FORS CLAVIGERA.

[Contents]FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER L.A friend, in whose judgment I greatly trust, remonstrated sorrowfully with me, the other day, on the desultory character of Fors; and pleaded with me for the writing of an arranged book instead.But he might as well plead with a birch-tree growing out of a crag, to arrange its boughs beforehand. The winds and floods will arrange them according to their wild liking; all that the tree has to do, or can do, is to grow gaily, if it may be; sadly, if gaiety be impossible; and let the black jags and scars rend the rose-white of its trunk where Fors shall choose.But I can well conceive how irritating it must be to any one chancing to take special interest in any one part of my subject—the life of Scott for instance,—to find me, or lose me, wandering away from it for a year or two; and sending roots into new ground in every direction: or (for my friend taxed me with this graver error also) needlessly re-rooting myself in the old.And, all the while, some kindly expectant people are[30]waiting for ‘details of my plan.’ In the presentment of which, this main difficulty still lets me; that, if I told them, or tried to help them definitely to conceive, the ultimate things I aim at, they would at once throw the book down as hopelessly Utopian; but if I tell them the immediate things I aim at, they will refuse to do those instantly possible things, because inconsistent with the present vile general system. For instance—I take (seeLetter V.) Wordsworth’s single line,“We live by admiration, hope, and love,”for my literal guide, in all education. My final object, with every child born on St. George’s estates, will be to teach it what to admire, what to hope for, and what to love: but how far do you suppose the steps necessary to such an ultimate aim are immediately consistent with what Messrs. Huxley and Co. call ‘Secular education’? Or with what either the Bishop of Oxford, or Mr. Spurgeon, would call ‘Religious education’?What to admire, or wonder at! Do you expect a child to wonder at—being taught that two and two make four—(though if only its masters had the sense to teachthat, honestly, it would be something)—or at the number of copies of nasty novels and false news a steam-engine can print for its reading?What to hope? Yes, my secular friends—What? That it shall be the richest shopman in the street; and be buried with black feathers enough over its coffin?[31]What to love—Yes, my ecclesiastical friends, and who is its neighbour, think you? Will you meet these three demands of mine with your three Rs, or your catechism?And how would I meet them myself? Simply by never, so far as I could help it, letting a child read what is not worth reading, or see what is not worth seeing; and by making it live a life which, whether it will or no, shall enforce honourable hope of continuing long in the land—whether of men or God.And who is to say what is worth reading, or worth seeing? sneer the Republican mob. Yes, gentlemen, you who never knew a good thing from a bad, in all your lives, may well ask that!Let us try, however, in such a simple thing as a child’s book. Yesterday, in the course of my walk, I went into a shepherd-farmer’s cottage, to wish whoever might be in the house a happy new year. His wife was at home, of course; and his little daughter, Agnes, nine years old; both as good as gold, in their way.The cottage is nearly a model of those which I shall expect the tenants of St. George’s Company, and its active members, to live in;—the entire building, parlour, and kitchen, (in this case one, but not necessarily so,) bedrooms and all, about the size of an average dining-room in Grosvenor Place or Park Lane. The conversation naturally turning to Christmas doings and havings,—and I, as an author, of course inquiring whether Agnes had[32]any new books, Agnes brought me her library—consisting chiefly in a good pound’s weight of the literature which cheap printing enables the pious to make Christmas presents of for a penny. A full pound, or it might be, a pound and a half, of this instruction, full of beautiful sentiments, woodcuts, and music. More woodcuts in the first two ounces of it I took up, than I ever had. to study in the first twelve years of my life. Splendid woodcuts, too, in the best Kensington style, and rigidly on the principles of high, and commercially remunerative, art, taught by Messrs. Redgrave, Cole, and Company.Somehow, none of these seem to have interested little Agnes, or been of the least good to her. Her pound and a half of the best of the modern pious and picturesque is (being of course originally boardless) now a crumpled and variously doubled-up heap, brought down in a handful, or lapful, rather; most of the former insides of the pamphlets being now the outsides; and every form of dog’s ear, puppy’s ear, cat’s ear, kitten’s ear, rat’s ear, and mouse’s ear, developed by the contortions of weary fingers at the corners of their didactic and evangelically sibylline leaves. I ask if I may borrow one to take home and read. Agnes is delighted; but undergoes no such pang of care as a like request would have inflicted on my boyish mind, and needed generous stifling of;—nay, had I asked to borrow the whole heap, I am not sure whether Agnes’s first tacit sensation would not have been one of deliverance.Being very fond of pretty little girls, (not, by any[33]means, excluding pretty—tall ones,) I choose, for my own reading, a pamphlet1which has a picture of a beautiful little girl with long hair, lying very ill in bed, with her mother putting up her forefinger at her brother, who is crying, with a large tear on the side of his nose; and a legend beneath: ‘Harry told his mother the whole story.’ The pamphlet has been doubled up by Agnes right through the middle of the beautiful little girl’s face, and no less remorselessly through the very middle of the body of the ‘Duckling Astray,’ charmingly drawn by Mr. Harrison Weir on the opposite leaf. But my little Agnes knows so much more about real ducklings than the artist does, that her severity in this case is not to be wondered at.I carry my Children’s Prize penny’s-worth home to Brantwood, full of curiosity to know “the whole story.” I find that this religious work is edited by a Master of Arts—no less—and that two more woodcuts of the most finished order are given to Harry’s story,—representing Harry and the pretty little girl, (I suppose so, at least; but, alas, now with her back turned to me,—the cuts came cheaper so,) dressed in the extreme of fashion, down to her boots,—first running with Harry, in snow, after a carriage, and then reclining against Harry’s shoulder in a snowstorm.I arrange my candles for small print, and proceed to read this richly illustrated story.Harry and his sister were at school together, it appears,[34]at Salisbury; and their father’s carriage was sent, in a snowy day, to bring them home for the holidays. They are to be at home by five; and their mother has invited a children’s party at seven. Harry is enjoined by his father, in the letter which conveys this information, to remain inside the carriage, and not to go on the box.Harry is a good boy, and does as he is bid; but nothing whatever is said in the letter about not getting out of the carriage to walk up hills. And at ‘two-mile hill’ Harry thinks it will be clever to get out and walk up it, without calling to, or stopping, John on the box. Once out himself, he gets Mary out;—the children begin snowballing each other; the carriage leaves them so far behind that they can’t catch it; a snowstorm comes on, etc., etc.; they are pathetically frozen within a breath of their lives; found by a benevolent carter, just in time; warmed by a benevolent farmer, the carter’s friend; restored to their alarmed father and mother; and Mary has a rheumatic fever, “and for a whole week it was not known whether she would live or die,” which is the Providential punishment of Harry’s sin in getting out of the carriage.Admitting the perfect appositeness and justice of this Providential punishment; I am, parenthetically, desirous to know of my Evangelical friends, first, whether from the corruption of Harry’s nature they could have expected anything better than his stealthily getting out of the carriage to walk up the hill?—and, secondly, whether[35]the merits of Christ, which are enough to save any murderer or swindler from all the disagreeable consequences of murder and swindling, in the next world, are not enough in this world, if properly relied upon, to save a wicked little boy’s sister from rheumatic fever? This, I say, I only ask parenthetically, for my own information; my immediate business being to ask what effect this story is intended to produce on my shepherd’s little daughter Agnes?Intendedto produce, I say: what effect itdoesproduce, I can easily ascertain; but what do the writer and the learned editor expect of it? Or rather, to touch the very beginning of the inquiry, for what class of child do they intend it? ‘For all classes,’ the enlightened editor and liberal publisher doubtless reply. ‘Classes, indeed! In the glorious liberty of the Future, there shall be none!’Well, be it so; but in the inglorious slavery of the Past, it has happened that my little Agnes’s father has not kept a carriage; that Agnes herself has not often seen one, is not likely often to be in one, and has seen a great deal too much snow, and had a great deal too much walking in it, to be tempted out,—if she ever has the chance of being driven in a carriage to a children’s party at seven,—to walk up a hill on the road. Such is our benighted life in Westmoreland. In the future, do my pious and liberal friends suppose that all little Agneses are to drive in carriages? That istheir[36]Utopia. Mine, so much abused for its impossibility, is only that a good many little Agneses who at present drive in carriages, shall have none.Nay, but perhaps, the learned editor did not intend the story for children ‘quite in Agnes’s position.’ For what sort did he intend it, then? For the class of children whose fathers keep carriages, and whose mothers dress their girls by the Paris modes, at three years old? Very good; then, in families which keep carriages and footmen, the children are supposed to think a book is a prize, which costs a penny? Be that also so, in the Republican cheap world; but might not the cheapeners print, when they are about it, prize poetry for their penny? Here is the ‘Christmas Carol,’ set to music, accompanying this moral story of the Snow.“Hark, hark, the merry pealing,List to the Christmas chime,Every breath and every feelingHails the good old time;Brothers, sisters, homeward speed,All is mirth and play;Hark, hark, the merry pealing,—Welcome Christmas Day.Sing, sing, around we gather,Each with something new,[37]Cheering mother, cheering father,From the Bible true;Bring the holly, spread the feast,Every heart to cheer,Sing, sing, a merry Christmas,A happy, bright New Year.”Now, putting aside for the moment all questions touching the grounds of the conviction of the young people for whom these verses are intended of the truth of the Bible; or touching the propriety of their cheering their fathers and mothers by quotations from it; or touching the difficultly reconcileable merits of old times and new things; I call these verses bad, primarily, because they are not rhythmical. I consider good rhythm a moral quality. I consider the rhythm in these stanzas demoralized, and demoralizing. I quote, in opposition to them, one of the rhymes by which my own ear and mind were educated in early youth, as being more distinctly, and literally ‘moral,’ than that Christmas carol.“Dame Wiggins of LeeWas a worthy old soul,As e’er threaded a nee-Dle, or washed in a bowl.She held mice and ratsIn such antipa-thy,That Seven good CatsKept Dame Wiggins of Lee.”[38]Putting aside also, in our criticism of these verses, the very debateable question, whether Dame Wiggins kept the Seven Cats, or the Seven Cats Dame Wiggins; and giving no judgment as to the propriety of the license taken in pronunciation, by the accent on the last syllable of ‘antipathy,’ or as to the evident plagiarism of the first couplet from the classical ballad of King Cole, I aver these rhymes to possess the primary virtue of rhyme,—that is to say, to be rhythmical, in a pleasant and exemplary degree. And I believe, and will venture also to assert my belief, that the matter contained in them, though of an imaginative character, is better food for a child’s mind than either the subject or sentiment of the above quoted Christmas Carol.The mind of little Agnes, at all events, receives from story, pictures, and carol, altogether, no very traceable impression; but, I am happy to say, certainly no harm. She lives fifteen miles from the nearest manufacturing district,—sees no vice, except perhaps sometimes in the village on Sunday afternoons;—hears, from week’s end to week’s end, the sheep bleat, and the wind whistle,—but neither human blasphemy, nor human cruelty of command. Her shepherd father, out on the hills all day, is thankful at evening to return to his fireside, and to have his little daughter to look at, instead of a lamb. She suffers no more from schooling than serves to make her enjoy her home;—knows already the mysteries of butter-making and poultry-keeping;—curtsies to me without[39]alarm when I pass her door, if she is outside of it;—and, on the whole, sees no enemy but winter and rough weather.But what effect this modern Christmas carolwouldhave had on her mind, if she had had the full advantage of modern education in an advanced and prosperous town,—the following well written letter,—happily sent me by Fors at the necessary moment,—enables me at once to exhibit:—“10th January, 1874.Dear Mr. Ruskin,Your appendix to the Fors this month contains a chapter on what some will assert is very exceptional ——shire brutality. After nine years’ residence in a ——shire village, I am compelled to believe that the vileness which horrified Judge Mellor is everywhere ingrained where factory and colliery rule prevails.Could you but hear the blasphemous and filthy language our rosy village bairns use as soon as they are out of the parson’s earshot, even