Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

Some would nowadays use that story merely to prove that the monkey’s nature and the man’s nature are, after all, one and the same.  Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man, as there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature—of all which four I see every day too much.  The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin than people fancy.  Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the ox, and the lion—and not unwisely—as the three highest types of human capacity.  The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their master’s death.  The animals and monsters of Greek myth—like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable—glide insensibly into speech and reason.  Birds—the most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a poet—are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man.  The Norseman—the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history can tell us—was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native forests that he had “ten men’s strength and eleven men’s wisdom.”  How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem—that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower animals?  I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan:

Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the monkey’s heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some “divine afflatus”—an expression quite as philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read nowadays—and had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his.  But that theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.

And now, if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I must protest against the use of the word “sacrifice” which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an “enormous sacrifice of life;” an expression which means merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever; no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance, cupidity, or mismanagement.

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, “In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a martyr?” answered, “In the same sense that a man might be said to be a martyr to the gout.”

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words “hero.” “heroism,” “heroic,” which is becoming too common, namely, applying them to mere courage.  We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more than one beside, from the French press.  I trust that we shall neither accept it, nor the temper which inspires it.  It may be convenient for those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it, into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as this: “Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous: therefore every Frenchman is a hero.”  But we, who have been trained at once in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts, and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope, not to trifle thus with that potent and awful engine—human speech.  We shall eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the word “moral,” which has crept from the French press now and then, not only into our own press, but into the writings of some of our military men, who, as Englishmen, should have known better.  We were told again and again, during the late war, that the moral effect of such a success had been great; that the morale of the troops was excellent; or again, that the morale of the troops had suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised.  But when one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, one discovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which they expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by the animal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal passion of fear.  This abuse of the word “moral” has crossed, I am sorry to say, the Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must not imitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, he being unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on the occasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised.  We, I hope, shall confine the word “demoralisation,” as our generals of the last century would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including, of course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by the word “heroism,” in like manner, whether applied to a soldier or to any human being, not mere courage, not the mere doing of duty, but the doing of something beyond duty; something which is not in the bond; some spontaneous and unexpected act of self-devotion.

I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to this sound distinction in her golden little book of “Golden Deeds,” and said, “Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier’s life.  It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional brightness, of a golden deed.”

I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience to duty and express heroism.  I know also that it would be both invidious and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to draw that line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deeds which I could not do myself; but—to give an instance or two of what I mean:

To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic.  It is simple duty.  To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to be gained thereby for one’s own side.  Then, indeed, it rises towards, if not into, the heroism of self-sacrifice.

Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct of those Spartans at Thermopylæ, when they sat “combing their yellow hair for death” on the sea-shore?  They devoted themselves to hopeless destruction; but why?  They felt—I must believe that, for they behaved as if they felt—that on them the destinies of the Western World might hang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a mightier and a nobler man than they.  And they did their work.  They produced, if you will, a “moral” effect, which has lasted even to this very day.  They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian host, but of the whole Persian empire.  They made the event of that war certain, and the victories of Salamis and Platæa comparatively easy.  They made Alexander’s conquest of the East, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole world.

They did not, of course, foresee all this.  No great or inspired man can foresee all the consequences of his deeds; but these men were, as I hold inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty stake for which they played; and to count their lives worthless, if Sparta had sent them thither to help in that great game.

Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German cavalry regiments who, in the battle of Mars-la-Tour, were bidden to hurl themselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the unbroken French infantry, and went to almost certain death, over the corpses of their comrades, on and in and through, reeling man over horse, horse over man, and clung like bull-dogs to their work, and would hardly leave, even at the bugle-call, till in one regiment thirteen officers out of nineteen were killed or wounded?  And why?

Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a quarter of an hour.  A respite must be gained for the exhausted Third Corps.  And how much might be done, even in a quarter of an hour, by men who knew when, and where, and why to die!  Who will refuse the name of heroes to these men?  And yet they, probably, would have utterly declined the honour.  They had but done that which was in the bond.  They were but obeying orders after all.  As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic persons: “‘I have but done that which it was my duty to do,’ is the natural answer of those capable of such actions.  They have been constrained to them by duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act otherwise; and did not once think of themselves in the matter at all.”

