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(titlepage)
THE DAILY SCOLDING
FROM A SKETCH BY AN INMATE.
EDINBURGH
EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS
1865.
This has notably been the case with the marvellous impulse which has
been given in our age to the virtue of charity--charity, that is, in
the common acceptation of the word, as exercised towards the poor. How far
we have advanced in that more heavenly charity which is greater than faith
and hope, is not the question with which we have to do. Our purpose at
present is only to examine, so far as our space permits, the practical
results of that sudden turn in the wheel of public opinion, which has
rendered the care of the poor one of the most approved pursuits of the
day.
The movement on behalf of the lower classes has now lasted long enough
to have assumed the proportions of a
national principle, which no change in the caprice of fashion can henceforth destroy. The breach thus made in the conventional barriers that shut out the poorer classes from the sympathies of those in more favoured ranks, has opened a way for nobler impulses and higher motives than any the world could inspire; so that much solid good is to be found underlying the inevitable humbug and unreality which accompanies all popular movements, and claims a special right of possession in the charities of the nineteenth century.
Human nature is essentially gregarious; and in examining the various
channels which modern charity has made for itself, we shall find that the
ideas first started by the originators of the various systems now in force
have been repeated again and again in endless development by all who have
followed their steps.
Whether the object of the charity be the shelter of the homeless, the
feeding of the hungry, the education of the ignorant, or the checking of
the social evil, we shall find that, generally speaking, such institutions
as do not bear an earlier date than the period comprised in the last thirty
years are founded each one on precisely the same principles, and carried
out with the very same class of regulations.
In seeking, therefore, to test the values of the results that have been
attained, it is by no means difficult to recognise the mistakes, everywhere
the same, which have mainly hindered the furtherance of the various objects
in view. These mistakes, it seems to us, may be classed under two general
heads, and they both spring from the leading ideas (erroneous in their very
essence) which are to be found under various aspects at the root of all
causes of failure.
Briefly stated, these are--First, The theory that all
moral effects are to be produced by discipline alone; and a consequent
system of severe over-legislation, whose laws, of the most narrow
and rigid description, are framed in an iron mould, to which the objects of
charity must bend all their wants, necessities, and sufferings, without the
smallest
regard to the varieties of individual character or previous circumstance.
Secondly, The employment of a cumbrous and needless
machinery, which exhausts the funds, and paralyses in a great measure the
energies and capabilities of the workers.
If, in place of the first of these errors, we had had from the
commencement the free action, the forbearance, the ready intuition of a
large-hearted love, seeking the good of individual souls alone, and
counting its own plans and theories as nothing in comparison, how different
a result we should have had to record! while, on the other hand, if
simplicity and self-denial had ruled all the outward mechanism of
the various charities, the numbers benefited might have been counted by
hundreds instead of tens.
We shall best prove both our positions, perhaps, by taking an example
from the various philanthropic schemes now at work, in which the object of
the charity has more than any other suffered by the mistakes in question.
One of the most important movements of modern benevolence has been the
attempt to grapple with that moral plague which has been termed 'the
social evil.' Nothing could be better than the first principles which
gave birth to the new penitentiary system. Men and women alike had
recognised the guilty, cowardly sham, by which the world had sought to hide
its blackest curse under a veil of mock prudery, while it let thousands of
wretched women drift year after year into the abyss, without a hand
stretched out to save them, because their sin was unfit to be named in the
polite society that scrupled not to receive with open arms the very men for
whom they sinned.
It became the fashion not only to admit the existence of this deadly
sore, corroding the secret springs of life among us, but to consider that
there could be no nobler work for pure-minded women than the effort
to reclaim the most unhappy and degraded of their own sex. The result of
these very desirable conclusions was the establishment, in England of
several, in Scotland of one or two, Refuges for
the Fallen, conducted for the most part by ladies offering themselves freely to the work. With such elements of success, what might not have been accomplished! But they started from the very first on the mistaken principles of which we have spoken, and following blindly in one another's lead, the result has, in our estimation, been simply disastrous.
In describing one of these 'Homes,' and the system pursued
in it, we shall describe all, for they scarcely differ in even
insignificant details.
To begin--How do they prepare the building, intended to receive as
many as can be accommodated of a class numbering, in England alone, many
thousands? One would think that the great effort would be to provide the
utmost space that could by any means be made available so that the greatest
possible number might find a shelter beneath its roof.
Of course the dimensions of the building must be limited by the amount
of funds; and considering the end in view, one would certainly expect that
the simplest plans for housing large numbers, the plainest materials, and
the least costly arrangements, would be adopted in a 'Home'
designed to be a refuge for the almost countless lost.
But what is the reality? A most elaborate ecclesiastical building is
erected, so arranged in an expensive, not to say luxurious manner, that the
principle object seems to be the gratification and convenience of the
ladies in charge, while the amount of space left to the poor penitents is
not much more than would be required for the servants of a large
establishment; a highly ornamented chapel, with all the most costly
appliances; a well-furnished sitting-room for the head lady,
another for her chief assistant, a third for the ladies in general, a
fourth for the visitors, a fifth for meals, a sixth for the chaplain, a
bedroom for each of the ladies, a room for any of them who may be unwell, a
room for the lady housekeeper, another for the lady
infirmarium, etc., and all these at the least
must be supplied before the true use of the building, the accommodation of
the penitents, is con-
sidered at all. Even the small space left after all for the poor outcasts is rendered far less available than it might be by the over-legislation, of which, in its moral effects, we shall have to speak at length; a work-room, a meal-room, a class-room, a waiting-room, and, we grieve to have to write it, a punishment-room are withdrawn from the space given to sleeping accommodation, on which, of course, the number of inmates must depend. And what is the result? In buildings which, from first to last, have cost as much as the barracks of a regiment, and where one would wish to gather hundreds of these unhappy women, we find that there is space for eight, twelve, fifteen, twenty, or thirty penitents only!
We have given the actual numbers received in the principal
'Homes' in England; only one or two have attained to twenty
inmates, and in one only has the highest figure, thirty, been exceeded.
This is in the largest church penitentiary in the kingdom, where a
magnificent building, fit, but for its monastic appearance, to be the
palace of a prince, has, by recent contributions of large sums from all
parts of the country, been made capable of containing fifty fallen
women.
Of course, we need hardly say that all the supposed
'necessary' appliances of these buildings are of the same
expensive and cumbrous nature.
