Sanitary and Social Lectures, etc Part 7

And here, perhaps some sweet soul may look up reprovingly and say: "He talks of rest. Does he forget, and would he have the working man forget, that all these outward palliatives will never touch the seat of the disease, the unrest of the soul within? Does he forget, and would he have the working man forget, who it was who said-who only has the right to say: "Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? Ah no, sweet soul. I know your words are true. I know that what we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong, self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for it is strong enough to use G.o.d's gifts without abusing them; the character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or food merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from the wild l.u.s.ts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, and, seeking for light and life by means forbidden, found thereby disease and death. Yes, I know that; and know, too, that that rest is found only where you have already found it.

And yet, in such a world as this, governed by a Being who has made suns.h.i.+ne, and flowers, and green gra.s.s, and the song of birds, and happy human smiles, and who would educate by them-if we would let Him-His human children from the cradle to the grave; in such a world as this, will you grudge any particle of that education, even any harmless subst.i.tute for it, to those spirits in prison whose surroundings too often tempt them, from the cradle to the grave, to fancy that the world is composed of bricks and iron, and governed by inspectors and policemen? Preach to those spirits in prison, as you know far better than we parsons how to preach; but let them have besides some glimpses of the splendid fact, that outside their prison-house is a world which G.o.d, not man, has made; wherein grows everywhere that tree of knowledge, which is likewise the tree of life; and that they have a right to some small share of its beauty, and its wonder, and its rest, for their own health of soul and body, and for the health of their children after them.

GREAT CITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE FOR GOOD AND EVIL. {187}

THE pleasure, gentlemen and ladies, of addressing you here is mixed in my mind with very solemn feelings; the honour which you have done me is tempered by humiliating thoughts.

For it was in this very city of Bristol, twenty-seven years ago, that I received my first lesson in what is now called Social Science; and yet, alas! more than ten years elapsed ere I could even spell out that lesson, though it had been written for me (as well as for all England) in letters of flame, from the one end of heaven to the other.

I was a school-boy in Clifton up above. I had been hearing of political disturbances, even of riots, of which I understood nothing, and for which I cared nothing. But on one memorable Sunday afternoon I saw an object which was distinctly not political. Otherwise I should have no right to speak of it here.

It was an afternoon of sullen autumn rain. The fog hung thick over the docks and lowlands. Glaring through that fog I saw a bright ma.s.s of flame-almost like a half-risen sun.

That, I was told, was the gate of the new gaol on fire. That the prisoners in it had been set free; that-But why speak of what too many here recollect but too well? The fog rolled slowly upward. Dark figures, even at that great distance, were flitting to and fro across what seemed the mouth of the pit. The flame increased-multiplied-at one point after another; till by ten o'clock that night I seemed to be looking down upon Dante's Inferno, and to hear the mult.i.tudinous moan and wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro amid that sea of fire.

Right behind Brandon Hill-how can I ever forget it?-rose the great central ma.s.s of fire; till the little mound seemed converted into a volcano, from the peak of which the flame streamed up, not red alone, but, delicately green and blue, pale rose and pearly white, while crimson sparks leapt and fell again in the midst of that rainbow, not of hope, but of despair; and dull explosions down below mingled with the roar of the mob, and the infernal hiss and crackle of the flame.

Higher and higher the fog was scorched and shrivelled upward by the fierce heat below, glowing through and through with red reflected glare, till it arched itself into one vast dome of red-hot iron, fit roof for all the madness down below-and beneath it, miles away, I could see the lonely tower of Dundie s.h.i.+ning red;-the symbol of the old faith, looking down in stately wonder and sorrow upon the fearful birth-throes of a new age. Yes.-Why did I say just now despair? I was wrong. Birth-throes, and not death pangs, those horrors were. Else they would have no place in my discourse; no place, indeed, in my mind. Why talk over the signs of disease, decay, death? Let the dead bury their dead, and let us follow Him who dieth not; by whose command

The old order changeth, giving place to the new, And G.o.d fulfils himself in many ways.

If we will believe this,-if we will look on each convulsion of society, however terrible for the time being, as a token, not of decrepitude, but of youth; not as the expiring convulsions of sinking humanity, but as upward struggles, upward toward fuller light, freer air, a juster, simpler, and more active life;-then we shall be able to look calmly, however sadly, on the most appalling tragedies of humanity-even on these late Indian ones-and take our share, faithful and hopeful, in supplying the new and deeper wants of a new and n.o.bler time.

