Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

And, in fact, when we come to examine the first and commonest objection against sanitary reformers, we find it perfectly correct.  They are said to be theorists, dreamers of the study, who are ignorant of human nature; and who in their materialist optimism, have forgotten the existence of moral evil till they almost fancy at times that they can set the world right simply by righting its lowest material arrangements.  The complaint is perfectly true.  They have been ignorant of human nature; they have forgotten the existence of moral evil; and if any religious periodical should complain of their denying original sin, they can only answer that they did in past years fall into that folly, but that subsequent experience has utterly convinced them of the truth of the doctrine.

For, misled by this ignorance of human nature, they expected help, from time to time, from various classes of the community, from whom no help (as they ought to have known at first) is to be gotten.  Some, as a fact, expected the assistance of the clergy, and especially of the preachers of those denominations who believe that every human being, by the mere fact of his birth into this world, is destined to endless torture after death, unless the preacher can find an opportunity to deliver him therefrom before he dies.  They supposed that to such preachers the mortal lives of men would be inexpressibly precious; that any science which held out a prospect of retarding death in the case of “lost millions” would be hailed as a heavenly boon, and would be carried out with the fervour of men who felt that for the soul’s sake no exertion was too great in behalf of the body.

A little more reflection would have quashed their vain hope.  They would have recollected that each of these preachers was already connected with a congregation; that he had already a hold on them, and they on him; that he was bound to provide for their spiritual wants before going forth to seek for fresh objects of his ministry.  They would have recollected that on the old principle (and a very sound one) of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, the minister of a congregation would feel it his duty, as well as his interest, not to defraud his flock of his labours by spending valuable time on a secular subject like sanitary reform, in the hope of possibly preserving a few human beings, whose souls he might hereafter (and that again would be merely a possibility) benefit.

They would have recollected, again, that these congregations are almost exclusively composed of those classes who have little or nothing to fear from epidemics, and (what is even more important) who would have to bear the expenses of sanitary improvements.  But so sanguine, so reckless of human conditions had their theories made them, that they actually expected that parish rectors, already burdened with over-work and vestry quarrels—nay, even that preachers who got their bread by pew-rents, and whose life-long struggle was, therefore, to keep those pews filled, and those renters in good humour—should astound the respectable house-owners and ratepayers who sat beneath them by the appalling words: “You, and not the ‘Visitation of God,’ are the cause of epidemics; and of you, now that you are once fairly warned of your responsibility, will your brothers’ blood be required.”  Conceive Sanitary Reformers expecting this of “ministers,” let their denomination be what it might—many of the poor men, too, with a wife and seven children!  Truly has it been said, that nothing is so cruel as the unreasonableness of a fanatic.

They forgot, too, that sanitary science, like geology, must be at first sight “suspect” in the eyes of the priests of all denominations, at least till they shall have arrived at a much higher degree of culture than they now possess.

Like geology, it interferes with that Deus e machinâ theory of human affairs which has been in all ages the stronghold of priestcraft.  That the Deity is normally absent, and not present; that he works on the world by interference, and not by continuous laws; that it is the privilege of the priesthood to assign causes for these “judgments” and “visitations” of the Almighty, and to tell mankind why He is angry with them, and has broken the laws of nature to punish them—this, in every age, has seemed to the majority of priests a doctrine to be defended at all hazards; for without it, so they hold, their occupation were gone at once. 13  No wonder, then, if they view with jealousy a set of laymen attributing these “judgments” to purely chemical laws, and to misdoings and ignorance which have as yet no place in the ecclesiastical catalogue of sins.  True, it may be that the Sanitary Reformers are right; but they had rather not think so.  And it is very easy not to think so.  They only have to ignore, to avoid examining, the facts.  Their canon of utility is a peculiar one; and with facts which do not come under that canon they have no concern.  It may be true, for instance, that the eighteenth century, which to the clergy is a period of scepticism, darkness, and spiritual death, is the very century which saw more done for science, for civilisation, for agriculture, for manufacture, for the prolongation and support of human life than any preceding one for a thousand years and more.  What matter?  That is a “secular” question, of which they need know nothing.  And sanitary reform (if true) is just such another; a matter (as slavery has been seen to be by the preachers of the United States) for the legislator, and not for those whose kingdom is “not of this world.”

Others again expected, with equal wisdom, the assistance of the political economist.  The fact is undeniable, but at the same time inexplicable.  What they could have found in the doctrines of most modern political economists which should lead them to suppose that human life would be precious in their eyes, is unknown to the writer of these pages.  Those whose bugbear has been over-population, whose motto has been an euphuistic version of

The more the merrier; but the fewer the better fare—

cannot be expected to lend their aid in increasing the population by saving the lives of two-thirds of the children who now die prematurely in our great cities; and so still further overcrowding this unhappy land with those helpless and expensive sources of national poverty—rational human beings, in strength and health.

