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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES



GIFT OF

^te Gordoi Moore



ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM



ASPECTS



OF THE



SOCIAL PROBLEM



BY VARIOUS WRITERS



EDITED BY

BERNARD BOSANOUET



ILonlion

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK
1895

All rights reserved



H/V

3^ Ha.



PREFACE

Though the public mind is full of the problems of social
reform, it is remarkable how little literature, combining
trained observation in the social field with reasonable
theory, is available for the general reader. The present
volume of studies has been brought together with the view
of helping to fill this gap, and of indicating, however
imperfectly, the sort of work by which it should further be
filled. The contributors may claim that they have all
attempted to qualify as social students in two definite ways.
They all possess prolonged and systematic experience in
practical efforts to improve the condition of the poor, and
they have all paid careful attention to the methods and
principles of social reform. Their studies, written on
different occasions, with different purposes, and drawn from
different fields of observation, appear, when compared
together, to have a single principle at their root. The writers
have seen and felt as well as reflected that the individual
member of society is above all things a character and a
will, and that society as a whole is a structure in which
will and character "are the blocks with which we build."

Among the influ.ences which operate upon the will,
they of course take note of some that are due to material
or economic conditions. At any given moment such
circumstances are apt to present themselves as fixed
quantities and irresistible causes ; but in watching the

8381)44



vi ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

social process, life by life and generation by generation,
the skilled observer becomes aware that circumstance is
modifiable by character, and so far as circumstance is a
name for human action, by character alone.

It is this principle which operates in the following
papers through all the differences of their subject-matter.
It shows itself in the sympathetic scrutiny of the skilled
helpers of the poor, who, in their analyses of causes of
distress or methods of reform, insist on entering into the
mind, habits, and feelings of the classes under consideration,
and on comprehending their lives from the beginning to
the end. In the treatment of history and statistics the
same tendency may be noted. The statistical student
especially, who is trained by practical contact with the
effort to help the poor, is led to plead for better statistical
instruments and a finer use of them, because the human
mind is so deUcate and so complex a growth. Not even
the ways of birds can be understood from mere books and
measurements, and man "is of more value than many
sparrows." If political economy is to form part of a true
social science, its abstractions must be criticised in the
light of a more complete and a finer experience. No
science of organisms can dispense with highly-trained obser-
vation of life. The scientific logician will corroborate this
view. To count means to count something, and all infer-
ence from enumeration depends on the precise nature of
that which is enumerated. It is long since Lotze drew
attention to the readiness with which this fact is forgotten.

The student of ethics, if he has any practical training,
will confirm the principle which experience teaches. Some
readers will indeed remember how, in Goethe's play, a son
cannot be got to understand that the grand titles which he
has learnt at school belong to his own father who is standing
before him ; and so the ethical teacher, who argues all day



PREFACE vii

long that ethical forces are the real powers of the world, is
apt to shrink and turn aside when he is assured by the
student of hfe : " Only give scope to character, and it will
unfailingly pull us through." And yet this is simply the
fact which he has continually been proving.

It should be definitely recognised as the extreme ot
folly to despise the material conditions of life. The prin-
ciple here suggested is not, as often misrepresented, that
some undefined miracle of moral agency is loftier and
better than any intelligible causation. The point is simply
that all conditions practically mean human action, and all
human action issues from the whole disposition of human
minds. Therefore the disposition of the mind as a whole
is the determining condition of all conditions, and though
men may suffer through the character of others, they can
gain and retain no permanent advantage excepting through
their own. Now characters or dispositions react altogether
differently to conditions which are quantitatively and
materially the same, according to the means by which they
come, and their consequent relation to the feelings and
expectations of the persons concerned. Help from a
dutiful son may put heart into a man to struggle through
his distress ; the same money, thrown to him by a stranger,
may crush him to the earth. And thus a well-meaning
attempt to effect an improvement may quickly quadruple
the evil, and such a result is observed with terrible fre-
quency j whereas, when approached in a different way, the
evil may vanish before a sure and persistent growth of
good. The difference between two such attempts will be
found to depend mainly on the different relation of the
methods adopted to the character both of those to be
benefited and of any who have been accomplices in the
mischief which it is desired to arrest.

