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

more observant of intelligence than careful of memory concerning facts. Still, when all the aid that can be expected is got from the Government grants, the, schools will not be self-supporting. Here, then, comes in the really novel part of the project. _The rest must be supplied by voluntary work._ The trained staff of the School Board teachers will instruct the classes in those subjects required or sanctioned by the Department for which grants are made; but for all other subjects--the recreative, the technical, the scientific, the minor arts, the history, the dancing, and the rest--the schools will depend wholly upon volunteer teachers.

We must not disguise the audacity of the scheme. There are, I believe, in London alone 120 schools, for which 2,400 volunteers will be required. They must not be mere amateurs or kindly, benevolent people, who will lightly or in a fit of enthusiasm undertake the work, and after a month or so throw it over in weariness of the drudgery; they must be honest workers, who will give thought and take trouble over the work they have in hand, who will keep to their time, stick to their engagement, study the art of teaching, and be amenable to order and discipline. Are there so many as 2,400 such teachers to be found in London, without counting the many thousands wanted for the rest of the country? It seems a good-sized army of volunteers to raise.

Let us, however, consider. First, there is the hopeful fact that the Sunday-School Union numbers 12,000 teachers--all voluntary and unpaid--in London alone. There is, next, another hopeful fact in the rapid development of the Home Arts Association, which has existed for no more than a year or two. The teaching is wholly voluntary; and volunteers are crowding in faster than the slender means of the Society can provide schools for them to teach in, and the machinery, materials, and tools to teach with. Even with these facts before us, the projector and dreamer of the scheme may appear a bold man when he asks for 2,400 men and women to help him, not in a religious but a purely secular scheme. Yet it may not appear to many people purely secular when they remember that he asks for this large army of unselfish men and women--so unselfish as to give some of their time, thought, and activity for nothing, not even praise, but only out of love for the children--from a population of four millions, all of whom have been taught, and most believe, that self-sacrifice is the most divine thing that man can offer. To suppose that one in every two thousand is willing to the extent of an hour or two every week to follow at a distance the example of his acknowledged Master does not, after all, seem so very extravagant, For my own part, I believe that for every post there will be a dozen volunteers. Is that extravagant? It means no more than a poor 1 per cent, of such distant followers.

Those who go at all among the poor, and try to find out for themselves something of what goes on beneath the surface, presently become aware of a most remarkable movement, whispers of which from time to time reach the upper strata. All over London--no doubt over other great towns as well, but I know no other great town--there are at this day living, for the most part in obscurity, unpaid, and in some cases alone, men and women of the gentle class, among the poor, working for them, thinking for them, and even in some cases thinking with them. One such case I know where a gentlewoman has spent the greater part of her life among the industrial poor of the East End, so that she has come to think as they think, to look on things from their point of view, though not to talk as they talk. Some of these men are vicars, curates, Nonconformist ministers, Roman Catholic clergymen; some of the women are Roman Catholic sisters and nuns; others are sham nuns, Anglicans, who seem to find that an ugly dress keeps them more steadily to their work; others are deaconesses or Bible-women. Some, again, and it is to these that one turns with the greatest hope--they may or may not be actuated by religious motives--are bound by no vows, nor tied to any church. When twenty years ago Edward Denison went to live in Philpot Lane, he was quite alone in his voluntary work. He had no companion to try that experiment with him. Now he would be one of many. At Toynbee Hall are gathered together a company of young and generous hearts, who give their best without grudge or stint to their poorer brethren. There are rich men who have retired from the haunts of the wealthy, and voluntarily chosen to place their homes among the poor. There are men who work all day at business, and in the evening devote themselves to the care of working boys; there are women, under no vows, who read in hospitals, preside at cheap dinners, take care of girls' clubs, collect rents, and in a thousand ways bring light and kindness into dark places. The clergy of the Established Church, who may be regarded as almoners and missionaries of civilization rather than of religion, seeing how few of the poor attend their services, can generally command voluntary help when they ask for it. Voluntary work in generous enterprise is no longer, happily, so rare that men regard it with surprise; yet it belongs essentially to this century, and almost to this generation. Since the Reformation the work of English charity presents three distinct aspects. First came the foundation of almshouses and the endowment of doles. Nothing, surely, can be more delightful than to found an almshouse, and to consider that for generations to come there will be a haven of rest provided for so many old people past their work. The soul of King James's confectioner--good Balthazar Sanchez--must, we feel sure, still contemplate his cottages at Tottenham with complacency; one hopes His Majesty was not overcharged in the matter of pasties and comfits in order to find the endowment for those cottages. Even the dole of a few loaves every Sunday to as many aged poor has its attraction, though necessarily falling far short of the solid satisfaction to be derived from the foundation of an almshouse. But the period of almshouses passed away, and that of Societies succeeded. For a hundred years the well-to-do of this country have been greatly liberal for every kind of philanthropic effort. But they have conducted their charity as they have conducted their business, by drawing cheques. The clergy, the secretaries, and the committees have done the active work, administering the funds subscribed by the rich man's cheques. The system of cheque-charity has its merits as well as its defects, because the help given does generally reach the people for whom it was intended. Compared, however, with the real thing, which is essentially personal, it may be likened unto the good old method--which gave the rich man so glorious an advantage--of getting into heaven by paying for masses. Its principal defect is that it keeps apart the rich and poor, creates and widens the breach between classes, causing those who have the money to consider that it is theirs by Divine right, and those who have it not to forget that the origin of wealth is thrift and patience and energy, and that the way to wealth is always open for all who dare to enter and to practise these virtues.

