it to the extreme of exaggeration, then our heart would
indeed sink within us, if we did not know that there are
things which are difficult to see in proportion to their
plainness and simplicity. And if we have the smallest
sense of humour we may be inclined to smile at our own
enthusiasm, remembering how some accidental circum-
stance, some new association or intense experience, awoke
ourselves from the dogmatic slumber which not so very
long ago, in the stress perhaps of an absorbing profession,

' A lecture given at Essex Hall for the i<"thical Society.



104 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM viii

we shared with the wicked world, which is now as inatten-
tive to us as we were then to others.

But is not this, at all events in general, the task to
which an Ethical Society, as such, must be taken to have
pledged itself; the task, I mean, of learning to see in the
world of ethical realities ? And may I not hope to be
received with sympathy if not with assent, when I venture
to illustrate from one aspect of an urgent social problem —
that of the unemployed — a mode of moral perception, in
which, if I am right, our ethical movement itself has yet
very much to learn ?

Not long ago, for example, when it was said by an
expert ^ that the normal evil of unemployment was moral
rather than economic, objection was taken to this view
by one who speaks from the standpoint of the idealist
reformer.- The antithesis impressed me forcibly, for the
reason that recent controversy has largely turned on
the relation of ethics to economics, and in the opposi-
tion to which I have just referred the disputants appeared
to have exchanged positions — the expert on the old lines
of 1834 desiring to introduce ethics into an economic
problem, and the reformer imbued with the current notions
of to-day declining to do so. The explanation must be
found in a difference of the senses in which the opposite
terms are used. I will state it as I understand it. If the
ethical and economical views are abstract and opposite
onesidednesses, as, for example, in the popular contrast of
justice and mercy, or of selfishness and benevolence, that, /
think, is the sense in which the average reformer of to-day
desires to combine them, and in which the expert who
adheres to the older lines refuses to do so. But if the
ethical point of view is concrete and the economic
abstract — if, that is, the ethical view deals with man in his
essential completeness as an active being, and the economic
view only with some small portion of the influences opera-
tive upon him — then the positions are reversed. The
reformer of to-day objects to the simpler and more definite

1 Mr. C. S. Loch, in Times, 31st October 1893.
- Mr. J. A. M. Macdonald in House of Commons.



VIII CHARACTER AND CAUSATION 105

causes of action — the " economic " conditions — being over-
ridden by tlie analysis of more complex influences ; while
the expert, who is held to be old-fashioned, maintains that
if you really want to explain man's behaviour in the con-
crete, you must take the individual man as a working
system of ideas and interests in his full and complex
personality, and that is a moral point of view. When we
say, in this sense, that the problem is moral rather than
economic, we are not to be understood as adopting any
vulgar answer to the vulgar question, " Did this man sin, or
his parents, or society ? " A moral point of view does not
to us mean a point of view which holds a question as
solved by apportioning blame to the unfortunate ; it does
mean a point of view which treats men not as economic
abstractions, but as living selves with a history and ideas
and a character of their own. And to me, at least, the
concrete and inclusive point of view is always truly idealist.
It seems necessary not to cease reiterating that the ideal
is to the material not as less but as more, not an opposite
but an inclusion, not a subtraction but an addition.

If we say, then, of any problem which is usually regarded
as economic, that it is really and in truth a moral problem,
we are only right if we are speaking in the sense which I
have indicated. Ethical economics are not to be con-
structed Hke Dickens's Chinese metaphysics, by studying
the two subjects separately and then combining the
information ; the phrase can only mean that the rather
simple and definite influences which we are accustomed to
isolate as the object of economic science, shall have their
place in the whole of life criticised and adjusted by a fuller
and deeper experience of man's nature and the causes
which operate in his action. And this seems the right
place to remark what is urged upon us more intensely by
observation from year to year, that if economic science is
to become ethical or concrete, it must be studied in a
manner which as yet has hardly been attempted. As
a theory of simple general tendencies, or of causes and
consequences within a commercial world where usages were
fairly regular, it was adequately conceived in the light of an



