OR, HOW THE WORK OF THE RICH AMONG THE POOR IS MARRED, Most persons are agreed, at least on one point, in this bewildering world of ours-that it is the unquestionable duty of the rich to care for the poor; and there are not many perhaps who have gone midway on their life's journey without discovering why the promise that the poor should never cease out of the land is one of the sweetest and most merciful that could have been made to us. It needs but a little of the desillusionment which tracks youth's fairy dreams-but a few of those solemn lulls in the passion-storm of existence when we hear the footsteps of the approaching death echoing down the dim aisles of the future, on his swift mission to some beloved friend--but a few, in short, of the stern realities of life, to teach us that the only pure and certain human joy is the power of relieving suffering-there is no despondency or weariness how great soever which can withstand the rapture of heart, fresh as in the charmed days when the morning dew was on the flowers of life, which springs from the assuaging of pain or sorrow in sunless lives. A person was once asked what had been the happiest moment she had ever known. She was one who had had more than a common share of the good things of this world. She had a bright home and many friends. She had achieved success in a brilliant society, and won literary fame, and had drunk deep of intellectual pleasures in the course of a life which was far spent. Yet she said, the happiest moment she had ever known was that in which a withered old woman tottered into the room holding out her shaking hands towards her, and weeping for joy, as she exclaimed, "I said I'd come and thank you for saving my boy, though I dropped on the road." Her boy was a poacher, who in a midnight affray had, inadvertently as he saidwilfully as others declared-shot a gamekeeper. He was tried for his life, and almost to the last moment he had no counsel, as neither he nor his miserable old mother had the means of securing one. The lady, knowing nothing of him, heard accidentally that if he remained undefended it would go hard with him, and she engaged a first-rate counsel on his behalf. The result was, that although his sentence was death, it was accompanied by a recommendation to mercy; a petition, which was afterwards drawn up by his defender, procured a commutation of the extreme penalty; and so it was that the joys of happy love, and fame, and pleasure paled before the grateful light in the poor old mother's eyes as she spoke her homely thanks, and then dropped back to her obscurity, and was no more seen. The truism which this circumstance illustrates, however, is one which our readers in all probability have abundantly proved for themselves, and the point to which it brings us will be no less familiar to them. Who that has recognised the obligation or appreciated the blessing of caring for the poor, has failed to discover that the right mode of performing that duty or profiting by that privilege is just one of the most difficult problems which this life offers to us? We live in the midst of religious observances, of enlightened civilization, and of physical comforts, and we know meanwhile that all around us there lies a very ocean of suffering, of want, and of sin, from whose seething bosom night and day the cry goes up of ruined lives and perishing souls, making shipwreck in the very sight of land-for we are there useless as when we stand upon the shore and watch a vessel foundering out at sea-longing to succour them, longing to save and feeling as if the blood of these our fellow creatures would be demanded at our hands, as w passively look on to see them drifting past helpless and hopeless to the great deep. Yet when we would relieve suffering we are met by imposture when we would lessen want we are told we ar encouraging vice, and when we seek to reform a sinner we are assured that we are making hypocrite. And it is in the main true. These, and a thousand other difficulties meet us so soon as w trench on but the outskirts of that dark gulf o living agony, whose depths no human thought es sound. There is nothing like the test of realit for proving the truth of a position; so we will giv a few of the experiences of a certain blunderer wh had to pay dear for a personal recognition of th truth we have referred to above, that the probler of the right treatment of the poor is about th hardest of social puzzles. Most of these exper ences were ludicrous enough, but there was hardh one of them which did not illustrate some of th mistakes of which we speak. Being possessed of zeal and a sanguine tempera ཞེས་འཞིནམ ment, this blunderer plunged headlong into the worst district of a large town, intending to produce therein most wonderful results. Certainly it was 3 promising field for philanthropic efforts. There was no species of suffering or wickedness which had not its representative there. It was such a low, squalid neighbourhood, that there were few who held even the religion of respectability-a culture which satisfies the aspirations of a vast sumber of the middle classes in England. There were streets upon streets of houses which seemed the most confined and miserable it was possible to conceive, and their inhabitants at the lowest stage of wretchedness, till