Part 15

First, as to overcrowding. This is a question that distinctly affects the state, and with regard to which we have to “live in the whole,” and to see that the welfare of the community is at stake, and that the state must have an authoritative voice in it. Virtue, sobriety, decency, are physically impossible in the conditions under which a vast number of its citizens are living. The national health and morals are in danger. All the arguments that justified the interference of the state with the rights of the Irish landlord, apply equally to the London landlords, and the artificial forcing up of rents, which has resulted from the necessity many workmen are under of living near their work. Yet this question has been the subject of permissive legislation! The Artisans’ Dwellings Improvement Act, an honest attempt on the part of Sir Richard Cross to deal with the problem, was rendered applicable to all towns of 28,000 inhabitants or upward—that is to say, about eighty towns—but it was entrusted to the municipalities to carry it out, the town councils which we have left to be composed chiefly of men of narrow education, largely swayed by self-interest, and probably extensive owners of the very property to be demolished! It is exactly as if the Irish Land Bill had been permissive, and entrusted to the Irish landlords to put it into execution! Can we wonder that in about sixty out of the eighty towns, it remains a dead letter? In eleven it has led to discussion; in two or three it has led to the demolition of buildings, but not to their erection. Is there not a want of ordinary _seeing_ in our moral life? Could we hope to solve a single scientific problem on the methods on which we are content to live?

“The commercial success,” as Mr. Peek observes, “that has been achieved by several of the Artisans’ Dwellings Companies which, while providing good houses, yet pay fair dividends, shows that the poorest pay rents which give a fair interest on capital, so that the municipality will not be compelled to embark in a ruinous undertaking, or one that will not pay in the long run, to say nothing of the gain to the health and morals of the nation.”

Secondly, let us take pauperism. First of all let us clearly recognize that no system of paid officials, no mechanical workhouse will take the place of human thought and human care. Nothing will do instead of love. Indeed, there are already signs that we are working out a _reductio ad absurdum_ with these portentous and ever-increasing warehouses of the destitute and the vicious that are springing up, throwing the winter support of whole dissolute families on hard-working rate-payers, and systematically discouraging thrift. But the problem has been solved satisfactorily on a small scale, and can be on a larger. The Elberfield experiment, which in twelve years reduced the number of paupers from 4,800 to 1,800, notwithstanding that the population had increased from 50,000 to 64,000, and that great commercial depression existed, has been too often described not to be familiar to all. But a remarkable parallel movement among the Jews is scarcely so well known as it deserves to be. When “Oliver Twist” was published, the leading Jews were so mortally ashamed of the picture drawn by the popular novelist of Fagan and the low Jewish quarters in London, that they formed themselves at once into an organization to remedy so disgraceful a state of things. The numbers to be dealt with amounted to those of a populous town, with the additional difficulty afforded by immigrant Jews arriving in large numbers from the Continent in a state of the greatest destitution. The investigation of every case requiring relief was undertaken by volunteer workers, assisted by skilled officers, and was not in the steam pig-killing style, but patient and exhaustive with true human brotherhood; in deserving cases the relief given was sufficient to make a guardian’s hair stand on end, but was given with the view to helping the man to a means of livelihood. Especially this wise liberality was shown in the treatment of their widows. Whilst Mr. Peek has no better suggestion to offer than that the widows’ children should be removed to the pauper barrack-schools to herd with the lowest children of casuals, a system which Mr. Peek himself strongly condemns, the Jews recognized that the mother, if well conducted, was the proper person to have the care of them, and that her place was at home. They therefore either provided their widows with indoor work, or, when that was impossible, relieved them on a sufficient scale to enable them to look after their children at home; the consequence being that instead of feeding the outcast class, as the neglected children of our widows too often do, they grew up productive and well-conducted members of the community. If, however, a family was found overcrowding, all relief was steadily refused till they consented to live a human life, assistance being given to move into a larger tenement. By these wise and thoughtful methods in the course of a single generation the Jews have worked up the people from a considerably lower level to one decidedly above our own. To be sure the Jew does not drink. Give the most destitute Jew five pounds down, and at the end of the year you will find him a small capitalist, having considerably despoiled the Egyptians meanwhile. But the intemperance of our people is largely caused by overcrowding, and by their amusements and recreation-rooms being in the hands of those who make their profit not by the entertainment but by the drink traffic, and indefinite improvement may be brought about by wiser regulations that have the good of the people, and not the fattening of publicans and brewers at heart. Surely the success of the Jewish and Elberfeld efforts prove that the problem of the reduction of pauperism and the inducing of healthy habits of thrift and self-helping in the people is soluble, and with that army of devoted Christian workers in our midst, to whose untiring efforts we owe it that social disaster has not already overtaken us, it must be possible for us to carry on the same movement, if Birmingham or one of our public-spirited towns would lead the way.

