Out of the dissecting-room, beyond the narrow precincts of the hospital, masked in gay clothes, with faces all red with paint and wrinkled with idiotic leer, stand side by side the living and the dead.
The princ.i.p.al London Hospitals are the following:-1. St. Bartholomew"s Hospital, in West Smithfield, first founded in the twelfth century, and refounded by Henry VIII. in 1546. The building, a s.p.a.cious quadrangular structure, is princ.i.p.ally modern, having been finished in 1770. It makes up 580 beds. In 1848,71,573 were relieved by this hospital, viz., 5,826 inpatients, 19,149 out-patients, and 46,598 casual ditto. Necessity is the only recommendation to this inst.i.tution; and patients are received without limitation. The medical staff is equal to any in the metropolis.
The staircase was gratuitously painted by Hogarth. 2. Guy"s Hospital, St. Thomas"s Street, Southwark, founded in 1721, contains accommodation for 580 in-patients, and has an excellent museum and theatre of anatomy.
This magnificent hospital, which consists of two quadrangles and two wings, was founded and endowed by Thomas Guy, a bookseller, who expended 18,793 upon the building, and left 219,419 for its endowment-the largest sum, perhaps, that has ever been expended by any individual on similar purposes. Recently, however, Guy"s Hospital has met with another benefactor, but little inferior, in point of liberality, to its founder; a citizen, of the name of Thomas Hunt, having bequeathed to it, in 1829, the princely sum of 200,000! The medical school attached to this hospital, while under the superintendence of the late Sir Astley Cooper, was one of the most extensive, and probably, also, the best in the empire. 3. St. Thomas"s Hospital, in High Street, Borough, was formed out of two other charities by Edward VI., and rebuilt in 1693. Additions were made in 1732, and a large part was rebuilt in 1836. It contains 18 wards, and 428 beds. It has an income of about 25,000 a year, derived almost wholly from rents of estates in London and the country. 4. St.
George"s Hospital, near Hyde Park Corner, lately rebuilt, has a fine front, 200 feet in length, facing the Green Park. It accommodates 460 in-patients. 5. The Middles.e.x Hospital, near Oxford Street, founded in 1745, has 285 beds, and relieves numerous out-patients. 6. London Hospital, in Whitechapel, was founded in 1740. Its wards accommodate about 250 patients. 7. Westminster Hospital, rebuilt in 1833, near the Abbey, has 174 beds; but three wards, containing s.p.a.ce for fifty additional beds, are unfurnished, notwithstanding there is a great demand for hospital accommodation. 8. The Marylebone and Paddington Hospital, opened in 1850, has 150 beds, which it is proposed to increase to 376, supposing the necessary funds to be forthcoming. This, and the four last mentioned hospitals, depend wholly, or almost wholly, on voluntary subscriptions, which are said to be very insufficient to meet the demands upon them. The University College and King"s College Hospitals, and Charing Cross Hospital, are smaller establishments of the same nature, each accommodating about 120 patients, and there are other establishments of the same description. Medical schools are connected with the above hospitals, in which lectures are delivered by the officers, and which are attended by several hundreds of students. Within the last few years the number of medical students has considerably decreased.
PORTLAND PLACE.
The worst effects of drunkenness are, perhaps, after all, its indirect ones. It is a sad sight to see man stricken down in his prime, and woman in her beauty; to see individuals" hopes and prospects blighted; to see in that carcase staggering by the utter wreck and ruin of an immortal soul. But this is but a small portion of the damage done to humanity by the ravages of intemperance. Look at our great social evil. I need not name it. No one who walks the streets of London by night requires to be informed what that is. Has drink nothing to do with it? Ask that unfortunate, who has just commenced her evening"s walk. She will tell you that when she parted with her innocence she had previously been drugged with drink; that if it were not for drink she could not pursue her unhallowed career; that her victims are stimulated by drink; and that without the gin-palace or the public-house she and such as she could not exist. I do not now speak of the worst forms of prost.i.tution, of the gin-palaces in the East frequented by drunken sailors, where women are kept as a source of attraction and revenue; but of the better cla.s.ses, of the dashing women who are supplied with expensive dresses by respectable Oxford-street tradesmen in the expectation of being paid by some rich victim; the women whom you meet dressed so gay in Regent-street or Portland-place.