But to return. It was on the Tuesday or Wednesday after, if I recollect right, that I saw another, and a still more awful sight. Along the north side of Queen Square, in front of ruins which had been three days before n.o.ble buildings, lay a ghastly row, not of corpses, but of corpse-fragments. I have no more wish than you to dilate upon that sight. But there was one charred fragment-with a sc.r.a.p of old red petticoat adhering to it, which I never forgot-which I trust in G.o.d that I never shall forget. It is good for a man to be brought once at least in his life face to face with fact, ultimate fact, however horrible it may be; and have to confess to himself, shuddering, what things are possible upon G.o.d's earth, when man has forgotten that his only welfare lies in living after the likeness of G.o.d.

Not that I learnt the lesson then. When the first excitement of horror and wonder were past, what I had seen made me for years the veriest aristocrat, full of hatred and contempt of these dangerous cla.s.ses, whose existence I had for the first time discovered. It required many years-years, too, of personal intercourse with the poor-to explain to me the true meaning of what I saw here in October twenty-seven years ago, and to learn a part of that lesson which G.o.d taught to others thereby.

And one part at least of that lesson was this: That the social state of a city depends directly on its moral state, and-I fear dissenting voices, but I must say what I believe to be truth-that the moral state of a city depends-how far I know not, but frightfully, to an extent as yet uncalculated, and perhaps incalculable-on the physical state of that city; on the food, water, air, and lodging of its inhabitants.

But that lesson, and others connected with it, was learnt, and learnt well, by hundreds. From the sad catastrophe I date the rise of that interest in Social Science; that desire for some n.o.bler, more methodic, more permanent benevolence than that which stops at mere almsgiving and charity-schools. The dangerous cla.s.ses began to be recognised as an awful fact which must be faced; and faced, not by repression, but by improvement. The "Perils of the Nation" began to occupy the attention not merely of politicians, but of philosophers, physicians, priests; and the admirable book which a.s.sumed that t.i.tle did but re-echo the feeling of thousands of earnest hearts.

Ever since that time, scheme on scheme of improvement has been not only proposed but carried out. A general interest of the upper cla.s.ses in the lower, a general desire to do good, and to learn how good can be done, has been awakened throughout England, such as, I boldly say, never before existed in any country upon earth; and England, her eyes opened to her neglect of these cla.s.ses, without whose strong arms her wealth and genius would be useless, has put herself into a permanent state of confession of sin, repentance, and amendment, which I verily trust will be accepted by Almighty G.o.d; and will, in spite of our present shame and sorrow, {192} in spite of shame and sorrow which may be yet in store for us, save alive both the soul and the body of this ancient people.

Let us then, that we may learn how to bear our part in this great work of Social Reform, consider awhile great cities, their good and evil; and let us start from the facts about your own city of which I have just put you in remembrance. The universal law will be best understood from the particular instance; and best of all, from the instance with which you are most intimately acquainted. And do not, I entreat you, fear that I shall be rude enough to say anything which may give pain to you, my generous hosts; or presumptuous enough to impute blame to anyone for events which happened long ago, and of the exciting causes of which I know little or nothing. Bristol was then merely in the same state in which other cities of England were, and in which every city on the Continent is now; and the local exciting causes of that outbreak, the personal conduct of A or B in it, is just what we ought most carefully to forget, if we wish to look at the real root of the matter. If consumption, latent in the const.i.tution, have broken out in active mischief, the wise physician will trouble his head little with the particular accident which woke up the sleeping disease. The disease was there, and if one thing had not awakened it some other would. And so, if the population of a great city have got into a socially diseased state, it matters little what shock may have caused it to explode. Politics may in one case, fanaticism in another, national hatred in a third, hunger in a fourth-perhaps even, as in Byzantium of old, no more important matter than the jealousy between the blue and the green charioteers in the theatre, may inflame a whole population to madness and civil war. Our business is not with the nature of the igniting spark, but of the powder which is ignited.

I will not, then, to begin, go as far as some who say that "A great city is a great evil." We cannot say that Bristol was in 1830 or is now, a great evil. It represents so much realised wealth; and that, again, so much employment for thousands. It represents so much commerce; so much knowledge of foreign lands; so much distribution of their products; so much science, employed about that distribution.

