Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays.
by Charles Kingsley.
WOMAN"S WORK IN A COUNTRY PARISH. {3}
I HAVE been asked to speak a few words to you on a lady"s work in a country parish. I shall confine myself rather to principles than to details; and the first principle which I would impress on you is, that we must all be just before we are generous. I must, indeed, speak plainly on this point. A woman"s first duties are to her own family, her own servants. Be not deceived: if anyone cannot rule her own household, she cannot rule the Church of G.o.d. If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom she is in contact all day long, she will not really sympathise with the poor whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe this is very great. It seems so much easier to women to do something for the poor, than for their own ladies" maids, and house-maids, and cooks. And why? Because they can treat the poor as _things_: but they _must_ treat their servants as persons. A lady can go into a poor cottage, lay down the law to the inhabitants, reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell them how to set things right, which, if she had the doing of them, I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they. She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a shilling, as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs: but with the servants it is not so. She knows their characters; and, what is more, they know hers; they know her private history, her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power, and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work with them, because, if she does, she will be forced to carry it out; and it cannot be cold, dry, perfunctory, official: it must be hearty, living, loving, personal. She must make them her friends; and perhaps she is afraid of doing that, for fear they should take liberties, as it is called-which they very probably will do, unless she keeps up a very high standard of self-restraint and earnestness in her own life-and that involves a great deal of trouble, and so she is tempted, when she wishes to do good, to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside, who, as she fancies, know nothing about her, and will never find out whether or not she acts up to the rules which she lays down for them. Be not deceived, I say, in this case also. Fancy not that they know nothing about you.
There is nothing secret which shall not be made manifest; and what you do in the closet is surely proclaimed (and often with exaggeration enough and to spare) on the house-top. These poor folks at your gate know well enough, through servants and tradesmen, what you are, how you treat your servants, how you pay your bills, what sort of temper you have; and they form a shrewd, hard estimate of your character, in the light of which they view all that you do and say to them; and believe me, that if you wish to do any real good to them, you must begin by doing good to those who lie still nearer to you than them. And believe me, too, that if you shrink from a hearty patriarchal sympathy with your own servants, because it would require too much personal human intercourse with them, you are like a man who, finding that he had not powder enough to fire off a pocket-pistol, should try to better matters by using the same quant.i.ty of ammunition in an eighty-four pound gun. For it is this human friendship, trust, affection, which is the very thing you have to employ towards the poor, and to call up in them. Clubs, societies, alms, lending libraries are but dead machinery, needful, perhaps, but, like the iron tube without the powder, unable to send the bullet forth one single inch; dead and useless lumber, without humanity; without the smile of the lip, the light of the eye, the tenderness of the voice, which makes the poor woman feel that a soul is speaking to her soul, a heart yearning after her heart; that she is not merely a _thing_ to be improved, but a sister to be made conscious of the divine bond of her sisterhood, and taught what she means when she repeats in her Creed, "I believe in the communion of saints."
This is my text, and my key-note-whatever else I may say to-day is but a carrying out into details of the one question, How may you go to these poor creatures as woman to woman?
Your next duties are to your husband"s or father"s servants and workmen.
It is said that a clergyman"s wife ought to consider the parish as _her_ flock as well as her husband"s. It may be so: I believe the dogma to be much overstated just now. But of a landlord"s, or employer"s wife (I am inclined to say, too, of an officer"s wife), such a doctrine is absolutely true, and cannot be overstated. A large proportion, therefore, of your parish work will be to influence the men of your family to do their duty by their dependants. You wish to cure the evils under which they labour. The greater proportion of these are in the hands of your men relatives. It is a mockery, for instance, in you to visit the fever-stricken cottage, while your husband leaves it in a state which breeds that fever. Your business is to go to him and say, "_Here is a wrong_; _right it_!" This, as many a beautiful Middle Age legend tells us, has been woman"s function in all uncivilised times; not merely to melt man"s heart to pity, but to awaken it to duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest: that if he will not repair the wrong by justice, she will, if possible (as in those old legends), by self-sacrifice. Be sure this method will conquer. Do but say: "If you will not new-roof that cottage, if you will not make that drain, I will.
