.f : T ;; : :; .rf ■ C,\ENC£_ BIRMINGHAM LECTURE SOCIETY. ■Prtsiiicnt: SIR THOMAS MARTINEAU, J.P. ^ire-$rc$ibcnts: Richard Chamberlain, Esq.,M.P. Jesse Collings, Esq., M.P. Sir Walter Foster, M.P. William Harris, Esq , J.P. Alderman W. Kenrick, M.P. Councillor W. J. Lancaster. ^rrasurn-: Thomas Rose, 17 Bennett's Hill. Councillor R. F. Martineau. C. E. Mathews, Esq. W. B. Smith, Esq. Sam. Timmins, Esq., J.P., F.S.A. Rev. W. Tuckwell, M.A. Alderman W. White, J P. dkmtarj): Cecil Crosskey, 117 Gough Road. T HE Society was formed in July, 1881, to provide for the delivery on Sundays of Lectures upon subjects calculated to promote the social, moral, and intellectual well-being of the com¬ munity at large. During the session, the first Sunday in October to the last Sunday in March Lectures are delivered every third Sunday in the Town Hall, and on the other Sundays at four or five centres in the City. The Chair is taken at each Lecture at Seven o’clock. The Lectures are advertised and a notice inserted in the Birmingham Daily Mail each Saturday. The Lectures are free, the expenses of the Society being defrayed by collections and the members’ subscriptions. A small subscription to the Society constitutes membership. Members are admitted to the Town Hall at Door L, open ten minutes before the other doors. All persons wishing to become members, or willing to assist the Committee in making these meetings a success, are requested to communicate with the Hon. Secretary or Treasurer. •CSS”” Christian Socialism AND OTHER LECTURES, Delivered on Sunday Evenings, in the Town Hall , ‘Birmingham, BY > Rev. W. Tuckwell, M.A. (Late Fellow of New College , Oxford , and Rector of Stockton, Ru^ky). Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done, ON EARTH. LONDON: Simpkin, Hamilton, Kent and Co., Limited, Paternoster Row. ‘ c /> \\ BIRMINGHAM: V CONTENTS. PA(- K Christian Socialism ----- 3 The New Utopia 33 1 The Church of the Future - - 61 Natural History for Working Men - 83 ? (T$ o 1565 CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM. SUN DAT, FEBRUARY v 1 th , 18 “If every just man who now pines with want Had hut a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly-pampered luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed. — Milton, CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM. £N*NGLAND is the richest country in the world. Foreigners visiting our shores with introductions to our privileged classes carry home bewildering tales of the opulence they have observed. They tell of men—not one or two, but many—with fixed yearly incomes ranging from £50,000 to £200,000, owning from five to ten great establish¬ ments in town and country. In eveiy shire they see mansions larger and more sumptuous than royal palaces in other lands. They are taken to Tattersall’s, where 10,000 guineas are given for a racehorse; to book auctions, where a Mazarin Bible is purchased for £4,000; to china sales, where 1,000 guineas are paid for a cup and saucer; and they are told that the purchasers of these toys feel the out¬ lay scarcely more than a poor man feels the cost of a postage stamp. They go back declaring that the wealth, luxury, refinement, civilization of this wonderful land are unmatched in ancient or in modern history. But England is also the poorest country in the world. Foreigners who come to us with higher aims than to dine in West End squares, and lounge in West End clubs; who desire to study the source of all this wealth, aud the condi¬ tion not of the few who spend it so much as of the many who create it, stand aghast at the misery they encounter. They find in splendid London, in rich Liverpool and Glasgow, 4 not singly, but by thousands, houses in whose foulness no wild beast would make his lair, and the poison of whose atmosphere would undermine the constitution of a sewer rat. They penetrate courts paved with loathsome sewage, ascend rotten railless staircases, traverse passages alive with vermin and black with exuding filth; enter rooms eight feet square, with little glass in the windows and no fire in the grate, whose furniture is a board laid on bricks and a heap of rotting rags, in which a whole family, sometimes two whole families, ten or twelve in number, spend much of the day and all the night. They talk to the busy workers in these horrible dens, to the woman stitching trousers for seventeen hours a day, work for which she earns one shilling, and the tailor who employs her receives eighteen; to the man making fishing boots at 4s. 6d. a pair, which are sold for three guineas in the shops ; to girls receiving one penny for sewing 100 button holes, five farthings for • » making a shirt; to children pasting match boxes from half-past six in the morning till ten at night, and earning five shillings by a whole week’s work. They learn without surprise that to lives like these thieving and violence and harlotry are habitual accompaniments, drink an almost necessary palliative; that into many London courts no policeman dares venture unaccompanied ; that out of 35 houses in a single street 32 are brothels; that in one small district 100 gin palaces can be counted; that in a recent Church census only 40 out of 4,000 people could be found who ever attended any place of worship. They pass from the large towns to the country, to find, in many a village streets, of miserable hovels, each with its one small bedroom inhabited by families of six to ten in number, its only drinking well foul to taste and smell, its condition outraging every law of morality, decency, health, but secure from legal interference because many of the Guardians who wield the rural sanitary authority are them¬ selves owners of cottage property. They learn that the wages of the tenants are from nine to twelve shillings weekly ; that While twenty-one shillings a week in the country and thirty shillings in the town is known to be the smallest sum on which a wife and family can be main¬ tained, the average wage throughout England is twenty- five shillings in the town, fifteen shillings in the country. They sum up their discoveries in the formula that in rich, prosperous, happy England ten per cent, of the population are paupers; that ten per cent, are rich beyond all precedent and all reason; that twenty per cent, are prosperous and privileged ; that sixty per cent.—the sixty per cent, whose toil supports all the rest—earn average weekly wages five shillings a week below the minimum of decency and comfort. Returning to their own land, and pondering the double marvel which they have seen, our foreigners will not be slow in arriving at certain philosophical and economic con¬ clusions. They will realise that the outrageous wealth of the ten per cent., spoken of superficially as the wealth of England, is really a sign and symptom of deep-seated and deadly national disease : that as in the human body there is a physical malady called hypertrophy, whereby all sustenance taken in goes to support one morbid region, and leaves the rest unnourished, bloodless, pining, so to a like social malady the body politic of a nation is liable, G and the body politic of England is a prey ; that its hyper¬ trophied part, its over-fed bloated region, is the ten per cent, of many mansions and of many thousand pounds a year. And this disease acts doubly; it is direct and indirect. It is direct, because this enormous means of out¬ lay gathered in so few hands is for the most part mis¬ chievously spent; spent perhaps upon the turf, which generates more blackguards, accumulates more immorality, spreads wider mischief, than any institution in the world ; spent perhaps in sport, whose English annals are bloody with midnight conflicts between the preserver and the poacher, and which in two Scottish counties alone has depopulated 200,000 acres, and desolated 1,000 happy homes, in order to create a solitude for deer. And it is indirect, because all investigation proves that luxury and poverty increase in equal ratio; because every sovereign which goes into the pockets of the idle rich man represents a proportional deficiency in the pockets of the defrauded poor man ; because the splendour of the few is born of the squalor of the many ; because John Hodge starves on ten shillings a week in order that my lord may fatten on his hundred thousand a year; because ten inmates fester in one foul attic in order that his grace the duke may keep up his twelve mansions in town and country ; because horrified coroners’ juries in the east end of London sicken over the evidence which compels their verdict of starvation-death, in order that city feasts may pamper the indigestion of dyspeptic aldermen; because the disease corroding the vitals of English life is the Monopoly of Wealth. I have stated the case moderately ; anyone familar with I the subject could expand into a ghastly sermon each utter¬ ance that I have textualised; and sermons on such texts as these, unlike the neutral truisms of ecclesiastical pulpits, inevitably tend to issue in swift and resolute action. The continuance of social inequalities was possible while the conspiracy of the few against the many was unbroken, while the masses were cut off from education and from political power. But board schools and cheap literature have begotten a yearly increasing class of working men who fathom the grievances of their order and perceive the remedy; and the Franchise Act, imperfect and deficient though it be, has committed the future of property, of labour, of society, of legislation, to the hands of the very men who are martyrs to unpropertied proletarianism, labour disproportionate and wasted, social injustice, legal disability; vet who in voting and in law-making power are more than three to one as compared with the privileged classes. It behoves all who have read and thought, who are adepts in economic law, familiar with past history, conversant through personal knowledge at once with the wrongs and with the demands of the gathering labour hosts, to do all that in them lies, by pen and voice, so to shape the righteous discontent of the suffering many, so to foster wise and timely self-sacrifice in the privileged few, that the revolution which is inevitable and imminent, in England first and then in neighbouring lands, may be a peaceful reconstruction of society, rather than a desolating invasion of the Goths. The monopoly of wealth operates in three directions. There is the monopoly of land ; and the Monopole is the Landlord :—of industry; and the Monopole is the Em- 8 ployer :—of money ; aud the Monopole is the Capitalist. Let us begin with Land Monopoly. In earliest English history every freeman was a land- owner ; Englishmen dwelt together by clans or families each in their own village which bore their name ; Learnings in their “ ton ” or town of Leamington ; Huntings in their “ don ” or down of Huntingdon ; Beormings in their “ham’’ or home of Birmingham. The land was tilled by common labour, yielded its produce for the maintenance of all; the heads of households met once in a month around the moot hill or moot tree of the village to arrange disputes, make laws, administer justice ; each little settlement was inde- pendent; each man lived in competence, security, comfort. But war begat the king ; and the king gathered round him an aristocracy ; and out of military service grew the feudal system ; and on this were grafted primogeniture, or inherit¬ ance of the eldest son ; and entail, which fixed the land for ever in a succession of eldest sons ; and the common lands became crown lands, to be bestowed on the favourites of the monarch ; and the clan rights were swept away ; and the free village was transformed into the manor of the lord ; the larger freeholders became tenants, the smaller became “ villeins,” labourers, or slaves. And so free and happy England became enslaved and discontented England ; and when Norman William conquered English Harold the people made no resistance ; for it mattered little to them under what master they were miserable. But in the three centuries which followed the Norman Conquest the position of the working classes was improved. Labour rent was exchanged for money rent; the workmen bought back their 9 old rights from their quarrelsome, necessitous, idle lords; the tenants became once more copyholders or small proprietors; the slave rose into the villein, the villein into the yeoman ; in the towns the craft-guilds or trades unions were giving like independence to the artisans ; and the introduction of a House of Commons elected by the general vote increased to a formidable extent the political power of both urban and rural labourers. The aristocracy took the alarm ; forced down and fixed the price of labour, cancelled the rights which had been granted to the tenants, deprived them of their parliamentary vote, drove them back into the bonds of villeinage and serfage. The famous revolt of Wat Tyler, whose name all labourers should hold in honour, was the protest of the working man against these iniquities; he and his brethren met in arms only to claim freedom for their persons and their lands. Their demands were granted, and they peaceably dispersed ; then the nobles set upon them, murdered fifteen hundred of those who had been most active in their cause, and recalled the grants on the faith of which their insurrection had dissolved itself. Again under Jack Cade, a third time in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the people rose, to be defeated on each occasion, not by open force, but by bad faith, murder, ruthless cruelty. So at last the aristocracy conquered ; a principle was established from w 7 hich the Norman and Plantagenet princes, tyrannical as they were, would have recoiled as monstrous ; it was laid down that the right of the landowner in the land was absolute, with no corresponding duties ; he might cultivate it, let it in leases or on yearly tenancy, suffer it to lie waste, desolate it for purposes of sport, eject its inhabitants at his 10 own caprice, on religious, political, personal grounds. For two centuries the hard lot of the labourer was mitigated by the possession of common lands, on which he could feed his cow or sheep, raise his vegetable patch, cut his firing. On that ewe lamb, too, the rich man cast his eye ; a succes¬ sion of Enclosure Acts abridged and by degrees appropriated it. In the last hundred and seventy years eight million acres have been robbed from the poor man, much of it within living memory, and swept into the landlord’s hands. The big fish in a pond eat up the little fish first; then they slaughter one another ; the survivors every year are larger and more handsome, but they are fewer. That is a type of the backward development of the English acreocracy. In early English history, as we have seen, the whole popula¬ tion were landowners ; in the fourteenth century probably two-thirds were either copyholders or proprietors. How does their number stand to-day ? There are, according to Mulhall’s estimate, 47 million acres of cultivated land in Great Britain, which, excluding holdings of less than five acres in extent, are divided amongst 180,000 persons. The Duke of Sutherland “ owns,” as it is called, 1,358,000 acres; Lord Middleton 1,006,000 acres. The Duke of Norfolk’s rent roll is <£270,000 a year from land; Lord Bute’s £232,000; the Duke of Buccleugh’s £231,000. The wealth of the agricultural land on which a million labourers toil gives 25 per cent, to the half-fed workers who create it, 75 per cent, to the idle peer who pockets it. Lord London¬ derry’s royalties raise the price of our coal; Lord Dudley’s of our iron. A London mansion rents for many times its value, a London shop charges twice the fair cost of its 11 wares, because the soil on which they stand pays ground rent to the Dukes of Westminster, Bedford, Portland. The Liverpool ratepayers were compelled to subsidise Lord Derby with .£200,000, for leave to convert at their own expense the worthless barren waste of Bootle Sands into a line of serviceable docks. And this tremendous and perennial tax on commercial, agricultural, domestic industry, .. is paid to men who number only half one per cent of the community, and who in return for it do absolutely nothing. If a great landowner becomes a Minister of State, does he decline the salary ? If he commands a regiment, does he refuse to draw the pay ? They sit upon our shoulders as the old man in the Arabian Nights sate upon the shoulders of Sindbad; but Sindbad’s old man was childless, while ours is a prolific and affectionate father, with countless younger sons, whom primogeniture and entail cut off from natural inheritance to be quartered on the public purse. And this monopoly is ruinous to the land which it absorbs. Of our 47 million cultivated acres, three-fourths is on the system of tenure which produces the worst possible agriculture—a six months’ notice to quit. Twenty years ago Mr. Disraeli boasted that the land yielded three rents; it paid rent, he said, to the labourer, the farmer, and the landowner. He would have to confess to-day that it has made the labourer a pauper; that the farmer, a victim to inflated rents in the past and low prices in the present, is piteously conscious of impending ruin which he is too uneducated to explain, and too unenterprising to avert; that the landowner himself, profuse and extravagant even / 12 beyond his vast resources, is crippled with encumbrances to the extent of 41 per cent, on the aggregate value of the land. It is well to learn from neighbours; and the contrast between the French and English land systems and their results is marvellously instructive. In France feudalism, with many other social plagues, was crushed out by the Revolution; and the division of the land into small pro¬ prietary holdings which succeeded it was perpetuated by the' Code Napoleon. While to-day in England the owners of estates over one acre are only 320,000, in France they are seven millions. In France, four millions cultivate their own property with their own hands; the number of whom this can be said in England is so small as not to be entered ir the returns. In England, the average extent of a single farm is 390 acres; in France, less than 10 acres; four million owners holding properties of two acres; while farms of 200 acres are so few that they can be counted on the fingers. In France there are eight million acres of common land, the exact amount of which the English peasant has been robbed since 1710. And if we look to the results of the two systems in the producing power of the two countries, we find that while in 1880 France sold to other nations from the surplus of her soil 27 millions worth of food, England bought from other nations, through her own deficient supply, 80 millions worth of food ; that the mort¬ gages on landed property in France, which is far greater in extent than ours, amounted in 1885 to 770 millions, while they reached in England the enormous sum of 1,600 millions sterling. Honeycombed with economic failure an outrage upon Christian feeling, landlordism stands 13 condemned; the worst of all social monopolies, because engrossing the most imperious and vital of all social necessities. We pass, secondly, to Industrial Monopoly, whose Monopole is the Employer. As in the case of the land, so in the case of industry, the page of history shall tell the tale. All wealth is the result of human labour applied to land or the products of land. The earliest savage slew the beasts of the field, snared the fishes of the river, gathered wild fruits, dug up roots for food, scooped holes in the ground or built nests in the trees for habitation, hewed boughs and k\ split logs for firewood ; all these were his wealth. The later savage rudely tilled the ground, built simple huts, tamed and domesticated animals, spun fibre into garments, baked clay into pots; all these, again, were wealth; working first alone, then in families, then in tribes, each man produced for himself, or bore his share in producing for the community, the “ daily bread ” they needed ; to hoard was unnecessary ; distinction between rich and poor impossible. But once more war, the primal curse of all society, introduced the slave ; instead of slaying an overpowered enemy, his captor retained him as a servant, made him work, and confiscated his daily toil, appropriating to himself the “ wealth ” which his slave’s unpaid labour had created. This was the founda¬ tion of “ capital ”; the distinction between rich and poor began ; men became accustomed to the spectacle of a wealthy class side by side with a poor class; to the slave-owner, living on the unpaid toil of other men; to the slaves, creat¬ ing wealth, but owning no property in their own creation. 