And it is undeniable, that as yet we have had no means of rapid and cheap distribution of goods, whether imports or manufactures, save by this crowding of human beings into great cities, for the more easy despatch of business. Whether we shall devise other means hereafter is a question of which I shall speak presently. Meanwhile, no man is to be blamed for the existence, hardly even for the evils, of great cities. The process of their growth has been very simple. They have gathered themselves round abbeys and castles, for the sake of protection; round courts, for the sake of law; round ports, for the sake of commerce; round coal mines, for the sake of manufacture. Before the existence of railroads, penny-posts, electric telegraphs, men were compelled to be as close as possible to each other, in order to work together.

When the population was small, and commerce feeble, the cities grew to no very great size, and the bad effects of this crowding were not felt. The cities of England in the Middle Age were too small to keep their inhabitants week after week, month after month, in one deadly vapour-bath of foul gas; and though the mortality among infants was probably excessive, yet we should have seen among the adult survivors few or none of those stunted and etiolated figures so common now in England, as well as on the Continent. The green fields were close outside the walls, where lads and la.s.ses went a-maying, and children gathered flowers, and sober burghers with their wives took the evening walk; there were the b.u.t.ts, too, close outside, where stalwart prentice-lads ran and wrestled, and pitched the bar, and played backsword, and practised with the long-bow; and sometimes, in stormy times, turned out for a few months as ready-trained soldiers, and, like Ulysses of old,

Drank delight of battle with their peers,

and then returned again to the workshop and the loom. The very mayor and alderman went forth, at five o'clock on the summer's morning, with hawk and leaping-pole, after a duck and heron; or hunted the hare in state, probably in the full glory of furred gown and gold chain; and then returned to breakfast, and doubtless transacted their day's business all the better for their morning's gallop on the breezy downs.

But there was another side to this genial and healthy picture. A hint that this was a state of society which had its conditions, its limit; and if those were infringed, woe alike to burgher and to prentice. Every now and then epidemic disease entered the jolly city-and then down went strong and weak, rich and poor, before the invisible and seemingly supernatural arrows of that angel of death whom they had been pampering unwittingly in every bedroom.

They fasted, they prayed; but in vain. They called the pestilence a judgment of G.o.d; and they called it by a true name. But they know not (and who are we to blame them for not knowing?) what it was that G.o.d was judging thereby-foul air, foul water, unclean backyards, stifling attics, houses hanging over the narrow street till light and air were alike shut out-that there lay the sin; and that to amend that was the repentance which G.o.d demanded.

Yet we cannot blame them. They showed that the crowded city life can bring out human n.o.bleness as well as human baseness; that to be crushed into contact with their fellow-men, forced at least the loftier and tender souls to know their fellow-men, and therefore to care for them, to love them, to die for them. Yes-from one temptation the city life is free, to which the country life is sadly exposed-that isolation which, self-contented and self-helping, forgets in its surly independence that man is his brother's keeper. In cities, on the contrary, we find that the stories of these old pestilences, when the first panic terror has past, become, however tragical, still beautiful and heroic; and we read of n.o.ble-hearted men and women palliating ruin which they could not cure, braving dangers which seemed to them miraculous, from which they were utterly defenceless, spending money, time, and, after all, life itself upon sufferers from whom they might without shame have fled.

They are very cheering, the stories of the old city pestilences; and the n.o.bleness which they brought out in the heart of many a townsman who had seemed absorbed in the l.u.s.t of gain-who perhaps had been really absorbed in it-till that fearful hour awakened in him his better self, and taught him, not self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, but self-sacrifice; begetting in him, out of the very depth of darkness, new and divine light. That n.o.bleness, doubt it not, exists as ever in the hearts of citizens. May G.o.d grant us to see the day when it shall awaken to exert itself, not for the palliation, not even for the cure, but for the prevention, yea, the utter extermination, of pestilence.

