Transcribed from the 1880 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org SANITARY AND SOCIAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS * * * * * BY CHARLES KINGSLEY * * * * * London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1880. CONTENTS. PAGE Woman’s Work in a Country Parish 3 The Science of Health 21 The Two Breaths 49 Thrift 77 Nausicaa in London; or, the Lower Education of Women 107 The Air-Mothers 131 The Tree of Knowledge 167 Great Cities and their Influence for Good and Evil 187 Heroism 225 The Massacre of the Innocents 257 “A mad world, my masters.” 271 WOMAN’S WORK IN A COUNTRY PARISH. {3} I HAVE been asked to speak a few words to you on a lady’s work in a country parish. I shall confine myself rather to principles than to details; and the first principle which I would impress on you is, that we must all be just before we are generous. I must, indeed, speak plainly on this point. A woman’s first duties are to her own family, her own servants. Be not deceived: if anyone cannot rule her own household, she cannot rule the Church of God. If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom she is in contact all day long, she will not really sympathise with the poor whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe this is very great. It seems so much easier to women to do something for the poor, than for their own ladies’ maids, and house-maids, and cooks. And why? Because they can treat the poor as _things_: but they _must_ treat their servants as persons. A lady can go into a poor cottage, lay down the law to the inhabitants, reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell them how to set things right, which, if she had the doing of them, I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they. She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a shilling, as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs: but with the servants it is not so. She knows their characters; and, what is more, they know hers; they know her private history, her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power, and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work with them,