14 Capital, accumulation, usury, the whole complicated system of modern economics, spring from the day which saw the first captive dig the ground or fell the tree, in order that the result of his day’s work—the “wealth ”—which his day’s work yielded—might pass from him, its producer, to the un¬ labouring owner, who stood by and confiscated it as fast as it was created. As civilisation advanced, the serf replaced the slave. < The slave-owner had grown into the lord, or had become the king. King and lord, with soldiers at their command, had swept into their own hands the raw material, the land and the products of the land, which were once the common field of common labour; the few were capitalists; the many were unpropertied. As the slaves taken in earlier times died out, as the idea of slavery in its naked form was condemned by religious feeling, serf labour took the place of slave labour. The poor man received back a portion of the land which had been robbed from him, on condition that three-fourths of his time should be spent in labour for his lord, the remaining fourth being his own for labour on his own especial plot of land. Thus the lord’s capital continued to increase by unpaid labour, by confiscation of the serf’s pro¬ duction during the three-fourths of the year which he spent upon his lord’s land. But with the political and social revo¬ lution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the serf, too, passed away; his place was taken by the free labourer working for weekly wages ; and he survives, little changed, in the agricultural labourer of to-day. The “free labourer” he is called in history, but he differed and differs from the slave in degree only, not in kind. He is free to change his master, if he can; and his wife and children are his own if he can maintain them on starvation pay ; but he remains a slave in that his labour-force and the wealth begotten by it are not his own; and whereas the slave’s health and bodily condition are of importance to his owner, whose interest it is to keep him fed and clothed, so that his strength may last, and his value as a wealth producer may continue, the "employer’s only concern with the free labourer is to get as much work out of him as possible, since, if he is worn out, goes into the workhouse, or dies, there are plenty more to take his place. It is important that we should understand how this process operates to-day; how, in a free country and in Christian times, the idle few can legally rob and plunder the working many; how the unlabouring employer lives upon the unpropertied labourer. Three factors go to the making of a fortune; labour-force, raw material, and instruments of production. Labour-force is useless without the other two, and the aim and result of aristocratic legislation in the past have been to exclude the free labourer from all possibility of obtaining them. The employer owns the raw material— land, iron, corn, flax, cotton, timber, or coal; his capital has purchased for him the instruments of production—tools, machinery, building, shipping; he requires labour-force, and this he will obviously buy at the lowest price he is compelled to pay for it. The rate of wages in England cannot well be lower than it is at present; were it to become so, the labourer must pice and die. In this low-priced market the employer buys his labour-force; the ra w material, the instru¬ ments of production, the labour-force, are brought together 16 in his hands; together they will produce profit, and the profit they produce is his. In order to yield him profit, they must of course produce a very much higher sum than he has paid for them. He has to pay for his labour-force in weekly wages, to replace the wear and tear of his instruments of production, to purchase the raw products, cotton, iron, and so forth, to which his labour-force is applied. All this must first be paid out of the wealth which his three factors make ; all that they yield besides is “ profit ” ; and this profit is to be extracted out of the difference between the real value of the labourers’ work and the price which the employer pays for it. Suppose for instance, the employer calculates that the wealth produced by his men during five hours of work in one day will exactly replace the wages, wear and tear, and purchase money, represented by the whole of that day’s work; at the expiration of the five hours he is where he was, neither worse nor better. Yes, but in the succeeding five hours which make up the day the men can create the same amount of wealth once more; there will be no outlay on these five hours; the day’s wear and tear and purchase and the labourers’ wage have been all paid for in the first five hours; for the rest of the day the labourer will receive nothing, but will create wealth all the same, and the profit of the employer will arise from the unpaid labour of the afternoon. What this profit is we cannot exactly tell till the labour statistics, ordered by the House of Commons, are completed; but the American statistics, which fairly repre¬ sent our own conditions of work, show that for every three shillings which a workman earns for himself he puts two shillings and nine pence half-penny into his employer s pocket; that for every £1 the employer pays he not only gets back his £1, but receives besides eighteen shillings and seven pence produced by the workman’s toil, eleven- twelfths, that is, of the whole remuneration which the labourers receive. Now let us see how this possibility of making profit upon unpaid labour has arisen to so vast dimensions. The “Industrial Period,” as it is called, began with the invention of the spinning jenny, the guillotine of the pro¬ letariat, in 1764. Before that time the production of manufactured goods was comparatively natural and healthy. The Silas Marner of each village worked his loom in his own house, and wove the yarn which the cottagers’ and farmers’ wives had spun : in the towns small factories set up rude machines, masters and men living together and work¬ ing side by side, making no large fortunes, but meeting the wants of the neighbourhood, producing a durable material at a fair price. With the latter half of the century all this was changed. The new machines of Arkwright, Hargreaves, Crompton, all three working men, who little guessed the miseries which their ingenuity was bequeathing to their class, enabled each operative, ivorking at the same waye as before , to multiply a hundred-fold the wealth which each day’s work produced, and with it the profit of the employer, not of the worker. Vast fortunes rose; mill hands became cotton lords; gains were further increased by the employ¬ ment of female labour and of children from five years old for pitifully low wages, and by the extension of the period of toil to fifteen hours a day. These last horrors were prohibited by Parliament in 1853, after twenty years of 18 fierce resistance from the employer class. But the unfore¬ seen mischiefs of machine development remained. 1. It demoralised society. The spectacle of men rising by leaps and bounds into colossal fortunes excited the cupidity of their neighbours; society became based on wealth instead of on labour ; the drones in the human hive, consuming without producing, living in waste and idleness on the hoards which others store, far from being extirpated as out of place in a healthy corporate body, came to be thought woi’thy of respect and envy, by virtue of their idle useless¬ ness. 2. The common labour of society, which should shape itself for the common good, became a fratricidal strife; a strife of capital against labour, of capital against capital, of labour against labour. Capital wars with labour: the labourer, in proportion as he becomes educated, as he reads and thinks, realises that out of every hour’s work which he produces, one-tenth only is for himself, nine-tenths for his employer; understands that whatever he creates beyond the mere necessaries of life will at once be taken from him by the master, and that he can wring for himself more than a bare subsistence only by constant war. Capital wars with capital : some special article fascinates the market; money flows into the favoured industry ; capitalists compete with each other in its production till the market is glutted or the fashion changes; then the demand ceases, the venture is abandoned, the operatives are unemployed, the smaller capitalists are ruined. Labour wars with labour, as hungry wolves fight over a fallen horse. Competing for work, the artisans force down wages; as lengthened toil or starvation pay prostrates them, eager rivals press to take their place; 19 the righteous strike is foiled by the superior command of capital and perpetual reserve of unemployed on whom the master can fall back; till we come down to the hideous spectacle of the Liverpool and London docks, the daily competition for employment, to which, underpaid and exhausting as it is, only a few can be admitted, while the many are turned awa^to prepare by a day’s starvation for another struggle on the morrow. 3. This contest neces¬ sitates waste of productive force. Goods are not produced because the community require them, but that they may yield a profit to the capitalist; warehouses are choked with unsold clothe-stuffs, while hundreds of thousands are shivering in rags. Through the operations on the market of rival Monopoles, trade is at one time inflated, when goods are sold above their value to the loss of the consumer and to the aggrandisement, not of the producer, but of his owner; at another time slack, when wares are sold at a lower sum than their production cost, indicating labour wasted, because directed in a channel where it was unneeded. Yet further waste is involved in clerks, in travellers, in advertisements ; all machines for forcing goods in a market which exhibits no natural demand for them, and all ultimately defrayed by the consumer ; and the readjustment of produce value to money value by means of elaborate adulteration, on the one hand lowers the standard of retail trade morality, on the other affects the health and pocket of the purchaser ; until commercial enterprise sums up its decalogue in the Horatian maxim—“ Virtus post nummos ,” “Pelf before probity,”— enunciates its philosophic creed—“ There is no God but political economy, and competition is his prophet.” I have spoken of employers as “ unlabouring ” ; that requires qualification; they are unlabouring in reference to the profits of their business; not in reference to the wages of superintendence , which if they earn it, they may fairly claim. Many employers labour assiduously at their factories or workshops; they are the managers; on their superior skill, intelligence, experience, the welfare of the whole enter¬ prise depends. They, like other labourers, are worthy of their hire ; only it must come to them as wages , not as profit : it will not be nine-tenths, nor two-thirds, nor one half, of the entire remuneration earned by the whole army of workers. But in the third monopoly of which we have to speak, the Monopoly of Money, no such qualification is possible : the capitalist pure and simple, the man living on usury, or “interest” as it is now-a-days euphemistically called, absorbs the wealth produced by other men without the smallest con¬ tribution to the common store. The old Mosaic law, the Hebrew prophets and psalmists, forbade usury, that is in¬ terest, as an offence against God and man. Modern Christian legislation holds with Hosea Biglow, that “ They didn’t know everything down in Judee,” and pronounces usury laudable. The proverb declares that you cannot eat your cake and have it; the capitalist knows better; he places his cake at interest in funds or railway shares, and eats it up in annual slices, to find when all has been con¬ sumed, that it remains entire and untouched to be eaten over and over again. When the father of the poet Pope, two hundred years ago, had accumulated twenty thousand pounds in trade, he retired from business, locked his money in a box, and took out coin as he required it. To-day he 21 would invest it at five per cent., and receive for it a thousand pounds a year, without diminishing by one farthing the original sum. This is a very pleasant process for the owner of twenty thousand pounds, but in order to be certain that it is moral in itself and beneficial to the community, we must enquire whence this thousand a year would be derived. . The true nature of interest is obscured by the language used respecting it. People talk of invested capital as of some¬ thing which possesses inherent powers of reproduction ; they seem to think, with Shylock, that gold and silver breed together like ewes and rams : it is an axiom of capitalistic economy that <£1,000 will double itself in fourteen years. A little thought will show that the accruing slices do not spring by spontaneous generation from the capital cake, but are cut from cakes which belong to other people. When a man tells you that he has £30,000 in the Funds, he does not mean that he is the owner of 30,000 sovereigns—if all the fund-holders in Birmingham wished to draw out their property in coin to-morrow, there would probably not be gold enough in all Great Britain to meet the call—he means that he is entitled to draw from the Bank of England £1,000 a year. How does the £1,000 which he draws out get annually into the Bank of England ? It comes from the taxation of the country; and the taxation of the country, if you trace it to its source, is produced entirely by the workers of the country. Money in the Funds means nothing more or less than the right to appropriate without return the results of other people’s labour. The £400,000,000 which is withdrawn each year in the shape of interest, as Mr. Giffen’s figures tell us, from the aggregate earnings of the whole community, is only one more illustration of the uncivil truth, that those who get wealth without producing it get it by defrauding the producers. The Landlord, the Employer, the Capitalist or usurer, like FalstafFs disre¬ putable comrades, are “three sworn brothers.” So far, I have propounded naked facts, as traced from the history of the past, or as underlying the social machinery of the present, to illustrate the system which I have called Monopoly, to explain the miseries, only too widespread and undeniable, which I depicted at the outset—the miseries of the English poor. They lie before us, these unfortunates, as we journey from Jerusalem to Jericho, stripped, wounded, and half dead. Some men cross over to the other side; refuse to see the sufferings they do not mean to heal, pre¬ serve their selfishness from sacrifice, their well-drilled con¬ sciences from reproach. Some draw near and gaze upon them; feel genuine sorrow at the sight; breathe the cheap sigh of unperforming sympathy; muster the conventional excuse, or the well-worn proverb, or the scientific formula, or the perverted “text,” which drape so readily in the guise of necessity, or prudence, or economy, or common sense, or duty; and so, in their turn, pass by. Some “ have com¬ passion ; ” set themselves to realise the wretchedness, to probe the cause, to apply the salve; not only by the silent research which pours oil into the single wound, but by the clamorous appeal which calls for national recognition and demands political reform. I have grouped the soldiers in this noble army under the common name of Christian Socialists; let me pause to explain a word which is to many minds 23 distorted by preconception or obscured by scanty knowledge. Men who challenge social or religious maxims were burnt 300 years ago, excommunicated 200 years ago, exe¬ crated 100 years ago;-—to-day they are called Socialists. Labels are ineffective commonly in proportion as they are compendious. To designate a man a Socialist with tbe idea that he and his sentiments are thereby classified, is like .addressing a letter to London, with no intervening street or square. The word Socialism represents not a party, not even a scheme; it is a criticism merely of existing social arrangements, a protest against the noxious element that poisons them, a cry for the free development of our common social life, unrestricted by such artificial regulations as are contrived to favour a particular class. In this criticism, protest, cry, all men must join who claim remotest kinship with the Good Samaritan. And since some amongst us recognize in the Good Samaritan a personification more than allegorical, a transcript and a portrait of that Working Man of Galilee, who ministered not to the sick body only, but to the soul diseased ; whose keen insight shrivelled the pretence of false professors, whose all-resolving sympathy detected, fostered, won, the germ of goodness lurking in degraded natures; whose condemnation of the rich and fashionable, the Scribe and Pharisee, the Priest and Levite, raised Him to the Cross on which as on an oriflamme all active combatants in their brethren’s cause gaze ever through the weariness of onward fight; we feel that Socialism is a term incomplete and partial, expressing economic dissatisfaction, omitting brotherly love, unless we expand and hallow it by the fuller and more sacred name of Christian Socialism, 24 I am told that Christianity is played out; that, in the coarse words of Tennyson’s vivisecting surgeon, “ the good Lord Jesus has had his day.” Yes—because the Christianity of the Churches is not the Christianity of Christ. It was as the Man, not as the God, that Christ drew all men after Him; love for the man begat worship of the God. Our Churches reverse the current; they postulate a transcenden¬ tal Christ, a miraculous birth, a vicarious death, a perennial atonement, a Nicene Homoousion, as the foundation o i spiritual life ; they arrest us on the threshold of the faith (a threshold which themselves, like Dagon’s priests, have contrived to overleap) with an all-exacting demand upon our moral faculty, our historic conscience, our scientific apprehension :—the central figure of their creed, the Man Christ Jesus, before whom, if rightly postured, Atheist, Secularist, Christian, bow side by side in human reverence, recedes from sight, is dwarfed, eclipsed, obscured. The metaphysics of theology formed in our great poet’s page the recreative debate of fiends; it was to herald the goodwill and love of man to man that the angelic host awoke celestial echoes upon Christmas night. I look forward in the future