These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: its simplicity.  Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected, boastful, wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic character of a deed; because all these faults spring out of self.  On the other hand, wherever you find a perfectly simple, frank, unconscious character, there you have the possibility, at least, of heroic action.  For it is nobler far to do the most commonplace duty in the household, or behind the counter, with a single eye to duty, simply because it must be done—nobler far, I say, than to go out of your way to attempt a brilliant deed, with a double mind, and saying to yourself not only—“This will be a brilliant deed,” but also—“and it will pay me, or raise me, or set me off, into the bargain.”  Heroism knows no “into the bargain.”  And therefore, again, I must protest against applying the word “heroic” to any deeds, however charitable, however toilsome, however dangerous, performed for the sake of what certain French ladies, I am told, call “faire son salut”—saving one’s soul in the world to come.  I do not mean to judge.  Other and quite unselfish motives may be, and doubtless often are, mixed up with that selfish one: womanly pity and tenderness; love for, and desire to imitate, a certain Incarnate ideal of self-sacrifice, who is at once human and divine.  But that motive of saving the soul, which is too often openly proposed and proffered, is utterly unheroic.  The desire to escape pains and penalties hereafter by pains and penalties here; the balance of present loss against future gain—what is this but selfishness extended out of this world into eternity?  “Not worldliness,” indeed, as a satirist once said with bitter truth, “but other-worldliness.”

Moreover—and the young and the enthusiastic should also bear this in mind—though heroism means the going beyond the limits of strict duty, it never means the going out of the path of strict duty.  If it is your duty to go to London, go thither: you may go as much farther as you choose after that.  But you must go to London first.  Do your duty first; it will be time after that to talk of being heroic.

And therefore one must seriously warn the young, lest they mistake for heroism and self-sacrifice what is merely pride and self-will, discontent with the relations by which God has bound them, and the circumstances which God has appointed for them.  I have known girls think they were doing a fine thing by leaving uncongenial parents or disagreeable sisters, and cutting out for themselves, as they fancied, a more useful and elevated line of life than that of mere home duties; while, after all, poor things, they were only saying, with the Pharisees of old, “Corban, it is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;” and in the name of God, neglecting the command of God to honour their father and mother.

There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave their children unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are spending their money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of their own.  It is ill to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs; or even to the angels.  It is ill, I say, trying to make presents to God, before we have tried to pay our debts to God.  The first duty of every man is to the wife whom he has married, and to the children whom she has brought into the world; and to neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the conceit that a man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will actually allow him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man’s invaluable services.  Be sure that every motive which comes not from the single eye, every motive which springs from self, is by its very essence unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as it may.

But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of approbation—the desire for the love and respect of our fellow-men.  That must not be excluded from the list of heroic motives.  I know that it is, or may be proved to be, by victorious analysis, an emotion common to us and the lower animals.  And yet no man excludes it less than that true hero, St. Paul.

If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of whom I spoke just now, knew that their memories would be wept over and worshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would become watchwords to children in their fatherland, what is that to us, save that it should make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had that thought with them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy, and death more sweet?

And yet—and yet—is not the highest heroism that which is free even from the approbation of our fellowmen, even from the approbation of the best and wisest?  The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in secret?  The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber?  The Godlike lives lived in obscurity?—a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, and entreat to be left alone with God.  True, they cannot always hide.  They must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the golden lesson.  But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect and womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces the woman transcends the man, that it would hide if it could.

And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the golden deeds of women in Miss Yonge’s book—it was a pleasant thought to me, that I could say to myself—Ah! yes.  These heroines are known, and their fame flies through the mouths of men.  But if so, how many thousands of heroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, of whom we shall never know.  But still they are there.  They sow in secret the seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not that we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble, ill-dressed woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance.  She who nurses a bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse.  She who spends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless brother, on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend.  She who—But why go on with the long list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comes in contact daily—and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of a clergyman’s high calling that he does come in contact with them—why go on, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism—the commonest, and yet the least remembered of all—namely, the heroism of an average mother?  Ah, when I think of that last broad fact, I gather hope again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more—because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, at the managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands by chicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how to draw—would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she would find some more chivalrous employment for his or her pen—for were they not, too, born of woman?—I only say to myself—having had always a secret fondness for poor Rebecca, though I love Esau more than Jacob—Let the poor thing alone.  With pain she brought these girls into the world.  With pain she educated them according to her light.  With pain she is trying to obtain for them the highest earthly blessing of which she can conceive, namely, to be well married; and if in doing that last, she manœuvres a little, commits a few basenesses, even tells a few untruths, what does all that come to, save this—that in the confused intensity of her motherly self-sacrifice, she will sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscience and her own credit?  We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-driven soul when we meet her in society; our duty, both as Christians and ladies and gentlemen, seems to me to be—to do for her something very different indeed.