I will not buy a new dress till it is done; I will sell the horse you gave me, p.a.w.n the bracelet you gave me, but the thing shall be done."
Let him see, I say, that you are in earnest, and he will feel that your message is a divine one, which he must obey for very shame and weariness, if for nothing else. This is in my eyes the second part of a woman"s parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind when you hear, as I trust you will, lectures in this place upon that _Sanitary Reform_, without which all efforts for the bettering of the ma.s.ses are in my eyes not only useless, but hypocritical.
I will suppose, then, that you are fulfilling home duties in self-restraint, and love, and in the fear of G.o.d. I will suppose that you are using all your woman"s influence on the mind of your family, in behalf of tenants and workmen; and I tell you frankly, that unless this be first done, you are paying a t.i.the of mint and anise, and neglecting common righteousness and mercy. But you wish to do more: you wish for personal contact with the poor round you, for the pure enjoyment of doing good to them with your own hands. How are you to set about it? First, there are clubs-clothing-clubs, shoe-clubs, maternal-clubs; all very good in their way. But do not fancy that they are the greater part of your parish work. Rather watch and fear lest they become subst.i.tutes for your real parish work; lest the bustle and amus.e.m.e.nt of playing at shopkeeper, or penny-collector, once a week, should blind you to your real power-your real treasure, by spending which you become all the richer. What you have to do is to enn.o.ble and purify the _womanhood_ of these poor women; to make them better daughters, sisters, wives, mothers: and all the clubs in the world will not do that; they are but palliatives of a great evil, which they do not touch; cloaks for almsgiving, clumsy means of eking out insufficient wages; at best, kindly contrivances for tricking into temporary thriftiness a degraded and reckless peasantry. Miserable, miserable state of things! out of which the longer I live I see less hope of escape, saving by an emigration, which shall drain us of all the healthy, strong, and brave among the lower cla.s.ses, and leave us, as a just punishment for our sins, only the cripple, the drunkard, and the beggar.
Yet these clubs _must_ be carried on. They make life a little more possible; they lighten hearts, if but for a moment; they inculcate habits of order and self-restraint, which may be useful when the poor man finds himself in Canada or Australia. And it is a cruel utilitarianism to refuse to palliate the symptoms because you cannot cure the disease itself. You will give opiates to the suffering, who must die nevertheless. Let him slip into his grave at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use these charitable societies, remembering all along what a fearful and humbling sign the necessity for them is of the diseased state of this England, as the sportula and universal almsgiving was of the decadence of Rome.
However, the work has to be done; and such as it is, it is especially fitted for young unmarried ladies. It requires no deep knowledge of human nature. It makes them aware of the amount of suffering and struggling which lies around them, without bringing them in that most undesirable contact with the coa.r.s.er forms of evil which house-visitation must do; and the mere business habits of accuracy and patience to which it compels them, are a valuable practical schooling for them themselves in after-life. It is tiresome and unsentimental drudgery, no doubt; but perhaps all the better training on that account. And, after all, the magic of sweetness, grace, and courtesy may shed a hallowing and humanising light over the meanest work, and the smile of G.o.d may spread from lip to lip, and the light of G.o.d from eye to eye, even between the giver and receiver of a penny, till the poor woman goes home, saying in her heart, "I have not only found the life of my hand-I have found a sister for time and for eternity."
