Therefore, I entreat you to bear in mind (for without this all visiting of the poor will be utterly void and useless), that you must regulate your conduct to them, and in their houses, even to the most minute particulars, by the very same rules which apply to persons of your own class. Never let any woman say of you (thought fatal to all confidence, all influence!): Yes, it is all very kind: but she does not behave to me as she would to one of her own quality. Piety, earnestness, affectionateness, eloquenceall may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a poor woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering her house, even at her own request, while she is at meals. She may decline to sit; she may beg you to come in, all the more reason for refusing utterly to obey her, because it shows that that very inward gulf between you and her still exists in her mind, which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with a lady. Womans heart is alike in all ranks, and the deepest sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last and least. We should not like anyoneno, not an angel from heaven, to come into our houses without knocking at the door, and say: I hear you are very ill offI will lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are very careless of money, I will take your accounts into my own hands; and still less again: Your son is a very bad, profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I intend to take him out of your hands and reform him myself. Neither do the poor like such unceremonious mercy, such untender tenderness, benevolence at horse-play, mistaking kicks for caresses. They do not like it, they will not respond to it, save in parishes which have been demoralised by officious and indiscriminate benevolence, and where the last remaining virtues of the poor, savage self-help and independence, have been exchanged (as I have too often seen them exchanged) for organised begging and hypocrisy.
I would that you would all read, ladies, and consider well the traits of an opposite character which have just come to light (to me, I am ashamed to say, for the first time) in the Biography of Sidney Smith. The love and admiration which that truly brave and loving man won from everyone, rich or poor, with whom he came in contact, seems to me to have arisen from the one fact, that without perhaps having any such conscious intention, he treated rich and poor, his own servants and the noblemen his guests, alike, and alike courteously, considerately, cheerfully, affectionatelyso leaving a blessing and reaping a blessing wheresoever he went.
Approach, then, these poor women as sisters, and you will be able gradually to reverse the hard saying of which I made use just now: Do not apply remedies which they do not understand, to diseases which you do not understand. Learn lovingly and patiently (aye, and reverently, for there is that in every human being which deserves reverence, and must be reverenced if we wish to understand it)learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by that time they will have learnt to understand your remedies, and they will appreciate them. For you have remedies. I do not undervalue your position. No man on earth is less inclined to undervalue the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments, mannerseven physical beauty. All are talents from God, and I give God thanks when I see them possessed by any human being; for I know that they, too, can be used in His service, and brought to bear on the true emancipation of womanher emancipation, not from man (as some foolish persons fancy), but from the devil, the slanderer and divider who divides her from man, and makes her live a life-long tragedy, which goes on in more cottages than in palacesa vie à part, a vie incomprisea life made up half of ill-usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited martyrdom, instead of being (as God intended) half of the human universe, a helpmeet for man, and the one bright spot which makes this world endurable. Towards making her that, and so realising the primeval mission by every cottage hearth, each of you can do something; for each of you have some talent, power, knowledge, attraction between soul and soul, which the cottagers wife has not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must be drawn by them alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ; for they are not given in His name, which is that boundless tenderness, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice, by which even the cup of cold water is a precious offeringas God grant your labour may be!
THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH. 2
Whether the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if it seem probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil? How they can be, if not destroyed, at least arrested? These are questions worthy attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father and mother in these isles. I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay; and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taughtthe rudiments of it at leastin every school, college, and university.
We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived. They may have been able to say of themselvesas they do in a State paper of 1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude: What comyn folk of all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England? They may have been fed on great shins of beef, till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini calls them, the English wild beasts. But they increased in numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of natural selection, which issue in the survival of the fittest, cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.
At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first years of this century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the population. Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married, brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to live more or less civilised lives. An event, doubtless, for which God is to be thanked. A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new noblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that duty should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when our soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms. To murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the will of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.
The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise. And it may do so thus: