VI.UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENTS.[1]

1Reprinted, by permission, from theNineteenth Centuryof February 1884.

Oncemore, as happens in crises of history, rich and poor have met. ‘Scientific charity,’ or the system which aims at creating respectability by methods of relief, has come to the judgment, and has been found wanting. Societies which helped the poor by gifts made paupers, churches which would have saved them by preaching made hypocrites, and the outcome of scientific charity is the working man too thrifty to pet his children and too respectable to be happy.

Those who have tried hardest at planning relief and at bringing to a focus the forces of charity, those who have sacrificed themselves to stop the demoralising out-relief and restore to the people the spirit of self-reliance, will be the first to confess dissatisfaction if they are told that the earthly paradise of the majority of the people must be to belong to a club, to pay for a doctor through a provident dispensary, and to keep themselves unspotted from charity or pauperism. There is not enough in such hope to call out efforts of sacrifice, and a steady look into such an earthly paradise discloses that the life of thethrifty is a sad life, limited both by the pressure of continuous toil and by the fear lest this pressure should cease and starvation ensue.

The poor need more than food: they need also the knowledge, the character, the happiness which are the gift of God to this age. The age has received His best gifts, but hitherto they have fallen mostly to the rich.

It is a moment of Peace. To-day there are no battles, but the returns of the dead and wounded from accidents with machinery and from diseases resulting from injurious trades show that there are countless homes in which there must still be daily uncertainty as to the father’s return, and many children and wives who become orphans and widows for their country’s good.

It is an age of Knowledge. But if returns were made either of the increased health due to the skill of doctors and sanitarians, or of the increased pleasures due to the greater knowledge of the thoughts and acts of other men in other times and countries, it would be shown that neither length of days nor pleasure falls to the lot of the poor. Few are the poor families where the mother will not say, ‘I have buried many of mine.’ Few are the homes where the talk has any subject beyond the day’s doings and the morrow’s fears.

It is an age of Travel, but the mass of the poor know little beyond the radius of their own homes. It is no unusual thing to find people within ten miles of a famous sight which they have never seen, and it is the usual thing to find complete ignorance of other modes of life, a thorough contempt for the foreigner and all his ways. The improved means of communication which is the boast of the age, and which has done so much to widenthought, tends to the enjoyment of the rich more than of the poor.

It is an age of the Higher Life. Higher conceptions of virtue, a higher ideal of what is possible for man, are the best gift to our day, but it is received only by those who have time and power to study. ‘They who want the necessaries of life want also a virtuous and an equal mind,’ says the Chinese sage; and so the poor, being without those things necessary to the growth of mind and feeling, jeopardise Salvation—the possession, that is, of a life at one with the Good and the True, at one with God.

Those who care for the poor see that the best things are missed, and they are not content with the hope offered by ‘scientific charity.’ They see that the best things might be shared by all, and they cannot stand aside and do nothing. ‘The cruellest man living,’ it has been said, ‘could not sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold,’ and those who see must do something. They may be weary of revolutionary schemes, which turn the world upside down to produce after anarchy another unequal division; they may be weary, too, of philanthropic schemes which touch but the edge of the question. They may hear of dynamite, and they may watch the failure of an Education Act, as the prophets watched the failure of teachers without knowledge. They may criticise all that philanthropists and Governments do, but still they themselves would do something. No theory of progress, no proof that many individuals among the poor have become rich, will make them satisfied with the doctrine oflaissez faire; they simply face the fact that in the richest country of the world the great mass of their countrymenlive without the knowledge, the character, and the fulness of life which are the best gift to this age, and that some thousands either beg for their daily bread or live in anxious misery about a wretched existence. What can they do which revolutions, which missions, and which money have not done?

It is in answer to such a question that I make the suggestion of this paper. I make it especially as a development of the idea which underlies a College Mission. These Missions are generally inaugurated by a visit to a college from some well-known clergyman working in the East End of London or in some such working-class quarter. He speaks to the undergraduates of the condition of the poor, and he rouses their sympathy. A committee is appointed, subscriptions are promised, and after some negotiations a young clergyman, a former member of the college, is appointed as a Mission curate of a district. He at once sets in motion the usual parochial machinery of district visiting, mothers’ meetings, clubs, &c. He invites the assistance of those of his old mates who will help; at regular intervals he makes a report of his progress, and if all goes well he is at last able to tell how the district has become a parish.

The Mission, good as its influence may be, is not, it seems to me, an adequate expression of the idea which moved the promoters. The hope in the College when the first sympathy was roused was that all should join in good work, and the Mission is necessarily a Churchman’s effort. The desire was that as University men they should themselves bear the burdens of the poor—and the Mission requires of them little more than an annual guinea subscription. The grand idea whichmoved the College, the idea which, like a new creative spirit, is brooding over the face of Society, and is making men conscious of their brotherhood, finds no adequate expression in the district church machinery with which, in East London, I am familiar. There is little in that machinery which helps the people to conceive of religion apart from sectarianism, or of a Church which is ‘the nation bent on righteousness.’ There is little, too, in the ordinary parochial mechanism which will carry to the homes of the poor a share of the best gifts now enjoyed in the University.

