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SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LONDON.NEIGHBOURHOOD GUILDSCrown 8vo. Price 4s 6d.
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF
ETHICS.
Adapted from the German of G. Von Gizycki,
Professor of Philosophy in the University of Berlin.
BY
STANTON COIT, Pn.D.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
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NEIGHBOURHOOD GUILDS
Jlnsfcnuneni of Social ilcforni
BY
STANTON £OIT, PhD.
Lecture?' of the South Place Ethical Society, London.
SECOND
EDITION.
bonbon
SWAN SONNENSOHEIN & CO.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1892
<P
£SA.
^fcORNELlX
UNIVERSITY;
<^LI3RARY^zCONTENTS,
PAGK
I.—Neighbourhood Guilds and the Industrial
Problem........................... .	1
II.—The Neighbourhood Guild Defined—Its
Credentials.........................7
III.	—Locality in Cities as a Factor in Reform
—Illustrated in Relief Work .	.	17
IV.	—Co-operation with other Reform Agencies 28
V.—Neutrality in Religion................86
VI.—Enthusiasm for the Guild ....	40
VII.—The Family' as the Moral Unit of Society 46
VIII.—Social Meetings for Young Men and Young
Women...............................62
IX.—The Division of a Guild into Clubs .	.	66
X.—The Space Needed for One Guild .	.	60
XI.—The Limit of Membership in one Club	.	68
XII.—A Radiation of Guilds irom a Centre	.	68
XIII.	—A Body of Trained Workers on Secular
Lines..................................71
XIV.	—The Guild Budget.......................78
XV.—The Transformation of Various Institutions
into Neighbourhood Guilds	81X
Contents,
PAGE
XVI.—Tue Way to Start a New Guild •	•	91
XVII.—Reform Work—Class Work .... 99
XVIIE—Entertainments............................108
XIX.—The Personality of the Leaders of a Guild 117
XX.—Moral and Civic Instruction in the Guild 126
XXI.—The Moral Discipline of the Guild .	.	135
XXII.—What Classes of People the Guild may
Reach..............................138
XXIII.- Not a Mere Drop in the Ocean .	.	147NEIGHBOURHOOD GUILDS :
an instrument of Social IRefornt.
I.
Neighbourhood Guilds and the Industrial
Problem.
No one has as yet accepted, in the full sense
in which he meant it, General Booth’s chal-
lenge to bring forward a better scheme than
his for lifting the fallen classes of society
into independence and prosperity. He de-
manded that over against the Salvation Army
and the network of measures he had proposed,
any one who refused to support him should
not only point out other and better methods,
but also another body of workers who were
ready and competent to execute them. This
no one of his opponents has done.
It is true that some clergymen have announced
that the Church is the proper organisation to
B2
Neighborhood Guilds.
execute Mr. Booth’s suggestions, but they have
said nothing to show that the Church will in
any likelihood adopt the enterprise. In a
similar manner the socialists insist that such
a work should not be left in the hands of the
Salvation Army; but they have not been able
to point to any County Council or other local
authority willing and able to carry out the
scheme. Others, by fair and telling criticism,
have shown up gross and dangerous defects,
both in some important details and in the
fundamental conception of Mr. Booth’s plan.
While such critics have been chiefly negative
and destructive in intention, there is, neverthe-
less, visible in the background of their argu-
ments the outline of a counter-scheme. But
they, too, fail to tell us who will apply their
better method. The Secretary of the Charity
Organisation Society cannot say, “ I will
supply an adequate corps of enthusiastic
workers, ready to put into practice the prin-
ciples of reform I have laid down.” And
Mr. Bosanquet, in his admirable criticism* of
Mr. Booth’s scheme, does not try to con-
* ‘“In Darkest England’ on the Wrong Track.” By
B. Bosanquet. MJL London : Swan Sonnenschein & Co.and the Industrial Problem.
3
ceal his disappointment that the Salvation
Army, which might have led out the unhappy
denizens from Darkest England, has been set
on the wrong track by its “ General.” But the
Army having failed him, Mr. Bosanquet leaves
us without a hint of where to turn for rescue.
The Neighbourhood Guild does, I believe,
solve the difficulty of getting the right men as
well as the right measures. If it ean do this,
it deserves public attention. And that large
class in the community who for religious or
economic reasons have found themselves unable
to sanction General Booth’s scheme may be
glad to support another already successfully
begun, which contains none of those elements
of social danger felt to be inherent in the
Salvation Army enterprise.
In the following pages the Neighbourhood
Guild will be considered primarily as a scheme
for getting the right men; only incidentally
will the problem as to the right ultimate
measures of industrial reform be dealt with
The former is the more pressing question of
the hour. Were an adequate number of men
systematically at work, attempting to under-
stand and solve our agrarian and industrial4
Neighbourhood Guilds
difficulties, the just solution would be sure to
dawn gradually upon the popular consciousness,
and the new order be ushered in as noiselessly
as the day. Whatever be the nature of the
fundamental changes ultimately to be made in
land-tenure, in taxation, and in the private
ownership of the instruments of production,
there must be a preliminary enlightenment of
the great mass of the people in economic and
social principles and aims, and a corresponding
enthusiasm or disposition to bring about a
juster order of life. But this enlightenment
and the disposition to carry out specific radical
reforms can only be brought about when the
intellectual life of the people has been organised.
The first step in social reform, if my psycho-
logy be correct, must be the conscious organisa-
tion of the intellectual and moral life of the
people for the total improvement of the human
lot. Out of a comprehensive aspiration issue
particular resolutions to reform life on definite
lines by specific means. This is true of masses
of men as well as of individuals. The organisa-
tion of the intellectual and moral life of the
people is the crying need of our day. Because
of the lack of it, our ideals and schemes areand the Industrial Problem.
5
cold, abstract, bloodless things, or, at best, are
impotent; they are like spirits without bodies,
they cannot make themselves seen or felt or
heard; they have no hands, nor feet, nor eyes,
nor tongue. Were they the true deliverers,
they would be utterly powerless, handicapped
by lack of tangible substance—lack of hosts
of men inspired by them. If this first step,
the organisation of the masses mentally and
morally, were taken, the second step, the
enlightenment of the people in social prin-
ciples, could be easily made, and then the
realization of the just state would not be
remote, nor would it be brought in with vio-
lence. Now such a general organisation of the
life of the people, and such a general civic
instruction, are the special field of action
which the Neighbourhood Guild would pre-
sume to assign to itself. How it could meet
the requirements of the case, what its own
internal principles and methods are, I shall
attempt in these pages to point out. To
do this it is not necessary for the writer to
make any confession of faith as to the nation-
alization of land and capital. As to special
measures, I shall simply assume that, whatever6
Neighbourhood Guilds.
be the final and widest-sweeping reforms,—
whether the wage system is simply to be modi-
fied or is to be superseded by a better method
of production and distribution,—still the im-
mediate line of advance will be through the
organisation of all labourers, women as well as
men, into trades unions, through a reduction
of the hours of work, through friendly societies,
through greater domestic conveniences and
healthier surroundings, through better educa-
tion in general, and through increased recrea-
tion and higher amusements. With these
specific schemes of reform the Neighbourhood
Guild is already allied. Presupposing their
value and anticipating still more radical
reforms, which for our present purpose may
remain undefined as the secret of the future,
I turn to consider the internal principles of
the Neighbourhood Guild and its methods of
work.II.
The Neighbourhood Guild Defined—Its
Credentials.
The very name, Neighbourhood Guild, sug-
gests the fundamental idea which this new
institution embodies: namely, that, irrespective
of religious belief or non-belief, all the people,
men, women, and children, in any one street,
or any small number of streets, in every
working-class district in London, shall be or-
ganised into a set of clubs, which are by
themselves, or in alliance with those of other
neighbourhoods, to carry out, or induce others
to carry out, all the reforms—domestic, indus-
trial, educational, provident, or recreative—
which the social ideal demands.
At the outset, a true insight into the spirit
and methods of the Guild will perhaps be
gained most readily by noting that it is an
expansion of the family idea of co-operation..
In the family all ages and both sexes meet8
Neighbourhood Guilds :
mentally and morally, and do not limit their
combination of effort to the attainment of any
one special object in life, such as the mere
physical comfort, or the health, or the financial
convenience, or the intellectual development,
or the sympathetic encouragement of one an-
other; but all of these aims are pursued at
once, and any one of them may become
supreme as occasion demands, and each mem-
ber receives the kind of help adapted to his
present need.
The bad effects of forming societies of work-
ing people for any one object alone, however
good in itself, seem (because they are indirect)
to escape the notice of many would-be philan-
thropists. Such a society causes its members
to magnify out of all proportion that one side
of life or culture which it aims to develop.
We have in all parts of London the melan-
choly spectacle of groups of people who are in
this way made intensely narrow in their ideal
of manhood. We may regard as typical the
case of a club for young men in East London,
which met twice a week for four years simply
for the purpose of boxing. The Cambridge
graduate, who organised and counselled thisDefinition and Credentials.
9
institution, was a man of. the highest culture,
appreciative of literature, a lover of art, a
man filled with devotion to the community,
but none of these characteristics did he betray
or communicate to the young men he had
rallied about him. They only knew him as a
man fond of boxing. What to him was the
most trifling thing in life became to them the
absorbing object of interest, the centre and
ground of friendship, the gauge and standard
of manly excellence. The leading members of
the club were continually tempted to quit
amateur efforts and become professional boxers,
even at the risk of losing their social status in
the club.
Bookish pursuits, also, if followed exclu-
sively, have a narrowing effect upon the mem-
bers of a club. The same evil ensues if only
recreation be the end in view, or any one reform
or set of reforms, like that urged by the Anti-
Vaccination Society or those proposed by the
Social Democratic Federation. The principle of
relative proportion in pursuits is a clear one.
Boxing must have no more conspicuous place
in the club-life than it deserves in a rational
system of physical culture; while all bodilyIO
Neiglibou rhood Gu ilds :
exercises together cannot be allowed to usurp
time, attention, and enthusiasm, to the ex-
clusion of sympathetic and intellectual occu-
pations. If, in his own judgment, the organiser
of the East End club of which I spoke, con-
ceded a pre-eminence of worth to the study
of Shakespeare or Darwin, as compared with
high efficiency in boxing, then he should
have intermingled these diverse interests. But
neither should any lover of literature sacrifice
the physical culture of the members of his club
to the appreciation of the poets, nor should
he interest them even in their own completest
development to the neglect of the altruistic life.
Every club, to be a healthy centre of social
development, must also interest itself in the
outside world and its needs. Industrial and
political movements must claim its attention
at the same time that it pays due regard to the
physical and mental culture of its members.
In its social reform work the Neighbourhood
Guild does not even limit its effort—as is be-
coming the fashion of the hour—to the rescue
of those who have already fallen into vice,
crime, or pauperism. Equally would it touch
and draw to itself the whole class of self-sup-Definition and Credentials.
11
porting wage-earners, and not only with the
object of preventing them from falling into
these worst evils, but also of bringing within
their reach the thousand higher advantages
which their limited means do not at present
allow them individually to attain. The su-
preme aim which it constantly keeps in view
is the completest efficiency of each individual,
as a worker for the community, in morals,
manners, workmanship, civic virtues and in-
tellectual power, and the fullest possible at-
tainment of social and industrial advantages.
Thus it includes the rescue of the fallen,
though its preventive work is more conspicu-
ous ; and both these are subordinate to its
effort to realize ideals of efficiency and culture
higher than those now prevailing even among
prosperous working men. But in pursuing the
loftier aims, it must not be supposed to be quit-
ting the rescue and preventive work; for no
hard and fast line can be drawn between the
former and these latter. The way to save and
prevent is often by educating the intellect, and
cultivating the taste of the person in danger or
already fallen; and, again, the superior de-
velopment of one member of a family or of a12
Neighbourhood Guilds :
circle of friends may prove the social salvation
of all the rest.
Lest so comprehensive a scheme seem fanci-
ful, let it in the first place be remembered that
the Guild may always point to the institution
of the family as the tested experiment of
a co-operative society pursuing as many aims
as there are sides to human life itself. And in
the second place, it must be remembered that
to do almost all things for one person or a
few persons is possible, whereas to do any one
thing for everybody might be hopeless. Now
any one Neighbourhood Guild for the most
part concentrates its efforts upon the compari-
tively few people living in its immediate vicinity.
Let it further be remembered, that while one
Guild may reach only 500 people on all sides of
their life, 500 Guilds would reach 250,000 people
on all sides of their life. And 500 Guilds would
not be many, if we consider the number of
institutions of any one kind in London, as, for
instance, the Board Schools, of which there are
over 400. Again, it must be borne in mind
that those privileges which no one Guild alone
could attain, might easily be reached by the
combined efforts of 1,000 Guilds.Definition and Credentials.	ij
A further reason for believing in the prac-
ticability of this scheme is the success which,
has attended the several attempts thus far
made to carry it out. The first Guild was
started about five years ago in one of the poor-
est and most crowded quarters of New York
City. It has had as great success in the number
of members and variety of enterprises under-
taken as its house-accommodations and finances
would permit. At present it consists of six
clubs and a kindergarten, and it has recently
been accepted by the newly formed American
University Settlement Association as their first
settlement and centre of work. Another Guild
has been started in Philadelphia, and another
in Brooklyn, both of which have taken firm
root and are flourishing. Two years and a
half ago, a similar institution was started
in London. It had its origin in a club con-
sisting of eight working lads, meeting once a
week in a private drawing-room. It now con-
sists of five clubs and contains 230 members
of all ages, representing less than 100-families.
