that of obtaining reliable information on which an opinion may be formed; for in nearly every newspaper reference to wireless telegraphy we see signs of an inspired brief, by the system being definitely written up' or 'written down.'

It seems a vast pity that this should be so. It should surely be possible to appoint a jury of independent experts to test the value of the new telegraphy and give a report for the benefit alike of the Government and the people. Such a jury need not necessarily be composed of gentlemen whose connection with ætheric methods has lacked expansion either through insufficient personal belief or insufficient public support.

Even apart from purely mercenary considerations, there is perhaps a tendency for those connected with the present methods of telegraphy to view unfavourably any new system, and to rather conclude that it is unequal to the object aimed at. Though such experts have the advantage of being fully acquainted with the requirements, they do not always recognise that these can be satisfactorily met in different ways-off the somewhat beaten track that they are used to and know so well.

CHARLES BRIGHT.

VOL. LIII-No. 312

X

THE BEGINNING OF TOYNBEE HALL

A REMINISCENCE

'How did the idea of a University Settlement arise?' What was the beginning?' are questions so often asked by Americans, Frenchmen, Belgians, or the younger generation of earnest English people, that it seems worth while to reply in print, and to turn one's mind back to those early days of effort and loneliness before so many bore the burden and shared the anxiety. The fear is that in putting pen to paper on matters which are so closely bound up with our own lives, the sin of egotism will be committed, or that a social plant, which is still growing, may be damaged, as even weeds are if their roots are looked at. And yet in the tale which has to be told there is so much that is gladdening and strengthening to those who are fighting apparently forlorn causes that I venture to tell it in the belief that to some our experiences will give hope.

In the year 1869, Mr. Edward Dennison took up his abode in East London. He did not stay long nor accomplish much, but as he breathed the air of the people he absorbed something of their sufferings, saw things from their standpoint, and, as his letters in his memoirs show, made pregnant suggestions for social remedies. He was the first settler, and was followed by the late Mr. Edmund Hollond, to whom my husband and I owe our life in Whitechapel. He was ever on the look-out for men and women who cared for the people, and hearing that we wished to come eastward, wrote to Dr. Jackson, then Bishop of London, when the living of St. Jude's fell vacant in the autumn of 1872, and asked that it might be offered to Mr. Barnett, who was at that time working as curate at St. Mary's, Bryanston Square, with Mr. Fremantle, now the Dean of Ripon. I have the Bishop's letter, wise, kind, and fatherly, the letter of a general sending a young captain to a difficult outpost. Do not hurry in your decision,' he wrote; it is the worst parish in my diocese, inhabited mainly by a criminal population, and one which has, I fear, been much corrupted by doles.'

How well I remember the day Mr. Barnett and I first came to see it!-a sulky sort of drizzle filled the atmosphere; the streets, dirty and ill-kept, were crowded with vicious and bedraggled people,

neglected children, and overdriven cattle. The whole parish was a network of courts and alleys, many houses being let out in single furnished rooms for 8d. a night-a bad system, which lent itself to every form of evil, to thriftless habits, to untidiness, to loss of selfrespect, to unruly living, to vicious courses.

We did not 'hurry in our decision,' but just before Christmas, 1872, Mr. Barnett became vicar. A month later we were married, and took up our lives' work on the 6th of March, 1873, accompanied by our friend Edward Leonard, who joined us to do what he could'; his could' being ultimately the establishment of the Whitechapel committee of the Charity Organisation Society, and a change in the lives and ideals of a large number of young people, whom he gathered round him to hear of the Christ he worshipped.

It would sound like exaggeration if I told my memories of those times. The previous vicar had had a long and disabling illness, and all was out of order. The church, unserved either by curate, choir, or officials, was empty, dirty, unwarmed. Once the platform of popular preachers, Mr. Hugh Allen and Mr. (now Bishop) Thornton, it had had huge galleries built to accommodate the crowds who came from all parts of London to hear them-galleries which blocked the light, and made the subsequent emptiness additionally oppressive. The schools were closed, the school-rooms all but devoid of furniture, the parish organisation nil; no mothers' meeting, no Sunday school, no communicants' class, no library, no guilds, no music, no classes, nothing alive. Around this barren, empty shell surged the people, here to-day, gone to-morrow. Thieves and worse, receivers of stolen goods, hawkers, casual dock labourers, every sort of unskilled low-class cadger congregated in the parish. There was an Irish quarter and a Jew quarter, while whole streets were given over to the hangers-on of a vicious population, people whose conduct was brutal, whose ideal was idleness, whose habits were disgusting, and among whom goodness was laughed at, the honest, man and the right-living woman being scorned as unpractical. Robberies, assaults, and fights in the streets were frequent; and to me, a born coward, it grew into a matter of distress when we became sufficiently well known in the parish for our presence to stop, or at least to moderate, a fight; for then it seemed a duty to join the crowd, and not to follow one's nervous instincts and pass by on the other side. I recall one breakfast being disturbed by three fights outside the Vicarage. We each went to one, and the third was hindered by a hawker friend who had turned verger, and who fetched the distant policeman, though he evidently remained doubtful as to the value of interference.