About the middle of the sixteenth century, as far as I can ascertain, another and even more painful phenomenon appears in our great cities-a dangerous cla.s.s. How it arose is not yet clear. That the Reformation had something to do with the matter, we can hardly doubt. At the dissolution of the monasteries, the more idle, ignorant, and profligate members of the mendicant orders, unable to live any longer on the alms of the public, sunk, probably, into vicious penury. The frightful misgovernment of this country during the minority of Edward the Sixth, especially the conversion of tilled lands into pasture, had probably the effect of driving the surplus agricultural population into the great towns. But the social history of this whole period is as yet obscure, and I have no right to give an opinion on it. Another element, and a more potent one, is to be found in the discharged soldiers who came home from foreign war, and the sailors who returned from our voyages of discovery, and from our raids against the Spaniards, too often crippled by scurvy, or by Tropic fevers, with perhaps a little prize money, which was as hastily spent as it had been hastily gained. The later years of Elizabeth, and the whole of James the First's reign, disclose to us an ugly state of society in the low streets of all our sea-port towns; and Bristol, as one of the great starting-points of West Indian adventure, was probably, during the seventeenth century, as bad as any city in England. According to Ben Jonson, and the playwriters of his time, the beggars become a regular fourth-estate, with their own laws, and even their own language-of which we may remark, that the thieves' Latin of those days is full of German words, indicating that its inventors had been employed in the Continental wars of the time. How that cla.s.s sprung up, we may see, I suppose, pretty plainly, from Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth." Whether Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph, Doll and Mrs. Quickly, existed in the reign of Henry the Fifth, they certainly existed in the reign of Elizabeth. They are probably sketches from life of people whom Shakespeare had seen in Alsatia and the Mint.

To these merely rascal elements, male and female, we must add, I fear, those whom mere penury, from sickness, failure, want of employment drove into dwellings of the lowest order. Such people, though not criminal themselves, are but too likely to become the parents of criminals. I am not blaming them, poor souls; G.o.d forbid! I am merely stating a fact.

When we examine into the ultimate cause of a dangerous cla.s.s; into the one property common to all its members, whether thieves, beggars, profligates, or the merely pauperised-we find it to be this loss of self-respect. As long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on heroically, pure amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when self-respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in dens of physical and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, they must sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye, the very smells, which surround them. It is not merely that the child's mind is contaminated, by seeing and hearing, in overcrowded houses, what he should not hear and see: but the whole physical circ.u.mstances of his life are destructive of self-respect. He has no means for was.h.i.+ng himself properly: but he has enough of the innate sense of beauty and fitness to feel that he ought not to be dirty; he thinks that others despise him for being dirty, and he half despises himself for being so. In all raged schools and reformatories, so they tell me, the first step toward restoring self-respect is to make the poor fellows clean. From that moment they begin to look on themselves as new men-with a new start, new hopes, new duties. For not without the deepest physical as well as moral meaning, was baptism chosen by the old Easterns, and adopted by our Lord Jesus Christ, as the sign of a new life; and outward purity made the token and symbol of that inward purity which is the parent of self-respect, and manliness, and a clear conscience; of the free forehead, and the eye which meets boldly and honestly the eye of its fellow-man.

But would that mere physical dirt were all that the lad has to contend with. There is the desire of enjoyment. Moral and intellectual enjoyment he has none, and can have none: but not to enjoy something is to be dead in life; and to the lowest physical pleasures he will betake himself, and all the more fiercely because his opportunities of enjoyment are so limited. It is a hideous subject; I will pa.s.s it by very shortly; only asking of you, as I have to ask daily of myself-this solemn question: We, who have so many comforts, so many pleasures of body, soul, and spirit, from the lowest appet.i.te to the highest aspiration, that we can gratify each in turn with due and wholesome moderation, innocently and innocuously-who are we that we should judge the poor untaught and overtempted inhabitant of Temple Street and Lewin's Mead, if, having but one or two pleasures possible to him, he s.n.a.t.c.hes greedily, even foully, at the little which he has?

And this brings me to another, and a most fearful evil of great cities, namely, drunkenness. I am one of those who cannot, on scientific grounds, consider drunkenness as a cause of evil, but as an effect. Of course it is a cause-a cause of endless crime and misery; but I am convinced that to cure, you must inquire, not what it causes, but what causes it? And for that we shall not have to seek far.

The main exciting cause of drunkenness is, I believe, firmly, bad air and bad lodging.

A man shall spend his days between a foul alley where he breathes sulphuretted hydrogen, a close workshop where he breathes carbonic acid, and a close and foul bedroom where he breathes both. In neither of the three places, meanwhile, has he his fair share of that mysterious chemical agent without which health is impossible, the want of which betrays itself at once in the dull eye, the sallow cheek-namely, light.

