merely to accept my own statement. The Bishop of Marlborough, who is suffragan bishop for the West of London, found himself one Sunday morning in the very heart of this particular slum, and he said to me the day afterwards, "I could not imagine there was such a hell on earth." He said the people were sitting on the doorsteps, evidently trying to escape from the heat and vermin within, and the streets resounded with blasphemy and ugly words. Let me speak for a moment of the people in the slum. They consist partly of men and women who get their livelihood by hawking different wares in the street, such as fruit and flowers. There are organ-grinders in abundance; there are also a great many old-clothes sellers; men and women who sell chickweed and groundsel for birds, bottle-dealers and odd job snatchers. Many of them are very excellent fellows, who have had really no chance in life. Besides these I must confess there are a great many rogues, such as the men who will provide you with any kind of disguise you require. They will transform you either into an old soldier or an old sailor, and give you either one arm or two arms, or no arms at all. They are equally liberal as regards the provision of eyes; and if any of you should be short of a character they can always write you one, upon the best of paper, with a very neat blue or gold heading at the top, and purporting to come from one of the best names in the kingdom. Think for a moment of the houses in which these people dwell. At the corner of the street there is a large common lodging-house, and similar houses are to be found all through the streets. They contain, say, from forty to fifty beds for men, at fourpence a night, on one floor; perhaps as many beds for single women on the top floor; and there are also cubicles with short wooden partitions for those who are, I must say euphemistically, called married people. It is notorious that men and women who once take to living in these common lodginghouses are generally lost to all respectability, and they seem to lose all hope and all desire for anything better. It is a dreadful place, the common lodging-house of London. Besides the common lodging-houses, there are what are called furnished rooms. A furnished room consists of a very narrow place with a four-foot bed, invariably full of insects. Fortunately they never bite me, I suppose because my blood is particularly sour, so that you need not be afraid of any infection. Besides the bed the room contains a chair without a seat and probably with only three legs, a leaky kettle, and a spoon. For this a poor fellow who, if he is lucky, gets about twelve, fourteen, or fifteen shillings a week, has to pay four or five shillings a week. He and his wife and four or five children will occupy the bed, and, in order to bring the rent down, they will let the other side of the room to some woman or single man. This is the kind of thing we have going on in the wealthiest parish in the wealthiest city in the world. I must say something about what I regard as the duty of the Church with regard to these people. I fear that if we wait for the State to apply the Statutes which Lord Shaftesbury put on the Statute Book we shall have to wait yet for some considerable time. We cannot get our local authorities to apply the laws which have been passed, and I think the Church must be the pioneer of the State in this particular matter. The Church was the pioneer of the State in the matter of education, and so I think she will have to be the pioneer in this matter of providing better houses for the poor, and in this work the Metropolitan Common Lodging House Association is taking the lead.

The Rev. R. M. GRIER, Prebendary of Lichfield, Vicar of Hednesford, Staffordshire.

As a clergyman working among the miners of Staffordshire, I desire to thank Mr. Shuttleworth for the line which he has taken in regard to the poor of London. He has certainly made the work of men like myself a great deal lighter for us, by having in the centre of our civilization preached, as it were, from the house tops that a person because he is a priest is not the less but, if possible, even more a man. Whether he and I should agree in regard to some of the measures he proposes for the relief of suffering and in the interests of the poor, I do not know, but I am at one with him in his endeavour to substitute political humanity for political economy, as also in the view that the Gospel of Christ is a message of salvation, here and now, to body as well as soul, from all removable evils. The suggestion has been made by Mr. Hill that we in the country should keep the poor with us. May I suggest to him that he, on his part, should keep in London those gentlemen who promote bogus