Imagine a man’s visit to the Mission District of his college. He has thought of the needs of the poor, and of the way in which those needs are being met. He has formed in his mind a picture of a district where loving supervision has made impossible the wretchedness of ‘horrible London’; he expects to find well-ordered houses, people interested in the thoughts of the day, gathering round their pastor to learn of men and of God. He finds instead an Ireland in England, people paying 3s.or 4s.a week for rooms smaller than Irish cabins, without the pure air of the Irish hill-side, and with vice which makes squalor hopeless. He finds a population dwarfed in stature, smugly content with their own existence, ignorant of their high vocation to be partners of the highest, where even the children are not joyful. He measures the force which the Mission curate is bringing to bear against all this evil. He finds a church which is used only for a few hours in the week, and which is kept up at a cost of 150l.a year. He finds the clergyman absorbed in holding together his congregation by means of meetings and treats, and almost broken down by thestrain put upon him to keep his parochial organisation going. The clergyman is alone, his church work absorbs his power and attracts little outside help. What can he do to improve the dwellings and widen the lives of 4,000 persons? What can he do to spread knowledge and culture? What can he do to teach the religion which is more than church-going? What wonder if, when he is asked what help he needs, he answers, ‘Money for my church,’ ‘Teachers for my Sunday school,’ ‘Managers for my clothing club’? What wonder, too, if the visitor, seeing such things and hearing such demands, goes away somewhat discontented, somewhat inclined to give up faith in the Mission, and, what is worse, ready to believe that there is no way by which the best can be given to the poor?

It is to members of the Universities anxious to unite in a common purpose of improving the lives of the people that I make the suggestion that University Settlements will better express their idea. College Missions have done some of the work on which they have been sent, but in their very nature their field is limited. It is in no opposition to these Missions, but rather with a view to more fully cover their idea, that I propose the new scheme. The details of the plan may be shortly stated.

The place of settlement must of course first be fixed. It will be in some such poor quarter as that of East London, where a house can be taken in which there shall be both habitable chambers and large reception-rooms. A man must be chosen to be the chief of the Settlement; he must receive a salary which, like that of the Mission curate, will be guaranteed by the College, and he must make his home in the house. He must have taken agood degree, be qualified to teach, and be endowed with the enthusiasm of humanity. Such men are not hard to find; under a wiser Church government they would be clergymen, and serve the people as the nation’s ministers; but, under a Church government which in an age of reform has remained unreformed, they are kept outside, and often fret in other service. One of these, qualified by training to teach, qualified by character to organise and command, qualified by disposition to make friends with all sorts of men, would gladly accept a position in which he could both earn a livelihood and fulfil his calling. He would be the centre of the University Settlement. Men fresh from college or old University men would come to occupy the chambers as residents. Lecturers in connection with the University Extension Society would be his fellow-lecturers in the reception-rooms, and as the head of such a Settlement he would extend a welcome to all classes in his new neighbourhood.

The old Universities exercise a strange charm: the Oxford or Cambridge man is still held to possess some peculiar knowledge, and the fact that three of the most democratic boroughs are represented by University professors has its explanation. ‘He speaks beautiful German, but of course those University gentlemen ought to,’ was a man’s reflection to me after a talk with a Cambridge professor. Those, too, who may be supposed to know what draws in an advertising poster, are always glad to print after the name of a speaker his degree and college.

Thus it would be that the head of the Settlement would find himself as closely related to his new surroundings as to his old. The same reputation, whichwould draw to him fellow-scholars or old pupils, would put him in a position to discover the work and thought going on around him. He would become familiar with the teachers in the elementary and middle-class schools, he would measure the work done by clergy and missionaries, he would be in touch with the details of local politics; and, what is most important of all, he would come into sympathy with the hope, the unnamed hope, which is moving in the masses.

The Settlement would be common ground for all classes. In the lecture-room the knowledge gathered at the highest sources would, night after night, be freely given. In the conversation rooms the students would exchange ideas and form friendships. At the weekly receptions of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ the residents would mingle freely in the crowd.

The internal arrangements would be simple enough. The Head would undertake the domestic details and fix the price which residents would pay for board and lodging. He would admit new members and judge if the intentions of those who offered were honest. Some would come for their vacations; others occupied during the daytime would come to make the place their home. University men, barristers, Government clerks, curates, medical students, or business men each would have opportunity both for solitary and for associated life, and the expense would be various to suit their various means. The one uniting bond would be the common purpose, ‘not without action to die fruitless,’ but to do something to improve the condition of the people. It would be the duty of the Head to keep alive among his fellows the freshness of their purpose, ‘to recall the stragglers, refresh the outworn,praise and reinspire the brave.’ He would have, therefore, to judge of the powers of each to fill the places to which he could introduce them. To some he would recommend official positions, to some teaching, to some the organisation of relief, to some the visiting of the sick, and thus new life would be infused into existing churches, chapels, and institutions. Others he would introduce as members of Co-operative Societies, Friendly Societies, or Political and Social Clubs. He would so arrange that all should occupy positions in which they would become friends of his neighbours, and discover, perhaps as none have yet discovered, how to meet their needs.