io6 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM viii

imperfect abstract science, a loose mechanics of trade, as
meteorology is a loose mechanics of the atmosphere. But
if, as seems now to be the case, it aspires to deal not merely
with abstract tendencies but with man's behaviour as a
whole, and the causes of his good and ill fortune, then it
must change its place in the hierarchy of the sciences, and
its method must change correspondingly. Figures and
formulas will no longer suffice for its procedure ; like the
biologist or anthropologist, its votary will have to familiarise
himself with the actual phenomena of the life and evolution
which he investigates ; he will be compelled to approach
his problem neither by the empirical observation of the
uneducated eye, nor by the purely literary or arithmetical
researches of the bookman and statistical student. An
ethical economist who has not been in a position to feel the
tensions and relaxations of fibre in character, to know the
habits and the habitats of daily life among the classes whose
evolution, behaviour, and survival he is discussing, is like a
physicist without experimental knowledge, a doctor without
clinical experience, or a botanist or geologist without
practice in the field. I confess, audacious as the state-
ment may seem, that much of the writing of our reforming
publicists and economists gives me the impression of
the work of students who have not experienced the look
and feel and reaction of character in classes other than
their own. To them, if I am right, from sheer want of
experimental knowledge the effects of character are not a
reality. And therefore, for me, their theories and pro-
posals have no more weight or authority than I should
attach to the plans of an engineer whom I had detected in
not allowing for the difference between the qualities of
steel and of wood.

Now I repeat that if an ethical society is anything, it is
bound at least to a willingness to consider the operative
reality of ethical forces. So subtle, however, is the tendency
to substitute material conditions for spiritual reactions,
that I do not feel at all sure whether the attention focussed
upon social problems by the ethical movement generally,
is not in danger of obscuring rather than of emphasising



VIII CHARACTER AND CAUSATION 107

the ethical reality. We sometimes hear about our relation
to the labour movement. Well ! from the point of view
which I am trying to take, the right and wrong of our
attitude wholly depends on the depth and thoroughness of
our interpretation. I quite confess that I am uneasy if
ever we simply prophesy smooth things, even when I can-
not deny them a high degree of truth. It is so easy to say
pleasant things, and it is so dangerous ; it is so possible
that their pleasantness is felt rather than their truth
appreciated. The probability is that our duty will largely
consist not indeed in factious opposition to the drift of the
time, but in holding up and driving home neglected aspects
of truth. And if I had any rhetoric at command, I would
use it in entreating those whom we address to bias them-
selves habitually in this direction — in the direction of
considering most sympathetically those ideas and pro-
positions to which, at first sight, they feel the greatest
repugnance. It is not likely that a popular view should be
wholly destitute of truth, but all experience shows that it is
pretty certain to be highly charged with error.

These ideas force themselves upon us in studying the
recent Report of the labour department on " Agencies and
Methods for dealing with the Unemployed," 1893 ; and in
watching the progress of the question both within our
private knowledge and in the public press. The effects of
indiscriminate charity point to similar conceptions, and
they are confirmed by the observations of those who are
familiar with the Poor Law. This latter system is, and in
my personal judgment is rightly, about to be thrown open
frankly and directly to democratic control. Many are
simply triumphant in the prospect. I do not doubt that
after a longer or shorter experience the common sense of
our people will assert itself in reasonable habits of adminis-
tration. But it would be foolish to ignore the risks which
attend self-government of this particular kind. No doubt
we shall prove equal to the task laid upon us, but only by
exerting to the full our courage, our common sense, and
our attention to the lessons of experience.

