was their enthusiasm when they learned that two
of their visitors had been returned to Parliament at the General
Election of 1880. As one of the two was a Conservative and one a
Liberal, the political susceptibilities of the ward were not offended,
and we both received congratulations from all alike. One quaint incident
is connected with these memories. Just outside the Workhouse was a sort
of booth, or "lean-to," where a very respectable woman sold daffodils
and wall-flowers, which we used to buy for our friends inside. One day,
when one of the girls of our party was making her purchase, the
flower-seller said, "Would your Ladyship like to go to the Lady
Mayoress's Fancy Dress Ball? If so, I can send you and your brother
tickets. You have been good customers to me, and I should be very glad
if you would accept them." The explanation was that the flower-seller
was sister to the Lady Mayoress, whom the Lord Mayor had married when he
was in a humbler station. The tickets were gratefully accepted; and,
when we asked the giver if she was going to the Ball, she replied, with
excellent sense and taste, "Oh, no. My sister, in her position, is
obliged to give these grand parties, but I should be quite out of place
there. You must tell me all about it next time you come to the
Workhouse."
Meanwhile, during this "day of small things" a quiet but momentous
revolution had been going on all round us, in the spheres of thought and
conscience; and the earlier idea of individual service had been, not
swamped by, but expanded into, the nobler conception of corporate
endeavour.
It had been a work of time. The Christian Socialism of 1848--one of the
finest episodes in our moral history--had been trampled underfoot by the
wickedness of the Crimean War. To all appearance, it fell into the
ground and died. After two years of aimless bloodshed, peace was
restored in 1856, and a spell of national prosperity succeeded. The
Repeal of the Corn Laws had done its work; food was cheaper; times were
better; the revenue advanced "by leaps and bounds." But commercialism
was rampant. It was the heyday of the Ten Pound Householder and the
Middle Class Franchise. Mr. Podsnap and Mr. Gradgrind enounced the
social law. Bright and Cobden dominated political thinking. The
Universities were fast bound in the misery and iron of Mill and Bain.
Everywhere the same grim idols were worshipped--unrestricted
competition, the survival of the fittest, and universal selfishness
enthroned in the place which belonged to universal love. "The Devil take
the hindermost" was the motto of industrial life. "In the huge and
hideous cities, the awful problem of Industry lay like a bad dream; but
Political Economy warned us off that ground. We were assured that the
free play of competitive forces was bound to discover the true
equipoise. No intervention could really affect the inevitable outcome.
It could only hinder and disturb."[57] The Church, whose pride it had
been in remoter ages to be the Handmaid of the Poor, was bidden to leave
the Social Problem severely alone; and so ten years rolled by, while the
social pressure on labour became daily more grievous to be borne. But
meanwhile the change was proceeding underground, or at least out of
sight. Forces were working side by side which knew nothing of each
other, but which were all tending to the same result. The Church, boldly
casting aside the trammels which had bound her to wealth and culture,
went down into the slums; brought the beauty and romance of Worship to
the poorest and the most depraved, and compelled them to come in.
Whenever such a Church as St. Alban's, Holborn, or St. Barnabas, Oxford,
was established in the slums of a populous city, it became a centre not
only of religious influence, but of social, physical, and educational
reform. Ruskin's many-coloured wisdom, long recognized in the domain of
Art, began to win its way through economic darkness, and charged
cheerfully against the dismal strongholds of Supply and Demand. _Unto
this Last_ became a handbook for Social Reformers. The teaching of
Maurice filtered, through all sorts of unsuspected channels, into
literature and politics and churchmanship. In the intellectual world,
Huxley transformed "the Survival of the Fittest," by bidding us devote
ourselves to the task of fitting as many as possible to survive. At
Oxford, the "home" not of "lost" but of victorious "causes," T. H.
Green, wielding a spiritual influence which reached farther than that of
many bishops, taught that Freedom of Contract, if it is to be anything
but a callous fraud, implies conditions in which men are really free to
contract or to refuse; and insisted that all wholesome competition
implies "adequate equipment for the competitors."