Lastly, we come to the vast, hopeful field, presented by greater care for the young, and better methods of embodying it.

First, let the law protect the young of both sexes up to the legal age of majority from all attempts to lead them into a dissolute life. In most continental countries the corruption of minors is an indictable offense. The English penal code recognizes this principle in property; it is felony to abduct an heiress up to twenty-one, and a young man’s debts, except for bare necessaries, are null and void till he is of age; but, as usual, our English law leaves the infinitely more precious moral personality unprotected. There is no practical protection at any age for an English child from the trade of vice. An unruly child of fifteen or sixteen, or even younger, quarrels with her mother or with her employer, and runs off in a fit of temper. Even if she leaves her parents’ roof, it can not be brought under the law against abduction. No one abducts her; the child abducts herself. Yet the keeper of the lowest den of infamy can harbor that child for an infamous purpose, and he or she commits no indictable offence. It is no wonder, therefore, that the open profligacy of the young forms the very gravest feature of our large towns. Thankful as we are for the honest effort to deal with this monstrous anomaly in English law, shown by Lord Rosebery’s bill, we can not but regret the extreme inadequacy of its provisions, or that the legislature should refuse to extend legal protection from even the trade of vice, to the most dangerous age of a girl’s life, the age of sixteen—the age when, as the medical faculty are agreed, a girl is least morally responsible, and most liable to sexual extravagances, and when we can statistically prove that the greatest number of those who go wrong are led astray. The country will not rest till the legal protection from the trade of vice is extended to twenty-one.

Secondly, let us recognize it as an axiom that parental rights do not exist when wholly severed from parental duties; or, in other words, that the child has its rights as well as the parent, and that its indefeasible right is, in South’s strong words, “to be born and not damned into the world.” Let it be recognized, then, that no child of either sex is to be brought up in a den of infamy, and to attend school from thence to the contamination of the children of the respectable poor, the magistrates being no longer allowed to defeat this beneficent provision of the Industrial Schools Act, and parental responsibility being recognized by the parent being compelled to pay toward the Christian and industrial training of the child; all children living in, or frequenting, thieves’ dens and disorderly houses to be at once removed. Let day industrial schools be formed for the lowest class of children, so as to introduce some classification in our board schools, the want of which is one of their gravest defects. Let us adopt emigration to our colonies for our pauper and destitute children, whenever possible. Any one who has gone into the question can corroborate Mr. Samuel Smith’s statement in his able article in the May number of the _Nineteenth Century_, that “£15 per head covers all expenses, including a few months’ preparatory training, outfit, passage, etc.” The average cost of each child in the metropolitan district schools is nearly £25 per annum. About 11,000 pauper children are brought up in these large establishments at a cost to the ratepayers of London of £250,000 per annum. Probably each child is kept, on the average, five years, costing, say, £120 in all. Truly Mr. Smith may well add, “with a blindness that is incomprehensible, the guardians have preferred herding them together at a vast expense, and refused till quite lately to allow emigration to be tried.” And for those children who through bad health, or any other disability, are unable to emigrate, and can not be boarded out, as well as children whose drunken and dissolute parents are bringing them up to crime, let there be an order of teaching deaconesses instituted, and a state-aided training college, where educated ladies may receive training in the management of an industrial school, and from which the guardians can supply themselves with mothers for cottage homes on the plan of the Village Homes of Ilford, where the cost of a child is £14, instead of £25. By this arrangement the children would come under higher influence than the uneducated workhouse officials. Hundreds of ladies are wanting remunerative employment, and would gladly undertake this, if they could be put in the way of the work by a little preliminary training, and freed from the necessity of “doing the washing” in the cottage home. And, lastly, let it be a recognized theory that every Christian household has one respectable but rough little girl to train under its own upper class servants, to give her a good start in life, that our houses, with all their culture and refinement, may no longer be strongholds of _l’egoisme à plusieurs_, but centers for teaching good work, high character, and fine manners—organs for the public good.