to a Christian Church which shall erect the Good Samaritan as the symbolic image of its inmost shrine, and shall preach the brotherhood of man as the lesson of His life on earth. If then from love men pass to worship, well; if not, at least they will have learned the nobler half of Christianity instead of forfeiting the whole. And I look to a Christian ministry in the coming time, which shall be stamped with tender resemblance not with grotesque un¬ likeness to the Master ; which, by passionate pleadings or 25 by authoritative threats, shall remind the rich and powerful with whom it now obsequiously consorts, of the command to sell all and give, of the rich fool’s doom, of the camel and the needle’s eye, of the flame-tortured Dives, of the Apostolic community of goods; ranking as ally and leader, not as gainsayer and obstructionist to that crusading fellowship, which would wed material reform with spiritual development, religion with morality, Christianity wdth Socialism. I shall not, to-night at any rate, deal with the con¬ structive side of Christian Socialism. Of course it is not mere sentiment; of course it aims at righteous change, not only by moral enlightenment, but by positive enactment, by the prosaic media of the ballot-box and legislature. It plays its part in all wise efforts to soften or remove the inequality which is the plague-spot of English life, to limit individual rapacity, to vindicate the rights of equal brother¬ hood. Amended machinery of legislation, extended local government, nationalisation of the land, industrial and economic co-operation, revision of poor laws, emigration, improved housing of the poor, reconstitution of ecclesias¬ tical, educational, charitable endowments, readjustment of taxation, and retrenchment of public expenditure—all these reforms and many more it inscribes upon its banner; all ad¬ vocates and champions of these—if their w T ork is loving and impersonal, not partisan and selfish—it enrols amongst' its hierarchy. But in that it is Christian as well as socialistic, its weapons are not only compulsory but persuasive; it preaches the gospel of self sacrifice no less than the gospel of discontent. If the socialist struggles towards the day 26 when land monopoly shall be extinguished by land distri¬ bution ; when, in the presence of productive co-operation, initiated and subsidised, if necessary, by the State, commer¬ cial profit shall die the death; when the wisdom of Mosaic legislation shall be discerned, and the reform of usurious capitalism shall follow on the reform of agricultural and manufacturing impropriation ; the Christian socialist, realising how much of the oppression which he bewails springs from ignorance and carelessness rather than from hardness and brutality, believing that voluntary merciful¬ ness and surrender must follow on increasing knowledge, will rejoice to convert rather than to coerce, will anathema¬ tise and denounce the priest, will convince and win the Levite, I have not attacked—I never do attack—the personal landlord, employer, usurer : from many a living home, from many a monumental graveyard—from the homes of a Godin or a Leclaire—from the tombs of a Peabody, a Shaftesbury, a Morley, a Ryland—mute reproach would rise to silence and to rebuke indiscriminate and sweeping malediction. Nay, I find excuse for the individual capitalists, even where they spend their profits on themselves. They are born into the capitalist class; are taught at home and school to look upon themselves as rightful monopoles, on their “ hands ” as a machine existing for their repletion; they learn from the so-called political economist at college that the conditions of both are resultants of an iron law, against which it is foolish to contend; from the Christian minister in church, that rich and poor are both ordained of God, and that if Christ bid the capitalist who sought His service to sell all ♦ 27 and feed the poor, such mandate was not meant for modern times ; they resign themselves to the law, and piously accept the ordinance, grateful that economy and providence have conspired to rank them in the desirable minority. I do not attack them; but I do desire above all things to educate them; to infuse into them the first principles of social morality; to warn them that the death-grapple between capital and labour is to all thoughtful men the spectre of the swiftly-ripening future; and that it rests with them, in previsional self- defence, if not in humanitarian self-sacrifice, to provide that this great partnership shall be reconstructed on gradual and constitutional, rather than on violent and anarchic lines. I can imagine a capitalist employer awakening, like Zacchseus, to a sense of the iniquities which he had through life unconsciously perpetrated, and dispersing the organisa¬ tion which had ministered to his single benefit into wide¬ spread and beneficent channels. “ I recognise, henceforth,” he would say, “ that my workmen and myself are partners ill a common enterprise, in which claims to superior remuneration should depend only on the wealth-producing capacity of each worker. As the brain-power of the machine, the organiser of the common toil, trained to the purchase of material and to experience of consumers’ wants, I have a right to higher wages than my neighbour, in proportion, but only in proportion, to the higher value of my services. I have no right to live far away in pleasant country air, while my partners breathe by night and day the tainted atmosphere of the town in which we work ; no right to a spacious home with books and pictures, equipages and grounds, while they huddle in crowded cottages and foul slums; no right to command leisure and amusement and intellectual resource, while daily overwork takes from them all heart and appetite for self-improvement and healthy recreation; no right to be secured against old age and sickness, against anxiety for the future of my family, while my workmen’s narrow wage leaves to them no room for saving, no prospect against the inevitable helplessness of three score years and ten, except the workhouse and the pauper’s grave. 4 Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor.’ I will live amongst my men, will make possible to them the bright reward of toil which should convert the beast of burden into the happy man; will use my capital as the fertilizer of labour instead of as its oppressor, dividing equitably amongst our whole community the wealth which our common toil creates.” When the spirit of Christ shall have penetrated society, this ideal will approve itself to everyone, and will be universally worked out. Even now it has found believers and exponents. I need not, to a Birmingham audience, narrate at length the story of M. Godin’s “Social Palace;” of its spacious splendid tenements, within which managers, foremen, artisans, and labourers live their united happy life; of its schools, stores, dining halls, library, gymnasium, theatre, lecture rooms, gardens, common to all its inmates ; of its hospital for the sick, its pensions for the aged, its profits divided annually amongst the workers ; its absolute immunity from drunkenness, immorality, and crime. While other factories are too often associated in men’s minds with pale faces and stunted forms, grinding overwork of body, and hearts revolting against inequality and injustice, the 29 Guise Familistere is a heaven upon earth, and a heaven not of idleness, but of work. If the long-predicted second advent of the Christ is to be fulfilled, not by His visible and external coming, but by the awakening of men’s hearts to comprehend and manifest His spirit of far-reaching altruism and glad self-sacrifice, by the conversion of all social laws and customs into conformity with His teaching and His hfe; the emancipated toilers of the future, hailing that golden dawn of universal brotherhood, will place foremost in the calendar of the saints who heralded, foreran, prepared it, the name of M. GODIN. I claim him as a Christian Socialist. I see in his in¬ dustrial reform the panoply which all society will assume as that Socialism works out its aims. The great French philosopher of the eighteenth century sought relief against the “ sceva indignatio ,” the rage and pity bred in him by the abominations of his age and country, in mocking and sardonic laughter, whose reverberation shattered France, and which still peals terrible from the pages of his bitter volumes. The most mournful, yet most Christian of English poets, living in the same dreary times, took refuge in ideal solitude from the sights and sounds of wrong and suffering which racked his soul—fashioned for him¬ self “ a lodge in some vast wilderness, where rumour of oppression and deceit could never reach him more.” We in our day fly from the present to the future;—to the future which we are labouring to shape :—from the mutual rapines and the ghastly contrasts of our diseased civilisation and our false moral code to the intellectual, industrial, social, religious elevation, which lies in the womb of the not far 30 distant time, and will assuredly come to the birth when society gains strength to bring it forth. Then Christian Socialism will have done its work. Socialism may sheathe its sword -for the luxury of the few and the poverty of the many will have kissed each other, coalescing to form the competence of all :—Christianity need be no longer militant; for the end of her warfare will be accomplished, in that “all men bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” 5 THE NEW UTOPIA OR ENGLAND IN 1985. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY Zth, i88c.* 7 I with him believed That a benignant spirit was abroad, Which might not be withstood ; that poverty Abject as this would in a little time Be found no more ; that we should see the earth Unthwarted in her wish to recompense The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil; All institutes for ever blotted out That legalized exclusion ; empty pomp Abolished, sensual state and cruel power, Whether by edict of the one or few : And finally, as sum and crown of all Should see the People having a strong hand In framing their own laws ; whence better days To all mankind.— Wordsworth. * More than two years before the publication of “ Looking backwards. ’ THE NEW UTOPIA. HREE hundred and seventy years ago the England of * ““"d our forefathers was heaving under an excitement akin to that which agitates us to-day. It was the time known in history as the era of the Renaissance, a revolt of will and aspiration and life and thought against fifteen centuries of imprisonment ; spreading rapidly from Art and Literature to realms social, political, religious ; awakening a temper speculative and enquiring, a new intellectual and moral force, before which old distinctions, as it seemed, would melt away ; the sorrows of the many be redressed, the tyrannies of the few be confounded, the golden age return of brotherhood, security and freedom. Foremost amongst the men whom the early Renaissance bred was the great Chancellor Sir Thomas More, and its daring revolutionary spirit is condensed in his famous Romance of Utopia. Veiled under humorous titles ; for Utopia means the land of Nowhere, its capital city Amavro means the Shadowy, its historian Hythlodaye means the Nonsensical; it handles in a searching spirit, and for the first time in English history, problems of labour and capital, of crime, of government, of conscience, of religion. It opens with a conversation held at the table of Cardinal Morton, where Hythlodaye was present. A gentleman mentioned that twenty thieves had been that morning 34 hanged in London, and marvelled that robbery was not restrained by the severe laws which punished it. “ Nay,” said Hythlodaye, “ your laws do not prevent robbery, they cause it ; they first make the thieves, then hang them. Everywhere in this country of yours I see idle landlords living on the toil of helpless tenants ; the idle few enriched, the hardworking many becoming paupers, and so thieving for their bread.” “In fact,” continued this bold progenitor of Henry George, “the whole social system of England seems to me to be a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, its whole legal system a device for sanctioning that con¬ spiracy. The rich rob the poor, then lower the rate of wages, then make law’s to secure their robbery and to keep down the price of labour. Remedy there is but one ; eject the rich, and the poor will come back, thieves will cease, honest labour thrive. ‘ Propriety,’ that is Private Property, must be abolished and exiled ; till that is done, poverty, wretchedness, crime, are inevitable.” We are not surprised to learn that these utterances caused considerable com¬ motion in the company ; that a lawyer present offered to “refute them every one;” that a clergyman “could not refrain himself from chiding, scolding, railing, reviling; ” that the good-natured Cardinal himself “ turned the communication to another matter.” After dinner Hythlo- daye’s friends reproved him. “You should not talk so,” they said, “ first, because it is wrong; secondly, because it is impracticable.” “ If it be wrong,” said he, “ then Christ was w’rong ; for sure I am that He taught equality of rich and poor, and that His Apostles carried out His teaching. Impracticable it is not ; for in the island of Utopia, w’here r spent six years, all that I have advised was done, crime and pauperism were unknown, comfort and happiness reigned supreme.” With this preface the romance begins. Utopia was an island of about the size of England, and with the same population. It contained fifty-four shires, in each of which was one large city, standing on a fair river, with spacious streets, stately houses, extensive gardens: no unclean process or pursuit was permitted within the city ; ale houses and wine taverns were banished from it. At intervals throughout a shire were large farms, containing not less than forty inmates, in which all the inhabitants of the island learned in turn the art of husbandry, raising from the soil all things necessary for the general consumption. Besides agriculture, everyone was taught some special trade—the women to weave and spin, the men to become smiths, carpenters, or masons. No one was permitted to be idle, no one might work less than six nor more than nine hours in the day. Great importance was attached to mental knowledge, lectures being given daily in Mathematics, Astronomy, Music, Literature, Moral Philosophy, Natural History, which all from time to time attended. The old and sickly were maintained at the cost of the state; the promising younger men were exempted from bodily toil, and formed a learned class, from which were chosen Ambassadors, Priests, Rulers. Two hundred magistrates were chosen by universal suffrage; over whom were set twenty of a higher grade, and over all a Prince; the two hundred were changed every year, the twenty rarely, the Prince never, except through ’ his own misconduct. Their possessions were held absolutely :u; in common; produce was stored in the farms, and in large marketplaces in the four quarters of each town, from which, under the superintendence of the magistrates, every man took what he would without money and without price. Gold and silver they had in plenty from traffic with foreign countries, but held it in entire contempt, hanging chains of gold on the limbs of their bondsmen, and making of the same metal the meanest and most dishonourable of their domestic utensils. No man might marry before twenty-two years old, no woman till eighteen; divorce and profligacy were infamous and were rarely heard of. They tolerated all religions, but agreed to believe in immortality and in a Supreme Being whom they called Mithra, and worshipped with beautiful rites in their public Temple. Their highest morality was the love and service of others; their highest aim was bodily health, long life, beauty, mental enjoyment, knowledge, self-improvement. So they lived quickwitted, serene, prosperous ; and died cheerful, as going from a good to a better world. Such was the ideal, political and social, of an English Lord Chancellor, in the year 1516. Reading the book lately for the fiftieth time, I entertained myself by consider¬ ing with how few modifications it could be made applicable to the present moment. This great man, I thought, writing nearly 400 hundred years ago, put his finger on the very sores from which the body-social of our day is ailing. If some of his remedies are fantastic and impossible, others are identical with those now proposed by thinkers and accepted by men of action; his theories of government were masked by a romance, for they depended on the capricious will of a 37 despotic monarch ; ours are propounded plainly, gravely, practically; for they appeal to the irresistible suffrage of a people whose interest in the experiment is vital. Can it be that our curtain is rising on a New Utopia, in which the unfulfilled prophecies of the old shall find consummation and achievement • that the chimsera of past centuries is to be the truism of the next? that the Power which in the physical world still brings cosmic life and order out of chaotic disseverance and confusion has sent forth its fiat to resolve the strife and protest rising from oppressed humanity to-day into a harmony of universal brotherhood, universal knowledge, universal happiness ? As I pondered these things my thoughts became confused; past, present and future intermingled, and my reverie turned into a dream. I found myself in the country village in which my later years have been passed. It was the same, yet not the same; and I realised with pleasure, but without surprise — for in dreams nothing surprises—that a cherished wish was full lied, and that I was permitted, after a hundred years of absence, to revisit the scenes which I had known in life. The hills still bounded the western horizon in the summer morning sun; the grey church tower still rose from amongst the trees ; but all besides was changed. The mean cottages which formed the village streets had dis¬ appeared ; everywhere I saw garden-like enclosures of varying size, each with its dwelling house in its midst; here and there were ha ndsome public buildings; carriages passed to and fro by some invisible means of locomotion ; the men and women whom I met were picturesquely 38 dressed, although in working clothes, and bore in countenance, manner, speech, the stamp which we associate with education and refinement. As T sauntered wonder- inglv on, a single group attracted my attention and arrested me. 1 n a pretty garden, belonging to a neat farm house, which stood in an enclosure of perhaps twenty acres, a family, con¬ sisting of father and mother, in early middle age, with children ranging from eight to twenty years old, were seated at breakfast under the shade of a spreading tree. Seeing me to be a stranger, the father rose, invited me in, welcomed me to share their meal, and offered to show me his house and land. From the garden, with its trim lawn and spark¬ ling flower beds, we passed into the house, and found our¬ selves in a long room, running the length of the ground door, and divided by a curtain into two compartments. One of these was evidently the dwelling parlour. The walls were artistically painted by the hands of members of the family ; low bookcases, filled with books, lined two sides of the room, their tops covered with vases, statuettes, pictures, ornaments; m a corner was a kind of organ, with violin and flute beside it; on a table were a microscope and sped