As We Are and As We May Be Part 2

There is a billiard-table in all clubs as well as a card-room. Apart from cards and billiards the clubs recognise no form of recreation whatever. There are not in any club that I know, except the Savage, musical instruments: if you were to propose to have a piano, and to sing at it, I suppose the universal astonishment would be too great for words. At the Arts, I believe, some of the members sometimes hang up pictures of their own for exhibition and criticism, but at no other club is there any recognition of Art. There are good libraries at two or three clubs, but many have none. In fact, the clubs which belong to gentlemen are organized as if there was no other occupation possible for civilized people in polite society, except dining, smoking, reading papers, or playing whist and billiards. The working men who have recently established clubs of their own in imitation of the West-End clubs are said to be finding them so dull that, where they cannot turn them into political organizations, they have tolerated the introduction of gambling. When clubs were first established gambling was everywhere the favourite recreation, so that the working men are only beginning where their predecessors began sixty years ago.

Of all the Arts the average man, be he gentleman or mechanic, knows none. He has never learned to play any instrument at all; he cannot use his voice in taking a part, he cannot paint, draw, carve in wood or ivory, use a lathe, or make anything that the wide world wants to use. He cannot write poetry, or drama, or fiction; he is no orator; he plays no games of cards except whist, and no other games at all of any kind. What can he do? He can practise the trade he has learned, by which he makes his money. He knows how to convey property, how to buy and sell stock and shares, how to carry on business in the City. This, if you please, is all he knows. And when you propose that the working man shall, have an opportunity of learning and practising Art in any of its mult.i.tudinous varieties, he laughs derisively, because, which is a very natural and sensible thing to do, he puts himself in that man's place, and he knows that he would not be tempted to undergo the drudgery and the drill of learning one of the Arts, even did that Art appear to him in the form of a nymph more lovely than Helen of Troy.

The second objection belongs to the old order of prejudice. It used to be a.s.sumed that there were two distinct orders of human beings; it was the privilege of the higher order to be maintained by the labour of the lower; for the higher order was reserved all the graces, refinements, and joys of this fleeting life. The lower order were privileged to work for their betters, and to have, in the brief intervals between work and sleep, their own coa.r.s.e enjoyments, which were not the same as those of the upper cla.s.s; they were ordained by Providence to be different, not only in degree, but also in kind. The privileges of the former cla.s.s have received of late years many grievous knocks. They have had to admit into their body, as capable of the higher social pleasures and of polite culture, an enormous accession of people who actually work for their own bread--even people in trade; and it is beginning to be perceived that their amus.e.m.e.nts--also, which seems the last straw, their vices--can actually be enjoyed by the base mechanical sort, insomuch that, if this kind of thing goes on, there must in the end follow an effacement of all cla.s.ses, and the peer will walk arm and arm with the blacksmith. But cla.s.s distinctions die hard, and the working men are not yet all ready for the disciplined recreation which will help to break down the barriers, and we may not look for this millennium within the lifetime of living men. It is enough to note that the old feeling still lingers even among those who, a hundred years ago, when cla.s.s distinctions were in their worst and most odious form, would have been ranked among those incapable of refinement and ignorant of polite manners.

The third objection, that the people should only be helped in the way of education and self-improvement, is, at first sight, worthy of respect. But it involves the theory that it is the duty of the working man when he has done his day's work to devote his evenings to more work of a harder kind. There is a kind of hypocrisy in this feeling.