Such, then, are the unwieldly preparations which cripple the funds of
the 'Home' at the very outset.
The next great obstacles which the founders rear against their own
intended charity are the 'rules of admission;' and here we may
say that the observance of rules seems to be a sort of
Fetish-worship for the benevolent good people, which they will not
abandon for the most urgent reasons that could possibly be brought before
them. The deepest interest of any individual penitent is never allowed to
move one iota the iron laws first formed for the regulation of the whole
community.
The 'rules of admission' are generally most ingeniously
contrived to frustrate the object of the Refuge, by excluding all but an infinitesimal number out of the great aggregate:--'No penitent is to be received who cannot bring a medical certificate of perfect health.'--By that rule ninety-nine out of a hundred are struck from the list of possible recipients of the charity. 'None are to be received who will not promise to stay two years.'--Ninety-nine in two hundred may very well be set down as sacrificed to that rule. 'None are to be received unless the chaplain and lady superintendent are both satisfied of their eligibility;' and too often because the chaplain is satisfied the superintendent is not. 'None to be received a second time who have once left,' and so on ad infinitum.
In some Homes they have a rule which, if rigidly carried out, would
simply quash the whole concern. They propose to receive none who do not
give unmistakable signs of penitence. Now, that they should come to those
refuges as penitents, in the true sense of the word, is as nearly as can be
an impossibility, and, as a matter of fact, it is a phenomenon which
scarcely ever occurs; to expect it, is just one of the saddest mistakes
made by those who would befriend these fallen women, because it lies at the
root all that is wrong in their subsequent management. The object of these
refuges really ought to be, by God's help, to make penitents of them.
Where, in the name of common sense, are they to learn penitence, or catch
so much as a glimmer of God's grace, in the horrible lives out of
which they come? We cannot touch on the sickening details of their previous
condition, or on the immediate effects on the soul of a degradation which
trades in sin; but it is certain that it is more entirely deadening, not
only to the conscience, but to the better instincts of our nature, than any
other species of evil-doing; and the unhappy women who enter these
refuges under the mocking name of 'penitents,' have in reality
lost all perception of the distinction between right and wrong, and all
belief in a heaven or a hell.
There are many motives which induce them to seek a
shelter without a shadow of repentance for their evil lives. Generally speaking, it is a sudden impulse following some act of cruelty from the wretches among whom they live, or it is the sight of some worn-out companion dying in a workhouse, or some other phase of the temporal penalties of their career. Sometimes it is want succeeding lavish excess, or pain, disease, disappointment, disgust at the miseries which go side by side with their so-called pleasures; these, and a hundred other motives, drive those wayward, impulsive beings to any refuge which may seem to present itself, and the true wisdom, the true charity, would be to take advantage of the motive, be it even evil, which prompts them to escape, and after offering them every facility to come, and every inducement to remain, to take them just as they are, and strive by the gentlest means, and with due regard to individual temperament, to awaken them to a sense of their unspeakable misery, and to a knowledge of hope yet existent for them in the future.
But far other is indeed the treatment they receive. And here we reach
that one fatal error which has marred to an inconceivable extent this and
most other charities of our age, viz., over-legislation, developing
itself in a narrow minded discipline, administered without either love or
humility--the two absolutely essential qualities in those who
govern.
It is a grave question, and one to which we fear the true answer would
be most unsatisfactory, whether those penitentiaries, established from the
best motives, and conducted with the utmost self-denial, have not
been productive of far more evil than good, by the unfortunate system of
management, which has driven out those they should have saved to rush into
deeper guilt, and to warn others to avoid, as they would a
pest-house, the 'Homes,' which they have found, to use
the actual words of many of them, 'worse than the jail.' Let us
look at the facts. The persons whom this system is intended to reform are,
as we have said, totally dead to all sense of right. For the most part,
they enter on their dreadful career at so early an age, that
they are entirely ignorant of religious truth, and their only impression of the Christian faith is some vague recollection of unintelligible words learnt at the Sunday-school, or heard in drowsy weariness from Sunday sermons. Almost the only chance of rousing good feeling within them is by an appeal to the memory of some dead mother, who would, they feel, have wished better things for them; but in many cases they have been trained by their very parents in vice, and even this faint gleam of light is lost.
Accustomed only to lives of the wildest indulgence, the grossest excess,
the most lawless freedom,--governed solely by passion and impulse,
without hope in the future, or memory in the past, to inspire them with a
wish beyond the gratification of the present moment,--they come, in
the fiery excitement of some passing fancy, to the Refuge, and are
straightway subjected to a system of conventual rule and severe religious
observance, which the best-disposed novice that ever sought to be
trained as a nun would find hard to bear! It seems to us as if nothing
short of insanity could propose such a system to those poor reckless girls,
dead to moral sense, and unconscious of their own degradation, when
probably not one in a hundred of the most refined religious minds could
long endure the strain, the weariness and depression it inevitably
causes.
It is not possible in our limited space to give a detail of all the
wretched little stringent rules, which through the
four-and-twenty hours are arranged to goad and torment the
unreasoning victims into utter disgust with the very idea of repentance or
reform; but the general outline of the system consists in a multitude of
religious services, of which the penitents understand little or nothing;
hard labour, presided over by a severe elderly female, who checks wellnigh
every word or look; classes for instruction, made awful by their length,
and the rigid solemnity with which they are conducted; meals eaten without
the utterance of a word; and above all, a species of moral torture (for it
is nothing else to such beings), entitled 'silence times,' when
they are
seated all together at needlework, or some other sedentary employment, and the most absolute silence is enforced for two or three hours at a stretch, for no other purpose but 'to discipline the penitents.'
The smallest infraction of any rule is followed by punishment, for which
purpose the 'punishment-room' is provided, where the
poor creatures are locked up in solitary confinement, and generally on
bread and water, for periods varying from one day to a fortnight.
One of the cruellest parts of the system is their rigorous confinement
to the house, and total want of exercise in the open air. Setting aside the
consideration that the enjoyment of the natural beauty with which God has
filled the heavens and the earth is an innocent and legitimate pleasure,
which might surely be allowed to those who have voluntarily abandoned all
that seemed pleasure to them before, one would think that common sense
alone would teach their managers that out-door employment and
exercise is absolutely essential to their health, both of mind and body.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that not one breath of fresh air is allowed to
these poor prisoners through the day; not one half hour is granted them in
which to look on the blue sky and the sunshine, and to meet the cool breeze
with its invigorating power.