it was discovered that these were intersected by yards and alleys peopled with a class many degrees lower still in the social scale. There were thieves' lodging houses, and receptacles for even less reputable moral characters, and at every corner there was a public-house of the lowest description, which served as a nucleus for all the evils spreading round it. The blunderer was somewhat bewildered. Where on earth was a beginning to be made? Walking mournfully up and down the dirty streets, watching Lal-starved, savage-looking women beating puny children, with old wicked faces, or drunken men staggering about and swearing to the wind, if no one else was near, did not seem to be doing much to advance the interests of society, and it would have been a comparatively pleasurable sensation to have gone into the first lodging-house and deEvered up purse and handkerchief to the pickpockets if it would have given an opening for doing good somehow. But the very vastness of the miseries and evils all around seemed to produce a Bense of helplessness which was very oppressive. At last, however, this blunderer heard that up the dark staircase of one of the houses facing the street there lived an old man who had attained the age of a hundred and three years; which old man, though very intelligent, gave no signs of ever be towing a thought on the not improbable continacy that death would overtake him at last. His great age was no fable; a sceptic on the subject ok the trouble to search the register and found that it had been rather under than over stated. There could be no doubt that what he said was rue, and that he did remember the death of George II., and the ox which was roasted whole in the market place for the coronation of George III., and it was no less true that the recreations of this Venerable patriarch consisted in beating his wife with the broomstick every night, and dancing a bornpipe at the public-house after his daily potations. His wife was the fourth or fifth who had enjoyed the honour of his alliance, and was, as he would have expressed it, "a tidy young 'ooman of eighty." Here was a mission for the blunderer! and with many true and earnest thoughts as to the solemnity which must invest an interview with one so close upon the great mystery, and so VIII-19 little moved by its proximity, she climbed up to the den pointed out to her as his abode, and entered. The old man had been a herb gatherer, and had spent most of his life seeking plants on the mountains, often walking into Scotland and Wales; a fact which probably accounted in some degree for his good health and great age; and the room was filled with all sorts of strange looking herbs and insects. There he sat, with a quantity of perfectly white hair flowing over his shoulders-a complexion which a young girl might have envied, and a pair of keen dark eyes which had lost none of their brightness. He greeted his visitor with a sort of sulky civility, and his wife with elaborate empressement. This old woman's vocation in life was to go from one gentleman's house to another asking help for her patriarch, and assuring each person whom she mulcted that she never applied for relief to any other. The visitor rushed into her subject. She found that he could read and write, and that there was nothing to prevent his going to church-which edifice, however, it appeared he had only visited on isolated occasions in the course of a hundred years or so-and these had been the festal on which he had united himself to the various defunct ladies who preceded the wife now reigning. Most energetically did the blunderer begin to talk to him of his swift approaching change, but he listened to the whole with an air of immovable stolidity, and made no answer. Then she tried the form of questions. "Would he like the clergyman to come and see him?" He lifted up his stick and struck the ground violently as he shouted "No!" "Would he go to church?"--"No!" "Would he read some books if she brought them?""No!" "Would he let her read to him herself?" "No!" "Now we'll come to terms!" he answered, clapping his hands vigorously on his knee; "that's a sensible word at last!" And so the blunderer's mission on this occasion ended in her going home to order the delectable dish in question, with her mind somewhat overwhelmed by the phenomenon of an existence of an hundred and three years, which had resulted in the solitary conviction that apple dumplings were the only things to be desired in this world -or the next. But the truth is, her failure was illustrative of the common mistake made by those who really desire to benefit the poor, and that is, the habit of commencing their intercourse with them by an abrupt onslaught on their moral and spiritual condition, which evolves an assumption of superiority, and a self-arrogated right to pry into the secrets of their soul, that cannot fail to be most galling to human nature, whether it be clad in rags or in purple and fine linen. We have only to consider how far we should like a spiritual inquisitor to enter our drawing-room, unknown and uninvited, and at once demand that we should deliver up the secrets of our conscience, to be commented upon by his superior intelligence, while he proceeds to accuse us of a catalogue of sins which he believes he has