Part 9

The clergyman begins with a hall into which he gathers a congregation, and which he uses as a centre for “Mission” work. He himself is the only link between the college and the poor. He gives frequent reports of his progress, and enlists such personal help as he can, always keeping it in mind that the “district” is destined to become a “parish”. Many districts thus created in East London now take their places among the regular parishes, and the income of the clergyman is paid by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the patronage of the living is probably with the Bishop, and the old connexion has become simply a matter of history. Apart from the doubt whether this multiplication of parochial organizations, with its consequent division of interests, represents a wise policy, it is obvious that a college mission does not wholly cover the idea which possessed the college. The social spirit fulfils itself in many ways, and no one form is adequate to its total expression.

The idea was that all members of the college should unite in good work. A college mission excludes Nonconformists. “Can we do nothing,” complained one, “as we cannot join in building a church?”

The idea was to bring to bear the life of the University on the life of the poor. The tendency of a mission is to limit efforts within the recognized parochial machinery. “Can I help,” I am often asked, “in social work, which is not necessarily connected with your church or creed?” A college mission may--as many missions have done--result in bringing devoted workers to the service of the poor--where a good man leads, good must follow--but it is not, I think, the form best fitted to receive the spirit which is at present moving the Universities.

As a form more adequate, I would suggest a Settlement of University men in the midst of some great industrial centre.

In East London large houses are often to be found; they were formerly the residences of the wealthy, but are now let out in tenements or as warehouses. Such a house, affording sufficient sleeping rooms and large reception rooms, might be taken by a college, fitted with furniture, and (it may be) associated with its name. As director or head, some graduate might be appointed, a man of the right spirit, trusted by all parties; qualified by character to guide men, and by education to teach. He would be maintained by the college just as the clergyman of the mission district. Around such a man graduates and undergraduates would gather. Some working in London as curates, barristers, government clerks, medical students, or business men would be glad to make their home in the house for long periods. They would find there less distraction and more interest than in a West-End lodging. Others engaged elsewhere would come to spend some weeks or months of the vacation, taking up such work as was possible, touching with their lives the lives of the poor, and learning for themselves facts which would revolutionize their minds. There would be, of course, a graduated scale of payment so as to suit the means of the various settlers, but the scale would have to be so fixed as to cover the expense of board and lodging.

Let it, however, be assumed that the details have been arranged, and that, under a wise director, a party of University men have settled in East London. The director--welcomed here, as University men are always welcomed--will have opened relations with the neighbouring clergy, and with the various charitable agencies; he will have found out the clubs and centres of social life, and he will have got some knowledge of the bodies engaged in local government. His large rooms will have been offered for classes, directed by the University Extension or Popular Concert Societies, and for meetings of instruction or entertainment. He will have thus won the reputation of a man with something to give, who is willing to be friendly with his neighbours. At once he will be able to introduce the settlers to duties, which will mean introductions to friendships. Those to whom it is given to know the high things of God, he will introduce to the clergy, who will guide them to find friends among those who, in trouble and sickness, will listen to a life-giving message. Honour men have confessed that they have found a key to life in teaching the Bible to children, and not once nor twice has it happened that old truths have seemed to take new meaning when spoken by a man brought fresh from Oxford to face the poor. Those with the passion for righteousness the director will bring face to face with the victims of sin. In the degraded quarters of the town, in the wards of the workhouses, they will find those to whom the friendship of the pure is strange, and who are to be saved only by the mercy which can be angry as well as pitiful. As I write, I recall one who was brought to us by an undergraduate out of a wretched court, overwhelmed by the look and words of his young enthusiasm. I recall another who was taken from the police court by a Cambridge man, put to an Industrial School, and is now touchingly grateful, not to him, but to God for the service. Some, whose spare time is in the day, will become visitors for the Charity Organization Society, Managers of Industrial and Public Elementary Schools, Members of the Committees which direct Sanitary, Shoe Black, and other Societies, and in these positions form friendships, which to officials, weary of the dull routine, will let in light, and to the poor, fearful of law, will give strength. Others who can spare time only in the evening will teach classes, join clubs, and assist in Co-operative and Friendly Societies, and they will, perhaps, be surprised to find that they know so much that is useful when they see the interest their talk arouses. In one club, I know, whist ceases to be attractive when the gentleman is not there to talk. There are friendly societies worked by artisans, which owe their success to the inspiration of University men, and there is one branch of the Charity Organization Society which still keeps the mark impressed on it, when a man of culture did the lowest work.