Moreover—and this point is worthy of serious attention—that school of political economy, which has now reached its full development, has taken all along a view of man’s relation to Nature diametrically opposite to that taken by the Sanitary Reformer, or indeed by any other men of science.  The Sanitary Reformer holds, in common with the chemist or the engineer, that Nature is to be obeyed only in order to conquer her; that man is to discover the laws of her existing phenomena, in order that he may employ them to create new phenomena himself; to turn the laws which he discovers to his own use; if need be, to counteract one by another.  In this power, it has seemed to them, lay his dignity as a rational being.  It was this, the power of invention, which made him a progressive animal, not bound as the bird and the bee are, to build exactly as his forefathers built five thousand years ago.

By political economy alone has this faculty been denied to man.  In it alone he is not to conquer nature, but simply to obey her.  Let her starve him, make him a slave, a bankrupt, or what not, he must submit, as the savage does to the hail and the lightning.  “Laissez-faire,” says the “Science du néant,” the “Science de la misère,” as it has truly and bitterly been called; “Laissez-faire.”  Analyse economic questions if you will: but beyond analysis you shall not step.  Any attempt to raise political economy to its synthetic stage is to break the laws of nature, to fight against facts—as if facts were not made to be fought against and conquered, and put out of the way, whensoever they interfere in the least with the welfare of any human being.  The drowning man is not to strike out for his life lest by keeping his head above water he interfere with the laws of gravitation.  Not that the political economist, or any man, can be true to his own fallacy.  He must needs try his hand at the synthetic method though he forbids it to the rest of the world: but the only deductive hint which he has as yet given to mankind is, quaintly enough, the most unnatural “eidolon specûs” which ever entered the head of a dehumanised pedant—namely, that once famous “Preventive Check,” which, if a nation did ever apply it—as it never will—could issue, as every doctor knows, in nothing less than the questionable habits of abortion, child-murder, and unnatural crime.

The only explanation of such conduct (though one which the men themselves will hardly accept) is this—that they secretly share somewhat in the doubt which many educated men have of the correctness of their inductions; that these same laws of political economy (where they leave the plain and safe subject-matter of trade) have been arrived at somewhat too hastily; that they are, in plain English, not quite sound enough yet to build upon; and that we must wait for a few more facts before we begin any theories.  Be it so.  At least, these men, in their present temper of mind, are not likely to be very useful to the Sanitary Reformer.

Would that these men, or the clergy, had been the only bruised reed in which the Sanitary Reformers put their trust.  They found another reed, however, and that was Public Opinion; but they forgot that (whatever the stump-orators may say about this being the age of electric thought, when truth flashes triumphant from pole to pole, etc.) we have no proof whatsoever that the proportion of fools is less in this generation than in those before it, or that truth, when unpalatable (as it almost always is), travels any faster than it did five hundred years ago.  They forgot that every social improvement, and most mechanical ones, have had to make their way against laziness, ignorance, envy, vested wrongs, vested superstitions, and the whole vis inertiæ of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  They were guilty indeed, in this case, not merely of ignorance of human nature, but of forgetfulness of fact.  Did they not know that the excellent New Poor-law was greeted with the curses of those very farmers and squires who now not only carry it out lovingly and willingly to the very letter, but are often too ready to resist any improvement or relaxation in it which may be proposed by that very Poor-law Board from which it emanated?  Did they not know that Agricultural Science, though of sixty years’ steady growth, has not yet penetrated into a third of the farms of England; and that hundreds of farmers still dawdle on after the fashion of their forefathers, when by looking over the next hedge into their neighbour’s field they might double their produce and their profits?  Did they not know that the adaptation of steam to machinery would have progressed just as slowly, had it not been a fact patent to babies that an engine is stronger than a horse; and that if cotton, like wheat and beef, had taken twelve months to manufacture, instead of five minutes, Manchester foresight would probably have been as short and as purblind as that of the British farmer?  What right had they to expect a better reception for the facts of Sanitary Science?—facts which ought to, and ultimately will, disturb the vested interests of thousands, will put them to inconvenience, possibly at first to great expense; and yet facts which you can neither see nor handle, but must accept and pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for, on the mere word of a doctor or inspector who gets his living thereby.  Poor John Bull!  To expect that you would accept such a gospel cheerfully was indeed to expect too much!

