As We Are and As We May Be - Walter Besant (most recommended books txt) 📗

gymnasium; (5) a library; and lastly, a winter garden. In other words, it is to be an institution which will recognise the fact, that for some of those who have to work all day at, perhaps, uncongenial and tedious labour, the best form of recreation may be study and intellectual effort; while for others--that is to say, for the great majority--music, reading, tobacco, and rest will be desired. Let us be under no illusions as to the supposed thirst for knowledge. Those who desire to learn are even in youth always a minority. How many men do we know, among our own friends, who have ever set themselves to learn anything since they left school? It is a great mistake to suppose that the working man, any more than the merchant-man or the clerk-man, or the tradesman, is ardently desirous of learning. But there will always be n few; and especially there are the young who would fain, if they could, make a ladder of learning, and so, as has ever been the goodly and godly custom in this realm of England, mount unto higher things. The Palace of the People would be incomplete indeed if it gave no assistance to ambitious youths. Next to the classes in literature and science come those in music and painting. There is no reason whatever why the Palace should not include an academy of music, an academy of arts, and an academy of acting, in a few months after its establishment it should have its own choir, its own orchestra, its own concerts, its own opera, and its own theatre, with a company formed of its own _alumni_. And in a year or two it should have its own exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculpture. As regards the simpler amusements, there must be rooms where the men can smoke, and others where the girls and women can work, read, and talk; there must be a debating society for questions, social and political, but especially the former; there must be a dancing school, and a ball once every week, all the year round; it should be possible to convert the great hall into either theatre, concert-room, or ball-room; there must be a bar for beer as well as for coffee, and at a price calculated so as to pay just the bare expenses; there must be a library and writing-room, and the winter garden must be a place where the women and children can come in the daytime while the men are at work. One thing must be kept out of the place: there must not be allowed to grow up in the minds even of the most suspicious the least jealousy that religious influences are at work; more than this, the institution must be carefully watched to prevent the rise of such a suspicion; religious controversy must be kept out of the debating-room, and even in the conversation-rooms there ought to be power to exclude a man who makes himself offensive by the exhibition and parade of his religious or irreligious opinions.

As for the teaching of the classes, we must look for voluntary work rather than to a great endowment. The history of the College in Great Ormond Street shows how much may be done by unpaid labour, and I do not think it too much to expect that the Palace of the People may be started by unpaid teachers in every branch of science and art: moreover, as regards science, history and language, the University Extension Society will probably find the staff. There must be, however, volunteers, women as well as men, to teach singing, music, dancing, sewing, acting, speaking, drawing, painting, carving, modelling, and many other things. This kind of help should only be wanted at the outset, because, before long, all the art departments ought to be conducted by ex-students who have become in their turn teachers, they should be paid, but not on the West-end scale, from fees--so that the schools may support themselves. Let us not _give_ more than is necessary; for every class and every course there should be some kind of fee, though a liberal system of small scholarships should encourage the students, and there should be the power of remitting fees in certain cases. As for the difficulty of starting the classes, I think that the assistance of Board School masters, foremen of works, Sunday schools, the political clubs, and debating societies should be invited; and that besides small scholarships, substantial prizes of musical and mathematical instruments, books, artists' materials, and so forth, should be offered, with the glory of public exhibition and public performances. After the first year there should be nothing exhibited in the Palace except work done in the classes, and no performances of music or of plays should be given but by the students themselves.

There has been going on in Philadelphia for the last two years an experiment, conducted by Mr. Charles Leland, whose sagacious and active mind is as pleased to be engaged upon things practical as upon the construction of humorous poems. He has founded, and now conducts personally, an academy for the teaching of the minor arts; he gets shop girls, work girls, factory girls, boys and young men of all classes together, and teaches them how to make things, pretty things, artistic things. 'Nothing,' he writes to me, 'can describe the joy which fills a poor girl's mind when she finds that she, too, possesses and can exercise a real accomplishment.' He takes them as ignorant, perhaps--but I have no means of comparing--as the London factory girl, the girl of freedom, the girl with the fringe--and he shows them how to do crewel-work, fretwork, brass work; how to carve in wood; how to design; how to draw--he maintains that it is possible to teach nearly every one to draw; how to make and ornament leather work, boxes, rolls, and all kinds of pretty things in leather. What has been done in Philadelphia amounts, in fact, to this: that one man who loves his brother man is bringing purpose, brightness, and hope into thousands of lives previously made dismal by hard and monotonous work; he has put new and higher thoughts into their heads; he has introduced the discipline of methodical training; he has awakened in them the sense of beauty. Such a man is nothing less than a benefactor to humanity. Let us follow his example in the Palace of the People.