It has reached the limit which its present
house-room can accommodate. It meets every
evening at Leighton Hall, Leighton Crescent,14
Neighbourhood Guilds:
Kentish Town, N.W. This building, which
contains twenty-four rooms, and stands de-
tached in a garden, besides being the home of
the Guild, is also what is called a University
Settlement, half of the house being used as a
residence by a number of university graduates
who devote leisure hours to the work of the
Guild.
It is true that some of the most important
work which the Guild aspires to do has not yet
been undertaken. But the first months and
years of such an institution must naturally be
devoted to the organisation of its members and
the inculcation of its principles into their minds.
It is something, however, in two and a half
years (to limit our consideration to the Guild in
London), to have organised five clubs well, and
through them to have founded a circulating
library, Sunday afternoon free concerts, Sun-
day evening lectures, Saturday evening dances
for members, a choral society, and fifteen to
twenty classes in various branches of techni-
cal and literary education, and to have in-
spired the members of the Guild with the
desire to plant new Guilds, and to push for-
ward, as they are doing, at least one specificDefinition and Credentials.
15
reform of general interest. To have done
so little as this may seem to some readers
no very strong credential for inducing the
public to assist in the establishment of so
wide a scheme as inspires the founders of
the Guild. But if one considers the enor-
mous disparity between General Booth’s few
factories, shelters, homes, and labour intelli-
gence bureau on the one hand, and the vast en-
terprise he has laid before the public on the
other, one must see that the Neighbourhood
Guild, as it is, does not fall short of its ideal any
more glaringly than does the Salvation Army
of its new ambition. Furthermore, the social
reform wing of the latter is an undertaking for
which the staff of the army have had no train-
ing whatever. They are, moreover, according to
the frank admission of their leader, fully occu-
pied with another kind of work, which they do
not intend to abandon. As General Booth says
of his new expedition, " My people will be new
to it. We have trained our soldiers in the sav-
ing of souls; we have taught them knee-drill;
.	.	. and that will ever continue the main
business of their lives. .	.	. But the new
sphere on which we are entering will call fori6
Neighbourhood Guilds.
new faculties other than those which have
hitherto been cultivated, and for knowledge of
a different character. .	.	. Already our
world - wide Salvation work engrosses the
energies of every officer we command. With
its extension we have the greatest difficulty
to keep pace. .	.	.”* The Neighbourhood
Guild, though comparatively small, may at least
lay claim to being a body of people who have
been trained in the special methods and prin-
ciples which they now wish to apply on a vastly
larger scale. Nor, again, may the actual
achievement of the Guild seem so insignificant
in comparison with its wider dream of future
usefulness, when the sum of money for which
it appeals to the public is known to be propor-
tionately small. It asks for only £2,000 a
year for ten years, instead of £100,000 to begin
with, and £30,000 annually for ever after.
For there are good reasons, as I shall show
later, for believing that after ten years, with
£2,000 a year, Neighbourhood Guilds could be
fully self-supporting, and could propagate them-
selves without aid from the general public.
* “ In Darkest England,” pp. 283, 284.hi.
Locality in Cities as a Factor in Reform—
Illustrated in Relief Work.
The new principle of organising the social life
of all the people in one small district renders
practicable many an enterprise which otherwise
would be Utopian. One of the least merits of
the Guild will be its power, when once it is
established, of finding its financial support
among those whom it directly benefits. Indeed,
the idea of organising the whole social life of
neighbourhoods may well be called a vital
principle of reform, inasmuch as it gives life
to many a worthy undertaking which other-
wise languishes from lack of support and en-
thusiasm. And yet hitherto this principle has
scarcely been entertained by reformers.
Dr. Chalmers appreciated better than any
one else had ever done, the influence of locality
in cities as a charm and attraction to the
philanthropic worker, and many have followed
»	o18	Neighbourhood Guilds.
out his hints. His principle was that each
benevolent lady or gentleman must have a
special street or group of houses to visit, and
visit regularly; then, affection for the place
and the people would lighten the labour and
transfuse it with pleasure. He also appreci-
ated more than any one else had done, the
vast amount of timely help, which in cases of
distress and bereavement is constantly being
administered with wisdom and tenderness, in
the poorest districts, by the neighbours them-
selves. And so fully was he impressed with
the worth and naturalness of such assistance,
that he often waited until the last possible
moment, before he would step in to apply aid
from a distance—in order to give full chance
for the spirit of neighbourly responsibility and
service among the people themselves to express
itself. But Chalmers’ scheme of philanthropy
was after all aristocratic. While he would
organise his rich parishioners into disciplined
bodies of workers, he never seemed to think
of developing and lifting out of its spasmodic
and intermittent state that instinctive philan-
thropy to be found among the families of the
labouring classes in any one street or house.Locality in Cities as a Factor in Reform. 19
It is just this idea, however, which is the root
principle of the Neighbourhood Guild. Un-
directed and unorganised, the instinctive
generosity of the working people is inevit-
ably sentimental, fanciful, easily fatigued, and
excited only by the most palpable forms of
want. The poor as well as the rich need en-
lightenment in their charity; when awakened
to responsibility and instructed, their impulsive
kindness becomes a persistent principle of all-
round care for one another; and if neighbour-
hood be linked to neighbourhood, each organ-
ised in its own guild, but all united in those
efforts which are too comprehensive for any
one to undertake alone, the whole life of the
metropolis will be raised. And can it be raised
in any other way ?
If we consider the vast amount of personal
attention and time needed, to understand and
deal effectively with the case of any one man
or family that has fallen into vice, crime, or
pauperism, we shall see the impossibility of
coping with even these evils alone, unless the
helpers be both many and constantly at hand.
The Report of the Poor Law Commissioners
of 1832 pictures well the difficulties of suchNeighbourhood Guilds.
30
efforts, in the following extract from the evi-
dence given before them by the assistant over-
seer of the Parish of St. George’s, Southwark:
“ Suppose you go to a man’s house as a
visitor; you ask, Where is Smith (the pauper)?
You see his wife and children, who say they
do not know where he is, but that they believe
he is gone in search of work. How are you to
tell in such a case whether he is at work or
not ? It could only be by following him in
the morning, and you must do that every day,
because he may be in work one day and not
another. Suppose you have a shoemaker who
demands relief of you, and you give it to him
on his declaring that he is out of work. You
visit his place and find him in work; you say
to him, as I have said to one of our paupers,
‘ Why, Edwards, I thought you had no work ? ’
and he will answer, ‘Neither had I any, and
I have only got a little job for the day, etc.,
etc.’ ” *
This witness before the Commissioners sums
up his conclusion in the following manner:
“Unless you have a considerable number of
• “ The Old Poor Law and The New Socialism.” By
P. C. Montague. Cassell be Co.Locality in Lities as a Factor in Reform. 21
men to watch every pauper every day, you
are sure to be cheated.’* Although there is
exaggeration here, still one might say that in
any neighbourhood formed into a local guild
it would be possible to fulfil the demand for
many friendly watchers to every person out of
work. They would unavoidably be at his heels
every night and morning, going and coming
from work; they would be in shops and facto-
ries throughout the district; they would know
where he spent his evenings and how, and
would still have time for the pursuit of all the
other aims of the guild besides.
But the need of detailed personal super-
vision over the applicants for work or food,
clothing, medicine or shelter, may be best
appreciated by considering the criticism of the
Charity Organisation Society committee on the
plan of giving free dinners to poor Board
School children.
The following extract will help us to realize
what a multiplicity of remedies is sometimes
needed in one family in order to render
efficient assistance.
“ H—d. Father (aged 33 years), mother (30
years), and three children (six have died). A22
Neighbourhood Guilds.
builder’s labourer, earning 20s. to 27s. when
in work, but losing a lot of time. Mother get-
ting 6s. a week by washing. She is not a good
manager, and the house is untidy. Both out
of work at time of inquiry, everything pawned,
10s. 6d. due for rent, and family subsisting on
landlady’s charity. The eldest girl, who had
chest delicacy, was receiving one halfpenny
meal a week!
“ The Charity Organisation Society provided
a letter to the Chest Hospital, cod-liver oil and
medicine.
tf The mother was out of health and suffering
from varicose veins. Good food and an elasti®
stocking enabled her to continue her work.
The father had a bout of rheumatism. He
was not in a club, and had to call in the parish
doctor. He thinks that an eight hours day
would set matters right. But the immediate
step seems to be that he should join a club,
and that his wife should learn to manage.”*
But admitting that the Charity Organisation
* First Report of a special Committee of the Charity
Organisation Society appointed to consider the best means
of dealing with Board School children alleged to be in
want of food. Printed by Spottiswoode & Co., 1891, p. 7.Locality in Cities as a Factor in Reform. 23
Society principle is right, may not its advo-
cates be blamed for not having gone a step
further and devised some practical method of
procuring the enormous number of workers
which would be required in order to carry
out their principle? Must not this abstract
theory be joined to some concrete institution
which can easily bring it into play, before it can
become anything more than idle protest against
every philanthropic ^undertaking ? The Neigh-
bourhood Guild, while accepting the abstract
principle of detailed attention to every case of
indigence, supplements this and renders it
practicable by the principle, that every neigh-
bourhood—but especially the poorest—should
constitute itself its own Charity Organisation
Society. Probably in the case of the family
just cited, a dozen neighbouring families knew
six months before the Charity Organisation
Society stepped in, that the eldest girl had
chest delicacy, that the home was untidy, that
the mother was suffering from varicose veins,
and that the father was not in a club. Now
in a Guild, the neighbours would have learned
that they must provide a letter to the Chest
Hospital, cod-liver oil and medicine for the24
Neighbourhood Guilds.
girl, good food and an elastic stocking for
the mother, and by moral suasion must con-
strain the father to join a club, and must help
to find him work.
This special function of gaining insight into
the real needs of any family is, of course, fully
met by Miss Octavia Hill’s system of rent
collectors. But in this matter the Guild does
not set itself up as a competing system, but
rather as a larger plan, comprehending the
special methods which Miss Hill has developed.
Already the Guild in Kentish Town has applied
to the landlord of the worst street in the
district to be the rent collector from all the
tenants. Miss Hill’s method becomes infinitely
more powerful for good when joined to the
hundred other forces of the Guild, which make
for social regeneration. There is also the same
objection to be brought against her plan, as
against Dr. Chalmers’—that it is aristocratic,
that the regenerative work, instead of plant-
ing itself among the people themselves, and
taking root there, is fed only from the upper
classes of society. If for no other reason than
this, it must collapse before many years,
just as Chalmers’ scheme did. Surely theLocality in Cities as a Factor in Reform. 25
history of the working classes proves that any
thorough reform of their social life must rest in
a movement from within their own ranks, how-
ever much it may need the time and attention
of a few men and women of leisure at its in-
ception.
Another superiority of neighbourhood phi-
lanthropy over the friendly visitations of ladies
who live an hour’s distance away, lies in
the fact that only neighbours can know with-
out prying! Mere unexpected and unplanned
accident will disclose to them what others can-
not discover without impertinence. Even the
rent-collector coming once a week for a half hour
or less on an errand not always agreeable to
the tenant, must suffer embarrassment on this
score. I know from two years’ experience on
a Charity Organisation Society committee and
from frequent visits to the needy, that a more
than Jesuitical tact is required to find out the
facts and not be grossly inquisitive. I know
that many a family has been suspected by its
neighbours, on account of the smiling, would-be
vague, inquiries put to them by the Charity
Organisation Society’s agent. But if the neigh-
bours already know, or can know without26
Neighbourhood Guilds.
offence, why should not they be summoned to
relieve as well as to give testimony ? Let it
not come into any one’s mind as an objection
that the poor neighbours could not afford to
confer material relief of the kind that the
“ friendly visitor ” gives; for neither do the
staff of the Charity Organisation Society or of
any other charitable institution give the relief
out of their own purse. But it has not yet
been proved that even the poorest neighbour-
hood would be unable to look after its own des-
titute. I believe that it would be able. And
if money from the rich were needed, it would
be only for intellectual and artistic luxuries.
Then, again, charitable relief is quite free
from the tendency to pauperize, only when
given by those exposed to poverty. Only the
man who can truthfully say to me, “ I may be
thrown out of work next month, or I may fall
ill, and then it will be your turn to help me,”
can give me food or money and not lower my
independence.
But more than, by any other circumstance, is
the sting taken out of-all relief given in the
Neighbourhood Guild by the fact that here the
assistance is only an incidental and not theLocality in Cities as a Factor in Reform. 27
main occasion of the organisation. How grim
a commentary upon the social life of the poor
is it that they unite almost exclusively to
procure funeral privileges and sick-money, and
help when they are out of work! But how
tender and unobtrusive such assistance, where
neighbours are already knit together by a
thousand high associations in play and song, in
pursuit of the intellectual ends of life, in the
enjoyment of art, literature, music, conversa-
tion, and nature ! It is terrible when men draw
together only in suffering; whereas those who
have laughed and thought together, and joined
in ideal aims, can so enter into one another’s
sorrow as to steal much of its bitterness away.
The direct relief of the needy is happily not
the prime object of the Neighbourhood Guild.IV.
Co-operation with other Reform Agencies.