when leaving the Sabbath School!Yet we have a rural dean as incumbent, an excellent schoolmaster, and model school. The Government Inspector is highly satisfied, and there are the usual edifying tea parties, prize-givings, and newspaper puffs, yearly.I know that the children are well taught six days a week, yet there is little fruit of good behaviour among them, and an indecency of speech which is amazing in[40]rural children. On Christmas morn a party of these children, boys and girls, singing carols, encountered my young daughter going alone to the church service. The opportunity was tempting, and as if moved by one vile spirit, they screamed at her a blast of the most obscene and profane epithets that vicious malice could devise. She knew none of them; had never harmed them in her life. She came home with her kind, tender heart all aghast. ‘Why do they hate me so?’ she asked.Yet a short time after the same children came into the yard, and began, with the full shrill powers of their young lungs,‘Why do I love Jesus?’the refrain,‘Because He died for me,’with especial gusto. My husband, ignorant of their previous conduct, gave them a bright shilling, which evoked three more hymns of similar character. What does all this mean?Our Bishop says that we have a model parish, a model school, and a model parson—yet we have children like this. Our parson knows it, and says to me that he can do nothing to prevent it.More than this. It is almost incredible; but my own horrified ears have borne witness of it. Young boys will threaten girls of their own age, in the vilest terms, with outrage like that at Burnley. I have heard it again and again. Had Judge Mellor had nine years’ experience of[41]——shire life, he would not have been surprised at the utter brutality of mind exhibited.Yet we are not criminal compared with other districts. Bastardy and drunkenness are at present the darkest shades we can show; but there is perhaps some better influence at work from the vicinage of two great squires which secures us pure air and wide fields.I am glad to read that you purpose vexing yourself less with the sins of the times during the coming summer. It is too great a burthen for a human mind to bear the world’s sins in spirit, as you do. If you mean to preserve yourself for the many thousands whose inner heart’s bitterness your voice has relieved, you must vex yourself less about this age’s madness.The sure retribution is at hand already.”2‘What does all this mean?’ my correspondent asks, in wise anxiety.National prosperity, my dear Madam, according to Mr. Goschen, the ‘Times,’ and ‘Morning Post’;—national prosperity carried to the point of not knowing what to do with our money. Enlightenment, and Freedom, and orthodox Religion, and Science of the superbest and trustworthiest character, and generally the Reign of Law, answer the Duke of Argyll and Professor Huxley. Ruin—inevitable and terrible, such as no nation has yet suffered,—answer God and the Fates.[42]Yes—inevitable. England has to drink a cup which cannot pass from her—at the hands of the Lord, the cup of His fury;—surely the dregs of it, the wicked of the earth shall wring them and drink them out.For let none of my readers think me mad enough or wild enough to hope that any effort, or repentance, or change of conduct, could now save the country from the consequences of her follies, or the Church from the punishment of her crimes. This St. George’s Company of ours is mere raft-making amidst irrevocable wreck—the best we can do, to be done bravely and cheerfully, come of it what may.Let me keep, therefore, to-day wholly to definite matters, and to little ones. What the education we now give our children leads to, my correspondent’s letter shows. What education they should have, instead, I may suggest perhaps in some particulars.What should be done, for instance, in the way of gift-giving, or instruction-giving, for our little Agnes of the hill-side? Would the St. George’s Company, if she were their tenant, only leave her alone,—teach her nothing?Not so; very much otherwise than so. This is some part of what should be done for her, were she indeed under St. George’s rule.Instead of the “something new,” which our learned Master of Arts edits for her in carolling, she should learn, by heart, words which her fathers had known, many and[43]many a year ago. As, for instance, these two little carols of grace before meat:—What God gives, and what we take,’Tis a gift for Christ His sake;Be the meale of Beanes and Pease,God be thanked for those and these.Have we flesh, or have we fish,All are Fragments from His dish:He His Church save; and the King;And our Peace here, like a Spring,Make it ever flourishing.Here, a little child, I standHeaving up my either hand;Cold as Paddocks though they be,Here I lift them up to Thee.For a Benizon to fall,On our meat, and on us all.These verses, or such as these, Agnes should be able to say, and sing; and if on any state occasion it were desired of her to say grace, should be so mannered as to say obediently, without either vanity or shame. Also, she should know other rhymes for her own contentment such as she liked best, out of narrow store offered to,[44]her, ifshe choseto learn to read. Reading by no means being enforced upon her—still less, writing; nothing enforced on her but household help to her mother; instant obedience to her father’s or mother’s word; order and cleanliness in her own departments and person; and gentleness to all inoffensive creatures—paddocks as well as lambs and chickens.Further, instead of eighteen distinct penny Children’s Prizes, containing seventy-two elaborate woodcuts of ‘Ducklings Astray,’ and the like, (which I should especially object to, in the case of Agnes, as too personal, she herself being little more at present than a duckling astray,) the St. George’s Company would invest for her, at once, the ‘ridiculously small sum of eighteenpence,’ in one coloured print—coloured by hand, for the especial decoration of her own chamber. This colouring by hand is one of the occupations which young women of the upper classes, in St. George’s Company, will undertake as a business of pure duty; it was once a very wholesome means of livelihood to poorer art students. The plates of Sibthorpe’s Flora Græca, for instance, cost, I am informed, on their first publication, precisely the sum in question,—eighteen-pence each,—for their colouring by hand:—the enterprising publisher who issued the more recent editions, reducing, in conformity with modern views on the subject of economy, the colourist’s remuneration to thirty shillings per hundred. But in the St. George’s Company, young ladies who have the gift of[45]colouring will be taught to colour engravings simply as well as they can do it, without any reference whatever to pecuniary compensation; and such practice I consider to be the very best possible elementary instruction for themselves, in the art of watercolour painting.And the print which should be provided and thus coloured for little Agnes’s room should be no less than the best engraving I could get made of Simon Memmi’s St. Agnes in Paradise; of which—(according to the probable notions of many of my readers, absurd and idolatrous)—image, little Agnes should know the legend as soon as she was able to understand it; though, if the St. George’s Company, could manage it for her, she should be protected from too early instruction in the meaning of that legend, by such threats from her English playfellows as are noticed in my correspondent’s letter.Such should be some small part of her religious education. For beginning of secular education, the St. George’s Company would provide for her, above and before all things, a yard or two square of St. George’s ground, which should be wholly her own; together with instruments suited to her strength, for the culture, and seeds for the sowing, thereof. On which plot of ground, or near it, in a convenient place, there should be a bee-hive, out of which it should be considered a crowning achievement of Agnes’s secular virtues if she could produce, in its season, a piece of snowy and well-filled comb. And, (always if she chose to learn to read),[46]books should be given her containing such information respecting bees, and other living creatures as it appeared to the St. George’s Company desirable she should possess. But touching the character of this desirable information, what I have to say being somewhat lengthy, must be deferred to my March letter.Castleton, Peak of Derbyshire,27th January.Since finishing this letter, I have driven leisurely through the midland manufacturing districts, which I have not traversed, except by rail, for the last ten years. The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life are the south-eastern suburb of Bradford, (six miles long,) and the scene from Wakefield bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.[47][Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.In my last December’s letter, I promised, for January, some statement of real beginning of operations by our Company; but, as usual, was hindered from fulfilling my promise at the time I intended. And the hindrance lay, as in all useful business it is pretty sure in some measure to lie, in the state of British law. An acre of ground, with some cottages on it, has been given me for our Company; but it is not easy to find out how the Company is to lay hold of it. I suppose the conveyancing will cost us, in the end, half a dozen times the value of the land; and in the meantime I don’t care to announce our possession of it, or say what I mean to do with it. I content myself for the present with reprinting, and very heartily, as far as my experience holds, ratifying, the subjoined portions of a letter, sent me the other day out of a country paper. The writer is speaking, at the point where my quotation begins, of the difficulty of getting a good bankruptcy act passed:—“The reason alleged is that almost any lawyer is ready to help any lying and false-trading person to drive his coach and four through any Act, however good in intention it may be. This is a sad state of things, and is wasteful of more things than money or good temper. It is, however, on the matter of conveyancing that we wish to say a few words.…“We are accustomed to look at the matter as a very simple one. We have before us the deeds of our dwelling-house.[48]The real point is, why can we not sell these papers to, say John Smith, for £1,000, if John is satisfied that our little cottage, with all its admirable rooms so well arranged, is worth that amount? Why can’t we sell him this matter in a simple and clear way? Or, for a case the least bit complicated, take our six shops in the chief street. Why can’t we sell one each to Brown, Jones, Robinson, Thompson, Atkinson, or Williams, their respective and respectable tenants, in an equally simple way? The English law steps in and says that we must have a cumbrous deed prepared for each case, and the total cost to all of us, without stamps, would be about one hundred pounds, at a reasonable computation. What do we get for this large sum? Absolutely nothing but jargon on parchment, instead of plain and simple English, which all the Smiths and Browns might understand, and get for a tenth of the cost. This is all the more irritating, because sensible people are agreed that our present plan is a cumbrous farce, and, moreover, nobody laughs at it but the lawyers who get the picking. Any six honest, clear-headed, educated men could devise a system in a month which would put an end to the needless and costly worry entailed by the existing legal paraphernalia. We have never yet seen any tangible objections to the simple system, nor any salient and satisfactory reasons for retaining the present circumlocutory, wasteful, and foolish one.“Another monstrous anomaly is that we might sell each of our before-mentioned shops in our chief street, and yet retain the original deed untouched; so that after drawing cash from each of our present tenants, we could mortgage the whole block again, and clear off with the double cash.3[49]“But even the present system might be made endurable, and herein lies its greatest blame, namely—that you never know what you are going to pay for the foolish and needless work you are having done. You are entirely at the mercy of the lawyer. When we consider that this so-called difficult and skilful work is always managed in the best offices by a mere clerk, and seldom, if ever, by the principal, we have a reasonable ground of complaint against the enormous and unfair charges usually made for work so done by wholesale.“We will conclude with a practical suggestion or two. Building clubs have been a great boon to the saving element in our community. It is the wish of most people to have a house of their own, and these clubs find, for hundreds, the readiest means to that end. They have made easy the borrowing and the paying back of money, and they have been the means of simplifying mortgage deeds which, for clubs, are only £2 ,, 5s., and if got up simpler, and printed, instead of being written, might easily and profitably be done for a guinea. Could not they confer a still greater boon on the community by combining, and compelling by a strong voice, the lawyers to systematize and cheapen the present mode of conveyancing? This would be a great work, and might be done. Still better would it be to combine to send up suggestions to Parliament for a simpler and better plan, such as would lead to the passing of an Act for the embodiment of this great and much-needed reform.”[51][Contents]Accounts.The following additional subscriptions complete the account of receipts for St. George’s Fund to 15th January, 1875.£s.d.25.Gift50026.Gift113430.Gift02637.Gift50038.Annual (1875)11039.Gift (on condition of being immediately used)250040.Gift20041.Gift50044.Third Donation (1874)1000£541610[53]1The Children’s Prize. No. XII. December, 1873. Price one penny.↑2Yes, I know that; but am I to be cheerfuller therefore?↑3I don’t vouch for the particular statements in this letter. It seems to me incredible that any practical absurdity so great as this should exist in tenure of property.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER L.