Why should the working man be fired with that ardour for knowledge which is not expected of ourselves? I look round among my own acquaintances and friends, and I declare that I do not know a single household, except where the head of it is a literary man, and therefore obliged to be always studying and learning, in which the members spend their evenings after the day's work in the acquisition of new branches of learning. One may go farther: even of those who belong to the learned professions, few indeed there are who carry on their studies beyond the point where their knowledge has a marketable value. The doctor learns his craft as thoroughly as he can, and, after he has pa.s.sed, reads no more than is just necessary to keep his eyes open to new lights; the solicitor knows enough law to carry on his business, and reads no more. As for the schoolmaster--who ever heard of a cla.s.sical master reading any more Latin and Greek than he reads with the boys? and who ever heard of a mathematical master keeping up his knowledge of the higher branches, which put him among the wranglers of his year, but are not wanted in the school? Even the lads who have just begun to go into the City, and who know very well that their value would be enormously increased by a practical and real knowledge of French, German, or shorthand, will not take the trouble to acquire it. Yet, with the knowledge of all this, we expect the working man in his hours of leisure, and after a day physically exhausting, to sit down and work at something intellectual. There are, without doubt, some men so strong and so avid of knowledge that they will do this, but these are not many, and they do not long remain working men.

The People's Palace offers recreation to all who wish to fit themselves for its practice and enjoyment. But it is recreation of a kind which demands skill, patience, discipline, drill, and obedience to law. Those who master any one of the Arts, the practice of which const.i.tutes true recreation, have left once and for ever the ranks of disorder: they belong, by virtue of their apt.i.tude and their education--say, by virtue of their Election--to the army of Law and Order. They will not, we may be sure, be recruited from those whom long years of labour and want of cultivation have tendered stiff of finger, slow of ear and of eye, impenetrable of brain. We must get them from the boys and girls. We must be content if the elders learn to take delight in the hand-work which they cannot execute, the decorative work which they can never hope wholly to understand, the music and singing in which they themselves will never take a part.

But they will by no means be left out. They will have the library, the writing and reading rooms, the conversation and smoking rooms, with those games of skill which are loved by all men. There will be entertainments, concerts, and performances for them. And for those who desire to learn there will be cla.s.ses, lectures, and lecturers. At the same time, I do not, I confess, antic.i.p.ate a rush of young working men to share in these joys and privileges. This part of the Palace will grow and develop by degrees, because it is through the boys and girls that the real work and usefulness of the Palace will be effected, and not by means of the men. Of course, there will be from the outset a small proportion capable of rightly using the place. For all these reasons, it seems as if we may be very well contented that the recreation part of the scheme has been for the moment kept in the background.

II. Let us turn to the educational side of the scheme.

When a lad has pa.s.sed the standards--very likely a bright, clever little chap, who had pa.s.sed the sixth and even the seventh standard with credit--it becomes necessary for him immediately to earn the greater part of his own living. It is not in the power of his father, who lives from week to week, or even from day to day, to apprentice his boys and put them to a trade. They must earn their living at once.

What are they to do?

At the very age when these boys have reached the point when the intellect, already partly trained and the hand, not yet trained at all, should begin to work together, they are faced by the terrible fact--how terrible to them they little know--that they can be taught no trade. They must go out into the world with a pair of unskilled hands, and nothing more. Consider. A country lad learns every day something new; he learns continually by daily practice how to use his hands and his strength, by the time he is eighteen he has become a very highly skilled agriculturist; he knows and can do a great many most useful and necessary things. But the town lad, if he learns no trade, learns nothing. He will never have any chance in life; he can never have any chance; he is foredoomed to misery; he will all his life be a servant of the lowest kind; he will never have the least independence; he will, in all probability, be one of those who wait day by day for the chance gifts of Luck. At the best, he can but get into the railway service, or into some house of business where they want porters and carriers.

There is, however, a great demand for boys, who can earn five s.h.i.+llings a week as shop boys, errand boys, and so forth. Our clever lad, therefore, who has done so well at school, becomes a fruiterer's lad, cleans out the shop, carries round the baskets, and is generally useful; he gets a rise in a year or two, to seven s.h.i.+llings and sixpence; presently he is dismissed to make room for a younger boy who will take five s.h.i.+llings. Shall we follow the lad farther? If he gets, as we hope he may, steady employment, we see him next, at the age of fifteen, marching about the streets in the evening with a girl of the same age to whom he makes love, and smoking 'f.a.gs,' or cigarettes.