And those social atomists who raise their vehement cry about personal rights and the liberty of the subject over all compulsory measures for saving children, I would remind that the question is not of compulsion or non-compulsion; but whether the natural guardians of a child shall be compelled to pay toward its Christian and industrial training, or whether they and I, as ratepayers, shall be compelled to pay for its degradation in prisons, in infirmary beds, and workhouses. Compulsion there is anyhow: but surely no reasonable mind can doubt which compulsion is most in accordance with the true right and true liberty.

And how can I better close than with the impassioned words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, apostrophizing our material splendor, as shown in the great Exhibition of 1851, by the side of our moral squalor:

“O Magi of the East and of the West, Your incense, gold and myrrh are excellent! What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest? Your hands have worked well: is your courage spent In handiwork only? Have you nothing best Which generous souls may perfect and present And He shall thank the givers for? No light Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor Who sit in darkness when it is not night? No cure for wicked children? Christ—no cure! No help for women sobbing out of sight Because men made the laws? No brothel lure Burnt out by popular lightnings? Hast thou found No remedy, my England, for such woes?

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Alas! great nations have great shames, I say.

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O gracious nations, give some ear to me! You all go to your fair, and I am one Who at the roadside of humanity Beseech your alms,—God’s justice to be done!” —_The Contemporary Review._

AT REST.

By SARAH DOUDNEY.

Ah, silent wheel, the noisy brook is dry, And quiet hours glide by In this deep vale, where once the merry stream Sang on through gloom and gleam; Only the dove in some leaf-shaded nest Murmurs of rest.

Ah, weary voyager, the closing day Shines on that tranquil bay, Where thy storm-beaten soul has longed to be; Wild blast and angry sea Touch not this favored shore, by summer blest, A home of rest.

Ah, fevered heart, the grass is green and deep Where thou art laid asleep; Kissed by soft winds, and washed by gentle showers, Thou hast thy crown of flowers; Poor heart, too long in this mad world oppressed, Take now thy rest.

I, too, perplex’d with strife of good and ill, Long to be safe and still; Evil is present with me while I pray That good may win the day; Great Giver, grant me thy last gift and best, The gift of rest!

—_Good Words._

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BUSINESS requires earnestness and strength of character, life must be allowed more freedom; business calls for the strictest sequence, whereas in the conduct of life inconsecutiveness is often necessary—nay, is charming and graceful. If thou art strict in the first, thou mayest allow thyself more freedom in the second; while if thou mix them up, thou wilt find the free interfering and breaking in upon the fixed.—_Goethe._

ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.

By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

I.—THE SAILOR, PEDDLER, FARMER, PREACHER.

In mechanics, an eccentric is a wheel that can start all the rest of the machinery with a jerk and a kick, and keep it going. It was the little eccentrics that enabled ten thousand Chautauquans to scatter to every part of the land in a few hours. The cam-motion in human nature starts its machinery and scatters its thought. We ought to thank God for the minds that wabble. Every originator has been counted eccentric—many of them have been pronounced insane. The little Festuses sitting in judgment are always crying to the inspired apostles of truth, “Thou art beside thyself.”

It is finite mechanism and finite thought that invent geometry and theology. Men hang, cunningly and truly, their long counter-shafts of creed, of behavior, of thought, of dress, of consistency, of loyalty; they bolt and key thereto immovably all human characters which are round, “line them up” all true and uniform, lubricate with lucre, put on the steam and away they all go beautifully and all alike. Woe be to one who wabbles in this machine-shop of society! But God uses no plumb-lines, right-angles, levels or true circles. “Nature’s geometrician,” the bee, never made a true hexagon. The old planets go “spinning through the grooves of change” in eccentrics, and never collide. Erratic comets dash through and among them, and never crash. I suppose the most eccentric character that ever walked this earth was that strange boy from Nazareth who confounded the doctors with his unprecedented outgivings. His teachings were indeed so strange that after the world has been for one thousand nine hundred years trying to work its standard up to them, a perfect Christian would to-day be accounted _non compos mentis_ by the rest of Christendom.

So it is not a bad idea to study eccentric characters, especially if they are strangely good and oddly useful. One such, at least, we have at hand for the first study of this series—Rev. Edward T. Taylor, “Father Taylor,” “The Sailor-Preacher,” of Boston and the world.