It is impossible to say exactly how all these influences intertwined and
co-operated. One man was swayed by one force; another by another; and,
after long years of subterranean working, a moment came, as it comes to
the germinating seed deep-hidden in the furrow, when it must pierce the
superincumbent mass, and show its tiny point of life above ground.[58]
The General Election of 1880, by dethroning Lord Beaconsfield and
putting Gladstone in power, had fulfilled the strictly political objects
which during the preceding three years my friends and I had been trying
to attain. So we, who entered Parliament at that Election, were set
free, at the very outset of our public career, to work for the Social
Reform which we had at heart. We earnestly desired to make the lives of
our fellow-men healthier, sweeter, brighter, and more humane; and it was
an ennobling and invigorating ambition, lifting the pursuit of politics,
out of the vulgar dust of office-seeking and wire-pulling, into the
purer air of unselfish endeavour. To some of us it was much more; for it
meant the application of the Gospel of Christ to the practical business
of modern life. But the difficulties were enormous. The Liberal party
still clung to its miserable old mumpsimus of _Laissez-faire_, and
steadily refused to learn the new and nobler language of Social Service.
Alone among our leading men, Mr. Chamberlain seemed to apprehend the
truth that political reform is related to social reform as the means to
the end, and that Politics, in its widest sense, is the science of human
happiness.
But, in spite of all discouragements, we clung to "a Social Philosophy
which, however materialistic some of its tendencies might have become,
had been allied with the spiritual Hegelianism with which we had been
touched. It took its scientific shape in the hands of Karl Marx, but it
also floated to us, in dreams and visions, using our own Christian
language, and invoking the unity of the Social Body, as the Law of
Love, and the Solidarity of Humanity."[59]
At the sound of these voices the old idols fell--_Laissez-faire_ and
_Laissez-aller_, Individualism and Self-content, Unrestricted
Competition and the Survival of the Fittest. They all went down with a
crash, like so many dishonoured Dagons; and, before their startled
worshippers had time to reinstate them, yet another voice of warning
broke upon our ears. _The Bitter Cry of Outcast London_, describing the
enormous amount of preventable misery caused by over-crowding, startled
men into recognizing the duty of the State to cope with the evil. Then
came Henry George with his _Progress and Poverty_, and, as Dr. Holland
says, he "forced us on to new thinking." That "new thinking" took
something of this form--"Here are the urgent and grinding facts of human
misery. The Political Economy of such blind guides as Ricardo and
Bastiat and Fawcett has signally failed to cure or even mitigate them.
Now comes a new prophet with his gospel of the Single Tax. He may, or
may not, have found the remedy, but at any rate he has shown us more
clearly than ever the immensity of the evil, and our responsibility for
suffering it to continue. We profess and call ourselves Christians. Is
it not about time that, casting aside all human teachings, whether
Economic or Socialistic, we tried to see what the Gospel says about the
subject, and about our duty in regard to it?"
Out of this stress of mind and heart arose "The Christian Social Union."
It was founded in Lent, 1889, and it set forth its objects in the
following statement--
"This Union consists of Churchmen who have the following objects at
heart:--
(i) To claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule
social practice.
(ii) To study in common how to apply the moral truths and
principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties
of the present time.
(iii) To present CHRIST in practical life as the Living Master and
King, the enemy of wrong and selfishness, the power of
righteousness and love."
The Christian Social Union, originating with some Oxford men in London,
was soon reinforced from Cambridge, which had fallen under the inspiring
though impalpable influence of Westcott's teaching. Westcott was, in
some sense, the continuator of Mauricianism; and so, when Westcott
joined the Union, the two streams, of Mauricianism and of the Oxford
Movement, fused. Let Dr. Holland, with whom the work began, tell the
rest of the story--"We founded the C. S. U. under Westcott's
presidentship, leaving to the Guild of St. Matthew their old work of
justifying God to the People, while we devoted ourselves to converting
and impregnating the solid, stolid, flock of our own church folk within
the fold.... We had our work cut out for us in dislodging the horrible
cast-iron formulae, which were indeed wholly obsolete, but which seemed
for that very reason to take tighter possession of their last refuge in
the bulk of the Church's laity."
"Let no man think that sudden in a minute
All is accomplished and the work is done;--
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it,
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun."[60]
The spirit which created the Christian Social Union found, in the same
year, an unexpected outlet in the secular sphere. In the Session of
1888, the Conservative Ministry, noting the general disgust which had