There are thousands of such pairs to be seen everywhere; in Victoria Park on Sundays, or Hampstead Heath on Sat.u.r.day evenings, every evening in the great thoroughfares--in Oxford Street as much as in Whitechapel, in the music-halls and in the public-houses. You may see them sitting together on doorsteps as well as promenading the pavement. If there is any way of spending the evenings more destructive of every good gift and useful quality of manhood and womanhood than this, I know not what it is. The idleness and uselessness of it, the precocious abuse of tobacco, the premature and forced development of the emotions which should belong to love at a later period, the loss of such intellectual attainments as had already been acquired, the vacuous mind, the contentment to remain in the lower depths--in a word, the waste and wanton ruin of a life involved in such a youth, make the contemplation of this pair the most melancholy sight in the world. The boy's early cleverness is gone, the brightness has left his eyes, he reads no more, he has forgotten all he ever learned, he thinks only now of keeping his berth, if he has one, or of getting another if he has lost his last. But there is worse to follow, for at eighteen he will marry the little slip of a girl, and by the time she is five-and-twenty there will be half a dozen children born in poverty and privation for a similar life of poverty and privation, and the hapless parents will have endured all that there is to be endured from the evils of hunger, cold, starving children, and want of work.

This couple were thrown together because they were left to themselves and uncared for; they marry because they have nothing else to think about; they remain in misery because the husband knows no trade, and because of mere hands unskilled and ignorant there are already more than enough.

The Palace is going to take that boy out of the streets: it is going to remove both from boy and girl the temptation--that of the idle hand--to go away and get married. It will fill that lad's mind with thoughts and make those hands deft and crafty.

In other words, the Palace will open a great technical school for all the trades as well as for all the Arts. It is reckoned that three years' training in the evenings will give a boy a trade. Once master of a trade his future is a.s.sured, because somewhere in the world there is always a want of tradesmen of every kind. There may be too many shoemakers in London while they are wanted in Queensland; cabinet-makers and carpenters may be overcrowded here, but there are all the English-speaking countries in the world to choose from.

There can be no doubt that the schools will be crowded. The success of the schools at the old Polytechnic (where there are 8,000 boys), of the Whittington Club, of the Finsbury Technical Schools, leave no doubt possible that the East-End Palace Schools will be crammed with eager learners. The Palace is in the very heart and centre of East London, with its two millions, mostly working men; trams, trains, and omnibuses make it accessible from every part of this vast city--from Bromley, Bow and Stratford, from Poplar, Stepney and Ratcliff, from Bethnal Green and Spitalfields. Yet but two or three years, and there will be 20,000 boys and more flocking to those gates which shut out the Earthly h.e.l.l of ignorance, dependence, and poverty, and open the doors to the Earthly Paradise of skilled hands and drilled eye, of plenty and the dignity of manhood. Why, if it were only to stop these early marriages--if only for the sake of the poor child-mother and the unborn children doomed, if they see the light, to life-long misery--one would shower upon the Palace all the money that is asked to complete it. Think--with every stone that is laid in its place, with every hour of work that each mason bestows upon its walls, there is another couple rescued, one more lad made into a man, one more girl suffered to grow into a woman before she becomes a mother, one more humble household furnished with the means of a livelihood, one more unborn family rescued from the curse of hopeless poverty.

The remaining portions of the scheme, with its provision for women as well as men, its entertainments, its University extension lectures, reading-rooms, and schools of Art in all its branches, can only be fully realized when the first generation of these boys has pa.s.sed through the technical schools, and they have learned to look upon the Palace as their own, to consider its halls and cloisters the most delightful place in the world. And what the Palace may then become, what a perennial fountain it may prove of all that makes for the purification and elevation of life, one would fain endeavour to depict, but may not, for fear of the charge of extravagance.