But to return.  Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which are being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right to say, what we are all tempted to say at times: “How can I be heroic?  This is no heroic age, setting me heroic examples.  We are growing more and more comfortable, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, money-making; more and more utilitarian; more and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals, in our religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more and more of loss and gain.  I am born into an unheroic time.  You must not ask me to become heroic in it.”

I do not deny that it is more difficult to be heroic, while circumstances are unheroic round us.  We are all too apt to be the puppets of circumstances; all too apt to follow the fashion; all too apt, like so many minnows, to take our colour from the ground on which we lie, in hopes, like them, of comfortable concealment, lest the new tyrant deity, called Public Opinion, should spy us out, and, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, cast us into a burning fiery furnace—which public opinion can make very hot—for daring to worship any god or man save the will of the temporary majority.

Yes, it is difficult to be anything but poor, mean, insufficient, imperfect people, as like each other as so many sheep; and, like so many sheep, having no will or character of our own, but rushing altogether blindly over the same gap, in foolish fear of the same dog, who, after all, dare not bite us; and so it always was and always will be.

For the third time I say,

Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.

But, nevertheless, any man or woman who will, in any age and under any circumstances, can live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences.

If any ask proof of this, I shall ask them, in return, to read two novels; novels, indeed, but, in their method and their moral, partaking of that heroic and ideal element, which will make them live, I trust, long after thousands of mere novels have returned to their native dust.  I mean Miss Muloch’s “John Halifax, Gentleman,” and Mr. Thackeray’s “Esmond,” two books which no man or woman ought to read without being the nobler for them.

“John Halifax, Gentleman,” is simply the history of a poor young clerk, who rises to be a wealthy mill-owner in the manufacturing districts, in the early part of this century.  But he contrives to be an heroic and ideal clerk, and an heroic and ideal mill-owner; and that without doing anything which the world would call heroic or ideal, or in anywise stepping out of his sphere, minding simply his own business, and doing the duty which lies nearest him.  And how?  By getting into his head from youth the strangest notion, that in whatever station or business he may be, he can always be what he considers a gentleman; and that if he only behaves like a gentleman, all must go right at last.  A beautiful book.  As I said before, somewhat of an heroic and ideal book.  A book which did me good when first I read it; which ought to do any young man good who will read it, and then try to be, like John Halifax, a gentleman, whether in the shop, the counting-house, the bank, or the manufactory.

The other—an even more striking instance of the possibility, at least, of heroism anywhere and everywhere—is Mr. Thackeray’s “Esmond.”  On the meaning of that book I can speak with authority.  For my dear and regretted friend told me himself that my interpretation of it was the true one; that this was the lesson which he meant men to learn therefrom.

Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in a coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age.  He is—and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray’s genius is shown—altogether a man of his own age.  He is not a sixteenth-century or a nineteenth-century man born out of time.  His information, his politics, his religion, are no higher than of those round him.  His manners, his views of human life, his very prejudices and faults, are those of his age.  The temptations which he conquers are just those under which the men around him fall.  But how does he conquer them?  By holding fast throughout to honour, duty, virtue.  Thus, and thus alone, he becomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-century hero.  This was what Mr. Thackeray meant—for he told me so himself, I say—that it was possible, even in England’s lowest and foulest times, to be a gentleman and a hero, if a man would but be true to the light within him.

But I will go farther.  I will go from ideal fiction to actual, and yet ideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most unheroic age which the civilised world ever saw was also the most heroic; that the spirit of man triumphed most utterly over his circumstances at the very moment when those circumstances were most against him.

How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest sense of that word.  The fact of his having done so is matter of history.  Shall I solve my own riddle?

Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs?  Is there a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage—rather say, a whole heaven—higher than before; and that wherever the tale of their great deeds spread, men accepted, even if they did not copy, those martyrs as ideal specimens of the human race, till they were actually worshipped by succeeding generations, wrongly, it may be, but pardonably, as a choir of lesser deities?