A friend, in whose judgment I greatly trust, remonstrated sorrowfully with me, the other day, on the desultory character of Fors; and pleaded with me for the writing of an arranged book instead.But he might as well plead with a birch-tree growing out of a crag, to arrange its boughs beforehand. The winds and floods will arrange them according to their wild liking; all that the tree has to do, or can do, is to grow gaily, if it may be; sadly, if gaiety be impossible; and let the black jags and scars rend the rose-white of its trunk where Fors shall choose.But I can well conceive how irritating it must be to any one chancing to take special interest in any one part of my subject—the life of Scott for instance,—to find me, or lose me, wandering away from it for a year or two; and sending roots into new ground in every direction: or (for my friend taxed me with this graver error also) needlessly re-rooting myself in the old.And, all the while, some kindly expectant people are[30]waiting for ‘details of my plan.’ In the presentment of which, this main difficulty still lets me; that, if I told them, or tried to help them definitely to conceive, the ultimate things I aim at, they would at once throw the book down as hopelessly Utopian; but if I tell them the immediate things I aim at, they will refuse to do those instantly possible things, because inconsistent with the present vile general system. For instance—I take (seeLetter V.) Wordsworth’s single line,“We live by admiration, hope, and love,”for my literal guide, in all education. My final object, with every child born on St. George’s estates, will be to teach it what to admire, what to hope for, and what to love: but how far do you suppose the steps necessary to such an ultimate aim are immediately consistent with what Messrs. Huxley and Co. call ‘Secular education’? Or with what either the Bishop of Oxford, or Mr. Spurgeon, would call ‘Religious education’?What to admire, or wonder at! Do you expect a child to wonder at—being taught that two and two make four—(though if only its masters had the sense to teachthat, honestly, it would be something)—or at the number of copies of nasty novels and false news a steam-engine can print for its reading?What to hope? Yes, my secular friends—What? That it shall be the richest shopman in the street; and be buried with black feathers enough over its coffin?[31]What to love—Yes, my ecclesiastical friends, and who is its neighbour, think you? Will you meet these three demands of mine with your three Rs, or your catechism?And how would I meet them myself? Simply by never, so far as I could help it, letting a child read what is not worth reading, or see what is not worth seeing; and by making it live a life which, whether it will or no, shall enforce honourable hope of continuing long in the land—whether of men or God.And who is to say what is worth reading, or worth seeing? sneer the Republican mob. Yes, gentlemen, you who never knew a good thing from a bad, in all your lives, may well ask that!Let us try, however, in such a simple thing as a child’s book. Yesterday, in the course of my walk, I went into a shepherd-farmer’s cottage, to wish whoever might be in the house a happy new year. His wife was at home, of course; and his little daughter, Agnes, nine years old; both as good as gold, in their way.The cottage is nearly a model of those which I shall expect the tenants of St. George’s Company, and its active members, to live in;—the entire building, parlour, and kitchen, (in this case one, but not necessarily so,) bedrooms and all, about the size of an average dining-room in Grosvenor Place or Park Lane. The conversation naturally turning to Christmas doings and havings,—and I, as an author, of course inquiring whether Agnes had[32]any new books, Agnes brought me her library—consisting chiefly in a good pound’s weight of the literature which cheap printing enables the pious to make Christmas presents of for a penny. A full pound, or it might be, a pound and a half, of this instruction, full of beautiful sentiments, woodcuts, and music. More woodcuts in the first two ounces of it I took up, than I ever had. to study in the first twelve years of my life. Splendid woodcuts, too, in the best Kensington style, and rigidly on the principles of high, and commercially remunerative, art, taught by Messrs. Redgrave, Cole, and Company.Somehow, none of these seem to have interested little Agnes, or been of the least good to her. Her pound and a half of the best of the modern pious and picturesque is (being of course originally boardless) now a crumpled and variously doubled-up heap, brought down in a handful, or lapful, rather; most of the former insides of the pamphlets being now the outsides; and every form of dog’s ear, puppy’s ear, cat’s ear, kitten’s ear, rat’s ear, and mouse’s ear, developed by the contortions of weary fingers at the corners of their didactic and evangelically sibylline leaves. I ask if I may borrow one to take home and read. Agnes is delighted; but undergoes no such pang of care as a like request would have inflicted on my boyish mind, and needed generous stifling of;—nay, had I asked to borrow the whole heap, I am not sure whether Agnes’s first tacit sensation would not have been one of deliverance.Being very fond of pretty little girls, (not, by any[33]means, excluding pretty—tall ones,) I choose, for my own reading, a pamphlet1which has a picture of a beautiful little girl with long hair, lying very ill in bed, with her mother putting up her forefinger at her brother, who is crying, with a large tear on the side of his nose; and a legend beneath: ‘Harry told his mother the whole story.’ The pamphlet has been doubled up by Agnes right through the middle of the beautiful little girl’s face, and no less remorselessly through the very middle of the body of the ‘Duckling Astray,’ charmingly drawn by Mr. Harrison Weir on the opposite leaf. But my little Agnes knows so much more about real ducklings than the artist does, that her severity in this case is not to be wondered at.I carry my Children’s Prize penny’s-worth home to Brantwood, full of curiosity to know “the whole story.” I find that this religious work is edited by a Master of Arts—no less—and that two more woodcuts of the most finished order are given to Harry’s story,—representing Harry and the pretty little girl, (I suppose so, at least; but, alas, now with her back turned to me,—the cuts came cheaper so,) dressed in the extreme of fashion, down to her boots,—first running with Harry, in snow, after a carriage, and then reclining against Harry’s shoulder in a snowstorm.I arrange my candles for small print, and proceed to read this richly illustrated story.Harry and his sister were at school together, it appears,[34]at Salisbury; and their father’s carriage was sent, in a snowy day, to bring them home for the holidays. They are to be at home by five; and their mother has invited a children’s party at seven. Harry is enjoined by his father, in the letter which conveys this information, to remain inside the carriage, and not to go on the box.Harry is a good boy, and does as he is bid; but nothing whatever is said in the letter about not getting out of the carriage to walk up hills. And at ‘two-mile hill’ Harry thinks it will be clever to get out and walk up it, without calling to, or stopping, John on the box. Once out himself, he gets Mary out;—the children begin snowballing each other; the carriage leaves them so far behind that they can’t catch it; a snowstorm comes on, etc., etc.; they are pathetically frozen within a breath of their lives; found by a benevolent carter, just in time; warmed by a benevolent farmer, the carter’s friend; restored to their alarmed father and mother; and Mary has a rheumatic fever, “and for a whole week it was not known whether she would live or die,” which is the Providential punishment of Harry’s sin in getting out of the carriage.Admitting the perfect appositeness and justice of this Providential punishment; I am, parenthetically, desirous to know of my Evangelical friends, first, whether from the corruption of Harry’s nature they could have expected anything better than his stealthily getting out of the carriage to walk up the hill?—and, secondly, whether[35]the merits of Christ, which are enough to save any murderer or swindler from all the disagreeable consequences of murder and swindling, in the next world, are not enough in this world, if properly relied upon, to save a wicked little boy’s sister from rheumatic fever? This, I say, I only ask parenthetically, for my own information; my immediate business being to ask what effect this story is intended to produce on my shepherd’s little daughter Agnes?Intendedto produce, I say: what effect itdoesproduce, I can easily ascertain; but what do the writer and the learned editor expect of it? Or rather, to touch the very beginning of the inquiry, for what class of child do they intend it? ‘For all classes,’ the enlightened editor and liberal publisher doubtless reply. ‘Classes, indeed! In the glorious liberty of the Future, there shall be none!’Well, be it so; but in the inglorious slavery of the Past, it has happened that my little Agnes’s father has not kept a carriage; that Agnes herself has not often seen one, is not likely often to be in one, and has seen a great deal too much snow, and had a great deal too much walking in it, to be tempted out,—if she ever has the chance of being driven in a carriage to a children’s party at seven,—to walk up a hill on the road. Such is our benighted life in Westmoreland. In the future, do my pious and liberal friends suppose that all little Agneses are to drive in carriages? That istheir[36]Utopia. Mine, so much abused for its impossibility, is only that a good many little Agneses who at present drive in carriages, shall have none.Nay, but perhaps, the learned editor did not intend the story for children ‘quite in Agnes’s position.’ For what sort did he intend it, then? For the class of children whose fathers keep carriages, and whose mothers dress their girls by the Paris modes, at three years old? Very good; then, in families which keep carriages and footmen, the children are supposed to think a book is a prize, which costs a penny? Be that also so, in the Republican cheap world; but might not the cheapeners print, when they are about it, prize poetry for their penny? Here is the ‘Christmas Carol,’ set to music, accompanying this moral story of the Snow.“Hark, hark, the merry pealing,List to the Christmas chime,Every breath and every feelingHails the good old time;Brothers, sisters, homeward speed,All is mirth and play;Hark, hark, the merry pealing,—Welcome Christmas Day.Sing, sing, around we gather,Each with something new,[37]Cheering mother, cheering father,From the Bible true;Bring the holly, spread the feast,Every heart to cheer,Sing, sing, a merry Christmas,A happy, bright New Year.”Now, putting aside for the moment all questions touching the grounds of the conviction of the young people for whom these verses are intended of the truth of the Bible; or touching the propriety of their cheering their fathers and mothers by quotations from it; or touching the difficultly reconcileable merits of old times and new things; I call these verses bad, primarily, because they are not rhythmical. I consider good rhythm a moral quality. I consider the rhythm in these stanzas demoralized, and demoralizing. I quote, in opposition to them, one of the rhymes by which my own ear and mind were educated in early youth, as being more distinctly, and literally ‘moral,’ than that Christmas carol.“Dame Wiggins of LeeWas a worthy old soul,As e’er threaded a nee-Dle, or washed in a bowl.She held mice and ratsIn such antipa-thy,That Seven good CatsKept Dame Wiggins of Lee.”[38]Putting aside also, in our criticism of these verses, the very debateable question, whether Dame Wiggins kept the Seven Cats, or the Seven Cats Dame Wiggins; and giving no judgment as to the propriety of the license taken in pronunciation, by the accent on the last syllable of ‘antipathy,’ or as to the evident plagiarism of the first couplet from the classical ballad of King Cole, I aver these rhymes to possess the primary virtue of rhyme,—that is to say, to be rhythmical, in a pleasant and exemplary degree. And I believe, and will venture also to assert my belief, that the matter contained in them, though of an imaginative character, is better food for a child’s mind than either the subject or sentiment of the above quoted Christmas Carol.The mind of little Agnes, at all events, receives from story, pictures, and carol, altogether, no very traceable impression; but, I am happy to say, certainly no harm. She lives fifteen miles from the nearest manufacturing district,—sees no vice, except perhaps sometimes in the village on Sunday afternoons;—hears, from week’s end to week’s end, the sheep bleat, and the wind whistle,—but neither human blasphemy, nor human cruelty of command. Her shepherd father, out on the hills all day, is thankful at evening to return to his fireside, and to have his little daughter to look at, instead of a lamb. She suffers no more from schooling than serves to make her enjoy her home;—knows already the mysteries of butter-making and poultry-keeping;—curtsies to me without[39]alarm when I pass her door, if she is outside of it;—and, on the whole, sees no enemy but winter and rough weather.But what effect this modern Christmas carolwouldhave had on her mind, if she had had the full advantage of modern education in an advanced and prosperous town,—the following well written letter,—happily sent me by Fors at the necessary moment,—enables me at once to exhibit:—“10th January, 1874.Dear Mr. Ruskin,Your appendix to the Fors this month contains a chapter on what some will assert is very exceptional ——shire brutality. After nine years’ residence in a ——shire village, I am compelled to believe that the vileness which horrified Judge Mellor is everywhere ingrained where factory and colliery rule prevails.Could