III. There is one other point which those who have read the correspondence and comments upon the proposed inst.i.tution in the papers have noted with amus.e.m.e.nt rather than with astonishment. It is a point which comes out in everything that has been written on the scheme, except by the actual founders. It is the profound distrust with which the more wealthy cla.s.ses regard the working men--not the poor, so-called, but the working men. They do not seem even to have begun trusting them: they speak and think of them as if they were children in leading-strings; as if they were certain to accept with grat.i.tude whatever gifts may be bestowed upon them, even when they are safe-guarded and carefully regulated as for mischievous boys; as if the working men were constantly looking for guidance to the cla.s.s which has the money. It is true that the working men are always looking for guidance, just like the rest of us. 'Lord, send a leader!'

It is the cry of all mankind in all ages. But that the working men regard the people who live in villas, and are genteel, as possessing more wisdom than themselves is by no means certain.

This feeling was, of course, most deeply marked when the great Drink Question arose, as it was bound to arise. We have heard how meetings were called, and resolutions pa.s.sed by worthy people against the admission of intoxicating drinks into the Palace. At one of the meetings they had the audacity to pa.s.s a resolution that 'East London will never be satisfied until intoxicating drink of any kind is prohibited in the Palace.' East London! with its thousands of public-houses! Dear me! Then, if East London pa.s.sed such a resolution, its hypocrisy surpa.s.ses the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees.

If, however, a little knot of people choose to call themselves East London, or Babylon, or Rome, and to pa.s.s resolutions in the name of those cities, we can accept their resolutions for what they are worth.

Whether the working man will adopt them and put them into practice is another matter altogether.

Let us remember, and constantly bear in mind, that the Palace is to be _governed by the people for themselves_. Otherwise it would be better for East London that it had never been erected. Whatever we do or resolve is, in fact, subject to the will of the governing body. As for pa.s.sing a resolution on drink for the Palace, we might just as well resolve that drink shall not be sold to the members of the House of Commons, and expect them instantly to close their cellars. If the governing body wish to have drink in the Palace they will have it, whether we like it or not. But it shows the profound distrust of the people that these restrictions should be attempted and these resolutions pa.s.sed. For my own part, considering the needlessness of drink in such a place, the abundant facilities provided outside, and the enormous additional trouble, danger, and expense entailed by letting drink be sold in a place where there will be every evening thousands of young people, I am quite sure that the governing body--that is to say, the chosen representatives of East London--will never admit it within their walls.

We do not trust the working man. We have given over to him the whole of the power. All the power there is we have given to him, because he stands in an enormous majority. We have made him absolute master of this realm of Great Britain and Ireland. What could we do more for a man whom we blindly and implicitly trusted? Yet the working man, for whom we have done so much, we have not yet begun to trust.

SUNDAY MORNING IN THE CITY

On Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when the last of the clerks bangs the great door behind him and steps out of the office on his way home; when the shutters of the warehouses are at last all closed; there falls upon the street a silence and loneliness which lasts from three o'clock on Sat.u.r.day till eight o'clock on Monday--a sleep unbroken for forty-one long hours. In the main arteries, it is true, there is always a little life; the tramp of feet never ceases day or night in Fleet Street or Cheapside. But in all the narrow streets branching north and south, east and west, of the great thoroughfares there is silence--there is sleep. This Sabbath of forty hours' duration is absolutely unparalleled in any other City of the world. There is no other place, there never has been any other place, in which not only work ceases, but where the workers also disappear. In that far-off City of the Rabbis called Sambatyon, where live the descendants of the Ten Tribes, the river which surrounds and protects the City with its broad and mighty flood, too strong for boats to cross, ceases to flow on the Sabbath; but it is not pretended that the people cease to live there.

Of no other City can it be said that it sleeps from Sat.u.r.day night till Monday morning.