The same dreary round of entirely irksome duties and needless restraints
drives them through day and night, to begin again, with lessened powers of
endurance, or, if these fail, to descend to a lower depth of misery in the
solitude, so awful to these ill-balanced minds, of the
'punishment-room.'
Lest we should be thought to be making an exaggerated statement, we
subjoin the actual time-table of one of these modern penitentiaries,
managed by ladies, who give their assistance gratis. We must beg our
readers not to suspect us of sarcasm when we assure them that this Refuge
is considered one of the most lax in the treatment of
penitents.
| 5 A.M. | Rise. |
| 5.30, | Private Prayer. |
| 5.45, | Industrial Work. |
| 6.45, | Prayers in Chapel. |
| 7, | Breakfast. |
| 7.30, | Industrial Work. |
| 12, | Dinner. |
| 12.30, | Mid-day Prayers and Recreation. |
| 1, | Industrial Work. |
| 4, | Tea. |
| 4.30, | Work. |
| 7, | Bible-Class and Reading. |
| 8, | Service in Chapel. |
| 8.15, | Private Prayers. |
The half hour between 12.30 and 1, which is to be divided between
'Mid-day Prayers and Recreation,' would be a positive
burlesque on the idea of 'recreation,' if it were not so really
cruel, considering that this is all the time allowed for
relaxation of any kind to those who, before they entered the Home, had
never known either work or restraint.
We have spoken hitherto only of the daily systematic regulation of these
Refuges, but it will readily be understood that the moral government of the
penitents is in all its variations conducted on the same principles. The
ladies in charge, whose self-denial and devotion, generally
speaking, it is impossible to praise too highly, have adopted the
unfortunate theory, that it is necessary to keep these unhappy women at a
distance, in order to teach them the heinousness of their sin and the vast
difference between the pure and the fallen. Now as, in the first instance
at all events, it is by working on their affections alone that there is the
least chance of winning them, the result of this system is absolutely fatal
to their own well-meant intentions.
The punishment-room, with its solitude and its bread and water,
is in constant requisition for offences which are the inevitable result of
this treatment on minds and bodies disorganized by excess and subject to
every form of hysteria.
We shall best show the nature of this ill-judged system by an illustration from real life, which the poor girl in question related herself, when urged afterwards to make one more effort at reform.
She had entered a penitentiary to please her mother--the one being
whom she really loved in the world; and moved by this powerful affection
she did honestly try to enter thoroughly into the plans of reform urged
upon her at the Home. She remained there longer than most of her
companions, struggling against the overwhelming depression of a life which
was one intolerable bondage and weariness to her. At last, the total
confinement to the house and the continual strain, became more than she
could bear. One morning she made her escape, and flew like a bird let loose
into the free air of the first fields she could reach outside the town.
After walking about for an hour or two, she began to reflect on the grief
it would cause her mother if she went back to her evil life. Thoughts of
God, whose anger she had been of late taught to dread, regret at losing all
she had gained by her late endurance, a conviction she could not repress
that anything was better than going back to her 'old ways,' all
combined to decide her to return to her prison before she had spoken to a
single person outside the walls. She never doubted that her fault in
leaving it would be forgiven in consideration of the great effort she made
in returning; and surely if ever there was a case where the teaching of the
parable of the Prodigal Son should have been carried out, this was one. She
arrived at the door of the Home, told where she had been, and expected
praise for her conduct in coming back; instead of that, she was met by
angry reproof, and sentenced forthwith to a week of the
punishment-room, on bread and water; 'And then,' she
said, 'after I had been locked up a while, Miss -- came up and
scolded and rated at me, and she hardened me,--she did for ever. I
left as soon as I could, and I would rather die than go to one of those
places again.'
That girl has done more to hinder her companions from
entering penitentiaries than the worst keepers of bad-houses have ever accomplished, and some such injudicious treatment has sent hundreds like her from these 'Homes,' to plunge into deepened guilt and misery. Will it be believed that in some penitentiaries, in addition to the burden and thraldom of the daily rules, they have established, at certain periods of the year, a religious observance called a 'retreat for the penitents,' held on one, two, or more days, during which the penitents are required to keep a total silence from morning till night, and, with scarce any interruption except for meals, to spend the entire day in the chapel, where religious services of different kinds are carried on the whole time?
The judgment displayed in this proceeding need not be characterized by
us, but it was forcibly illustrated on a recent occasion, when one of these
'retreats' was being held in a penitentiary. One of the poor
penitents, a specially well disposed girl, suddenly burst from the chapel,
where she was kneeling with her companions, and rushed into the courtyard,
where she began shouting a ribald song at the top of her voice, and then
laughed and screamed alternately, till she fell into hysterics. She had no
malicious intent in doing so, and was really sorry afterwards to have
disturbed the ladies, but it was the simple reaction from a degree of
mental strain, for which she, as well as the others, were totally
unfit.
'I am now going to speak from the bottom of my heart,' said
a poor diseased outcast, shivering in the tramp ward of a workhouse, when
urged to return to a penitentiary. 'I would rather go to jail for two
months as to the "Home" for one day. Liberty's sweet, and
it's a black look-out to see a prison door shut upon you; but
oh, it's better than the rules, and the 'silence times,'
and the curtsies to the ladies every time you move, and being punished if
you forget.'
It were easy to describe the large, simple, airy building, with enclosed
fields and gardens surrounding it, which we
should like to see prepared for these poor outcasts, and the homely, cheerful life to which they should be invited within it, where kindness adapting itself to their varying needs from day to day should alone rule them, and such restraints only be imposed as would be needful to shelter them from evil. But our purpose at present is to point out mistakes in existing charities, and not to suggest new schemes.
We have described the system of our modern penitentiaries, because it
could best illustrate the position we laid down in the first instance, that
over-legislation and cumbrous machinery are the two great evils
which tend to render the charities of this age abortive, and these errors
will be found marring the greater part of them, be they what they may.
Orphanages; refuges for the destitute; homes for the aged, for
incurables, for convalescents, for training servants; schools of every
description,--all these institutions are alike crippled and perverted
by the stern policy which has discipline, and not love for its watchword.
Of course, in the case of the children, this principle has an especially
free scope; laws are solemnly enacted for them, and chaplains gravely
consulted on their peccadilloes; and it is really sad to see the little
premature old men and women, with all natural vivacity and joyousness
crushed out of them, who are the result of the system.