discovered by private observation of our life and habits! If we have been very well brought up, it is to be hoped we would dismiss our self-constituted teacher without too much discourtesy; but is there one amongst us who would not feel all that is vicious in his nature rise in antagonism against such a proceed. ing? And most certainly its real effect upon the poor is precisely the same. They will not show it; the prospect of sundry shillings and half-crowns passing from the pocket of the inquisitor to that of the submissive sinner will cause the infliction, to be patiently borne and even responded to in a canting manner; but not the slightest real hold will be gained over them, and any artificial good which may seem to result will vanish so soon as the immediate scrutiny is withdrawn. If we would benefit the poor, we must begin by constituting ourselves their friend in the fullest acceptation of the term. Now we all know that a friend, to be really such, must sink any superiority he may possess, and place himself on a level with him whose confidence he shares. Of course, as regards the poor, it is impossible we can divest ourselves of the advantages of education and position; but it is possible that we should meet them only on the ground which is common to all the joys and sorrows inseparable from humanity, and the bodily ills and ordinary necessities of existence. To place ourselves for the time being on an equality with the poor, and to give them a hearty and open sympathy, is one of the great secrets of success; and it may be considered as an inviolable rule, that no advice or moral influence ought to be attempted till we have, relieved their bodily wants, and sympathised with their temporal troubles, long enough to convince them that it is their happiness and good we have at heart and in no sense our own. For the poor are very shrewd, and although they might not be able to put their convictions into so many words, they have an instinctive consciousness of the motive which lies at the root of the charity of those who make it a sort of spiritual speculation for their own benefit, investing in good deeds in this world with the view of drawing upon heaven for a reward in that which is to come. It were well if it were understood, once for all, that any one who goes among the poor with only motives of this description is certain to fail of the smallest real success among them. There must be a genuine love for them, a hearty compassion for their physical suffering, and an earnest unselfish desire to help them for their own sake, before the slightest good can be done to either their souls or bodies, Even with the most single-hearted wish to serve them, however, it is hard for a person in another rank of life to understand the sort of network of small social difficulties and troubles which surrounds the lives of the poor, and bends them down to live as completely in the present moment only as if their existence, like that of the lower animals, were destined to terminate for ever in the dust of death Our unfortunate blunderer had an amusing instance of this on one occasion. She had gone, to visit a young couple of the better class of the poor. They had as yet no children, and the husband, being a stoker on the railway, they were above the reach of want. Under these circumstances it seemed to their visitor that they might have attended to their religious duties at least to the extent of going to church on Sundays, and she ventured to intimate as much to the young woman, who was standing rather idly at her door. "Will you please to walk in till I show you something?" was the woman's answer; and she conducted her visitor into the little kitchen where her husband sat by the fire. He had just come home for half an hour, to have his tea, and was watching the kettle on the fire with the most absorbing interest. He was, of course, in his working-clothes, and his face and hands were of a deep oily black, after the manner of stokers, Now, ma'am," said the woman, pointing to him, you see that there man; that's my husband, and I'm bound to do a part by him, aint I?" 66 66 Very well, then; would you like to know how I has to pass my Sundays? A washing of he! Never a blessed moment has he to wash hisself through the week, out early and late as he is, and half the night too, and blacker nor any crow all the while. Well, on Sundays it's fitting and proper he should try to look like a Christian if he can, so he sets me to it after we has our breakfast, with a bucketful of soap-suds and a scrubbing-brush, and I rubs at him off and on all the day, till my arms ache, and he aint much better than he wor; and then, after we has our tea, he says to me, Come, Sally, have another try, there's a brave wench; and goes at him again, and sluices him down, till you'd think a born nigger ud come out, white; and if you'll believe me, ma'am, when I polishes him of with a dry towel afore we go to bed, he's only a light brown after all !” What was to be said in reply to such stubborn facts; especially when the good woman finished with the unanswerable argument, "So you see. ma'am, them as wants to live religious, had best not marry a stoker?" It is, in a great measure, because no allowance is made for such little difficulties as those, that wellmeaning