THE TWO WINDOWS
TheUnion Workhouse of the ancient parish of Herne—how calm and pastoral is that little nook of Kent!—has two outward windows. The fabric, built by the inspiration of the New Poor-law, was a blind, eyeless piece of brickwork; a gaol for the iniquity and perseverance of poverty; a Newgate for the felony of want. The chiefs and elders of Parliament had said, “Let us make abiding-places for the poor; let us separate them, lepers as they are, from the clean; let us shut them up from the sight of the green earth; let them not behold the work of the season in the budding trees, in their leafy branches, in their red and golden robes of autumn, in the gaunt bareness of solemn winter. Let the grass spring and the wild-flower blossom; but let not the poor, the unclean of the land, look upon the work of God.” After this resolve the Union was built; with inner windows looking upon walls, and walls turned blank upon the outward world. No crevice, no loophole permitted captive poverty a look, a glimpse of the fresh face of nature; his soul, like his body, was bricked up according to statute; he had by the insolenceof destitution offended the niceness of the world, and he was doomed by his judges to a divorce from the commonest rights of earth. Hence, the Union Workhouse turned its sullen, unbroken wall of brick upon the fields and trees, and the pauper was made to look only upon pauperism. The freshness and luxuriance of nature—her prodigal loveliness—was not for his eyes; he was poor, and even to behold the plenteousness of the teeming earth was an enjoyment beyond his state—a banned delight—a luxury which those who paid for his food could not properly vouchsafe him!
At length—when they themselves know it not, men’s hearts will work, a sense of right will sometimes steal upon their sleep, an instinct of goodness will, like silver water from the rock, gush forth—at length it was resolved by the guardians of the poor—guardians of the poor! what a holiness of purpose should inform those well-worn syllables—that the dull, blind, squalid workhouse should have light; that its brick walls should be pierced with two windows; that the fields and trees should gladden pauper eyes, appealing to old recollections; childhood thoughts; daily, customary feelings. It was determined that the pauper prisoner should, through the iron bars of penury, have comforting glimpses of God’s goodness without; that he should, though all unconsciously, make offerings upon the green altar of the earth; that his heart should commune, in its own unknowing way, with those sweet influences, which, coming from God, discourse in some manner to all men.
And so it was determined that the Union Workhouse should have two outward windows. The guardians of the poor appeared with the labourers. “Here,” said the guardians, “break through the wall; here pierce one window—here, another.” Then turning to the paupers, some few age-stricken folks, they said, with smug complacency,“We are going to give you some light.” And this, reader, is not a goosequill fiction; it is a thing of truth.
“We are going to give you some light.” We cannot help it, if this liberal goodness—this gentle philanthropy—drive back thought to the first gift of light; if it call up, as with an iron tongue, the memory of the holy birth of light, word-begotten, of all men. And the nature of man, solemnised by such memories—kindled and uplifted, skies beyond expression, by the sublime inheritance—is it not a hard task to consider with composure even the compunction of a guardian of the poor, who pierces with two windows the prison-house of the pauper to let God’s light in? May not the small authority of man be sometimes as a blaspheming burlesque of Almighty Beneficence?
Let us, for a time forgetful of state philosophy—forgetful of the plausibilities of social prosperity that set the poor apart from the rich and well-to-do, as creatures somewhat different in the real drama of life, although on certain occasions, as it were for form’s sake, for Christian ceremony, allowed to be made from the clay of the same Eden as their masters—let us behold the earth in its freshness, and man, its owner, in the vigour of his new birth, the heir of an impartial Providence, and the receiver of its glories; and then consider him as the task-master of his fellow, as the grudging churl that metes out light and air to his helpless brother; and for this sole cause—this one bitter reason—heishelpless.
A miserable sight—a hideous testimony of the thankfulness of prosperous man—is the rural union, with its blank dead wall of brick; a cold, blind thing, the work of human perversity and human selfishness, amidst ten thousand thousand evidences of Eternal bounty. How beautiful is the beauty of God around it! There is not a sapling waving its green tresses of June that does not make the heartyearn with kindliness; not a field-flower that does not, with its speaking eye, tell of abundant goodness; the brook is musical with the same sweet truth; all sights and sounds declare it. The liberal loveliness of nature, turn where we will, looks upon and whispers to us. We are made the heirs of wealth inexhaustible, of pleasures deep as the sea and pure as the joys of Paradise. And our return for this, our offering to the wretchedness of our fellow-creatures, is yonder prison, with its dead wall turned upon the pleasant aspects of nature, lest the pauper captives within should behold what God has done for that world, in which, according to the world’s justice, they have nothing. Hence is the pauper treated, in his blind dungeon, as though there was a felonious purpose in his eyesight; as though, a prisoner in the union, he would commit larceny on the meads and trees, and all the rural objects that from babyhood have been familiar to him, to the exceeding injury and loss of the free folks, who, by the blessing of skill and good luck, have “land and beeves.”
We know not a more fantastic tyranny, a more wilful assertion of the arrogance of man, than this needless shutting up of his poorer brother in a gaol of poverty—barring his eyes of every comforting object, compelling him to look only upon that which at every look speaks to his soul of his miserable dependence upon his richer fellow; which denies to him the innocent, unbought glimpse of out-door nature, as though the scene was a land of promise from which his beggary had made him alien. Is human want so wicked that it should be unblessed with even a glance at the pleasant things of creation? Has the pauper—because pauper—no further claim upon the earth, save for his final bed—the grave? The rustic unions, with their forlorn blank walls, cry, yes!
If God punish man for crime, as man punishes man for poverty, woe to the sons of Adam!