There is no desire on the part of the Guild
to compete with other institutions and organi-
sations, which are carrying on special lines of
rescue and preventive work. This constitutes
its second main feature as a scheme of social
reform. It puts itself into co-operation with
other reform movements, thus unifying in itself
as many instruments of rescue as General
Booth’s scheme proposes; but with this differ-
ence, that it would not ignore and overlap the
good work of others. It will not attempt to
start homes for fallen women, but send girls
who have erred to homes already established;
and if there is not a sufficient number of such
institutions, it will use its influence to stir up the
association, founded for that special purpose, to
the establishment of new homes. So with the
men who have just been released from prison;
the Guild will secure the co-operation of theCo-operation with other Reform, Agencies. 29
Prisoners’ Aid Societies for them. So with
other kinds of assistance. It will not establish
a bank, but, in preaching thrift, will recommend
the Post Office Savings Bank. It, moreover,
will urge every man or woman wage-worker to
become a member of a trades union, or if none
exists, to form one immediately, instructing
them as to the value of such combination in
keeping up wages and in preventing employers
from practising petty injustices. Only such
institutions will it attempt to establish as are
needed in the particular district, such as
there is no likelihood of other agencies estab-
lishing, and such as naturally would be an out-
growth of the social life of the Guild. For
instance, there would be need in nearly every
district for a Neighbourhood Guild Residence
Club for young men who do not live with their
parents, or who, because of over-crowding,
might better be away from home. At the age
of twenty it is often best for the son no longer
to remain under the somewhat narrow and
unimaginative dictation of the father, who is
too apt to forget that his son is already a man.
Now the moral advantages arising- to young
men from being in a Guild Residence as com-30
Neighbourhood Guilds.
pared with being in common l®dgings are too
evident to need any defence. Equally impera-
tive ia the demand for suitable residences for
young women who have no home. Also each
street needs a co-operative coal-dep6t, for which
the coals would be bought in August, when
prices are lowest, and sold in winter, in small
amounts, at the market value, the profit to be
used for neighbourhood improvements, or re-
turned to the co-operators, as seems best. Nor
is it altogether visionary to hope that, under
the influence of the Guild spirit of friendship
and reform, neighbours would be induced to
undertake a co-operative kitchen, at least
during the summer months, when fires would
not otherwise be needed in the houses. The
food could be delivered hot to the family at the
very moment when wanted. The quality of
food and of the cooking would be infinitely
better. The expense would be less, because of
the saving in coal and of that effected by buy-
ing the food in large quantities. Such a method
of co-operation would not meet with the oppo-
sition sure to be raised against any attempt
to establish a common dining-room for neigh-
bours. This latter would violate the familyCo-operation with other Reform Agencies. 31
sense of privacy. But it must be remembered
that while the dining-table is the social as
well as the physical centre of the home, the
cooking stove is not; and so long as the dining-
table remains intact, no removal of other
domestic functions to a communistic centre has
any tendency(to disintegrate the family union.
The washing and the cooking may well be
relegated to the public wash-house and the
Neighbourhood Guild kitchen.
Another institution which every Guild would
need, and for which the members of the one in
Kentish Town are already sighing and planning,
would be a home in the country. Each Guild
must have its own country house, that acquaint-
ances, and only acquaintances, may be together
during the country holiday. A general notion
prevails among the privileged classes of society
that working people are not sensitively discri-
minating in their choice of companions, and do
not mind the jostling crowd. But it is not so.
Only necessity forces them into toleration of
the noisy throngs of Hampstead Heath and the
Crystal Palace on a Bank Holiday. Even
where habit has dulled their sensitiveness, they
need only a few weeks of more refined and32
Neighbourhood Guilds.
friendly comradeship to make them hate the
noise and coarseness of large pleasure-seeking
crowds. No plan could show less appreciation
of the social nature of working people than the
proposal to establish a “ fTAifecfeapeZ-on-Sea.”
It is the quiet group of intimate friends which
must have its own seaside or country retreat.
Besides these, the social life of a fully developed
Guild would require a considerable number of
large rooms for its circulating library and read-
ing-rooms, for concerts, lectures, plays, commit-
tees for a score of purposes, for reading circles,
for meetings of each of the clubs, for gymnas-
tics, and for social gatherings of the whole Guild.
So little, however, does it wish to compete with
other institutions that even education in the
ordinary branches would gladly be handed over
to polytechnic institutes and Board-School even-
ing classes, since, in the Neighbourhood Guild,
education, in the conventional sense of the
word, is subordinate to the development of the
sympathetic and moral nature of its members,
and this development is best reached in the
social and business meetings and the committee
councils of the various clubs.
I cannot better illustrate the actual relationCo-operation with other Reform Agencies. 33
of the Guild to other institutions and the kind
of reform work it aims at accomplishing im-
mediately, than by quoting Mr. Bosanquet’s sug-
gestions as to what the Salvation Army might
do, but does not; for it is what the Guild already
does, to a certain degree, and hopes to do on
a vastly larger scale, as soon as it has made its
methods more widely known. Mr. Bosanquet
says : * “ (1) With such a force as the Army
has at command, able to visit thoroughly in all
the poorest quarters, they might lay before
the Sanitary Authority in every district, from
month to month, a complete list of all insani-
tary dwellings; and they might spirit up the
inhabitants to make the necessary complaints,
without which it is so very hard to get magis-
trates to enforce the law. (2) With such a
force as the Army has at command, going in
and out among the people, and belonging to the
same trades and occupations, they might soon
by example and precept make it an unknown
thing that any man in regular work should not
belong to a first-rate, sound Friendly Society,
and that any children should not be sent regu-
* See “4 In Darkest England ’ on the Wrong Track,”
p. 53.
D34
Neighbourhood Guilds.
larly to school. Children miss school through
change of residence; the Salvation Army might
call on all new-comers in the street, and say :
“ If you really wish to do right, send your chil-
dren to school, and don’t wait for the visitor to
find you out.” And by doing these simple
things they would do higher good, and more of
it, and to infinitely more people and in a much
shorter time, than a hundred General Booths
and a thousand farm colonies could do. But I
have never heard that they have made any be-
ginning to do anything whatever of the kind;
and therefore I say that they have not yet ac-
quired familiar experience of the actual methods
which are most efficient in benefiting the poorer
wage-earners.
“ The case of the east end bootmaker (Mr. T.),*
shows the same thing; that case was not stated
or treated by a person of experience. I say,
then, that the Army has not yet turned its
attention to becoming a body of trained workers
on secular lines, although I should quite think
that the members of the Army are better ma-
terial for such workers than any other philan-
thropic organisation has at command. But
* Rid. p. 27.Co-operation with other Reform Agencies. 35
they have gone mad about the creation of a new
institution on a large scale, and this is not to
be surprised at; it is always the first resort of
the inexperienced, because it seems a direct
method.”
But what the Salvation Army is not, and does
not intend to be, yet what Mr. Bosanquet and
many wish it might be, the Neighbourhood
Guilds is in its very essence, namely : “ a body
of trained workers on secular lines,” turning
“ its attention to the simple details of local
and individual work among the poor.”V.
Neutrality in Religion.
Another prominent characteristic of the
Neighbourhood Guild is that it draws together
neighbours of all religions and of no religious
opinions, and makes of them enthusiastic
workers for the good of the community; it
only demands unselfishness of conduct. On
this basis of neutrality in religion, and with no
ulterior motive of religious propaganda, the
Neighbourhood Guild worker can enter houses
and win the confidence and co-operation of
families, where the Salvationist, or even the
Churchman sent by the Church, would be met
with coldness and suspicion. I have heard a
hundred young men and women in the few
Guilds already existing say—and even when
they themselves were devout Christians : “ The
reason our Guild succeeds so well is because
we never mix up religion with it, and never
bother anybody, one way or the other, about
36Neutrality in Religion.	$7
religion.” Furthermore, I know, by frequent
conversation with working people, that the great
mass of them have a proud contempt for the
Salvation Army. It is therefore questionable
whether the Army could do the local secular
work which Mr. Bosanquet wishes it might. I
cannot refrain from quoting what Mr. Charles
Booth, in his “ Life and Labour,” says of the
religious services of the Salvation Army in
East London: * “If the student of these
matters turns his eyes from those conducting
the service to those for whom it is conducted,
he sees for the most part blank indifference.
Some may ‘ come to scoff, and stay to pray,’
but scoffers are in truth more hopeful than
those—and they are the great bulk of every
audience of which I have ever made one—
who look in to see what is going on; enjoy-
ing the hymns, perhaps, but taking the whole
service as a diversion. I have said that I do
not think the people of East London irreli-
gious in spirit, and also that doctrinal discus-
sion is almost a passion with them; but I do
not think the Salvation Army supplies what
they want, in either one direction or the other.
* p. 126.38
Neighbourhood, Guilds.
The design of the Army ‘to make all men yield,
or at least listen,’ will be disappointed in East
London. On the other hand, they will find re-
cruits there, as elsewhere in England, to swell
the comparatively small band of men and
women who form the actual Army of General
Booth, and who may find their own salvation
while seeking vainly to bring salvation to
others. Not by this road (if I am right) will
religion be brought to the mass of the English
people.”
If Mr. Charles Booth’s judgment be cor-
rect, then no thorough reorganisation of the
higher life, and through that of the whole life,
of the people can be accomplished by the
Salvation Army. Now, instead of attempting
to draw together from any neighbourhood as
workers or captains only those who confess
certain evangelical doctrines, the Neighbour-
hood Guild seeks to draw together first the
best people of the neighbourhood, the most
intelligent, upright, faithful, honest, indus-
trious and public-spirited, whatever their views
about the fall of man and the atonement may
be; and out of these it expects to form the
“ remnant ” of the righteous who shall save theNeutrality in Religion.
39
dissolute, the intemperate, the lazy, the hungry,
the neglected. It invites the co-operation of
devout worshippers, only expecting that no one
shall use the Guild as a means to religious con-
version. Just as the Guild leaves each special
institution to pursue its own line of activity, so
it leaves and expects the Church, through the
clergy and ministers and through the services
and the Sunday schools, to teach theology and
to stir up religious emotions. It will in no
wise work against such efforts.VI.
Enthusiasm foe the Guild.
While the Guild is neutral in religion, one
of its chief virtues is the enthusiasm and
spirit of mutual help and of self-improvement
which it fosters. Instead of needing to he
urged on to work, the volunteer workers who
have helped to organise and counsel the
various clubs have rather to be held back from
over-taxing their strength out of mere de-
light in the enterprise. They begin with one
evening a week; then they want two; and
soon three seem not too many, until the other
members of the family protest and succeed in
bringing back the enthusiasm into ordinary
bounds. A tendency to rob the luxurious
home of what seem to the worker superfluous
pictures, books, and furniture, for the enrich-
ment of the clubs is a charge not infrequently
brought against Neighbourhood Guild workers.
Nor do the members themselves fall short
40Enthusiasm for the Guild.
4l
in this madness. The young men, after work-
ing hard all day, are inclined, if there is any-
thing to be done, to work for their club all
night. Five young men of the Guild in
London recently worked from midnight until
seven in the morning to prepare for an enter-
tainment for the benefit of their library, so' as
to save the expense of hiring others to do the
work ; then they went to their day’s vocations
as usual. This enthusiasm is due in part to
the friendship which springs up unawares
among the members of the club. One young
man insisted last summer that if the Guild had
remained closed another month he must surely
have died. This spirited attachment to the
Guild is in great part due to the method of
responsible self-government on which each
club is based. In the Neighbourhood Guild,
unlike the Salvation Army, there is no such
thing as implicit obedience—hence the joy of
self-direction. There is rational harmony,
unity of will; there is the demand that when
any member has promised to do any particular
thing he must keep his word; but there is no
command from any authority above the united
will and character of the club. Only if a state42	Neighbourhood Guilds.
of war were about to arise, would the organ-
iser exercise authority. The outside workers
who have thus far assisted by their counsel in
each club are equally independent and person-
ally responsible; they know and approve of the
spirit and methods of the Guild before they
undertake work, and then all the details are
left to themselves. It is this independence
and responsibility, this voluntary co-operation,
which gives breath and breeze, freedom and
expansion, to the atmosphere of the Guild.
To illustrate the method of government in a
club of young men between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-six, I may take the following inci-
dent : The young men and young women had
chosen to have as their Christmas festivity a
fancy dress ball. It had been planned that no
one should spend more than half a crown on his
costume; but a certain set of more ambitious
youths insisted on hiring suits for ten shillings
each at the costumier’s. I protested that I
had never spent ten shillings in my life on one
evening’s entertainment, and that surely they
ought not to do so. Then one of the young
men said sarcastically in the meeting of the
whole club, “ We have often been told that thisEnthusiasm for the Guild
43
club is self-governing, and the printed pro-
spectus of the club declares so. But of course
that is only upon paper! ” I saw that he was
right; and I yielded my judgment, saying that
they had far better waste ten shillings than
that I should treat them like children, and
break the principal of the Guild. Fortunately,
the calico costumes turned out to be so much
fresher and prettier than the hired robes, that
the triumph was virtually on the side of
economy.
This principle of freedom allied to personal
responsibility has stirred up an interest not
only in the lighter and merrier objects of the
Guild, but also in its earnest purposes.
The members of the Guild in New York show
the most tender devotion to any family of the
Guild in bereavement, or to any member in time
of sickness. Not long ago the father of a family,
five children of which were in the Guild, was
killed in a lift at the factory where he worked.