An attempt is made to awaken the City every Sunday morning when the bells begin to ring, and there is as great and joyful a ringing from every church tower or steeple as if the bells were calling the faithful, as of old, by the hundred thousand; they go on ringing because it is their duty; they were hung up there for no other purpose; hidden away in the towers, they do not know that the people have all gone away, and that they ring to empty houses and deserted streets. For there is no response. At most one may see a solitary figure dressed in black stuff creeping stealthily along like a ghost on her way from the empty house to the empty church. When the bells leave off silence falls again, there is no one in the street. One's own footsteps echo from the wall; we walk along in a dream; old words and old rhymes crowd into the brain. It is a dead City--a City newly dead--we are gazing upon the dead.

Life and thought have gone away Side by side.

All within is dark as night.

In the windows is no light; And no murmur at the door So frequent on its hinge before.

Silence everywhere. The blinds are down in every window of the tall stack of offices, the doors are all closed, if there are shutters they are up, there are no carte in the streets, no porters carry burdens, there are no wheelbarrows, there is no more work done of any kind or sort. Even the taverns and the eating-shops are shut--no one is thinking of work. To-morrow--Monday--poverty will lift again his cruel arm, and drive the world to work with crack of whip. The needle-woman will appear again with her bundle of work; the porters, the packers, the carmen, the clerks, the merchants themselves will all come back--the vast army of those who earn their daily bread in the City will troop back again. But as for to-day, n.o.body works; we are all at rest; we are at peace; we are taking holiday.

This is the day--this is the time--for those who would study the City and its monuments. It is only on this day, and at this time, that the churches are all open. It is only on this day, and at this time, that a man may wander at his ease and find out how the history of the past is ill.u.s.trated by the names of the streets, by the houses and the sites, and by the few old things which still remain, even by the old things, names and all, which have perished. The area of the City is small; its widest part, from Blackfriars to the Tower, is but a single mile in length, and its greatest depth is no more that half a mile But it is so crowded and crammed full of sites sacred to this or that memory of its long life of two thousand busy years, there is so much to think of in every street, that a pilgrim may spend all his Sunday mornings for years and never get to the end of London City. I should hardly like to say how many Sunday mornings I have myself spent in wandering about the City, Yet I can never go into it without making some new discovery. Only last week, for instance, I discovered in the very midst of the City, in its most crowded part, nothing less than a house--with a private garden. I had thought that the last was destroyed about four years ago when they pulled down a certain n.o.ble old merchant's mansion, No, there is one other stall left; perhaps more. There are gardens, I know, belonging to certain Companies'

Halls; there is the ivy-planted garden of Amen Court; there are burying-grounds laid out as gardens; but this is the only house I know in the City which has a private garden at the back. One must not say where it is, otherwise that garden will be seized and built upon. This the owner evidently fears, for he has surrounded it by a high wall, so that no one shall be able to seize it, no rich man shall covet it, and offer to buy it and build great warehouses upon it, and the underground railway shall not dig it out and swallow it up.

In such journeyings and wanderings one must not go with an empty mind, otherwise there will be neither pleasure nor profit. The traveller, says Emerson, brings away from his travels precisely what he took there. Not his mind but his climate, says Horace, does he change who travels beyond the seas. In other words, if a man who knows nothing of archaeology goes to see a collection of flint implements, or a person ignorant of art goes to see a picture gallery, he comes away as ignorant as he went, because flint implements by themselves, or pictures by themselves, teach nothing. They can teach nothing. So, if a man who knows nothing of history should stand before Guildhall on the quietest Sunday in the whole year he will see nothing but a building, he will hear nothing but the fluttering wings of the pigeons. And if he wanders in the streets he will see nothing but tall and ugly houses, all with their blinds pulled down. Before he goes on a pilgrimage in the City he must first prepare his mind by reading history. This is not difficult to find. If he is in earnest he will get the great 'Survey of London,' by Strype and Stow, published in the year 1720 in two folio volumes. If this is too much for him, there are Peter Cunningham, Timbs, Thornbury, Walford, Hare, Loftie, and a dozen others, all of whom have a good deal to tell him, though there is little to tell, save a tale of destruction, after Strype and Stow.