But yet, though the public opinion of the mass could not be depended on, there was a body left, distinct from the mass, and priding itself so much on that distinctness that it was ready to say at times—of course in more courteous—at least in what it considered more Scriptural language: “This people which knoweth not the law is accursed.”  To it therefore—to the religious world—some over-sanguine Sanitary Reformers turned their eyes.  They saw in it ready organised (so it professed) for all good works, a body such as the world had never seen before.  Where the religions public of Byzantium, Alexandria, or Rome numbered hundreds, that of England numbered its thousands.  It was divided, indeed, on minor points, but it was surely united by the one aim of saving every man his own soul, and of professing the deepest reverence for that Divine Book which tells men that the way to attain that aim is, to be good and to do good; and which contains among other commandments this one—“Thou shaft not kill.”  Its wealth was enormous.  It possessed so much political power, that it would have been able to command elections, to compel ministers, to encourage the weak hearts of willing but fearful clergymen by fair hopes of deaneries and bishoprics.  Its members were no clique of unpractical fanatics—no men less.  Though it might number among them a few martinet ex-post-captains, and noblemen of questionable sanity, capable of no more practical study than that of unfulfilled prophecy, the vast majority of them were landowners, merchants, bankers, commercial men of all ranks, full of worldly experience, and of the science of organisation, skilled all their lives in finding and in employing men and money.  What might not be hoped from such a body, to whom that commercial imperium in imperio of the French Protestants which the edict of Nantes destroyed was poor and weak?  Add to this that these men’s charities were boundless; that they were spending yearly, and on the whole spending wisely and well, ten times as much as ever was spent before in the world, on educational schemes, missionary schemes, church building, reformatories, ragged schools, needlewomen’s charities—what not?  No object of distress, it seemed, could be discovered, no fresh means of doing good devised, but these men’s money poured bountifully and at once into that fresh channel, and an organisation sprang up for the employment of that money, as thrifty and as handy as was to be expected from the money-holding classes of this great commercial nation.

What could not these men do?  What were they not bound by their own principles to do?  No wonder that some weak men’s hearts beat high at the thought.  What if the religious world should take up the cause of Sanitary Reform?  What if they should hail with joy a cause in which all, whatever their theological differences, might join in one sacred crusade against dirt, degradation, disease, and death?  What if they should rise at the hustings to inquire of every candidate: “Will you or will you not, pledge yourself to carry out Sanitary Reform in the place for which you are elected, and let the health and the lives of the local poor be that ‘local interest’ which you are bound by your election to defend?  Do you confess your ignorance of the subject?  Then know, sir, that you are unfit, at this point of the nineteenth century, to be a member of the British Senate.  You go thither to make laws ‘for the preservation of life and property.’  You confess yourself ignorant of those physical laws, stronger and wider than any which you can make, upon which all human life depends, by infringing which the whole property of a district is depreciated.”  Again, what might not the “religious world,” and the public opinion of “professing Christians,” have done in the last twenty—ay, in the last three years?

What it has done, is too patent to need comment here.

The reasons of so strange an anomaly are to be approached with caution.  It is a serious thing to impute motives to a vast body of men, of whom the majority are really respectable, kind-hearted, and useful; and if in giving one’s deliberate opinion one seems to blame them, let it be recollected that the blame lies not so much on them as on their teachers: on those who, for some reasons best known to themselves, have truckled to, and even justified, the self-satisfied ignorance of a comfortable moneyed class.

But let it be said, and said boldly, that these men’s conduct in the matter of Sanitary Reform seems at least to show that they value virtue, not for itself, but for its future rewards.  To the great majority of these men (with some heroic exceptions, whose names may be written in no subscription list, but are surely written in the book of life) the great truth has never been revealed, that good is the one thing to be done, at all risks, for its own sake; that good is absolutely and infinitely better than evil, whether it pay or not to all eternity.  Ask one of them: “Is it better to do right and go to hell, or do wrong and go to heaven?”—they will look at you puzzled, half angry, suspecting you of some secret blasphemy, and, if hard pressed, put off the new and startling question by saying, that it is absurd to talk of an impossible hypothesis.  The human portion of their virtue is not mercenary, for they are mostly worthy men; the religious part thereof, that which they keep for Sundays and for charitable institutions, is too often mercenary, though they know it not.  Their religion is too often one of “Loss and Gain,” as much as Father Newman’s own; and their actions, whether they shall call them “good works” or “fruits of faith,” are so much spiritual capital, to be repaid with interest at the last day.

Therefore, like all religionists, they are most anxious for those schemes of good which seem most profitable to themselves and to the denomination to which they belong; and the best of all such works is, of course, as with all religionists, the making of proselytes.  They really care for the bodies, but still they care more for the souls, of those whom they assist—and not wrongly either, were it not that to care for a man’s soul usually means, in the religious world, to make him think with you; at least to lay him under such obligations as to give you spiritual power over him.  Therefore it is that all religious charities in England are more and more conducted, just as much as those of Jesuits and Oratorians, with an ulterior view of proselytism; therefore it is that the religious world, though it has invented, perhaps, no new method of doing good; though it has been indebted for educational movements, prison visitations, infant schools, ragged schools, and so forth, to Quakers, cobblers, even in some cases to men whom they call infidels, have gladly adopted each and every one of them, as fresh means of enlarging the influence or the numbers of their own denominations, and of baiting for the body in order to catch the soul.  A fair sample of too much of their labour may be seen anywhere, in those tracts in which the prettiest stories, with the prettiest binding and pictures, on the most secular—even, sometimes, scientific—of subjects, end by a few words of pious exhortation, inserted by a different hand from that which indites the “carnal” mass of the book.  They did not invent the science, or the art of story-telling, or the woodcutting, or the plan of getting books up prettily—or, indeed, the notion of instructing the masses at all; but finding these things in the hands of “the world,” they have “spoiled the Egyptians,” and fancy themselves beating Satan with his own weapons.