you but hear the blasphemous and filthy language our rosy village bairns use as soon as they are out of the parson’s earshot, even when leaving the Sabbath School!Yet we have a rural dean as incumbent, an excellent schoolmaster, and model school. The Government Inspector is highly satisfied, and there are the usual edifying tea parties, prize-givings, and newspaper puffs, yearly.I know that the children are well taught six days a week, yet there is little fruit of good behaviour among them, and an indecency of speech which is amazing in[40]rural children. On Christmas morn a party of these children, boys and girls, singing carols, encountered my young daughter going alone to the church service. The opportunity was tempting, and as if moved by one vile spirit, they screamed at her a blast of the most obscene and profane epithets that vicious malice could devise. She knew none of them; had never harmed them in her life. She came home with her kind, tender heart all aghast. ‘Why do they hate me so?’ she asked.Yet a short time after the same children came into the yard, and began, with the full shrill powers of their young lungs,‘Why do I love Jesus?’the refrain,‘Because He died for me,’with especial gusto. My husband, ignorant of their previous conduct, gave them a bright shilling, which evoked three more hymns of similar character. What does all this mean?Our Bishop says that we have a model parish, a model school, and a model parson—yet we have children like this. Our parson knows it, and says to me that he can do nothing to prevent it.More than this. It is almost incredible; but my own horrified ears have borne witness of it. Young boys will threaten girls of their own age, in the vilest terms, with outrage like that at Burnley. I have heard it again and again. Had Judge Mellor had nine years’ experience of[41]——shire life, he would not have been surprised at the utter brutality of mind exhibited.Yet we are not criminal compared with other districts. Bastardy and drunkenness are at present the darkest shades we can show; but there is perhaps some better influence at work from the vicinage of two great squires which secures us pure air and wide fields.I am glad to read that you purpose vexing yourself less with the sins of the times during the coming summer. It is too great a burthen for a human mind to bear the world’s sins in spirit, as you do. If you mean to preserve yourself for the many thousands whose inner heart’s bitterness your voice has relieved, you must vex yourself less about this age’s madness.The sure retribution is at hand already.”2‘What does all this mean?’ my correspondent asks, in wise anxiety.National prosperity, my dear Madam, according to Mr. Goschen, the ‘Times,’ and ‘Morning Post’;—national prosperity carried to the point of not knowing what to do with our money. Enlightenment, and Freedom, and orthodox Religion, and Science of the superbest and trustworthiest character, and generally the Reign of Law, answer the Duke of Argyll and Professor Huxley. Ruin—inevitable and terrible, such as no nation has yet suffered,—answer God and the Fates.[42]Yes—inevitable. England has to drink a cup which cannot pass from her—at the hands of the Lord, the cup of His fury;—surely the dregs of it, the wicked of the earth shall wring them and drink them out.For let none of my readers think me mad enough or wild enough to hope that any effort, or repentance, or change of conduct, could now save the country from the consequences of her follies, or the Church from the punishment of her crimes. This St. George’s Company of ours is mere raft-making amidst irrevocable wreck—the best we can do, to be done bravely and cheerfully, come of it what may.Let me keep, therefore, to-day wholly to definite matters, and to little ones. What the education we now give our children leads to, my correspondent’s letter shows. What education they should have, instead, I may suggest perhaps in some particulars.What should be done, for instance, in the way of gift-giving, or instruction-giving, for our little Agnes of the hill-side? Would the St. George’s Company, if she were their tenant, only leave her alone,—teach her nothing?Not so; very much otherwise than so. This is some part of what should be done for her, were she indeed under St. George’s rule.Instead of the “something new,” which our learned Master of Arts edits for her in carolling, she should learn, by heart, words which her fathers had known, many and[43]many a year ago. As, for instance, these two little carols of grace before meat:—What God gives, and what we take,’Tis a gift for Christ His sake;Be the meale of Beanes and Pease,God be thanked for those and these.Have we flesh, or have we fish,All are Fragments from His dish:He His Church save; and the King;And our Peace here, like a Spring,Make it ever flourishing.Here, a little child, I standHeaving up my either hand;Cold as Paddocks though they be,Here I lift them up to Thee.For a Benizon to fall,On our meat, and on us all.These verses, or such as these, Agnes should be able to say, and sing; and if on any state occasion it were desired of her to say grace, should be so mannered as to say obediently, without either vanity or shame. Also, she should know other rhymes for her own contentment such as she liked best, out of narrow store offered to,[44]her, ifshe choseto learn to read. Reading by no means being enforced upon her—still less, writing; nothing enforced on her but household help to her mother; instant obedience to her father’s or mother’s word; order and cleanliness in her own departments and person; and gentleness to all inoffensive creatures—paddocks as well as lambs and chickens.Further, instead of eighteen distinct penny Children’s Prizes, containing seventy-two elaborate woodcuts of ‘Ducklings Astray,’ and the like, (which I should especially object to, in the case of Agnes, as too personal, she herself being little more at present than a duckling astray,) the St. George’s Company would invest for her, at once, the ‘ridiculously small sum of eighteenpence,’ in one coloured print—coloured by hand, for the especial decoration of her own chamber. This colouring by hand is one of the occupations which young women of the upper classes, in St. George’s Company, will undertake as a business of pure duty; it was once a very wholesome means of livelihood to poorer art students. The plates of Sibthorpe’s Flora Græca, for instance, cost, I am informed, on their first publication, precisely the sum in question,—eighteen-pence each,—for their colouring by hand:—the enterprising publisher who issued the more recent editions, reducing, in conformity with modern views on the subject of economy, the colourist’s remuneration to thirty shillings per hundred. But in the St. George’s Company, young ladies who have the gift of[45]colouring will be taught to colour engravings simply as well as they can do it, without any reference whatever to pecuniary compensation; and such practice I consider to be the very best possible elementary instruction for themselves, in the art of watercolour painting.And the print which should be provided and thus coloured for little Agnes’s room should be no less than the best engraving I could get made of Simon Memmi’s St. Agnes in Paradise; of which—(according to the probable notions of many of my readers, absurd and idolatrous)—image, little Agnes should know the legend as soon as she was able to understand it; though, if the St. George’s Company, could manage it for her, she should be protected from too early instruction in the meaning of that legend, by such threats from her English playfellows as are noticed in my correspondent’s letter.Such should be some small part of her religious education. For beginning of secular education, the St. George’s Company would provide for her, above and before all things, a yard or two square of St. George’s ground, which should be wholly her own; together with instruments suited to her strength, for the culture, and seeds for the sowing, thereof. On which plot of ground, or near it, in a convenient place, there should be a bee-hive, out of which it should be considered a crowning achievement of Agnes’s secular virtues if she could produce, in its season, a piece of snowy and well-filled comb. And, (always if she chose to learn to read),[46]books should be given her containing such information respecting bees, and other living creatures as it appeared to the St. George’s Company desirable she should possess. But touching the character of this desirable information, what I have to say being somewhat lengthy, must be deferred to my March letter.Castleton, Peak of Derbyshire,27th January.Since finishing this letter, I have driven leisurely through the midland manufacturing districts, which I have not traversed, except by rail, for the last ten years. The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life are the south-eastern suburb of Bradford, (six miles long,) and the scene from Wakefield bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.[47][Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.In my last December’s letter, I promised, for January, some statement of real beginning of operations by our Company; but, as usual, was hindered from fulfilling my promise at the time I intended. And the hindrance lay, as in all useful business it is pretty sure in some measure to lie, in the state of British law. An acre of ground, with some cottages on it, has been given me for our Company; but it is not easy to find out how the Company is to lay hold of it. I suppose the conveyancing will cost us, in the end, half a dozen times the value of the land; and in the meantime I don’t care to announce our possession of it, or say what I mean to do with it. I content myself for the present with reprinting, and very heartily, as far as my experience holds, ratifying, the subjoined portions of a letter, sent me the other day out of a country paper. The writer is speaking, at the point where my quotation begins, of the difficulty of getting a good bankruptcy act passed:—“The reason alleged is that almost any lawyer is ready to help any lying and false-trading person to drive his coach and four through any Act, however good in intention it may be. This is a sad state of things, and is wasteful of more things than money or good temper. It is, however, on the matter of conveyancing that we wish to say a few words.…“We are accustomed to look at the matter as a very simple one. We have before us the deeds of our dwelling-house.[48]The real point is, why can we not sell these papers to, say John Smith, for £1,000, if John is satisfied that our little cottage, with all its admirable rooms so well arranged, is worth that amount? Why can’t we sell him this matter in a simple and clear way? Or, for a case the least bit complicated, take our six shops in the chief street. Why can’t we sell one each to Brown, Jones, Robinson, Thompson, Atkinson, or Williams, their respective and respectable tenants, in an equally simple way? The English law steps in and says that we must have a cumbrous deed prepared for each case, and the total cost to all of us, without stamps, would be about one hundred pounds, at a reasonable computation. What do we get for this large sum? Absolutely nothing but jargon on parchment, instead of plain and simple English, which all the Smiths and Browns might understand, and get for a tenth of the cost. This is all the more irritating, because sensible people are agreed that our present plan is a cumbrous farce, and, moreover, nobody laughs at it but the lawyers who get the picking. Any six honest, clear-headed, educated men could devise a system in a month which would put an end to the needless and costly worry entailed by the existing legal paraphernalia. We have never yet seen any tangible objections to the simple system, nor any salient and satisfactory reasons for retaining the present circumlocutory, wasteful, and foolish one.“Another monstrous anomaly is that we might sell each of our before-mentioned shops in our chief street, and yet retain the original deed untouched; so that after drawing cash from each of our present tenants, we could mortgage the whole block again, and clear off with the double cash.3[49]“But even the present system might be made endurable, and herein lies its greatest blame, namely—that you never know what you are going to pay for the foolish and needless work you are having done. You are entirely at the mercy of the lawyer. When we consider that this so-called difficult and skilful work is always managed in the best offices by a mere clerk, and seldom, if ever, by the principal, we have a reasonable ground of complaint against the enormous and unfair charges usually made for work so done by wholesale.“We will conclude with a practical suggestion or two. Building clubs have been a great boon to the saving element in our community. It is the wish of most people to have a house of their own, and these clubs find, for hundreds, the readiest means to that end. They have made easy the borrowing and the paying back of money, and they have been the means of simplifying mortgage deeds which, for clubs, are only £2 ,, 5s., and if got up simpler, and printed, instead of being written, might easily and profitably be done for a guinea. Could not they confer a still greater boon on the community by combining, and compelling by a strong voice, the lawyers to systematize and cheapen the present mode of conveyancing? This would be a great work, and might be done. Still better would it be to combine to send up suggestions to Parliament for a simpler and better plan, such as would lead to the passing of an Act for the embodiment of this great and much-needed reform.”[51][Contents]Accounts.The following additional subscriptions complete the account of receipts for St. George’s Fund to 15th January, 1875.£s.d.25.Gift50026.Gift113430.Gift02637.Gift50038.Annual (1875)11039.Gift (on condition of being immediately used)250040.Gift20041.Gift50044.Third Donation (1874)1000£541610[53]