We began our work very quietly and simply: opened the church (the first congregation was made up of six or seven old women, all expecting doles for coming), restarted the schools, began Bible

Classes, established relief committees, organised parish machinery, and tried to cauterise, if not to cure, the deep cancer of dependence which was embedded in all our parishioners alike, lowering the best among them and degrading the worst. At all hours, on all days, and with every possible pretext, the people came and begged. To them we were nothing but the source from which to obtain tickets, money, or food; and so confident were they that help would be forthcoming that they would allow themselves to get into circumstances of suffering or distress easily foreseen, and then send round to demand assistance.

I can still recall my emotions when summoned to a sick woman in Castle Alley, an alley long since pulled down, where the houses, three storeys high, were hardly six feet apart; the sanitary accommodation pits in the cellars; and the whole place only fit for the condemnation it got directly Cross's Act was passed. This Alley, by the way, was in part the cause of Cross's Act, so great an impression did it make on Lord Cross, then Sir Richard Cross, when Mr. Barnett induced him to come down and see it one hot summer's day.

In this stinking alley, in a tiny, dirty room, all the windows broken and stuffed up, lay the woman who had sent for me. There were no bed-clothes; she lay on a sacking covered with rags.

'I do not know you,' said I, ' but I hear you want to see me.' 'No, ma'am!' replied a fat, beer-sodden woman by the side of the bed, producing a wee, new-born baby; we don't know yer, but 'ere's the babby, and in course she wants clothes and the mother comforts like. So we jist sent round to the church.'

This was a compliment to the organisation which represented Christ, but one which showed how sunken was the character which could not make even the simplest provision for an event which must have been expected for months, and which even the poorest among the respectable counts sacred.

The refusal of the demanded doles made the people very angry. Once the Vicarage windows were broken; once we were stoned by an angry crowd, who also hurled curses at us as we walked down a criminal-haunted street, and howled out, as a climax of their wrongs, And it's us as pays 'em.' But we lived all this down, and as the years went by, reaped a harvest of love and gratitude which is one of the gladdest possessions of our lives, and is quite disproportionate to the service we have rendered. But that is the end of the story, and I must go back to the beginning.

In a parish, which occupies only 109,500 square yards and was inhabited by 8,000 persons, we were confronted by some of the hardest problems of city life. The housing of the people, the superfluity of unskilled labour, the enforcement of resented education, the liberty of the criminal classes to congregate and create a low public opinion, the administration of the Poor Law, the amusements of the ignorant,

the hindrances to local government (in a neighbourhood devoid of the leisured and cultured), the difficulty of uniting the unskilled men and women in trade unions, the necessity for stricter Factory Acts, the joylessness of the masses, the hopelessness of the youngall represented difficult problems, each waiting for a solution and made more complicated by the apathy of the poor, who were content with an unrighteous contentment, and patient with a Godless patience. These were not the questions to be replied to by doles, nor could the problems be solved by kind acts to individuals, nor by the healing of the suffering, which was but the symptom of the disease.

In those days these difficulties were being dealt with mainly by good kind women, generally elderly; few men, with the exception of the clergy and noted philanthropists, such as Lord Shaftesbury, were interested in the welfare of the poor, and economists rarely joined close experience with their theories.

'If men, cultivated, young, thinking men, could only know of those things they would be altered,' I used to say, with girlish faith in human good-will-a faith which years has not shaken; and in the spring of 1875 we went to Oxford, partly to tell about the poor, partly to enjoy 'eights week' with a group of young friends. Our party was planned by Miss Toynbee, whom I had met when at school, and whose brother Arnold was then an undergraduate at Balliol. Our days were filled by the hospitality with which Oxford still rejoices its guests; but in the evenings we used to drop quietly down the river with two or three earnest men, or sit long and late in our lodgings in the Turl, and discuss the mighty problems of poverty and the people. How vividly Canon Barnett and I can recall each and all of that first group of 'thinking men,' so ready to take up enthusiasms in their boyish strength-Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Hoare, Leonard Montefiore, Alfred Milner, Philip Gell, John Falk, G. E. Underhill, Ralph Whitehead, Lewis Nettleship! Some of these are still here and caring for the people, but others have passed behind the veil, where perhaps earth's sufferings are explicable.

We used to ask each undergraduate as he developed interest to come and stay in Whitechapel, and see for himself. And they came, some to spend a few weeks, some for the long vacation, while others, as they left the University and began their life's work, took lodgings in East London, and felt all the fascination of its strong pulse of life, hearing, as those who listen always may, the hushed unceasing moans underlying the cry which ever and anon makes itself heard by an unheeding public.

From that visit to Oxford in the 'eights week' of 1875 date many visits to both the Universities. Rarely a term passed without our going to Oxford, where the men who had been down to East London introduced us to others who might do as they had done.