It has been reserved for this century, almost for this generation, to discover that the highest form of charity is personal effort and self-sacrifice. It has also been reserved for this time to show that what was only possible in former times for those who were under vows, so that in old days they man or woman who was moved by the enthusiasm of humanity put on robe or veil and swore celibacy and obedience, can really be practised quite as well without religious vows, peculiar dress, articles of religion, papal allegiance, or anything of the kind. The doubter, the agnostic, the atheist, may as truly sacrifice himself and give up his life for humanity as the most saintly of the faithful. There was an enthusiast fifteen years ago who cheerfully endured prison and exile, poverty and persecution, for what seemed to him the one thing in the world desirable and necessary to mankind. I believe he was an atheist. Then came a time when, for a brief moment, the dream was realized. And immediately afterwards it crumbled to the dust. When all was lost, the poor old man arose, and, bareheaded, his white hair flying behind him in the breeze, this martyr to humanity mounted a barricade, and stood there until the bullets brought him death. This is the enthusiasm which may be intensified, disciplined, and ennobled by religion, but it is independent of religion; it is a personal quality, like the power of feeling music or writing poetry. When it is encouraged and developed, it produces men and women who can only find their true happiness in renouncing all personal ambitions, and giving up all hopes of distinction. They have hitherto sought the opportunity of satisfying this instinctive yearning in the Church and in the convent. They have now found a readier if not a happier way, with more liberty of action and fewer chains of rule and custom, outside the Church, as lay-helpers. It seems to me, perhaps because I am old enough to have fallen under the influence of Maurice's teaching, that a large part of this voluntary spirit is due to the writings of that great teacher and his followers. Certainly the College for Working Men and Women was founded by men of his school, and has grown and now flourishes exceedingly, and is a monument of voluntary effort sustained, passing from hand to hand, continually growing, and always bringing together more and more closely those who teach and those who are taught. Cheque-charity may harden the heart of him who gives, and pauperize him who takes. That charity which is personal can neither harden nor pauperize.

Considering these things, therefore, the impulse to personal effort which has fallen upon us, the greatness of the work that is to be done, the simplicity of the means to be employed, and the cooperation of the better kind of working men themselves, I cannot but think that the promoters of this scheme have only to hold up their hands in order to collect as many voluntary teachers as they wish to have.

There is a selfish side to this scheme which ought not to be entirely overlooked. It is this: The wealth of Great Britain is not, as some seem to suppose, a gold-mine into which we can dig at pleasure; nor is it a mine of coal or iron into which we can dig as the demand arises. Our wealth is nothing but the prosperity of the country, and this depends wholly on the industry, the patience, and the skill of the working man; everything we possess is locked up, somehow or other, in industrial enterprise, or depends upon the success of industrial enterprise; our railways, our ships, our shares of every kind, even the interest of our National Debt, depend upon the maintenance of our trade. The dividends even of gas and water companies depend upon the successful carrying on of trade and manufactures. We may readily conceive of a time when--our manufactures ruined by superior foreign intelligence and skill, our railways earning no profit, our carrying trade lost, our agriculture destroyed by foreign imports, our farms without farmers, our houses without tenants--the boasted wealth of England will have vanished like a splendid dream of the morning, and the children of the