But there is another field of parish usefulness which I cannot recommend too earnestly, and that is, the school. There you may work as hard as you will, and how you will-provided you do it in a loving, hearty, cheerful, _human_ way, playful and yet earnest; two qualities which, when they exist in their highest power, are sure to go together. I say, how you will. I am no pedant about schools; I care less what is taught than how it is taught. The merest rudiments of Christianity, the merest rudiments of popular instruction, are enough, provided they be given by lips which speak as if they believed what they said, and with a look which shows real love for the pupil. Manner is everything-matter a secondary consideration; for in matter, brain only speaks to brain; in manner, soul speaks to soul. If you want Christ"s lost-lambs really to believe that He died for them, you will do it better by one little act of interest and affection, than by making them learn by heart whole commentaries-even as Miss Nightingale has preached Christ crucified to those poor soldiers by acts of plain outward drudgery, more livingly, and really, and convincingly than she could have done by ten thousand sermons, and made many a n.o.ble lad, I doubt not, say in his heart, for the first time in his wild life, "I can believe now that Christ died for me, for here is one whom He has taught to die for me in like wise." And this blessed effect of school-work, remember, is not confined to the children. It goes home with them to the parents. The child becomes an object of interest and respect in their eyes, when they see it an object of interest and respect in yours. If they see that you look on it as an awful and glorious being, the child of G.o.d, the co-heir of Christ, they learn gradually to look on it in the same light. They become afraid and ashamed (and it is a n.o.ble fear and shame) to do and say before it what they used to do and say; afraid to ill-use it. It becomes to them a mysterious visitor (sad that it should be so, but true as sad) from a higher and purer sphere, who must be treated with something of courtesy and respect, who must even be asked to teach them something of its new knowledge; and the school, and the ladies" interest in the school, become to the degraded parents a living sign that those children"s angels do indeed behold the face of their Father which is in heaven.
Now, there is one thing in school-work which I wish to press on you; and that is, that you should not confine your work to the girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more, and who (paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and freely-_the boys_. I am not going to enter into the reasons _why_. I only entreat you to believe me, that by helping to educate the boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a cla.s.s (as I have seen done with admirable effect) of grown-up lads, you may influence for ever not only the happiness of your pupils, but of the girls whom they will hereafter marry. It will be a boon to your own s.e.x as well as to ours to teach them courtesy, self-restraint, reverence for physical weakness, admiration of tenderness and gentleness; and it is one which only a lady can bestow. Only by being accustomed in youth to converse with ladies, will the boy learn to treat hereafter his sweetheart or his wife like a gentleman. There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in the heart of every untutored clod; if it dies out in him (as it too often does), it were better for him, I often think, if he had never been born: but the only talisman which will keep it alive, much more develop it into its fulness, is friendly and revering intercourse with women of higher rank than himself, between whom and him there is a great and yet a blessed gulf fixed.
I have left to the last the most important subject of all; and that is, what is called "visiting the poor." It is an endless subject; if you go into details, you might write volumes on it. All I can do this afternoon is to keep to my own key-note, and say, Visit whom, when, and where you will; but let your visits be those of woman to woman. Consider to whom you go-to poor souls whose life, compared with yours, is one long malaise of body, and soul, and spirit-and do as you would be done by; instead of reproving and fault-finding, encourage. In G.o.d"s name, encourage. They scramble through life"s rocks, bogs, and thornbrakes, clumsily enough, and have many a fall, poor things! But why, in the name of a G.o.d of love and justice, is the lady, rolling along the smooth turnpike-road in her comfortable carriage, to be calling out all day long to the poor soul who drags on beside her over hedge and ditch, moss and moor, bare-footed and weary-hearted, with half-a-dozen children at her back: "You ought not to have fallen here; and it was very cowardly to lie down there; and it was your duty, as a mother, to have helped that child through the puddle; while, as for sleeping under that bush, it is most imprudent and inadmissible?" Why not encourage her, praise her, cheer her on her weary way by loving words, and keep your reproofs for yourself-even your advice; for _she_ does get on her way, after all, where _you_ could not travel a step forward; and she knows what she is about perhaps better than you do, and what she has to endure, and what G.o.d thinks of her life-journey. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy. But do not be a stranger to her. Be a sister to her. I do not ask you to take her up in your carriage. You cannot; perhaps it is good for her that you cannot. It is good sometimes for Lazarus that he is not fit to sit at Dives"s feast-good for him that he should receive his evil things in this life, and be comforted in the life to come. All I ask is, do to the poor soul as you would have her do to you in her place. Do not interrupt and vex her (for she is busy enough already) with remedies which she does not understand, for troubles which you do not understand. But speak comfortably to her, and say: "I cannot feel _with_ you, but I do feel _for_ you: I should enjoy helping you, but I do not know how-tell me. Tell me where the yoke galls; tell me why that forehead is grown old before its time: I may be able to ease the burden, to put fresh light into the eyes; and if not, still tell me, simply because I am a woman, and know the relief of pouring out my own soul into loving ears, even though in the depths of despair." Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, I am convinced that the only way to help these poor women humanly and really, is to begin by confessing to them that you do not know how to help them; to humble yourself to them, and to ask their counsel for the good of themselves and of their neighbours, instead of coming proudly to them, with nostrums ready compounded, as if a doctor should be so confident in his own knowledge of books and medicine as to give physic before asking the patient"s symptoms.