In the management of Reformatories, indeed, the peculiar attributes of
nineteenth century charity manifest themselves to the full as conspicuously
as in that of penitentiaries. The reformation of the young is one of the
special hobbies, and many institutions, both public and private, have
sprung up of late years for that purpose. But in the whole of them, from
the vast Government Refuge for convicted boys or girls, down to the private
Home for eight or ten female orphans, where elderly ladies ruling them grow
in that narrow sphere ever narrower in their ideas, till trifles are
magnified to a crushing importance, and butterflies are broken on the wheel
after the most approved fashion--in all these the same principle of
stern government is found to
reign supreme, the moral machinery employed in all its unbending rigour.
When it pleased God of all compassion to seek the reformation of a whole
world lying in wickedness, there was but one agency employed, one only
motive power set in action by Him to accomplish the mighty end. That agency
was love--love so deep, so broad, so high, that there were none too
wicked or too weak to find a shelter for their wretchedness in its infinite
tenderness and pity. The worst of sinners ministered to that Love manifest
in the flesh, and feared not to kiss His feet; the outcast children of the
streets hung round Him unreproved; the sick and sorrowful never sought from
Him in vain the healing virtue that brought relief and comfort, though well
He knew their gratitude would be as fleeting as the morning dew; the woman
that was a sinner, and the friend that denied Him, were the first to whom
He gave token of His return from the grave to which their own sins and
those of others had consigned Him. 'I have given you an
example,' He said, when in all loving humility He had performed His
last act of touching kindness to those who were about to forsake Him; and
He had indeed given them an example all His life long of unwearied efforts
to save the lost, to reform the erring, to raise the fallen by means of
love alone, in all gentleness, meekness, and tenderest compassion. The
servant is not greater than his master. How comes it then, that those who
in all sincerity are His servants, never fail, when they attempt the task
of reform, to proceed on a principle diametrically opposed to that which
governed all His dealings with the guilty? Surely one would have expected
that they would have followed inch by inch the footsteps of perfect wisdom,
when they engaged in the very work for which He left His Father's
glory, and endured the cross?
Yet how is it in reality? What concord has that Divine Reformer and His
one principle of action--the charity that never faileth, with the
cold, austere authority, the
haughty arrogance, the severe, even merciless discipline, practised by those who govern our so-called 'reformatories?' We will give the testimony on this point of one who was an entirely impartial observer, a man singularly devoid of prejudice, who set himself to examine into the charities of London, with the honest desire to appreciate what was good, and only to regret what might be mistaken. He is speaking of the Feltham Reformatory for boys; and although this is a Government institution, it is not practically under a severer system than the private reformatories which have followed in its wake, even those established for girls and governed by women. The details, of course, may vary, but the principle that rules them and, the moral effects are precisely the same. At Feltham1
'there were no luxuries,' Mr. Jerrold says, 'save
that of cleanliness. The work was hard; the hours were long--from six
in the morning in summer: and the punishments were not of the
mildest. Boys were reduced to No. 10 or No. 16, letter A or B. They had
neither affection nor even regard about them. A line of conduct was traced
out for them, and they must keep to it, or suffer the penalties prescribed
for the government of the school. They could see their parents, or receive
letters from them, once in three months only. The chaplain would speak some
comforting words to them; they might get a pat on the head from the
superintendent; but they must remain apart, wrapped up in their own
thoughts, cut off from the world, and without the gentle tones of one
womanly voice to expand and soften their nature. It is said to be the best
that can be done for them, their natural parents having failed them; but it
is a cold, and harsh, and desolate place to abide in for the young who
should still be under the maternal wing. I watch the little fellows
marching in columns from the fields to the hoarse word of command, and see
how completely the will is curbed and the heart is disregarded, in order
that these large numbers may be dealt with ...
'I doubt whether
this constant strain on the spirits, and this incessant wheeling to the
right and left are good. The boys are apt to become dogged. A very wise
head has told us that "the bow should be sometimes loose." I
was struck with a remark from one of the authorities, that the boys would
not play. When they had a half holiday lately, and foot-balls were
given them, one school was incited to challenge another, but no match could
be got up. The boys held sullenly back,
___________________1 The following extracts are all
taken from Signals of Distress, by Blanchard Jerrold.
London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co.
Page 18
and broke into groups and chattered. I saw them at play; one or two appeared endeavouring to be cheerful, and the rest were leaning so silently in line against the schoolroom wall that I thought they were under punishment. A tame, meek boy who was idly kicking a stone about seemed utterly unable to rouse himself....
'A long row of neat
pig-styes built by the boys, inhabited by prime Berkshire porkers,
and mounds of potatoes laid up for the winter, were evidences that the
farming of this great Middlesex industrial experiment had been begun in
earnest;' but 'the pigs are consumed by the officers of the
school, the boys not being allowed to taste pork. The consequence is, as
the superintendent's punishment-book shows, they frequently
steal it. In this book I found this entry, "Stealing piece of pork,
six strokes on each hand with cane."...
'The
tailors' room was a lofty, well-ventilated apartment, where
some five-and-twenty boys were sitting cross-legged,
busily plying the needle, under the vigilant eye of a master. By the fire
stood a most miserable-looking lad, whose hair had been cut close to
his head, so that it looked like the back of a mouse. I inquired what his
offence was. The superintendent ordered him to stand forward. He was asked
why his hair had been cropped. He answered, "For taking money from my
friends." The answer was given in a meek, subdued voice. The boy was
dispirited and thoroughly ashamed--a picture of dejection. He had not,
it should be understood, stolen one farthing, but he had accepted money
from one of his comrades, and the school rules forbade this. While the
master tailor showed us the stout pilot suits making for the boys going
into the navy, this cropped boy stood at hand, and I could not help
thinking the punishment he was suffering disproportioned to his offence. I
marked a second cropped boy among the budding tailors, and was told he had
been cropped by mistake! We returned to the endless corridor, passing doors
on each side, until we halted by a narrow transverse passage. This led us
to the bath. Some five-and-twenty boys, under the
superintendence of a master, were bathing, or drying, or dressing
themselves. They looked blue with cold; their teeth were chattering. Over
the bath were the solitary confinement cells. They were dark and bare
enough--four walls, and a rug to be folded in, at night. The
superintendent opened one of the doors with a loud noise, but the prisoner
was fast asleep, and had not been disturbed. He woke as by instinct at the
superintendent's summons. He was a runaway, who had been brought back
that morning. He looked dejected and wobegone while the superintendent
described his case and fate. "He will remain here," said the
superintendent, "till the magistrates meet eight days hence. They
will deal with him. He will be flogged." The next cell contained a
second runaway. I remarked that the boy had neither socks nor braces.