The jury at the inquest decided, on the testi-
mony of the employers and of workmen who
had been bribed, that the man was intoxicated
at the time of the accident. By the efforts of
the Guild the matter was investigated, with44
Neighbourhood Guilds.
the result that the jury reversed its decision to
one of culpable negligence on the part of the
employers. The Guild is now suing the firm
for damages on behalf of the family. It has
also assisted the family in a host of ways, so
that even without the father’s wages it is again
self-supporting. One of the young men of this
same Guild not long ago was dangerously ill
with typhoid fever. The members procured
for him one of the best physicians in the city,
while the young women sent him port wine,
beef tea, delicacies and flowers, during his
illness and convalescence. The Guild, besides,
by one evening’s entertainment raised £10 for
his benefit, so that he began work again after
his long illness with very little loss financially.
In the same spirit, the young women’s club
of the Kentish Town Guild gave at the holi-
day season a Christmas treat at Leighton Hall
to sixty very poor children. Each young
woman of the Guild—factory workers them-
selves—made some useful garment for some
one poor child. But such a treat was only
the beginning of regular work on the part of
the young women’s club for the little folk of
the district. Both the young men and womenEnthusiasm for the Guild.
45
are anxious to spread the Guild privileges by
multiplying the number of Guilds in the poorest
streets. More than a score of them have
exclaimed to me impatiently, “I do wish we
could begin the work in Litcham Street now ! ”
And all that keeps us back from beginning to-
morrow is the lack of money to pay for the
initial expenses. It is evident, then, that the
Neighbourhood Guild, although so radically
different in method from the Salvation Army,
is marked by an equal enthusiasm for good
works.VII.
The Family as the Moral Unit of Society.
In another fundamental and yet quite a
different respect the Guild is totally unlike
almost every other institution of the People.
It regards the family as the true moral unit
of society. This it would hold intact, would
raise into conformity with its ideal, and make
use of as a stronghold of the wider civic
virtues. The Guild aims at including all the
members of any family; and thus, if there
are seven in it, would bring a sevenfold influ-
ence for good to bear upon each member—in
the first place, directly upon each; and again,
indirectly through the six others. This prin-
ciple is not applied by trades unions, friendly
societies, working girls’ or working men’s
clubs, Young Men’s or Young Women’s Chris-
tian Associations, polytechnic institutions or
political clubs. All of these, by separating,
in their social life, young and old, boys and
46The Family as the Moral Unit of Society,
girls, men and women, Tories and Liberals, or
men of different trades aud women of different
trades, maim and cripple the many-sided hu-
manity of the persons they would benefit.
It is not easy to see how any other institu-
tion than the Neighbourhood Guild could hold
inviolable the social life of the family, and yet
at the same time allure the members into wider
associations. But the Guild can do this, and
thereby not only strengthens the family tie,
but transforms the family from what it almost
always is, an exclusive and selfish monopoly
of what is best in life, into an agent for foster-
ing and dispensing the highest blessings to the
surrounding community. The family finds its
truest social function by entering as a family
into co-operation with other families for objects
beneficial to all.
Since the Guild consists of a group of clubs
for all ages and both sexes, each club in it
exercises a wholly different moral influence
upon its members from what it would if
isolated. For instance, although our young
woman’s club is very similar in its internal
management and work to all the ordinary work-
ing girls’ clubs, no one could make a greater4«
Neighbourhood Guilds.
mistake than to classify it with them. For
a working girls’ club becomes a totally dif-
ferent institution when it is part of a Guild
to which belong the father and mother, the
brothers and little sisters. The club in the
Guild leads the girl in her longing for social
pleasures into her family, the working girls’
club by itself, on the contrary, leads her away
from home friendships. I question whether by
itself it ought ever to be established for girls who
live with their parents. It is an institution of
unquestionable moral worth only in the case
of independent girls who live in lodgings. Nor
have I any less misgivings as to the ultimate
effects of young men’s clubs in the Christian
Associations when unconnected with clubs for
sisters and fathers and mothers. The boy gets
a wholly perverted view of sociability, he soon
regards it as a relation which only men with
men are capable of; and after he marries, he
will be so unaccustomed to the idea of comrade-
ship and conversation with women that when
he craves social pleasures of an intellectual
type he will turn away from home to the poli-
tical club or even the public-house. I have
often visited the large gatherings of youngThe Family as the Moral Unit of Society. 49
men in the Young Men’s Christian Associations,
but never without alarm. Where are the sis-
ters and sweethearts and fathers and mothers
of these young men ? And why are these men
drawn off here by themselves evening after even-
ing ? Can there be a doubt that such institu-
tions, in spite of their good intention, are hostile
to the social life of the family and to the intel-
lectual and moral companionship of the sexes ?
Yet this unwholesome separation of young
and old, of men and women, is not more perni-
cious to the best life of the community than is
the dividing of men in their social life exclu-
sively according to trades. How can class dis-
tinction, how can class prejudice and animosity
and mutual misunderstanding, ever be done
away with if only those of the same handicraft
meet together for the wider ends of life ? If
about the trades union be gathered the whole
intellectual opportunity of the man, then art,
literature, recreation, good works and friend-
ship will shed a halo over that particular in-
dustrial group, and thus will intensify a thou-
sandfold that very spirit of jealousy already
most disadvantageous to the cause of universal
labour organisation.
E50	Neighbourhood Guilds.
The public-house has long been introducing
side attractions—splendid lights and carved
woodwork, reading-rooms, music, friendly sick-
club privileges—in order to meet the new and
wider needs of working men; but this adorn-
ment of the path that leads to drunkenness is
not less seductive than the tendency to make
trades’ associations the rallying point of a man's
whole life. Let trades unions remain restricted
to the special object of settling labour disputes
justly, but let the man’s whole life be guarded
by an organisation as broad as life itself. If
in one family, one son is a shoemaker and one
a shop-keeper and one a clerk, is not this dif-
ference of occupation only an additional reason
for their associating out of working hours?
They would then correct the onesidedness of
one another’s culture.
And scarcely less pernicious are political
clubs, the moment they take upon themselves,
as they are inclined to do, the whole manage-
ment of the social life of their members. They,
too, have their reading-rooms, their garden
parties and dances, their circulating libraries,
their concerts, their general lecture courses.
But they introduce a sword of division betweenThe Family as the Moral Unit of Society. 51
men who need each other most. Who so much
needs the companionship of a Liberal as a
Tory? and who so much the acquaintance of
a Tory as a Liberal or a Socialist? What
will so effectively break down party fanaticism
as an organisation of the social life of the
people along non-political lines? And how
can neighbours ever come to love one another
as neighbours, if their whole life be divided by
political differences ? How shall children of
one mother continue in manhood their early
affection, when all these artificial barriers of
trade and class and party are thrust in between
them? The more urgent is the influence of
the Neighbourhood Guild in preserving the
family life, because modern industry in its de-
mand for perfect mobility of labour, strikes a
blow directly at the home life of working men.VIII.
Social Meetings foe Young Men and Young
Women.
A kindred principle, which distinguishes the
Guild, follows from its being a group of fami-
lies. Young men and young women meet to-
gether in its classes, committees, social enter-
tainments, dances, concerts, lectures, visits to
museums, and excursions to the country. The
benefit and protection to the character of
youths between the ages of fourteen and
twenty-five in meeting young women in this
manner in the Guild is inestimable. Nothing
so diverts the youth’s imagination from temp-
tation and from unworthy fancies like chival-
rous comradeship with right-minded women.
And as each Guild always starts with such,
and tends to raise all who enter, up to their
standard, it is always a centre of refining in-
fluence for men.
But more than this—five years’ experience
53Social Meetings for Young Men and Women. S3
in the Neighbourhood Guilds confirms the
belief that the constant companionship of
seventy young men and seventy young women
is the surest safeguard against hasty and too
early marriage. Of the young men and women
in the Forsyth Street Neighbourhood Guild in
New York, who have now met evening after
evening for nearly five years, not one has
married, and only one engagement has been
formed, yet many of the members are two-
and-twenty and three-and-twenty years old.
It is well that every young man and every
young woman should know by long acquaint-
ance fifty or a hundred members of the other
sex. Then, if they marry from among that
number, there is a strong probability of con-
genial taste and character.
It should be said, further, in order to disarm
a common prejudice, that in the Guild there is
no promiscuous and unregulated meeting of
the young men and women. And especially
in the dancing and social evenings is the re-
gulation strict; no one is ever admitted to
them except the members of clubs, the same
persons who have been meeting week after
week for other more serious objects. Those,54
Neighbourhood Guilds.
therefore, who would rightly condemn the
bringing in of all sorts of people from the
street and the allowing of them to dance to-
gether, must recognise in the exclusive nature
of the Guild dances a safeguard that is certain
to prevent impropriety.IX.
The Division of a Guild into Clubs.
The bringing of both sexes and of all ages to-
gether in the Guild is not more fundamentally
a peculiarity of it than is the subdivision into
a number of clubs, separated according to age
and sex. The reasons for this division are not
far to seek. Boys between the ages of twelve
and seventeen have a certain quality of mind
in common, which draws them naturally to-
gether ; and when they are formed into a club,
the natural affinity becomes elevated into a
manly esprit de corps. Also, their tastes being
similar, the same occupations interest them.
But more than this, the same moral discipline
the same instruction in conduct, and the same
warnings against error, apply to them all. To
illustrate the specific treatment of boys in a
club, consider how admirably the study of
nature, of birds and crystals and shells, assists
in the moral development of youths. An inte-
55s 6	Neighbourhood Guilds.
rest in the collection of natural objects is the
surest and happiest means of diverting the boy’s
imagination from a morbid direction, at an age
when he is liable to be unduly preoccupied
with himself. And in a club the interest in
such studies may readily be fanned into an
enthusiasm.
Now, with girls, there is not the same
reason for the study of natural history. But
besides the difference of methods in treatment
and instruction, there is also a further reason
for distinct clubs for boys and girls. Boys
should feel themselves to be men, not simply
as individuals, but in common as representa-
tives of a natural class; and girls ought to
be made conscious of the common lot of all
women and to sympathise with all, as well as
to recognise their own lot as individuals. And,
furthermore, however much men may care for
the society of women, and women for that of
men, there is also a distinct and natural liking
of men for the society of their own sex, and
of women for theirs. Both these attachments
should be satisfied, and the Guild meets this
need by having separate clubs for each sex
and then uniting the clubs for various intel-The Division of a Guild into Clubs.
57
lectual and recreative objects. There is also
a special advantage to women in having a self-
governing club of their own, because there
they learn executive management and organi-
sation, and gain practice in speaking, de-
bating and co-operating in practical work;
whereas, if women are only in the same club
with men, they are certain, with rare excep-
tions, to stay in the background, while the
men come to the front and do all the
initiative work. But if boys between twelve
and seventeen, and girls between the same
ages, form natural groups, so do young men
between seventeen and twenty-five, and women
of corresponding years. Beyond this limit of
age, all men feel themselves on easy and natural
terms of conversation with one another, as also
do women above twenty-five years old. There
is, therefore, a natural division of all persons
over twelve years old into six clubs, three for
men and boys, and three for women and girls.
Yet experience in the Guild work proves that
there should not be an advancement of the
members of a younger club into an older, for
that breaks up the friendships and the moral
attachment to the club, but rather must each5 8	Neighbourhood Guilds.
of the younger clubs each year raise the age of
admission for new members; so that the club
which now consists of boys will in five years
be the young men’s club, and so on, while a
new club of young boys and girls must be
formed every few years for those just leaving
school.
Before turning from the subject of the sub-
division of the Guild into clubs according to
age and sex, I must not omit to refer to the
strong spirit of group-emulation which the
inevitable comparison of each club with the
others of the Guild engenders. It thus appeals
to the motive which the early French Socialists
believed would be powerful enough, as an in-
centive to work, to take the place of individual
competition. Each club, seeing the excellence
of the others, is not satisfied until it has reached
the same standard. Especially is the rivalry
between young men’s and young women’s clubs
always spirited and wholesome. Neither will
allow the other to outdo it in generous support
of the Guild, in the quality of its entertain-
ments, in the economic and parliamentary man-
agement of its finances and business meetings.
It should, however, be noted that, althoughThe Division of a Guild into Clubs.
59
there is emulation, there is no competition for
prizes.
This same principle of emulation would
come into play on a large scale if there were
a number of connected Guilds. There would
spring up a rivalry of one with the other, and
a corresponding intensification of interest in
every intellectual or social undertaking of the
Guild.X.
The Space Needed foe one Guild.
Bepoee the general principles and methods
are further elucidated, it may be well to ex-
plain certain details of our work, which persons
who are interested in the scheme and wish to
start on similar lines always ask about.
First, as to the amount of room needed for
six clubs. If all the members of each club
met together every evening, then six rooms
large enough to accommodate them would be
needed; but the practice, adopted for other
reasons, of not allowing any club to have more
than one regular and formal meeting a week
enables one large room to serve all the clubs.
At Leighton Hall, for example, the largest
room, which is 40 feet by 20, is at present used
on Monday evenings by the Choral Society, to
which members of all the clubs and non-
members belong; on Tuesday evenings by the
Young Women’s Club, for gymnastics and their
60The Space Needed for one Guild.
6l
literary, musical, and business meeting; on
Wednesdays by the club of younger boys, who,
during one hour of the evening, are joined by
the little girls for a dancing class; on Thurs-
day evenings by the young men, for their
regular meetings; on Fridays by the older men
and women; on Saturdays this same room is
used by the young men and women, 140 in all,
for dancing and for musical entertainments;
on Sunday afternoons, at 4 o’clock, the free
concert takes place in it; on Sunday evenings,
at 8 o’clock, the free lectures, followed by dis-
cussions, are held there. Although it might be
thought that this one room did its fair share of
work, yet so desirous are the organisers of the
Guild to make good use of the space at their
disposal, that their conscience will not be freed
from a haunting sense of waste until the room
is used every Sunday morning for working
men’s classes, such as have proved successful
in many cities in England; every Saturday
afternoon, as a play - room for the poorest
Board School children of the district; and the
rest of the week during the day time as a free
model kindergarten, or possibly as a creche.
