Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social ReformBarnett, S. A. (Samuel Augustus)
General
Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform
Barnett, S. A. (Samuel Augustus)
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class
By some such plans relief could be afforded to all who belong to what
may be called the lowest class; for the assistance of those who could
be helped by tools, emigration, or money, the great Friendly Societies,
the Society for Relief of Distress, and the Charity Organisation
Society might act in conjunction. These societies are unsectarian, are
already organised, and may be developed in power and tenderness to any
extent by the addition of members and visitors.
These means and all means which are suggested seem sadly inadequate,
and in their very setting forth provoke criticism. There are no
effectual means but those which grow in a Christian society. The
force which, without striving and crying, without even entering into
collision with it, destroyed slavery will also destroy poverty. When
rich men, knowing God, realise that life is giving, and when poor men,
also knowing God, understand that being is better than having, then
there will be none too rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and none
too poor to enjoy God’s world.
SAMUEL A. BARNETT.
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III.
_PASSIONLESS REFORMERS._[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the _Fortnightly Review_ of August
1882.
The mention of the poor brings up to most people’s minds scenes of
suffering, want, and misery. The vast number of people who, while
poor in money, are rich in life’s good, who live quiet, thoughtful,
dignified lives, are forgotten, and the word ‘poor’ means to many
the class which we may call degraded. But the first class is by far
the largest, and the wide East End of London (which the indolent
think of only as revolting) contains at a rough calculation, say,
twenty of the worthy poor to one of the degraded poor. It is curious
how widely spread is the reverse idea. Many times have I been asked
if I am not ‘afraid to walk in East London,’ and an article on the
People’s Entertainment Society aroused, not unjustly, the anger of
the East London people at the writer’s descriptions of them and
of her fears for her personal safety while standing in the Mile
End Road! One lady, after a visit to St. George’s-in-the-East and
Stepney, expressed great astonishment to find that the people lived
in _houses_. She had expected that they abode, not exactly in tents,
but in huts, old railway carriages, caravans, or squatted against a
wall. East Londoners will be glad to know that she went back a wiser
and not a sadder woman, having learnt that riches are not necessary to
refinement, that some of the noblest characters are developed under
the enforced self-control of an income of a pound or thirty shillings
a week, that love lived side by side with poverty without thought of
exit by the window though poverty had trodden a beaten path through the
door, and that books and ideas, though not plentiful enough to become
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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