Therefore, I entreat you to bear in mind (for without this all visiting of the poor will be utterly void and useless), that you must regulate your conduct to them, and in their houses, even to the most minute particulars, by the very same rules which apply to persons of your own cla.s.s. Never let any woman say of you (thought fatal to all confidence, all influence!): "Yes, it is all very kind: but she does not behave to me as she would to one of her own quality." Piety, earnestness, affectionateness, eloquence-all may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a poor woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering her house, even at her own request, while she is at meals. She may decline to sit; she may beg you to come in, all the more reason for refusing utterly to obey her, because it shows that that very inward gulf between you and her still exists in her mind, which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with a lady. Woman"s heart is alike in all ranks, and the deepest sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last and least. We should not like anyone-no, not an angel from heaven, to come into our houses without knocking at the door, and say: "I hear you are very ill off-I will lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are very careless of money, I will take your accounts into my own hands;" and still less again: "Your son is a very bad, profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I intend to take him out of your hands and reform him myself." Neither do the poor like such unceremonious mercy, such untender tenderness, benevolence at horse-play, mistaking kicks for caresses. They do not like it, they will not respond to it, save in parishes which have been demoralised by officious and indiscriminate benevolence, and where the last remaining virtues of the poor, savage self-help and independence, have been exchanged (as I have too often seen them exchanged) for organised begging and hypocrisy.
I would that you would all read, ladies, and consider well the traits of an opposite character which have just come to light (to me, I am ashamed to say, for the first time) in the Biography of Sidney Smith. The love and admiration which that truly brave and loving man won from everyone, rich or poor, with whom he came in contact, seems to me to have arisen from the one fact, that without perhaps having any such conscious intention, he treated rich and poor, his own servants and the n.o.blemen his guests, alike, and _alike_ courteously, considerately, cheerfully, affectionately-so leaving a blessing and reaping a blessing wheresoever he went.
Approach, then, these poor women as sisters, and you will be able gradually to reverse the hard saying of which I made use just now: "Do not apply remedies which they do not understand, to diseases which you do not understand." Learn lovingly and patiently (aye, and reverently, for there is that in every human being which deserves reverence, and must be reverenced if we wish to understand it)-learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by that time they will have learnt to understand your remedies, and they will appreciate them. For you _have_ remedies. I do not undervalue your position. No man on earth is less inclined to undervalue the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments, manners-even physical beauty. All are talents from G.o.d, and I give G.o.d thanks when I see them possessed by any human being; for I know that they, too, can be used in His service, and brought to bear on the true emanc.i.p.ation of woman-her emanc.i.p.ation, not from man (as some foolish persons fancy), but from the devil, "the slanderer and divider" who divides her from man, and makes her live a life-long tragedy, which goes on in more cottages than in palaces-a vie a part, a vie incomprise-a life made up half of ill-usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited martyrdom, instead of being (as G.o.d intended) half of the human universe, a helpmeet for man, and the one bright spot which makes this world endurable.