A friend, in whose judgment I greatly trust, remonstrated sorrowfully with me, the other day, on the desultory character of Fors; and pleaded with me for the writing of an arranged book instead.

But he might as well plead with a birch-tree growing out of a crag, to arrange its boughs beforehand. The winds and floods will arrange them according to their wild liking; all that the tree has to do, or can do, is to grow gaily, if it may be; sadly, if gaiety be impossible; and let the black jags and scars rend the rose-white of its trunk where Fors shall choose.

But I can well conceive how irritating it must be to any one chancing to take special interest in any one part of my subject—the life of Scott for instance,—to find me, or lose me, wandering away from it for a year or two; and sending roots into new ground in every direction: or (for my friend taxed me with this graver error also) needlessly re-rooting myself in the old.

And, all the while, some kindly expectant people are[30]waiting for ‘details of my plan.’ In the presentment of which, this main difficulty still lets me; that, if I told them, or tried to help them definitely to conceive, the ultimate things I aim at, they would at once throw the book down as hopelessly Utopian; but if I tell them the immediate things I aim at, they will refuse to do those instantly possible things, because inconsistent with the present vile general system. For instance—I take (seeLetter V.) Wordsworth’s single line,

“We live by admiration, hope, and love,”

for my literal guide, in all education. My final object, with every child born on St. George’s estates, will be to teach it what to admire, what to hope for, and what to love: but how far do you suppose the steps necessary to such an ultimate aim are immediately consistent with what Messrs. Huxley and Co. call ‘Secular education’? Or with what either the Bishop of Oxford, or Mr. Spurgeon, would call ‘Religious education’?

What to admire, or wonder at! Do you expect a child to wonder at—being taught that two and two make four—(though if only its masters had the sense to teachthat, honestly, it would be something)—or at the number of copies of nasty novels and false news a steam-engine can print for its reading?

What to hope? Yes, my secular friends—What? That it shall be the richest shopman in the street; and be buried with black feathers enough over its coffin?[31]

What to love—Yes, my ecclesiastical friends, and who is its neighbour, think you? Will you meet these three demands of mine with your three Rs, or your catechism?

And how would I meet them myself? Simply by never, so far as I could help it, letting a child read what is not worth reading, or see what is not worth seeing; and by making it live a life which, whether it will or no, shall enforce honourable hope of continuing long in the land—whether of men or God.

And who is to say what is worth reading, or worth seeing? sneer the Republican mob. Yes, gentlemen, you who never knew a good thing from a bad, in all your lives, may well ask that!

Let us try, however, in such a simple thing as a child’s book. Yesterday, in the course of my walk, I went into a shepherd-farmer’s cottage, to wish whoever might be in the house a happy new year. His wife was at home, of course; and his little daughter, Agnes, nine years old; both as good as gold, in their way.

The cottage is nearly a model of those which I shall expect the tenants of St. George’s Company, and its active members, to live in;—the entire building, parlour, and kitchen, (in this case one, but not necessarily so,) bedrooms and all, about the size of an average dining-room in Grosvenor Place or Park Lane. The conversation naturally turning to Christmas doings and havings,—and I, as an author, of course inquiring whether Agnes had[32]any new books, Agnes brought me her library—consisting chiefly in a good pound’s weight of the literature which cheap printing enables the pious to make Christmas presents of for a penny. A full pound, or it might be, a pound and a half, of this instruction, full of beautiful sentiments, woodcuts, and music. More woodcuts in the first two ounces of it I took up, than I ever had. to study in the first twelve years of my life. Splendid woodcuts, too, in the best Kensington style, and rigidly on the principles of high, and commercially remunerative, art, taught by Messrs. Redgrave, Cole, and Company.

Somehow, none of these seem to have interested little Agnes, or been of the least good to her. Her pound and a half of the best of the modern pious and picturesque is (being of course originally boardless) now a crumpled and variously doubled-up heap, brought down in a handful, or lapful, rather; most of the former insides of the pamphlets being now the outsides; and every form of dog’s ear, puppy’s ear, cat’s ear, kitten’s ear, rat’s ear, and mouse’s ear, developed by the contortions of weary fingers at the corners of their didactic and evangelically sibylline leaves. I ask if I may borrow one to take home and read. Agnes is delighted; but undergoes no such pang of care as a like request would have inflicted on my boyish mind, and needed generous stifling of;—nay, had I asked to borrow the whole heap, I am not sure whether Agnes’s first tacit sensation would not have been one of deliverance.