Once upon a time there was a rascally old n.o.bleman who lived in a big house in Piccadilly. Mr. Raikes describes him as "a little sharp-looking man, very irritable, and swore like 10,000 troopers, enormously rich, and very selfish." He sat all day long at a low window, leering at beauty as it pa.s.sed by, and under his window was a groom waiting on horseback to carry his messages to any one whom he remarked in the street. If one did not know that we lived in a highly moral age, one would fancy many such old n.o.blemen lived in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, for in the streets leading thence, and reaching as far back as Tottenham-court-road, we have an immense female population, all existing and centred there, who live by vicious means-all with the common feeling of their s.e.x rooted out and destroyed; all intended by nature to diffuse happiness around; all a curse on all with whom they have to do. In this small circle, there is enough vicious leaven to leaven all London. It is impossible to get a true estimate of their number. Guesses of all kinds have been made, but none are exactly to be depended on. In a great capital like ours, where wealthy sensualists can and do pay enormous sums for the gratification of their whims-(I have seen it stated that on one occasion a gentleman went into a house in Norton-street with a 500 bank-note, and after staying a few hours received but 20 change)-it is not alone the professedly vicious-the cla.s.s whom we call prost.i.tutes-who prost.i.tute themselves. As fine shops are pointed out in fashionable streets, which are said to be houses of the most infamous description, in spite of the display of lace and millinery in the window, so there are thousands of women, supposed to be respectable, and to live in a respectable manner, who yet are to all intents and purposes prost.i.tutes, though they would not be cla.s.sified as such. Now the number of this latter cla.s.s is much exaggerated. Towards the close of the last century, when the population of London amounted to about a million, Dr. Colquhoun, magistrate of the Thames Police, a.s.serted the number of prost.i.tutes to be at least 50,000. If prost.i.tution has followed the same ratio of increase as the population, the number now must be considered as truly appalling. But evidently the Doctor"s estimate is exaggerated. At a period much nearer to our own, Mr.
Chadwick puts down the number, excluding the City, at 7,000; Mr. Mayne, at from 8,000 to 10,000. The City Police estimates the number at 8,000, and this estimate is supported by Dr. Ryan, and Mr. Talbot, secretary to the a.s.sociation formed in London for the protection of young girls. This is a very high figure; but a recent French writer tells us that in London, in the higher ranks of life, the proportion of vicious women to virtuous are as one to three! and in the lower ranks virtue does not exist at all!!! At any rate, there is reason to believe that in London there are 5,000 infamous houses. If besides we reckon up the procuresses, the keepers of low gin-palaces and beer-shops, where women are the bait, we are lost and bewildered, and dare not trust ourselves to give in numbers any idea of the persons directly and indirectly connected with prost.i.tution, or of the sum spent annually in London on that vice alone. And all this is carried on in the most methodical way. There are men and women whose constant employment is to search all parts of the metropolis for fresh victims; and to them young girls from the country and servant maids-of-all-work are easy prey. Then letters are written and sent to the clubs and to the patrons of such infamy, and they are furnished with all the particulars, and the price of the victim"s willing or unwilling seduction and shame. This state of things is progressive.
Last year the returns of the City missionaries show an increase in their districts of fallen women to the number of 1,035. Of course it is only with the dregs that the City missionary comes in contact. While a woman preserves her health, and youth, and good looks, she lives in better quarters than those into which the City missionary generally finds his way. For a time she is gay; she dresses fine, spends money freely, drinks, and sings, and then prematurely becomes old, and sad, and poor.
Is this ever to be so? Is woman always to sell herself to man? And is man to dream that the smile thus bought is no lie, but a precious truth?
I don"t suppose that if men were temperate universal chast.i.ty would be the result; but that we should have less immorality is, I think, an admitted fact. Why are women, prost.i.tutes? Chiefly, we are told, because of poverty; and of all causes of poverty, is not intemperance the greatest? Would you see how one vice is connected with another? Come up Portland-place at night. True, there are no public-houses here, but they are plentiful enough in the neighbourhood; and in them all night the men and painted women from Portland-place madden themselves with drink. Yes, here are the women that should have been British wives and mothers utterly perverted, and dragging down with them many a heart that might have emerged into a n.o.ble life. l.u.s.t and intemperance have slain them.
"Lost, lost, lost for ever!" is the cry that greets us as we look at them.
An a.s.sociation has been formed in this neighbourhood to wipe away this plague spot. In their report, the committee state, when the movement commenced, which issued in the establishment of the a.s.sociation at the close of 1857, the condition of the districts (All Souls and Trinity), comprising the streets lying immediately to the eastward of Portland-place, was perfectly appalling. It was then calculated that in those streets there were not less than 140 notorious houses of ill-fame, containing from six to ten fallen women each, which fearful array of prost.i.tution was swelled by a large number of young women, lodging in the districts, who were known to be gaining their livelihood nominally by working for shops, but princ.i.p.ally by the means of night prost.i.tution.