roscope, prizes, my host told me, won by his boys at college ; a glass door opened into a small conservatory, filled with delicate exotics, whose fragrance perfumed the room. The other compart¬ ment was less highly decorated. A large table showed it to be the dining room; a spinning, weaving, and sewing machine made me think it was also the work-room of the ladies of the family. A door led from it into the kitchen, where was no lire-place to be seen, but a range of cooking pans, standing on a sort of platform. My guide told me 39 that fires were now disused ; that an electrical engine be¬ neath the floor, whose motive power he did not explain, cooked the meals, lighted and warmed the house, conveyed hot-water to kitchen, bed rooms, and conservatory, ground the corn in a small mill outside, baked the bread in the oven. He led me as he spoke from the kitchen into a well- filled larder and a well appointed dairy ; through a kitchen garden, one side of which was lined with beehives, through poultry yard and piggery, to an orchard of fruit trees, be¬ neath which sheep were feeding, to a paddock which held a cow, to a large field of mowing grass with ensilage-pit attached, and so to his arable land, with its patches of maize, flax, potatoes, green crops, and corn. I ventured to ask a question as to the outlay and profit of the little farm. Outlay, he told me, there was none, except on chemical manure, which it paid him to use profusely, and of course the annual rent paid, to the State of <£20, being £1 per acre. As to profit, his land furnished him with more than he required of bread, butter, milk, poultry, eggs; of flax for his household linen, of wool for his household cloth ; domestic indoor work was executed by the ladies of his family ; with his son’s help he tilled the land ; all surplus produce found a ready sale at the village storehouse ; like all Ins neighbours, he had always a year’s income in advance, lying at the village bank ; and, as his eldest boy had just returned from College with a silver medal, he was pleased to think that the holding would continue in his family after he was dead and gone. I craved an explanation of the silver medal, and was informed that in each county was a Government Agricultural College, in which every one must be trained who proposed to gain 40 his living by the land. Those who at the expiration of two years obtained a gold medal were allowed to rent 50 acres, silver medallists 20 acres, bronze medallists 10, those who gained a mere certificate 5 acres, those who failed in this could not hold more than two. Thus, said he, in our own parish there are 1,325 acres We have 2 gold medallists, 4 silver, 30 bronze, 100 certificated farmers of 5 acres, 50 men having only two; the 200 artisans at the cement works have one acre each, which every working man can claim ; and allow¬ ing a few acres for our public institutions, and official persons employed in them, you will see by calculating that I have accounted for the whole of our acreage, and for the 400 families which are supported by it. I struggled against this avalanche of new ideas to inquire what was the smallest holding which could maintain a family. “ Ten acres,” he said, “ was the lowest; the five acre men had some leisure, the two acre men a great deal; these also followed trades, were the smiths, masons, carpenters, and so forth, of the place ; were employed in the public institutions, or helped in the fifty acre or even in the twenty acre lots. Work was sufficient, and wages high; every man in the place was well housed, comfortable, and independent. A hundred years ago,” he went on, “ our village records tell us that these fields maintained about 130 families, with a population of less than 700 souls. Some of the land was uncultivated, all of it suffered from the wasteful system of fallowing; many of the houses were foul; many of the villagers were sunk in ignorance, drunkenness, poverty; all were over¬ worked. To-day the same area supports 400 families, with a population of 2,000 souls; the homes are comfortable and 41 mostly handsome, the people are happy and cultured, every square yard of ground is made to yield to its very utmost, and to yield it for the benefit of those who till it.” “Some of what you say,” I answered, “ I can see to be true, the rest I can believe; now tell me how it came about.'' “ Ah ! ” replied he, “ that is a long story, and my day’s work is waiting me. Let me send you to our parson, who will give you up his morning, and satisfy you better than I can do.” I started at the word Parson, its familiar sound seemed incongruous with this altered world. “You have a parson then 1 ” I said. He looked at me with surprise. “What should we do without him? He is our chief lecturer, he conducts all our concerts, leads all our society, is our librarian and the curator of our museum, is the best cricketer and the best dancer in the parish.'' A si chewed the cud of these astounding statements, “ a change came o’er the spirit of my dream.” The apartment in which we stood changed into a larger room, book-lined from floor to ceiling; instead of my cheery host I saw a tall man with keen eye, intelligent face, and winning mien ; and I felt that I was in the presence of the Parson. I found myself telling him that I was a stranger; that I had seen something of the parish, that I was referred to him for further knowledge ; and praying him to explain to me first of all the nature of his own position ; how church and parson had withstood the tide of change flowing everywhere around. “A century ago,” he said, “the State Church consisted of a single religious body, older indeed and more venerable than most other sects, but representing less than one-half the population, and in its exclusiveness inconsistent 42 absolutely with democratic sentiment. Yet it seemed to thinking men that a State Church, if it could be brought into harmony with popular feeling, was a potential instru¬ ment of teaching and of civilization not to be lightly thrown away ; and that its time-honoured parochial machinery and its countless beautiful churches ought, if possible, to be retained and utilised. It was decreed accordingly that, saving vested interests of present Incumbents, the entire church property should become the property of the State, that all members of existing sects should be eligible to the State Church ministry, no religious test being exacted except a solemn profession of Christianity ; but that all such can¬ didates must pass successfully a severe Government examin¬ ation in Science, Literature, Art, Music, Oratory ; and that none should be appointed to a cuie except by the consent of two-thirds of the entire population of the parish. A good stipend and a high social position made the post a tempting one; men offered themselves from all sects and classes, including the old State Church ; with the result that at the present time these ministers are some of the most accomplished men in England, in every sense leaders of their congregations ; that churches have multiplied and are well tilled; that sects are dying out; that non-religious bodies have been won by the spectacle of a Christianity at once rational and vital; that speculative theology is extinct, and that worship has taken its place.'’ As he spoke he led the way to the church It was twice its former size ; its interior was aglow with beauty, the windows all stained, the walls coloured, the stonework carved; in the midst were a hundred choir seats, tilled, he told me, on Sundays by the picked 43 instruments and voices of the place ; and I could well be¬ lieve him when he added that at their services not a seat in all the church was ever vacant. The churchyard was not less changed. The old clumsy headstones were removed, and paths of velvet turf wound amongst beds filled with roses so magnificent that I, a veteran rosegrower, never remembered to have seen the like. Their luxuriance was soon explained. Burial of the dead, he said, had long been discontinued ; bodies were burned with reverent religious rites ; the small residuum of ashes was placed beneath the soil, and a rose tree planted over it. “ The result,” he went on, “is as poetical as it is sanitary. You remember Keats' beautiful poem, in which a girl nurtures a plant of Basil on her murdered lover’s head— And thus she daily fed it with thin tears, Whence thick and green and beautiful it grew, So that it smelt more balmy than its peers Of Basil-tufts in Florence, for it drew Nurture besides, and life, from human fears, From the fast mouldering head there shut from view. So here I love to think,” continued this delightful man, “that the survivors of our dead, instead of shrinking in horror from the thought of ghastly sepulchral change, can see the relics of their dear ones transformed by the loving alchemy of Nature into the rich foliage and burgeoning petals of the sweetest flower that blows." Reluctantly I left these peaceful precincts—fragrant, picturesque, suggestive—and followed my conductor to the Schoolhouse. It was a noble building, larger than any Board School I had ever seen in Birmingham or in London ; arranged in three blocks, with separate playgrounds for in- 44 fants, girls, and boys. 1 was shown the common music room, and the art school in which boys and girls were not only drawing but designing; the boys’ laboratories and workshops, the girls’ spinning, weaving, sewing rooms, and their model kitchen for the teaching of domestic economy. I was told that there were eight hundred pupils, ranging from three to eighteen years old, and thirty teachers ; that the education was absolutely free, the village schools having supplanted the old public schools and absorbed their endow- 0 ments, and being further largely subsidised by the State, which spent money more freely and ungrudgingly upon this than on any object of national outlay. Our next visit was to the “Christ-house,” as he called it, by which I found he meant the Hospital. It had two wards for men and women; each bed curtained and uncurtained at pleasure, and provided with simple mechanism for raising, supporting, shifting patients; each had its “Nightingale,” or picturesque dressing jacket, its sliding desk or table, its cool water-filter on a stand. The walls were painted with foliage, animals, and flowers; at one end was an aviary, from which tame birds flew about the room, or perched, petted and fearless, on the beds; fern cases and aquariums filled the recesses of the windows; an organ stood in the midst, played daily by a skilful sister; telephones stretched from bed to bed, communicated with the other rooms, and even passed into the church, so that during the Sunday services the full beauty of hymn and anthem might sweep through the wards. A low w indow opened upon a wide and sheltered balcony, into which on soft days bed-ridden sufferers were wheeled, Down stairs was a convalescent ward, a children’s ward, a smoking room, no less delightful in freshness of decoration and of furniture, the whole ruled by a gentleman and a lady doctor, with their well-trained staff of smiling, comely, sympathetic sisters. This, too, was maintained, I was told, in great measure by the State. We proceeded now to the largest building I had seen, standing in some sixteen acres of ground, and called the Village Union In the entrance was a marble statue, whose lineaments somehow seemed familiar to me. It represented a man, aged but erect and tall, with thin hair round a massive brow, deep lines furrowed in the face, an axe in the right hand. I learned that he was a statesman of old time, still held in universal honour through the land as the founder of English Democracy. We passed hence into a Library, with books, newspapers, and reading-desks ; into an Art Gallery, where I would gladly have spent the afternoon ; for by means of drawings, photographs, and models, was exhibited, in a form closely condensed, the history and progress of Modern Art in Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Pottery, Decoration, Metalwork ; while in an adjoining room were priceless Paintings by Great Masters, lent by the State and changed every twelve months. Scarcely less interesting was the Museum, exhibiting on one side a complete collection of the Fauna and Flora of the parish, on the other typical specimens illustrating the classifications of Minerals, Rocks, Fossils, Animals, Plants. A wing of the building held a Theatre, used for Plays, Concerts, Readings, Lectures, Debates; beneath this was a large Ballroom, in which Dances were held once t* week, on other evenings Military Drill, For it seemed 46 that every grown man in the village was carefully drilled twice a week; that once a month the men of several villages met to practise more extended evolutions ; that once a year, in the fortnight following the harvest, an immense gathering took place in every county of all its able-bodied men, for the purpose of rifle practice, reviews, and sham fights. “Thus,’’ said the Parson, “a citizen army of six million soldiers is maintained in constant order without costing a penny to the State; and though in the present condition of the world War seems impossible, the institution is intrinsically popular and is likely always to be kept up.” We had not yet exhausted the Village Union. We visited a Gymnasium and Bath Room, and passed into the Recre¬ ation Ground without, of which two acres were laid out as a Botanical Garden, a large piece was set apart for Games, and the remainder was fashioned as a Pleasance with turf, water, trees, and flowers. On one of the grassplots a familiar object caught my eye—a massive Boulder of red granite, carefully protected, and inscribed with a historic legend. “That,” said my friend, “is a curious relic of the Great Ice Age. Recent discoveries have revealed much glacial knowledge, and have shown guesses hazarded on the subject by our forefathers to have been absurd; but it is curious that this boulder was discovered and preserved by a Parson of this parish more than a century ago. Many stories are told about him ; he was clearly born before his time, and was supposed by his neighbours to be mad.” Not far from the Village Union was the Storehouse, into which converged the entire traffic of the village, each department separate, but under a single roof. In one were 47 sold meat and poultry ; in a second, bread and confectionery j in a third, cheese, butter, eggs, milk; in a fourth, groceries j in the next was a printing press, with books for sale; in others were clothes, farm implements, household furniture. Everything that a man of simple habits could wisli to buy was here collected, and I learned that the whole was the common property of the village, every householder possess¬ ing in it an equal share, enjoying equally its economic advantages, and tincling in it a ready sale for all his surplus stock. As we left its door, I asked the Parson if any Public houses still lingered in the village. He did not appear to comprehend me, and T explained them to be rooms of public resort, in which amid uncomfortable surround¬ ings men assembled to drink bad beer and adulterated spirits, with the occasional result to the consumers of excitement, incoherence, and unsteadiness. He said con¬ temptuously “ that such observances were suited probably to a savage time, but that he had never heard of them. If men cared for beer and spirits they drank them with their meals at home ; but unalcoholic drinks were now so varied and so delicious that very little of any other was consumed. 1 I expressed a wish to see the Cement Works, of which T retained a lively recollection, and we ascended the hill which led to them, passing on our way the State House, consisting of the Bank, Post Office, and Railway Station, with the municipal rooms of the Village Council and the Land Court. We approached the works through a ring of workmen’s houses, standing each in its acre of ground. T observed upon the beauty, size, and fancifulness of their architecture, and was told that the business was successful, 48 and that the men spent most of their profits upon their homes. The factory itself covered a larger space of ground than in former days ; the tall chimneys and the smoke by which it was then conspicuous in ugliness had vanished, electricity being now available to raise and crush the stone, to burn and grind the cement, to propel the trucks and boats which carried it away. It was the property of 200 workmen. Fifty years ago, on his land reverting to the community, the descendant of the former owners had sold his plant and machinery to the State, and had gone away. The State sold it to the workmen, on terms which extended payment over a period of 40 years. For a time this social¬ istic arrangement led to quarrels amongst the men, but they had long outgrown that. A governing committee was elected annually, endowed with large powers and implicitly obeyed ; the workmen were the corporate owners, dividing all the profits, paying rent to the State for the land em¬ ployed, each being besides the individual owner of his own acre on the same terms. The hours of work here, as in every factory, were limited to eight hours a day, and overtime was forbidden. In fact, as we talked, the early afternoon bell rang, and the men came trooping past, no longer, as I remembered them, tired, downcast, sullen, with, in many cases, a long walk before they could reach their homes; but fresh, cheerful, unwearied, hastening to their pretty dwell¬ ings close at hand, with abundant energy to spare for garden work, or public amusement, or mental improvement, or domestic pleasure, during the long remaining afternoon and evening. So we sauntered back, inspecting various enclosures, visiting various houses, finding everywhere 49 beautiful homes, educated and prosperous inmates, every foot of land in perfect and continual cultivation. Seated once more in the Parson’s Library, I put the question into words which had been fermenting in my mind all day. “ How did all this come about ? You tell me that there are in England some twenty thousand villages, such as I have seen to-day ; that in all of them Institutions not less extensive have been erected, and are in part maintained, by the State ; that, on the other hand, taxation, customs, and excise have been abolished. Where, then, does the money come from ; what is the income of the State, and whence is it derived ?” “The income of the State,” he answered, “is at the present moment about one hundred millions ; its increase, and the consequent development of State-aided village life, have been very gradual; and to understand it we must go a long way back. In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, as history tells us, land rental had fallen nearly 70 per cent. ; including former waste lands, 25 million acres were out of cultivation ; farmers were ruined, towns overcrowded, workmen were unemployed and starv¬ ing ; in the towns ripe for violence, in the country clamour¬ ing for land which lay idle, but which they were not allowed to touch. Various remedies were tried, primogeniture and entail were abolished, transfer of land was made easy, .allotment extension Acts were passed, attempts were made, attended by abundant litigation, to recover the common lands which had been enclosed unjustly ; but these hardly scratched the surface of the evil, until a measure was introduced at last which went directly to its root. It was laid down by Parliament that land was the property of the 50 community; that private ownership without occupation was detrimental to public interests; it was