But is there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national life dying, or dead around them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very shame—cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadian simplicity and innocence?  When I read Petronius and Juvenal, and recollect that they were the contemporaries of the Apostles; when—to give an instance which scholars, and perhaps, happily, only scholars, can appreciate—I glance once more at Trimalchio’s feast, and remember that within a mile of that feast St. Paul may have been preaching to a Christian congregation, some of whom—for St. Paul makes no secret of that strange fact—may have been, ere their conversion, partakers in just such vulgar and bestial orgies as those which were going on in the rich freedman’s halls; after that, I say, I can put no limit to the possibility of man’s becoming heroic, even though he be surrounded by a hell on earth; no limit to the capacities of any human being to form for himself or herself a high and pure ideal of human character; and, without “playing fantastic tricks before high heaven,” to carry out that ideal in every-day life; and in the most commonplace circumstances, and the most menial occupations, to live worthy of—as I conceive—our heavenly birthright, and to imitate the heroes, who were the kinsmen of the gods.

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

Speech in behalf of Ladies’ Sanitary Association. [11 - Delivered at St. James’s Hall, London, 1859.]

Let me begin by asking the ladies who are interesting themselves in this good work, whether they have really considered what they are about to do in carrying out their own plans?  Are they aware that if their Society really succeeds, they will produce a very serious, some would think a very dangerous, change in the state of this nation?  Are they aware that they would probably save the lives of some thirty or forty per cent. of the children who are born in England, and that therefore they would cause the subjects of Queen Victoria to increase at a very far more rapid rate than they do now?  And are they aware that some very wise men inform us that England is already over-peopled, and that it is an exceedingly puzzling question where we shall soon be able to find work or food for our masses, so rapidly do they increase already, in spite of the thirty or forty per cent. which kind Nature carries off yearly before they are five years old?  Have they considered what they are to do with all those children whom they are going to save alive?  That has to be thought of; and if they really do believe, with some political economists, that over-population is a possibility to a country which has the greatest colonial empire that the world has ever seen; then I think they had better stop in their course, and let the children die, as they have been in the habit of dying.

But if, on the other hand, it seems to them, as I confess it does to me, that the most precious thing in the world is a human being; that the lowest, and poorest, and the most degraded of human beings is better than all the dumb animals in the world; that there is an infinite, priceless capability in that creature, fallen as it may be; a capability of virtue, and of social and industrial use, which, if it is taken in time, may be developed up to a pitch, of which at first sight the child gives no hint whatsoever; if they believe again, that of all races upon earth now, the English race is probably the finest, and that it gives not the slightest sign whatever of exhaustion; that it seems to be on the whole a young race, and to have very great capabilities in it which have not yet been developed, and above all, the most marvellous capability of adapting itself to every sort of climate and every form of life, which any race, except the old Roman, ever has had in the world; if they consider with me that it is worth the while of political economists and social philosophers to look at the map, and see that about four-fifths of the globe cannot be said as yet to be in anywise inhabited or cultivated, or in the state into which men could put it by a fair supply of population, and industry, and human intellect: then, perhaps, they may think with me that it is a duty, one of the noblest of duties, to help the increase of the English race as much as possible, and to see that every child that is born into this great nation of England be developed to the highest pitch to which we can develop him in physical strength and in beauty, as well as in intellect and in virtue.  And then, in that light, it does seem to me, that this Institution—small now, but I do hope some day to become great and to become the mother institution of many and valuable children—is one of the noblest, most right-minded, straightforward, and practical conceptions that I have come across for some years.

We all know the difficulties of sanitary legislation.  One looks at them at times almost with despair.  I have my own reasons, with which I will not trouble this meeting, for looking on them with more despair than ever: not on account of the government of the time, or any possible government that could come to England, but on account of the peculiar class of persons in whom the ownership of the small houses has become more and more vested, and who are becoming more and more, I had almost said, the arbiters of the popular opinion, and of every election of parliament.  However, that is no business of ours here; that must be settled somewhere else; and a fearfully long time, it seems to me, it will be before it is settled.  But, in the meantime, what legislation cannot do, I believe private help, and, above all, woman’s help, can do even better.  It can do this; it can improve the condition of the working man: and not only of him; I must speak also of the middle classes, of the men who own the house in which the working man lives.  I must speak, too, of the wealthy tradesman; I must speak—it is a sad thing to have to say it—of our own class as well as of others.  Sanitary reform, as it is called, or, in plain English, the art of health, is so very recent a discovery, as all true physical science is, that we ourselves and our own class know very little about it, and practise it very little.  And this society, I do hope, will bear in mind that it is not simply to seek the working man, not only to go into the foul alley: but it is to go to the door of the farmer, to the door of the shopkeeper, aye, to the door of ladies and gentlemen of the same rank as ourselves.  Women can do in that work what men cannot do.  The private correspondence, private conversation, private example, of ladies, above all of married women, of mothers of families, may do what no legislation can do.  I am struck more and more with the amount of disease and death I see around me in all classes, which no sanitary legislation whatsoever could touch, unless you had a complete house-to-house visitation by some government officer, with powers to enter every dwelling, to drain it, and ventilate it; and not only that, but to regulate the clothes and the diet of every inhabitant, and that among all ranks.  I can conceive of nothing short of that, which would be absurd and impossible, and would also be most harmful morally, which would stop the present amount of disease and death which I see around me, without some such private exertion on the part of women, above all of mothers, as I do hope will spring from this institution more and more.