One natural result of this dense aggregation of depravity in a narrow spot was the front of insolent and shameless defiance which vice had put on. Indecent exhibitions in broad day from the windows of these houses, utterances the most revolting, that startled and shocked the ear of the pa.s.senger who had unwarily penetrated these haunts of infamy, together with the outrageous conduct of the unhappy children of shame, who even before the shades of night had fallen were wont to come forth in hundreds upon the pavements of Portland-place and Regent-street, seemed to indicate a determination that no vestige of respectability should be suffered to linger in a neighbourhood which not thirty years before was as pure and as much resorted to as any of the most favoured districts of western London. The keepers of these houses were many of them foreigners; some were known to the police as determined forgers, gamblers, and thieves. Others, indeed the princ.i.p.al part, were females grown old in the path of depravity, in whose bosom every spark of womanly tenderness had become quenched; who could treat, indeed, with a show of kindness the unhappy girls they had enticed to their doors, so long as they were able to satisfy their exorbitant demands, but who did not hesitate to cast them out into a deeper degradation, or utter dest.i.tution, the moment a decay of their attractions or ill health had disabled them from paying the extravagant charges for their hired rooms and dresses. Riotous and brutal outrages were constantly taking place in these houses, and evidence that crimes of violence and sensuality of the darkest type had been enacted in them came to light. It was, moreover, ascertained that among those wretched traders in sin were those who had embarked in a still more repulsive branch of their guilty trade, and were making large gains by turning their houses into receptacles for young unfallen girls imported from abroad, who were sold over from time to time to the neighbouring brothel keepers. Such was the awful moral pestilence which, up to that time, was raging unchecked, and year by year it was rapidly enlarging the area of its ravages.
At the meeting held to receive this report, the Rev. Mr. Garnier stated that "he visited himself a house in Norton-street, where in one room he saw a seat placed around so as to hold as many of the poor creatures as possible on a day that was appointed for brothel keepers, to attend and bid for their purchase (hear, and much sensation). The unfortunate girls thus disposed of were brought from abroad, and while connected with the House of Commons he had the best evidence of this, for n.o.blemen and members of parliament showed letters they continually received soliciting them to partake of the depravity (much sensation). The letters spoke of a beautiful girl just imported from Belgium or France, and the n.o.bleman or gentleman, whichever he might be, was asked to visit her, as she was at his service. In one case a letter was received from the rectory district of that parish (Marylebone), in which it was stated that a girl at a certain address was ready to be given up to l.u.s.t to the highest bidder. These letters were addressed to the Speaker as well as the members of the House of Commons, and this, together with the spectacle he (the Rev. gentleman) witnessed in Norton-street, was, he considered, very good evidence of the abominable traffic that was carried on in this country.
"The Rev. Mr. Marks said, within the last fifteen months he was called to visit three Jewesses, painful as the duty was, and this visit was made in the Rev. Mr. Garnier"s district. These three girls had been imported for the purposes of prost.i.tution (hear, hear). In one case alone he was enabled to take the poor creature from the abominable vice that threatened her, and sent her home; and he nearly succeeded with another, but with regret-aye, deep regret, he said so-he was prevented. A sum of 200 had been offered to retain the girl, and this sum was offered by the brother of an M.P."
The discussion of the delicate question, as the _Times_ terms it, has lately received new light in an unexpected quarter. The victims themselves have taken to writing. "Another Unfortunate" describes her parents. They were drunkards-their chief expense was gin-their children were left to grow up without moral training of any kind. The writer says:-"We heard nothing of religion. Sometimes when a neighbour died we went to the burial, and thus got within a few steps of the church. If a grand funeral chanced to fall in our way we went to see that, too-the fine black horses and nodding plumes-as we went to see the soldiers when we could for a lark. No parson ever came near us. The place where we lived was too dirty for nicely-shod gentlemen. "The publicans and sinners" of our circ.u.mscribed, but thickly-populated locality had no "friend" among them. Our neighbourhood furnished many subjects to the treadmill, the hulks, and the colonies, and some to the gallows. We lived with the fear of these things, and not with the fear of G.o.d before our eyes." From such a training could we expect otherwise? The writer asks what business has society to persecute such as she: a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit; the unfortunate is the fruit, and society is the tree.
It is in vain that we reclaim the women. The only remedy-the only way to put down the social evil-is to reclaim the men.
MARK-LANE.
On a Monday morning, especially on the Eastern Counties lines, the trains running into town have an unusually large number of pa.s.sengers. They consist generally of the jolly-looking fellows who, at the time of the cattle show, take the town by storm, and fill every omnibus and cab, and dining room, and place of public amus.e.m.e.nt, and then as suddenly retire as if they were a Tartar horde, dashing into some rich and luxurious capital, then vanishing with their booty, none know whither. However, penetrate into Mark-lane, you may see them every Monday and Friday, smelling very strong of tobacco smoke-for, although smoking is absurdly and strictly prohibited on railways, it is a known fact that people will smoke nevertheless-and with the air of men who are not troubled about trifles, and have their pockets well lined with cash. These are the merchants and millers and maltsters of Mark-lane. All England waits for their reports; their decisions affect the prices of grain at Chicago on one side, and far in the ports of the Black Sea on the other. Bread is the staff of life, and its traffic affects the weal or woe of empires.
Prices low in Mark-lane, and in the garrets of London, in the cellars of Manchester, in the wynds of Edinburgh, there is joy. As we may suppose, the trade in grain is one of the most ancient in the world. There were corn merchants and millers long before Mark-lane was built. Originally the corn merchants of the metropolis a.s.sembled at a place called Bark"s Quay, where now the Custom-house stands. Then they moved into Whitechapel, somewhere near Aldgate Church, and then the Corn Exchange in Mark-lane was built. Originally there was but one exchange, that erected in 1749, which is private property, and the money for which was raised in eighty hundred-pound shares; each share at this time being worth 1,300.