Towards making her that, and so realising the primeval mission by every cottage hearth, each of you can do something; for each of you have some talent, power, knowledge, attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager"s wife has not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must be drawn by them alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ; for they are not given in His name, which is that boundless tenderness, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice, by which even the cup of cold water is a precious offering-as G.o.d grant your labour may be!
THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH. {21}
WHETHER the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if it seem probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil? How they can be, if not destroyed, at least arrested? These are questions worthy attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father and mother in these isles. I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay; and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every cla.s.s, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taught-the rudiments of it at least-in every school, college, and university.
We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived. They may have been able to say of themselves-as they do in a State paper of 1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude: "What comyn folk of all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have been fed on "great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared off the less fit, in every generation, princ.i.p.ally by infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of the strongest const.i.tutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.
At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first years of this century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the population. Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married, brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to live more or less civilised lives. An event, doubtless, for which G.o.d is to be thanked. A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new n.o.blenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that duty should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when our soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms. To murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the will of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.
The old order changeth, yielding place to the new, And G.o.d fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise. And it may do so thus:
The rapid increase of population during the first half of this century began at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted; namely, about the end of the long French war. There may have been periods of exhaustion, at least in England, before that. There may have been one here, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the Crusades; and another after the Wars of the Roses. There was certainly a period of severe exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth"s reign, due both to the long Spanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced from abroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the national weakness which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts. But after none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become more easy; or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of a colonial empire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings and a fresh supply of food for them. Britain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was in an altogether new social situation.
At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since the beginning of the war with Spain in 1739-often snubbed as the "war about Jenkins"s ear"-but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as it was one of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once famous "forty fine harvests" of the eighteenth century, the British people, from the gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of the mightiest and most capable races which the world has ever seen, comparable best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capable period. That, at least, their works testify. They created-as far as man can be said to create anything-the British Empire. They won for us our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the world. But at what a cost!
Their bones are scattered far and wide, By mount, and stream, and sea.
Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle only, but worse destroyers than shot and sh.e.l.l-fatigue and disease-had been carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest young men, each of whom represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried at home, or married, in default, to a less able man. The strongest went to the war; each who fell left a weaklier man to continue the race; while of those who did not fall, too many returned with tainted and weakened const.i.tutions, to injure, it may be, generations yet unborn. The middle cla.s.ses, being mostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this very day. One cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercial cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-aged, whose whole bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle cla.s.s is anything but exhausted. In Liverpool, especially, I have been much struck not only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily size of the mercantile men on "Change. But it must be remembered always, first, that these men are the very elite of their cla.s.s; the cleverest men; the men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost all of them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the st.u.r.dy young volunteer who serves in the haberdasher"s shop, country-bred men; and that the question is, not what they are like now, but what their children and grandchildren, especially the fine young volunteer"s, will be like? A very serious question I hold that to be, and for this reason.
War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence. For instead of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn. And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised, humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same ill effect.
In the first place, tens of thousands-who knows it not?-lead sedentary and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a fraction of their bodies as of their minds. And all this in dwellings, workshops, what not?-the influences, the very atmosphere of which tend not to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under the feeling of unhealth and depression. And that such a life must tell upon their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar circ.u.mstances, upon their offspring"s offspring, till a whole population may become permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that walks through the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover, and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation has to deal-we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who-looking at them from a merely physical point of view-are most fit to die. Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanitary reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has-so I am told-increased the average length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power, who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny.
Do I say that we ought not to save these people if we can? G.o.d forbid.
The weakly, the diseased whether infant or adult, is here on earth; a British citizen; no more responsible for his own weakness than for his own existence. Society, that is, in plain English, we and our ancestors, are responsible for both; and we must fulfil the duty, and keep him in life; and, if we can, heal, strengthen, develop him to the utmost; and make the best of that which "fate and our own deservings" have given us to deal with. I do not speak of higher motives still; motives which, to every minister of religion, must be paramount and awful. I speak merely of physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience of every man-the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or woman to save life, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.