Thus, before he begins he should learn something of Roman London, Saxon London, Norman London, of London medieval, London under the Tudors, London of the Stuarts, and London of the Georges. He should learn how the munic.i.p.ality arose, gaining one liberty after another, and letting go of none, but all the more jealously guarding each as a sacred inheritance; how the trade of the City grew more and more; how the Companies were formed, one after the other, for the protection of trade interests. Then he should learn how the Sovereign and great n.o.bles have always kept themselves in close connection with the City, even in the proudest times of the Barons, even in the days when the n.o.bles were supposed to have most despised the burgesses and the men of trade. He should learn, besides, how the City itself, its houses, and its streets, grew and covered up the s.p.a.ce within the wall, and spread itself without; he should learn the meaning of the names--why one street is called College Hill and another Jewry and another Minories. Armed with such knowledge as this, every new ramble will bring home to him more and more vividly the history of the past. He will never be solitary, even at noon on Sunday morning even in Suffolk Street or Pudding Lane, because all the streets will be thronged with figures of the dead, silent ghosts haunting the scenes where they lived and loved and died, and felt the fierce joys of venture, of risk, and enterprise.

But let no man ramble aimlessly. It is pleasant, I own, to wander from street to street idly remembering what has happened here; but it is more profitable to map out a walk beforehand, to read up all that can be ascertained about it before sallying forth, and to carry a notebook to set down the things that may be observed or discovered.

Or, which is another method, he may consider the City with regard to certain divisions of subjects. He may make, for instance, a special study of the London churches. The City, small as it is, formerly contained nearly 150 parishes, each with its church, its burying-ground, and its parish charities. Some of these were not rebuilt after the Great Fire, some have been wickedly and wantonly destroyed in these latter days. A few yet survive which were not burned down in that great calamity. These are St. Helen and St.

Ethelburga; St. Katherine Cree, the last expiring effort of Gothic, consecrated by Archbishop Laud; All Hallows, Barking, and St. Giles.

Most of the existing City churches were built by Wren, as you know. I think I have seen them nearly all, and in every one, however externally unpromising, I have found something curious, Interesting, and unexpected--some wealth of wood-carving, some relic of the past s.n.a.t.c.hed from the names, some monument, some a.s.sociation with the medieval city.

Of course, it is well to visit these churches on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon or Monday morning, when they are swept before and after the service; but as one is never quite certain of finding them open, it is, perhaps, best to take them after service on the Sunday. If you show a real interest in the church, you will find the pew-opener or verger pleased to let you see everything, not only the monuments and the carvings in the church, but also the treasures of the vestry, in which are preserved many interesting things--old maps, portraits, old deeds and gifts, old charities--now all clean swept away by the Charity Commission--ancient Bibles and Prayer-books, muniment chests, embroidered palls, old registers with signatures historical--all these things are found in the vestry of the City church.

Then there are the churchyards. We are familiar with the little oblong area open to the street, surrounded by tall warehouses, one tomb left in the middle, and three headstones ranged against the wall, patches of green mould to represent gra.s.s, and a litter of sc.r.a.ps of paper and orange-peel. This is fondly believed to be the churchyard of some old church burned down or rebuilt. There are dozens of these in the City; it is sometimes difficult to find out the name of the church to which they once belonged. Every time a building is erected adjacent to them they become smaller, and when they happened to lie behind the houses they were shut in and forgotten, covered over and built upon when n.o.body was looking, and so their very memory perished.