This, I believe, is the only metropolitan market for corn, grain, and seeds. The market days are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; hours, ten to three. Wheat is paid for in bills at one month, and other corn and grain in bills at two months. The Kentish hoymen, distinguishable by their sailors" jackets, have stands free of expense, and pay less for metage and dues than others, and the Ess.e.x dealers enjoy some privileges; in both cases said to be in consideration of the men of Kent and Ess.e.x having continued to supply the city when it was ravaged by the plague.
Old Mark-lane consists of an open Doric colonnade, within which the factors have their stands. It resembles the atrium, or place of audience in the Pompeian house, with its impluvium, the place in the centre in which the rain fell. In this market, managed by a committee and secretary, there was no foreign compet.i.tion. At this time there are about seventy-two stands, and more than a hundred subscribers of five guineas each. I believe the stands are from thirty to forty pounds a year. Now at one time this place was quite a close borough. There were more factors than the place could hold, and when a stand was vacant it was given to some poor broken-down man, who would not be likely to interfere with the jolly business which the rest were carrying on. The excluded were very indignant. They planted themselves in Mark-lane.
They did business in the street outside the Exchange. They were men of equal standing and respectability with any of the privileged; and after an immense amount of grumbling and growling, they did as most Englishmen would have done-went to Parliament, and got an Act to have a second Exchange erected side by side with the old one. This second erection was completed in 1826, and in the part.i.tion are now a couple of arches, which were placed there in order that, if at any time the old Exchange were amalgamated with the new-a consummation of which there seems no chance at present-the whole may be formed into one capacious market. The new Exchange has a central Grecian Doric portico, surmounted by imperial arms and agricultural emblems, the ends having corresponding pilasters. Here lightermen and granary-keepers have stands as well as corn merchants, factors, and millers. At the further end of this building there is a seed-market; nor is this all. Attached to the new Exchange is an hotel, in the upper room of which is an auction room for the sale of damaged cargoes; and on the other side-that is, above the old Exchange-is a subscription refreshment room, known as Jack"s, where most of the Norfolk flour is sold, a great deal of it being paid for in ready money, and then resold again downstairs, on the usual credit, the profit on such a transaction being the odd threepence or sixpence, which becomes a respectable sum if you buy or sell a thousand quarters. Up here are the millers or their agents in large quant.i.ties. "We are not," said one to the writer, "the rogues the world takes us for. If we don"t sell good flour, the bakers can"t sell their bread." Let us hope this is true; but in these days of universal rascaldom, when gold, no matter how dishonestly acquired, makes its possessor an object of respect, and not of scorn, what wonder is it that we believe that there are rogues in grain as well as in other trades? In the middle of the old Exchange you will see an immense number of foreigners; these are Greeks, living all together in the neighbourhood of Finsbury-square, who are gradually getting all the foreign trade-what are our English merchants about?-of the country into their hands. It is the Greeks, not the English, who buy up the corn shipped from the ports of the Black Sea, and pour it into the English market. Besides these Greeks, you will see captains of vessels in great numbers waiting to hear if their cargoes are sold, and where they are to be taken. A busy scene is Mark-lane, especially on a Monday.
The malt tax in 1857 was 6,470,010, which represents an enormous amount of malt, of which a great part is sold in Mark-lane. In the year 1857 there were imported into the United Kingdom 3,473,957 quarters of wheat, 1,701,470 of barley, 1,710,299 of oats, 76,048 of rye, 159,899 of peas, 305,775 of beans, 1,150,783 of Indian corn, 188 of buck-wheat, and 2,763 of bere or bigg; and in the same year there were imported 2,184,176 cwts.
of flour and meal. Then we must not forget the home produce, which is princ.i.p.ally brought into London by ships, though a great deal of it comes up by rail. In London alone the consumption of wheat in the shape of flour and otherwise may be estimated at upwards of 1,600,000 quarters a year. But Mark-lane is not, like Smithfield, a market for London alone.
On the contrary, it is attended by buyers from all parts of the country.
The cargoes in the river sold at Mark-lane may be landed at Leith, or Glasgow, or Liverpool, or even in the distant ports of Cork, or Belfast, or Dublin. Well may there be a bustle in Mark-lane. At eleven the market commences, and at the various stands preparations are made for the business of the day by untying and placing on the stands little bags containing samples of every conceivable species of grain eatable by man or beast. At the end of the day the floor is covered with the samples which the buyer, after rubbing over in his hands and inspecting, has thrown down. The sweepings are afterwards gathered up and sold, and realise, I believe, a very handsome sum in the course of the year. At half-past two a beadle rings a bell, and no more are permitted to enter the Exchange. Those that are there hastily finish their business, tie up their samples, swallow a chop, rush off to their respective termini, and in two or three hours are perhaps more than a hundred miles away.