In social reform, then, character is the condition of



viii ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

conditions, and this is the principle which the following
studies illustrate in observation, in criticism, and in theory.
In the statistical papers the numerical tables have been
reduced to a minimum, and it is hoped that these articles
will be found as attractive as they are important.

The thanks of the contributors are due to the editors of
the following periodicals for permitting the republication
of articles which have appeared in them : — The Contempor-
ary Review (i). The National Review (i). The Economic
Journal^ (2), The International Journal of Ethics (i), The
Charity Oi'ganisation Revieiv (2). Nine of the papers are
now published for the first time ; two have appeared in
Reports of Poor Law Conferences.

BERNARD BOSANQUET,

Editor.

' These appeared as three separate articles.



CONTENTS

PAGE

1. The Duties of Citizenship . . . . i

By B. BOSANQUET

2. The Duties of Citizenship — Coti/huted . . . 14

By B. Bosanquet

3. The Children of Working London . . .28

By 11. Dendy

4. The Protection of Children . . . .46

By M. M'Callum

5. The Position of Women in Industry . . -63

By II. Dendy

6. Marriage in East London . . . -75

By II. Dendy

7. The Industrial Residuum . . . .82

By II. Dendy

8. Character in its Bearing on Social Causation . 103

P)y B. Bosanquet



X ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

TAGE

9. Old Pensioners . . . . . .118

By IL Dendy

10. Pauperism and Old-Age Pensions . . . 126

By C. S. Loch

11. The Meaning and Methods or True Charity . 167

By H. Dendy

12. Some Aspects ok Reform . . . .180

By M. M'Callum

13. Origin and History or the English Poor Law . 195

■ By II. Dendy

14. Some Controverted Points in the Administration

OF Poor Relief ...... 226

By C. S. Loch

15. Returns as an Instrument in Social Science . 268

By C. S. Loch

16. Socialism and Natural Selection . . . 289

By B. Bosanquet

17. The Principle of Private Property . . . 308

By B. Bosanquet

iS. The Reality of the General Will . . . 319

By B. Bosanquet

INDEX 333



ERRATUM.



On p. 152, line 12 from bottom, for 364, 198 read 3(;5, 19S,
and /or 342, 998 read 4G3, 992 v. p. 143.



r



THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP

By B. BOSANQUET

I HAVE been considering how most usefully to deal with so
vast a subject as the Duties of Citizenship. And it has
occurred to me that a certain amount of theory may be the
most practically valuable contribution which I in particular
am able to offer to you. It is agreed, I believe, among
authorities on technical education that no reading or
lecturing can be a substitute for workshop training. And
therefore I shall avoid every attempt to instruct you what
in particular you are to do. For that you need workshop
training, and your presence here shows that you know
where to go for it. Nor again would it be useful that I
should attempt to give even general advice as to the
line of life and of work which it is most expedient to
take up. Individual lives must be moulded by individual
judgment.

But perhaps there is some use in trying to throw light
on the connection between our several lives and the society
in which we find ourselves. It may be possible to ex-
hibit some perfectly simple conceptions which may be
capable of serving as clues to the unity of life underly-
ing the confusion of purposes and opinions by which we
are surrounded.