Being very fond of pretty little girls, (not, by any[33]means, excluding pretty—tall ones,) I choose, for my own reading, a pamphlet1which has a picture of a beautiful little girl with long hair, lying very ill in bed, with her mother putting up her forefinger at her brother, who is crying, with a large tear on the side of his nose; and a legend beneath: ‘Harry told his mother the whole story.’ The pamphlet has been doubled up by Agnes right through the middle of the beautiful little girl’s face, and no less remorselessly through the very middle of the body of the ‘Duckling Astray,’ charmingly drawn by Mr. Harrison Weir on the opposite leaf. But my little Agnes knows so much more about real ducklings than the artist does, that her severity in this case is not to be wondered at.

I carry my Children’s Prize penny’s-worth home to Brantwood, full of curiosity to know “the whole story.” I find that this religious work is edited by a Master of Arts—no less—and that two more woodcuts of the most finished order are given to Harry’s story,—representing Harry and the pretty little girl, (I suppose so, at least; but, alas, now with her back turned to me,—the cuts came cheaper so,) dressed in the extreme of fashion, down to her boots,—first running with Harry, in snow, after a carriage, and then reclining against Harry’s shoulder in a snowstorm.

I arrange my candles for small print, and proceed to read this richly illustrated story.

Harry and his sister were at school together, it appears,[34]at Salisbury; and their father’s carriage was sent, in a snowy day, to bring them home for the holidays. They are to be at home by five; and their mother has invited a children’s party at seven. Harry is enjoined by his father, in the letter which conveys this information, to remain inside the carriage, and not to go on the box.

Harry is a good boy, and does as he is bid; but nothing whatever is said in the letter about not getting out of the carriage to walk up hills. And at ‘two-mile hill’ Harry thinks it will be clever to get out and walk up it, without calling to, or stopping, John on the box. Once out himself, he gets Mary out;—the children begin snowballing each other; the carriage leaves them so far behind that they can’t catch it; a snowstorm comes on, etc., etc.; they are pathetically frozen within a breath of their lives; found by a benevolent carter, just in time; warmed by a benevolent farmer, the carter’s friend; restored to their alarmed father and mother; and Mary has a rheumatic fever, “and for a whole week it was not known whether she would live or die,” which is the Providential punishment of Harry’s sin in getting out of the carriage.

Admitting the perfect appositeness and justice of this Providential punishment; I am, parenthetically, desirous to know of my Evangelical friends, first, whether from the corruption of Harry’s nature they could have expected anything better than his stealthily getting out of the carriage to walk up the hill?—and, secondly, whether[35]the merits of Christ, which are enough to save any murderer or swindler from all the disagreeable consequences of murder and swindling, in the next world, are not enough in this world, if properly relied upon, to save a wicked little boy’s sister from rheumatic fever? This, I say, I only ask parenthetically, for my own information; my immediate business being to ask what effect this story is intended to produce on my shepherd’s little daughter Agnes?

Intendedto produce, I say: what effect itdoesproduce, I can easily ascertain; but what do the writer and the learned editor expect of it? Or rather, to touch the very beginning of the inquiry, for what class of child do they intend it? ‘For all classes,’ the enlightened editor and liberal publisher doubtless reply. ‘Classes, indeed! In the glorious liberty of the Future, there shall be none!’

Well, be it so; but in the inglorious slavery of the Past, it has happened that my little Agnes’s father has not kept a carriage; that Agnes herself has not often seen one, is not likely often to be in one, and has seen a great deal too much snow, and had a great deal too much walking in it, to be tempted out,—if she ever has the chance of being driven in a carriage to a children’s party at seven,—to walk up a hill on the road. Such is our benighted life in Westmoreland. In the future, do my pious and liberal friends suppose that all little Agneses are to drive in carriages? That istheir[36]Utopia. Mine, so much abused for its impossibility, is only that a good many little Agneses who at present drive in carriages, shall have none.

Nay, but perhaps, the learned editor did not intend the story for children ‘quite in Agnes’s position.’ For what sort did he intend it, then? For the class of children whose fathers keep carriages, and whose mothers dress their girls by the Paris modes, at three years old? Very good; then, in families which keep carriages and footmen, the children are supposed to think a book is a prize, which costs a penny? Be that also so, in the Republican cheap world; but might not the cheapeners print, when they are about it, prize poetry for their penny? Here is the ‘Christmas Carol,’ set to music, accompanying this moral story of the Snow.

“Hark, hark, the merry pealing,List to the Christmas chime,Every breath and every feelingHails the good old time;Brothers, sisters, homeward speed,All is mirth and play;Hark, hark, the merry pealing,—Welcome Christmas Day.Sing, sing, around we gather,Each with something new,[37]Cheering mother, cheering father,From the Bible true;Bring the holly, spread the feast,Every heart to cheer,Sing, sing, a merry Christmas,A happy, bright New Year.”

“Hark, hark, the merry pealing,

List to the Christmas chime,

Every breath and every feeling

Hails the good old time;

Brothers, sisters, homeward speed,

All is mirth and play;

Hark, hark, the merry pealing,—

Welcome Christmas Day.

Sing, sing, around we gather,Each with something new,[37]Cheering mother, cheering father,From the Bible true;Bring the holly, spread the feast,Every heart to cheer,Sing, sing, a merry Christmas,A happy, bright New Year.”

Sing, sing, around we gather,

Each with something new,[37]

Cheering mother, cheering father,

From the Bible true;

Bring the holly, spread the feast,

Every heart to cheer,

Sing, sing, a merry Christmas,

A happy, bright New Year.”

Now, putting aside for the moment all questions touching the grounds of the conviction of the young people for whom these verses are intended of the truth of the Bible; or touching the propriety of their cheering their fathers and mothers by quotations from it; or touching the difficultly reconcileable merits of old times and new things; I call these verses bad, primarily, because they are not rhythmical. I consider good rhythm a moral quality. I consider the rhythm in these stanzas demoralized, and demoralizing. I quote, in opposition to them, one of the rhymes by which my own ear and mind were educated in early youth, as being more distinctly, and literally ‘moral,’ than that Christmas carol.

“Dame Wiggins of LeeWas a worthy old soul,As e’er threaded a nee-Dle, or washed in a bowl.She held mice and ratsIn such antipa-thy,That Seven good CatsKept Dame Wiggins of Lee.”

“Dame Wiggins of Lee

Was a worthy old soul,

As e’er threaded a nee-

Dle, or washed in a bowl.

She held mice and rats

In such antipa-thy,

That Seven good Cats

Kept Dame Wiggins of Lee.”

[38]

Putting aside also, in our criticism of these verses, the very debateable question, whether Dame Wiggins kept the Seven Cats, or the Seven Cats Dame Wiggins; and giving no judgment as to the propriety of the license taken in pronunciation, by the accent on the last syllable of ‘antipathy,’ or as to the evident plagiarism of the first couplet from the classical ballad of King Cole, I aver these rhymes to possess the primary virtue of rhyme,—that is to say, to be rhythmical, in a pleasant and exemplary degree. And I believe, and will venture also to assert my belief, that the matter contained in them, though of an imaginative character, is better food for a child’s mind than either the subject or sentiment of the above quoted Christmas Carol.

The mind of little Agnes, at all events, receives from story, pictures, and carol, altogether, no very traceable impression; but, I am happy to say, certainly no harm. She lives fifteen miles from the nearest manufacturing district,—sees no vice, except perhaps sometimes in the village on Sunday afternoons;—hears, from week’s end to week’s end, the sheep bleat, and the wind whistle,—but neither human blasphemy, nor human cruelty of command. Her shepherd father, out on the hills all day, is thankful at evening to return to his fireside, and to have his little daughter to look at, instead of a lamb. She suffers no more from schooling than serves to make her enjoy her home;—knows already the mysteries of butter-making and poultry-keeping;—curtsies to me without[39]alarm when I pass her door, if she is outside of it;—and, on the whole, sees no enemy but winter and rough weather.

But what effect this modern Christmas carolwouldhave had on her mind, if she had had the full advantage of modern education in an advanced and prosperous town,—the following well written letter,—happily sent me by Fors at the necessary moment,—enables me at once to exhibit:—

“10th January, 1874.Dear Mr. Ruskin,Your appendix to the Fors this month contains a chapter on what some will assert is very exceptional ——shire brutality. After nine years’ residence in a ——shire village, I am compelled to believe that the vileness which horrified Judge Mellor is everywhere ingrained where factory and colliery rule prevails.Could you but hear the blasphemous and filthy language our rosy village bairns use as soon as they are out of the parson’s earshot, even when leaving the Sabbath School!Yet we have a rural dean as incumbent, an excellent schoolmaster, and model school. The Government Inspector is highly satisfied, and there are the usual edifying tea parties, prize-givings, and newspaper puffs, yearly.I know that the children are well taught six days a week, yet there is little fruit of good behaviour among them, and an indecency of speech which is amazing in[40]rural children. On Christmas morn a party of these children, boys and girls, singing carols, encountered my young daughter going alone to the church service. The opportunity was tempting, and as if moved by one vile spirit, they screamed at her a blast of the most obscene and profane epithets that vicious malice could devise. She knew none of them; had never harmed them in her life. She came home with her kind, tender heart all aghast. ‘Why do they hate me so?’ she asked.Yet a short time after the same children came into the yard, and began, with the full shrill powers of their young lungs,‘Why do I love Jesus?’the refrain,‘Because He died for me,’with especial gusto. My husband, ignorant of their previous conduct, gave them a bright shilling, which evoked three more hymns of similar character. What does all this mean?Our Bishop says that we have a model parish, a model school, and a model parson—yet we have children like this. Our parson knows it, and says to me that he can do nothing to prevent it.More than this. It is almost incredible; but my own horrified ears have borne witness of it. Young boys will threaten girls of their own age, in the vilest terms, with outrage like that at Burnley. I have heard it again and again. Had Judge Mellor had nine years’ experience of[41]——shire life, he would not have been surprised at the utter brutality of mind exhibited.Yet we are not criminal compared with other districts. Bastardy and drunkenness are at present the darkest shades we can show; but there is perhaps some better influence at work from the vicinage of two great squires which secures us pure air and wide fields.I am glad to read that you purpose vexing yourself less with the sins of the times during the coming summer. It is too great a burthen for a human mind to bear the world’s sins in spirit, as you do. If you mean to preserve yourself for the many thousands whose inner heart’s bitterness your voice has relieved, you must vex yourself less about this age’s madness.The sure retribution is at hand already.”2

“10th January, 1874.