decreed that existing landowners should hold their land unmolested during their lifetime, and that their heirs should do the same; but that it should then revert to the State, and their successors in the third generation must pay rent for it or give it up.” “I can understand,” I said, “that this measure went to the root of the evil, but was it an equitable one ? Did it appear to good men at the time, does it appear to you, morally defensible and just?” “The ethical aspect of the question,” he answered, “ was at the time carefully discussed, not only by those having a personal interest in the change, but, as you say, by good men, men highminded and disin¬ terested. And T for one heartily agree with the conclusion • at which they arrived. They thought that a community cannot rob itself; that its contracts with individuals are sacred, but by no means perpetual; that the treatment now extended to private owners had been applied with universal applause to the Universities thirty years before, to the City Companies more recently : that further, most of the land now prospectively resumed had been amassed unrighteously in the past; that much of it was uncultivated, that all of it had become unsaleable ; that finally, the safety of the State is at all times supreme, and a continuance of existing arrangements must involve national ruin. And it must be owned that the effect of the new law was immediate. First the waste lands were sold to the State at nominal prices, and, broken up into small holdings, were let to humble men without rent for the next three years, on condition that cottages were built upon them, the State advancing money for this purpose 51 on easy terms of repayment, with the result that villages sprang up and the towns began to feel relief. Then the great landowners, the men with live or six country houses and estates to match, parted with some of their superfluous acres for small sums down, or for brief terminable annuities ; and these again were broken up, and let at a quit rent to a higher class of cultivators. Soon all sales ceased, for lives began to fall in. As the rental of these increasing reversions filled the public coffers, taxation was first lightened, then abolished ; men flocked from town to country; agricultural colleges were established ; the style of cultivation every¬ where improved, and the character of the tenants with it; large and solitary mansions were converted into public institutions; the desolate parks around them became populous and happy villages ; and now the whole of England is divided into small holdings, nowhere of more than fifty acres in extent, untaxed, enormously productive, yielding- one hundred millions yearly to the State, every shilling of which comes back to the people ; easily transferred, easily managed by the local land courts ; protected rigidly from sub-letting, sub-division, mortgaging. The same principle was applied to other kinds of property. Fundholders were tenderly dealt with ; their holdings were left unmolested through two succeeding generations, secured to their heirs, and their heirs’ heirs, then reverting to the State; and thus, without the slightest injury to individuals—for though we sometimes meet with men who are proud of their great-grandfathers, none has been ever known to take a personal and vital interest in the fortunes of his great-grandson—the national debt has been extinguished, with an annual saving of thirty millions to the community. Railway shares and shares in banks were handled in a similar fashion; railway traffic, revolutionised by electricity, is now conducted at a fourth • of its former cost; and the old banks have been replaced by village national banks, giving low interest and receiving limited deposits, but holding money safely ; and, since men no longer either hoard or speculate, setting free an army of stockbrokers, capitalists, lawyers, clerks, for productive labour.” “ What effect,” I asked, “ has this revolution exercised upon the towns?” “In one woid,” he said, “it has made them suburban.” They felt it in three different ways— their population diminished, their retail trade was killed by co-operation, and their manufactures passed into the hands of working men. These eagerly took advantage of the law which enables every artisan to rent from the state one acre of ground. Acres could be had only in the suburbs, and to the suburbs they went; churches, schools, places of amuse¬ ment, co-operative stores, followed them ; urban land fell in value ; first the foul rookeries, then the poorer houses were pulled down, their sites becoming agricultural ; and an English town is now a ring of villages enclosing a nucleus of factories, penetrated, entwined, and refreshed by green spaces of public recreation or private garden ground. ** I think you said,” I queried, “ that in these factories eight hours a day was made the legal maximum of work. Such a law must surely have injured English trade, in competition with foreign workmen, and as regards the aggregate productiveness of the nation ? ” “ The problem of competition,” he said, “ was very shortly settled, No sooner was our law passed than foreign workmen throughout Europe, between whom and our own a close understanding prevailed, struck for and obtained a similar limit of working time. Nor will it seem to you that our aggregate pro¬ ductiveness was diminished, when you remember the immense number of productive workers liberated by the simpler habits of our day, not only in the cases which I just now mentioned, but by the disappearance of the idle classes, the extinction of sport and racing—both relics surely of primaeval savagery—by the great limitation of domestic servants, the abandonment of all trades minister¬ ing to luxury and ostentation. In fact, so far are we from thinking our working population insufficient for producing wealth, that we labour to keep it stationary by state-aided emigration on the .largest scale. Our colonies, which long ago adopted our laws with respect to land and capital, eagerly welcome from our shores the admirable class of men whom we now send to them as settlers. Their increase has been enormous. The population of New Zealand a hundred years ago was 400,000, it is now four millions. That of Australia has risen from four to twelve millions ; others have increased in like proportion. They form with us a vast confederation ; all traffic is mutually free ; while a visible link between us is maintained in the persons of their sovereigns, who are always members of the English Royal Family. And in speaking of the colonies I place Ireland first. Her population has quadrupled in the past half century by the return from America of the descendants of expatriated natives : her bogs are all drained, her hill tops tilled, her towns rival ours in manufacturing energy ; with 54 t her own institutions, her own Parliament, and by her own desire an English prince upon her throne, she is in affection as in distance the nearest to us of our imperial sisters. India lastly is an inexhaustible customer. She too has for emperor an English prince; but she maintains a native army, is officered by native civilians ; her mischievous rajahs and zemindars are no more ; her 250 millions, rising yearly in education and knowledge, cultivate her splendid soil for their own benefit and not for that of others ; a new religion, combining the pure philosophy of Buddha with personal faith in Christ, is extinguishing or harmonising the old beliefs, banishing as it spreads the demons of idol-worship, sacerdo¬ talism, and caste.” “ I gather then,” I said, “ that you have still a Royal Family?” “Yes,” he answered, “we have preserved our Monarchy, partly for political convenience, partly from historic sentiment. Many of its members, as we have seen, fill colonial thrones; they are carefully educated for their station, and are amongst the most accomplished persons in the community. They marry English men and English women, and in the third generation become ordinary citizens; but the main line of descent is carefully pre¬ served, and the reigning sovereign discharges all the essential duties of a President, maintained with a splendour manly and respectable, not absurd and childish, at a cost of less than £20,000 a year. “I have,” said I, “ only one more question to ask, but that is a most important one. Has not this uniform prosperity been purchased by a corresponding loss of intellectual life? Those beautiful English parks, with foliage and greensward. 55 lakes and avenues; those ancient country houses, with their libraries and pictures; that leisurely upper class, with its conversation, its learning, its refinement;—has not the extinction of all these lowered the standard of culture ? If the material gain be great, is not the aesthetic loss irreparable 1 ” “No,” answered he eagerly, “ our culture is not lowered, it has but shifted its centre of gravity ! Some four million homes which were squalid and resourceless, are now in¬ tellectually and artistically beautiful. The private galleries and libraries which were seen perhaps by a hundred artists or scholars in a year, and whose owners were often not educated to understand them, circulate now in twenty thousand centres, to be copied, examined, studied, read, by countless, ever-changing students. ./Esthetic loss irrepar¬ able ? ” he continued, “if aesthetics be the aptitude for dis¬ cerning beauty, will any true aesthetic say that the beauty of a thousand homesteads, with their blossoming orchards and waving corn, is less than the sullen, solitary, splendour of a dispeopled deer forest, a desolate grouse moor, an exclusive park ? The poet may see a ‘ smiling land ’ in either, but the humanist reads in one the genial smile of contented serenity, in the other the freezing smile of aristocratic selfishness. And we have a learned class ! Our teachers and our authors are not less numerous than their forefathers, and stand upon a higher level ; we have bred in the last half century more scientists, poets, historians, artists, orators, thinkers, than in the century and a half before, and each year swells the list.” I listened in delighted silence to the torrent of words I 56 had evoked, as my eloquent friend went on to catalogue the $ treasures which were the heritage of his happy time. I learned that electricity had superseded the diminishing coalfields, and become the sole vehicle of light, heat, motion, force ; that in geology the crystalline rocks had been shown to be metamorpliic products, early man had been pushed back into the Eocene age, missing links had been discovered to complete the chain of evolution between the Salpa and the mammal ; that in meteorology the patient comparison of two centuries of collected observations had enabled the expert to foretell storm and rain and sunshine uner¬ ringly for a month to come ; that the ease and cheapness with which diamonds could be produced had doubled the power of the microscope ; that the chemist was trembling on the verge of the discovery of the protoplasmic secret, and might succeed at any moment in projecting a living cell upon the laboratory table ; that medical science, whilst its increased reverence for life had rescued it from the stigma of purchasing pathological knowledge at the cost of vivi- sectional cruelty, yet had succeeded in extending the average duration of human life, in limiting infant mortality to less than one per cent., and in exterminating, by its familiarity with disease germs, the hideous family of zymotic maladies. His talk passed from England into foreign lands. He was relating the universal establishment of Democracy on the Continent; the division of Europe into three great confederations, the Teutonic, the Latin, and the Slav ; the dissolution of Turkey ; the independence and prosperity of Egypt; the voluntary surrender of Gibraltar, its fort¬ resses dismantled, its blood-stained rock blown into the sea with dynamite ; and was expatiating with patriotic fervour on the primacy amongst all nations of England and her colonies, in extent, in power, in wealth, in solidarity, in happiness, — when the mental and bodily labours of the day began to tell upon my nerves; his voice sounded musically in my ears, but conveyed no meaning to my mind. I fell into a deep sleep, from which presently waking with a start I found myself sitting in my own room at home, and the volume of Utopia which I had been reading fallen with a crash upon the ground. The greeting of Joseph’s brethren, “Behold this dreamer cometh,” is a comment on my lecture which I am prepared to hear, and to which I can contentedly submit. For remember, first, that Dreamland is not merely a refuge from the sorrows of a waking world ; it is the nebulous haze out of which new worlds are formed; all social economies, all legislative experiments, are born in the thinker’s brain before they can be moulded under the plastic force of circumstances. Remember, once again that, belief in the world’s perfectibility is the logical outcome of belief in the Creator’s perfectness, and has been held by men in every age to whom the philosophic and the religious mind alike accord homage as the noblest of their race. It took shape in the Holy mountain of Isaiah and the Millennium of John, no less than in the Republic of Plato, the New r Atlantis of Bacon, the Utopia of Sir Thomas More ; nay, it was heralded by a greater than any or all of these; for what is it but that Kingdom of God on earth whose estab¬ lishment was the prime motive and final cause of the teach* 58 ing and the life of Christ ? Methinks in such a company I need not be ashamed to dream ; to dream of a coming day which shall reverse the triumph of wrong and break the cycle of sorrow ; a day of wider knowledge and of firmer faith ; a day of equal not of selfish aims ; a day of univer¬ sal brotherhood not of class distinction. “For behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth, “ and the former heaven and earth are passed away. The “voice of weeping shall be no more heard in it nor the “voice of crying. They shall build houses and inhabit “ them ; they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit “ thereof. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they “ shall not plant, and another eat ; but they shall obtain “ joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1 th , 1886 . Hail to the State of.England ! and conjoin With this a salutation as devout Made to the spiritual fabric of her Church ; Founded in truth; by blood of martyrdom Cemented ; by the hands of wisdom reared, In beauty of holiness, with ordered pomp Decent and unreproved. The voice that greets The majesty of both shall pray for both ; That, mutually protected and sustained, They may endure long as the sea surrounds This favoured land, or sunshine warms her soil. W ordsworth. \ CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. I SPOKE a parable in this hall a year ago, portraying in terms of wholly uninspired prophecy the jDOSsible future of England. I predicted the access of material prosperity to classes amongst which it had been hitherto a stranger, by means of the redistribution of the land. With the gaiety of an irresponsible enthusiast I substituted the State for the capitalist, co-cperative for private enterprise ; swept away with one hand the deer forest and the private park, with the other hand the slum, the workhouse, and the gaol ; parcelled out England into a vast allotment ground, set with picturesque homes, yielding boundless produce, sustaining a free, an equal, a contented population. My prophecy was received with rapture, but with incredulity; as a dream, not as a programme; as the confession of an opium-eater, not the forecast of a statesman. Yet the ehimsera of one age becomes the truism of the next; and at the present moment the ages are moving with accelerated velocity. A year has passed : the condensed political education of the autumn has so far taught the labouring class to use its newly-acquired power, that Peasant Tenancy is accepted as the agricultural condition of the future; from motives of philanthropy or on principles of salvage, land-owning squires and glebe-owning parsons are offering the coveted holdings as a boon, your admirable Allotment Association is demanding them as a right ; nor will any ridicule be cast to-day on the prediction that before many years, perhaps before many months are past, compulsory purchase and a land-court will have bound the labourer to the soil, the cottage will be added to the enlarged allotment, the congested population of the towns will How back to the ransomed acres, the historic cow will have calved and its progency tilled the land, the working man will have ex¬ changed the poverty, slavery, and overwork of centuries for the social independence and financial competency which his productive toil will have deserved and his political sagacity will have won. But my dream soared above the region of physical and domestic comfort into the higher atmosphere of moral and spiritual elevation. T threw around my New Utopia the halo of a worship universal and harmonious, of a faith rational and fervent, of a ministry admired, beloved, and followed; for I endowed it with a National Church. With this problem, too, we are to-day brought face to face. A question which not long ago was languid and remote has suddenly become imminent and pressing ; arresting states¬ men, backed by popular interest, refusing to be any longer shelved. Yet if the public will is alive to the urgency of the question, the public mind is unprepared for it; uninstructed as to the complications it involves, not mastering its deep import to the national welfare. Happily its solution is not immediately necessary; there'will be time to examine and discuss, time for the application of principles and of know¬ ledge, so that the final decision may be submitted to the 63 verdict of democratic wisdom, not flung to the scramble of democratic passion. And looking at it myself—not as a Churchman, not as a Nonconformist', not as a Liberationism but simply as a religious and patriotic citizen,—I would lay before you to-night the facts and considerations which have made my own mind clear, and may possibly fiy-nish you with materials for leisurely and dispassionate study, against the time when the call for irrevocable action shall resound. And I would win your consideration to the matter by an argument which may, perhaps, be new to you. In law and in fact the existing Church is yours. The franchise of the Church is wider even than the franchise of the State. On the Parliamentary roll women are voteless ; all rate-payers men and women are constituents of the Establishment. They may not accept its teaching nor attend its worship ; that is an accident of their own pleasure or of its present imperfect constitution, not in any legal sense a disqualification In the Vestry, or Church Parliament, we have the lineal descendant of the ancient folk-mote of primitive English democracy. I have explained to the Working-men in my own village that of this Vestry they are all members ; that it is their privilege and duty to understand the Parish income, to control the Parish expenditure ; to elect their own Churchwardens, Guardians, and other Parish officials. The idea has spread, from our own to adjacent villages; and I suspect that in the coming spring there will be a rattling of dry bones, and a reclothing of ancient skeletons with flesh ; that the Easter Vestry in many a Warwickshire Village will be no longer confined to the Squire, the Parson, and a few leading farmers, but