Mark-lane for the rest of the week is a dull, dirty lane, with but few pa.s.sengers, and very dark and dull indeed.
Yet Mark-lane has its romances. Look around you; not a man perhaps but can tell you of enormous profits and enormous losses. The trade carried on here is of so speculative a character that but few realise money by it after all. Come to this stand. It was calculated the other day that the firm carrying on business here were losing at the rate of a thousand pounds per hour. Hear this factor: "I once bought some Windsor beans at an early hour in the morning at 32s. a quarter, and sold them the same day at 64s." Yet our informant has been compelled to settle with his creditors. You may point to me a man who has not been reduced to this, but he is a _rara avis_, and he can tell you how, perhaps, another day or another hour would have made him a bankrupt. The rule is a crisis and a crash; not a disgraceful one-for the unlucky ones, many of them, manage to pay twenty shillings in the pound eventually-but a crisis and a temporary suspension. In some cases where a man has been in trade many years, and has acc.u.mulated a handsome fortune, one unlucky speculation scatters it all, and compels him-old, and dest.i.tute of the energy of youth-to begin business again. This is hard, but it cannot be helped.
Men who have been on the Exchange long can tell you funny stories of how they came at seven in the morning and cleared handsome sums of money before they went home to breakfast, and broke all the laws against regrating and forestalling which the thoughtful stupidity of our ancestors had devised-in order that bread, the staff of life, might not be high in price-on a most royal scale. We do not hear of such things now, nor do the mobs of London now break into the Quaker Chapels to see if the flour is hidden there-an amiable weakness to which the mob was much given towards the end of the last century, when wheat was at famine prices, and the loaf was cheap at two and tenpence. We are fallen upon better days, upon days of free trade, when the English artisan, in order that bread may be cheap, has his emissaries and agents scouring all parts of the old world and the new.
PREACHING AT ST. PAUL"S CATHEDRAL.
In that celebrated chapter in which Gibbon explains the rise and progress on natural grounds of the Christian religion, it has always seemed to us that he has not done justice to the immense influence which the inst.i.tution of the pulpit must originally have possessed. Had he gone no further than the pages of his New Testament, the distinguished historian would have found many an instance of oratorical success. He would have read how Herod quailed before the rude orator who in the desert drew mult.i.tudes to hear him as he proclaimed the advent of the Messiah, and warned a generation of vipers to flee from the wrath to come; he would have read how, whilst the Teacher spake as never man spake, the common people heard him gladly; how Felix trembled in his pride and power, and how the polished intellect of Athens listened, and admired, and believed, while Paul preached of an unknown G.o.d. It is true that in a subsequent chapter Gibbon does not altogether ignore the pulpit, and admits the sacred orators possessed some advantages over the advocate or the tribune. "The arguments and rhetoric of the latter," he writes, "were instantly opposed with equal arms by skilful and resolute antagonists, and the cause of truth and reason might derive an accidental support from the conflict of hostile pa.s.sions. The bishop, or some distinguished presbyter to whom he cautiously delegated the powers of preaching, harangued without the danger of interruption or reply a submissive mult.i.tude whose minds had been prepared and subdued by the awful ceremonies of religion. Such was the strict subordination of the Roman Catholic Church, that the same concerted sounds might issue at once from a hundred pulpits of Italy or Egypt, if they were _tuned_ by the master hand of the Roman or Alexandrian bishop." But much more than this may be said. Wonderful is the power of oratory. Gibbon may have under-rated it, for we know that he never could summon up the requisite courage to make a speech in Parliament; but nevertheless rare power is his, who can speak what will touch the hearts, and form the opinion, and mould the lives of men. The more unlettered be the age, the more triumphant will be this power; and when the theme is the stupendous one of religion-when in it, according to the belief of preacher and hearer, eternal interests are involved-woe that shall never pa.s.s away-joy that shall never die-when, moreover, this living appeal is put in the place of dead form or dreary routine, what wonder is it that before it should fade away the pagan faith of Greece or Rome? The pulpit and Christianity are identical. In times of reformation and revival, the pulpit has ever been a power. When spiritual darkness has come down upon the land-when the oracles have been dumb-when the sacred fire on the altar has ceased to burn, the pulpit has been a form, a perquisite, a sham, rather than a message of peace and glad tidings to the weary and heavy laden.
How comes it to pa.s.s that in these days the pulpit of the Establishment has failed to be this? Mr. Christmas, a clergyman of the Established Church, in a volume recently published, seeks to answer this question.