But it is palpable that in doing so we must, year by year, preserve a large percentage of weakly persons who, marrying freely in their own cla.s.s, must produce weaklier children, and they weaklier children still.
Must, did I say? There are those who are of opinion-and I, after watching and comparing the histories of many families, indeed of every one with whom I have come in contact for now five-and-thirty years, in town and country, can only fear that their opinion is but too well founded on fact-that in the great majority of cases, in all cla.s.ses whatsoever, the children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again, to their grand-parents of the beginning of the century; and that this degrading process goes on most surely and most rapidly in our large towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns, and therefore in proportion to the number of generations during which the degrading influences have been at work.
This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as the years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common sense. For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his life.
Society and British human nature are what they have become by the indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the one than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by theories than we can by coercion-to which, by-the-bye, almost all these theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay. We must teach men to mend their own matters, of their own reason, and their own free-will. We must teach them that they are the arbiters of their own destinies; and, to a fearfully large degree, of their children"s destinies after them. We must teach them not merely that they ought to be free, but that they are free, whether they know it or not, for good and for evil. And we must do that in this case, by teaching them sound practical science; the science of physiology as applied to health. So, and so only, can we cheek-I do not say stop entirely-though I believe even that to be ideally possible; but at least cheek the process of degradation which I believe to be surely going on, not merely in these islands, but in every civilised country in the world, in proportion to its civilisation.
It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those laws of hereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many marriages disastrous to generations yet unborn. But much valuable light has been thrown on this most mysterious and most important subject during the last few years. That light-and I thank G.o.d for it-is widening and deepening rapidly. And I doubt not that in a generation or two more, enough will be known to be thrown into the shape of practical and provable rules; and that, if not a public opinion, yet at least, what is more useful far, a widespread private opinion will grow up, especially among educated women, which will prevent many a tragedy and save many a life.
But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than enough, is known already, to be applied safely and easily by any adults, however unlearned, to the preservation not only of their own health, but of that of their children.
The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure air and pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each tends to make bone, fat, or muscle, provided only-provided only-that the food be unadulterated; the value of various kinds of clothing, and physical exercise, of a free and equal development of the brain power, without undue overstrain in any one direction; in one word, the method of producing, as far as possible, the mentem sanam in corpore sano, and the wonderful and blessed effects of such obedience to those laws of nature, which are nothing but the good will of G.o.d expressed in facts-their wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs of hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system-all this is known; known as fully and clearly as any human knowledge need be known; it is written in dozens of popular books and pamphlets. And why should this divine voice, which cries to man, tending to sink into effeminate barbarism through his own hasty and partial civilisation: "It is not too late. For your bodies, as for your spirits, there is an upward, as well as a downward path. You, or if not you, at least the children whom you have brought into the world, for whom you toil, for whom you h.o.a.rd, for whom you pray, for whom you would give your lives,-they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and have all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give."-Ah, why is this divine voice now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man regarding her?
I appeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can never be, into the stern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and self-sacrifice;-they who bring forth children, weep over children, slave for children, and, if they have none of their own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the s.e.xless bee, for the children of others-Let them say, shall this thing be?
Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly. That I speak neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well.
Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priest of thirty years" standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and I have in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the sense of the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of the cure.