Born in Virginia, reared on the sea, and adopted by New England. Born a religionist, he preached “play” sermons when a child; born again a Christian, he preached the gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church until all humanity claimed him. Born a poet, for ten years he studied nature in her tragic and her melting moods upon the sea; studied man in the forecastle, in the prison, upon the farm, in the market. Nature was his university; humanity his text-book; hard experience his tutor. At the age of twenty he had traveled the world over, had sounded the depths of human fortune, passion, misery, and sin; was profoundly learned in his great text-book, and the most inspired interpreter of its unuttered wants—and did not know the alphabet! He had become celebrated throughout New England as a marvelous prodigy in the despised sect of “shouting Methodists” years before he could read a text or “line” a hymn. And to the day of his death his preaching knew no method, his eloquence no logic, his conduct no consistency, and his power no limit or restraint. To this day no one has succeeded in analyzing his genius. He could not himself account for his power, nor could he control it. He seemed to play upon his audiences at will as a master plays upon the harp; yet some unseen, mysterious force played upon him in turn. His brethren in the ministry, who accounted for his strange power by attributing it to the Holy Spirit, were confounded by the rudeness, jocoseness, and at times almost profanity of his speech at its highest flights; and they who undertook to resolve his efforts into the accepted elements of human power were astounded by the more than human resources of a mind uncultured and a nature as wild, as uncontrollable, as bright and as sad as the sea he loved. Surely, if ever man was inspired, Father Taylor was.

His career, like his methods, answered to all the terms that can define eccentricity. Deeply religious as the child was by nature, he ran away to sea at the age of seven. His conversion was characteristic. Putting into port at Boston, he strolled to a meeting-house where a revival was in progress; instead of going in by the door, he listened outside, and when stricken under conviction, with characteristic impulsiveness he climbed in through the window. To use his own sailor words: “I was dragged in through the ‘lubber hole,’ brought down by a broadside from the seventy-four, Bishop Hedding, and fell into the arms of Thomas W. Tucker.” This was at the age of nineteen. Then off to sea as a privateersman in the war of 1812, he was captured and imprisoned at Halifax, and here his preaching of the gospel strangely began. A fellow-prisoner read texts to him till one flashed upon his conception as the cue to his discourse. “Stop!” the boy would cry; “read that again.” “That will do;” and he was ready to pour forth a fervid hour of pathos, wit, brilliant imagery, all supported by perfect acting.

Out of prison at last, he returns to Boston, leaves his seafaring forever, and takes to the road with a tin peddler’s cart: clad in a sailor’s jacket and tarpaulin, talking “sea lingo,” religion and poetry in equal proportions, he traveled over New England as attractive a sight as Don Quixote would have been. He came across an old lady who taught him to read (age 21), and he paid her by gratefully holding meetings in her big kitchen, and exhorting wondering crowds of rustics and weeping crowds of penitents. Next he undertook to learn shoemaking, and then worked a farm for a living—all the time concentrating his intense nature on his grand passion for playing upon the human heart; earning little bread for himself, and breaking the bread of life abundantly to farmers, shoemakers, fishermen; in farm houses, school houses, barns, camp-meetings; over a circuit of his own organization. “He was a youthful rustic Whitefield,” says Bishop Haven, “thrilling rustic audiences with his winged words and fiery inspiration.” He loved to preach from the text, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” Taylor did not know letters, and his speech was rude and coarse, his blunders innumerable: if words failed him out of his limited vocabulary, he manufactured them. Once, completely at fault in his struggle to express the burning thoughts that crowded his brain he cried, with a perplexed but irradiated face: “I have lost my nominative case, but I am on my way to glory!” A few smiled; all wept. His earnestness atoned for many defects; his imagery was even now beautiful, and his magnetism irresistible.

Thus young Taylor preached, unlicensed, for five years. It was the breaking-up and seed-time of New England Methodism. Between the Puritans and Quakers, with their mutual antagonism, the shouting Methodists were as corn between the millstones, a despised and persecuted sect.

About the age of twenty-five occurred three notable events in his life. He was licensed by the Methodist Conference to preach. He attended school a short time and began his education. He married one of God’s noble-women to complete his education. For ten years he continued the life of a circuit preacher, growing in culture, power, spirit, and fame, under that wise and gentle nurture. No one can say how far short of its fullness Father Taylor’s life might have fallen without Deborah Taylor.