CHAPTER XI

A PROGRAMME OF HELPFULNESS

The Triumph over Blindness—The Professor’s Audience—Free Trade and Protection—The Luxury of Light—The Malady of Poverty.

[Sidenote: The Triumph over Blindness.]

His election to a professorial chair meant much to Fawcett and helped greatly to carry him successfully forward in the career which he had mapped out for himself. It proved two points of much significance in his life as a blind man: first, that his colleagues and the elder men in authority at Cambridge thought that he had the intellectual training and qualifications to develop the honourable post to which he was elected; and secondly, that they did not feel that his blindness would hinder his making the most of his knowledge or prevent his students reaping good results from his lectures. Perhaps no less important was the added buoyancy and confidence given to Fawcett by a knowledge of his ability to control and lead men, even if they were only his pupils at Cambridge. This was a step, even if a very small one, on his path towards his election to Parliament. From that point of vantage he felt that he could ultimately lead the hosts of the ignorant and oppressed and force great issues for the national welfare.

The material advantages following his victory were also important: his fellowship yielded from £250 to £300 a year, which, with his professorship worth £300 a year, was sufficient for his needs. He rejoiced that his professorship compelled him to be at Cambridge for eighteen weeks each year, and for the rest of his life he continued to give his annual course of lectures.

The attitude taken towards the duties of a professor at Cambridge at that time seems to us now almost comic and Gilbertian. It was not expected that the professor should have a voluntary attendance of enthusiastic pupils at his lectures. When it was considered advisable for him to have a larger audience, the lecture-rooms were filled by forcing the ‘poll’ men, that is the undergraduates taking the Ordinary Degree, to attend a certain number of lectures; and whilst this arrangement remained in force Fawcett had a large share of these coerced auditors. In 1876 the regulation was done away with, and his lectures were nearly deserted, though in his later years he had again a respectable audience.

[Sidenote: The Professor’s Audience.]

A friend who saw Fawcett lecturing at Cambridge after the repeal of compulsory attendance says that the impression made upon him was grotesque. On entering the lecture-room, which was practically deserted, one saw the huge blind man holding forth with his ringing voice to space. Fawcett, in answer to condolences on this weird phenomenon, replied, with a merry laugh, that it was quite all right and he was used to it.

Fawcett was practically the only professor who objected to the withdrawal of compulsion; he said that he had been convinced by experience that his hearers profited more than he had anticipated. Examinations showed that they had really acquired useful knowledge. He did not share the objections of his colleagues, who felt that they had to lecture above the capacities of their enforced audiences. He should not, he said, alter in any case the character of his own lectures. There is something sublime and adamantine in this attitude; with his two feet planted firmly, the blind man proposed not for a moment to lessen the height of his intellectual stature, but by sheer force and determination, derrick-like, to hoist even the lowest members of his audience up to his own level. The impracticability of this point of view is obvious, but it is intensely Fawcettian. He felt that the great truths embodied in political economy were so simple and vital that he could graft them painlessly and with good results on the most unfertile mind.

[Sidenote: The Science of Helpfulness.]

He did not confine himself to elucidating the essential elements of his science only, nor was he content to reiterate what he had said to former audiences. He loved political economy as a living and helpful science. His lectures were always fresh, earnest, and illustrated by the bearing of the subject on history or current political events. He did not care to teach subtleties, but to drill his pupils in a science which he firmly believed would help them to deal intelligently and efficiently with the great problems of inequality, poverty, ignorance, and misery which were calling in vain to high Heaven to be solved.

Fawcett’s critics among the younger men often felt that he was too conservative. He idealised Mill, and his friends maintained that he had read no book except Mill’s _Political Economy_; it was true that he had read no book so exhaustively. He urged his hearers at one of his lectures to study some good book until they were prepared to give the substance and fully to analyse the argument of every chapter, and then having acted conscientiously on his advice himself, naïvely suggested Mill’s _Political Economy_ as excellent for this purpose.

[Sidenote: Homely Political Economy.]