companies. They are a source of infinite mischief. Indeed, I am not sure that we shall ever be able very greatly to improve the condition of the people until the Church has either moralized or abolished limited liability companies. Too often the shareholders in such companies appear to think that not only their pecuniary risks, but their responsibilities before God are strictly limited by Act of Parliament. Let me illustrate the action of these companies. A friend of mine invented an engine, which is now having a large sale. The fame of his invention reached the ears of a firm of London solicitors; so down they came, and offered to start a company with a capital of £100,000 for the sale of his engines, and proposed to give my friend £25,000 out of the 100,000, for his invention. My friend replied, "The concern will not bear so much money.' The characteristic reply was, "What is that to do with you? You would get your money, and if the concern went to pieces six months hence you would be perfectly safe." My friend was a poor man, but a man of honour, and he refused the temptation. If he had accepted it, what would have been the result? The manager of the works would have had to grind the faces of the poor in order to provide dividends for the shareholders. But even if a smaller sum had been raised, the shareholders would probably have known nothing and cared nothing for the men by whose labour, by whose thews and sinews their profits were being made. I would also suggest to Mr. Hill that if we keep the poor on the land, he should send us back the absentee landlords. In my neighbourhood, where there are large numbers of mines, heavy royalties on the coal are paid to the landlords. Now, some of these landowners live among the miners and do a great deal of good, but some live at a distance, and not one single penny can we get from them in the interests of the poor. I attended a mass meeting of the miners a short time ago, and I think some of the absentee landlords would have been very much astonished if they had heard the strength of the language in which they were denounced, and the calm way in which the miners spoke about the royalties, as if they were being robbed of them. Having been for some time a member of a trades' union, and taken a successful part in more than one strike, I am convinced that if the people are only treated with common justice, the gentry will have nothing to fear from them. But if they are to be so treated, some of our habits and prepossessions must go to the wall. We have been considering the housing of the poor. Has it ever occurred to you that a very large number of those who live in the worst dens in the worst parts of our large cities once lived in houses as comfortable as those of any person in this hall? We have been talking about thrift. Has it ever occurred to you that whilst we desire to promote thrift, we force upon the people the most dangerous temptations_to unthrift? We have been talking about recreation. Has it ever occurred to you that we keep up among the people an evil, which does a great deal to vulgarise their recreations, and convert their pleasures into a source of misery to them? We have been talking about sweating. Has it ever occurred to you that one of the worst forms of sweating is to be found in those tied public-houses, the owners of which are sometimes returned to Parliament, and are flattered by the Church and ennobled by the State? It has been a matter of surprise to many in this country that the late great and successful strike in London was attended with so few deeds of violence. Perhaps it may not be generally known that Mr. Burns and Mr. Tillett were constantly warning the men against entering public-houses. A working-man, whom I have the honour of numbering amongst my dear and intimate friends, told me that he heard Mr. Burns addressing a large body of his fellow-men, some of whom were smoking and some of whom had evidently been drinking, and that he said, "the worst enemies we have are not the directors of the dock companies and Mr. Norwood, but the public-houses of this country and the men who waste in drink and tobacco the money which their wives and children need at home." These words were more loudly cheered than any other part of his address.

ARNOLD HILL, Esq.

I HAVE asked for permission to speak for a few moments on a subject very dear to my heart, and my apology for troubling you must be that I have now for many years been responsible for the employment of many thousands of men. The subject is the duty of the Church with regard to thrift in relation to the working classes, and not only of the Church, but of us all. I believe that this evening we have had a most

