Sanitary and social lectures and essays / by Charles Kingsley.

  • Kingsley, Charles, 1819-1875.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary and social lectures and essays / by Charles Kingsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and mercy. But you wish to do more : you wish for personal contact with the poor round you, for the pure enjoyment of doing good to them with your own hands. How are you to set about it ? First, there are clubs —clothing-clubs, shoe-clubs, maternal-clubs; all very good in their way. But do not fancy that they are the greater part of your parish work. Rather watch and fear lest they become substitutes for your real parish work; lest the bustle and amusement of playing at shopkeeper, or penny-collector, once a week, should blind you to your real power—your real treasure, by spending which you become all the richer. What you have to do is to ennoble and purify the womanhood of these poor women; to make them better daughters, sisters, wives, mothers: and all the clubs in the world will not do that; they are but palliatives of a great evil, which they do not touch ; cloaks for almsgiving, clumsy means of eking out insuflS.cient wages; at best, kindly contrivances for tricking into temporary thrifti- ness a degraded and reckless peasantry. Miserable, miserable state of things ! out of which the longer I live I see less hope of escape, saving by an emigration, which shall drain us of all the healthy, strong, and brave among the lower classes, and leave us, as a just punishment for our sins, only the cripple, the drunkard, and the beggar. Yet these clubs must be carried on. They make