"We remove them always," he said; "it's military
rule. They are wonderfully cunning. There is one here (in another cell) who
was found altering his blouse, to make it like a coat. This was his
preparation for absconding. He will be flogged
tonight by the drill-master." As we descended to the corridor,
the boys were issuing from the bath-room in double file, and to
military word of command. Along the corridors we constantly caught the
master's sharp words--"Right wheel; halt; left
wheel." Along the central line of the corridor lay bundles of the
boys' clothes, and they marched until they faced those bundles, when
they were halted, and they clothed themselves with military
precision.' ... 'The master always speaks to them with the
voice of a drill-sergeant. The seventy or eighty tailors and the
fifty or sixty shoemakers fall in, and wheel and face about. I saw them sit
to their supper. They were marshalled by word of command, and marched to
their bread and cocoa with the precision of Guards. They even raised their
hands, and clasped them, and sang grace to the sharp orders of the
master.' ... 'There is an elaborate detective machinery kept
up, by which officers of the school, some of whom are sworn in as
constables, can swoop upon runaways, and carry them back to their section
and the birch. The birch, the cane, bread and water, solitary confinement,
and incessant drill--these are the terrors ever present to the Feltham
boy's mind. It was painful to see them march from the school to the
supper form--1, 2, 3 lift their hands in prayer; again 1, 2, 3 lower
their hands, and take their seats before their iron mugs of cocoa, and set
to in solemn silence. Not a word must be spoken during meal
time.1 And why? The day has been
spent in the workshop, in the fields, and in school. It is dark. The boys
are weary. Why should they be doomed to sit elbow to elbow munching their
dry bread? It is enough to freeze the heart out of them, and it is through
the heart they must be reformed.' ... 'I have now a few words
to say on the instrument of terror that overshadows the school, and may
well make the stoutest boy tremble. The corporal punishments are
administered by a tall, muscular drill-master, who has, I believe,
been in the army. The punishment-book shows that his muscle is not
seldom brought into requisition. Strokes on the hand, and a dozen with the
birch, meet many offences, as "very gross insubordination," and
altering blouses with a view to absconding. I witnessed three canings and
two floggings with the birch. I may be chicken-hearted, but I
confess that when I saw a boy stretched upon a table--when I saw him
stripped and held by two or three stout men, while a fourth, a stalwart
disciplinarian, with a long birch, struck the naked flesh with his full
might, pausing between each blow, while the urchin shrieked with agony and
implored forgiveness, I confess I thought it was a brutal sight for any
eyes to look upon, and I pitied the forty-nine boys who were bound
to witness it. Again, when this same stalwart drill-master took a
heavy cane and struck a boy's hand with such force that the cane
whistled through the air, and the boy in his agony writhed like a cut worm,
I looked on with a strong feeling that this was bad and brutal. I am told
that it is necessary, but I should like all who advocate the birch
___________________1 This is a rule which prevails
also in all the penitentiaries and other charitable institutions of a
kindred nature.
Page 20
to see it in operation. It is said it flogs the vice out of a boy, but I am inclined to think it is apt to flog the heart out of him.'
We have given the account of this Reformatory at some length,
because, as we have said above, it is simply a specimen on a large scale of
the system which prevails in all the so-called 'Homes'
for the erring or destitute. It matters very little whether
'reformation' as regards a guilty past, or
'training' with a view to a doubtful future, be the object of
the institution; the ruling principle is still the same. Even in
Orphanages, where surely the charity that comes to bereaved children in
name of the Father of the fatherless, should wear as nearly as may be the
likeness of a mother's love,--even there the harshness and moral
cruelty exercised by devoted and well-meaning managers is almost
incredible. Could anything at Feltham be worse in its measure than the
proceeding, in a certain Home for little orphans, where a mite of a child
was condemned to two or three days' solitary imprisonment for coming
down stairs with her cap awry, or some similar want of precision in her
toilette; where the children having been allowed on one occasion, by a too
soft-hearted younger teacher, to talk for a few minutes after going
to their rooms, were discovered in the commission of this frightful offence
by the head lady, and were forthwith taken out their beds and severely
beaten, because they knew the RULE of the
Home, and should not have supposed any under-teacher could abrogate
it? In this 'Home,' where in winter they were physically made
to endure bitter cold, and all the year round suffered in the yet more
freezing atmosphere of a total lovelessness, the poor little wretches were
so unhappy that they were for ever plotting how to make their escape. Two
of them did manage to run off one day: one, in some unaccountable
manner, succeeded in reaching the house of a relation thirty miles distant;
the other was found late at night in the midst of a drenching rain,
crouching in the shrubbery not far from the gate, and was straightway
conveyed back to the 'Home' to be punished! Nor are those who
through toil and poverty have reached the close of life allowed to
pass to another world without the previous 'discipline' of this iron-handed charity. We can vouch for the fact, that in a certain 'Home for aged female paupers,' the poor old women were sentenced to their rooms as a punishment when they coughed more than the superintending lady thought necessary. Doubtless there are exceptions, but they are generally charities which have been established by individuals wealthy enough to undertake them alone, and wise enough to follow no rule but the simple one of seeking to make their protégées good by first making them happy. Once let a society or a committee sit down to draw up 'rules,' and the result is inevitable. We must confess, however, that apart altogether from the system of management pursued in those institutions, we greatly doubt whether they are wise charities for the managers any more than for the inmates, when we consider the matter with regard to the great mass of human misery and guilt that overspreads this world.
In the midst of that vast heart-sickening chaos of all evil,
moral and physical, we must do the most, as well as the best
we can; and it is a serious question whether the self-devoted
persons who shut themselves up with half-a-dozen old men, or
old women, or children, as the case may be, would not be of incalculably
more use in their generation if, in lowly imitation of the Divine example,
they simply went out into this suffering world and strove to do good, and
to help their sorrowful fellow-creatures wherever and however the
occasion presented itself. Were it even certain that their work in the
narrow spheres they make for themselves were entirely successful, instead
of their protégées being, as we believe, over-trained,
over-disciplined, and too often over-refined, it still seems
to us that the zeal, energy, and self-denial expended in nurturing,
as it were, a few exotics in a hot-house, might be multiplied a
hundredfold in its results if it were turned into the vast wilderness of
teeming wretchedness that lies unknown and unvisited all around them.