If, indeed, these men claimed boldly all printing, all woodcutting, all story-telling, all human arts and sciences, as gifts from God Himself; and said, as the book which they quote so often says: “The Spirit of God gives man understanding, these, too, are His gifts, sacred, miraculous, to be accounted for to Him,” then they would be consistent; and then, too, they would have learnt, perhaps, to claim Sanitary Science for a gift divine as any other: but nothing, alas! is as yet further from their creed.  And therefore it is that Sanitary Reform finds so little favour in their eyes.  You have so little in it to show for your work.  You may think you have saved the lives of hundreds; but you cannot put your finger on one of them: and they know you not; know not even their own danger, much less your beneficence.  Therefore, you have no lien on them, not even that of gratitude; you cannot say to a man: “I have prevented you having typhus, therefore you must attend my chapel.”  No!  Sanitary Reform makes no proselytes.  It cannot be used as a religious engine.  It is too simply human, too little a respecter of persons, too like to the works of Him who causes His sun to shine on the evil and the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good to the unthankful and to the evil, to find much favour in the eyes of a generation which will compass sea and land to make one proselyte.

Yes.  Too like the works of our Father in heaven, as indeed all truly natural and human science needs must be.  True, to those who believe that there is a Father in heaven, this would, one supposes, be the highest recommendation.  But how many of this generation believe that?  Is not their doctrine, the doctrine to testify for which the religious world exists, the doctrine which if you deny, you are met with one universal frown and snarl—that man has no Father in heaven: but that if he becomes a member of the religious world, by processes varying with each denomination, he may—strange paradox—create a Father for himself?

But so it is.  The religious world has lost the belief which even the elder Greeks and Romans had, of a “Zeus, Father of gods and men.”  Even that it has lost.  Therefore have man and the simple human needs of man, no sacredness in their eyes; therefore is Nature to them no longer “the will of God exprest in facts,” and to break a law of nature no longer to sin against Him who “looked on all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”  And yet they read their Bibles, and believe that they believe in Him who stood by the lake-side in Galilee, and told men that not a sparrow fell to the ground without their Father’s knowledge—and that they were of more value than many sparrows.  Do those words now seem to some so self-evident as to be needless?  They will never seem so to the Sanitary Reformer, who has called on the “British Public” to exert themselves in saving the lives of thousands yearly; and has received practical answers which will furnish many a bitter jest for the Voltaire of the next so-called “age of unbelief,” or fill a sad, but an instructive chapter in some future enlarged edition of Adelung’s “History of Human Folly.”

All but despairing, Sanitary Reformers have turned again and again to her Majesty’s Government.  Alas for them!  The Government was ready and willing enough to help.  The wicked world said: “Of course.  It will create a new department.  It will give them more places to bestow.”  But the real reason of the willingness of Government seems to be that those who compose it are thoroughly awake to the importance of the subject.

But what can a poor Government do, whose strength consists (as that of all English Governments must) in not seeming too strong; which is allowed to do anything, only on condition of doing the minimum?  Of course, a Government is morally bound to keep itself in existence; for is it not bound to believe that it can govern the country better than any other knot of men?  But its only chance of self-preservation is to know, with Hesiod’s wise man, “how much better the half is than the whole,” and to throw over many a measure which it would like to carry, for the sake of saving the few which it can carry.

An English Government, nowadays, is simply at the mercy of the forty or fifty members of the House of Commons who are crotchety enough or dishonest enough to put it unexpectedly in a minority; and they, with the vast majority of the House, are becoming more and more the delegates of that very class which is most opposed to Sanitary Reform.  The honourable member goes to Parliament not to express his opinions, (for he has stated most distinctly at the last election that he has no opinions whatsoever), but to protect the local interests of his constituents.  And the great majority of those constituents are small houseowners—the poorer portion of the middle class.  Were he to support Government in anything like a sweeping measure of Sanitary Reform, woe to his seat at the next election; and he knows it; and therefore, even if he allow the Government to have its Central Board of Health, he will take good care, for his own sake, that the said Board shall not do too much, and that it shall not compel his constituents to do anything at all.