To use his own language, "the author had long felt that through some cause or other the Church had not secured that hold on the attention of the mult.i.tude without which her ministration could be but partially effective." Why, even in these few lines we see a reason of the failure which Mr. Christmas mourns. Clergymen live in a world of their own, and will not look at facts as worldly men are compelled to do. Now, as a matter of fact, the Church of England is not the church, but merely a section of the church; and yet you cannot go into an episcopalian place of worship but you hear what the church says-what the church holds-what the church commands-when common sense tells every one that the speaker is merely referring to the Establishment in England, and that even if he were appealing to the custom and tradition of that body of believers which, in all countries and ages, const.i.tutes the church, the inquiry is of little consequence after all-the appeal, in reality, being to the Bible, and the Bible alone, which, in the well-worn language of Chillingworth, is the religion of Protestants. Thus is it so much preaching in the Church of England fails to reach and attract the ma.s.ses.
The ministers will deal in fictions-will exclaim, "Hear the church"-will wander away from topics of human interest into questions with which the educated (and still more the uneducated) mind has no sympathy. The middle-cla.s.s public go to hear-for it is the genteel thing to go to church-but they sit silent, pa.s.sive, exhausted by the long preliminary service, wearied, and unmoved. What wonder is it that the more independent and manly-the men who do not fear Mrs. Grundy-who are not afraid of conventionalisms, either stop at home, or leave the Establishment for the more living service of dissent? Mr. Christmas observes:-"Few will venture to say that the style of preaching most valued among nonconformists is inferior to that heard from the pulpits of the Establishment." The reason is not far to seek: dissent has no ancient prestige to plead; dissent has no rich endowment to fall back on; dissent lives on and is strong in spite of the cold shade of aristocracy, or of the sneer of the bigot or the fool; dissent depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, and dull and dim, dissent melts like snow beneath the warm breath of the south. Dissent reminds us more than the Establishment of the earlier period of Christianity, of the Carpenter"s Son who had not where to lay his head; whose apostles were fishermen, and whose kingdom, to use His own emphatic declaration, "was not of this world." The public mind is shocked and estranged when it hears the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he did the other day, defending a recent ecclesiastical appointment, on the plea that the fortunate individual was a man of blameless life, of high family, and great wealth.
"Mr. A. B.," says Mr. Christmas, "must be a clergyman, and Mr. A. B. has not the gift of utterance. Well, he will be able to read his sermons, and the rest of his brethren do the like. It is no detriment to a man"s prospects that the church is half empty when he preaches. "He is a very learned man-or a very well connected man-or a very good man-or an excellent parish priest: it is a pity he is not more successful in the pulpit; but then, really, preaching is the smallest part of a clergyman"s duty."" Such is the way in which such a subject is treated within the pale of the Establishment.
But the Sunday Evening Service at St. Paul"s Cathedral is an answer to all this. Let us see! On a cold winter evening, underneath its magnificent dome, are seated some three thousand well-dressed people. On the first occasion of holding evening service, the scene was rather indecorous for Sunday evening. A large number of those who had been unable to obtain admission to the service were lingering about the south door, and as the carriages of the Lord Mayor and other civic dignitaries were leaving with their occupants, the a.s.sembled crowd gave vent to their feelings by unmistakable groans of displeasure, as if they considered themselves to have been unfairly excluded. But this is over-the thing has become a fact. The audience has toned down to the level English standard of propriety. The sublime service, in spite of its length and monotony, has been listened to with a patience almost devout; and the choir, "200 trebles and altos, 150 tenors, and 150 ba.s.ses," the largest and most complete choir that was ever yet organised, has done its part to heighten the rapture and piety of the night. A clergyman now ascends the pulpit to preach. He is a popular clergyman-the crowd to-night is larger than it has ever yet been-active, learned, industrious, charitable, devout. He is the Rev. Canon Dale, rector of St. Pancras. Yet what is his theme? The Church-the Mother of us all-the divinely appointed means of man"s recovery from the power and the consequence of sin. Is not this a fatal blunder? What man wants is, not the Church, but the message it proclaims-the voice itself, not the messenger-the good tidings of great joy, not the human instruments by which they are revealed to man.
But this service shows the strength of the church in the metropolis. The reply to this, we fear, is unsatisfactory. The present able Bishop of London is endeavouring to procure a union of the City churches. The answers to the inquiries of the bishop made by the clergy present some curious features. The Rev. J. Charlesworth, rector of the joint parishes of St. Mildred, Bread-street, and St. Margaret Moses, replies in answer to the bishop"s interrogatories that the largest attendance at any of his church services is ten, that his net income is 220 a year, and that the population is 258. The Rev. J. Minchin, rector of the joint parishes of St. Mildred, Poultry, and St. Mary, Colechurch, reports that the largest attendance at his service is 30, his net income 280, and the population 600. The Rev. Thomas Darling, rector of St. Michael Paternoster Royal and St. Martin"s Vintry, reports that his largest attendance is 25, his net income 240, population 430. The Rev. Dr. Kynaston, high master of St. Paul"s School, reports that the attendance at the church of the joint parishes of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey and St. Nicholas Olave, of which he is rector, is 30, his income 263, with a house in good repair, population 592. The Rev. Charles Mackenzie, rector of the joint parishes of St. Benet, Gracechurch, and St. Leonard, Eastcheap, states the attendance at 48, net income 287, population 300. The Rev. Dr.