advisers of the poor so habitually defeat their own object, and by patronising and faultfinding create a secret antagonism where most they desire to inspire confidence. standing well enough; surely you can see him now, "No, I don't see anything," she answered. The results of a different line of action were very touchingly exemplified to our blunderer, on an occasion when a circumstance occurred which was suf-ing at the right place. He is there as plain as I ever ficiently striking in itself to be worth recording, apart from the lesson it conveys. A certain couple, rather more respectable than their neighbours, though very poor, and burdened with a large family, had taken dire offence against some of those who cared for the poor in the district, and notably against the blunderer herself, in consequence of the remonstrance which had been made ¦ at the miserable state in which they had left an old grandmother. In this district, whatever may be the case elsewhere, old fathers and mothers were openly considered a severe infliction; their market value was fixed at the precise sum which could be "extorted from the parish for their relief, and if it was exceeded, as it usually was, by the amount required for their nourishment, the "care" taken of them by their dutiful children just stopped short of hurrying them into another world by surreptitious means. The man in question had not been worse than his neighbours in letting his bedridden old mother lie week after week in an indescribable state of disease and neglect, and he considered the attempt which had been made to remedy her condition as an aspersion on his filial attention, which he resented with a degree of vindictive animosity to those concerned which could hardly be believed, and which exercised an influence much to their prejudice on all around him. It came to pass, however, that the man fell ill of rapid consumption, and as his wife could neither afford to give him the nourishment he required, nor to pay for a nurse to help her in tending him, she was fain to accept of the blunderer's services in these respects, though without the smallest relenting from her cherished anger. The man himself did soften a little as the days passed on and his strength faded, and no word save that of kindness and sympathy ever met his ear from the person he had done his best to injure. At last there came an evening, after his life had seemed for several days at the lowest ebb, when he appeared rather better, and openly showed his satisfaction when his visitor took her place at his side for the night-watch. He had never been in the least delirious through his illness, and on this occasion he seemed especially clear and collected. Some time after midnight he turned to his voluntary nurse, and said to her composedly, as he pointed to a corner of the room, "There's Jim." Now Jim was a little cripple boy of his own, who had died a year or two previously. His visitor thought he meant his eldest son John, who was earning his livelihood in a town very far distaut: "You mean John," she said; "you forget he is not here." "I don't mean John," said the man, impatiently; "I mean Jim, my little lame Jim; you knew him saw anything in my life." He seemed annoyed that she could not say she saw Jim, and after a moment he turned round to look at her; as he did so, the light of intelligence and consciousness faded out of his eyes, they became fixed, and, without a sigh or a shudder, in that instant he died. No one, we think, who had been present when this veritable incident occurred, could have failed to indorse his wife's awe-struck exclamation when her first burst of grief was over—“I shall always say he saw our Jim." This, however, is but an episode in what we have to relate. It so happened that this couple, amongst their many coarse, ugly children, had one little girl of three years old who was positively lovely. Such a child is sometimes seen to drop, as it were, from the clonds into the midst of a brutish, godless family, and in some way work out a little angel mission of her own amongst them. In this case, the mother, with her hard, sullen nature and almost fiendish temper, had given herself up to a passionate worship of her little fairhaired Emmie, and it was with deep gasping sobs a few days later that she told our blunderer how from the moment the child first looked on her dead father she kept repeating, "I'm going to my daddy;" and how, as the coffin was carried out of the house, she nodded her little sunny head towards it, and said, "I'm coming soon;" and so it was that the very next day Emmie fell ill of a wasting fever, and the terrified mother was only too glad once more to accept her visitor's help in tending her. For two or three weeks they did all that human care could do, but the little one faded slowly and surely; day by day the blue eyes grew more dim, and the tiny hands whiter and smaller, and the sweet childish voice, that still repeated she was "going to daddy," sunk almost to a whisper. At last, one day a message was brought to the blunderer, in her own home, that Emmie was "taken for death," and was not likely to live even long enough to enable her to see her once more. As speedily as was possible she was at the cottage; but the sound of bitter weeping and lamentation' met her ear as