THE MORAL AXE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH. 



151 



book-learning, and so on, are not natural to man, 

 but art is. 



Then, side by side with art, try Nature. Side 

 by side of the worship of humanity, or, if you 

 please, reverence for humanity, try the worship of 

 the earth and sky. Remember Miss Nightingale's 

 story of the dying man in hospital, where the 

 windows were too high from the ground : " He 

 didn't know anything about Natur', but he should 

 like to have one look out at window before he 

 died." You think the colonist's earth-hunger, 

 the passion of the French peasant for his freehold, 

 is mere sordid greed. It is that ; and it is also 

 something infinitely larger and higher than that. 

 It is the earth-worship instinctive in the race. If 

 you doubt it, look at the geranium-pots in the 

 back alleys of Bethnal Green. 



This brings me to the last point I will obtrude 

 upon you. In the name of public health, the 

 health of London and Liverpool, as well as of 

 England generally, make the most of what of the 

 rural population is still left to us. Six out of 

 each eleven persons living in London were born 

 outside it. If you talk to them, you will find they 

 do not regret their country villages. There is no 

 homesickness. Why ? Because village life is 

 dull; because in London, with its vile lodgings 

 and precarious struggle for existence, there is 

 excitement, there is life by the brain. There is 

 a rich multiform drama every Saturday night in 

 the Whitechapel Road. Flaring gas-lights; 

 strong lights and shadows; carts of vegetables 

 and cheap fruits ; variety of strongly-seasoned 

 food ; toys, colors, shop-windows, street-cries, 

 collisions, medleys of all sorts, and stimulating 

 social intercourse — what is there in country vil- 

 lages to compare with this ? The very fairs, in- 

 stead of being made decent, have been abolished. 

 Then in London there is independence. There is 

 no farmer to turn one adrift at a week's notice, 

 or to strip the ripe grapes from the pretty cottage 

 walls or the ripe cider-apples from the trees. I 

 speak of things I have myself seen and known. 

 And I lived for years on the estate of a most 

 philanthropic nobleman. 



In the interests of town and country alike, is 

 there not some reasonable percentage among the 

 twelve thousand gentlemen who possess two- 



thirds of the soil of England, who are ready to 

 become great citizens, who are prepared to stop 

 the velocity of this exodus from villages, by 

 making village life more bright, more free, more 

 strong — in one word, more healthy ? Some slight 

 restoration of the twenty-acre freeholds of past 

 times, some fixed ownership of house and gar- 

 den, some genial simulating culture — difficult of 

 attainment though all this be — is it so chimeri- 

 cally impossible ? Must the whole work of rural 

 progress be left to Joseph Arch and other subse- 

 quent antagonisms far more fierce and far less 

 manly ? • 



I have done ; but in ending, as in beginning, 

 let me deprecate very earnestly the thought that 

 by any implication I have disparaged other pro- 

 jects of reform, more practical apparently and 

 more immediate, in the obtrusion of my own. 

 And especially let it be granted me to say one 

 word in thankful praise of the lecture and of the 

 lecturess who opened the course this year by 

 her plea for Open Spaces. From the precept 

 and example of Miss Octavia Hill I have always 

 thought it a privilege to be a learner. Her close 

 contact with the hard, dry, minute, tedious facts 

 of misery, whether in Barrett Court or in out- 

 relief committees ; her attempts to lessen, not so 

 much physical pain, as moral degradation ; her 

 up-hill struggle against the miserable indulgence of 

 indolent or sectarian almsgiving; and her last pa- 

 tient and eloquent pleading for green breathing- 

 spaces and resting-places close to the homes of the 

 poor, are all precious, not merely for their immedi- 

 ate beneficence to the needy, but still more because 

 they seem to me a sort of object-lessons in large 

 type for the rich in elementary social ethics — les- 

 sons which can hardly fail to lead the pupils in 

 her school to larger and deeper issues. More- 

 over, they will bear, as many other remedial 

 measures will not bear, the test which should be 

 applied to all palliatives ; that is to say, being 

 beneficent for the immediate present, they are 

 such as to facilitate, not such as to prejudice, the 

 future. They are not impediments, but install- 

 ments, of that guiding ideal toward which each 

 one of us, I believe, whatever his point of depart- 

 ure, whatever the path he may have chosen, pur- 

 poses to strive. — Fortnightly Review. 