practical expression of the approaching enfranchisement of the sexes in that most admirable speech which came from Miss Barnett's lips, in which she denounced those specious requests for legislation from the clergy who spoke before her, and said that the real meaning of thrift was the thrift of the people at home, and not that insurance for an old age which, perhaps, may never come; and still less, that compulsory State insurance, of which we have heard, and which, I believe, is doomed to failure. The character of a man is formed not by compulsion, but by that atmosphere of perfect liberty, whereof we British are proud. It is by that moulding of character, which promotes true thrift, and not by the compulsion of the State, that the Church will make her people strong. I know that if I could persuade the workmen that in every home I could raise wages by 4s. or 5s. a week, and if I could persuade them that they are bound, first of all, to give up alcohol, and then persuade them to add to that renunciation tobacco, they would be the stronger and better men. Lastly, if I could persuade them to give up the total use of flesh meat on the strength of that sacrifice, you would find we should be cutting at the roots of all the sweating, of which so much nonsense has been talked. A man who has control of himself and his purse has also control of the market, and I know from experience that our best men cannot possibly be sweated, not because they have all sufficient money, but because they are the masters of their own trade, and therefore no master can do without them. What is the moral of the great strike with which we have all been sympathising during the last three months? The grand lesson, which comes to us for the first time in the annals of London labour, is that the lowest class of employés have found the importance of self-help and combination, and have ascertained that they are absolute masters of their own destinies. I contend that when we learn the lesson of self-control, we find that men can live on the purest, simplest, and most wholesome elements of food at a minimum of cost. If you buy a pound of wheat you pay less than Id. for it, whereas if you go to the butcher's shop you pay 6d. if you are lucky, and yet every pound of wheat contains three times as much nutriment as the pound of meat. me give you an illustration. One of our leading men in the works not long ago tried the experiment of seeing how little his family could live on. He lived on the best foods that could be bought in the market, and he found that the cost amounted to Is. 3d. a day for a family of ten. I myself have lived over and over again at the price of 2d. a day, although, in my case, no necessity existed. You have only to test these things in your own lives, and you will find them true.

Let

A. STANLEY COBB, Esq., Pontypridd.

THE subject on which I wish to speak relates to the difficulty which the working classes experience in obtaining work. A good deal has been said about the housing of the poor, and different rates of wages; but one of the hardest things that can happen to a poor man is to find when he is anxiously desiring to work that no work is forthcoming. It is, I think, rather disappointing to Church people generally to see that in the recent strike in London so little influence was exercised by anyone connected with the Church. It is perfectly true that the Bishop of London was associated with the final settlement; but the practical conduct of affairs throughout was left in the hands of Mr. Burns, Mr. Tillett, and Mr. Champion. We have already heard that a great deal of self-denial was shown during the strike, and we have seen the result; but that result may very easily be exaggerated. It is true that an increase has been obtained in the rate of wages; but it is by no means clear that the difficulty felt by the great mass of employees in finding labour will be removed. I hear somebody say, it is just the other way; " and there is no doubt that will be the case, because some of the work that has hitherto been done in London will now be removed to other places, and there will therefore be less work to be done, although what is done will be better paid for. A permanently successful endeavour to raise the working classes, as a whole, must be founded, in my opinion, on a real approximation of the demand and the supply of labour. These are old truths which we may fight against as much as we like, but which, after all, actually determine the great majority of cases in life. The value of goods and the value of labour will ultimately depend upon the supply and demand. The question is, how is a proper approximation between the two to be obtained? It seems to me that one method of enabling the working-man to find employment has been very much neglected. We are all acquainted with the work carried on in the Servants' Registry Offices. If a servant wants a place, she does not

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go about from house to house asking whether a servant is wanted there, but she puts her name down on the register, or she ascertains from the register the names of employers who want servants. We want to have similar registry offices for workmen. This was tried on a small scale some time ago by Mr. Nathaniel Louis Cohen, and it was very successful; and Cardinal Manning has recently said, "what we may hope will come from this strike is a registration of labourers and an organization of labour." Such a system would enable labourers to know where to apply for labour; and, on the other hand, employers would know where to register their wants, and thus obtain a selection of the best labour available at the required time. Why should not some London committee be formed to promote such a system of registration; to appoint reliable agents, in different districts, whose duty it would be to ascertain the characters of the men, and the class of work they were seeking; and to receive and publish reports periodically?

