Our Common Land (and Other Short Essays) - Octavia Hill

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      [1] The amount remaining uninclosed and subject to Common-rights is variously estimated; a report of the Inclosure Commissioners in 1874 putting it at about 2,600,000 for England and Wales, while the recent return of landowners, prepared by the Local Government Board, makes the uninclosed area little more than 1,500,000 acres.

       Table of Contents

      I have assumed throughout this paper that most district visitors feel a certain dissatisfaction both with district visiting and with systems of relief as they exist, even where such systems are best organised. Some may think that there is too much relief given, some that there is too little, others that what is given is of the wrong kind. I believe, also, some visitors feel that their spiritual influence is interfered with in different ways by the unsatisfactory character of the temporal relief. To some of them it seems incongruous to carry tracts in one hand and coal-tickets in another; to others, that carrying either, still more carrying both, as a matter of course, shuts them off from true intercourse with the best kind of working men and women; others, again, feel that carrying tracts without coal-tickets when the grate is empty seems a little like want of sympathy; and others that carrying coal-tickets without tracts is treating the poor as if they were only concerned with the outside things of life.

      However earnestly our clergy have desired to solve this problem of how to deal wisely with the temporal condition of their flocks, it remains a problem still. However tenderly our visitors have mourned over it, as it affects hundreds of individuals, it remains mournful still. What prospect is there of its being vigorously studied with a view to solution, or even to radical improvement, by those who have power to effect improvement? Busy, overworked clergymen, with services and sermons, and churches and schools, and thousands of souls to see to, have inherited systems of relief in their parishes which they hardly have time to reform, and the gigantic pressure of daily duty perpetuates many unwise plans, though many, I am well aware, are being abolished. How far the best still falls below what they would like to see let the clergy themselves say. I believe most of them, if asked, would reply: "I have tried honestly to make my system of relief as satisfactory as I could, but it is far from my ideal." And this is so from another cause. You can never make a system of relief good without perfect administration, far-sighted watchfulness in each individual case; and this is specially true in an age in which bad systems of relief have trained the people to improvidence. Given your entirely enlightened clergyman, he cannot in a large London parish do much more than see to his people when the crisis of distress has come. He cannot watch over them before it comes, yet it is then that distress is preventable. On whom does the continuous watchfulness devolve at best? Visitors, young, inexperienced, untaught, undertake districts; they find themselves part of a system, and follow in its lines; they meet individual cases of want, improvidence, disease, and though they know little themselves how to deal with such, they hesitate to make calls upon the time of a too busy clergyman, kind as he is in helping, gladly as he would reply to a practical question about the individual; they cannot talk out with him radical means of dealing with the roots of such evils. What can they do? They give or withhold the soup-ticket or the shilling. Has the clergyman usually time, has the visitor often knowledge to do much more than deal with the individual question of relief or no relief at the moment in the special case?

      And yet the problem has become appalling, gigantic: viewed in its entirety, it might make us almost tremble?

      Statesmen, philanthropists, political economists, try their hands at it, or rather their heads. Do they succeed better than the clergy and the visitors? Do they not often succeed worse? For the clergy and the visitors at least bear witness to the poor of sympathy with them, and deal with the wants round them practically; while the theorists, let their theories be ever so excellent, somehow stand so far off that they bring little practically into operation. Who does not know of good laws passed which are nearly inoperative because not enforced by brave persons face to face with the evils which should be removed by them? Who does not know of sound principles of political economy clearly enunciated to those unconcerned by them, which never reach the ears of those whose lives they deeply affect, still less are brought before them by those whom they would trust?

      Now these two classes, the studious, more leisurely, generalising thinkers, and the loving, individualising doers, need to be brought into communication; and that is what in this paper I wish most emphatically to enforce. Each has knowledge the other requires; separated, they are powerless; combined, they may do much. For I have drawn miserable pictures of the weakness of both, but see on the other hand what each has of strength. The clergy have all that is pitiful, all that is generous in the hearts of their richer parishioners on their side—the power of calling out workers from among them, the power of directing a large part of their alms, the distribution of money, the leadership of the men. Besides these they have the enormous accumulated knowledge of the poor, gathered in long years of intimate observation of them in their homes—a mass of information over which they may not have much time to brood, and from which they may not be in the habit of generalising, yet what might not the theorists learn from it?

      And the visitors. I have called them inexperienced, and I might have added that their work is less valuable in many ways, because it is intermittent; but pause to think what these visitors are and might be. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gentle, earnest, duty-doing souls, well born, well nurtured, well provided for, possibly well educated, turning aside out of the bright paths which they could pursue continuously, to bring a little joy, a little help, to those who are out of the way. A voluntary gift this, if a very solemn duty. I have heard persons who give their whole time to the poor speak a little disparagingly of these fleeting visits, and young girls themselves, fevered with desire to do more, talk rather enviously of those who can give their time wholly to such work; but have they ever thought how much is lost by such entire dedication?—or, rather, how much is gained by her who is not only a visitor of the poor, but a member of a family with other duties? It is the families, the homes of the poor, that need to be influenced. Is not she most sympathetic, most powerful, who nursed her own mother through her long illness, and knew how to go quietly about the darkened room; who entered so heartily into the sister's love and marriage; who obeyed so perfectly the father's command when it was hardest? Better still if she be wife and mother herself, and can enter into the responsibilities of a head of a household, understands her joys and cares, knows what heroic patience it needs to keep gentle when the nerves are unhinged and the children noisy. Depend upon it, if we thought of the poor primarily as husbands, wives, sons, and daughters, members of households, as we are ourselves, instead of contemplating them as a different class, we should recognise better how the house training and high ideal of home duty was our best preparation for work among them. Nay, to come down to much smaller matters than these family duties, to the gladness of party, ball, and flower-show, I believe these, too, in innocent and happy amount, when they brighten the eyes and bring the ready smile to the face, and make the step free and joyous, prepare us to bring a gleam of sunlight into many a monotonous life among the poor. What, in comparison with these gains, is the regularity of work of the weary worker, whose life tends to make her deal with people en masse, who gains little fresh spring from other thoughts and scenes? For what is it that we look forward to as our people gradually improve? Not surely to dealing with them as a class at all, any more than we should tell ourselves off to labour for the middle class, or aristocratic class, or shop-keeping class. Our ideal must be to promote the happy natural intercourse of neighbours—mutual knowledge, mutual help, of a kind, certainly, but not this professed devotion of a life; and it will be better from the beginning to mould our system so that it shall bear witness of what it ought to become. If we establish a system of professed workers, amateur or paid, we shall quickly begin to hug our system, and perhaps to want to perpetuate it even to the extent of making work for it. Well, here we have then our wonderful company of visitors full of real care for the people, with time and intelligence to apply the wisest principles, did they but know them, with fullest thought, to individual cases; capable of inspiring confidence, of winning allegiance;

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