It is curious to look for them. For instance, there is a certain great burying ground laid down in Strype's map of the year 1720. It is there represented as so large that to cover it up would be a big thing. No single man would dare to appropriate all at once so huge a slice of land. I went, therefore, in search of this particular churchyard, and I found a very curious thing. On one side of the ground stands a great printing office. As the gate was open I walked in. At the back of the printing office is a flagged court or yard. In the court the boys--it was the dinner hour--were leaping and running. Not one of them knows now that he is running and jumping over the bones of his ancestors. It is clean forgotten that here was a great churchyard. Another great burying ground long since built over lay at the back of Botolph's Lane in Thames Street. That is built over and forgotten. There is another where lies the dust of the marvellous boy Chatterton. I am due that of the thousands who every day seek this spot not one can tell or remember that it was once a burying ground. On this spot the paupers of the parish of St. Andrew's, Holborn, were buried--Chatterton, that poor young pauper! with them. And it is now a market, Farringdon Market--close to Farringdon Street--opposite the site of the Old Fleet Prison whence came so many of the bodies which now lie beneath these flags.

Or, a pilgrim may consider the City with special reference to the great Houses which formerly stood within its walls. There were palaces in the City--King Athelstan had one; King Richard II. lived for a time in the City; Richard III. lived here; Henry V. had a house here. Of the great n.o.bles, the Beaumonts, Scropes, Arundells, BiG.o.ds all had houses. The names of Worcester House, Buckingham House, Hereford House, suggest the great Lords who formerly lived here. And the names of Crosby Hall, Basinghall, Gresham House, College Hill, recall the merchants who built themselves palaces and entertained kings.

Again, there are the City Companies and their Halls. Very few visitors ever make the round of the Halls: yet they are most curious, and contain treasures great and various. It is not always easy to see these treasures, but the conscientious pilgrim, who, by the way, must not seek entrance into these Halls on the Sunday morning, will persevere until he has managed to see them all.

As for the sights of the City--the things which Baedeker enumerates, and which foreign and country visitors run to see--the Tower, the Monument, the Guildhall, the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange, the Mint, St. Paul's, and the rest, I say nothing, because the pilgrim does not waste his Sunday morning over things to be seen as well on any other day. But there are some things to be seen every day which are best approached on Sunday, by reason of the peace which prevails and a certain solemnity in the air. I would, for instance, choose to visit the Charter House on a Sunday morning, I would sit with the Pensioners in their quiet chapel, and I would stroll about the peaceful courts of that holy place, venerable not only for its history but for the broken and ruined lives--often ruined only in purse, but rich in honour and in n.o.ble record--of the fifty bedesmen or pensioners who rest there in the evening of their days. And quite apart from its a.s.sociations, I know no more beautiful place in the City or anywhere else than the ancient Charter House.

Again, we may wander in the City and remember the great men who have made certain streets for ever famous. Thus, to stand in Bread Street is to think of Milton. Here he was born, here he was baptized, here for a time he lived. Or we may visit Blackfriars and remember the Elizabethan dramatists. Here Shakespeare had a house--it was among the ruins of old Blackfriars Abbey, part of the foundations of which were found when some years ago they made an extension of the Times'

printing office. Broad Street recalls the memory of Gresham, while that of Whittington lingers along Thames Street and College Hill and clings to St. Michael's Church. In that parish he lived and died. Here he founded the College of the Holy Spirit which still exists in the Highgate Almshouses; on its site the boys of Mercers School now study and play. His tomb was burned in the Great Fire and his ashes scattered, but the very streets preserve his name. Boas Alley, of which there are two, records the fact that Whittington brought a conduit or Boss of fresh water to this spot. It was he who paved Guildhall, he who built a hall for the Grey Friars, now the Blue Coat School, he who rebuilt Newgate; of all the merchants who have adorned the great City not one whose memory is so widely spread and whose example has so long survived his death. When country boys think of the City of London they still think of Whittington.