Is it well, while thousands upon thousands of wretched
and guilty human beings are swarming round us day by day--is it well, we say, that those who are willing to give themselves to the poor for Christ's sake should restrict their life's work to a doubtful experiment on some half dozen souls, with whom they isolate themselves altogether from the great family of God's creatures? The more, as it has always seemed to us, that those good works which must be conducted in institutions, such as the reclaiming of the fallen or the care of the insane, might so easily be rendered a twofold charity by placing them under the charge of persons themselves in straitened circumstances, such as the widows of poor clergymen, governesses out of employment, or professional men incapacitated from pursuing their calling,--all of whom, obliged to spend their lives in struggling for a scanty subsistence, would be thankful to find a home where they had it in their power also to do a little good. But even amongst those who do, like their Lord, go about doing good, it is painful to think how sorely their best efforts are frustrated by the prevalence amongst them of the very same spirit which is the bane of the establishments we have been describing--a spirit of harshness and intolerance towards human error and weakness, and a love of rule and authority, which leads them to assert a right to legislate for the souls and bodies of all who are the recipients of their gifts, and to demand, as it were, a return for every penny bestowed in so much moral improvement. Doubtless, no one would own it to themselves, but we believe that there is an idea latent in the minds of most good people who patronize the poor, that they ought only to bestow their alms on immaculate virtue, and that the blackguard, or the depraved woman whom want overtakes, whenever the trade in sin grows 'slack,' should be left alone to grapple with their fate, on the ground that it serves them right. Of course, we do not mean to say that the principle which would choose 'the deserving poor' for relief in preference to others is not a right one, provided the individual who relieves can flatter himself that he possesses such nice discrimination as to be able
to balance justly the deserts of those whose opportunities for good or temptations to evil have been so bewilderingly varied. Persons are apt to forget that those (and how many such there are in this 'enlightened country!') who never, from the cradle to the grave, hear the name of God but in blasphemy, are far less guilty in the indulgence of the grossest vices than even their patronizers themselves, when they give way to the polite sins of society.
We shall be met on this ground, doubtless, with the vexed question of
imposture in all its phases, and the risk that all undiscriminating charity
would but tend to encourage the cunning beggars who limp about
one-legged on crutches in the day-time, and dance in patent
boots at their 'swarrys' in the evening; and no doubt this is
the one great difficulty which will always stand in the way of the best and
most judicious efforts for the welfare of the poor. But it is not
insurmountable; no one who actually visits among them can fail to detect
much real misery; though allied to guilt, no less real; and there is
another side of the question which is almost wholly overlooked in this
legislative age, and that is the probability, we believe we might safely
say certainty, that with those whose moral perception is absolutely dead,
whose conscience has never been aroused, whose ignorance is invincible, it
is by active compassion for their bodily suffering, by ministering to their
bodily wants alone, that we can ever hope to touch the poor lost soul
within; the law of kindness, of love--the law that stirs the deepest
springs of all God's dealings with ourselves--alone can cope
with the evil which we shall ever seek in vain to remedy by severity and
discipline. He sends His rain on the just and on the unjust: why
should His sinful creatures be so merciless to the sins they do not chance
to share?
There comes a day to the drunkard and the profligate and the
street-walker, when their lawless revelry is stopped, when want
stares them in the face, and disease grasps their misused bodies, and racks
them as they lie cursing and
moaning in their despair; if in that hour one comes to them whom they know to be good and pure, one whom they would expect to shun all contact with them, and speaks to their heart by deeds, not words, as though ever saying, 'Poor creature, you have been very sinful, but so have I; and the good Saviour who died to save us both has sent me to help and comfort you, that you may know He loves you,' the tender mercy of that look and touch will draw out in their perishing souls, as nothing else in this world could, the still lingering traces of the Image in which they were first created, and bring, it may be, many a reckless wanderer to the feet of the universal Father, never known till then.
It may be thought that we are simply descanting on impossible theories,
very fair-seeming on paper, but quite unmanageable in practice. It
is not so. Those theories have been put to the test of positive facts; so
also has the opposite system, with what results the daily history of the
elaborate and costly London City Mission could perhaps best tell us. Mr.
Jerrold gives us some insight into its mode of working; and as his
impartiality cannot be doubted, we will give some of his remarks on the
subject. He begins by complaining, as we have done, of the burdens grievous
to be borne, which modern charity lays upon the recipients of her
bounty:--
'The recent discussion at a meeting of the Society of Arts on
model cottages for the working classes, was an excellent illustration of
the manner in which men totally ignorant of the wants and feelings of the
poor will dogmatize on their improvement, lay down plans for their
dwellings, reform their tailors' bills, change their food, and
prescribe their reading.' ... 'The Rev. M.A., who designed the
rules of a model lodging-house, was astonished when it was made
known to him that the single young men to whom he addressed himself would
not be drilled in their own rooms for which they paid rent, and that they
declined to pay for ventilation with slavery. Half the charities of London
are encumbered with absurd restrictions and conditions. A man must attend a
certain class in order to obtain a crust of bread and a refuge pallet at
night, or the dole belongs only to the hypocrite. Hence the spread of a
pauperized class. Poor people learn to conform to the rules of sectarian
charities; they whine and mum, and teach their children to whine and mum
after the approved fashion.' ... 'All charity should
be help; ... it should comfort the man who is out of work in a way that will stimulate him to seek work.... It should leave him free, and never debase him by extorting conditions that he must fain pay with hypocrisy. The London City Museum has four hundred missionaries doing a work of charity. Here is a little army that might do incalculable good if it would approach the slums of London--the fences and padding-kens--the sloppy alleys and the fever-gardens--in a thoroughly sensible spirit. It is the subscribers of the income of #37,000, which this mission enjoys, who are in the wrong. I have reason to know that the missionaries are zealous, and in a great degree useful men; but they would be more useful, there would be fewer of those barefooted wild children in the streets, if the public who subscribe would be at the pains of learning how they may best help the poor out of the slough of despond, out of the inhuman squalor in which they now lie huddled behind the great and busy arteries of the wealthy metropolis. The city missionary is a good and a brave man as a rule, but his sphere of activity is foolishly circumscribed. He has only words for the ragged, and tracts for the famished.' ... 