Stebbing, rector of St. Mary Somerset and St. Mary Woolchurch Haw, reports that his largest attendance is 40, net income 250, population unknown. The Rev. Thomas Jones, rector of Allhallows, Lombard-street, reports that his largest attendance is 50, his net income 396, population 456. The Rev. F. J. Stainforth, inc.u.mbent of Allhallows Staining, reports that his largest attendance is 50, net income 800, population 500. Many more of the same sort might be given from the official returns, and in some cases there is an attendance of 100 or 150 persons where the income of the inc.u.mbent is upwards of 1,000 a year.
One reason of this wretched state of things we have hinted at. The removal of the city population, we may be told, is another: but the population in the neighbourhood of these places is sufficient to fill them were the population given to church-going. With all due deference, we would fain ask the clergy if they do not fail to attract the public, owing to their themes and manner of treating them? Some preachers always manage to bring in the Old Testament dispensation. The preacher is dwelling among the priests and Levites: perpetually he tells you what the Jews did and did not; how they were a stiff-necked people; how they went after strange G.o.ds; how their nation was blotted out, and their temple razed to the ground, and their very name became a reproach. Man needs not the Hebrew learning, but the Christian faith; not the voice that thundered from Sinai, but the accents of mercy that were heard on Calvary in that awful hour when the earth trembled, when the grave gave up its dead, when the veil of the Temple was rent in twain, and the Son of Man died upon the cross. The preacher of the cla.s.s we have referred to almost seems to think otherwise: he ignores the present, and lives only in the past. He is worse than a lawyer with his precedents. His dialect is obsolete, and a stumbling-block to active, earnest, intelligent living men, whether rich or poor. He is like a man with corks, who is afraid to cut them off, and strike out boldly for himself. He cannot ask you for a penny for a new church without showing how liberally the Jews supported the public worship of their day. He is great in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He seems as if he could have no faith in Christianity unless he could lock it up with Old Testament texts. "I fear," writes Erasmus, in his "Age of Religious Revolution," "two things-that the study of Hebrew will promote Judaism, and that the study of philology will revive Paganism." Really we sometimes are inclined to believe that the first fear has been realised. Many a preacher reminds us of Bishop Corbett"s "Distracted Puritan," when he says-
"In the blessed tongue of Canaan I placed my chiefest pleasure, "Till I p.r.i.c.k"d my foot with a Hebrew root, And it bled beyond all measure."
We can well imagine many a preacher thus speaking, and feel disposed to wish that such might p.r.i.c.k their feet with Hebrew roots till they wholly discontinue their references to extinct forms of worship, and apply the truth that Christ came to preach to man"s present position-to the hopes and fears-to the struggles and duties-to the pa.s.sions and vanities of to-day. There is progress everywhere. Why should preaching be the exception? If, as is admitted, the eloquence of the bar or senate has declined, may we not naturally conclude that in that of the pulpit there has been a falling off as well, especially when we remember how much the press has supplemented the latter? Verily, the clergy, whether in or out of the Establishment, must exert themselves. The nation demands that the enormous wealth and patronage possessed by the latter be devoted to something more than refined enjoyment or epicurean ease. It is not churches we want, but parsons. An orator can preach anywhere, as well from an old tub as from a pulpit, costly and consecrated, and curiously wrought.
AN OMNIBUS YARD.
In one of the remotest of the Fejee Islands some Wesleyan missionaries, in the year 1851, landed a pair of horses. We read general excitement prevailed at the towns near, and a great muster gathered on the beach at the day of landing. It was long before the native mind got reconciled to the phenomenon. The people, we are told, were terrified if approached by a horse. They would jump into the river, run up cocoa-nut and other trees, and climb houses for safety while the animal pa.s.sed their place.
In England this stage of terror has long been pa.s.sed, and horses themselves are gradually giving place to steam.
Nevertheless, for short traffic-for transit to places where the snort of the steam engine will never be heard-for crooked ways inimical to machinery-for the convenience of those who like to be taken up and set down at their own doors-for the comfort of the nervous, whose firm belief is, that for the regular railway traveller a fatal smash is only a question of time, the London omnibus is a permanent inst.i.tution. It is difficult to perceive how people managed before it had an existence-when the fare from Highbury to the Bank was a shilling, and when the traveller for the journey from Highgate to London, along the dreary wastes of Holloway, paid no less than half-a-crown, and when even for that exorbitant sum, as it would now be deemed, you had no chance of a trip unless you had booked your place. In those times happy-yea, thrice happy-were the fathers of families living beyond the sound of Bow bells.
In these, how can a man help going to the bad, rise he ever so early, or sit he up ever so late, eat he ever so of the bread of carefulness, if mamma and daughters can ride from the furthest suburbs-from remote Peckham or airy Paddington-for the ridiculously small sum of sixpence, or even less, in a vehicle as luxuriously fitted up as a private carriage, to the shops so tempting to the female mind of the fashionable and dissipated West? Happily the evil is tending to cure itself. The ladies have acquired a mode of dressing which simply renders, in the majority of cases, the use of an omnibus an impossibility.
