Culture and Anarchy

members suffer with it. Individual perfection is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along with us. “The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world,” says the wise man. And to this effect that excellent and often-quoted guide of ours, Bishop Wilson, has some striking words:⁠—“It is not,” says he, “so much our neighbour’s interest as our own that we love him.” And again he says: “Our salvation does in some measure depend upon that of others.” And the author of the Imitation puts the same thing admirably when he says:⁠—“Obscurior etiam via ad coelum videbatur quando tam pauci regnum coelorum quaerere curabant; the fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.” So all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress towards perfection, if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery, such as manufactures or population⁠—which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so⁠—create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and perforce they must for the most part be left by us in their degradation and wretchedness. But evidently the conception of free-trade, on which our Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which they think they have found the secret of national prosperity⁠—evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, for this end, of manufactures and population, threatens to create for us, if it has not created already, those vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people, to the existence of which we are, as we have seen, absolutely forbidden to reconcile ourselves, in spite of all that the philosophy of the Times and the poetry of Mr. Robert Buchanan may say to persuade us.

Hebraism in general seems powerless, almost as powerless as our free-trading Liberal friends, to deal efficaciously with our ever-accumulating masses of pauperism, and to prevent their accumulating still more. Hebraism builds churches, indeed, for these masses, and sends missionaries among them; above all, it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of the Times, and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable. But with regard to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led to the very same conclusions, though from a point of view of its own, as our free-trading Liberal friends. Hebraism, with that mechanical and misleading use of the letter of Scripture on which we have already commented, is governed by such texts as: “Be fruitful and multiply,” the edict of God’s law, as Mr. Chambers would say; or by the declaration of what he would call God’s word in the Psalms, that the man who has a great number of children is thereby made happy. And in conjunction with such texts as these, Hebraism is apt to place another text: “The poor shall never cease out of the land.” Thus Hebraism is conducted to nearly the same notion as the popular mind and as Mr. Robert Buchanan, that children are sent, and that the divine nature takes a delight in swarming the East End of London with paupers. Only, when they are perishing in their helplessness and wretchedness, it asserts the Christian duty of succouring them, instead of saying, like the Times: “Now their brief spring is over; there is nobody to blame for this; it is the result of Nature’s simplest laws!” But, like the Times, Hebraism despairs of any help from knowledge and says that “what is wanted is not the light of speculation.”

I remember, only the other day, a good man looking with me upon a multitude of children who were gathered before us in one of the most miserable regions of London⁠—children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without hope⁠—said to me: “The one thing really needful is to teach these little ones to succour one another, if only with a cup of cold water; but now, from one end of the country to the other, one hears nothing but the cry for knowledge, knowledge, knowledge!” And yet surely, so long as these children are there in these festering masses, without health, without home, without hope, and so long as their multitude is perpetually swelling, charged with misery they must still be for themselves, charged with misery they must still be for us, whether they help one another with a cup of cold water or no; and the knowledge how to prevent their accumulating is necessary, even to give their moral life and growth a fair chance!

May we not, therefore, say, that neither the true Hebraism of this good man, willing to spend and be spent for these sunken multitudes, nor what I may call the spurious Hebraism of our free-trading Liberal friends⁠—mechanically worshipping their fetish of the production of wealth and of the increase of manufactures and population, and looking neither to the right nor left so long as this increase goes on⁠—avail us much here; and that here, again, what we want is Hellenism, the letting our consciousness play freely and simply upon the facts before us, and listening to what it tells us of the intelligible law of things as concerns them? And surely what it tells us is, that a man’s children are not really sent, any more than the pictures upon his wall, or the horses in his stable are sent; and that to bring people into the world, when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself decently and not too precariously, or to bring more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is, whatever the Times and Mr. Robert Buchanan may say, by no means an accomplishment of the divine