'The city missionary has awkward work to perform. He is the bearer of religious consolation; but the field is not ready for him. All this dirt must be cleared away first. These begrimed patterers and pickpockets cannot jump from this degradation into a state of piety. The missionary is not very hopeful. He says, "Nearly twenty cases of death have occurred during the last twelve months. I cannot refer to any of them as sleeping in Jesus, all have left, to me at least, unsatisfactory evidence of their ultimate happiness." This missionary also complains that his prayer-meetings are not so well attended as those where temporal relief is given with the teaching, and where people listen with solid reward before them to tempt them. But I protest at once against the style in which the missionaries make reports on their labours. They provoke hostility, and suggest to the mind of the most amiable reader a certain falsity in the writer. In a word, their tone is canting. I am quite certain that if many of the forlorn creatures scoff at the city missionary, it is because he will persist in talking a religious or missionary jargon that is wholly unintelligible to the mass of men and women. The report of an individual case sent in by the Drury Lane missionary is not calculated to impress, but rather to puzzle, and it may be to disgust the reader; it is choked with hackneyed verbosities. It jars upon the ear, and makes the listener look doubtingly towards the speaker. Is he in earnest, and the right man in the right place, who walks amid ragged savages, uninformed and cold as the ground they tread, and talks of them in this wise? "Mr. -- (a cardboard modeller), aged fifty, of the Model House, Charles Street--the only instance of real apparent good I have seen there--first came under my notice while visiting there, as I have done from time to time. About January 1860, he came to have a more open liking for my visits. Being a man of some education, having been educated in Christ's Hospital, Newgate Street, he was able to express his ignorance of God's
plan of salvation, and his own felt need of God's pardoning love, in a straightforward, intelligent manner. For a very long time he wandered in darkness, seeing men as trees walking. I felt great pleasure in often visiting him. He began to attend Trinity Church, as also a church in the city, and was also an attendant at my Thursday evening meeting. He evidently was seeking salvation. Eventually, the Lord led him by a path he knew not. One day in June 1860, he told me of new light that had broken in upon him, which led to further conversation, during which time I gathered he had received great good from one of the Dublin Society's tracts, Good News; and a passage he read there, under God's blessing, was the means of bringing to his soul a sweet assurance of God's pardoning love." ... 'I am glad that the cardboard modeller has listened to the pious exhortations of the missionary, but, at the same time, I am surprised; for I cannot understand how the pious zealot made himself intelligible to him. I should be sorry wilfully to disparage the doings of the London missionary body; but their knowledge has not been turned to the fullest possible account. Such knowledge, the result of experience, might have been turned to most profitable account many years ago, had the missionaries of our London alleys shown a sense of the importance of temporal as well as spiritual matters, and had understood the temporal good as a basis for the spiritual.'
In fact, it is as we have said, in this age even the charity that seeks
out the poor in their own dens and hovels is but too much pervaded with the
harsh, cold, domineering spirit which makes prison-houses of our
so-called 'Homes.' Although, in the freedom of the
streets, they cannot, as in the Refuges, be coerced into an outward
conformity with the severe rules of their benefactors, it is very easy to
put on the screw in another shape, which only so far varies in its results
that it makes them hypocrites, instead of making them simply hate religion
and goodness and propriety as the source of their unhappiness in these
institutions of benevolence.
The effect of a simple change of system was remarkably illustrated in
the case of a night-school for boys, which was started in the lowest
quarter of a large town.
It was a charity greatly needed in the locality where it was founded.
Scores of boys, not a few of them rogues and vagabonds, prowled about the
streets in the evening, and got into every conceivable mischief and
wickedness. They
were of the lowest class, had never been sent to school as children, and were for the most part as entirely ignorant of religion or morality as if they lived in a heathen land. Nevertheless, for lads of that description, the idea of learning, if they have not to pay for it, and if it is a matter of voluntary choice and not compulsion, has often great attractions; and even where there is not this inducement, the prospect of a room with lights and a fire, and plenty of companionship, is quite sufficient to bring them in shoals to the school in the first instance. Their continuing to come depends on the treatment they meet with.
In the town of which we speak, the night-school was established
by some clergymen, who enlisted various young men in the service, and a
good staff of teachers was soon secured. Rules were drawn up and
punishments decided upon, and the school commenced.
A very short period of practised enforcement of the rules and the
punishments was sufficient to bring the school into such a state of wild
rebellion that the police had to be called in on more than one occasion.
The boys continued to attend, but it was with the view of manifesting their
opinion of the school and its masters, by furtively putting out the gas,
and then proceeding to break windows, throw stones, and otherwise convince
their teachers that their 'discipline' had certainly not been
successful. Of course no good end could be gained by a continuance of such
a state of things, and it was decided to give up the school. There was
however a lady, who, when the school first commenced, had taken a little
class in a corner of the room, and who had always found the boys so
manageable, that she felt convinced the cause of the failure lay with the
managers and not with the scholars. She asked leave, before the school was
finally given up, to be allowed to try if she could carry it on alone; the
gentlemen thought it about the rashest venture a deluded female could make,
but knowing that she would have help within reach if the boys became
dangerous, they let her have her way.
The next evening when the boys assembled, the gentlemen informed them
that the school would be given up to Miss --, and took their
departure. Enter Miss -- upon the scene. Some thirty or forty boys
were raging round the room, shouting, swearing, quarrelling, overturning
the desks, shouldering the forms, and attacking one another; the whole
party, without exception, having in the space of two minutes adorned
themselves with moustaches, an impromptu
decoration derived from the ink-bottles. The noise was so tremendous
that she could not attempt to make herself heard, but seizing hold of the
first boy she could catch, she hurriedly exclaimed, 'Ask them if they
would like to hear the wonderful story of Jack Smith?' The boy soon
compelled them to hear his message, and there was a universal shout of
acquiescence; in another moment their missiles were flung aside, and they
were all crowding round her with eager calls for Jack Smith, mingled with
hopes that he was a robber. She told them she would not utter a word until
they were perfectly quiet, and instantly they all squatted down on the
ground at her feet, and she took her place in the midst of them.
Now the proposal to tell them about Jack Smith had been a sudden idea,
uttered on the spur of the moment, and she knew no such story, but she saw
that delay would be fatal; if she did not win their attention in the next
five seconds the uproar would be worse than ever. She therefore plunged
headlong into a history, invented as she spoke, and which she soon found
must be of the most sensational description; but as her object was to
accustom them to obey her, she noted every word spoken, or sly blow dealt
to a comrade, and at once refused to proceed till they were perfectly
orderly. The result was, that by the time she had hung, drawn, and
quartered Jack Smith, she had so completely gained their attention, that
they listened attentively to the few words in which she told them that she
would keep a school open for them alone, if they liked to come where there
would be no punishments and no rules, save the one inviolate law, that
anybody behaving ill should
be dismissed at once. They all assured her they would come, and that they would behave well; and they did.