The Report I mentioned just now should be studied by



io8 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM viii

all who desire to have a concrete knowledge of the " un-
employed " problem. To every reader, no doubt, it will
suggest different ideas. To me it presents itself as a
protracted analysis of character in its material aspects.
The agencies which set out to benefit the workman in want
of employment are found to operate not merely according
to the intentions of their managers, but according to the
material which they meet with. The Trade Society, oper-
ating upon the trained and reliable mechanic, can deal
with want of employment by out-of-work benefit, and can
use, as it has every motive to use, the most effective
organisation for restoring him to work ; and when we
read that, in the year 189 1, 205 societies expended over
;^2 2o,ooo in out-of-work benefit to their members, we see,
just as with the Friendly Societies, the enormous scale of
those operations which grow up through the organising
power and mutual confidence of large numbers of resolute
and foreseeing men. You may say, " But this is their pro-
sperity and not their character." A shallow comment; let
us look at them then in adversity. When, under famine
conditions, in the cotton scarcity, exceptional measures
were taken for the support of regular operatives in large
bodies, it was found possible to excite their interest and
desire of doing good work under wholly unfamiliar con-
ditions, and considerable engineering enterprises of a skilled
kind were executed with benefit both to the employed and
to the public. This is not done without much sifting ; the
less reliable material cannot be applied thus efficiently.
Those who would not accept continuous employment
drifted away, and ended, no doubt, either in the casual
labour class, or in dependence on the Poor Law.

When we turn from agencies which deal with or are
formed by the skilled and disciplined ranks of labour, to those
which have attempted to assist, under the name of the un-
employed, the unfortunate throng whose condition of
partial employment does not seriously vary from year to
year, we find that the most careful attempts to assist them
have been but slightly more successful than the most careless.
It is notable throughout the whole Report how no agency



VIII CHARACTER AND CAUSATION 109

is successful except in as far as it excludes the chronic
unemployed. And under the conditions of an ordinary
London agitation this has meant that no general agency
for helping the unemployed is successful except in as far as
it excludes those whose supposed needs have called it into
existence. So far as this has not been done, the hopeless-
ness of the material reacts on the agency. Do we all
realise that the work provided for the unemployed by
London local authorities last winter ^ consisted, for the
most part, of three days' employment in the week, given
to the same individual men either fortnightly, or in many
cases only once or twice throughout the whole season ? -
Or take, again, the Liverpool experiment ; the work given
"amounted in all to one week's work for about 12 per
cent, taken at random, of the men registered as unem-
ployed." It may be said, "But this must be the fault of
the local authorities ; why do they not organise more
adequately ? " The local authorities have found out by
simple contact that m so far as they are asked to take on
all applicants, they are not dealing with an industrial class
nor with an industrial problem. The class has practically
no limit, and the procedure is checked at an arbitrary line.
Turn where you will in the Report, the result is the same.
The great bulk of those who have been dealt with by
general agencies do not possess the industrial character ;
they and the true industrial class, like oil and water,
absolutely refuse to mix, and agencies which have adapted
themselves to the one class are by that very fact disqualified
for assisting the other. Especially in the continental
colony experiments this has become clear ; the whole
arrangement has nothing to do with any industrial class,
and this result is not accidental but plainly inevitable.
Note, e.g. the effect of introducing high-rate piece-work at
Glasgow.^ You cannot organise what has lost the organic
character. Any one who is not convinced of this should
study the Abbey Mills experiment made by the Mansion
House Conference last year,'* in which the only hopeful

^ 1892-93. '^ p. 231. ■* Report, p. 235.

•^ 1892-93.



no ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM viii

cases 1 have been subsequently inquired into, with the
result that hardly any have been found to have had their
position permanently bettered. Out of 716 first applicants
some 40 may have been the better for what was done ;
not at all in the way of relief or test work, but in the way
of subsequent assistance, especially emigration, which in no
way depended on the work provided. Is not this proportion
of effective help to expectation excited a case of burning
down your house to roast your pig ? And you may take it
that no other general experiment was as hopeful as this.
I am not speaking, however, of the relief or test work
policy as such ; I am speaking of the difference of quahty
in classes of people revealed by the operations of agencies
which work either with or for them. And I say that
this difference of quality is in the largest sense a difference
of character. Those who wish further to pursue the nature
of this difference, which is not immediately relative to
amount of income, should read a study of the industrial
Residuum by a member of this society in the Economic
Joi/r/ial for December 1893.- This is a piece of work
which rests on experience of the kind really needed by the
economic student if he seriously intends to make economics
a concrete or ethical science.