I see this, that three persons out of every four are utterly unaware of the general causes of their own ill-health, and of the ill-health of their children.  They talk of their “afflictions,” and their “misfortunes;” and, if they be pious people, they talk of “the will of God,” and of “the visitation of God.”  I do not like to trench upon those matters here; but when I read in my book and in your book, “that it is not the will of our Father in Heaven that one of these little ones should perish,” it has come to my mind sometimes with very great strength that that may have a physical application as well as a spiritual one; and that the Father in Heaven who does not wish the child’s soul to die, may possibly have created that child’s body for the purpose of its not dying except in a good old age.  For not only in the lower class, but in the middle and upper classes, when one sees an unhealthy family, then in three cases out of four, if one will take time, trouble, and care enough, one can, with the help of the doctor, who has been attending them, run the evil home to a very different cause than the will of God; and that is, to stupid neglect, stupid ignorance, or what is just as bad, stupid indulgence.

Now, I do believe that if those tracts which you are publishing, which I have read and of which I cannot speak too highly, are spread over the length and breadth of the land, and if women—clergymen’s wives, the wives of manufacturers and of great employers, district visitors and schoolmistresses, have these books put into their hands, and are persuaded to spread them, and to enforce them, by their own example and by their own counsel—that then, in the course of a few years, this system being thoroughly carried out, you would see a sensible and large increase in the rate of population.  When you have saved your children alive, then you must settle what to do with them.  But a living dog is better than a dead lion; I would rather have the living child, and let it take its chance, than let it return to God—wasted.  O! it is a distressing thing to see children die.  God gives the most beautiful and precious thing that earth can have, and we just take it and cast it away; we toss our pearls upon the dunghill and leave them.  A dying child is to me one of the most dreadful sights in the world.  A dying man, a man dying on the field of battle—that is a small sight; he has taken his chance; he is doing his duty; he has had his excitement; he has had his glory, if that will be any consolation to him; if he is a wise man, he has the feeling that he is dying for his country and his queen: and that is, and ought to be, enough for him.  I am not horrified or shocked at the sight of the man who dies on the field of battle; let him die so.  It does not horrify or shock me, again, to see a man dying in a good old age, even though the last struggle be painful, as it too often is.  But it does shock me, it does make me feel that the world is indeed out of joint, to see a child die.  I believe it to be a priceless boon to the child to have lived for a week, or a day: but oh, what has God given to this thankless earth, and what has the earth thrown away; and in nine cases out of ten, from its own neglect and carelessness!  What that boy might have been, what he might have done as an Englishman, if he could have lived and grown up healthy and strong!  And I entreat you to bear this in mind, that it is not as if our lower or our middle classes were not worth saving: bear in mind that the physical beauty, strength, intellectual power of the middle classes—the shopkeeping class, the farming class, down to the lowest working class—whenever you give them a fair chance, whenever you give them fair food and air, and physical education of any kind, prove them to be the finest race in Europe.  Not merely the aristocracy, splendid race as they are, but down and down and down to the lowest labouring man, to the navigator—why, there is not such a body of men in Europe as our navigators; and no body of men perhaps have had a worse chance of growing to be what they are; and yet see what they have done!  See the magnificent men they become, in spite of all that is against them, dragging them down, tending to give them rickets and consumption, and all the miserable diseases which children contract; see what men they are, and then conceive what they might be!  It has been said, again and again, that there are no more beautiful race of women in Europe than the wives and daughters of our London shopkeepers; and yet there are few races of people who lead a life more in opposition to all rules of hygiene.  But, in spite of all that, so wonderful is the vitality of the English race, they are what they are; and therefore we have the finest material to work upon that people ever had.  And, therefore, again, we have the less excuse if we do allow English people to grow up puny, stunted, and diseased.