Perhaps you are afraid that the preparation, the reading, for such a walk about the City would be dull. I have never found it so. I do not think that anyone who has the least love for, or knowledge of, old things would find such reading dull. There are, to be sure, some unhappy creatures who love nothing but what is new, and esteem everything for what it will fetch. These are the people who are always trying to pull down the City churches. They are at this very moment pulling down another, the poor old church of St. Mary Magdalen. The tower is down, the roof is off the windows are all broken, in a week or two the church will be razed to the ground, and in a year or two its very memory will have perished. Why, we vainly ask, do they pull it down? What harm has the old church done? To be sure its congregation numbered less than a dozen, but then we must not estimate an old church by a modern congregation. There has been a church here from time immemorial. It is mentioned in the year 1120. It was, therefore, certainly a Saxon church. Edward the Confessor probably wors.h.i.+pped here--perhaps King Alfred himself. One of its Rectors was John Carpenter, executor of Whittington, and founder of the City of London School; another was Barham, author of the 'Ingoldsby Legends.'

The loss of St. Mary Magdalen is one more link with the past absolutely destroyed, never to be replaced. These destroyers, for instance, are the kind of people who pulled down Sion College. As often as I pa.s.s the spot where that place once stood I mourn and lament its loss more and more. It was the college of the City clergy, they were its guardians, it was their library, it contained their reading hall; formerly it held their garden, and it had their almshouses. There was hardly any place in the City more peaceful or more beautiful than the long narrow room which held their library. It was a very ancient site--formerly the site of Elsing's Hospital, the oldest hospital in the whole City. Everything about it was venerable, and yet the City clergy themselves--its official guardians--sold it for what it would fetch, and stuck up the horrid thing on the embankment which they call Sion College. There they still use the old seal and arms of the college. But there is no more a Sion College--that is gone. You cannot replace it. You might as well tear down King's College Chapel at Cambridge and call Dr. Parker's City Temple by that honoured and ancient name. Well, for such people as the majority of the City clergy who can do such things, there can be no voice or utterance at all from ancient stones, the past can have no lessons, no teachings for them, there can be no message to them from the dead who should still live for them in memory and a.s.sociation. For them the ancient City and its citizens are dumb.

Now that we know what to expect and what to look for, let us take together a Sunday morning ramble in a certain part of the City. We will go on a morning in early summer, when the leaves of those trees which still stand in the old City churchyards are bright with their first tender green, and when the river, as we catch glimpses of it, shows a broad surface of dancing waves across to the stairs and barges of old Southwark. We will take this walk at the quietest hour in the whole week, between eleven and twelve. All the churches are open for service. We will look in noiselessly, but, indeed, we shall find no congregations to disturb, only, literally, two or three gathered together.

I will take you to the very heart of the City. Perhaps you have thought that the heart of the City is that open triangular s.p.a.ce faced by the Royal Exchange, and flanked by the Bank of England and the Mansion House. We have taught ourselves to think this, in ignorance of the City history. But a hundred and fifty years ago there was no Mansion House, three hundred years ago there was no Royal Exchange, and the Bank of England itself is but a mushroom building of the day before yesterday.

In the long life of London--it covers two thousand years--the chief seat of its trade, the chief artery of its circulation, has been Thames Street. Along here for seventeen hundred years were carried on the chief events in the drama which we call the History of London. Its past origin, its growth and expansion, are indicated along this line.

Here the City merchants of old--Whittingtons, Fitzwarrens, Sevenokes, Greshams--thronged to do their business. To these wharves came the vessels laden from Antwerp, Hamburg, Riga, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Venice, Genoa, and far-off Smyrna and the Levant. This line stretches across the whole breadth of the City. It indicates the former extent of the City, what was behind it originally was the ma.s.s of houses built to accommodate those who could no longer find room on the riverside. It is now a narrow, dark, and dirty street; its south side is covered with quays and wharves; narrow lanes lead to ancient river stairs; its north side is lined with warehouses, the streets which run out of it are also dark and narrow lanes with offices on either side. It is no longer one of the great arteries of the City. Those who come here use it not for a thoroughfare but for a place of business. When their business is done they go away; the churches, of which there were once so many, are more deserted here than in any other part of the City Let me give you a little--a very little--of its history.