Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

They become, it is said, discontented, conceited, dogmatical.  They take up hasty notions, they condemn fiercely what they have no means of understanding; they are too fond of fine words, of the excitement of spouting themselves, and hearing others spout.

Well.  I suppose there must be a little truth in the accusation, or it would not have been invented.  There is no smoke without fire; and these certainly are the faults of which the cleverest middle-class young men whom I know are most in danger.

But—one fair look at these men’s faces ought to tell common sense that the cause is rather physical than moral.  Confined to sedentary occupations, stooping over desks and counters in close rooms, unable to obtain that fair share of bodily exercise which nature demands, and in continual mental effort, their nerves and brain have been excited at the expense of their lungs, their digestion, and their whole nutritive system.  Their complexions show a general ill-health.  Their mouths, too often, hint at latent disease.  What wonder if there be an irritability of brain and nerve?  I blame them no more for it than I blame a man for being somewhat touchy while he is writhing in the gout.  Indeed less; for gout is very often a man’s own fault; but these men’s ill-health is not.  And, therefore, everything which can restore to them health of body, will preserve in them health of mind.  Everything which ministers to the corpus sanum, will minister also to the mentem sanam; and a walk on Durham Downs, a game of cricket, a steamer excursion to Chepstow, shall send them home again happier and wiser men than poring over many wise volumes or hearing many wise lectures.  How often is a worthy fellow spending his leisure honourably in hard reading, when he had much better have been scrambling over hedge and ditch, without a thought in his head save what was put there by the grass and the butterflies, and the green trees and the blue sky?  And therefore I do press earnestly, both on employers and employed, the incalculable value of athletic sports and country walks for those whose business compels them to pass the day in the heart of the city; I press on you, with my whole soul, the excellency of the early-closing movement; not so much because it enables young men to attend mechanics’ institutes, as because it enables them, if they choose, to get a good game of leap-frog.  You may smile; but try the experiment, and see how, as the chest expands, the muscles harden, and the cheek grows ruddy and the lips firm, and sound sleep refreshes the lad for his next day’s work, the temper will become more patient, the spirits more genial; there will be less tendency to brood angrily over the inequalities of fortune, and to accuse society for evils which as yet she knows not how to cure.

There is a class, again, above all these, which is doubtless the most important of all; and yet of which I can say little here—the capitalist, small and great, from the shopkeeper to the merchant prince.

Heaven forbid that I should speak of them with aught but respect.  There are few figures, indeed, in the world on which I look with higher satisfaction than on the British merchant; the man whose ships are on a hundred seas; who sends comfort and prosperity to tribes whom he never saw, and honourably enriches himself by enriching others.  There is something to me chivalrous, even kingly, in the merchant life; and there were men in Bristol of old—as I doubt not there are now—who nobly fulfilled that ideal.  I cannot forget that Bristol was the nurse of America; that more than two hundred years ago, the daring and genius of Bristol converted yonder narrow stream into a mighty artery, down which flowed the young life-blood of that great Transatlantic nation destined to be hereafter, I believe, the greatest which the world ever saw.  Yes—were I asked to sum up in one sentence the good of great cities, I would point first to Bristol, and then to the United States, and say, That is what great cities can do.  By concentrating in one place, and upon one object, men, genius, information, and wealth, they can conquer new-found lands by arts instead of arms; they can beget new nations; and replenish and subdue the earth from pole to pole.

Meanwhile, there is one fact about employers, in all cities which I know, which may seem commonplace to you, but which to me is very significant.  Whatsoever business they may do in the city, they take good care, if possible, not to live in it.  As soon as a man gets wealthy nowadays, his first act is to take to himself a villa in the country.  Do I blame him?  Certainly not.  It is an act of common sense.  He finds that the harder he works, the more he needs of fresh air, free country life, innocent recreation; and he takes it, and does his city business all the better for it, lives all the longer for it, is the cheerfuller, more genial man for it.  One great social blessing, I think, which railroads have brought, is the throwing open country life to men of business.  I say blessing; both to the men themselves and to the country where they settle.  The citizen takes an honest pride in rivalling the old country gentleman, in beating him in his own sphere, as gardener, agriculturist, sportsman, head of the village; and by his superior business habits and his command of ready money, he very often does so.  For fifty miles round London, wherever I see progress—improved farms, model cottages, new churches, new schools—I find, in three cases out of four, that the author is some citizen who fifty years ago would have known nothing but the narrow city life, and have had probably no higher pleasures than those of the table; whose dreams would have been, not as now, of model farms and schools, but of turtle and port-wine.