The elder settlers will, perhaps, take up official positions. If they could be qualified, they might be Vestry-men and Guardians, or they might qualify themselves to become Schoolmasters. What University men can do in local government is written on the face of parishes redeemed from the demoralizing influence of out-relief, and cleansed by well-administered law. Further reforms are already seen to be near, but it has not entered into men’s imaginations to conceive the change for good which might be wrought if men of culture would undertake the education of the people. The younger settlers will always find occupation day or night in playing with the boys, taking them in the daytime to open spaces, or to visit London sights, amusing them in the evening with games and songs. Unconsciously, they will set up a higher standard of man’s life, and through friendship will commend to these boys respect for manhood, honour for womanhood, reverence for God. Work of such kind will be abundant, and, as it must result in the settlers forming many acquaintances, the large rooms of the house will be much used for receptions. Parties will be frequent, and whatever be the form of entertainment provided, be it books or pictures, lectures or reading, dancing or music, the guests will find that their pleasure lies in intercourse. Social pleasure is unknown to those who have no large rooms and no place for common meeting. The parties of the Settlement will thus be attractive just in so far as they are useful. The more means of intercourse they offer, the more will they be appreciated. The pleasure which binds all together will give force to every method of good-doing, be it the words of the preacher, spoken to the crowd, hushed, perhaps, by the presence of death, or be it the laughter-making tale told during the Saturday ramble in the country.

If something like this is to be the work of a College Settlement, “How far,” it may be asked, “is it adequate to the hope of the college to do something for the poor?” Obviously, it _affords an outlet for every form of earnestness_. No man--call himself what he may--need be excluded from the service of the poor on account of his views. No talent, be it called spiritual or secular, need be lost on account of its unfitness to existing machinery. If there be any virtue, if there be any good in man, whatsoever is beautiful, whatsoever is pure in things will find a place in the Settlement.

There is yet a fuller answer to the question. A Settlement enables men to _live within sight of the poor_. Many a young man would be saved from selfishness if he were allowed at once to translate feeling into action. It is the facility for talk, and the ready suggestion that a money gift is the best relief, which makes some dread lest, after this awakening of interest, there may follow a deeper sleep. He who has, even for a month, shared the life of the poor can never again rest in his old thoughts. If with these obvious advantages, a Settlement seems to want that something which association with religious forms gives to the mission, I can only say that such association does not make work religious, if the workers have not its spirit. If the director be such a man as I can imagine, and if there be any truth in the saying that “Every one that loveth knoweth God,” then it must be that the work of settlers, inspired and guided by love, will be religious. The man in East London, who is the simplest worker for God I know, has added members to many churches, and has no sect or church of his own. The true religious teacher is he who makes known God to man. God is manifest to every age by that which is the Best of the age. The modern representatives of those who healed diseases, taught the ignorant, and preached the Gospel to the poor, are those who make common the Best which can be known or imagined. Christ the Son of God is still the “Christ which is to be”--and even through our Best He will be but darkly seen.

That such work as I have described would be useful in East London, I myself have no doubt. The needs of East London are often urged, but they are little understood. Its inhabitants are at one moment assumed to be well paid workmen, who will get on if they are left to themselves; at another, they are assumed to be outcasts, starving for the necessaries of living. It is impossible but that misunderstanding should follow ignorance, and at the present moment the West-End is ignorant of the East-End. The want of that knowledge which comes only from the sight of others’ daily life, and from sympathy with “the joys and sorrows in widest commonalty spread,” is the source of the mistaken charity which has done much to increase the hardness of the life of the poor.

The much-talked of East London is made up of miles of mean streets, whose inhabitants are in no want of bread or even of better houses; here and there are the courts now made familiar by descriptions. They are few in number, and West-End visitors who have come to visit their “neighbours” confess themselves--with a strange irony on their motives--“disappointed that the people don’t look worse”.

The settlers will find themselves related to two distinct classes of “the poor,” and it will be well if they keep in mind the fact that they must serve both those who, like the artisans, need the necessaries for _life_, and also those who, like casual labourers, need the necessaries for _livelihood_. They will not of course come believing that their Settlement will make the wicked good, the dull glad, and the poor rich, but they may be assured that results will follow the sympathy born of close neighbourhood. It will be something, if they are able to give to a few the higher thoughts in which men’s minds can move, to suggest other forms of recreation, and to open a view over the course of the river of life as it flows to the Infinite Sea. It will be something if they create among a few a distaste for dirt and disorder, if they make some discontented with their degrading conditions, if they leaven public opinion with the belief that the law which provides cleanliness, light and order should be applied equally in all quarters of the town. It will be something, if thus they give to the one class the ideal of life, and stir up in the other those feelings of self-respect, without which increased means of livelihood will be useless. It will be more if to both classes they can show that selfishness or sin is the only really bad thing, and that the best is not “too good for human nature’s daily food”. Nothing that is divine is alien to man, and nothing which can be learnt at the University is too good for East London.