Dear Mr. Ruskin,

Your appendix to the Fors this month contains a chapter on what some will assert is very exceptional ——shire brutality. After nine years’ residence in a ——shire village, I am compelled to believe that the vileness which horrified Judge Mellor is everywhere ingrained where factory and colliery rule prevails.

Could you but hear the blasphemous and filthy language our rosy village bairns use as soon as they are out of the parson’s earshot, even when leaving the Sabbath School!

Yet we have a rural dean as incumbent, an excellent schoolmaster, and model school. The Government Inspector is highly satisfied, and there are the usual edifying tea parties, prize-givings, and newspaper puffs, yearly.

I know that the children are well taught six days a week, yet there is little fruit of good behaviour among them, and an indecency of speech which is amazing in[40]rural children. On Christmas morn a party of these children, boys and girls, singing carols, encountered my young daughter going alone to the church service. The opportunity was tempting, and as if moved by one vile spirit, they screamed at her a blast of the most obscene and profane epithets that vicious malice could devise. She knew none of them; had never harmed them in her life. She came home with her kind, tender heart all aghast. ‘Why do they hate me so?’ she asked.

Yet a short time after the same children came into the yard, and began, with the full shrill powers of their young lungs,

‘Why do I love Jesus?’

the refrain,

‘Because He died for me,’

with especial gusto. My husband, ignorant of their previous conduct, gave them a bright shilling, which evoked three more hymns of similar character. What does all this mean?

Our Bishop says that we have a model parish, a model school, and a model parson—yet we have children like this. Our parson knows it, and says to me that he can do nothing to prevent it.

More than this. It is almost incredible; but my own horrified ears have borne witness of it. Young boys will threaten girls of their own age, in the vilest terms, with outrage like that at Burnley. I have heard it again and again. Had Judge Mellor had nine years’ experience of[41]——shire life, he would not have been surprised at the utter brutality of mind exhibited.

Yet we are not criminal compared with other districts. Bastardy and drunkenness are at present the darkest shades we can show; but there is perhaps some better influence at work from the vicinage of two great squires which secures us pure air and wide fields.

I am glad to read that you purpose vexing yourself less with the sins of the times during the coming summer. It is too great a burthen for a human mind to bear the world’s sins in spirit, as you do. If you mean to preserve yourself for the many thousands whose inner heart’s bitterness your voice has relieved, you must vex yourself less about this age’s madness.

The sure retribution is at hand already.”2

‘What does all this mean?’ my correspondent asks, in wise anxiety.

National prosperity, my dear Madam, according to Mr. Goschen, the ‘Times,’ and ‘Morning Post’;—national prosperity carried to the point of not knowing what to do with our money. Enlightenment, and Freedom, and orthodox Religion, and Science of the superbest and trustworthiest character, and generally the Reign of Law, answer the Duke of Argyll and Professor Huxley. Ruin—inevitable and terrible, such as no nation has yet suffered,—answer God and the Fates.[42]

Yes—inevitable. England has to drink a cup which cannot pass from her—at the hands of the Lord, the cup of His fury;—surely the dregs of it, the wicked of the earth shall wring them and drink them out.

For let none of my readers think me mad enough or wild enough to hope that any effort, or repentance, or change of conduct, could now save the country from the consequences of her follies, or the Church from the punishment of her crimes. This St. George’s Company of ours is mere raft-making amidst irrevocable wreck—the best we can do, to be done bravely and cheerfully, come of it what may.

Let me keep, therefore, to-day wholly to definite matters, and to little ones. What the education we now give our children leads to, my correspondent’s letter shows. What education they should have, instead, I may suggest perhaps in some particulars.

What should be done, for instance, in the way of gift-giving, or instruction-giving, for our little Agnes of the hill-side? Would the St. George’s Company, if she were their tenant, only leave her alone,—teach her nothing?

Not so; very much otherwise than so. This is some part of what should be done for her, were she indeed under St. George’s rule.

Instead of the “something new,” which our learned Master of Arts edits for her in carolling, she should learn, by heart, words which her fathers had known, many and[43]many a year ago. As, for instance, these two little carols of grace before meat:—

What God gives, and what we take,’Tis a gift for Christ His sake;Be the meale of Beanes and Pease,God be thanked for those and these.Have we flesh, or have we fish,All are Fragments from His dish:He His Church save; and the King;And our Peace here, like a Spring,Make it ever flourishing.Here, a little child, I standHeaving up my either hand;Cold as Paddocks though they be,Here I lift them up to Thee.For a Benizon to fall,On our meat, and on us all.

What God gives, and what we take,

’Tis a gift for Christ His sake;

Be the meale of Beanes and Pease,

God be thanked for those and these.

Have we flesh, or have we fish,

All are Fragments from His dish:

He His Church save; and the King;

And our Peace here, like a Spring,

Make it ever flourishing.

Here, a little child, I stand

Heaving up my either hand;

Cold as Paddocks though they be,

Here I lift them up to Thee.

For a Benizon to fall,

On our meat, and on us all.

These verses, or such as these, Agnes should be able to say, and sing; and if on any state occasion it were desired of her to say grace, should be so mannered as to say obediently, without either vanity or shame. Also, she should know other rhymes for her own contentment such as she liked best, out of narrow store offered to,[44]her, ifshe choseto learn to read. Reading by no means being enforced upon her—still less, writing; nothing enforced on her but household help to her mother; instant obedience to her father’s or mother’s word; order and cleanliness in her own departments and person; and gentleness to all inoffensive creatures—paddocks as well as lambs and chickens.

Further, instead of eighteen distinct penny Children’s Prizes, containing seventy-two elaborate woodcuts of ‘Ducklings Astray,’ and the like, (which I should especially object to, in the case of Agnes, as too personal, she herself being little more at present than a duckling astray,) the St. George’s Company would invest for her, at once, the ‘ridiculously small sum of eighteenpence,’ in one coloured print—coloured by hand, for the especial decoration of her own chamber. This colouring by hand is one of the occupations which young women of the upper classes, in St. George’s Company, will undertake as a business of pure duty; it was once a very wholesome means of livelihood to poorer art students. The plates of Sibthorpe’s Flora Græca, for instance, cost, I am informed, on their first publication, precisely the sum in question,—eighteen-pence each,—for their colouring by hand:—the enterprising publisher who issued the more recent editions, reducing, in conformity with modern views on the subject of economy, the colourist’s remuneration to thirty shillings per hundred. But in the St. George’s Company, young ladies who have the gift of[45]colouring will be taught to colour engravings simply as well as they can do it, without any reference whatever to pecuniary compensation; and such practice I consider to be the very best possible elementary instruction for themselves, in the art of watercolour painting.

And the print which should be provided and thus coloured for little Agnes’s room should be no less than the best engraving I could get made of Simon Memmi’s St. Agnes in Paradise; of which—(according to the probable notions of many of my readers, absurd and idolatrous)—image, little Agnes should know the legend as soon as she was able to understand it; though, if the St. George’s Company, could manage it for her, she should be protected from too early instruction in the meaning of that legend, by such threats from her English playfellows as are noticed in my correspondent’s letter.

Such should be some small part of her religious education. For beginning of secular education, the St. George’s Company would provide for her, above and before all things, a yard or two square of St. George’s ground, which should be wholly her own; together with instruments suited to her strength, for the culture, and seeds for the sowing, thereof. On which plot of ground, or near it, in a convenient place, there should be a bee-hive, out of which it should be considered a crowning achievement of Agnes’s secular virtues if she could produce, in its season, a piece of snowy and well-filled comb. And, (always if she chose to learn to read),[46]books should be given her containing such information respecting bees, and other living creatures as it appeared to the St. George’s Company desirable she should possess. But touching the character of this desirable information, what I have to say being somewhat lengthy, must be deferred to my March letter.

Castleton, Peak of Derbyshire,27th January.

Since finishing this letter, I have driven leisurely through the midland manufacturing districts, which I have not traversed, except by rail, for the last ten years. The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life are the south-eastern suburb of Bradford, (six miles long,) and the scene from Wakefield bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.[47]