will 64 be thronged by Labourers having a thirst for information which will insist on being slaked, and a consciousness of power which refuses to be set aside. And I dwell on this to-night as a preliminary to the discussion on which we are entering; because the temper in which we approach the consideration of our own property is different from the temper which we bring to the consideration of what belongs to others ; and I entreat you to remember that this Estab¬ lished Church, whatever it may be and however it may need reform, is not a foreign citadel to be stormed, nor a neigh¬ bour’s estate to be appropriated, but altogether and absolutely your own, not to be lightly abandoned and thrown away if it can be maintained and utilised and improved. By a N ational Church, I understand that side or depart¬ ment of the State which is concerned with the social, moral, religious training of the community. Its duties are to facilitate external public worship ; to provide ministers, who shall be intellectual leaders of national culture, and high- minded exemplars of national conduct; above all to organise missionary effort amongst that great majority whose pressing daily needs leave no taste for religious refinements and no interest in religious respectability, but whose attention vibrates readily to messages from the higher life when weighted with intelligence and sympathy. The essence of a National Church is therefore nationality ; it must suit all religious needs and respect all religious peculiarities; its standard of life and conduct cannot be too high, for on these all good men agree ; its code of belief and doctrine cannot be too wide, for on these most good men differ ; but it must 65 be national or nothing. It was in recognition of these facts that the English Church was established, and may, T would hope, still be reconstructed. Its foundation is younger by many years than the introduction of Christianity into England, and was due to a most remarkable man, Theodore of Tarsus. With rare sagacity he forebore to erect a Church which should be an independent and separate institution; but linked his Church on to the State, adopting and transforming actual political organisations. The lord's demesne became the parish, the lord’s chaplain the parish priest; the petty kingdom was the bishopric, the king’s chaplain was the bishop. For four hundred years the two worked in harmony; no sharp line divided Church from State; one melted into the other ; the Church was essentially national. This came to an end at the Conquest; the State became an appanage of Normandy, the Church a vassal of Rome; it gained in secular authority, became a great power in the State, co¬ ordinate with the Barons "and the Crown; but it lost its hold upon the People. The two great movements of religious revival which swept over the land found it cold or hostile ; from the preaching of the Friars in the thirteenth century it stood sullenly aloof ; the Lollard Reformers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it per¬ secuted relentlessly to the death. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries it grew in worldliness, wickedness, isolation; but the New Learning took from it its intellectual prestige; the dissolution of the Monasteries robbed it of its wealth; and it fell with a great fall never again to be politically supreme. Politically useful it remained ; the c 66 later Tuclors and the first two Stuarts used it as a tool of monarchic power. For one brief moment, under Cromwell, it regained its old nationality, while English benefices were filled indifferently by Anglicans, Presbyterians, Inde¬ pendents, if only a Government Board of “ Triers ” was satisfied of their piety and learning; but on black Bartholomew’s day two thousand ministers were ejected by the restored king, and the Church became a Sect. A Sect it has continued ever since; sleepy in one century, active in the next; but stationary amid universal progress, restricted amid universal emancipation ; till the late political crisis placarded the fact that in temper and feeling it was at issue absolutely with those for the sake of whom it existed, and forced into prominence the alternative of nationalising it by reform and reconstruction, or of abandoning as im¬ practicable the idea of a State-controlled ecclesiastical system. Tried then by the test of nationality, the Anglican Church has failed; embracing theoretically the entire people, its actual adherents number barely one-half of the population. Nor need we be surprised at this when we consider the constraining disabilities of its Ministers. Remember, first, the limitation of their theological beliefs. The young aspirant to the Anglican Priesthood, at a time of life when his intellect is still fermenting, and his judgment immature, is compelled to accept and to avouch, not with the blind obedience of a Roman Catholic, but with a Protestant’s claim to private judgment, an Arminian Liturgy, Calvinistic Articles, and a transcendental Creed. His theological instructors have taught him to brand all 67 intelligences less prehensile than his own not with scientific inaccuracy but with moral peccancy. His clerical associates survey other Protestant Churches, under the generic name of “Dissent,'’ with active dislike or with disparaging toleration. Even if his own force of character and personal good sense should impel him to repudiate this narrowness, he is pro¬ hibited by law from showing his goodwill towards his brethren of other denominations in any overt form ; if any clergyman of the Established Church were honoured by an invitation from Birmingham to address the Severn Street Schools or to occupy George Dawson’s pulpit on Sunday next, his consent would expose him to penal treatment from his Bishop. Remember, secondly, the intellectual incompe¬ tence of the Clergy. Other professions, by natural selection or by competitive examination, choose the best officials they can obtain : the Bishops accept almost all who come. The abler University Students pass into secular life ; the dregs “ take Orders,” as it is called. Their special preparation is infantine ; a few obsolete text books are thought sufficient to qualify for Ministerial initiation. Their literary pro¬ ficiency is in most cases ludicrously imperfect; towards science they comport themselves with the hostility of absolute ignorance ; they are incapable of superintending the musical services of their congregations ; their sermons are exasperating or common-place. Modern discovery, men are told, has changed the aspect of biblical criticism ; Geology is said to arraign the Mosaic records of the Creation and the Deluge, and to assert the immense antiquity of man ; Ethnology impugns the genealogy of the sons of Noah ; Philology finds the story of Babel inconsistent with dis- 4 « 68 covered facts ; Comparative Mythology claims as Sun-myths the hero Samson and the prophet Jonah ; Historical Criticism reports errors in the Jewish annals, and sees in Hebrew prophecy strains poetically narrative, not super- naturally predictive. Dimly or distinctly the Laity become acquainted with these inroads on old-fashioned faith ; they would know how Theology meets them; to what extent the borderland of Revelation is to be circumscribed; what they must abandon and what they may still believe. To whatsoever guides they may betake themselves, they refrain from questioning the clergy, as divining them to be wholly unacquainted with the subject, or professionally pledged to an exploded and irrational view. I made this statement lately in a large company, when it was challenged by a clergyman present, a distinguished dignitary of large mind and ample learning. I begged him to put it to the test, to make use of his extensive and intimate acquaintance amongst his brethren; to probe their views, for instance, on the Mosaic Cosmogony. The company took up the matter, and agreed to meet again after an interval to hear the dignitary’s report. He came at the appointed time, dejected but amused, to inform us that after a wide course of questioning he had found nine-tenths of his neighbours un¬ aware of any valid objections to the literal acceptance of a Six-days’-Creation Remember, lastly, that the relation of the clergy to their flocks is not ministerial but autocratic. Without reference to their predilections, without adjustment of his own convictions to their previously ascertained ex¬ perience, the Anglican Incumbent comes as the nominee of an irresponsible patron to be the omnipotent pastor of an 69 utterly helpless flock. Who has not seen a congregation broken up by the advent of a new clergyman determined to carry out a system of worship and of doctrine wholly alien to that which under his predecessor they have enjoyed and loved ? Who has not pitied the frogs, into whose quiet pool, where a clerical King Log has reigned fraternally for years, Jupiter sends down a clerical King Stork, of portentous spiritual activity and unappeasable spiritual hunger. It was my lot some years ago to worship now and then in a church of the former sort. The building was doubtless ugly, but it was crowded from porch to altar; the hymns were possibly conventicular, but they were sung with bacchanalian fervour; the black-gowned Boanerges in the pulpit emitted minacious, nay, appalling doctrine, reminding one of that Mr. Perkins the Divine, commemorated by old Fuller, who used in preaching “to pronounce the w’ord Damn! with an emphasis that left a doleful echo in his auditors’ ears for a good while after.” But his flock knew this to be only pro¬ fessional veneer, and that in the home and by the sick bed he was the tender charitable Christian, breathing love and hope. The institution was not splendid, but it met their needs; the clergyman was not an Apostle, but they loved and trusted him; above all the entire domain was theirs; they could say of it as Touchstone says of his bride, “a poor thing, sir, but mine own.” I went last year to the same church. Dear old Boanerges had passed away, and in his stead was an “ advanced ” gentleman with a retinue of semi-clerical acolytes. With all its elegant imbecilities Ritualism reigned triumphant; an etagere crammed with nosegays had taken the place of the Creed 70 and Ten Commandments against the eastern wall ; clouds of incense discomposed the spiders in the roof; holy sandwich men, with “ banners to right of them, banners to left of them,” marched in procession round the church. But where was the congregation ? Where the crowds who in times past were wont to leave their trouble and their worldliness at the door each Sabbath-day, and to find within their simple synagogue a House of God and Gate of Heaven ? They had marvelled, had groaned, had remonstrated, been slighted, gone elsewhere: the sacred associations of years had been broken up, the united fellow¬ ship of devotion severed, by the legalised abuse which treats cure of souls as an article of commercial value, and sacrifices the spiritual welfare of a Christian community to the patronage rights of an indifferent stranger. I learnt these facts from a shrewd, sardonic old gentleman, with whom I walked home from the half-empty Church. He had frequented it of old, and continued, he said, from force of habit to attend it, though the changes that he witnessed set his soul on edge. None of these appeared so much to outrage him as the substitution for the old, hearty hymnody, of what he called “ Gregorians,” which he described as a bald and jejune style of music, dating from the time before harmony was discovered, and abhorrent to an educated taste. He had gone so far as to head a deputation of parishioners respectfully lo protest against this particular innovation as needlessly alienating the worshippers and sinning against musical science. The Rector had answered severely that the “ tones ” to whicli they objected were of an unearthly beauty and of a more than mediaeval r 71 chastity : that they commemorated worship even earlier than the Christian era, and were in fact the strains to which King David had set the Psalms. The old gentleman accepted the defence, not as festhetically or historically sound, but as explaining a passage in the Bible which had hitherto perplexed him : he had never, he said, understood before, but henceforth he should never cease to understand, why it was that when David played the harp before King Saul, Saul threw a javelin at him. My friend had his joke, but that did not alter the crime, nor undo the mischief. To me, pondering all these things, the wonder is, not that Nonconformity should have grasped a moiety of Christian England; not that the Working Class, keensighted, intolerant of shams, accepting no religious teaching which is not intellectually stimulating and transparently sincere, should have fallen away into contemptuous indifference or active Secularism; but that English reverence for the past, albeit supported by occasional bright examples of the model Christian Pastorate, should have continued to maintain and subsidise so degenerate a solecism. Here, nevertheless, it is to-day, corrupt in its narrowness, its incompetence, its tyranny, yet still theoretically national, still retaining in its fabrics, its endowments, its machinery, momentous survivals of its past ideal. Can these relics be utilised, these corruptions superseded, this ideal reconstituted in a living concrete form ? That is the problem which we have to solve. A cry for Church Reform is heard from within the Church. But on this point History is explicit; no corrupt Corporation ever reformed itself. The manifesto of the Bishop of Worcester, the more comprehensive letter of S. G. O., the addresses of certain clergymen to the Arch¬ bishop, the proposals of Bishop Magee, are laudable so far as they go; but they express the feeling of a minority, itself incapable of perceiving the acuteness of the situation. If the sale of advowsons were to cease, if the discipline of the clergy were to be tightened, if the incomes of the Bishops were reduced, and themselves recalled to their diocesan duties from the expiring House of Loids, if Convocation were made representative, and a preponderating influence in its councils given to the laity, the Church would be relieved from certain scandals which constitute its opprobrium to-day ; but its fundamental weakness would be uncorrected, the vital objections to its continuance unremoved, in that, being the Church of a minority, or at best of a bare majority, it claims an exclusive social prerogative and exclusive pecuniary en¬ dowments inconsistent with the first principles of Democracy. Disestablishment is an obvious panacea. That would cut the knot, not solve the difficulty ; would resemble the trenchant economy of Mr. Samuel Weller’s friend, who cut off his child’s head in order to cure him of squint¬ ing. I cannot think that the adherents of this pessimist alternative realise the complications which it involves not or the consequences to which it would lead. I can¬ not think they understand its complications. Irish Disen- do wment, which Liberationists are fond of quoting, is no precedent at all. The Irish Establishment never even pre¬ tended to be national ; it pillaged a subject nation to decorate a handful of dominant settlers with a lordly, lazy hierarchy ; it was a crime and a blunder from its cynical 73 foundation under Queen Elizabeth to its righteous dissolu¬ tion under Queen Victoria. The English Church has, what the Irish had not, vast private benefactions, immense private patronage, College and Chapter Livings bound up with the University and Cathedral systems, costly buildings national not sectarian in their interest and value, poor parishes unprovided with sacred furniture except through the Establishment, primary schools forming a part of Church endowments; presenting, if attacked, conditions of bewil¬ dering complexity, arraying in its defence, the strongest and richest interests in the land, precipitating reforms for which the time is notyet ripe, re' arding reforms acknowledged to be vitally and immediately necessary, Nor can I believe that they realise its consequences; the specialisation namely of a formidable Anglican sect, into which all the sacerdotal fanaticism of the clergy, kept in check at present by the State, will gravitate and condense itself; High Church persecuting Broad Church, and launching its non pos$umus against the reforming Laity, Protestant Christianity paralysed in -its strongest arm; the spiritual realm over which the old Church ruled portioned out between Agnos¬ ticism and Popery. And to gain this end we shall have forfeited the idea of national unity, abandoned national fabrics, sacrificed parochial machinery — time-honoured, penetrating, and limitlessly expansive. There remains a third alternative, Reconstruction. Disarticulate the present State Church, and organise it afresh under totally new conditions. Reassert its nation- • X . ality; proclaim the inherent right of every citizen, no matter in what subsidiary denomination he may range him- 74 self, to partnership in its constitution and share in its endowments. Reform its Ministry in three directions. Let it be comprehensive ; not bound by sectarian tests, but welcoming within its ranks, as Dr. Arnold pleaded fifty years ago, all who profess and call themselves Christians. Let it be educated : in literature, art, science, music, oratory; tested, as civil servants of the State are tested, by an examining Board of Triers, such as was rehearsed by Cromwell. Let it be popular; each parochial minister elected and controlled by the entire popu¬ lation of a parish, speaking through such local Councils as, . conferred ere long on the whole United Kingdom, will go far to turn the corner of every administrative difficulty. Grasp the idea, if it be new to you, before you discard it as fantastic ; realise all that it will preserve ; anticipate all that it may become; a great State Department of social, moral, religious education; officered by the most accom¬ plished of our citizens ; embracing all sects in a brotherhood of lofty aspiration and enthusiastic utterance; “holding no form of creed but contemplating all ” ; a revival of ancient unity on the lines of modern progress; a democratic Church wedded to a democratic State. I tell you that the instinct and longing of the masses are antedating such a revolution. In country and in town alike the vast Working Class, impervious for the most part to the propagandism of Church ♦ or of Nonconformity, yield eager welcome to the few who come amongst them,—gifted, earnest, eloquent, but un-official,— to tell them of the Kingdom of God. Close your eyes upon this gas-lit hall, and open them on a Midland village whose name you have sometimes heard. It is a summer Sunday 75 evening ; we find ourselves in the large yard of some cement works, bounded on three sides by frowsy walls and chim¬ neys, on the fourth by a canal in which many barges are laid up. The yard is filled with seats, extemporised by planks laid on bricks, and converging towards a small vacant square which contains a harmonium and a pulpit-desk; we are evidently about to assist at a rural open-air service. The yard is rapidly filling. Women come with their children and their husbands, lovers with their sweethearts ; a large party of grave men enters, led by a clerical superior, the minister and flock, your neighbour tells you, of a dissenting congregation in a neighbouring village, who shut up their chapel that they may attend these services; outside are boatmen and their wives, the former in rough blue suits