I venture, further, to express my strong conviction that the success of the Palace will depend entirely upon its being governed, within limits at first, but these limits constantly broadening, by the people themselves. If they think the Palace is a trap to catch them, and make them sober, good, religious and temperate, there will be an end. In the first place, therefore, there must be a real element of the working man upon the council; there must be real working men on every sub-committee or branch; the students must be wholly recruited from the working classes; and gradually the council must be elected by the people who use the Palace. Fortunately, there would be no difficulty at the outset in introducing this element, because the great factories and breweries in the neighbourhood might be asked each to elect one or more representatives to sit upon the council of the new University. It 'goes without saying' that the police work, the maintenance of order, the out-kicking of offenders, must be also entirely managed by a voluntary corps of efficient working men. Rows there will undoubtedly be, since we are all of us, even the working man, human; but there need be no scandals.

I must not go on, though there is so much to be said. I see before us in the immediate future a vast University whose home is in the Mile End Road; but it has affiliated colleges in all the suburbs, so that even poor, dismal, uncared-for Hoxton shall no longer be neglected; the graduates of this University are the men and women whose lives, now unlovely and dismal, shall be made beautiful for them by their studies, and their heavy eyes uplifted to meet the sunlight; the subjects or examination shall be, first, the arts of every kind: so that unless a man have neither eyes to see nor hand to work with, he may here find something or other which he may learn to do; and next, the games, sports, and amusements with which we cheat the weariness of leisure and court the joy of exercising brain and wit and strength. From the crowded class-rooms I hear already the busy hum of those who learn and those who teach. Outside, in the street, are those--a vast multitude to be sure--who are too lazy and too sluggish of brain to learn anything: but these, too, will flock into the Palace presently to sit, talk, and argue in the smoking-rooms; to read in the library; to see the students' pictures upon the walls; to listen to the students' orchestra, discoursing such music as they have never dreamed of before; to look on while His Majesty's Servants of the People's Palace perform a play, and to hear the bright-eyed girls sing madrigals.

[1884.]



THE ASSOCIATED LIFE.

[The substance of this paper was delivered as the presidential speech at the opening of the Hoxton Library and Institute.]



It has seemed to me--for reasons which I hope to make clear to you--that the present occasion, the opening of our newly-acquired Place of Gathering, is one on which something may be said upon the subject of the Associated Life--that is to say, on the union, or combination of men, or of men and women, in order to effect by collective action objects--objects worthy of effort--impossible for the individual to attempt.

It would seem at first sight that combination should be the very simplest thing in the world. It is self-evident that those who want anything have a much better chance of getting it if they join together in order to demand it, or to work for it. Like one or two other simple laws of human nature, this, though the simplest, is the hardest to get people to understand and to accept. Nothing is so difficult as to persuade people to trust each other, even to the extent of standing together and sticking together and working together in order to get what they want.

The first association of men was forced upon them for protection, I wonder how many ages--hundreds of thousands of years--it took to teach men to join together in order to protect themselves against starvation, wild beasts, and each other. The necessity of self-preservation first made men associate, and changed hunters into soldiers, and turned the whole world into a camp. It was war, which brought men together; it was war which taught men the necessity of order, discipline, and obedience; without the necessity for fighting, without the military spirit, no association at all would now be possible. A vast number of men practically use modern safety at this day for the purpose of being fighters, every man against his neighbour. Just as no one would, even now, do any work but for the necessity of finding food for himself and his family, so no one would ever have begun to stand side by side with his neighbour but for the absolute certainty that he would be killed if he did not.

Let us, however, consider a more advanced kind of association, that of men united for purposes of trade and profit. The craftsman of the town, who made things and sold them, found out by the experience of some generations that his only chance, if he would not become a slave, was to combine with others who made the same things for the same purposes. He therefore formed--here in London, as early as the