"But this," it may be urged, "is all familiar; we all
know the character of the Residuum in all classes of
society — its absence of clear ideas, of looking before or
after, of any form of self-control or continuous application.
Still, however, the problem is not a moral problem, for the
reason that the causes of its existence are physical and
economic, and it is to them and not to moral ideas that we
must look for the remedy. We know," it will be urged,
" that material conditions are not character, but they are
the substratum of character ; and in their improvement is
the only hope. They are the soil in which the plant of
character grows."

^ Between 80 and 90 in all out of 716 first applications, 372 of which
were entered into as coming from the class whom it was intended to
benefit.

- See previous essay.



VIII CHARACTER AND CAUSATION in

This conception I think I have fairly represented, and
I have great sympatliy with it ; for my own social work has
given me some special knowledge of sanitary conditions,
and of questions relating to the dwellings of the poor, while
the organisation of industry on the most permanent and
least uncertain footing is, we may say, the whole present
aim of the true reformer on the economic side. The point
of view embodied in these ideas is what we may call the
popular modern conception of the relation between matter
and spirit, and as against any absolute opposition of them
as two worlds it marks an immense advance. But it is not
the last word in theory nor a complete method in practice.
Let me allude again to the soil and the plant, for it is a
suggestive simile. The soil seems so solid and rich, as
if the plant could not but draw its life and substance ready
and strong from that fertile source. Yet, as we all know,
the soil contributes practically nothing to the solid frame-
work of the plant ; a few salts, which can be just as well
supplied in water, are all that comes from the earth. The
growth and solid framework of the plant are drawn from
the surrounding atmosphere, and its ability to convert in-
organic constituents to its use depends entirely on the
organising reaction of its own complete life. Material
conditions are necessary to existence ; but they are them-
selves dependent to an enormous extent on the energy of
the mind which they surround, and their deficiency, of
which there are innumerable degrees, constitutes, in a
way which would be incredible but for definite experience,
a difficulty, rather than an insuperable obstacle, in the
way of good life. It is a striking physical fact that the
well-fed and well-cared-for children in our institutional
schools are, as experts tell us, apt to suffer in bodily health
through lacking that amount of mental struggle or stimula-
tion which is indispensable to physical wellbeing. Right
ideas genuinely assimilated are necessary to material welfare ;
and wrong ideas, or the defect of them, are the most fruit-
ful influences in the production of physical and material
wretchedness. Even in sanitary work, and in the work
of trained nurses among the poor, the great gain is the



112 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM viii

individual education of the people to the importance of
sanitary matters, and not the mere momentary unstopping
of a drain or cleaning out of a room.

I do not then belittle material conditions or deny that
insuperable misfortune may destroy the industrial qualities
and drag a man down among the invertebrate Residuum.
Still less, in maintaining the main evil to be moral, do I
suggest the indolent and vulgar evasion — " It is all their
own fault." On the contrary, the fault, I am persuaded,
lies in great measure at our door ; but the suffering — the
suffering is inevitably theirs.