My only regret when I see so pleasant a sight is: Oh that the good man could have taken his workmen with him!

Taken his workmen with him?

I assure you that, after years of thought, I see no other remedy for the worst evils of city life.  “If,” says the old proverb, “the mountain will not come to Muhammed, then Muhammed must go to the mountain.”  And if you cannot bring the country into the city, the city must go into the country.

Do not fancy me a dreamer dealing with impossible ideals.  I know well what cannot be done; fair and grand as it would be, if it were done, a model city is impossible in England.  We have here no Eastern despotism (and it is well we have not) to destroy an old Babylon, as that mighty genius Nabuchonosor did, and build a few miles off a new Babylon, one-half the area of which was park and garden, fountain and water-course—a diviner work of art, to my mind, than the finest picture or statue which the world ever saw.  We have not either (and it is well for us that we have not) a model republic occupying a new uncleared land.  We cannot, as they do in America, plan out a vast city on some delicious and healthy site amid the virgin forest, with streets one hundred feet in breadth, squares and boulevards already planted by God’s hand with majestic trees; and then leave the great design to be hewn out of the wilderness, street after street, square after square, by generations yet unborn.  That too is a magnificent ideal; but it cannot be ours.  And it is well for us, I believe, that it cannot.  The great value of land, the enormous amount of vested interests, the necessity of keeping to ancient sites around which labour, as in Manchester, or commerce, as in Bristol, has clustered itself on account of natural advantages, all these things make any attempts to rebuild in cities impossible.  But they will cause us at last, I believe, to build better things than cities.  They will issue in a complete interpenetration of city and of country, a complete fusion of their different modes of life, and a combination of the advantages of both, such as no country in the world has ever seen.  We shall have, I believe and trust, ere another generation has past, model lodging-houses springing up, not in the heart of the town, but on the hills around it; and those will be—economy, as well as science and good government, will compel them to be—not ill-built rows of undrained cottages, each rented for awhile, and then left to run into squalidity and disrepair, but huge blocks of building, each with its common eating-house, bar, baths, washhouses, reading-room, common conveniences of every kind, where, in free and pure country air, the workman will enjoy comforts which our own grandfathers could not command, and at a lower price than that which he now pays for such accommodation as I should be ashamed to give to my own horses; while from these great blocks of building, branch lines will convey the men to or from their work by railroad, without loss of time, labour, or health.

Then the city will become what it ought to be; the workshop, and not the dwelling-house, of a mighty and healthy people.  The old foul alleys, as they become gradually depopulated, will be replaced by fresh warehouses, fresh public buildings; and the city, in spite of all its smoke and dirt, will become a place on which the workman will look down with pride and joy, because it will be to him no longer a prison and a poison-trap, but merely a place for honest labour.

This, gentlemen and ladies, is my ideal; and I cannot but hope and believe that I shall live to see it realised here and there, gradually and cautiously (as is our good and safe English habit), but still earnestly and well.  Did I see but the movement commenced in earnest, I should be inclined to cry a “Nunc Domine dimittis”—I have lived long enough to see a noble work begun, which cannot but go on and prosper, so beneficial would it be found.  I tell you, that but this afternoon, as the Bath train dashed through the last cutting, and your noble vale and noble city opened before me, I looked round upon the overhanging crags, the wooded glens, and said to myself: There, upon the rock in the free air and sunlight, and not here, beneath yon pall of smoke by the lazy pools and festering tidal muds, ought the Bristol workman to live.  Oh that I may see the time when on the blessed Sabbath eve these hills shall swarm as thick with living men as bean-fields with the summer bees; when the glens shall ring with the laughter of ten thousand children, with limbs as steady, and cheeks as ruddy, as those of my own lads and lasses at home; and the artisan shall find his Sabbath a day of rest indeed, in which not only soul but body may gather health and nerve for the week’s work, under the soothing and purifying influences of those common natural sights and sounds which God has given as a heritage even to the gipsy on the moor; and of which no man can be deprived without making his life a burden to himself, perhaps a burden to those around him.

But it will be asked: Will such improvements pay?  I respect that question.  I do not sneer at it, and regard it, as some are too apt to do, as a sign of the mercenary and money-loving spirit of the present age.  I look on it as a healthy sign of the English mind; a sign that we believe, as the old Jews did, that political and social righteousness is inseparably connected with wealth and prosperity.  The old Psalms and prophets have taught us that lesson; and God forbid that we should forget it.  The world is right well made; and the laws of trade and of social economy, just as much as the laws of nature, are divine facts, and only by obeying them can we thrive.  And I had far sooner hear a people asking of every scheme of good, Will it pay? than throwing themselves headlong into that merely sentimental charity to which superstitious nations have always been prone—charity which effects no permanent good, which, whether in Hindostan or in Italy, debases, instead of raising, the suffering classes, because it breaks the laws of social economy.

