W. T. Stead
IvHEN the streets of London were placarded with the words " Maiden Tribute," and everyone was talking of W. T. Stead, I was too small a boy to under- stand what all the pother was about, but the name of W. T. Stead stuck in my mind.
I think the initials have some such potency as those of W. G. Grace, A. J. Webbe, W. W. Read, C. B. Fry and I. D. Walker ; in any case, the name of W. T. Stead became a part of my world, though I knew as little about him as I knew of the President of the College of Surgeons, and nothing at all, thank God, of the business of organized harlotry.
Many years later, when I was helping to write a column which was intended to divert the readers of The Globe, W. T. Stead came to me as a piece of singularly good luck. Those were the years of the Boer War, and W. T. Stead opposed himself to that conflict with a degree of sentimentalism which easily lent itself to .my naughty pen. For weeks and weeks I poked fun at him, never once considering whether my fun would pain him, whether it was fair fun, or whether he had a wife and children who would be hurt by my savage levity. When one is young, and hard up for the materials of daily humour, one does not think of such considerations. A few years later I learned that this queer fellow Stead was standing at Sir John Fisher's side fighting for a powerful Royal Navy, and soon afterwards from Sir John Fisher himself I heard such good words spoken of W. T. Stead that my opinions of the man were utterly confounded. How could a Little Englander want a strong fleet ?
Then, I forget in what circumstance, I met W. T. Stead, and we had tea together in some rather obseure restaurant in the Strand, where he appeared to be well known. I remember very well the impression he made upon me. I thought him boisterous, ill-balanced, clumsily humorous and falsely genial. I wanted him to be what he looked, a magnificent lion of a man aflame with enthusiasm for great causes. But into his wonderful blue eyes, which were clearly intended to flash fire, came so continuously the flickering smile of facetiousness, and from his lips, almost hidden by a greying moustache and beard, came so often the unim- pressive phrases of a calculated good-heartedness, that I went away from him disappointed and dejected, feeling that he had merely bounced himself out of mediocrity into an unjustified notoriety.
Many years later on I visited the saddest and most sordid, and yet perhaps the most heroic slum neighbour- hood of London, to wit, Hoxton. By this time my sympathies had widened, and few things in life so appealed to my . spiritual nature as the magnificent struggle for virtue (call it respectability, if it please you) which is for ever being waged by the very poor in circum- stances of the most heartbreaking difficulty. Here in this dreadful Hoxton I had the great fortune to meet Mrs. J. T. Rae, founder of the Girls' Guild of Good Life, who not only showed me something of her triumphant work among the girls of Hoxton, but told me something about W. T. Stead which I had been too self-centred to discover for myself.
Deeply moved by the stories unfolded in Stead's " Maiden Tribute " as they appeared day by day in the Pall Mall Gazette, and inspired by his passion for safe- guarding the purity of young girls in a city breathing temptation with every breath of its multitudinous life, Mrs. Rae had heroically started this Guild in the worst quarter of London on the very day that Stead went to prison for an indiscretion in his determined effort to expose the White Traffic. As I studied this labour and saw how eagerly and gratefully the girls of Hoxton responded to Mrs. Rae's devoted sympathies, I perceived that I must revise my judgment of Stead.
The hostel which is at present being built in Hoxton (and for which the Guild is now asking funds, to com- plete it) is perhaps the noblest and fittest memorial to Stead. It helps one to forget those oddities in the man which troubled judgment, and enables one to 'remember that he was a knight-errant in the cause of loving-kindness. He was caught up and carried away by all the excitements and diversities of London's public life, but at the living centre of his tumultuous disposition was a sympathy with suffering, an indignation against oppression, and a hunger for a purer and better world, which ennobled him in the eyes of those who knew him best, and which inspired others to do the liIrd and often heart-breaking spade-work of civilization.
Which of us can sit in judgment on a man who has inspired this great work of the Girls' Guild of Good Life ? Every day and every night there are women giving themselves, without fee or reward, to the service of poor girls fighting a most desperate fight for bread and for purity in one of the darkest and most forbidding quarters of London ; and but for W. T. Stead that Guild would never have come into existence. The girl under seventeen, because she may take lower wages, displaces the older girl in London's factories, and these older girls, almost at their wits' end to know how to exist, come to the Guild for encouragement and help, and are never turned empty away. A man who could inspire such a work as this, and a work which grows with every year, surely deserves our tribute of admiration and gratitude.
The last time I saw him was in his house in Smith Square, at a luncheon party to meet two famous thought.. readers then performing at one of the London music-halls. I found him pretending to an amused scepticism about spiritualism, but soon saw that he was only too willing to believe everything these thought-readers protested they could do ; nevertheless, knowing how he had inspired Mrs. Rae, and how sincerely he sorrowed with the sufferings of the poor, I was able to see on that occasion a beauty in his face and an underlying gracious- ness in his manner which have ever since remained in my memory, checking hasty opinions, and humbling my judgment of my fellow-men.
He had a superb courage, a real passion of sympathy, and he kindled in better organized natures that self- sacrificing devotion to great causes which helps to keep civilization from completely surrendering to materialism. Because of him numberless people are happier, better, and safer. And if his spirit could return to journalism, the popular Press would cease to be an organ for destruc- tive vulgarity. His conception of life made him a great fighter and a bold apostle. And his conception of life was what it was because he believed in God.
HAROLD BEGIiIE.
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