Believe me, it is no mere poetic metaphor which connects in Scripture, Light with Life. It is the expression of a deep law, one which holds as true in the physical as in the spiritual world; a case in which (as perhaps in all cases) the laws of the visible world are the counterparts of those of the invisible world, and Earth is the symbol of Heaven.

Deprive, then, the man of his fair share of fresh air and pure light, and what follows? His blood is not properly oxygenated: his nervous energy is depressed, his digestion impaired, especially if his occupation be sedentary, or requires much stooping, and the cavity of the chest thereby becomes contracted; and for that miserable feeling of languor and craving he knows but one remedy-the pa.s.sing stimulus of alcohol;-a pa.s.sing stimulus; leaving fresh depression behind it, and requiring fresh doses of stimulant, till it becomes a habit, a slavery, a madness. Again, there is an intellectual side to the question. The depressed nervous energy, the impaired digestion, depress the spirits. The man feels low in mind as well as in body. Whence shall he seek exhilaration? Not in that stifling home which has caused the depression itself. He knows none other than the tavern, and the company which the tavern brings; G.o.d help him!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is easy to say, G.o.d help him; but it is not difficult for man to help him also. Drunkenness is a very curable malady. The last fifty years has seen it all but die out among the upper cla.s.ses of this country. And what has caused the improvement?

Certainly, in the first place, the spread of education. Every man has now a hundred means of rational occupation and amus.e.m.e.nt which were closed to his grandfather; and among the deadliest enemies of drunkenness, we may cla.s.s the printing-press, the railroad, and the importation of foreign art and foreign science, which we owe to the late forty years' peace. We can find plenty of amus.e.m.e.nt now, beside the old one of sitting round the table and talking over wine. Why should not the poor man share in our gain? But over and above, there are causes simply physical. Our houses are better ventilated. The stifling old four-post bed has given place to the airy curtainless one; and what is more than all-we wash. That morning cold bath which foreigners consider as Young England's strangest superst.i.tion, has done as much, believe me, to abolish drunkenness, as any other cause whatsoever. With a clean skin in healthy action, and nerves and muscles braced by a sudden shock, men do not crave for artificial stimulants. I have found that, coeteris paribus, a man's sobriety is in direct proportion to his cleanliness. I believe it would be so in all cla.s.ses had they the means.

And they ought to have the means. Whatever other rights a man has, or ought to have, this at least he has, if society demands of him that he should earn his own livelihood, and not be a torment and a burden to his neighbours. He has a right to water, to air, to light. In demanding that, he demands no more than nature has given to the wild beast of the forest. He is better than they. Treat him, then, as well as G.o.d has treated them. If we require of him to be a man, we must at least put him on a level with the brutes.

We have then, first of all, to face the existence of a dangerous cla.s.s of this kind, into which the weaker as well as the worst members of society have a continual tendency to sink. A cla.s.s which, not respecting itself, does not respect others; which has nothing to lose and all to gain by anarchy; in which the lowest pa.s.sions, seldom gratified, are ready to burst out and avenge themselves by frightful methods.

For the reformation of that cla.s.s, thousands of good men are now working; hundreds of benevolent plans are being set on foot. Honour to them all; whether they succeed or fail, each of them does some good; each of them rescues at least a few fellow-men, dear to G.o.d as you and I are, out of the nether pit. Honour to them all, I say; but I should not be honest with you this night, if I did not a.s.sert most solemnly my conviction, that reformatories, ragged schools, even hospitals and asylums, treat only the symptoms, not the actual causes, of the disease; and that the causes are only to be touched by improving the simple physical conditions of the cla.s.s; by abolis.h.i.+ng foul air, foul water, foul lodging, overcrowded dwellings, in which morality is difficult and common decency impossible. You may breed a pig in a sty, ladies and gentlemen, and make a learned pig of him after all; but you cannot breed a man in a sty, and make a learned man of him; or indeed, in the true sense of that great word, a man at all.

And remember, that these physical influences of great cities, physically depressing and morally degrading, influence, though to a less extent, the cla.s.ses above the lowest stratum.