In such an institution it is easy to see that development might be immeasurable. A born leader of men surrounded by a group of intelligent and earnest friends, pledged not ‘to go round in an eddy of purposeless dust,’ and placed face to face with the misery and apathy they know to be wrong, would of necessity discover means beyond our present vision. They would bind themselves by sympathy and service to the lives of the people; they would bring the light and strength of intelligence to bear on their government, and they would give a voice both to their needs and their wrongs. It is easy to imagine what such settlers in a great town might do, but it will be more to the point to consider how they may express the idea which underlies the College Mission—the interest, that is, of centres of education in the centres of industry, and the will of University men to acknowledge their brotherhood with the people.

If it be that the Missionary’s account of his Mission district fails at last to rouse the interest of his hearers,and if his work seems to be absorbed in the effort to keep going his parochial machinery amid a host of like machines, the same cannot be the fate of the Settlement.

Some of the settlers will settle themselves for longer periods, and those who are occupied during the daytime will find it as possible to live among the poor as among the rich; but there must also be room for those who can spend only a few weeks or months in the Settlement, so that men may come, as some already have come, to East London to spend part of a vacation in serving the people. This interchange of life between the University and the Settlement will keep up between the two a living tie. Each term will bring, not a set speech about the work of the Mission, but the many chats on the wonders of human life. The condition of the English people will come to be a fact more familiar than that of the Grecian or Roman, and the history of the College Settlement will be better known than that of the boat or the eleven. On the other side, thoughts and feelings which are now often spent in vain talks at debating societies will go up to town to refresh those who are spent by labour, or to find an outlet in action.

There is no fear that the College Settlement will fail to rouse interest. Its life will be the life of the College. As long as both draw their strength from the common source, from the same body of members, the sympathy of the College will be with the people. Nor is there any fear lest the work of the settlers become stereotyped, as is often the case with the work of Missions and Societies. Each year, each term, would alter the constitution of the Settlement as other settlers brought in other charactersand the results of other knowledge, or as their ideas became modified by common work with the various religious and secular organisations of the neighbourhood. The danger, indeed, would not be from uniformity of method or narrowness of aim; rather would it be the endeavour of the Head to limit the diversity which many minds would introduce, and restrain a liberality willing to see good in every form of earnestness. The variety of work which would embrace the most varied effort, and enlist its members in every movement for the common good, would keep about the Settlement the beauty of a perpetual promise.

If we go further, and ask how this plan reaches deeper than others which have gone before, the question is not so easily answered, because it is impossible to prophesy that a University Settlement will make the poor rich or give them the necessaries of true life. Inasmuch, though, as poverty—poverty in its true sense, including poverty of the knowledge of God and man—is largely due to the division of classes, a University Settlement does provide a remedy which goes deeper than that provided by popular philanthropy.

The poor man of modern days has to live in a quarter of the town where he cannot even try to live with those superior to himself. Around him are thousands educated as he has been educated, with taste and with knowledge on a level with his own. The demand for low things has created a supply of low satisfactions. Thus it is that the amusements are unrecreative, the lectures uninstructive, and the religion uninspiring. It is not possible for the inhabitant of the poor quarter to come into casual intercourse with the higher manners oflife and thought except at a cost which would constitute a large percentage of his income.

I am afraid that it is long before we can expect the rich and poor again to live as neighbours: for good or evil they have been divided, and other means must, for the present, be found for making common the property of knowledge. One such means is the University Settlement. Men who have knowledge may become friends of the poor and share that knowledge and its fruits as, day by day, they meet in their common rooms for talk or for instruction, for music or for play.

The settlers will be able to join in that which is done by other societies, while they share all their best with the poor, and in the highest sense make their property common. They may be some of the best charity agents, for they will have an experience out of the reach of others, which they will have accumulated through their different agencies. As members of various secular and religious organisations, they may be able to compare notes after the day’s work, and offer evidence as to how the poor live which, in days to come, might be invaluable. They may be some of the best educators, for, bringing ever-fresh stores of thought, they will see the weak spots in a routine which daily tires a child because it does so little to teach him, and they will have an opinion on national education better worth considering than the grumbles of those wearied with most things, or the congratulations of officials who judge by examinations. They may be the best Church reformers, for they will make more and more manifest how it is not institutions but righteousness which exalts a nation; how, one afteranother, all reforms fail because men tell lies and love themselves; and how, therefore, the first of all reforms is the reform of the Church, whose mission for the nation is that it create righteousness.

There is, then, for the settler of a University Settlement an ideal worthy of his sacrifice. He looks not to a Church buttressed by party spirit, nor to a community founded on self-helped respectability. He looks rather to a community where the best is most common, where there is no more hunger and misery, because there is no more ignorance and sin—a community in which the poor have all that gives value to wealth, in which beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised.

Samuel A. Barnett.

[This paper was read at a meeting at St. John’s College, Oxford, in November 1883, and resulted in the foundation of Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, and other University Settlements in poor districts of large towns.]

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