she drew near, and at the door she was received by one of the neighbours, who told her the child had died half an hour before. She went in; there sat the mother in a storm of grief, dashing herself from side to side, and actually shrieking out in her agony. One or two sympathising women stood round in tears, and on the simple bed, arranged upon two chairs, lay the child like a lovely marble statue sculptured over a tomb. Her eyes were closed, their long lashes lying without a quiver on her white cheek; her little rosebud mouth had not a tinge of colour, and her waxcu of dawn announcing the coming day. The chest began to heave at long, irregular intervals, and at last the heavy eyelids were slowly lifted up, the blue eyes shone out in living consciousness, and as the poor woman, who had never thought to meet excitement, the little pale lips that had seemed locked in such unrelenting silence, were calmly unclosed, and the low tremulous voice, like the sound of one speaking very far away, whispered the one word, "mother." It was too much for the widow; she fell back in her chair almost choking with agitation, and it was some minutes before she could at all regain composure. But the visitor meanwhile had lifted up the child, who was cold and trembling, and laying her in the mother's arms, she said, "You must take her close to you, and keep her warm; if she gets chilled now it will be really fatal." With what rapture the poor woman received her and clasped her to her heart as if she could never part with her again; and the simple words that burst from her lips were singularly touching to those who heard them, "My Emmie, I thought you was dead!" Tears rained down 'her face, and the good neighbours sobbed for sympathy. PRA hands were crossed motionless on her breast. It seemed to be death in its fairest aspect. The pallor, the stillness, the mortal chill were all there, yet to the one who now gazed on the corpse thus already laid out for the grave, there appeared to be something wanting-she could not have told what-that look again, bent over the child in speechless which inspired her with a doubt as to whether the soul of the little one had indeed entered on the great mystery. The heart did not beat, the pulse did not throb, there were all the symptoms of dissolution, yet the stamp of that indomitable peace which is never seen but on the face of the dead, did not seem to have settled on the child-like countenance, sweet and solemn as it was. The visitor argued in vain with herself against what seemed an unreasonable conviction; and much as she shrank from profaning the sanctity of the dead, or raising false hopes in the living, she felt constrained to make some effort to restore animation, in case her impression were after all correct. Hesitatingly she turned to the mother, "May I try if I can revive her? perhaps she is not quite gone." The woman stared stupidly at her. "Revive the dead, ma'am! I don't know what you be a-thinking of?" while the neighbours exclaimed at the folly of such an attempt, and detailed the particulars of the death, which did indeed seem incontestible from their account. Still, the vague impression haunted her. "It can do no harm to try," she said. The mother flung herself round on her seat and made no answer, while the other women shrugged their shoulders and nodded their heads significantly one to another in apparent doubt of her sanity. Without waiting for further discussion, she removed the coverings already laid over the child and began to use all the means she could think of for restoring animation. For a long time her attempts were quite in vain, but at last she detected the slightest possible tremor in the throat; her hopes revived, and she silently pointed it out to one of the women, who, with a look of mingled awe and curiosity, drew near anxiously and watched her proceedings; the others followed, and the mother, starting up, stared down on what she still believed to be her dead child with a sort of stony despair. A few more minutes of energetic effort, however, and the long eyelashes began to quiver, a faint tinge of colour stole into the white cheek like the first faint blush From that day the blunderer might have done whatever she pleased among the people of the district; and in the family itself, where so much bitterness and ill-will to the upper classes had existed, all angry feelings gave way to a friendship as hearty and sincere as they could ever have felt to a person of their own station; nor were those good results affected by the circumstance that a few weeks later little Emmie did in reality fulfil her often-repeated prediction, and passed away to the land where her father had gone before, this time not again to wake, till the. Lose which is alode the charity that never faileth should call her back to life to die no more, but fail to stay We have spoken of blunders; but in truth it is but one great want which mars in a thousand dif ferent forms the work of the rich among the poor that want is Love, in its purest and simplest essence, unincumbered by theories of duty or dis dipline-the love, not of masters to servants,y of patrons to dependents, if such exist-but of friend to friend, of brethren one with another.. tall oda wodood booMUSKUNE. 411 Dial 2 A 1 aiale and baad J: 1 20 |