1 I. and II. are lectures delivered at the Women's University Settlement,
Nelson Square, Southwark.

B



2 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PR<)BLEM i

T. The Ancient City. I

Many of you will think that I am beginning far away
from the subject if I take the idea of citizenship first in its
simplest form — as we see it in the ancient Greek world —
in the little sovereign state with its central town and sur-
rounding territory, the whole being equal in extent to a
small county, and in population to an English city of the
second rank. And to-day we will not scrutinise the
numerous defects of these little commonwealths, but will
try to gain inspiration from their positive ideas. And in
order to grasp these ideas, and to apprehend the pure and
simple nature of citizenship, we must forget a great part
of what surrounds us to-day. We must forget our divisions
and estrangements, our " interests," as wet call them, the
claims of birth and of wealth, the regimented and incor-
porated forces of labour and of capital, of industry and of
commerce, of agriculture and of manufactures ; we must
forget the distinction of town and country, so deep that
half the nation hardly knows how^ the other half lives ; we
must forget the vast and powerful organisations and
traditions of the Church, the army, the civil service, and
the law ; and more than all, we must learn to forget the
daily contrast of the executive and official staff which we
vaguely call the Government, with the mass of unofficial
persons who practically regard themselves as mere units
among millions of their like, living indifferently under the
protection of the law. In place of all this, let us call up
a different picture. Let us think of an independent
sovereign community of some 20,000 men, the whole free
population amounting to 100,000 souls, more or less.
There is free intercommunication betw'een the town and
the rural territory which immediately surrounds it ; the
freeman, as a rule, has at least a small landed property,
and is able to enjoy a fair proportion of leisure from manual
toil. Industries indeed exist, giving brightness and variety
to life, but heavy and monotonous labour is little in amount,
and chiefly devolves upon slaves, who were to the Greeks
what machinery, kej)! in its place, might be to us.



I THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP 3

What was it that the citizens of such a city chiefly
thought of? What filled their minds from day to day?

First, we may suppose as with us, the care of their
family, their property, and their livelihood. But probably
this was less often than with us an all-absorbing anxiety,
and never a cause of absolute isolation. It was a source,
no doubt, of occupation and eagerness in life, but it did
not shut a man up within the walls of a great industry or
profession, with its routine and traditions, so as to put all
else out of sight. One would be doing, on the whole, what
others did, and their work would bring them into contact
mentally as well as physically.

Secondly, the need of civic self-defence, and perhaps the
desire of aggression, would be ever present to their minds.
The citizens were their own army ; they had to be, and
always were, ready to fight ; their very livelihood was
bound up with the gain or loss of their city as a whole.
To return without your shield — the heavy shield which
could hardly be carried in flight — involved disfranchise-
ment not at Sparta only but probably in every Greek
commonwealth. The Athenian confirmation vow, as we
might call it, began with the words, " I will not disgrace
my shield nor desert my fellow -soldier." The leading
states were almost always at war by sea or land, and what-
ever may have been the other consequences of this state
of things, this much is certain, that the simplest form of
citizen duty, which is also the ultimate form, could hardly
be absent from the mind of a Greek of the great time.
His life, he knew, was at the disposal of his country.

But, thirdly, in a typical leading state of Greece there
would be a good chance of any individual having to think
about government and justice. They worked much by
large boards and commissions, and by huge juries; every
citizen would have to serve in some administrative capacity
now and again. The sovereign power, moreover, and, in-
deed, the actual executive responsibility, rested with the
primary assembly of all the citizens ; there was no throwing
off the decision on the shoulders of elected representatives.
Your personal vote helped to decide, and, in voting, you



4 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM i

knew that you must stand to the decision of the majority
with purse and person. " We who stand here to-day have
in a large measure created our country's greatness ; " that
is how an Athenian spoke. No modern assemblage of
persons can unite in words like those.

Fourthly, they were bent on enjoyment and distinction •
first, perhaps, bodily, but secondly, intellectual. Distinction
for a Greek citizen was to be the best man in Greece in
battle, or at running or wrestling ; to be the most beautiful
man ; to have the best horses ; to possess and to appreciate
in your city the most beautiful things — the stage -plays,
the singing and dancing, the statues, the pictures, the
temples.