The date of the London omnibus is not ancient. Mr. Shillibeer, in his evidence before the Board of Health, stated that on July 7th, 1829, he started the first pair of omnibuses in the metropolis, from the Bank to the Yorkshire Stingo, New-road, copied from Paris, where omnibuses had been established in 1819, by M. Lafitte, the banker. Each omnibus was drawn by three horses abreast, had no outside pa.s.sengers, and carried twenty-two inside. Now the same distance is traversed by omnibuses carrying twenty-four pa.s.sengers-twelve inside and twelve out-and drawn by two horses, for sixpence. At one time the pa.s.sengers were provided with periodicals-a custom that would be quite superfluous when for a penny the traveller can get all the day"s news. Shillibeer"s first conductors were two sons of British naval officers, who were succeeded by young men in velvet liveries. Shillibeer met with the usual fate of those who labour for the public, and was ruined; but the system he introduced has expanded with the growth of London, and has reached a gigantic extent. One company alone-the General Omnibus Company-a company which has effected a thorough reform in the omnibus service, and deserves the thanks of the public, had, in the first half year of the year 1858, 602 omnibuses running, travelling in the half-year 5,815,036 miles, and carrying 16,800,000 pa.s.sengers, and pays Government a duty of 4,000 a month. As their yard in Highbury is the largest of the kind, let me conduct the reader thither.
On the main Islington road, not far from Highbury-corner, just opposite Union Chapel, there is a stable-yard, at the entrance of which there are generally two or three "buses changing horses; a board over it denotes that it is the stabling of the London General Omnibus Company. If we go up that yard we shall find that we are in a vast square, occupying nearly twenty acres of ground, and running as far back as the Liverpool-road.
To the right of us are enormous stables, each stable containing forty horses, all comfortably bedded down in straw, resting after their labours, and recruiting their strength for fresh ones. The horses do not work too hard, not more than three hours out of the twenty-four, and consume daily 18 lbs. of corn and 10 lbs. of chaff. To each omnibus-with the exception of the few drawn by three horses, which have a dozen-there are ten horses attached-which are never changed-which are all numbered, and the fullest particulars of which are entered in a book kept by the active and intelligent foreman of the yard. There is a horse-keeper to each set, who knows the times of his omnibus, and acts accordingly. In the middle of the yard is an immense shed, under which the omnibuses are drawn at night and washed and cleaned for the next day. This washing is done very easily. An enormous tank, holding 27,000 gallons of water, supplies several tubs, against which each omnibus is placed. There is a watchman, who comes on at nine at night and receives the omnibuses as they come in, and ranges them in the order in which, on the following morning, they will commence their respective exits. At half-past seven the first omnibus leaves the yard; the next follows eight minutes afterwards, and so on all the rest of the day. The omnibuses that commence early, finish their day"s work about nine. Those who go on duty later wait and bring home the pleasure-seekers returning from the theatres and exhibitions, and other places of public resort. For the accommodation of these latter cla.s.ses extra omnibuses are required. Some of the omnibuses, we must add, work early and late; but then they have a good rest in the middle of the day. It is a hard life, that of an omnibus-citizens are apt to get fat, and stones are very trying. At a considerable expense, every "bus must be done up and repainted and revarnished every two years. The original cost of each "bus is about 120. They are all built in the yard, of iron and good oak and ash. In one part of the premises there is a steam-engine at work, sawing wood and turning machinery. In another part there are "buses in all stages of development-here a frame, there a complete body, and there one with wheels waiting for the varnish, and paint and velvet cushions and plate gla.s.s, which shall make it differ from what it now is, as does Sappho
"At her toilette"s greasy task, With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask."
But let us return to the horses. We have spoken of those in good health and in active work. Some of them are really capital cattle; and I was shown a pair of chestnuts worth at least a hundred pounds. We will now proceed to the infirmary, just premising that in so enormous a yard every precaution is taken against disease. A man is constantly at work whitewashing the stables. This takes him four months, and by the time he has done he has to commence anew. The infirmary consists of a series of roomy, brick stables, very warm and snug, where the dumb animals are treated more tenderly than many Christians. In another part there is a large inclosure, more than half covered, but open on one side for the recovery of the horses, who, having nothing particularly the matter with them, but who have lived too fast or worked too much, require a month or two of rest. The aged and the incurable are drafted off and sent to the repository, and sold for a few pounds. Let me add, even these horses continue their philanthropic career. No longer engaged in conveying the verdant youth of the metropolis to business or pleasure, they drag greens from door to door. The shoeing forge is close by. The physicking and shoeing is taken by contract, by one man. He must have enough to do, as in this yard and the one close by are generally a thousand horses. The food, prepared by steam, is ground at the depot in Bell-lane.