So much might be accomplished by means of62
Neighbourhood Guil.is.
one room, if there were at tached to it some place
for stowing away furniture when notin use.
If other rooms are at the disposal of the
Guild, they can be made use of for equally
diverse and manifold purposes. One room may
be used for several objects and lor several sets
of persons in one evening. Our library is occu-
pied from six to eight on Wednesdays by the
little girls; at eight the carpenter’s bench and
tools are carried in, and until ten o’clock the
room is used by the carpentry class; then a com-
mittee may take possession for three-quarters
of an hour to plan the wider campaign of the
Guild, or, if you please, to dream dreams of a
mighty service to mankind. The Guild at
Leighton Hall has at its disposal eight rooms
altogether : more would be a blessing; it might
make shift with less. Spacious apartments for
a Guild hold the same relation to its inner life
and growth as they do to the social life and
aims of a private family—they are no more and
no less essential. A Neighbourhood Guild in
one room is a Guild “ for a’ that.” Indeed, the
one in Kentish Town has been in its present
quarters only fourteen months; previously it
rented a schoolroom for only two nights a week.XI.
The Limit of Membership in One Club.
Another question of detail, involving, how-
ever, important psychological principles, is as
to the right size for any one club. In the
first place, I would say, no club should ever be
larger in numbers than would allow of all the
members sitting about in a circle in the largest
room of the Guild during their social and
business meetings. Never should there be any
front seats, or, rather, any back seats, in a
democratic social club. Nothing better sym-
bolizes the unity and equality of the members,
or fosters these sentiments more surely than
sitting about in such a circle to transact busi-
ness and debate social questions in general,
and the aims of the Guild in particular. If,
therefore, the largest room would accommodate
only twenty persons in this manner, no club in
that particular Guild should consist of more
than twenty persons. Under such circum-
6364	Neighbourhood Guilds.
stances it would be the constant object of the
organiser of the clubs to get the twenty best
persons in the neighbourhood, thus to make up
for defect of quantity by superior quality. But
while the size of the room, if small, may de-
termine the limit of numbers in any one club;
if the room were very large, another principle
comes in to limit the membership. No club
should have more members in it than can
easily become well acquainted with one an-
other. Every person who enters ought to be
able after five weeks in the club to know and
be known by all the old members personally
and by name, trusting to the ordinary casual
meetings to bring the acquaintance about. If
the club be too large for that, it defeats its own
end. It must be a home where any one’s absence
is felt and regretted. Nothing draws a person
to any place so much as being expected and
wanted. Experience shows that after a club has
been organised for a year or two it may raise its
membership, if it has room, to seventy. But a
larger number would certainly destroy the
personal intimacy of the members, the club
would then become an institution instead of a
group of friends, it would be a debating orThe Limit of Membership in One Club. 65
political society, or a polytechnic or educa-
tional centre, but not an expansion of the family
idea. And becoming impersonal, it would be
a dead thing, not an inspirer to generous co-
operation. I have said that after two years a
club might increase its numbers to seventy,
but even this should be step by step, lest new
elements of the wrong kind come in too
rapidly to be assimilated, and thereby destroy
the character and tone of the club. A club
ought never to have more than twenty or
thirty members for the first six months. No
one person organising it could understand the
individuality and talents of a greater number.
It is astonishing how persons who have gained
valuable experience in the guidance of others
in the home, fail to apply their wisdom when
they come to deal with people in social clubs.
Any parent knows that with five or six sons
and daughters to teach and discipline he has
his hands quite full, yet he will probably fancy
that the larger a club is the better, as if he
could influence and instruct and harmonize
two hundred strangers. When I read, as I
often do, of the marvellous success of some
club, and find it given as proof that the club
jp66
Neighbourhood Guilds.
has 1,000 or 1,500 members, then I know that
the founders of that club do not mean by
success the inner life and spiritual fellowship;
for no man has either imaginative insight or
time enough to know and cherish with indivi-
dualized affection 1,000 or 1,500 men. And
I know, further, that unless the friendships
comprehend the whole club, they only mean
so many cliques and factions jarring with one
another. Nothing has been more striking in
the moral development of the Guild clubs than
the way in which the spirit of the whole has
broken up, one after another, all narrower
divisions. What is still more important to
consider is, that small groups of friends may,
since they escape inspection, become centres of
demoralization, which will corrupt the whole
body. The social club, then, must not be so
large that the imagination and the sentiment of
its members will be unable to comprehend and
love it. Experience proves also that clubs for
boys and girls cannot wisely be made as large
as those for young men and women, for they
need more detailed attention, if one is to win
their affection, and to clarify and develop their
ideas of right and wrong.The Limit of Membership in One Club. 67
What, then, to the philistine mind is an
occasion for contempt—the small size of any
one Guild—is really its truest merit. For in
the highest things men are never reached and
saved, they are never made really happy and
free, by wholesale. Still, if the Guild scheme
should spread so that it could count 500
branches, it might win the applause even of
those who estimate the worth of institutions by
statistics of outward and visible things.XII.
A Radiation of Guilds from a Centre.
But if the Guild is to multiply itself, the de-
tails of the best method of procedure must be
to a certain extent determined upon before-
hand. Insuperable difficulties immediately
present themselves if we attempt to proceed
without a well thought-out plan. For instance,
how can the workers now ready to offer their
time and training undertake this enterprise, if
the next Guild were to be planted three or four
miles away from Leighton Hall ? Clearly, if
the personnel of the Kentish Town Guild is to
be of any service, the next branch founded must
be in the same district of London, and the
third one started at a point in easy walking
distance from the second, and so on. In tins
way a network of such institutions might
gradually be stretched all over London. Now
it happens, fortunately and designedly, that the
members of the Leighton Hall Guild do not
08A Radiatim of Guilds from a Centre. 69
live in any one street, or in contiguous streets,
but come from throughout Kentish Town,
Camden Town, and Gospel Oak. There would,
therefore, be a nucleus of workers already liv-
ing in each locality of the district, who would
become the founders of new Guilds. It is ac-
cordingly hoped that, if this analysis of the
Guild so commend the scheme to the public
as to induce them to assist in carrying it out,
then, instead of starting—or, at least, in addition
to starting—Guilds in their own neighbour-
hoods, they will lend their support to a radia-
tion of Guilds from Leighton Hall as a centre.
For the difficulty of finding volunteer workers
able to establish new branches is greater than
one might suppose. Six' months’ work in a
branch already founded is the only sure equip-
ment for undertaking the responsibility of a
new centre. If the public encourage the plan,
a number of friends will go with the writer of
these pages to live—as soon as' we can procure
a suitable residence for a Guild—in Litcham
Street, which is only twelve minutes’ walk
from Leighton Hall. More than a dozen
members of the Guild live within three
minutes’ walk of that street. They would70
Neighbourhood Guilds.
immediately help to form the new Guild,
developing the various sides of the work
needed to be done there, as soon as the clubs
were in order for action. Then we would go
to a third neighbourhood, and live there for
two or three months, until this centre also
began to show an independent character and
a capacity to develop itself. In the Parish of
St. Pancras, of which Kentish Town is a part,
there is a population of more than 246,000
souls; at least ten Guilds should be developed
here before we attempt to cross over into the
West End, the East and South of London. In
these ten Guilds, however, our experience and
wisdom would be growing, and the number of
efficient and enthusiastic workers continually
increasing, so that we could, in more systematic
fashion, send out workers to more distant
points.
It should be borne in mind as an argument
in favour of a radiation of Guilds from a centre,
that ten near one another could accomplish by
their united effort a hundred times more than
the same number scattered throughout London.XIII.
A Body of Trained Workers on Secular
Lines.
But having said so much about the members
of the Guild being trained in its methods, I
ought to specify the kind of training, and give
proof to justify the statement that they are
trained. Let us consider so light and frivolous
a matter as the work of teaching seventy young
men and seventy young women to dance the
lancers and to waltz. In order to introduce this
refined form of pleasure to the Leighton Hall
Guild, it was necessary for me to invite ten or
a dozen of my friends, living a long distance
away from Kentish Town, to come every Satur-
day evening for two months to take charge
of small classes in waltzing, and of each set of
lancers. But now I could find thirty young
men and thirty young women in the Guild
thoroughly capable and willing to introduce
dancing into any number of Guilds we might
7172
Neighbourhood Guilds.
start in the district. Or consider the teaching
of cooking. One of the young men of the
Leighton Hall Guild was apprenticed for five
years as a cook. He, like others in other de-
partments, contributed his talent to the benefit
of the Guild. He has been teaching cookery to
a class of twelve young women since last Novem-
ber, half of whom, at least, will be able under
his supervision before long to teach the same
course, and they are willing to do so. Thus in
the next Guild, from the start we should be
able to have lessons in cooking every evening in
the week, without overtaxing any one volunteer
worker. Similarly may instructors be drawn
from our classes in wood-carving, short-hand,
elocution, gymnastics, and the rest. A more
important skill, which also bears more directly
upon the main purpose of the Guild, is the ability
to act upon committees of all kinds, and to con-
duct the affairs of a club ; for without this skill
social reform and organisation cannot go on.
It has been most encouraging to note the rapidly
advancing self-government, and the correspond-
ing growth of conscious responsibility, which
has been made within a year. Foi’ example,
the treasurer of the young men’s club hadA Body of Trained Workers on Secular Lines. 75
always until recently delivered over the money
collected from the members’ fees to an older
friend outside the club, as soon as a pound was
collected; but suddenly the club awoke to a
sense of the indignity of dependence upon some
one outside, and of lack of trust in their own
treasurer. Since then the treasurer has had
entire possession of the club’s fees, and his in-
terest in his work has developed tenfold, as seen
in the greater attention to its details and in new
devices for proving his efficiency to his fellow-
members. This treasurer will be the instructor
to the inexperienced treasurer of the Litcham
Street young men’s club in the mysteries of
keeping accounts and of collecting dues
promptly. There are also in this young men’s
club half a dozen members, any one of whom
could be the right hand man of the new pre-
sident of any new club, showing him how to
keep order and conduct meetings. Besides,
through the system of electing officers every
three months, there are as many more members
who, having served as secretary of the club, can
write out admirable minutes of the business
transacted. There is also, on the part of nine-
tenths of the members of the older clubs, so74
Neighbourhood Guilds.
thorough an understanding of the objects of the
Guild, that I could call on as many as I might
need—fifteen or twenty—to go from house to
house, in any neighbourhood, to explain to the
inhabitants the scheme of social reform about
to be attempted among them, and to draw
them into it.
How the members are being trained also
in special lines of reform work is well illus-
trated in the investigation, which one young
man has been making, of the laws concerning
the establishment of public wash-houses and
baths, and concerning the way to bring pressure
to bear upon the vestry so as to influence it to
establish a public wash-house in Kentish Town.
The district is sorely in need of this great con-
venience for the poor. The nearest wash-house
is more than a mile away. So great and evi-
dent is the need, that one philanthropic person
has already established a private wash-house
in the district; but it is always overcrowded,
failing wholly to meet the need. This Guild
member, along with others, is now ready,
armed with the law, the facts and the argu-
ments, to help in the effort being made by the
Guild to arouse local sentiment and move theA Body of Trained Workers on Secular Lines. 75
authorities to their duty in the matter. This
sufficiently illustrates what the Guild is doing
in certain lines of secular work, and can do in
others.
But, undoubtedly, greater mastery of social
problems and methods of reform is needed on
the part of, at least, a few of the leading
members of the Guild than can be acquired
in leisure hours by people hard at work in
factories all day. Much of the work also
demands attention during the day-time by
persons devoting all their energy to it. For
these reasons it is proposed to draw from among
the members a few who have shown most
ability and most interest in the Guild work,
and enable them to devote all their time to
it. In short, I should become their employer,
paying them ordinary fair wages for eight
hours’ work a day, with ordinary promise of
advance if they succeed well. These would
become immediately the agents of the Guild,
to do whatever was needed. Sometimes they
would have to spend days together, merely in
studying the question of the housing of the
poor, or oh sanitation, or of co-operative stores
for distribution, in relation to the district they7.6
Neighbourhood Guilds.
were attending to. They would be visitors
and lecturers on the Guild scheme ; they would
establish in each district a labour intelligence
bureau; they would bring themselves into touch
with all the reform agencies in London—
hospitals, homes for women, the prisoners’
aid societies, friendly societies, trades unions,
the associations for founding trades unions
for women, the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, the philanthropic institu-
tions of the Church; they would be rent col-
lectors and organisers of clubs. The Guild
scheme needs two such agents immediately.
The first money spent, after meeting the already
existing expenses, will be for the wages of such
workers. This plan will in no wise destroy the
spontaneous and disinterested devotion of such
paid members to the clubs to which they al-
ready belong; for it is only for the eight hours’
work during the daytime that these mem-
bers would be paid. The evening work would
be volunteer, as at present. This distinction
would preserve the natural friendly relation
between the paid worker and the ordinary
member. For those, however, who had a strong
liking for such work and ability in it, it wouldA Body of Trained Workers on Secular Lines, 'j'j
be an added spur to good volunteer work, if
they had the outlook open before them of earn-
ing a modest livelihood, while, at the same time,
doing work for the good of the community.
