Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/826

820 them to bring up their children to callings requiring skill, and which will raise them to the higher ranks of labor; help them to save; encourage them to join clubs; lend them books; teach them to cultivate and care for flowers. These and other like influences will indirectly help them far more, even as to outward comforts, than any gifts of necessaries. But do not, when a family wants help, hesitate to give largely, if adequate help will secure permanent good. Remember, if you establish people in life so that they can be self-supporting, it is well worth while to do it, cost what it may.

I know little of your parish. But if it be, as I fancy, one in which the rich are many and the poor few compared to other places, I should like to add a word or two to such residents as are in good health and working here, urging them to consider the needs of more desolate districts, and pause to think whether or not they could transfer some of their time to them. I know it is a difficult question, and one to be judged in each case on its merits. I know well what may be urged on the ground of individual friendships formed with dwellers in your neighborhood, on the score of want of strength and time, and the claims of your own parish. Weigh these by all means, but think of the other side too, if by chance you can realize it. Friendship with poor old women in your district! Respect its claims; but are there no times when it may be worth while to make a change in work, even if it cause one to see less of friends? Have you ever seen the ward of an East End workhouse, where from year's end to year's end the old women live without any younger life round them, no sons or daughters whose strength may make their feebleness more bearable, no little grandchildren to be cared for, and make the old which is passing forget itself in the young which is coming into vigor? Is your bright young presence not asked for by the gray, monotonous, slowly ebbing life of those wards? If your strength does not allow you to visit in remote districts, I grant that an unanswerable argument; for strength is meant to be temperately used and not thrown away. Time! Well, it takes time to go backwards and forwards; but isn't one hour where the need is great and the workers very few worth more than many hours in a more favored district?

Have you ever realized what those acres and acres of crowded, heated, badly-built houses, over which you pass so quickly by train when you go in and out of London, mean? What kind of homes they make? What sort of human beings live and die there? Have you asked yourselves whether your presence, your companionship, is needed there? Whether the little children want your teaching? Whether your gentleness, your refinement, your gaiety, your beauty, are wanted there? Neighborhood! Oh yes, it has strong claims — some of the best possible; but then we must take care that we let our neighbors come round us naturally, rich and poor. I only know this neighborhood as I see it from the station, and it is possible it is otherwise inside, for I know quarters where the poor lodge often escape the eye of a casual observer; but I do know districts which are very like what yours looks, where the villas cover all the ground, and there is no place for the poor man's cottage. Where the idea of building for him would be mentioned with awed abhorrence by the comfortable residents, and they would talk about the unpleasantness of the poor living so near, chances of infection, etc., etc. Where the few persons required to serve the needs of the residents live in a somewhat pampered and very respectful dependence in small districts decently withdrawn from view, visited and over-visited by ladies who haven't far to go — where the poor say there isn't a house to be had, and the rich say they get everything from a distance.

While you are determined to have the rich neighborhoods, you must have the poor ones elsewhere. When you have gathered the poor round you, built for them, taught them, purified their houses and habits by your near presence, by all means talk about the claims of neighborhood. But till then you must, I believe, take wider outlook, and think of the neighborhoods you have left, where moreover those who indirectly serve you earn their bread. You who are merchants' wives and daughters, nay, even those of you who buy the merchants' goods, have the dock-laborers no claims upon you? If the question, Who is my neighbor? is asked by you, how do you think God answers it from heaven when he looks down and sees the vast multitudes of undisciplined poor by whose labor you live — and the few heroic workers whose lives are being spent for those poor almost forsaken by you.

And if some of you went there to give what little of leisure, what little of strength, you have to spare, would your own neighborhood suffer? I fancy not. For it seems as if usually where there are few poor and many rich living near together, 