BOOKS.
• THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE.* WE hope that all those who are interested in the problems of modern city life will not be deterred from reading the essays contained in this book by the strong political bias to be traced in most of them. This, to our mind, regrettable element does not destroy their interest or their value to those who desire to know the condition of the London poor. We shall not again allude in this review to the politics of these different essayists, merely stating that, in our judgment, they have weakened by their immoderate expressions an otherwise strong piece of work. "Realities at Home," the first, and perhaps the most significant, of the papers, deals with "the new town type,"—the street-bred people of the twentieth century. The picture is vivid and not very encouraging. Physically and mentally, the town-bred man, more especially the Londoner, is diverging from the recognised type of Englishman. Small, excitable, voluble, with little stamina or endurance, he seeks in betting and drinking the stimulus his feverish tempera- ment demands. Only a small proportion of Londoners are classified by Mr. Charles Booth as "very poor,"—only 10 per cent., in fact. But so many tens taken from so many hundreds would form the population of a large town. It is difficult, as Mr. Masterman says, to keep in mind the numbers when dealing with the percentages, and the percentages when handling the numbers. But it is by no means only on the "very poor" that the terrible effects of overcrowding are to be seen. Nearly a million people live, we are told, under conditions of illegal overcrowding, and if the local authorities could insist upon the carrying out of the law it would mean that this vast number of for the most part respectable people would be in the street. These people cannot have what to the simplest of their superiors are the necessary conditions of a civilised life. Not that they crave for these conditions. "The state of mind of the ordinary man in the ordinary street is acquiescence, sometimes shot with a vague discontent, more often with a fatuous cheerfulness." "Absolute concentration on an earthly outlook" is both the cause and the effect of his manner of life. His work demands no thought, he has no outlet whatever for the less material side of his nature, for, according to Mr. Masterman, while by no means devoid of a moral standard, he is entirely without a spiritual religion. Only a fringe of the people is touched by any of the Churches, yet the common standard includes neighbourly kindness, patience, and cheerfulness. Such a life offers no food whatever for the imagination or the spiritual life. The old crude ideas of heaven and hell are dead. They no longer have power either to goad or to restrain. Whatever we may think of the doctrines of eternal happiness and punishment, they did at least point to some goal other than that of physical comfort. God is still vaguely believed in as • The Heart of the Empire. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [7s. 6d.] "an amiable but absentee ruler," and "the curtain of the horizon has descended round the material things and the pitiful duration of human life."
Nothing but a real religion can, in Mr. Masterman's Judgment, raise the Londoner from his degrading apathy. In a religious revival alone lies "the possibility of peace- ful escape from the gathering difficulties of the future." Before a new and vivid realisation of the teachings of Christ "the technical questions would find moving power adequate to their speedy solution." But whence are we to look for this "wind of the spirit " ? The Roman Catholic Church does hard and devoted work among a very few, the lay element being almost entirely absent. The Free Churches do much good among the lower middle and upper artisan classes ; they have no effect in the depths. The Church of England is, in Mr. Masterman's eyes, "bound with the grave clothes of a dead past." Her quarrels and her con. ventionalities depress the spectator. Nevertheless, if she will but admit the need of reform and cease quarrelling over ritual and ceremony, he thinks she might get' back the fervour of her early ideals, and find it in her power to save the situation. We quote the last paragraph of this remarkable and strongly felt article, of which space has constrained us to give but an inadequate résumé :—" If the cry of 'Back to the Christ,' which so many observers note as a manifest sign of the coming years, be but a herald of a deep and earnest attempt of the Churches to realise once again the life and teaching of their Master, then to the anxious watcher the night may indeed be far spent,—the dawn be nigh at hand."
The author of the chapter devoted to "Children of the Town," while he warns the reader that there is much need to fear what manner of men and women they are becoming, and unless the present system of training is improved will con- tinue to become, certainly gives an attractive description of the boys and girls that they are. The secret of the strange charm they possess is, he tells us, their friendliness, their unhesitating trust in strangers, from which he argues that in the majority of cases they are accustomed to affection at home, and that their parents love them and, according to their lights, treat them well and kindly. Outside school the training of these children is naturally dependent on their mothers. Their fathers are away all day and are often hardly seen by them except on Sun- days. Of the moral standard set up and inculcated by a respectable woman of the class whose children fill the Board-schools he gives an interesting account. She condemns dishonesty and drunkenness first of all, and discourages all quarrelling indoors. She inculcates kindness to the weak, and her teachings prevail in a degree which would hardly be believed by those without experience. Also—rather to our astonishment—she encourages, apparently not so successfully, respect to superiors. Truthfulness is a virtue which is alto- gether overlooked, and the children early practise what Mr. Bray calls "the besetting sin of the poor." Respect for truth is a matter of self-respect, and this is precisely the quality in which the London child is wanting. In his parents' eyes. "only his actions count for anything," and the result too often is that he himself counts "only such actions as are known to be his."