The wages would not be higher than in ordi-
nary trades, so that no one would be allured
into work for the Guild by mere love of gain.
But the intellectual and moral advantages
would surely be a strong attraction to many,
as I already know from conversation on the
subject with a number of young men and
women. They would be developing their
minds, increasing their stock of knowledge in
all social matters, and reaping the satisfaction
of seeing every day the palpable gains in hap-
piness and character which they were bring-
ing to those about them. They would have
the outlook of a permanent position in life,
for which they would be growing more and
more fitly equipped. The Guild scheme once
established, no neighbourhood would wish to
dispense with the service of such a benefactor.
And yet the number of paid workers would be
comparatively small. So far as I can picture
to my mind the needs of the case, one such
worker for each Guild would be enough.XIV.
The Guild Budget.
In the question of securing trained workers,
the ever-recurring one of financial support
has again cropped up; for no aspect of the
work is more than a fair dream unless a
certain amount of money is forthcoming. It
will therefore be well, before proceeding to
further outlines of method, to consider the
details of finance. We make an appeal for
£2,000 a year for ten years, as covering the
Guild budget, of which the main details are
as follows for this year: Leighton Hall has
been bought for £750 for fifty-one years, with
an annual ground rent of £1. This has been
done by borrowing £250, and taking a mort-
gage of £500 on the property at 5 per cent,
interest. The loan and the mortgage ought
to be paid off this year. A £100 worth of
improvements and fundamental repairs are
needed at Leighton Hall before it will be
78The Guild Budget.
79
really in a desirable condition for the uses to
be made of it. Another £100 will be needed
for the proper furnishing of the class rooms
and library, and the wages of the care-taker.
The wages of two Guild workers for the year
would amount to about £156. The rent,
furnishing, care-taking, lighting, heating, etc.,
of a new Guild house would take £250. And
Guild house number three would require
another £250. These items would leave about
£400 for the establishment of a co-operative
coal-depot, and a residence club for young men,
and another for young women, for the stock-
ing of our libraries, and similar enterprises,
which would easily absorb the small amount at
our disposal.
However large the initial expenses may
seem, the hope of rendering each club self-
supporting in five years from the time of its
beginning can easily be shown to be well
founded. After they are well organised into
clubs, the young men and women and older
people always find themselves able to pay
threepence a week as regular fees into the
Guild. Four clubs of seventy members each
thus yield £2 10s. a week, or £130 a year.80	Neighbourhood Guilds.
The two younger clubs of fifty members each,
with a fee of twopence a week, would bring
in £43 6s. 8d. in a year. It is also found,
by reckoning from what has been done, that
any Guild with four older clubs could give
a musical and dramatic entertainment once a
fortnight (each of the older clubs taking its
turn in the management once in two months),
and could in this way, even in so small a
room as that at Leighton Hall, clear £4 at
each entertainment, on a charge of sixpence
for tickets. Such a source during twelve
months would bring £96 into the coffers of
the Guild. Here we have an annual income
of £269 6s. 8d., and no Neighbourhood Guild
could possibly require more. If it did, many
devices, such as garden-parties once a month
during the summer, with admission by tickets,
at one shilling each, are known to bring in
many pounds into local clubs.XV.
The Transformation of various Institutions
into Neighbourhood Guilds.
There is another way in which Guilds may
be started without calling upon the Leigldon
Hall workers, or demanding financial aid from
the public, or radiating from the Kentish Town
Guild as a centre. Many institutions already
exist which may most easily and naturally
be transformed into Neighbourhood Guilds.
Working men’s clubs almost unconsciously—at
least, with no fully preconceived plan—find
themselves admitting the women of the neigh-
bourhood into some sort of affiliation. The
women are allowed one evening a week, or are
assigned the use of a reading-room, or are in-
vited and expected to attend Thursday evening
lectures and Sunday morning concerts, or they
may have books from the circulating library;
so that in reality the working men's club has be-
come a union of two clubs, one for men and one82
Neighbourhood Guilds.
for women. In the same manner political clubs
for men, as I have observed before, tend to
widen their object so as to include the whole of
social reform; mere politics, except during excit-
ing crises, fall into the background; and general
education, recreation, and social pursuits take
their place. Indeed, I have been told that, were
it not for these attractions, which the political
name of the club would not lead a stranger to
suspect, such organisations could not keep
alive. It should be further stated that the
idea of a Neighbourhood Guild, as I have
described it, was in great part suggested by
the real nature and tendency of many institu-
tions, whose nominal and professed fellowship
and aim were much narrower. Such institu-
tions, it seems probable, only require that the
fully developed idea which unconsciously they
are already following, be presented clearly
before them, in order to induce them to place
the women’s club on complete equality with
the men’s, to make room for young people’s
clubs, and to drop the marked emphasis of any
one object like party politics for a balanced
and harmonized pursuit of all aspects of the
social ideal.Transformation of Institutions into Guilds. 83
Many a working men’s club, moreover, lan-
guishes because it has not had the wit to deve-
lop itself in this direction. Such clubs may be
induced by policy and necessity, as an alter-
native to breaking up, to widen their aim, and
to admit women and young people. The co-
operation of the women and the young will give
moral tone, life and charm to the men’s club.
It will prove as great an attraction as the
sale of spirits now proves, and would increase
the receipts of the club as much. Here is
a hint for working men’s temperance clubs.
No wonder they scarcely ever pay, no wonder
men need drink as a pastime, when they have
ascetically denied themselves the companion-
ship of women and the young.
The members of working girls’ clubs also
will rejoice at the proposal to give a number
of their club rooms for two or three evenings
a week to an affiliated club for young men.
Indeed, not only the members, but the organ-
isers would in many cases welcome such a
change. The ladies who have established
the admirable set of prosperous working
girls’ clubs in New York city, say that a
great drawback to the larger success of their84
Neighbourhood Guilds.
movement is due to the fact that they do not
reach the brothers and lovers of the girls.
There are attractions drawing the girl away
from the club-house of an evening, and divert-
ing her attention from the literary and busi-
ness pursuits. To meet this difficulty, the
clubs have certain evenings when they may
invite their men acquaintances. But unfortu-
nately, again, the men are shy of coming to a
women’s institution. Let the young men have
equal rights and privileges, so that it shall no
longer be merely a girls’ club, and the change
would not prove simply a benefit to the club
itself and to the girls, but to the young men as
well. The need for a similar transformation
of working lads’ institutions into Neighbour-
hood Guilds is equally evident and is begin-
ning to be consciously felt.
The Neighbourhood Guild idea lends itself
also to the solution of a difficult problem in
connection with the work of the London Poly-
technic Institutions. The vexing question with
these has always been how to meet the needs
of the social life, and touch the character as
well as train the special intellectual faculties of
those who attend their classes. Persons whoTransformation of Institutions into Guilds. 85
have been acquainted with the Leighton Hail
system of clubs, and who know the social needs
of the Polytechnics, have said that the incor-
poration of the Guild idea into the polytechnic
system is feasible. The only drawback I can
see is, that these institutions are too large and
are situated, for the most part, not in the neigh-
bourhoods of the homes of the people who
frequent it, but in business localities. Still,
each one might be the starting-point for Guilds
throughout its own district. The People’s
Palace has also fallen into confusion in its
attempt to reach and build up the social life of
its people. Is it not because the effort has not
been dominated by the principle of transform-
ing the social groups which spring up naturally,
into a network of inter-communicating clubs
for the pursuit of all high ends ?
There are reasons for questioning whether
even Toynbee Hall, in spite of all its good
work, will be a permanent force on the side
of culture and character, unless it unifies its
thousand scattered and wide-reaching efforts,
and renders them democratic by adopting its
own immediate neighbourhood as its field of
work, by setting its own neighbours to man*86
Neighbourhood Guilds.
age its enterprises, and by educating them
for this through the discipline and experience
of Guild club-life. Leighton Hall has some-
times been described as “ another Toynbee
Hall,” and perhaps (except that the work
of Leighton Hall is as yet comparatively in-
significant) this is as good a description as
could be given in three words. During a resi-
dence of three months at Toynbee Hall, the
founder of the first Neighbourhood Guild had
gained many practical suggestions which he
incorporated in the Guild. Several of the
Guilds also, like Toynbee Hall, are university
settlements. Besides this, many details of the
Toynbee work are repeated in the Guilds. And
still the difference between the latter and the
former is fundamental. The men at Toynbee
Hall believe in having no method or system,
but simply in watching their opportunity to do
anything good that turns up, and in learning
the condition and mental habits of the people.
Now to begin without preconceived plans is the
only scientific attitude toward social problems;
but that on principle one should continue, after
years of practical work and observation, to
have no formulated methods and principles, isTransformation of Institutions into Guilds. 87
itself a dogma. I asked a young Oxford
graduate some three years ago, what were the
principles and aims of the young men’s club
which he had charge of in Wentworth Street.
After some hesitation, he answered, that he
did not know that it had any principles or
aims. Then I asked what the young men did
during the evenings, what their programme
was, and how it varied from night to night.
He answered, that they had no programme,
and all the evenings were the same. The
members boxed, smoked, played cards, went
and came as they pleased. Nor could the
manager of this club see that it was doing any
particular good. I would not imply that this
is typical of the Toynbee work, but it is typical
of their dislike of method and system, or was
three, four and five years ago; and they still
decry method. But surely, if there is any
reason for the existence of a club, it must
reveal, to a rational observer, its aims and
principles; the practical effort to improve a
set of young men must disclose a best way
of doing so, and these generalizations from ex-
perience might become deductive principles to
guide the extension of the work into any new83
Neighbourhood Guilds.
field. What I would maintain is, that any
one reflecting over the various unconnected
details of the Toynbee Hall movement, will feel
that what it needs, is to formulate the principles
which its experience suggests, and that these
principles will turn out to be those of the
Neighbourhood Guild. If this be a correct
analysis of the needs of Toynbee Hall, then it
is probable that it will gradually develop the
main features of the Neighbourhood Guild. It
seems already to be doing so. Its clubs are
managed more like those of the Guild than
formerly. Its reading classes are gradually
becoming a more prominent characteristic, and
the differences between these and ordinary
classes is the personal and social relation of
teacher to class and of the members among
themselves, which is the feature of the Guild
classes. But I am not aware that the branches
of its work are as yet being unified and
systematised, or put into the hands of the
people of Whitechapel.
The social work done by many of the
Churches may suggest itself to my readers as
very similar to that of the Neighbourhood
Guild, and as easily capable of being developedTransformation of Institutions into Guilds. 89
into complete harmony. The main difference
between the Guild and the clubs in connection
with religious societies is the same as that
between it and almost all other clubs as now
conducted. These latter are inspired by no
far-reaching and definite purpose of social re-
construction. Accordingly they are aimless
and confined to details, they have no further
object than to keep boys off the street or
men out of public-houses, and to teach chess,
draughts, or reading. If they would under-
take the constant inculcation of social duties,
insistence upon the study of the economic
and moral problems of the day, and the
enlistment of their members into a detailed
scheme of reform, their resemblance to the
Guild would be something more than in the
mere mechanism of club-life. They must trans-
fer their emphasis from details and matters
indifferent, to the idea of reforming society.
That would be a greater innovation than the
mere adoption of the principles of internal
organisation. There is nothing, however, either
in the structure of the Guild or in its emphasis
of civic knowledge and of devotion to the
community, that conflicts with the doctrines9°
Neighbourhood Guilds.
of the Church ; and its work seems eminently
suitable for the laity to undertake. Of course
it would all depend on whether this secular
work would enlist the enthusiasm of the
religious missionary, and whether he would
feel inclined to remain silent in the Guild
upon matters of religion. The teaching of any
religious doctrines is in direct hostility to the
idea of neighbourhood organisation. In the
Guild in New York, Jews, Freethinkers, Cath-
olics, and Protestants worked harmoniously
together. One word, however, of either theo-
logical or anti-theological teaching would have
driven away from us one element or another.
In London the people who are indifferent or
hostile to theology are a considerable minority
in every neighbourhood. If you wish to draw
men together as neighbours, the only practical
policy is neutrality in religion. Whether any
Church is willing to assume this attitude in
its social reform work is for it to decide.XVI.
The Way to Start a New Guild.
“ How would you set to work to organise
a new Guild ? ” is a question often asked me.
The answer is, that there are many ways,
circumstances determining which is best in
any particular case. The problem, however,
divides itself into two. The way to start and
organise clubs for grown-up people is not the
same as that for young people’s clubs.
In order to induce the young to come to
a Guild it is sometimes only necessary to invite
one young man in the neighbourhood, and ask
him to invite everybody he knows. Thus the
Guild was started in New York with sixty-
three members, and no further advertisement
was necessary. The little brothers of these
formed the second club, the older sisters the
third, the little sisters the fourth club, and so
on. In case one person cannot bring in mem-
bers enough, a visit to the factories of the
m92
Neighbourhood Guilds.
neighbourhood and an invitation to the boys in
a five minute speech during their tea hour, will
cause a number to turn up at the Guild rooms
the next evening. Circulars also may be
distributed at every house in the neighbour-
hood. And if this distribution of hand-bills be
accompanied by a personal call and invitation
from some of the Guild workers, there is no
possibility of not getting the desired number
of members for the beginning. When they have
once come together, the first thing is to explain
briefly what the club will be like, and proceed
to the election from among their number of a
president, secretary and treasurer, pro tem.