Do we sufficiently recollect that the ideas which we
disseminate in theory and embody in practice form the
moral atmosphere of those who have not the opportunity
to criticise and to originate for themselves ? Have we any
concrete imagination of what it means when we read in
the Reports from the London districts last winter (1892-93)
" a great expectation of employment was aroused," or when
700 apphcants are gathered together, of whom about 40 can
be effectually aided ? Nothing is so pathetic to me as the
way in which the very weak poor are moulded and fashioned
by the ideas and practices that surround them. There is
a talk of employment in the coming winter ; some one
they know got three days in a whole quarter last winter
from the Vestry ; it is one more chance among the inscrut-
able chaos of partial employment and gifts and missions
and shelters which surround them ; it seems to be the way
they are expected and instructed to get on ; a Christmas
dole at Christmas ; three days work in January or February ;
a free meal from some " good Christian " once a week ;
jobs at charing for the woman, casual labouring for the
man. You can get on from year to year in that way, and
if there is to be a little public work now and then provided,
apparently by lottery, why, that seems to be part of the
whole providential arrangement, and in looking forward to
life this huge wheel of chance, this fragmentary dispensa-
tion, bulks largely in their view. I know at the present
moment of a boy of seventeen who refuses to work. He lives
on his mother and his brother. He knows well enough that he



VIII CHARACTER AND CAUSATION 113

has a fair chance of Hving without a regular trade, and he
apparently does not propose to learn one. How can he
but be influenced when he sees the universal claim that
" something must be done " for the people who know no
trade ? A Government Department sends round a circular
that work should be found for him which he can do, what-
ever his previous avocation, and which is not degrading.
He cannot suppose that people mean him to fit himself
for any industry. He will probably marry shortly ; why
should he not ? They will be taken care of if he does —
at least there is a fair chance of it. Others marry at that
age, and get on somehow. I am not blaming such as him ;
no one has told them that every member of a social
organism has a function which is the essence of his being,
and the whole world, as they see it and as we make it for
them, would flatly give the lie to any teacher who should
say so. What should we have done if, when we were lads
or girls, an idle, parti-coloured loafing life had been open
to us, which many of our acquaintance were following not
without cheerfulness, and which seemed to constitute a
claim on society? The old-fashioned idle fellowships at
Oxford and Cambridge partly give the answer. I have
heard the opinion expressed by one who should know,
that if the lives of sinecurists under that old system were
carefully scanned, one would find in them a black record
of misery following on idleness. " The difficulty of living
by regular work, and the ease of living without it," is,
as Mr. Charles Booth says, " the long and short of the
matter ; not merely because of the immediate attraction of
the easier course, but because of the educational influence
of such a state of things." I cannot say, of course, what
proportion of the Residuum owe their present degradation
to the fatal facilities now offered at every turn for embracing
a life with no true industrial basis rather than a life depend-
ing on definite organisable ability. But of this there is,
in my opinion, no reasonable doubt ; that the mere spread-
ing of the vague idea that " something must be done "
(something, that is, outside the best possible organisation
of all useful undertakings, and improvement of the con-

I



114 ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM viii

ditions of labour) is in and by itself a potent factor in the
creation of the miserable class whose existence we deplore;
and all attempts to palliate the mischief by twining ropes
of sand in pretending to organise the unorganisable material
simply aggravate the disease by furnishing that partial and
discontinuous employment which is the poison that corrupts
these people's lives.

Time fails me to enter into the process by which foolish
charity and a recklessly administered Poor Law co-operate
to the same bad end ; but I will give one crucial example
which may at least furnish food for reflection. In this very
hall, almost exactly three years ago to-day, I pointed out
the dangers which, in my judgment, attached to the social
scheme set out In Darkest England^ and among other
criticisms, I used the words : "The number of the home-
less class will simply be increased to meet the places thus
opened for their reception." That prediction has, it would
seem, been too sadly verified. In a controversy which
took place in the winter of 1892-93, Mr. Gaskell, who had
been employed by Mr. Francis Peek to report on the
social scheme of Bi Darkest England^ pointed out that
there was grave reason to suppose that the Salvation Army
policy was rapidly increasing the number of homeless
persons in London.^ The 4000 persons accommodated
by the shelters erected since 1888 are, according to all the
evidence, in excess of any homeless class that existed before
that date, and have arisen in a time of less pressure and
greater common lodging-house accommodation than that