Let me refer again to that word that I used; death—the amount of death.  I really believe there are hundreds of good and kind people who would take up this subject with their whole heart and soul if they were aware of the magnitude of the evil.  Lord Shaftesbury told you just now that there were one hundred thousand preventable deaths in England every year.  So it is.  We talk of the loss of human life in war.  We are the fools of smoke and noise; because there are cannon-balls, forsooth, and swords and red coats; and because it costs a great deal of money, and makes a great deal of talk in the papers, we think: What so terrible as war?  I will tell you what is ten times, and ten thousand times, more terrible than war, and that is outraged Nature.  War, we are discovering now, is the clumsiest and most expensive of all games; we are finding that if you wish to commit an act of cruelty and folly, the most costly one that you can commit is to contrive to shoot your fellow-men in war.  So it is; and thank God that so it is; but Nature, insidious, inexpensive, silent, sends no roar of cannon, no glitter of arms to do her work; she gives no warning note of preparation; she has no protocols, nor any diplomatic advances, whereby she warns her enemy that war is coming.  Silently, I say, and insidiously she goes forth; no! she does not even go forth; she does not step out of her path; but quietly, by the very same means by which she makes alive, she puts to death; and so avenges herself of those who have rebelled against her.  By the very same laws by which every blade of grass grows, and every insect springs to life in the sunbeam, she kills, and kills, and kills, and is never tired of killing; till she has taught man the terrible lesson he is so slow to learn, that, Nature is only conquered by obeying her.

And bear in mind one thing more.  Man has his courtesies of war, and his chivalries of war; he does not strike the unarmed man; he spares the woman and the child.  But Nature is as fierce when she is offended, as she is bounteous and kind when she is obeyed.  She spares neither woman nor child.  She has no pity; for some awful, but most good reason, she is not allowed to have any pity.  Silently she strikes the sleeping babe, with as little remorse as she would strike the strong man, with the spade or the musket in his hand.  Ah! would to God that some man had the pictorial eloquence to put before the mothers of England the mass of preventable suffering, the mass of preventable agony of mind and body, which exists in England year after year; and would that some man had the logical eloquence to make them understand that it is in their power, in the power of the mothers and wives of the higher class, I will not say to stop it all—God only knows that—but to stop, as I believe, three-fourths of it.

It is in the power, I believe, of any woman in this room to save three or four lives—human lives—during the next six months.  It is in your power, ladies; and it is so easy.  You might save several lives apiece, if you choose, without, I believe, interfering with your daily business, or with your daily pleasure; or, if you choose, with your daily frivolities, in any way whatsoever.  Let me ask, then, those who are here, and who have not yet laid these things to heart: Will you let this meeting to-day be a mere passing matter of two or three hours’ interest, which you may go away and forget for the next book or the next amusement?  Or will you be in earnest?  Will you learn—I say it openly—from the noble chairman, how easy it is to be in earnest in life; how every one of you, amid all the artificial complications of English society in the nineteenth century, can find a work to do, a noble work to do, a chivalrous work to do—just as chivalrous as if you lived in any old magic land, such as Spenser talked of in his “Faërie Queene;” how you can be as true a knight-errant or lady-errant in the present century, as if you had lived far away in the dark ages of violence and rapine?  Will you, I ask, learn this?  Will you learn to be in earnest; and to use the position, and the station, and the talent that God has given you to save alive those who should live?  And will you remember that it is not the will of your Father that is in Heaven that one little one that plays in the kennel outside should perish, either in body or in soul?

“A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.” [12 - Fraser’s Magazine, No. CCCXXXVII. 1858.]

The cholera, as was to be expected, has reappeared in England again; and England, as was to be expected, has taken no sufficient steps towards meeting it; so that if, as seems but too probable, the plague should spread next summer, we may count with tolerable certainty upon a loss of some ten thousand lives.

That ten thousand, or one thousand, innocent people should die, of whom most, if not all, might be saved alive, would seem at first sight a matter serious enough for the attention of “philanthropists.”  Those who abhor the practice of hanging one man would, one fancies, abhor equally that of poisoning many; and would protest as earnestly against the painful capital punishment of diarrhoea as against the painless one of hempen rope.  Those who demand mercy for the Sepoy, and immunity for the Coolie women of Delhi, unsexed by their own brutal and shameless cruelty, would, one fancies, demand mercy also for the British workman, and immunity for his wife and family.  One is therefore somewhat startled at finding that the British nation reserves to itself, though it forbids to its armies, the right of putting to death unarmed and unoffending men, women, and children.