This done, the whole evening will be taken up
with explaining to them how to conduct a
business meeting in parliamentary fashion, and
training them in making and seconding and
putting motions. No sport is so immediately
attractive as this kind of business. Nothing so
appeals to their sense of dignity and import-
ance. They feel that now they are at last of
significance in the community, and this feeling
is a basis for most that is good. Such meet-
ings of the club must be continued once every
week.The Way to Start a New Guild.
93
After a month has passed, regular officers
and an executive committee may be appointed.
But the committee and officers ought never, as
is the rule in so many clubs, and as is a necessity
in larger ones, to carry out the management
without consulting and getting the permission
of the whole club in every matter. Only
by such a democratic control of the com-
mittee by the vote of the members can a vital
interest on the part of all be sustained.
Only by such control can misunderstandings
between committee and club be prevented.
Only in this way also can the members receive
such an education in debate, in co-operation, in
mutual appreciation, in willingness to subordi-
nate one’s own whim to the good of the whole, as
will prepare them for participation in the wide
enterprises of the community at large. Once
organised, and holding a meeting once a week,
they will plan the whole work and amusement
of the club. Shall they form a choral society ?
what evening can it meet? Shall they have
dancing ? Shall every member be compelled to
attend, at least, one class once a week ? How
long shall a member be allowed to get in arrear
before he is dropped from the club ? Shall the94
Neighbourhood Guilds.
fees of members out of work be remitted?
What punishment shall be placed upon mem-
bers who conduct themselves unworthily ?
These are a few of the thousand and one
questions, of vital interest to those discussing
them, which from the first will spring up. A
body of rules for the club will thus be gradu-
ally formulated out of the needs and difficulties
which actually present themselves, and out of
the common sense and feeling for justice on the
part of the members themselves. Often rules
are asked for by persons wishing to start similar
clubs; but while rules imported from another
club might serve as a suggestion, they must not
be supposed to do away with the necessity of
building up the Guild code of law afresh out
of the thought and character of each new club.
Vitality and enthusiasm are more important
even than order and discipline.
As to which club—that for young men or
young women, or boys or girls—should be
started first, it seems that it is easier to get the
others to come if the young men be the first in
the field; for the younger boys look up to them,
and the young women are not repelled, whereas
the young men are sometimes kept away byThe Way to Start a New Guild.
95
pride, if small boys have anticipated them, or
if they should seem to follow the lead of girls.
But if there were room and plenty of organ-
isers, all clubs might be begun in the same
week, and then no question of precedence need
arise.
The problem of how to attract the middle-
aged people of any district is more difficult.
Their habits are settled, their time already is
mapped out, their cares weigh heavily upon
them. Moreover, if the young people are or-
ganised first, their elders shrink from joining
the Guild, which, in fact, gets the reputation
in the vicinity of being a young people’s insti-
tution, and parents are shy of associating with
their children in intellectual and social pur-
suits outside the home. But these obstacles
can be overcome. Gradually the parents will
get into the habit of attending the concerts,
lectures, the dramatic entertainments, and
debates of the Guild. Still, there are other
and greater difficulties. First, what would be
the main object of the club for the middle-
aged people ? What would they do ? They
are too old, they think, to care for amusements
and games, and too out of practice with studies96
Neighbourhood Guilds.
to oare to join classes. Evidently some serious
object must be set before them, and it must
be many-sided, so as to reach all tastes and
characters. It was with a sense of these
difficulties and needs that the parents of the
members of the Leighton Hall Guild were in-
vited to attend a discussion on “ The Need
for an Ethical Society in Kentish Town.” An
ethical society, with its comprehensive aim of
finding out our social duties and combining
to practise them, would touch the serious side
of human nature. The local reforms to be
introduced in the district would give the peo-
ple objects to talk about and work for. An
ethical society, having no religious or anti-
religious bias, would repel neither churchman
nor secularist. The position of being the oldest
members of the Guild would create a respon-
sible interest in the social and intellectual pur-
suits of the young people, while the earnest
purpose of an ethical society would prevent the
risk of seeming to be only upon a par with the
younger clubs. Eighteen of the parents came
forward after the discussion at Leighton Hall,
and signed their names to express their desire
to form such a society. The number of mem-The Way to Start a New Guild.
97
bers has been gradually growing. This society,
although scarcely two months old, has under-
taken the management of a Sunday evening
free lecture course, and has begun plans for
several local reforms. It meets twice a month
on Friday evenings for discussion of moral
problems, and twice to listen to a lecture on
some aspect of social or personal duty. It
also is to have a social gathering one evening
a month. It has, further, decided to open
the Guild rooms every Sunday afternoon from
four to eight o’clock, for all friends and
all the neighbours, as many as care to come.
There will be tea at cost charge, and music
and recitations; the reading room will be open;
for the most part, conversations among small
groups of friends will be the attraction. This
Society has already appointed a committee of
musical friends of the Guild to edit and pub-
lish a book of ethical songs, with tunes, for
the use of Guilds and board schools, and other
meetings of people earnest for social and
moral progress. The success of this method
of reaching the older people has confirmed
the conviction that, after all, this is the best
possible basis on which to form them into
n98	Neighbourhood Guilds.
a club. The name Ethical Society is, of
course, of no essential importance, and, like the
other clubs, the members could name them-
selves after their own fancy; but it does
describe the nature of the club and its prin-
ciples better perhaps than any other. A wise
difference of proceeding with the older people
would seem to be, to found, as described
above, a club for men and women together
first, and, then, to form a men’s section and a
women’s section for the special pursuits and
friendships of each.XVII.
Reform Work, Class Work.
It has probably become evident before this,
how the members of the Guild would
occupy themselves evening after evening
for years. Still, for the more thorough treat-
ment of this question, and the elucidation of
points connected with it but not yet brought
out, it will be fitting to consider three classes
of occupation,—reform work, class work, and
self-entertainment.
Before considering these points, it will be
well to answer an objection often brought
forward by persons who burn with righteous
indignation against the long hours of toil and
the hard lot of the working classes. Instead
of asking what the people could find to occupy
their evenings with in the Guild, they say:
“It is a very beautiful scheme, this, of en-
gaging the leisure hours of the poor in class-
work, reform work, and entertainments, but
991OO
Neighbourhood Guilds.
the poor have no leisure; and if they have,
they are too overworked to use it in such
pursuits. Let the good-hearted reformer first
devote all his energy to removing the burdens
of excessive toil; then would be the time to
talk about uniting the people for intellectual
and moral ends.” In answer to this criticism,
I would say two things. First, what I have
said before,—that the only road to the eman-
cipation of labourers from excessive toil is by
way of intellectual and moral co-operation.
Even trades unions were only indirectly and
after a time the means of securing industrial
advantages to their members. Primarily, as
the event proved, they were educational in-
stitutions, to those who entered them, in social
science and moral co-operation. They trained
their members to think and speak and to care
for one another. When that was accomplished,
the rest followed inevitably. But if that in-
tellectual and moral co-operation was the
prime advantage of the trades unions, why
should it have been gained unconsciously, and
only as the accompaniment of miserable
blunders in executive management, and of
terrible suffering from untimely strikes ? LetReform Work, Class Work.	iof
the end of social education be undertaken
consciously, systematically, and comprehen-
sively. In the second place, it is not gener-
ally true that working men have no leisure or
are too weary after the day’s toil. Many
a labourer attributes to each day’s work a
certain mental torpor when evening comes on,
which is due really not to that day’s work,
but to a habit of mental inactivity, which has
been growing upon him for years. Had he
begun at the age of seventeen to devote an
hour an evening to study or debate, at thirty
intellectual pursuits would have been a
recreation to him. I am continually as-
tonished at the intellectual vigour of young
working men after a long day’s toil. It can
only be accounted for by the fact that their
higher faculties have not been called into
action by the routine of the day, and are now
fresh and ready for work. Almost all work-
men are free from 8 to 11 in the evening, and
when their day’s labour has not taxed the
brain,, they need only a few months’ effort,
and the stimulus of social meeting, to over-
come the habit of mental idleness.
Let us return to the occupations which the102	Neighbourhood Guilds.
Guild finds for* its members. As to reform
work, 1 need only remind any one who has
ever attempted to serve on any local com-
mittee, political, charitable, or educational, of
the vast amount of time it takes to do any-
thing in the way of reform, and he will see
how the committees of the Guild will have
their hands full of work. Even if in the
Guild there were no special educational classes,
still the members would be kept fully occu-
pied.
And yet class work cannot be wholly handed
over to polytechnic institutions or evening
schools, much as we should like to do so. Only
certain kinds of studies can be as well pursued
in a class of strangers or partial strangers as
among friends. The elements of education,
reading and arithmetic, and industrial work,
short-hand, book-keeping, carpentry, sewing,
and the like, do not need the social atmosphere
of the Guild to foster them. Not so with the
study of literature, history, poetry, politics,
and all the departments of social science. In
these the greatest advantage is derived from
the cordial interest of all the members of the
class in one another. Such interest permits aReform Work, Class Work.
103
readier freedom in the expression of opinions,
a quicker understanding of objections raised,
an added attraction to the study. Friendship
and the pleasure of social converse supplement
the mere love of knowledge and acquisition.
The interest in the study is sure not to flag so
easily as when strangers come together for the
same study. The person who takes up such
pursuits, by meeting his fellow-students con-
tinually in other ways, readily recognises in
those about him sympathisers and apprecia-
tors of his intellectual merits and interests.
Thus he is constantly stimulated to keep up
to the standard which others expect him to
reach. He finds a hundred more themes for
conversation than he would if he were not
in a social circle who cared for his favourite
subjects. The mental isolation of young men
of the working classes, who, having a gift for
the higher studies, have carried their educa-
tion beyond that of their comrades in work
and social position, is pathetic. They have no
social life on the intellectual plane. A hunger
has been awakened in them which only the
society of kindred minds could satisfy. Educa-
tional institutions have trained them to thinkNeighbourhood Guilds.
104
and to love to think, but thought can grow clear
and sound only by the contact of thinker with
thinker. Hence, these people, who have only
books and formal instruction, fall into strange
and weird conceits. Indeed, no true culture,
no true sense of mental perspective, no harmony
or proportion in ideas, can come about merely
through books or through ordinary school
work. A constant daily social atmosphere
must supplement all merely systematic and
conventional education. What educator has
not noticed the difference in the effect of any
course of study upon two persons of equal
native ability but belonging the one to an
illiterate, and the other to a cultivated family ?
The Guild in its educational work aims at
supplying the atmosphere of a cultivated
family, as well as attending to the special
studies that treat of human relations.
The benefit to the intellectual life which a
Guild gradually confers, accrues not more to
those who crave it than to those without intel-
lectual aspirations. For this latter class there
is no other means of awakening their higher
mental life. They need just such friction of mind
with mind as the Guild meetings afford. TheyReform Work, Class Work.
’05
require also the praise and contempt of friends,
to lift them up to the mark and make them
ashamed of their ignorance. Many a well-
informed person has been led by social pride
to seek the information he has gained. This
motive at present is scarcely ever felt by mem-
bers of the working class as an incentive toward
better education, because no higher standard
is demanded than that which children attain
in Board Schools at the age of thirteen.
I may take a very trifling point of culture to
illustrate the intellectual stimulus of club-life
in the Guild. Teachers of Board Schools take
great pains to teach the pupils not to drop
their h’s and not to prefix them to the wrong
words. Often the children learn to speak
correctly in this respect during school hours;
but the moment they are at home again or
playing in the street, they adopt the dialect
of the family. In the debates and classes of
the Guild, because such errors are pointed out
and censured and because correct speech is
insisted upon, there has been so marked an
advance in the right use of the aspirate within
a year, that one could scarcely recognise the
speech of certain members as that of the sameio6
Neighbourhood Guilds.
individuals. So with the grammatical structure
of sentences. The members, now, good-na-
turedly correct one another. A great increase
is also observable in the number of words
which they use with exact meaning. The
regular weekly business and literary meet-
ing of each club also serves as a stimulus to
literary studies of all kinds, because it forms
an arena of mental contest and exhibition.
A youth will commit to memory a poem of
Wordsworth or Lowell in order to recite it
at the club meeting, whereas he would have
no incentive for doing so, were it not for the
opportunity given him to display his talent.
The six young men who have been taking
violin lessons in the Guild for a year and a
half, have been held to their task in great part
by the expectation of being able to open the
meetings of the club with violin music. Our
three dramatic classes are inspired for their
arduous work solely by the prospect of the
entertainments they are preparing for, and of
the benefit these will be to the Guild. The
wood-carving class has been making panels
for one of the Guild rooms. The relation of
club-life to educational class work and theReform Work, Class Work.
107
way in which each reacts upon and needs the
other is thus sufficiently explained. It is clear
that much of the time of all the younger
people must he engrossed in class work.XVIII.
Entertainments.
The principle of entertainment by the people,
which is prominent in the Guild, is one too often
overlooked by the organisers of clubs. The
deeper significance of it seems wholly to escape
nearly every observer. Because entertainment
is merry and a diversion, it is looked upon as a
superficial thing, and not serious—not worthy,
indeed, to be classed with solemn lectures and
discussion on socialism, politics, and morals.
But in reality the moral effects of mere merri-
ment, if it be active and self-originated and in-
nocent, are often deeper than those of grim dis-
pute and didactic instruction. Nay, many ten-
dencies to evil can be destroyed only by mirth.
Intemperance, and vice, and gloom, and often
ill-health, are the special enemies to mankind
which the Guild believes it can best help to
vanquish, in its own sphere of influence, by the
108Entertainments.