and brilliant neckerchiefs, the latter in many-coloured shawls. Still fresh comers stream in; there must be a thousand persons present. Last comes the parson, with his wife, and «with a little dog, his invariable companion, who curls himself up beside the pulpit, and behaves “like a Christian ” through the service. He (the parson) is the Rector of the parish in which these works are an outlying spur; finding that the waterside population would not come to church, he has brought the church to them ; the boon is greatly appreciated ; and the boatmen, we are told, will work day and night in order to get their barges up to the spot in time for Sunday. He puts on a gown and enters the pulpit; the choir take their places; the boatmen light their pipes; and the service begins with a Moody and Sankey hymn, briskly led by the Choir, taken up by the people, and rolling off in a flood of sound that 76 can be heard a mile away. A few prayers follow ; more Moody and Sankey ; a short well-chanted Psalm, a few verses of the Bible, more hymns; the people reverent and hearty. Last conies the sermon, fluent and well thought out, spoken, of course, not read, above all things lively; sometimes raising a broad grin from all except the boatmen, who find the unwonted effort to take in continued utterance too absorbing to admit of merriment; sometimes emitting a passionate appeal which draws a deep hum of sympathy from the corner where the Dissenters sit; often running off into a well-told story, with just enough of Midland dialect and accent to send it home. Once or twice the preacher pauses, and looks to see if they have had enough, but the eager faces reassure him, and on he goes again, till his carefully prepared peroration is delivered amid breathless silence ; one last hymn is sung, the crowd dissolves, the little dog rouses himself to jump upon his master ; and the boatmen, knocking out their pipes, come forward to u^j^r a grunt of genuine but incoherent thanks, and to go on their next day’s voyage not without some novel thoughts, some stirrings of a better nature, some glimpses of a life in which beer and skittles hold only a second place. As we remain alone in the empty yard, the last rays of the setting sun touching the tops of the tall chimneys, the evening star shining in the pale green sky, the swifts screaming their evening service over our heads, we meditate the lesson we have learnt. One-fourth of this congregation may have been church-goers, another fourth chapel-goers, one-half attending neither church nor chapel; yet here have all been brought together on a common Christian platform, by no magic of personal 77 attraction, for the parson is not more learned, pious, eloquent, than many of his clerical neighbours; he has merely the insight and the courage to step down from the stilts of Eccle¬ siastical conventionality, to evoke and apply the force, latent, overlaid, yet not extinguished, of an appeal from the National Church to the National Christian sentiment. You know quite well that what is possible in the country is possible also in the town ; those of you here to-night who are strangers ordinarily to all public worship know that if a man were to come amongst you on a Sunday night, a man with a tongue and heart and brain, a man whom you knew to be entertaining, fervent, rational, sympathetic, you would flock to hear him, even though he were a parson; and if, as his talk unfolded, he were to tell you of that Working Man of Galilee, eighteen hundred years ago, who turned his back upon the rich and went amongst the poor ; sought out the publicans and sinners, the roughs in the back streets of Capernaum and Jerusalem, the poor outcast women, flaunting in fictitious gaiety, and allaying with crime and excitement the hell which burnt within them ; won them by his sympathy and tenderness, flashed love into their brutality and hope into their despair by stripping the vile husk that sin had crusted round their souls and revealing in their inmost natures a relic of the nobleness and purity which is the image of God who made them ;—you know that the tears would spring into your hearts if not into your eyes, and you would go away with something of that desire for better things which is the beginning of Christian regeneration. I want an army of such men; I want a church which shall equip them; a Church truly Catholic in fact as for 78 centuries it has been falsely Catholic in name; startling the so-called upper class out of selfish profligate luxury to the level of a purer, higher life; winning the oppressed and suffering class by active sympathy, social and human, no less than religious and divine; binding all classes together under the headship of one sacred name by a threefold cord of boundless altruism, spiritual unity, common heavenward aspiration. Does the charm of the idea arrest you 1 Then test by means of it the reforming policies which come before you, and retain from amongst them that which would rebuild, not that which would demolish ! I appeal on behalf of such a policy to all earnest Churchmen who set their Church above their Establishment, their Christ above their Church ; to all Evangelical Nonconformists whose resentment at present injustice it would disarm, yet concentrate their longing for extended righteousness; to that increasing host of thoughtful Secularists who reverence Christ’s character, person, teaching, yet turn disappointed and disillusioned from the fragmentary images of these reflected by the shattered mirror of sectarianism; to those democratic states¬ men who, desiring passionately the redemption of the masses, see in a national State Church, comprehensive, educated, popular, an engine potent for secular no less than spiritual transformation, a divine corollary to the gospel of Christian Socialism. After centuries of selfishness and misrule it may be that a golden year is dawning; it is for us to welcome it and ring it in. Weary and long has been the old, bad year, whose knell even now I seem to hear tolling from the majestic towers of our ideal Church, fading into the past 79 with its loaded memories of ignorance, poverty, exclusion, servitude. Bright and hopeful and divine will be the New Year whose joyful birth-peal I pray that you and I may live to hear; a year not only of emancipation and compet¬ ency, but of leisure and its attendant happiness, education into self-respect and self-improvement, deep religious earnest¬ ness, all embracing Christian brotherhood. Ring out the Old, ring in the New ; Ring, happy bells, across the snow. The year is going, let him go ; Ring out the False, ring in the True ! Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; Ring out the darkness of the land ; Ring in the Christ that is to be ! NATURAL HISTORY FOR WORKING MEN SUNDAYJANUARY 27th, 1884 . Them only can such hope inspire, whose minds Have not been starved by absolute neglect, Nor bodies crushed by unremitting toil; To whom kind Nature therefore may afford Proof of the sacred love she bears for all. — Wordsworth, NATURAL HISTORY FOR WORKING MEN. fTtHE hymn with which you began the evening recalled Mn to my mind a speech which was made to me some months ago. I was lecturing to an assembly of working men; and the Chairman, who was a great employer of labour, and a person of vast importance in his own neigh¬ bourhood and in his own opinion, was kind enough to say to me at the conclusion, “ I liked all your lecture very well except the opening words: you knew these people to be working men and women, and you called them gentlemen and ladies !” Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, what are gentle¬ men and ladies ? Are they those who are humble of heart and unassuming in demeanour ? who respect their neigh¬ bour so religiously as neither by word or deed to hurt or wound or slight him ; who respect themselves so heartily as to shrink from all that is vile, and coarse, and mean, as treason against their own higher moral nature ? Is their rule of present life to do their duty come what will ? their hope in the future that they may leave the little corner of the world in which their lot is cast the better for their having lived there 1 If this is to be a gentleman or a lady, then well I know that many working men and working women may well lay claim to that gentility which my fastidious friend denied them. It would have been more to the purpose if he had asked me to define a working man. 84 Working men we all are in one sense or another. The idle man is a weed in the fair garden of the world, which in the good time coming will be plucked up and thrown away. The curse laid upon Adam at the first has been turned by his descendants to a blessing. In sweat of one sort or another we all earn and eat our bread, but sweat of the brow is not the only sweat that labour sheds. There is sweat of the heart, poured into the hospital ward, the barrack- room, the city slum, by those who struggle with sickness, sin, and suffering. There is sweat of the brain; of the Poet, who lifts for us the veil of a higher world, and, while we look into it through his eyes, makes us for the time poets like himself; of the Teacher, patient, unwearied, enthusiastic, whose privilege it is to toil not upon dead inert matter, but upon young, responsive, ardent minds, and while training hopeful intellects to win grateful hearts ; of the Discoverer, who creates miracle-woi king combina¬ tions and reveals harmonising laws; of the Statesman, who, rising far above the selfish struggles and the petty malignities of party, devotes his life to aid and raise the toiling masses, through whom a nation prospers, and for whose sake it ought to prosper Sweat of the brow, of the heart, and of the brain; factors all, it seems to me, in that historic Agony of Bloody Sweat, of which I read with deep emotion, which crowned a life of ceaseless toil, and wrote upon men’s hearts, in letters never to be effaced, that nothing great or lasting can be done, nothing worthy can exist, unless it springs from and is kept alive by work. These all are brother workers ; but when we speak of “ working men ” we mean a single class of workers, the 85 wage-earning class which labours in the sweat of its brow. Strange that the meaning should be so restricted; most lamentable, yet most undeniable, that between this class and others a line of separation should be so broadly drawn. I am not speaking now of political and of social dis¬ abilities ; were I lecturing on political economy or social science, I might have much to say on these; for well I know that their removal is the great problem of the age, beside which all other problems sink into insignificance. My topic leads me now rather to domestic disabilities, to the domestic difference between, let us say, the employed and the employer. It is not a difference which shows itself in the hours of work, but in the hours of rest and recreation. Through the day employer and employed both work alike; it may be that toil in the office and the counting house with its complica¬ tions and anxieties is more of the kind which wears out vitality and brings on premature old age, than toil by the melting-vat, the lathe, the forge. It is when the day’s work is done—when employer and employed go home—that, following them to their several homes, we see the difference between them. The employer goes to a spacious house of many rooms, from which by a ceaseless but invisible machinery all is shut out that might annoy and weary. His children meet him with their brightest faces and in their freshest dresses ; and if the youngest born is fractious, a penal settlement awaits it in a distant nursery. His dinner is orderly, leisurely, and superlatively well cooked; and he adjourns to a brightly lighted drawing room, with its flowers, ornaments and pictures; where music, books, and 86 conversation speed the pleasant hours along, wipe out the wrinkles from his brain, and send him to his work the next day a refreshed and recreated man. Now follow the employed to his home. First, it lacks space—that need not be important, and yet it may be very serious. It may be that his wife is a fruitful vine upon his walls, and that there are many olive branches round his table. If the latest born is teething,—and latest-borns always are,—there is no distant nursery to which to send it; its lamentations awake the sympathising memories of the last- oorn but one, and the solo passes into a duet; and when, after some months have passed away, the dear thing has cut all its teeth, another blessed toothless infant appears upon the scene, and the choral continuity of the domestic oratorio is complete.—Secondly, the working man’s home lacks beauty. Classical ornaments relieve the rich man’s table ; his walls are hung with artistic pictures, and hidden with delicate patterns and harmonious dados; he probably knows not how these things refresh and soothe his brain. My experience of the poor man’s home tells me that the ornaments in it as a rule are the reverse of soothing; that the pictures on his wall are the reverse of classical; and as regards their papering, I knew a distinguished artist who went once with a member of Parliament round the small streets of a town during his canvas; and when he had seen the inside of all the houses, he said he had read many years ago, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, how hell was paved, but he never knew till now how hell was papered.—Lastly, the poor man’s home lacks resource. The employer’s drawing-room bristles with resource. If he is musical, there are the piano and 87 the violin; if he is artistic, there is the portfolio of draw¬ ings ; if he is fond of literature, there is the well-chosen library of books; if he is fond of games, there are the chess¬ board and card-table ; if he is scientific, there under its glass case is the shining microscope on the side table. Of resource, as of these other things, the workman’s home, so far as I know the inside of it, is destitute ; and the natural con¬ sequence follows—he goes to the public house. It is not my business to preach against him or blame him—my sympathy is entirely with the publican. I think how sorrow must rankle in his ' honest heart when he remembers that it is for his interest that his customers should drink too much ; how remorse must sit upon his sensitive con¬ science when he considers how the stuff is made of which they drink. I say we must not blame the publican—the poor fellow has a wife and family to support; we must not blame the brewer—the poor man wants to get into Parlia¬ ment and be made a baronet; and so the brewer buys up public house property at an exorbitant value, and he charges the poor publican threepence a gallon for his beer above the market price, and the publican waters it until it has reached the threepenny limit and a little more, and then he restores its tone with caramel, and he revives its bitterness with quassia and gentian, and he refreshes its colour with a little picric acid, and he throws in a little cocculus indicus to enable his customers to “get forrader,” and a little salt to enable them to get thirstier (not in Birmingham, mind you, —in Birmingham everything is genuine—I can well believe that in Birmingham all the beer is sound, and all the brewers’ hands are clean; but when I pick the brains of 88 excisemen up and down the country, I do hear something of this kind); and so the poor man drinks that scientific com¬ pound, and his nose gets red, and his face gets fungous, and his voice gets thick, and he howls out songs compared with which a funeral chant is lively, and when the evening is over he goes to his deserted home upon a pair of legs which take him down the street with separate and irreconcileable ideas of progress. I know what has been done in your town to remedy this ; I have seen your coffee houses, cheap concerts, library, your free entertainments at Bingley Hall, the (social meetings of which notice has just been given. I know, too, that out of Birmingham the same kind of thing goes on. You have all heard of the town of Warwick; there is something there beside the Castle and the Assize Courts. In a suburb of Warwick there are large gelatine works, where amid engine sheds and chimneys is a palace for working men, at which two months ago I had the happiness of speaking when the place was opened. There are spacious kitchens and dining rooms, large billiard room, smoke room, and bagatelle room, a library, concert room, and splendid theatre; all built for working men by their employers, who own the works. Even in my own little Stockton, the existence of which you are kind enough to recognise, we have our evenings for the working men all through the winter. Once a fortnight we have lectures, and the working men come to hear them; you would find that they know all about Earl Simon and the first House of Commons, all about Wyclif and the Lollards, all about the strife between capital and labour in the 14th century. We have our entertainments 89 too, to which all our neighbours who can sing or read are glad to lend their help. We have a dancing class once a fortnight, and all the young villagers who can¬ not dance come there to learn ; we have a wonderful work¬ ing man, with pumps and a concertina, who walks fourteen miles to teach us the Caledonians, and the Lancers, and the Circassian circle, and then walks fourteen miles home again; and once a month we have a splendid ball in the largest of our board school rooms; we have it decorated with ever¬ greens and Chinese lanterns ; a working men’s committee to preside ; a side room for temperance refreshments, where such sandwiches as you don’t get at your coffee houses for twopence are sold to our hungry dancers for one penny. We have a professional lady who plays four hours at a stretch; and there boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives, dance —they don’t walk, or slide, or promenade, as people do in drawing-rooms, they dance; heel and toe, feet well off the ground, arm well round your partner’s waist. I really ought to apologise for talking so much of our little place, but it is your fault. You know if you write with lemon juice and hold it to the fire, the invisible writing comes out; so the warmth of your reception has brought out much that I never meant to say. All this is very delightful, but I want something more. T think of the poor brood hen who has been sitting on her chicks all day long, and cannot leave them for these entertainments when they are at roost; I think of the growing boys and girls who should be brought up to find the fireside pleasanter than the streets; I think of the husband who, in days of courting and of honeymoon, found his wife’s companionship the 90 pleasantest in all the world, and I want him to think so still. You have read the Arabian Nights ; how the Caliph Haroun Alraschid used to walk round Bagdad town at night in disguise, to see if anything was going wrong ; and how, if suffering or want was there, he set it right next day. I should like to be the Caliph of Birmingham for one twelve months. All the working men’s rooms should be decorated as the Kyrle Society have decorated the Congregational Hall, and the Shop girls’ Club in Broad Street; on their shelves should be cheap but graceful vases of Myatt ware ; in all the windows flowers ; on the walls, instead of the grocer’s advertisements and the burial cards, should be photographs of the great masters which can be bought for twopence each; in every sitting-room should be a piano and a concertina, and the wife and husband should know how to play them; there