Many have been the schemes of reform I have known, but, out of eleven years’ experience, I would say that none touches the root of the evil which does not _bring helper and helped into friendly relations_. Vain will be higher education, music, art, or even the Gospel, unless they come clothed in the life of brother men--“it took the Life to make God known”. Vain, too, will be sanitary legislation and model dwellings, unless the outcast are by friendly hands brought in one by one to habits of cleanliness and order, to thoughts of righteousness and peace. “What will save East London?” asked one of our University visitors of his master. “The destruction of West London” was the answer, and, in so far as he meant the abolition of the influences which divide rich and poor, the answer was right. Not until the habits of the rich are changed, and they are again content to breathe the same air and walk the same streets as the poor, will East London be “saved”. Meantime a Settlement of University men will do a little to remove the inequalities of life, as the settlers share their best with the poor and learn through feeling how they live. It was by residence among the poor that Edward Denison learned the lessons which have taken shape in the new philanthropy of our days. It was by visiting in East London that Arnold Toynbee fed the interest which in later years became such a force at Oxford. It was around a University man, who chose to live as our neighbour, that a group of East Londoners gathered, attracted by the hope of learning something and held together after five years by the joy which learning gives. Men like Mr. Goschen and Professor Huxley have lately spoken out their belief that the intercourse of the highest with the lowest is the only solution of the social problem.

Settlers may thus join the Settlement, looking back to the example of others and to the opinions of the wise--looking forward to the grandest future which has risen on the horizon of hope. It may not be theirs to see the future realized, but it is theirs to cheer themselves with the thought of the time when the disinherited sons of God shall be received into their Father’s house, when the poor will know the Higher Life as it is being revealed to those who watch by the never silent spirit, when daily drudgery will be irradiated with eternal thought, when neither wealth nor poverty will hinder men in their pursuit of the Perfect life, because everything which is Best will be made in love common to all.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

This paper was reprinted in February, 1884, when the following words and names were added.

The following members of the University have undertaken to receive the names of any graduates or undergraduates who feel disposed to join a “Settlement” shortly or at any future time:--

The Rev. the Master of University. The Hon. and Rev. W. H. Fremantle, Balliol. A. Robinson, Esq., New College. A. H. D. Acland, Esq., Christ Church. A. Sidgwick, Esq., C.C.C. W. H. Forbes, Esq., Balliol. A. L. Smith, Esq., Balliol. T. H. Warren, Esq., Magdalen. S. Ball, Esq., St. John’s. C. E. Dawkins, Esq., Balliol. B. King, Esq., Balliol. M. E. Sadler, Esq., Trinity. H. D. Leigh, Esq., New College. G. C. Lang, Esq., Balliol.

_Names should be sent in as soon as possible._

OXFORD, Feb., 1884.

THE BEGINNINGS OF TOYNBEE HALL.[1]

BY MRS. S. A. BARNETT.

1903.

[1] From “Towards Social Reform”. By kind permission of Messrs. Fisher Unwin.

“How did the idea of a University Settlement arise?” “What was the beginning?” are questions so often asked by Americans, Frenchmen, Belgians, or the younger generations of earnest English people, that it seems worth while to reply in print, and to trundle one’s mind back to those early days of effort and loneliness before so many bore the burden and shared the anxiety. The fear is that in putting pen to paper on matters which are so closely bound up with our own lives, the sin of egotism will be committed, or that a special plant, which is still growing, may be damaged, as even weeds are if their roots are looked at. And yet in the tale which has to be told there is so much that is gladdening and strengthening to those who are fighting apparently forlorn causes that I venture to tell it in the belief that to some our experiences will give hope.

In the year 1869, Mr. Edward Denison took up his abode in East London. He did not stay long nor accomplish much, but as he breathed the air of the people he absorbed something of their sufferings, saw things from their standpoint, and, as his letters in his memoirs show, made frequent suggestions for social remedies. He was the first settler, and was followed by the late Mr. Edmund Hollond, to whom my husband and I owe our life in Whitechapel. He was ever on the outlook for men and women who cared for the people, and hearing that we wished to come Eastward, wrote to Dr. Jackson, then Bishop of London, when the living of St. Jude’s fell vacant in the autumn of 1872, and asked that it might be offered to Mr. Barnett, who was at that time working as Curate at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, with Mr. Fremantle, now the Dean of Ripon. I have the Bishop’s letter, wise, kind and fatherly, the letter of a general sending a young captain to a difficult outpost. “Do not hurry in your decision,” he wrote, “it is the worst parish in my diocese, inhabited mainly by a criminal population, and one which has I fear been much corrupted by doles”.