He proved the teachings of Ricardo and Mill by what he had learned from the conditions of the country folk about Salisbury and Cambridge. He was wont to base his arguments on some homely, definite fact as illustration for his plain, home-made reasoning; for instance, he objected to a certain increased tax because it meant that every old woman in England would have a lump of sugar the less in her tea. That was the concrete thing on which he based his policy; and surely it is not one to be overlooked by a true statesman. He supplemented his knowledge by studying inexhaustibly the political, financial and economic movements of his time, and delighted in spending a quiet Sunday reading through all the newspapers he could collect. His appetite for them was insatiable, and he felt that he had been defrauded if his friends, when reading the Parliamentary debates, skipped any of even ‘the blow off,’ as they called the peroration.

He enriched his mind less by a pre-occupation with the abstract theory of Political Economy than by keeping constantly in touch with the affairs which were in actual course of transaction.

[Sidenote: _Free Trade and Protection._]

He was keenly interested in all those questions where political economy borders on finance. His book, _Free Trade and Protection_, published fifteen years after his first, assailed the tariff fetish dear to his generation. Terse and masterly, his publication became popular, and was regarded by many of the critics of his day as conclusive. In it he limited the problem to what he deemed its practical viewpoint. To him this was purely a commercial one, a question of profit and loss. Was protection profitable or not? He found that, sporadic evidence at times to the contrary, protection was not a paying business, and that it would only be maintained in the long run by a loss to the community, and therefore he considered it an obstruction in the way of progress, capital, and the general weal.

[Sidenote: The Luxury of Light.]

He was impressed by the fact that the evil of the day was the hopeless poverty of the mass of the people. He felt that the only way to help them was to understand the principles that govern ‘the conditions and consequences of money making and money spending,’ and so discover how best to make it possible for them to earn more money, that is, to have more power in exchange. He felt that men should be less content with their lot, and that schools and savings banks to replace the public-house would be great factors for regeneration. He used to tell the following anecdote, which touched his friend Mill deeply. Fawcett knew a Wiltshire man who was in the habit of going to bed at dusk. The man explained that this was his custom because he could not afford a candle, and added that, even if he could, he could not read, so why should he have the expense or luxury of light? How was it possible to change this labourer’s horizon, to lift him beyond the degrading pressure of sordid poverty, and to fill him with ambition, when he had to support his wife and himself on nine shillings a week? ‘Let us endeavour,’ Fawcett says, ‘to understand the true causes of poverty. That is the vital problem.’

[Sidenote: Malady of Poverty.]

As a Professor of Political Economy he tries, like a careful doctor, painstakingly to study and understand the symptoms of the malady of poverty and misery, refusing to accept any superficial diagnosis. He wants to discover the cause of the disturbance which, like a malignant tumour, vitiates the whole social system. While coping with these problems he kept his mind cool, critical, and impersonal, refusing all quack remedies, and seized every detail that helped him to his goal. In all simplicity he once asked Leslie Stephen why Carlyle called political economy the ‘dismal Science’—not a difficult question for the average man! But Fawcett loved budgets and balance-sheets; they brought to his mind vivid, concrete pictures that could never be dull, and he studied them industriously; industriously enough to realise thoroughly the fallibility of figures and the old truth so often quoted (can the reader bear it again?) that there are three kinds of lies, ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.’ Though his respect for his forerunners was great, his beliefs were fearlessly his own.

His warm personal relations with country labourers, many of whom he called his intimate friends, never lessened. Once, after a day’s fishing at Salisbury with Wright, he had some beer with a farmer, who told him that the labourers’ wages were to be lowered after the harvest. Fawcett, after vainly protesting, refused more beer and walked home. On his way he met one of his labouring friends, who accounted for his best clothes by saying that he was going to a harvest-home celebration at the church. Fawcett fell into a long reverie, and at last asked Wright how he would like to give thanks for a bountiful harvest when his wages were to be docked of a shilling a week.

[Sidenote: Co-operation.]

Such facts touched him deeply and set him pondering and writing on how best they could be changed. Co-operation seemed to him to be the cure for these ills; he felt that it would bind together the interests of the capitalists and the working men, and would ultimately do away with the friction between them. An article he published on this subject attracted the notice of George Eliot, and his proposals were put into practice at a colliery near Leeds.