Thus the meaning of citizenship was plain. Nothing
stood between you and your fellows in the community.
Citizenship was obviously and visibly a life, your whole life,
with common dangers, common responsibilities, common
enjoyments, and common ambitions. Your education,
your character, your religion, came direct from the written
and unwritten laws of your city. Your happiness was to
fill satisfactorily a recognised place, to be acknowledged by
your fellows as doing so, and to appreciate in common with
your city and your race what Pindar emphatically calls
" the pleasant things of Greece."

And so Socrates and his followers, the teachers to
whom we owe our definite scheme of virtue and of duty,
were only insisting upon the essence of the life around
them, when they told us that man's excellence was to do
that which in the system of citizenship it belonged to him
to do; that the true citizen was he who knew both how
to govern and how to be governed ; that man was naturally
a social being ; that society was not artificial, but the
outcome of human nature and the condition of human
morality ; and that though, historically speaking, it
originated out of the needs and impulses of bare living,
yet, nevertheless, its abiding purpose was that all its mem-
bers should live well. And to live well meant for him to
live that life in which the separate human animal feels and
knows himself to have his true being in an "end," — as



I THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP 5

philosophers call it — an aim or purpose or will which is
at once in the deepest sense his own, and also real and
permanent and greater than his separate self, having actual
existence in a social group with its sense of community,
its spirit and its laws. And such a life is called living
well, because only in it, and not without it, can the nature
of a human individual unfold its capacities and become the
most and highest that it has in it to be.

Now, under Greek conditions, this relation of the
individual to the community was tolerably easy to see.
The commonest Greek citizen could never altogether forget
that his actual existence was bound up with his discharge
of civic duty. He would not be allowed to forget it. ' If
he and others were careless of bodily training, or neglected
their drill by sea or land, their city might be defeated in
its next battle with the people over the way, and terrible
losses or worse might happen in consequence to his family
or to himself And so the mind was not distracted ; the
path of duty was plain ; the soldier was a citizen soldier,
the poet a citizen poet, the artist a citizen artist, and
the philosopher a citizen philosopher. Even the rebel,
the bad citizen, did not in his rebellion lose the civic
character ; on the contrary, the frightful bitterness of the
civil wars of Greece was due to the fact that both sides
were fighting (as in the Florence of Dante) for the very
centre of their existence — for that which was the whole
world to them.

2. The Alodern Wilderness of Interests.

In modern life it is very much harder to see our way.
According to our birth, our education, and our profession,
we fall into a groove, and some one or two huge incor-
porated " interests " fill our horizon. We are very much
let alone [by the general community, very free in that
sense' but this does not seem to develop in us either
character or originality — there is always a cry that national
character is decaying. Perhaj)s this is so far true, that
character is not developed by being let alone nor yet by



6 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM i

mere mechanical pressure of circumstances, but only in
as far as we succeed in detecting some plan or value in
the circumstances that press upon us, in relation to which
we can assert ourselves.

But it is very hard to detect such a plan or value in
our surroundings to-day, compared with those of the
citizen of a small ancient commonwealth. We have not
their definite set of duties on which the common good visibly
depended. We common folk do not realise that many
people are going to be much the worse or much the better
for the way in which we spend our lives. The interests
which fill the horizon for each of us are very different, and
many of us never think of trying to connect them together.
We have our ideas of right and wrong, and the little drama
of our own character and destiny plays itself out on its
tiny little stage, but we do not see how our fate and
character is the fate and character of our nation. One of
our little stages on which our life is enacted is the family.
It is one great root of morality. But it takes divergent
forms as a purpose in the modern world. Family selfish-
ness has two main directions — to the inside and to the
outside. The family may be sacrificed to the world of
business or pleasure, or the claims of the community may
be sacrificed to the family. In either case, both sides of
life are distorted, and the selfish self-complacent family is
a symptom of the same disease which preys on the house-
hold in which no one but its head is treated as existent.
How often family pride obscures and narrows the view,
and distorts our idea of the society around us. And the
same is true of " society " in the narrower sense. Many
of us do not grasp the idea of belonging to a human com-
munity at all ; we judge everything by the standard of a
class or clique ; we make no serious attempt to see any
connection between the life of this small minority and the
life of the nation. Those whom we call the educated, the
cultured, the distinguished, have very frequently, owmg in
great part to their disadvantages of birth and education
within a narrow circle, no germ of a genuine idea as to
the relative importance of their own lives and those of



I THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP 7

the general mass of the community, nor any capacity of
judging what is or is not socially mischievous. There is
not much to suggest such a connection in many homes
and circles. It needs a considerable effort to -realise.
People are born into a certain life and sphere, and there
is so much isolation in the modern world that they can
simply go on in their routine without feeling any difficulty.
Education does not mean, as it should, the victory over
idols of the class.

So with the industrial class interest. One can observe
that men born into it think that no other exists. Of
course they have one great advantage in point of truth —
viz. that their life is more typical than ours. There are
few who live as we do, there are many who live as they
do. Against that we have nothing to set but our power
of acquiring knowledge. Still, industry, especially a single
industry, is not all that makes up the national life.

Then there is the characteristic modern contrast of
Church and State. I think we all feel how difficult in
practice this is to handle — I do not mean with an estab-
lished church in particular, but with all visible churches, —
the temporal power always comes up in one form or
another, and I think I may say that any one brought up
with an exclusive feeling for any visible church has a great
difficulty in grasping a spiritual connection with the
community as such. Where a church is concerned there
is apt to be a side issue in all handling of practical ques-
tions, just as with every other strong association ; only
a body of this kind is very strong and very important as a
rival to the civil community. It is the most bewildering
of all the schisms which the ancients had not to deal with
and we have. If we could regard the Church as the in-
tensification of our civic sentiment and not as its antagon-
ist we might manage better than we do. So, again, the
modern soldier is hardly a citizen soldier. He thinks of
his regiment, his queen, and his flag, but he hardly knows
what he fights for. His courage would not satisfy the
conditions of valour as laid down by Plato or Aristotle.

Thus, and in many other ways, the idea of citizenship.



8 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM i

which was the first thing to a Greek, has almost ceased to
be a controlling conception for us. It is apt to be nar-
rowed down to what concerns the parliamentary election,
and the burning question of the hour, or sometimes it in-
cludes the municipal elections in a very intelligent town, or at
a striking crisis. We know our family, our neighbourhood,
our trade, our church ; but our citizenship we are only just
beginning to recognise, except in the parliamentary fran-
chise, which women, more than half the community, do
not possess.



3. Citizenship as a Clue to the Adjustment of Duties.

Before saying a word on the question Hoiv we should
recognise our citizenship, it may be well to ask ourselves,
" Is it really necessary to recognise it all ? " Perhaps, you
may think, citizenship was indeed the form which duty
took in the ancient world, but as it does not seem to press
upon us now, it may have been superseded by something
else — the family, for instance, and the workshop and the
European federation, not forgetting our duties to the
human race as a whole, which the ancients, as we are
somewhat erroneously informed, hardly thought of If
citizenship actually plays so small part in life, as we say, why
should we try and make it play a greater part ? Perhaps
" playing a greater part " is not the right way of describing
what we want it to do for us. It is not, so to speak, one
among other things, as we shall see directly. But the
reason why we should recognise our position as citizens is,
in short, that it alone includes all the other interests and
associations, and makes them possible. The association
to which we belong as citizens is the only one to which we
ascribe the right of compulsion, i.e. the only one which we
accept as having natural authority — that is, again, as fully
representing our own greater self, or our whole conception
of a common good. All the others are partial, and leave
out whole provinces of our lives and whole masses of our
fellow-countrymen, and the sign of this is that they are



I THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP 9

voluntary, except in as far as the State delegates authority
to them. Thus it is the State or civic community, in
which alone society is focussed as a whole, that repre-