How well I remember the day Mr. Barnett and I first came to see it!--a sulky sort of drizzle filled the atmosphere; the streets, dirty and ill kept, were crowded with vicious and bedraggled people, neglected children, and overdriven cattle. The whole parish was a network of courts and alleys, many houses being let out in furnished rooms at 8d. a night--a bad system, which lent itself to every form of evil, to thriftless habits, to untidiness, to loss of self-respect, to unruly living, to vicious courses.

We did not “hurry in our decision,” but just before Christmas, 1872, Mr. Barnett became vicar. A month later we were married, and took up our life-work on 6 March, 1873, accompanied by our friend Edward Leonard, who joined us, “to do what he could”; his “could” being ultimately the establishment of the Whitechapel Committee of the Charity Organization Society, and a change in the lives and ideals of a large number of young people, whom he gathered round him to hear of the Christ he worshipped.

It would sound like exaggeration if I told my memories of those times. The previous vicar had had a long and disabling illness, and all was out of order. The church, unserved by either curate, choir, or officials, was empty, dirty, unwarmed. Once the platform of popular preachers, Mr. Hugh Allen, and Mr. (now Bishop) Thornton, it had had huge galleries built to accommodate the crowds who came from all parts of London to hear them--galleries which blocked the light, and made the subsequent emptiness additionally oppressive. The schools were closed, the schoolrooms all but devoid of furniture, the parish organization nil; no Mothers’ meeting, no Sunday School, no communicants’ class, no library, no guilds, no music, no classes, nothing alive. Around this barren empty shell surged the people, here to-day, gone to-morrow. Thieves and worse, receivers of stolen goods, hawkers, casual dock labourers, every sort of unskilled low-class cadger congregated in the parish. There was an Irish quarter and a Jews’ quarter, while whole streets were given over to the hangers-on of a vicious population, people whose conduct was brutal, whose ideal was idleness, whose habits were disgusting, and among whom goodness was laughed at, the honest man and the right-living woman being scorned as impracticable. Robberies, assaults, and fights in the street were frequent; and to me, a born coward, it grew into a matter of distress when we became sufficiently well known in the parish for our presence to stop, or at least to moderate, a fight; for then it seemed a duty to join the crowd, and not to follow one’s nervous instincts and pass by on the other side. I recall one breakfast being disturbed by three fights outside the Vicarage. We each went to one, and the third was hindered by a hawker friend who had turned verger, and who fetched the distant policeman, though he evidently remained doubtful as to the value of interference.

We began our work very quietly and simply: opened the church (the first congregation was made up of six or seven old women, all expecting doles for coming), restarted the schools, established relief committees, organized parish machinery, and tried to cauterise, if not to cure, the deep cancer of dependence which was embedded in all our parishioners alike, lowering the best among them and degrading the worst. At all hours, and on all days, and with every possible pretext, the people came and begged. To them we were nothing but the source from which to obtain tickets, money, or food; and so confident were they that help would be forthcoming that they would allow themselves to get into circumstances of suffering or distress easily foreseen, and then send round and demand assistance.

I can still recall my emotions when summoned to a sick woman in Castle Alley, an alley long since pulled down, where the houses, three stories high, were hardly six feet apart; the sanitary accommodation--pits in the cellars; and the whole place only fit for the condemnation it got directly Cross’s Act was passed. This alley, by the way, was in part the cause of Cross’s Act, so great an impression did it make on Lord Cross (then Mr. Cross) when Mr. Barnett induced him to come down and see it.

In this stinking alley, in a tiny dirty room, all the windows broken and stuffed up, lay the woman who had sent for me. There were no bedclothes; she lay on a sacking covered with rags.

“I do not know you,” said I, “but I hear you want to see me.”

“No, ma’am!” replied a fat beer-sodden woman by the side of the bed, producing a wee, new-born baby; “we don’t know yer, but ’ere’s the babby, and in course she wants clothes, and the mother comforts like. So we jist sent round to the church.”

This was a compliment to the organization which represented Christ, but one which showed how sunken was the character which could not make even the simplest provision for an event which must have been expected for months, and which even the poorest among the respectable counts sacred.

The refusal of the demanded doles made the people very angry. Once the Vicarage windows were broken, once we were stoned by an angry crowd, who also hurled curses at us as we walked down a criminal-haunted street, and howled out as a climax to their wrongs “And it’s us as pays ’em”. But we lived all this down, and as the years went by reaped a harvest of love and gratitude which is one of the gladdest possessions of our lives, and is quite disproportionate to the service we have rendered. But this is the end of the story, and I must go back to the beginning.