Some Urgent Reforms- Missions to the Cultivated III
The Speaker, December 7, 1901





The English people, who are perhaps the most Aryan of all the Aryans, have a real instinct and enthusiasm for the great Aryan idea, the idea of reform. Unfortunately, however, by a subtle and not perhaps very important error in many of their calculations, they always make a splendid and strenuous effort to reform the wrong people. As we pass through London we see on every side the evidences of this perverted enthusiasm, this magnificent and futile industry. I was passing some little time ago by the site of the great preparations which are being made for the buildings of the new War Office. I was impressed, as every human must be, by that most prodigious and poetical of spectacles- an unfinished house. A house when it is finished may be, after all, only a Brixton villa, but so long as it is unfinished it is the Temple of Solomon. Such sentiments of respect I had, as anyone is bound to have, towards that impressive object, a scaffolding, the skeleton of a house, which, like a lobster, wears its skeleton outside. But all this poetic pleasure could not wholly obliterate the impression that the rebuilders of the War Office were rebuilding the wrong thing.

If, instead of repairing the War Office buildings, they had devoted themselves to repairing the War Office officials, they would indeed be performing a work of public urgency which whole crowds might collect to watch. It may be only a dream, but surely it is a beautiful one, to think of Mr. Brodrick with a scaffolding round him. A few simple repairs, the substitution of a new head, and such judicious props and restorations, would set him up again for many centuries as an unimpeachable Secretary of State for War. Unfortunately, however, the English people are afflicted with this curse of reforming the unessential and leaving the essential. They rebuild the mechanism, but they never rebuild the men.

But this case of Mr. Brodrick and the absence of a scaffolding around him, painful as it is, is no isolated case. On all sides we find this same tendency of the British public to be satisfied with any outlet for their splendid energy and philanthropy, whatever that outlet may be. And the greatest and most striking example is the extraordinary idea, adopted as a basis of thought by thinkers of every shape and colour, that the modern problem of humanity is the problem of the poor. The very word "problem" has come to mean a problem about the poor, except in the cases where it means something about a henpecked husband or a wife who is beaten with a poker. To me this seems the last and worst of all the insolences of aristocracy. It is the rich who are to "visit" the poor: why should not the poor visit the rich? It is the rich who are to improve the poor: why should not the poor improve the rich? I do not complain in the smallest degree of the heroic conduct of many young men of the upper classes who go down and live, actually and honestly, in Whitechapel. I merely suggest that it would be an excellent thing if a working man went to live, actually and honestly, in Belgravia. He would, of course, do just as the philanthropic patricians do. He would walk into the houses of earls and bishops and South African millionaires, approving of this and disapproving of that. He would tell the Earl that he was glad to see that he had some interest in really good pictures. He would tell the Bishop that he was really disappointed to find him reading Bright Bits or The Eternal City. He would warn them of the peculiar temptations of their estate; he would tell them of the mystical antagonism which all philosophies have felt to exist between wealth and the soul: in short, he would be turned out by the footmen.

Such a course of action, as far as I can discover, has never been adopted, strange as it may appear, in modern times. But here comes in an even stranger matter. Such a course of action really was adopted in older times, when the great religions ruled the world. The religious prophets, ' the Elijahs and the Baptists, the Savonarolas and the Bunyans, were the only real democrats, the only real disbelievers in the efficacy of fashion and station and wealth. They did conceive that the problem par excellence was not the problem of the poor, but the problem of the rich. They did go into kings' palaces and rebuke them as if they were the scum of the earth. They did speak to princes as the modern philanthropist speaks to costermongers. They did hope that there might be some real possibilities in peers and plutocrats, as we hope that there may be some real possibilities in vagabonds and thieves. They, I repeat, were perhaps the only real democrats that the world has ever seen. For it is no democracy, but only a foolish masquerade of aristocracy, when it is only possible for the aristocrat to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the plebeian. The real democracy is found when the plebeian may be genuinely interested in the welfare of the aristocrat. In this case again, therefore, I think we err by trying to correct the tributary instead of the source, by accusing the stream of poisoning the fountain. The real problem of the present day is the problem of the educated classes. If they do not find, as they profess so often that they do not find, life worth living, why should we strive and deny ourselves in order to bring the uneducated up to their level? Why should we pour out work and sacrifice in order to bring some paltry scores of men out of an ignorant hopelessness into an enlightened hopelessness. Before we ask what education will do for the poor, surely the first and most cogent question is, what has education done for us? Before we decide that culture will turn a street arab into a portrait of wisdom and virtue, let us remember that it may turn him into a suburban pessimist, a type far lower than the Hooligan. If the richer and more cultivated classes have really found nothing in all their opportunities to make them better men, if books and love and music, and all the great memories of man, have left them cold and unresponsive, then, indeed, they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the sin of vulgarisation. And any attempt on their part to teach and preach to the poor is as sensational a piece of impudence as a thief in Holloway Gaol preaching piety to the chaplain.

The great need of the age is philanthropy to the rich. We need a really vigorous and sympathetic system of missions and settlements to be established in the West-end. It is not enough for the person of limited means merely to think charitably of millionaires at Christmas, to bestow a word on them now and then, to support institutions designed for their improvement. The real philanthropist must go down and live among these people. He must take the rough-and-tumble of their gloomy, cynical, and lawless life. He must not be put off by the exhibition of many grossnesses and vulgarities, of an ignorance which may tempt him to laughter and a discourtesy which may tempt him to the great sin of contempt. Patiently, pliably, and yet steadfastly, he must study and cultivate the many gleams of good, the many germs of a certain wild honesty, which may be found in these people. He must concentrate his attention on the great problem of the rich; for this was, as I have said, what was done by Elijah and the great school of religious prophets, who, unlike the majority of philanthropists, were not snobs.

I do not think that it is any good merely to preach and pose to these people. A little merriment and geniality, a. little sympathy with their amusements, would go much further towards converting the millionaires and really attaching them to us by ties of affection than the stricter and more disdainful tone. A short time ago I had the pleasure cf seeing one of the really successful and admirable efforts towards the amelioration of the poor. It was a club or class, in which poor children were taught to dance the old English dances, to play the old English games, to sing the old English songs. The whole was terminated by the singing of a hymn- short, as all religious observances should be, since no man can endure long the presence of an idea so simple and terrible as the religious idea. This is clearly the model we should follow in this matter. We should make a long line of minor poets dance a few simple old nursery dances. We should instruct them, patiently and without giving way to anger, in the rules of many ancient games. At the end they should all sing a hymn, preferably the hymn that begins "Now the day is over." If they enjoyed it we should know they were really poets.