IX.
Lambkin’s Address to the League of Progress
Everybody will remember the famous meeting of the Higher Spinsters in 1868; a body hitherto purely voluntary in its organisation, it had undertaken to add to the houses of the poor and wretched the element which reigns in the residential suburbs of our great towns. If Whitechapel is more degraded now than it was thirty years ago we must not altogether disregard the earlier efforts of the Higher Spinsters, they laboured well each in her own sphere and in death they were not divided.
The moment however which gave their embryonic conceptions an organic form did not sound till this year of 1868. It was in the Conference held at Burford during thatsummer that, to quote their eloquent circular, “the ideas were mooted and the feeling was voiced which made us what we are.” In other words the Higher Spinsters were merged in the new and greater society of the League of Progress. How much the League of Progress has done, its final recognition by the County Council, the sums paid to its organisers and servants I need not here describe; suffice it to say that, like all our great movements, it was a spontaneous effort of the upper middle class, that it concerned itself chiefly with the artisans, whom it desired to raise to its own level, and that it has so far succeeded as to now possess forty-three Cloisters in our great towns, each with its Grand Master, Chatelaine, Corporation of the Burghers of Progress and Lay Brothers, the whole supported upon salaries suitable to their social rank and proceeding entirely from voluntary contributions with the exception of that part of the revenue which is drawn from public funds.
The subject of the Conference, out of which so much was destined to grow, was“The Tertiary Symptoms of Secondary Education among the Poor.”
Views upon this matter were heard from every possible standpoint; men of varying religious persuasions from the Scientific Agnostic to the distant Parsee lent breadth and elasticity to the fascinating subject. Its chemical aspect was admirably described (with experiments) by Sir Julius Wobble, the Astronomer Royal, and its theological results by the Reader in Burmesan.
Lambkin was best known for the simple eloquence in which he could clothe the most difficult and confused conceptions. It was on this account that he was asked to give the Closing Address with which the Proceedings terminated.
Before reciting it I must detain the reader with one fine anecdote concerning this occasion, a passage worthy of the event and of the man. Lambkin (as I need hardly say) was full of his subject, enthusiastic and absorbed. No thought of gain entered his head, nor was he the kind of man to have applied for payment unless he believed money to be owing to him. Neverthelessit would have been impossible to leave unremunerated such work as that which follows. It was decided by the authorities to pay him a sum drawn from the fees which the visitors had paid to visit the College Fish-Ponds, whose mediæval use in monkish times was explained in a popular style by one who shall be nameless, but who gave his services gratuitously.
After their departure Mr. Large entered Lambkin’s room with an envelope, wishing to add a personal courtesy to a pleasant duty, and said:
“I have great pleasure, my dear Lambkin, in presenting you with this Bank Note as a small acknowledgment of your services at the Conference.”
Lambkin answered at once with:
“My dear Large, I shall be really displeased if you estimate that slight performance of a pleasurable task at so high a rate as ten pounds.”
Nor indeed was this the case. For when Lambkin opened the enclosure (having waited with delicate courtesy for his visitor to leave the room) he discovered but fivepounds therein. But note what follows—Lambkin neither mentioned the matter to a soul, nor passed the least stricture upon Large’s future actions, save in those matters where he found his colleague justly to blame: and in the course of the several years during which they continually met, the restraint and self-respect of his character saved him from the use of ignoble weapons whether of pen or tongue. It was a lesson in gentlemanly irony to see my friend take his place above Large at high table in the uneasy days that followed.