Why, then-to come to practical suggestions-should there not be opened in every great town in these realms a public school of health? It might connect itself with-I hold that it should form an integral part of-some existing educational inst.i.tute. But it should at least give practical lectures, for fees small enough to put them within the reach of any respectable man or woman, however poor, I cannot but hope that such schools of health, if opened in the great manufacturing towns of England and Scotland, and, indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtain pupils in plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what they hear. The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomed by their own trades to the application of scientific laws. To them, therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a fresh set of facts, would have nothing strange in it. They have already something of that inductive habit of mind which is the groundwork of all rational understanding or action. They would not turn the deaf and contemptuous ear with which the savage and the superst.i.tious receive the revelation of nature"s mysteries. Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, the experiment be tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, as supplementary to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I am happy to say, becoming more and more common? Why should not people be taught-they are already being taught at Birmingham-something about the tissues of the body, their structure and uses, the circulation of the blood, respiration, chemical changes in the air respired, amount breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption, secretion, structure of the nervous system-in fact, be taught something of how their own bodies are made and how they work? Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, in some more civilised age and country, be held a necessary element in the school course of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, and arithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that "technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely, the technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well.
But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition of health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseases specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk, exposed to an artificial mode of life. Surely young men and women should be taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like.
They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, man or woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to his or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about those questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of their children may every day depend? I say-women as well as men. I should have said women rather than men. For it is the women who have the ordering of the household, the bringing up of the children; the women who bide at home, while the men are away, it may be at the other end of the earth.
And if any say, as they have a right to say-"But these are subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;" I rejoin-of course not, unless they are taught by women-by women, of course, duly educated and legally qualified. Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very properly object to her hearing from almost any man. This is one of the main reasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training of women for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in my mind, all possible objections to such a movement. And now, thank G.o.d, we are seeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save in secret-the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which she was thrust out during the sixteenth century.
I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society, {36} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers, announces a "Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology and Hygiene," by a lady, to which I am also most happy to see, governesses are admitted at half-fees. Alas! how much misery, disease, and even death might have been prevented, had governesses been taught such matters thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well. May the day soon come when there will be educated women enough to give such lectures throughout these realms, to rich as well as poor-for the rich, strange to say, need them often as much as the poor do-and that we may live to see, in every great town, health cla.s.ses for women as well as for men, sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught, not only to take care of themselves and of their families, but to exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.
There may be those who would answer-or rather, there would certainly have been those who would have so answered thirty years ago, before the so-called materialism of advanced science had taught us some practical wisdom about education, and reminded people that they have bodies as well as minds and souls-"You say, we are likely to grow weaklier, unhealthier.
And if it were so, what matter? Mind makes the man, not body. We do not want our children to be stupid giants and bravos; but clever, able, highly educated, however weakly Providence or the laws of nature may have chosen to make them. Let them overstrain their brains a little; let them contract their chests, and injure their digestion and their eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books. Intellect is what we want.
Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the world. We would rather see our son a genius than a mere athlete." Well: and so would I. But what if intellect alone does not even make money, save as Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, Sampson Bra.s.s, and Montagu Tigg were wont to make it, unless backed by an able, enduring, healthy physique, such as I have seen, almost without exception, in those successful men of business whom I have had the honour and the pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, or what is now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the great majority of cases, have the _corpus sanem_ if we want the _mentem sanem_; and healthy bodies are the only trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Which is cause and which is effect, I shall not stay to debate here. But wherever we find a population generally weakly, stunted, scrofulous, we find in them a corresponding type of brain, which cannot be trusted to do good work; which is capable more or less of madness, whether solitary or epidemic.
It may be very active; it may be very quick at catching at new and grand ideas-all the more quick, perhaps, on account of its own secret malaise and self-discontent; but it will be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake capacity of talk for capacity of action, excitement for earnestness, virulence for force, and, too often; cruelty for justice. It will lose manful independence, individuality, originality; and when men act, they will act from the consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a hedge, leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be brave, and swaying about in mobs and ma.s.ses. These were the intellectual weaknesses which, as I read history, followed on physical degradation in Imperial Rome, in Alexandria, in Byzantium. Have we not seen them reappear, under fearful forms, in Paris but the other day?
I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and shall hold, to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me to blame and to judge; because it tells me that these defects are mainly physical; that those who exhibit them are mainly to be pitied, as victims of the sins or ignorance of their forefathers.