The honest and skilled workman feels their effects. Compelled too often to live where he can, in order to be near his work, he finds himself perpetually in contact with a cla.s.s utterly inferior to himself, and his children exposed to contaminating influences from which he would gladly remove them; but how can he? Next door to him, even in the same house with him, may be enacted scenes of brutality or villainy which I will not speak of here. He may shut his own eyes and ears to them; but he cannot shut his children's. He may vex his righteous soul daily, like Lot of old, with the foul conversation of the wicked; but, like Lot of old, he cannot keep his children from mixing with the inhabitants of the wicked city, learning their works, and at last being involved in their doom.

Oh, ladies and gentlemen, if there be one cla.s.s for whom above all others I will plead, in season and out of season; if there be one social evil which I will din into the ears of my countrymen whenever G.o.d gives me a chance, it is this: The honest and the virtuous workman, and his unnatural contact with the dishonest and the foul. I know well the n.o.bleness which exists in the average of that cla.s.s, in men and in wives-their stern uncomplaining, valorous self-denial; and nothing more stirs my pity than to see them struggling to bring up a family in a moral and physical atmosphere where right education is impossible. We lavish sympathy enough upon the criminal; for G.o.d's sake let us keep a little of it for the honest man. We spend thousands in carrying out the separation of cla.s.ses in prison; for G.o.d's sake let us try to separate them a little before they go to prison. We are afraid of the dangerous cla.s.ses; for G.o.d's sake let us bestir ourselves to stop that reckless confusion and neglect which reign in the alleys and courts of our great towns, and which recruit those very dangerous cla.s.ses from the cla.s.s which ought to be, and is still, in spite of our folly, England's strength and England's glory. Let us no longer stand by idle, and see moral purity, in street after street, pent in the same noisome den with moral corruption, to be involved in one common doom, as the Latin tyrant of old used to bind together the dead corpse and the living victim. But let the man who would deserve well of his city, well of his country, set his heart and brain to the great purpose of giving the workmen dwellings fit for a virtuous and a civilised being, and like the priest of old, stand between the living and the dead, that the plague may be stayed.

Hardly less is the present physical state of our great cities felt by that numerous cla.s.s which is, next to the employer, the most important in a city. I mean the shopmen, clerks, and all the men, princ.i.p.ally young ones, who are employed exclusively in the work of distribution. I have a great respect, I may say affection, for this cla.s.s. In Bristol I know nothing of them; save that, from what I hear, the clerks ought in general to have a better status here than in most cities. I am told that it is the practice here for merchants to take into their houses very young boys, and train them to their business; that this connection between employer and employed is hereditary, and that clerks.h.i.+ps pa.s.s from father to son in the same family. I rejoice to hear it. It is pleasant to find anywhere a relic of the old patriarchal bond, the permanent nexus between master and man, which formed so important and so healthful an element of the ancient mercantile system. One would gladly overlook a little favouritism and nepotism, a little sticking square men into round holes, and of round men into square holes, for the sake of having a cla.s.s of young clerks and employes who felt that their master's business was their business, his honour theirs, his prosperity theirs.

But over and above this, whenever I have come in contact with this clerk and shopman cla.s.s, they have impressed me with considerable respect, not merely as to what they may be hereafter, but what they are now.

They are the cla.s.s from which the ranks of our commercial men, our emigrants, are continually recruited; therefore their right education is a matter of national importance.

The lad who stands behind a Bristol counter may be, five-and-twenty years hence, a large employer-an owner of houses and land in far countries across the seas-a member of some colonial parliament-the founder of a wealthy family. How necessary for the honour of Britain, for the welfare of generations yet unborn, that that young man should have, in body, soul, and spirit, the loftiest, and yet the most practical of educations.

His education, too, such as it is, is one which makes me respect him as one of a cla.s.s. Of course, he is sometimes one of those "gents" whom Punch so ruthlessly holds up to just ridicule. He is sometimes a vulgar fop, sometimes fond of low profligacy-of betting-houses and casinos.

Well-I know no cla.s.s in any age or country among which a fool may not be found here and there. But that the "gent" is the average type of this cla.s.s, I should utterly deny from such experience as I have had. The peculiar note and mark of the average clerk and shopman, is, I think, in these days, intellectual activity, a keen desire for self-improvement and for independence, honourable, because self-acquired. But as he is distinctly a creature of the city; as all city influences bear at once on him more than on any other cla.s.s, so we see in him, I think, more than in any cla.s.s, the best and the worst effects of modern city life. The worst, of course, is low profligacy; but of that I do not speak here. I mean that in the same man the good and evil of a city life meet. And in this way.