should be packs of cards, backgammon boards, and dominoes; there should be a small but readable library ; so that if the family prefer music they may have it, if they like games they may enjoy them, or the father might read aloud his Macaulay or his Dickens, whilst the girls should sew and the boys should draw; and the only difference between the rooms of employers and employed should be the less important one of space and of dimension. But I am not Caliph of Birmingham, and it is yourselves who must do these things. No political or social change will do it for you ; if the programme of the demo¬ cratic confederation were carried out to-morrow ; if the land were all nationalised; if cumulative taxation had cut down excessive incomes ; if education were compulsory and free ; if the House of Lords were thrown into the Thames and the ^JLKscMjUidtL f 1 ^, hjy^jucdLisifYvv CuatvcL icriCjLn, £si^^, txTv^Jucrv'' *L I £ ^ I. ^ I* ioa 91 Church were disestablished ; if manhood suffrage sent paid members to triennial parliaments; if everything which now stands upon its legs were to stand upon its head ; if Henry George were Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Tich- borne Claimant were Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Bradlaugh were Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Randolph Churchill were member for Birmingham, human nature would remain the same, unless to the gospel of socialistic equality you append the gospel of domestic happiness and comfort. Ladies and gentlemen, it will come ; it will come after a time, when your schools and institutes and working men’s and working women’s colleges have done their work; it will come when your women are equal in intelligence and education to the men; when they are content to postpone their marriages till their minds are ripe ; when they are prepared to serve a longer apprenticeship to the not easy task of making a working husband’s home alluring and attractive and re¬ sourceful. Laugh at me as a dreamer if you will; make merry over the pianos and the Myatt ware, but remem¬ ber that the chimsera of to-day becomes the truism of a later day, and when, by the turn of the century, you see all this accomplished, remember that I, whose bones and brains will by that time have been converted into blue lias clay, pro- phecied it sixteen years before. Those resources will come, but meanwhile they want time and money; and I come to-night to tell you of a re¬ source which reminds me of the splendid chapter I read in church last Sunday, in which the poet calls upon those who have no money to come and buy “ without money and with¬ out price.” Those resources again we must go out to seek 92 and bring home ; but I have to speak of that which hourly envelops and wraps us round. It is to me a sort of miracle that to the great majority of Englishmen Natural History should be untrodden ground—a satire on our boasted education that nine-tenths of our educated men and women should neglect it. You would think meanly of a stranger who should walk through your pin factories your ammunition factories, your glass works, incurious and unobservant of the exquisite machinery at work and the marvellous results produced. It used to be said that a University education produced this blankness of intel- xigence; it used I fear to be true, but, as the orthodox old lady said when the Universal Redemptionist told her that all mankind would be saved, “we hope for better things.” Meanwhile, around us everywhere are miracles of creath e and developing energy, surpassing a thousandfold the wonders of human enterprise, and we walk amongst them unheeding. In the flowers in your parlour window there are chemical processes going on quite as wonderful as Mason’s College Laboratory can show. I went the other day to see your Waterworks, and was told to admire the way in which your vast engines raise the water to the cistern high above their level Go to Edgbaston or Aston Park, and the same thing is going on in eve»y tall tree you see. Look at that high poplar; water is being raised from the ground and carried to its uppermost leaf; not as in the waterworks, with clanking metal, and puffing smoke, and visible toil and dirt, but by a silent upheaval only manifest through increased loveliness of form and colour. The spider’s webs upon your 93 wall surpass in strength and grace of structure the finest offspring of a Nasmyth’s fertile brain ; the insects in your waterbutt pass daily through transformations more wonderful than the metempsychosis of Pythagoras. Look up to the heavens as you go home to-night : if the sky is clear you will see a shooting star. Do you know what that is ? It is a chip thrown off in the manufacture of worlds, as a shaving flies from your lathe, or a spark from your grindstone ; rushing round aimlessly in space till it comes within our globe’s attraction, kindles into flame and burns away with the friction of our opposing atmosphere, or pursues its course, dwindling but not quite destroyed, till it falls upon the surface of our earth. Go to the mineral room at the British Museum and you will find its further chamber crammed with these fallino- O stars or meteorites which have been picked up at all times and places in the world. There is an enormous one weigh¬ ing three and a half tons called the Cranbourne Meteorite, because it was found at a place called Cranbourne, in Australia. I was there the other day, and there was a group of holiday makers staring at it and wondering what it was; they looked at me and I felt bound to tell them ; I soon had a couple of hundred people round me, and they applauded so joyously when they understood its meaning that I wished someone might be always there to explain the mysteries which a label does not always solve. Or turn your telescope (I will tell you how to get one presently) on a bright reddish star which you may see on many nights. That is the planet Mars: we look to it exactly as it looks to us. Those two white spots 94 at its extremities are its Polar ice-caps, we see them dwindle in the summer, and extend themselves in winter; those blue marks are its seas; the red marks are its lands. It has what we have, seas and lands, rivers, clouds, mist and rain ; a thousand to one it has life like ours. It has, perhaps, its England, and its Birmingham; perhaps at this very moment some philosopher is holding forth to a crowded audience like this, lecturing them on this our planet as they see it from their earth; telling them that for many weeks thick mists have obscured the planet, and that their sudden dispersion in the last few days seems to show that great gales must have occurred. Now look at Jupiter; its belts of cloud, its four revolving moons. From those moons Galileo tried to illustrate his discovery that the earth moved round the sun. He called on his opponents to look and understand; they closed their eyes and would not look, for they did not wish to understand. I fear their breed is not yet quite extinct. Now blacken your glass and turn it on the sun; that tiny spot it shows you is so large that our globe might drop into it and disappear, but it has a strange tale to tell of the sun’s solid nucleus and of the flaming photosphere which encircles it. Look at the moon; it is pitted like a small-pox patient Those pustules are enor¬ mous craters of extinct volcanoes, which have exhausted all its life, and left it to move through space without air or water, without sound, without life, a worn-out world. I sometimes think that these two bodies, the Sun and Moon, present a political allegory; the one young, new, fresh, brilliant, powerful; inconveniently powerful, some say, who And its energy alarming; inconveniently bright, say others, as 95 lighting comers and revealing secrets which will hardly bear the light; but the source and centre of life and growth ; the other beautiful, stately, picturesque, but yet worn out, still holding its old place in heaven, but shining with reflected lustre, radiant with a beauty borrowed from the distant past. My mind is not imaginative, is not, as you see, political; I leave these parables of Sun and Moon and Cranbourne Meteorite, to be worked out by minds which are. Lastly, turn your glass on yonder nebular haze which you see in patches here and there. Your glass cannot resolve it, nor can the Greenwich telescope, nor can Lord Rosse’s noble instrument • it represents the matter of the universe as it came from its Creator’s hand, a mere mist or vapour with the mysterious law of gravity impressed upon it. Obedient to that law it broke up and contracted into globes, the friction of the contracting particles generated terrific heat, a solid nucleus of living fire was formed, with a shell of burning vapour ; the nucleus became a sun, the shell broke up into planets circling round it, and in turn each solar system was complete. The infancy, the prime, the ex¬ hausted future of the universe may be brought within the survey of a £10 telescope. Now what is the moral of all this ? It is that the heavens above, the earth beneath, the birds of the air, the insects in the water, the flowers in your window, and the trees in your fields, utter for you the same choric cry; you seek resources that shall occupy your leisure, absorb your interest, delight while they expand your minds ? we are here, they say, surrounding, challenging, pressing you; arise, and enter on your inheritance ! 96 Has the thing been clone ? Have there been working men, at once discoverers and happy labourers in these subjects ? I know a man in a small West of England town, whom T am proud to call my friend; he is a working carpenter, and his wife keeps a little chandler’s shop. He has fitted up his parlour with cases and drawers, the shelves are full of fossils and minerals, the cases of plants, coins, and insects. Scarcely a week used to pass but he would bring me something new to name and to describe. Night after night his candle burns till late while he sorts and labels and studies his treasures, his wife working by his side. He knows not an hour of unhappiness or ennui, and he is a working man! The next time you travel from Bristol to Exeter, look out for a small station called Silverton. Close by the station you will see a round house with a pointed roof and shutters; that is a telescope room, and inside it is a telescope, made by the station- master who lives there. He made with his own hands an instrument for casting specula; he made a speculum inches in diameter; he made tube and cradle and finder; he made the shed you see; and there he spends all the weary hours of waiting which a station-master has to spend ; he sends me lunar photographs of his own taking, and now and again T see in the columns of Nature , which it is my delight to send him weekly, useful and interesting communica- tionsfrom his pen on astronomical subjects. He too is a work¬ ing man ! T knew a glazier in Oxford some years ago who used to mend my windows. When a young man he attended the lectures of one of our old-fashioned professors, a kind old man and an amusing lecturer. I remember amongst 97 other things, the professor used to explain to us the air gun, and one day some wicked wag put a bullet into it, and when the trigger was pulled, we saw the plaster come down from the ceiling, and heard presently a clatter on the stair case. The bullet had gone up into the lecture room above, and put to flight another professor and his pupils. Well, my glazier learnt Experimental Philosophy from these lectures ; he made his own instruments; electric machines, magnets, galvanometers, induction coils; and I have heard him lecture admirably to working men. He made an interesting dis¬ covery as to the thinness at which decomposed glass yields complementary colours ; he discovered that certain double salts, when crystallised at particular temperatures, assume spiral forms and become beautiful microscopic objects; he was an electrician, he was a discoverer, a microscopist, a naturalist; and he was a working man ! Did you ever hear of Robert Dick, the baker of Thurso? He mastered, in rambles after his day’s batch was baked, all the geology and all the botany of Caithness. Sir R. Murchison came to see him. Dick received him in his bake¬ house, and Sir Roderick challenged his statements about the Caithness formations, as being contradicted by the Ordnance map. Dirk spread out some flour on his baking board, and in five minutes had constructed a raised map of the county, showing ail its hills and dales, rocks and clifts, dislocations and fractures, watersheds and drainage. He gave a lesson in map making to the Director of the Ordnance Survey, a lesson in geography to the President of the Geographical Society ; and he was a working man ! Last of all, did you ever hear of Thomas Edward? When four years old he used D to bring home tadpoles, leeches, evats, beetles, crabs; and his mother, when she left home, tied him to the table that he might not go out. He dragged the table to the fire and burnt the cord. Next she locked up his clothes, and put on him an old petticoat of her own. He went out thus simply clad, and came back at night in such a state that it was difficult to say which was petticoat and which was Tom They sent him to a school, kept by an old woman named Bell Hill. He had a pet jackdaw, or “ kaye.” His mother would not allow him to leave it at home, Bell Hill would not have it at school ; so what was lie to do ? Those who have studied the construction of little boys are aware that nature has been rather economical of material in fashioning them behind ; and since tailors persist in cutting out their breeches with a view to future development rather than present scantiness, when a little boy’s trousers are buttoned, there is a good deal of space within. Into this space he put the kaye. The kaye found it warm ; and so long as Tom stood to say his lessons, the kaye. found it spacious. But Bell’s custom was to pray, or as she called it “groan,” twice a day with her scholars. The word was given, and they all knelt down. The kaye found the altered position what diplomatists call “strained" ; and a glimmer of light stealing in between Tom’s waistband and his waistcoat, the kaye put out its head and emitted the sound which jackdaws utter. All sprang to their feet. “ Lord save us^’ said Bell, “what is this”? The children’s answer was— “ It is Tam Edward, with a kaye sticking out of his breeks ! ’’ I must not tell you more of him, for the time is getting on. Get Smiles’ Life of a Scottish Naturalist from 99 the library, and read the rest. Tom was a poor man all his life ; he brought up eleven children. When he became old, and Queen Victoria heard of him, she did that which she always seems to me to do, namely, just that which her people would have her do—gave him an annuity of =£50. He is still living, old and comfortable, and as fond as ever of his old pursuits.* Now then, let me give you just one or two practical hints. First of all collect live things. Get an aquarium, a common bell-glass will do (turn yourselves a stand to hold it), in which plant a root of Chara from your ponds; put in a little earth, scatter a little gravel over, fill it with water, and leave it there for a month. You need never change your water, for the plant that you nave-put in it will keep it sweet. Fish strange things out of the pond and put them in ; find the large dragon fly grub, a brown stupid¬ looking animal with a coal-scuttle bonnet on its head. An insect swims within his reach, and the coal-scuttle bonnet turns into a pair of arms which catch the insect. Find the water spiders, the boatmen, the caddises, and watch their transformation. Collect cabinet specimens; beetles, which you find even in the thickest streets of Birmingham flying about in spring time ; put them into a little boiling water and pin them on to cork. Collect the beautiful butterflies ; collect fossils ; collect plants and press them ; learn how to stuff birds and animals; get a microscope, a telescope, a spectroscope, a photographic apparatus. Sixpence a day saved from the public-house will buy either of them in a year. * He died in 1880. 100 Then visit some good museum. Some day in the summer on a Bank Holiday let two or three hundred of you engage an excursion train and go to Oxford ; pick me up on the way and take me with you. I know all the professors and wise men, and I answer for it they will gladly show you all the treasures in their possession. We will go and see the great slabs with ripple marks and raindrops that tell how the tide rose and the rain fell millions of years ago; the splendid fossils from the Silurian to the Chalk; the implements of early man who lived in caves; the bones of the great Cetiosaurus who was 100 feet in length; the Egyptian beetles, and the Hies in amber, and the trapdoor spiders, and the gigantic wasp’s nest, whose architects consumed a pound of sugar and a pint of beer a day while they were building it; the great loadstone suspended over its bar of iron, be¬ neath which no hand, not even a teetotaller’s, is steady enough to pass a knife. After a morning there we will go and see the colleges, halls, gardens, old city walls, the river, and boats; we will come back with beautiful ideas, which will take twelve months to digest, as a boa constrictor feeds for weeks upon the rabbit he has swallowed. Last of all have an exhibition of your own pro¬ ductions. I attended your soiree in this hall last year; I think I only saw one thing, Mr. Dawson’s steam engine, made by a working man. I should like to see next year, and I shall come to see them if you ask me, one hundred tables, at the least, covered with exhibits of working men, specimens collected, birds stuffed, and apparatus made, eloquent in the tale they tell of happy evening hours spent at home. 101 Don’t you think such a study as that will make you wiser, happier, better, more religious ? I find it makes me so. I find that increased experience of the unknowable gives me more implicit faith in the Unknown ; that fuller knowledge of nature expands into deeper love of God. There are those who frown upon these studies, who will frown upon me for inculcating them to-night. My lecture last year provoked severe remarks from a so called religious newspaper; from Birmingham itself I had more than one anonymous letter, charging me with desecration of the Sabbath, with drawing people away from church, with pandering to a desire for popularity, with degrading my position as a Christian minister. I am not careful to answer criticism so conceived and so expressed ; but if you hear it during the week, tell those who adopt it to enquire of themselves and others whether what I have said in this or former years is likely to make you, my audience, more hostile or more friendly to religion; whether the fact of my being a Christian minister is likely to give you a contempt or a respect for my profession; whether it can really be a thing displeasing to Almighty God that working men should, after toiling all the week, dedicate two hours of His day to learn something of the beauty of His works? And in conclusion, tell them this: —A man once walked the earth, who “ spake as never man spake.” He had all wisdom, all knowledge, all power; yet He loved to base His sabbath and His week-day teaching upon the sights and sounds of nature ; the sower sowing, the seed springing of itself, the tares among the wheat, the fowls of the air, the lilies of the field. His name was Jesus Christ: and lie was a working man ! BIRMINGHAM : Hudson and Son, Printers, Edmund Street. Vr