There can be no doubt that "the harmful fascination of the streets" has a bad effect on the nerves and disposition of the town-bred child, rendering him highly strung, irritable, and unstable. This fascination, which all who have been brought up even in the richer quarters. Of London will recognise, is well described by Mr. Bray: "No one can wander along the crowded roads on a Satur- day evening when the whole world is tossing about on the pavement like some stormy sea, without being seized by a curious thrill of excitement." Child and man alike feel it, "and once they have been subjected to the crowd passion,. crave for a repetition of the emotion." Never to have known the calming influences of Nature is a great loss, and Mr. Bray declares that even a fortnight's holiday in the country makes a deep mental impression on town children, forming an epoch in their lives, and standing as a landmark in their past. Among the voluntary agencies at work for the good of the London children, the one, we read, which might be the most important, is the Sunday-school. The majority of children, we learn to our surprise, attend some kind of Sunday-
school. The usefulness of these institutions is crippled, how. ever, by a lack of efficient teachers, most of whom come from the same class as their scholars, and also by the dry doctrinal nature of the lessons imparted by young curates quite unaccustomed to children. The subtleties of Christian dogma are equally outside the interests and the comprehen- sion of a child, and he retains little but what is vague and mermingless. With one clear idea standing out among the mists that the next world is "a sort of topsy-turvydom where the poor will be rich and the rich poor," religion and conduct remain completely apart in his mind. How far the religious teaching given in the Board-schools is able to supply these defects, we do not quite make out from the essay before us. Mr. Bray is in favour of the compromise which prohibits sectarian teaching, while retaining what he calls the "residual calx " of Christianity ; and he declares that religion has been found the only means of imparting definite moral teaching. The whole question of religious teaching in schools would be, he considers, best settled by Parliament. The end of such instruction is, in his opinion, to teach the child "to judge his actions, his victories, and his defeats, not by the world's standard of social and commercial success, but by the rules of right and wrong laid down by the one supreme man, Jesus Christ," so that children who see round them so much of man's degradation "may learn something of his infinite dignity." In the Board-schooLsystem be sees many defects, and for its im- provement suggests many remedies. That the schools should be brought into touch with the social and philanthropic agencies of the parish is most desirable, but nearly impossible while the clergy maintain their hostile position. At present the children too often forget both the training and the learning that have been imparted to them, because no one helps them to keep them in mind. For Mr. Bray's scheme for the general improvement of the system of primary education we must refer our readers to his essay.
The housing question is discussed by Mr. F. W. Lawrence in all the aspects of the vicious circle in which that hitherto unanswerable problem moves. The essayist fixes his hopes on the removal of a proportion of the factories with their work- men, and the consequent loosening of the packed mass within the city, where rents now run to from 2s. or 3s. per room a week on the outskirts to 7s. 6d. in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road ; also on increased facilities of transit, and a more effectual supervision of suburban build- ing. Many of the new jerry-built houses are even at the start hardly fit for human habitation. A policy of prevention, as well as one of cure, should be devised. From day to day, he tells us, "the venue of the solution of the problem is changed." What was yesterday the suburb is now the town, what to-day is country will to-morrow be a suburb.
"The Church and the People" is written by a parson who, instead of taking "the standpoint of the ideal litirchman," endeavours to take the standpoint of the labouring classes. Putting himself in their place, be weighs the Church of England, and finds it wanting. The services, he says, to a man who is not what is technically called a Churchman seem monotonous and repetitive, and evoke in him nothing better than a feeling of respect for a rite he does not understand. Yet no change can be made in the Prayer-book, say the timid stewards of God's mysteries, without shaking the Church to her foundations. The majority of discourses, he continues, "deal with Old Testament scenes and New Testament writings, or declarations of shibboleths which mean much to the preacher, but little to the unconvinced hearer." The younger clergy begin their work, be complains, knowing nothing of the religions and social difficulties which beset the present day, though they may be well up in those which troubled the early Church or the Reformation period. He dreams of a Universal Christian Church which shall exist to proclaim the principles of its founder,—to teach morality, to witness to the Unseen, and also to the brotherhood of man. He pleads for less definition in matters of dogma, and in this matter, greatly as we sympathise with his dream, he seems to us to go altogether outside what is practical. " Personal fitness for the work" should be the test of candidates for the ministry," rather than theological acquiescence." The doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, and the Divinity of Christ should remain, in his opinion, undefined. We question if the priests of his ideal Church would find enough in common to enable them to womic together, and we altogether doubt his theory that the Church, if disestablished and reconstituted on these principles, would immediately be joined, by all the Dis- senters. They for the most part hold to particular dogmas more tenaciously even than the Church, and would take fright at a laxity of doctrine which to their minds would savour of agnosticism.
The religious element which we trace in two or three of these essays strikes us as exceedingly significant, because we believe it to be widely typical. A great many thoughtful and religious-minded men do undoubtedly believe that the elaborate edifice of dogma which the Churches have taken so long to build is tottering to its fall, but they do not fear that the vital spirit of Christianity will be quenched in the ruins. On the contrary, however imperfectly they conceive of the Divine Sonship, they believe that Christ's words shall not pass away, but will continue to guide the conduct and inspire the hope of mankind till at last "a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness" shall testify to the victory of the Saviour.
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