[Contents]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.In my last December’s letter, I promised, for January, some statement of real beginning of operations by our Company; but, as usual, was hindered from fulfilling my promise at the time I intended. And the hindrance lay, as in all useful business it is pretty sure in some measure to lie, in the state of British law. An acre of ground, with some cottages on it, has been given me for our Company; but it is not easy to find out how the Company is to lay hold of it. I suppose the conveyancing will cost us, in the end, half a dozen times the value of the land; and in the meantime I don’t care to announce our possession of it, or say what I mean to do with it. I content myself for the present with reprinting, and very heartily, as far as my experience holds, ratifying, the subjoined portions of a letter, sent me the other day out of a country paper. The writer is speaking, at the point where my quotation begins, of the difficulty of getting a good bankruptcy act passed:—“The reason alleged is that almost any lawyer is ready to help any lying and false-trading person to drive his coach and four through any Act, however good in intention it may be. This is a sad state of things, and is wasteful of more things than money or good temper. It is, however, on the matter of conveyancing that we wish to say a few words.…“We are accustomed to look at the matter as a very simple one. We have before us the deeds of our dwelling-house.[48]The real point is, why can we not sell these papers to, say John Smith, for £1,000, if John is satisfied that our little cottage, with all its admirable rooms so well arranged, is worth that amount? Why can’t we sell him this matter in a simple and clear way? Or, for a case the least bit complicated, take our six shops in the chief street. Why can’t we sell one each to Brown, Jones, Robinson, Thompson, Atkinson, or Williams, their respective and respectable tenants, in an equally simple way? The English law steps in and says that we must have a cumbrous deed prepared for each case, and the total cost to all of us, without stamps, would be about one hundred pounds, at a reasonable computation. What do we get for this large sum? Absolutely nothing but jargon on parchment, instead of plain and simple English, which all the Smiths and Browns might understand, and get for a tenth of the cost. This is all the more irritating, because sensible people are agreed that our present plan is a cumbrous farce, and, moreover, nobody laughs at it but the lawyers who get the picking. Any six honest, clear-headed, educated men could devise a system in a month which would put an end to the needless and costly worry entailed by the existing legal paraphernalia. We have never yet seen any tangible objections to the simple system, nor any salient and satisfactory reasons for retaining the present circumlocutory, wasteful, and foolish one.“Another monstrous anomaly is that we might sell each of our before-mentioned shops in our chief street, and yet retain the original deed untouched; so that after drawing cash from each of our present tenants, we could mortgage the whole block again, and clear off with the double cash.3[49]“But even the present system might be made endurable, and herein lies its greatest blame, namely—that you never know what you are going to pay for the foolish and needless work you are having done. You are entirely at the mercy of the lawyer. When we consider that this so-called difficult and skilful work is always managed in the best offices by a mere clerk, and seldom, if ever, by the principal, we have a reasonable ground of complaint against the enormous and unfair charges usually made for work so done by wholesale.“We will conclude with a practical suggestion or two. Building clubs have been a great boon to the saving element in our community. It is the wish of most people to have a house of their own, and these clubs find, for hundreds, the readiest means to that end. They have made easy the borrowing and the paying back of money, and they have been the means of simplifying mortgage deeds which, for clubs, are only £2 ,, 5s., and if got up simpler, and printed, instead of being written, might easily and profitably be done for a guinea. Could not they confer a still greater boon on the community by combining, and compelling by a strong voice, the lawyers to systematize and cheapen the present mode of conveyancing? This would be a great work, and might be done. Still better would it be to combine to send up suggestions to Parliament for a simpler and better plan, such as would lead to the passing of an Act for the embodiment of this great and much-needed reform.”[51]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

In my last December’s letter, I promised, for January, some statement of real beginning of operations by our Company; but, as usual, was hindered from fulfilling my promise at the time I intended. And the hindrance lay, as in all useful business it is pretty sure in some measure to lie, in the state of British law. An acre of ground, with some cottages on it, has been given me for our Company; but it is not easy to find out how the Company is to lay hold of it. I suppose the conveyancing will cost us, in the end, half a dozen times the value of the land; and in the meantime I don’t care to announce our possession of it, or say what I mean to do with it. I content myself for the present with reprinting, and very heartily, as far as my experience holds, ratifying, the subjoined portions of a letter, sent me the other day out of a country paper. The writer is speaking, at the point where my quotation begins, of the difficulty of getting a good bankruptcy act passed:—“The reason alleged is that almost any lawyer is ready to help any lying and false-trading person to drive his coach and four through any Act, however good in intention it may be. This is a sad state of things, and is wasteful of more things than money or good temper. It is, however, on the matter of conveyancing that we wish to say a few words.…“We are accustomed to look at the matter as a very simple one. We have before us the deeds of our dwelling-house.[48]The real point is, why can we not sell these papers to, say John Smith, for £1,000, if John is satisfied that our little cottage, with all its admirable rooms so well arranged, is worth that amount? Why can’t we sell him this matter in a simple and clear way? Or, for a case the least bit complicated, take our six shops in the chief street. Why can’t we sell one each to Brown, Jones, Robinson, Thompson, Atkinson, or Williams, their respective and respectable tenants, in an equally simple way? The English law steps in and says that we must have a cumbrous deed prepared for each case, and the total cost to all of us, without stamps, would be about one hundred pounds, at a reasonable computation. What do we get for this large sum? Absolutely nothing but jargon on parchment, instead of plain and simple English, which all the Smiths and Browns might understand, and get for a tenth of the cost. This is all the more irritating, because sensible people are agreed that our present plan is a cumbrous farce, and, moreover, nobody laughs at it but the lawyers who get the picking. Any six honest, clear-headed, educated men could devise a system in a month which would put an end to the needless and costly worry entailed by the existing legal paraphernalia. We have never yet seen any tangible objections to the simple system, nor any salient and satisfactory reasons for retaining the present circumlocutory, wasteful, and foolish one.“Another monstrous anomaly is that we might sell each of our before-mentioned shops in our chief street, and yet retain the original deed untouched; so that after drawing cash from each of our present tenants, we could mortgage the whole block again, and clear off with the double cash.3[49]“But even the present system might be made endurable, and herein lies its greatest blame, namely—that you never know what you are going to pay for the foolish and needless work you are having done. You are entirely at the mercy of the lawyer. When we consider that this so-called difficult and skilful work is always managed in the best offices by a mere clerk, and seldom, if ever, by the principal, we have a reasonable ground of complaint against the enormous and unfair charges usually made for work so done by wholesale.“We will conclude with a practical suggestion or two. Building clubs have been a great boon to the saving element in our community. It is the wish of most people to have a house of their own, and these clubs find, for hundreds, the readiest means to that end. They have made easy the borrowing and the paying back of money, and they have been the means of simplifying mortgage deeds which, for clubs, are only £2 ,, 5s., and if got up simpler, and printed, instead of being written, might easily and profitably be done for a guinea. Could not they confer a still greater boon on the community by combining, and compelling by a strong voice, the lawyers to systematize and cheapen the present mode of conveyancing? This would be a great work, and might be done. Still better would it be to combine to send up suggestions to Parliament for a simpler and better plan, such as would lead to the passing of an Act for the embodiment of this great and much-needed reform.”[51]

“The reason alleged is that almost any lawyer is ready to help any lying and false-trading person to drive his coach and four through any Act, however good in intention it may be. This is a sad state of things, and is wasteful of more things than money or good temper. It is, however, on the matter of conveyancing that we wish to say a few words.…

“We are accustomed to look at the matter as a very simple one. We have before us the deeds of our dwelling-house.[48]The real point is, why can we not sell these papers to, say John Smith, for £1,000, if John is satisfied that our little cottage, with all its admirable rooms so well arranged, is worth that amount? Why can’t we sell him this matter in a simple and clear way? Or, for a case the least bit complicated, take our six shops in the chief street. Why can’t we sell one each to Brown, Jones, Robinson, Thompson, Atkinson, or Williams, their respective and respectable tenants, in an equally simple way? The English law steps in and says that we must have a cumbrous deed prepared for each case, and the total cost to all of us, without stamps, would be about one hundred pounds, at a reasonable computation. What do we get for this large sum? Absolutely nothing but jargon on parchment, instead of plain and simple English, which all the Smiths and Browns might understand, and get for a tenth of the cost. This is all the more irritating, because sensible people are agreed that our present plan is a cumbrous farce, and, moreover, nobody laughs at it but the lawyers who get the picking. Any six honest, clear-headed, educated men could devise a system in a month which would put an end to the needless and costly worry entailed by the existing legal paraphernalia. We have never yet seen any tangible objections to the simple system, nor any salient and satisfactory reasons for retaining the present circumlocutory, wasteful, and foolish one.

“Another monstrous anomaly is that we might sell each of our before-mentioned shops in our chief street, and yet retain the original deed untouched; so that after drawing cash from each of our present tenants, we could mortgage the whole block again, and clear off with the double cash.3[49]

“But even the present system might be made endurable, and herein lies its greatest blame, namely—that you never know what you are going to pay for the foolish and needless work you are having done. You are entirely at the mercy of the lawyer. When we consider that this so-called difficult and skilful work is always managed in the best offices by a mere clerk, and seldom, if ever, by the principal, we have a reasonable ground of complaint against the enormous and unfair charges usually made for work so done by wholesale.

“We will conclude with a practical suggestion or two. Building clubs have been a great boon to the saving element in our community. It is the wish of most people to have a house of their own, and these clubs find, for hundreds, the readiest means to that end. They have made easy the borrowing and the paying back of money, and they have been the means of simplifying mortgage deeds which, for clubs, are only £2 ,, 5s., and if got up simpler, and printed, instead of being written, might easily and profitably be done for a guinea. Could not they confer a still greater boon on the community by combining, and compelling by a strong voice, the lawyers to systematize and cheapen the present mode of conveyancing? This would be a great work, and might be done. Still better would it be to combine to send up suggestions to Parliament for a simpler and better plan, such as would lead to the passing of an Act for the embodiment of this great and much-needed reform.”[51]

[Contents]Accounts.The following additional subscriptions complete the account of receipts for St. George’s Fund to 15th January, 1875.£s.d.25.Gift50026.Gift113430.Gift02637.Gift50038.Annual (1875)11039.Gift (on condition of being immediately used)250040.Gift20041.Gift50044.Third Donation (1874)1000£541610[53]

Accounts.

The following additional subscriptions complete the account of receipts for St. George’s Fund to 15th January, 1875.£s.d.25.Gift50026.Gift113430.Gift02637.Gift50038.Annual (1875)11039.Gift (on condition of being immediately used)250040.Gift20041.Gift50044.Third Donation (1874)1000£541610[53]

The following additional subscriptions complete the account of receipts for St. George’s Fund to 15th January, 1875.

£s.d.25.Gift50026.Gift113430.Gift02637.Gift50038.Annual (1875)11039.Gift (on condition of being immediately used)250040.Gift20041.Gift50044.Third Donation (1874)1000£541610

[53]

1The Children’s Prize. No. XII. December, 1873. Price one penny.↑2Yes, I know that; but am I to be cheerfuller therefore?↑3I don’t vouch for the particular statements in this letter. It seems to me incredible that any practical absurdity so great as this should exist in tenure of property.↑

1The Children’s Prize. No. XII. December, 1873. Price one penny.↑

2Yes, I know that; but am I to be cheerfuller therefore?↑

3I don’t vouch for the particular statements in this letter. It seems to me incredible that any practical absurdity so great as this should exist in tenure of property.↑

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