THE ADDRESS
My dear Friends,
I shall attempt to put before you in a few simple, but I hope well-chosen words, the views of a plain man upon the great subject before us to-day. I shall attempt with the greatest care to avoid any personal offence, but I shall not hesitate to use the knife with an unsparing hand, as is indeed the duty of the Pastor whosoever he may be. I remember a late dear friend of mine[who would not wish me to make his name public but whom you will perhaps recognise in the founder and builder of the new Cathedral at Isaacsville in Canada[54]]. I remember his saying to me with a merry twinkle of the eye that looms only from the free manhood of the west: “Lambkin,” said he, “would you know how I made my large fortune in the space of but three months, and how I have attained to such dignity and honour? It was by following this simple maxim which my dear mother[55]taught me in the rough log-cabin[56]of my birth: ‘Be courteous to all strangers, but familiar with none.’”[57]
My friends, you are not strangers, nay, on the present solemn occasion I think I may call you friends—even brethren!—dear brothers and sisters! But a little bird has told me.... (Here a genial smile passed over his face and he drank a draught of pure cold water from a tumbler at his side.) A little bird has told me, I say, that some of you feared a trifle of just harshness, a reprimand perhaps, or a warning note of danger, at the best a doubtful and academic temper as to the future. Fear nothing. I shall pursue a far different course, and however courteous I may be I shall indulge in no familiarities.
“The Tertiary symptoms of Secondary Education among the Poor” is a noble phrase and expresses a noble idea. Why the very words are drawn from our Anglo-Saxon mother-tongue deftly mingled with a few expressions borrowed from the old dead language of long-past Greece and Rome.
What is Education? The derivation of the word answers this question. It is from “e” that is “out of,” “duc-o” “I lead,” from the root Duc—to lead, to govern(whence we get so many of our most important words such as “Duke”; “Duck” = a drake; etc.) and finally the termination “-tio” which corresponds to the English “-ishness.” We may then put the whole phrase in simple language thus, “The threefold Showings of twofold Led-out-of-ishness among the Needy.”
The Needy! The Poor! Terrible words! It has been truly said that we have them always with us. It is one of our peculiar glories in nineteenth century England, that we of the upper classes have fully recognised our heavy responsibility towards our weaker fellow-citizens. Not by Revolution, which is dangerous and vain, not by heroic legislation or hair-brained schemes of universal panaceas, not by frothy Utopias. No!—by solid hard work, by quiet and persistent effort, with the slow invisible tenacity that won the day at Badajoz, we have won this great social victory. And if any one should ask me for the result I should answer him—go to Bolton, go to Manchester, go to Liverpool; go to Hull or Halifax—the answer is there.
There are many ways in which this good work is proceeding. Life is a gem of many facets. Some of my friends take refuge in Prayer, others have joined the Charity Organisation Society, others again have laboured in a less brilliant but fully as useful a fashion by writing books upon social statistics which command an enormous circulation. You have turned to education, and you have done well. Show me a miner or a stevedore who attends his lectures upon Rossetti, and I will show you a man. Show me his wife or daughter at a cookery school or engaged in fretwork, and I will shew you a woman. A man and a woman—solemn thought!
A noble subject indeed and one to occupy the whole life of a man! This “Education,” this “Leading-out-of,” is the matter of all our lives here in Oxford except in the vacation.[58]And what an effect it has! Let me prove it in a short example.
At a poor lodging-house in Lafayette, Pa., U.S.A., three well-educated men fromNew England who had fallen upon evil times were seated at a table surrounded by a couple of ignorant and superstitious Irishmen; these poor untaught creatures, presuming upon their numbers, did not hesitate to call the silent and gentlemanly unfortunates “Dommed High-faluthing Fules”; but mark the sequel. A fire broke out in the night. The house was full of these Irishmen and of yet more repulsive Italians. Some were consumed by the devouring element, others perished in the flames, others again saved their lives by a cowardly flight.[59]But what of those three from Massachusetts whom better principles had guided in youth and with whom philosophy had replaced the bitter craft of the Priest? They were found—my dear friends—they were found still seated calmly at the table; they had not moved; no passion had blinded them, no panic disturbed: in their charred and blackened features no trace of terror was apparent. Such is the effect, such the glory of what my late master andguide, the Professor of Tautology, used to call the “Principle of the Survival of the Fittest.”
(Applause, which was only checked by a consideration for the respect due to the Sacred edifice.)
Go forth then! Again I say go forth! Go forth! Go forth! The time is coming when England will see that your claims to reverence, recognition and emolument are as great as our own. I repeat it, go forth, and when you have brought the great bulk of families to change their mental standpoint, then indeed you will have transformed the world! For without the mind the human intellect is nothing.