No, let us still believe that if a thing is right, it will sooner or later pay; and in social questions, make the profitableness of any scheme a test of its rightness.  It is a rough test; not an infallible one at all, but it is a fair one enough to work by.

And as for the improvements at which I have hinted, I will boldly answer that they will pay.

They will pay directly and at once, in the saving of poor-rates.  They will pay by exterminating epidemics, and numberless chronic forms of disease which now render thousands burdens on the public purse; consumers, instead of producers of wealth.  They will pay by gradually absorbing the dangerous classes; and removing from temptation and degradation a generation yet unborn.  They will pay in the increased content, cheerfulness, which comes with health in increased goodwill of employed towards employers.  They will pay by putting the masses into a state fit for education.  They will pay, too, in such fearful times as these, by the increased physical strength and hardihood of the town populations.  For it is from the city, rather than from the country, that our armies must mainly be recruited.  Not only is the townsman more ready to enlist than the countryman, because in the town the labour market is most likely to be overstocked; but the townsman actually makes a better soldier than the countryman.  He is a shrewder, more active, more self-helping man; give him but the chances of maintaining the same physical strength and health as the countryman, and he will support the honour of the British arms as gallantly as the Highlander or the Connaughtman, and restore the days when the invincible prentice-boys of London carried terror into the heart of foreign lands.  In all ages, in all times, whether for war or for peace, it will pay.  The true wealth of a nation is the health of her masses.

It may seem to some here that I have dealt too much throughout this lecture with merely material questions; that I ought to have spoken more of intellectual progress; perhaps, as a clergyman, more also of spiritual and moral regeneration.

I can only answer, that if this be a fault on my part, it is a deliberate one.  I have spoken, whether rightly or wrongly, concerning what I know—concerning matters which are to me articles of faith altogether indubitable, irreversible, Divine.

Be it that these are merely questions of physical improvement.  I see no reason in that why they should be left to laymen, or urged only on worldly grounds and self-interest.  I do not find that when urged on those grounds, the advice is listened to.  I believe that it will not be listened to until the consciences of men, as well as their brains, are engaged in these questions; until they are put on moral grounds, shown to have connection with moral laws; and so made questions not merely of interest, but of duty, honour, chivalry.

I cannot but see, moreover, how many phenomena, which are supposed to be spiritual, are simply physical; how many cases which are referred to my profession, are properly the object of the medical man.  I cannot but see, that unless there be healthy bodies, it is impossible in the long run to have a generation of healthy souls; I cannot but see that mankind are as prone now as ever to deny the sacredness and perfection of God’s physical universe, as an excuse for their own ignorance and neglect thereof; to search the highest heaven for causes which lie patent at their feet, and like the heathen of old time, to impute to some capricious anger of the gods calamities which spring from their own greed, haste, and ignorance.

And, therefore, because I am a priest, and glory in the name of a priest, I have tried to fulfil somewhat of that which seems to me the true office of a priest—namely, to proclaim to man the Divine element which exists in all, even the smallest thing, because each thing is a thought of God himself; to make men understand that God is indeed about their path and about their bed, spying out all their ways; that they are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made, and that God’s hand lies for ever on them, in the form of physical laws, sacred, irreversible, universal, reaching from one end of the universe to the other; that whosoever persists in breaking those laws, reaps his sure punishment of weakness and sickness, sadness and self-reproach; that whosoever causes them to be broken by others, reaps his sure punishment in finding that he has transformed his fellow-men into burdens and curses, instead of helpmates and blessings.  To say this, is a priest’s duty; and then to preach the good news that the remedy is patent, easy, close at hand; that many of the worst evils which afflict humanity may be exterminated by simple common sense, and the justice and mercy which does to others as it would be done by; to awaken men to the importance of the visible world, that they may judge from thence the higher importance of that invisible world whereof this is but the garment and the type; and in all times and places, instead of keeping the key of knowledge to pamper one’s own power or pride, to lay that key frankly and trustfully in the hand of every human being who hungers after truth, and to say: Child of God, this key is thine as well as mine.  Enter boldly into thy Father’s house, and behold the wonder, the wisdom, the beauty of its laws and its organisms, from the mightiest planet over thy head, to the tiniest insect beneath thy feet.  Look at it, trustfully, joyfully, earnestly; for it is thy heritage.  Behold its perfect fitness for thy life here; and judge from thence its fitness for thy nobler life hereafter.