Mrs. HENRY KINGSLEY, S. Agnes' House, South Wimbledon. You, my Lord Bishop, have kindly announced my name; let me add that I am a nuisance. I have only been four days in Cardiff, so perhaps you have not found that out; you probably would if I lived longer amongst you. Mr. Shuttleworth has appealed to you all to-night to be nuisances. I speak mainly to drive that nail home. In the large meeting we have here to-night there are enough persons to make their voices felt all over Great Britain; and I ask you, in the name of that Church which we love, to make your voices heard on the subject of over-crowding. I ask this because I am convinced, and I am quite sure everyone on this platform will agree with me, that over-crowding is the root of the immorality, the drunkenness, and the poverty of the nation. I say the root. We spend, and rightly spend, a great deal of money and a great deal of time in fighting against the things which over-crowding causes; but I ask you to go deeper, and in every direction, and in every way, with your voices, through your books, if you write books, through your newspapers, to bring forward this question. I do not know if any of you have seen in the daily papers some letters which have recently appeared from the pen of the Rev. Arthur Robins, of Windsor. I should like those letters placarded, not only over every town, but in every village. I think we are rather in danger of considering London only in this matter. I can only say that in that beautiful city of Durham, where I was working for a time, the over-crowding is a disgrace. I know nothing about the pit villages in Wales; but there is one near Sunderland, called Ryhope, where for a year typhoid fever has been lurking about, simply because the sanitary arrangements are so disgraceful, and the people are living, in some instances, seven in a room. I suppose there is scarcely a city which could not bring forward hundreds of cases of slums like that which has been described to-night. There are persons here of great influence, persons whose voice can be heard in the councils of the nation. I appeal to them not to rest satisfied, whatever the reports of the Royal Commissioners may be, until a scheme is not only printed, but worked out for the whole nation; and I would say, as I said in conversation this afternoon on the very same subject, that the body which is to take up this matter is the spiritual body of the Church. There is not a single clergyman, whatever his rank may be, there is not a single missioner, whether male or female, who can take more than half the Gospel into many of the homes in Great Britain, simply because they know it is useless to ask people to follow out certain teachings in the Bible, because it is an absolute impossibility. I have to thank you very much for listening to me at this late hour, but may I suggest that we do not leave when this Congress breaks up without each of us resolving to endeavour, in whatever way we can, to put a stop to this terrible evil, which is the cause of the greater part of the disease, and the greater part of the sin of the nation?

445

COLONIAL HALL.

THURSDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 3RD, 1889.

The Ven. Archdeacon BRUCE in the Chair.

HOW TO MEET THE SPIRITUAL NEEDS OF
YOUNG MEN.

PAPERS.

The Rev. V. S. S. COLES, Pusey House, Oxford.

To meet the spiritual needs of young men of all classes, the Church needs the spirit of hope. Teachers who are out of heart, and do not really look for a due measure of success, must be out of sympathy with a class full of hopeful anticipation and joyous energy. The parish priest must never allow himself to think that to win young men to God is a hopeless task. He may be tempted to think so when he finds that in his congregation the women greatly outnumber the men, and of his male communicants very few are to be found between the ages of fifteen and thirty. He may be discouraged when he finds that in many homes it is habitually assumed that the outward profession of religion is for the daughters, and not for the sons, of the family.

And yet nearly half the perfect life on earth la between fifteen and thirty. Our Lord passed away from this world at the age when men are conventionally supposed to settle down to a religious life, and the Church dare not surrender her claim upon the years which He has especially made His own. Nor, in truth, is there any reason to do so. Because the outward profession of religion is hard to men, and especially to young men, it does not follow that its inward power is less present with them as a class. The two groups of followers most closely associated with the ministry of our Lord, correspond to the clergy and the women, whose prominence in our churches is so often made a reproach to us. Nicodemus and Joseph were long content to be disciples in secret; the young man whom He loved went away sorrowful.

When S. Paul warns S. Timothy of the special needs of the two sexes, he implies that prayer-perhaps public prayer- is as much the characteristic difficulty of men, as modesty in dress is that of women. When S. John contrasts the young with the old, it is bare victory that he looks for in the young, not the matured and perfected experience of the old.

No doubt it is to the missionary, rather than to the pastoral, work of the Church that the example of the ministry of our Lord applies; but how largely is the work of the Church missionary to-day in England. She has to re-conquer and win afresh a great people, and she must not be surprised if, in her missionary work, she is like her Lord. And, after all, it was for a Christian Church, fully formed, that S. Paul said, "I will that men pray."