She carried on a most successful school for two or three winters,
although it was one which would no doubt have horrified a rigid
disciplinarian. Her chief object was to give these poor heathen boys true
religious and moral teaching, and this she did almost entirely by
conversations. Gathering them all round a bright fire, which, poor fellows,
they seldom saw elsewhere, she encouraged them to talk to her freely, and
to tell her all their own ideas and opinions, and then, in the simplest
language, often interrupted by their eager questions, she told them the
great truths of God they would never hear elsewhere. So completely did she
win their confidence, that they did not hesitate to tell her of their past
misdeeds, and even of their intention to do the same again; and yet so
anxious were they not to offend her, that she never once heard an oath from
any one of them.
The great secret of her influence was the entire sympathy she gave them
in all their pursuits and pleasures; and so implicitly did they learn to
believe that she felt with them in all things, that they would often
identify her with their own habits and occupations in a most amusing
manner.
'Next time you wants to tame a bull, miss,' said a boy to
her once, 'I'll teach you the smartest dodge as ever was; you
gets a long whip, and you puts a ring through his nose,' etc.; and he
went off into an elaborate detail of the process.
'Well but, Bill,' she said, when he had done, 'do you
think I am ever likely to want to tame a bull?'
'Well, you might, on occasions,' he answered; 'but,
now I thinks on it, I believe you had best not try, for I am a'most
sure as the bull would get the better on you.'
The very frankness with which they spoke out their own crude ideas,
showed her how little they would have gained from a school conducted with
the ordinary strictness and
formality. A small boy, to whom some one had tried to teach the Catechism, obstinately refused to believe in anything but the 'Articles of the Christmas Feast;' and being asked for further explanation, said 'A jolly plum-pudding was the best on 'em.' Another, who professed to be strong in theology, was found to possess, as his sole religious creed, the theory that any one who had riches, 'five or ten pound like,' he explained must infallibly go to hell. As a practical refutation of this dogma, Miss -- told them the history of Miss Burdett Coutts' great wealth, and of the many good deeds and kind actions she had performed with it. 'Now you don't suppose,' she added, 'that a lady who made such a good use of her riches would go to hell simply because she had them?' 'Well, no,' was the reluctant answer; 'not if she warn't given to swearing.' Then there was the 'travelling chap,' as the other boys called him, who intimated that he had received quite a polite education, and whose confidence had to be summarily check, beginning, as they generally did, 'I know'd a parson as swore,' or 'I've known ladies afore you, miss; they was all play-actresses.'
Then there was the boy who invariably interrupted all histories of
heroes and saints recorded in Scripture by disparaging comparisons with Tom
Sayers. 'Moses and Joshua was all very well,' he would say,
'but what was they to that little chap, a-standing up, as game
as a bantam-cock, before that great thundering Yankee, and
a-knocking of him down like a nine-pin? Bless you, Noah and
Abraham and all that lot were not fit to hold a candle to him. He
war a hero, he war!'
Occasionally the high spirits of the boys would get the better of them,
and they would become noisy or riotous, but their teacher had only to say
that she must dismiss them for the night if they continued unruly, and they
were quiet at once. On one occasion, when they had been very boisterous,
one or two of the boys gravely suggested her proceeding to extreme
measures. 'Don't you think, miss,
you had better get a long cane, and give it us well all round?' 'The day that I find I must get a long cane,' was her answer, 'I shall break up the school, and have nothing more to do with you. I don't undertake to teach any but quiet, well-behaved boys.' This was such an awful threat to them that she had never occasion to renew it. Had not her own judgment been already strong against such measures as they proposed, their own confidences to her would have sufficed to convince her that the employment of brute force on such subjects is not the way to quell evil within them, or make religion and virtue lovely in their eyes. Often had they described to her the terrible rage, the fierce, revengeful anger, which had been excited within them when they were beaten, the oaths they swore to leave no stone unturned in the effort to get a hold of a knife, that they might then and there kill their master if they could; and when such feelings were roused towards clergymen at the night-school, it served no other purpose but to fill them with hatred for evermore towards those who would have been their best friends.
A tangible proof of the success of this 'undisciplined'
school was given in the fact that twenty or thirty of these street Arabs
presented themselves for confirmation on the next occasion which
offered.
We have shown pretty clearly, as it seems to us, in our first example,
'how not to do it,' and this last may give some
idea of the manner in which the poor must really be met, if we would
benefit them; for the needful principle is the same whatever be the special
object of the charity.
What we want is to get rid of the moral red-tapeism which
shackles and paralyses our modern benevolence, and to adopt in its place an
untrammelled simplicity and a flexible adaptation of all resources to the
exigencies of the moment. In place of 'discipline' let us have
love, and for unbending rule a ready sympathy.
Although our illustrations have been taken from those
charities which have to do with the souls rather than with the bodies of the poor, yet the evil effects of the system at present in vogue does also impair those which are appointed for the bestowal of material comforts far more than could be imagined. A gift hedged round with all manner of humiliating restrictions, and which the worn-out, sad-hearted pauper can only obtain by compliance with half-a-dozen rigid rules, may indeed nourish or clothe the body, but it does so stript of the blessing both to giver and receiver which was designed for us in the promise that the poor should never cease out of the land.
Let those who help the poor, whether morally or physically, abandon
their self-formed theories, their pre-arranged codes of iron
laws, to which, like the Procrustean bed, the wants and necessities of
their protégés must be moulded, and let them start with no
other guide than the one rule which the Divine Governor has given for our
own lives--to love God, and our neighbour as ourselves; and they will
find that this broad and comprehensive principle will never fail to meet
the varying requirements of every case that may present itself.
Loving God with heart and soul and strength, they will combat
successfully the evil which He hates, and, loving their neighbours as
themselves, they will ever, in imagination, place themselves in their
stead, and thus, feeling for and with them, will find that tender
compassion and loving humility will work miracles of healing both on body
and soul, which discipline and the arrogant exercise of authority could
never accomplish.
EDINBURGH: T. CONSTABLE, PRINTER TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY.