MR. ARNOLD WHITE ON THE PROBLEMS OF A GREAT CITY.*
Wa fear that many people who might otherwise learn a good deal from Mr. Arnold White's book will be deterred from reading it by the windy talk of the first chapter. The commonplace girdings at easy and well-to-do selfishness are very common indeed. They remind us of an author of an entirely different stamp. To hear that his style reminded any one of " Ouida " would no doubt pain Mr. White ; but so it is. Take the following:" To be accounted as an earnest' man, to occupy a seat on the Board of a Foreign Missionary Society, to hold views on the sanctity of the Sabbath, to be the author of a luscious hymn, are proved methods of mundane advance- ment ;" or, "Strict obedience to the command, 'Take no thought what ye shall eat,' would subject many an honoured saint to claret a shade too warm ;" or, "Since the Sermon on the Mount has been sub-edited by English society and their [sic] teachers in accordance with the requirements of a high standard of comfort;" or, "Converted the narrow way into a path to the House of Lords ;" or, " Oracles who have never lacked a cutlet." This is cheap rhetoric. The narrow way is no more a path to the House of Lords than it was to the Roman Senate. The Sermon on the Mount has never been sub- edited, though it is true it has rarely been put into practice. The men who get on in the world are those who attend to their btutinese, • The Problems of a Greet City. By Arnold White. London Remington and Co. 19313.
and not those who attend missionary meetings ; and Mr. White and the majority of his readers know it perfectly well.
Bat though we do not admire Mr. White's style, there are a great many remarks, and, indeed, whole passages in the book, which are well worth noting. There are facts there collected from personal knowledge which we do not know where to find elsewhere; and there are some practical suggestions which are unfortunately too good to be very much attended to by persons whose interest in things as they at present exist is stronger than their keenness of vision. The problems of a great city are not very hard to state, if a man sets about it in earnest. Mr. George stated many of them in a fine, natural rhetoric to which Mr. White has no pretensions; but they are stated by Mr. White with more fairness, with more judgment, and with a much more practical aim. But to state a problem is one thing, to solve it is another; and we cannot say we think that Mr. White has gone far on the road to solution, though he is content with plodding patience to explore that road and pursue it, in- stead of attempting, like Mr. George, to transport us as by the waving of a magician's wand to an airy and impossible Paradise.
Take, for instance, the question of premature marriage. Mr. White gives us some most curious and interesting facts. We of course agree with him as to the orgie called marriage perpe- trated in the " Red Church," and other churches " popularly distinguished by a title which cannot be reproduced here." This is the scene
Inside the church,' says a competent witness, ' was a noisy indecorous crowd. Doubtful jokes were being bandied about, which grew coarser and coarser as time went on. Hate were freely worn, and drink-bottles were passed to and fro and banded across the aisles. Every now and then a Prayer-Book or other missile was playfully thrown by one of the crowd.' After a long interval, during which the legal business was being transacted, the ceremony began, and my informant gradually worked his way np to the west [? east] end. The method pursued was to call the Christian names of the men together, and all the Christian names of the women, and insert the words 'in each case.' Thus the forty couples were united in holy matrimony. One man was so recalcitrant, he had to be led three times, drunk as he was, up to the altar ; when my informant protested against the indecency of allowing the ceremony in his case to proceed, but was told that the drunken bridegroom was already legally married. The bag was then banded round for the free-will offerings, and amid a shower of the coarsest jokes freely shouted after them, the newly married went out of church."
At another church, where it appears the fee is sevenpence-half- penny, and where the scene is the same," Bill" was heard to answer some criticism of his bride by the remark, " Well, and wot ther — — do yer want for sevenpence-halfpenny P" This should and could be stopped. But we cannot agree with Mr. White that "reckless marriages should be prevented by requiring from male minors previous to the celebration of marriage evidence of ability to maintain a family." It may be quite true that while the per-tentage of marriages where the husband is under age in the East of London is 59 per cent., in the West it is under 4 per cent. ; but to refuse to marry these people would have no appreciable effect whatever on the population, and we would call Mr. White's attention to the fact that in parts of Germany, before the abolition of the same rale, the illegitimate births were in the proportion of 90 per cent. As to what Mr. White calls the "sterilisation of the unfit," it would no doubt be an excellent thing ; but nothing but absolute imprisonment would effect it. The last thing which it would be possible to do would be to prevent the criminal and idle classes from having children to inherit their traditions. We have first to make the comfortable classes understand morality in this respect. Until we can make the "healthy and impecunious curate," whose death would leave a widow and six children penniless, feel true shame at his position, it is useless to expect the criminal and idle classes to understand and act upon the law of population. With another of Mr. White's modes of " sterilising the unfit " we have more sympathy :— " A great impulse," he says," would be given to this mach-desired object' if the idle man were allowed to die nnpitied in the street. The crapulous tenderness extended by the nineteenth century to suffering arising from any and every cause is the most fertile mother of hereditary pauperism and all that hereditary pauperism implies.
None are better acquainted with the troth of this charge than the industrious poor themselves. We need a wholesome return to that benevolence which was good enough for the prophets and seers of former days."
Mr. White discusses and quotes some of the views of the Social Democratic Federation. It is, as he says, remarkable that among all their schemes,- " There is never found a solitary appeal to the higher sense of the working classes. That much of the misery which appals every thoughtful man arises from idleness as well as from over-work ; from too short hours as well as from too prolonged a period of labour ; from gluttony and guzzling, as well as from ascetic abstinence ; from reckless unthrift, indulgence, profligacy, and dissipation, does not enter into the Socialistic propaganda."
This is true enough, and it is also true " that the idle poor are as distinctly the enemies of the virtuous poor as the idle rich." This needs saying to the working classes, and it would be better worth their while to hear than some of the stuff which the Socialist leaders talk. We are not preaching the doctrine that the well-to-do need no sermons ; but certainly they want some- thing better than they are likely to get from Mr. Champion, judging by his remarks as quoted by Mr. White. To come down from Utopia to "the municipalisation of gas " as a remedy for our social ills is a sorry fall, though we do not doubt that the municipalisation of gas would be a greater good than the nationalisation of wind of the sort circulated by these leaders of popular opinion.
On emigration, too, Mr. White has some useful remarks, the result of practical experience. But it is evident from his own showing that emigration by no means solves the problem. Even if the people were willing to go, numbers of them are quite unfit to emigrate, and there are few places left to which they can be sent. The self-governed Colonies and the American States do not want loafers any more than we do. "Ten years ago," said an old resident at the Cape to the present writer, "yon might leave your door unbolted in Cape Town. You can't do so now. Don't send us any more." Western Australia and Bechuanaland are the only two places available for colonisation which are still under the control of the British Cabinet. And we should like to point out, by the way, that such colonisation as Mr. White speaks of, where wives and children can go with the bread-winner, is far preferable to emigration in its ordinary sense, and ought to be far more practicable now than it was two centuries ago. As to the fitness of the emigrant, Mr. White says that out of six thousand un- employed men he examined, only 4i per cent. were eligible for a new life in the Colonies, and a large proportion of the six thousand were men who had recently come to London. It is true that by diverting the stream of emigration, at present flowing from the country to the large towns, to the Colonies, a great deal would be done to relieve both town and country ; but the idle and criminal, and also the feeble, must be dealt with at home.
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