109
happy spirit of play. It also regards its prin-
ciple of entertainment by the people them-
selves, under the moral and refining influences
of Guild life, as being the clue to the gradual
elevation of the taste of the people, which
now revels in the coarse and pitiable inanities
of the music hall.
Ordinarily philanthropic workers “ get up ”
entertainments for the people. But the prin-
ciple of the Guild is to set the people to getting
up their own entertainments. And nothing so
delights them. The preparation is not inferior
as an entertainment to the entertainment itself.
Nothing will so make them work and train them-
selves for a remote issue. Our choral society
practises once every week for three months, in
order to give a good concert which will pay for
music and the salary of the music master; then
they set to work again for the next concert with
greater fidelity and zeal than before. Our dra-
matic classes have sometimes worked one even-
ing a week for four or five months on one play.
The gymnastic class looks forward in the same
manner to giving its exhibition. And there is
never a doubt that it is all worth while, because
the mere relish of the activity is satisfying inno	Neighbourhood Guilds.
itself. Dancing is a never-failing attraction for
almost every Saturday evening in the year. Its
being an amusement is recognised as only the
fortunate accompaniment of the best mode of
cultivating grace of motion, quiet deference of
manner, and chivalrous attention to others in
little matters. Moreover, whether consciously
recognised by the participants or not, all these
modes of entertainment are also, as I have
said, the happiest means of attacking intempe-
rance. For this vice is one of those evil spirits
who come in when the house is discovered to
be swept and garnished; often all that is
needed is to fill the space.
Now the greater part of the working man’s
day being filled with drudgery, his evenings
ought to be for the most part devoted to recrea-
tion. Neither work nor study can on a Saturday
night rival the allurement of the public-house
and the music hall. He must indeed be lacking
in insight who cannot see that the establishment
of Saturday evening dances is a most serious and
deep-reaching moral reform. Dancing, with
good music and bright gas-light, is the only
diversion that will attract the coarsest and most
illiterate people, and win them away from theEntertainments.
in
haunts of intemperance. And if any one thinks
that such amusement, when directed under the
conditions prescribed by the Guild clubs, leads
to laxity of conduct, I must infer that he is
simply ignorant and inexperienced, and does
not know what he is saying. He is reasoning
from an abstract view of how human nature
will express itself, instead of generalizing from
ample observation. As with intemperance, so
with other vice;—in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred, immorality of this sort would have
been prevented in the case of young men, had
the imagination during the evening hours of
idleness been filled with jollity and merry
enterprise. I have known the whole habit
of a youth’s mind within a few months to
change in this respect to one of manly clean-
liness, and the whole expression of his coun-
tenance, from a hard and repulsive look, to
one of moral illumination. But even if these
various forms of entertainment by the mem-
bers themselves did not grapple as they do
with intemperance and vice, they would be
amply justified for all the time they take,
simply because they lighten and enliven weary
days and dull monotonous spirits. Harmless112
Neighbourhood Guilds.
pleasure is its own excuse. But because the
Guild also inspires to earnest and solemn
duties, it has an additional title to its hours
of merriment.
The success of the Guild entertainments in
Competing with music halls is seen in the case
of a certain group of young men in the Leigh-
ton Hall Guild, who, until they joined it, had
been accustomed to attend music halls every
Saturday evening; but now, to their own sur-
prise, they have not,—and laughingly boast that
they have not,—been inside a music hall for
eighteen months. Instead, they have had their
own private dances,—where the intervals be-
tween waltzes and lancers have been filled with
music by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach,
performed by friends of the Guild. The mem-
bers are conscious of the change of taste that
is being brought about in them. As one of
them said to me at the close of our eleventh
Sunday afternoon free concert, “ Well, we shall
not be satisfied after this with anything but the
very best music and the best performances.”
The secret of the way to change the artistic
appreciation of people is continuity of train-
ing in the better class of art. This principleEntertainnu nts.
ii3
of continuity, which the university extension
movement has applied so assiduously in estab-
lishing courses of twelve lectures with classes
on any one subject instead of scattered lectures
on various subjects, the Guild is attempting
to apply to the whole training of the emotions
and the will. One high-class concert is as good
as wasted upon people who will not hear another
for three months or a year, but such a concert
heard by the same people once every week for
six months will open up to them a new world
of beauty and delight. The same principle
applies to the improvement of manners. Noisy
horseplay and rowdy aggressiveness will not
be sensibly softened by one rebuke or by the
example of better manners once seen; but at
the end of six months, friendly attempts made
three and four evenings a week to tone down
the loud talking and laughing, and subdue the
needless romping, will make themselves felt.
Visitors coming to the Guild at intervals of a
few months always remark the change for the
better in the general deportment. I do not
mean for an instant that our Guild members
always behave like perfect ladies and gentle-
men. Any one coming may at any time note
1H4
Neighbourhood Guilds.
that certain girls are forward and rude, and
certain young men ill-bred. All I am main-
taining is that the Guild, as an influence, is
on the side of refined manners, and that these
very persons who misbehave were much worse
when they first joined the clubs, and would be
much worse now, were it not for the slow but
continuous influence of the Guild upon them.
When they are in the clubs, there is a proba-
bility of their being rebuked and talked with.
Even the clubs themselves become the guardian
of manners. Only recently the young women’s
club at Leighton Hall summoned two of their
members before the committee on account of
rude behaviour, and these two girls have been
suspended for four weeks for their mis-
demeanour.
The application of this principle of continuity
in the cultivation of the taste and in the exer-
cise of talents, would revolutionize the amuse-
ments of any neighbourhood, which the Guild
might have succeeded in organising. If many
Guilds were established, it is not a vain fancy
to believe that soon the people would have a
theatre and an opera of their own. Is it not
true that the Guild really embodies what theEntertainments.
115
People’s Palace only appears to embody,
namely, Walter Besant’s ideal of a Palace of
Delight, in which the people supply the actors
and musicians, and manage their own enter-
tainments ?
The great blunder of the People’s Palace
is its excessive size. If the people are to
be their own actors and singers and players
upon instruments, then every few hundred
people must have their own little stage, and
every individual who cares for it have his
chance of acting. Those with most talent
would soon come to the front. Scarcely any
person of genius would remain, as we feel
hundreds must now, undiscovered both to the
public and to themselves. These tiny Guild
theatres would be the training schools from
which the most successful performers would pass
to the grand stage built by the co-operation of
a dozen neighbouring Guilds. If the people’s
theatre and opera in this way sprang out of
the people’s best social life, the public and the
performers would be keeping pace with each
other, the one in appreciation, the other in
artistic presentation. And the stage would
again become the handmaid, if not of religion,Neighbourhood Guilds.
116
at least, of civic virtue. It would present
before the people their own deepest struggles
and highest aspirations; it would picture forth
the ideals of conduct, character, and society
which now haunt the imagination and fire the
hearts only of the most gifted poets, painters
and prophets. The writers of plays produce
whatever they know the people demand. But
the people as yet make no distinct demand,
they are so crude as to take whatever the
financial speculator thinks they would like.XIX.
The Personality op the Leaders op a Guild.
Having let my fancy carry me to so remote
a possibility as a regenerated stage and a true
people's theatre, let me turn the reader’s
attention back to consider that which must
be the vitalizing force of the Neighbourhood
Guilds, if they are to be centres of higher and
broader life,—the personality of the leaders.
It is generally cited as an objection to any
movement, that it is dependent upon the pecu-
liar character of those at the head of it. The
answer to this should be, that any institution
which does not need a strong and high person-
ality to animate it, which can be carried on
by a dull, uninterested board of managers or a
committee whose heart is not in their work and
who have no ideas illuminating their task, is
worthless as an instrument for communicating
enthusiasm and hope to the people. Nothing
but personality can organise the social chaos of
117118
Neighbourhood Guilds.
the masses into rational and moral co-operation.
It is no objection that every Guild is dependent
upon the peculiar character of its organiser. It
is, moreover, a mistake to imagine that suitable
personalities are so rare that, if one goes, no one
else would be forthcoming to take his place.
At the end of two years the founder of the New
York Guild left it in the hands of a fellow-
worker, who proved more efficient and original
in device than his predecessor. Experience,
a generous interest in the work, and the con-
sciousness of personal responsibility, develop
the type of personality required. What is
more, one Guild is not dominated by one person,
but each club has its own responsible adviser,
and is penetrated by his or her individuality.
In the two Guilds I have been best acquainted
with, the most successful clubs were those not
under the direct influence of the person who
received public credit for the success of the
Guilds.
A further fact not to be overlooked is, that
the personality of the leader communicates
itself to the club, and becoming thus incor-
porated into a permanent body, acts during
the leader’s absence. His conscience becomesThe Personality of the Leaders of a Guild. 119
the common conscience of the club, his en-
thusiasm burns in them, his wish through
affection becomes their will. When absent
he is often the more powerfully dominant,
for the members then feel a deeper responsi-
bility. A Guild club of young men has
been left for three months without its coun-
sellor, and yet has made greater progress
during that interval than ever before. I found
a touching evidence also of how strong the
personal attachment may become, in almost
the first words which more than a dozen mem-
bers of the New York Guild said to me, as soon
as I had a private chat with them, upon my
return after an absence of two years and a half:
“ Well,” each said to me, “ you see I have
kept my word, and have worked for the Guild,
as I promised you I would, until you came
back.” I myself had forgotten the half-playful
although sincere wish I had expressed so long
before; but generous loyalty is not a rare
virtue or a weak motive among classes un-
spoiled by too much worldly ambition. Be-
cause of this communication of personality to
a permanent organisation like the Guild, the
objection that it depends upon the presence120
Neighbourhood Guilds.
of one person is quite unfounded. The New
York Guild could, I believe, develop itself
henceforward, if left wholly to its own efforts.
But even if the clubs as a whole should not
incorporate and perpetuate the leader’s charac-
ter, there will always be certain individual
members who are themselves, by nature or
grace, radiating centres of moral life. They,
when once possessed by the Guild idea and by
respect for its workers, will become original
and fresh sources of strength to the clubs. A
personality of the type needed is perhaps more
common among working people than among
the more leisured classes. With the latter the
conventionalities of society, rather than the
opinions and tact of individuals, prescribe con-
duct ; while in each little circle of working
people some one man, however bad and un-
worthy, is apt to be law and gospel. Persons
with this gift of influencing others learn to
exercise it. Unsophisticated people not only
sacrifice themselves out of personal regard, but
expect and ask you to sacrifice yourself for
them for the same reason. Thus, then, within
the Guild itself is found the power that will
give vitality to it without fail. Were the GuildThe Personality of the Leaders of a Guild. 121
ruled from outside, were implicit obedience its
method of discipline, then it might not be able
to survive the loss of its leaders; but being
democratic and voluntary, with a decentralized
authority, it will live by means of a diffused
personality.
It is thus seen that personal work is the
very substance of the Guild’s activity. And
here a common misconception concerning such
work must be removed. It is often confounded
with indioidnal work, with the attempt to deal
with each separate person separately. It is
also commonly set over against institutional
and systematic work. But, as we have just
seen, personality may be infused into institu-
tions; nay, institutions are the only means of
storing up and preserving it. There is no op-
position between the two. Many institutions
are, be it granted, soulless, and yet they can
hold together for centuries, and work mischief.
But on the other hand, strong individual char-
acters die and do no further good, when they
have not entered into some state, or Church,
or society, or party. We must “ make channels
for the streams of love, where they may broadly
run ”; and those institutions are best which give122
Neighbourhood Guilds.
broadest scope to fresh personality. Now, the
Neighbourhood Guild is such a channel; next
to the family institution, no other gives such
free play to character. It is not in danger, as
schools and even churches are, of becoming
fossilized. Each Guild, like each family, starts
with a fresh enthusiasm, and each series of
young people forming new clubs, brings the
freshness of a new day, as children do to the
hearts of their parents.
Before dropping the subject of the personal
influence of the leader, it may be well to illus-
trate the method of managing a club without
direct authority. It should first be stated
that the organiser never becomes a member,
and, therefore, never has the right to vote,
neither does he make or second a motion.
Accordingly, if no one of the members cared
to introduce any measure he might wish to
see considered, it would not come before
the club. At first a club will seem to
have no will of its own and not any power
of independent judgment. But, after a year
of club-life, the members will have developed
a mind of their own. And many a time the
organiser will find them voting in oppositionThe Personality of the Leaders of a Guild. 123
to his opinion. How then will he be able to
control the club ? I should say by superior
wisdom and character; or else, in all except
cases of downright evil, it would be better that
he should be governed by the club. Recently,
at my suggestion, one of the young men of the
Leighton Hall Guild proposed in their club
that the membership be raised from sixty to
seventy. But the motion was defeated. The
club were quite satisfied with themselves.
Why should they take in outsiders, whom they
might not care for ? Selfish exclusiveness is
one of the first-born of the evil brood of pride
and privilege, and must be strangled at the
beginning. The member who proposed the
increase of the size of the club informed me
that he would give notice the next week of his
intention of introducing the same measure at
the following meeting. “ But,” I said to him,
“ what arguments have you that will remove
the prejudice of the members ? You gave no
clear and forcible reasons for increasing the
number of members. You must work out every
argument into minute detail, else you cannot
bring the advantages of your proposed change
strongly enough before the club to overthrow124
Neighbourhood Guilds.
their preconceived notions.” The youth was
confused and embarrassed for a moment, for
he had not thought out the subject clearly. But
a Socratic questioning brought to light three
reasons for increasing the size of the club—(1)
the regular dues from ten more members would
increase the income of the club, and enable it
to be more nearly self-supporting; (2) among
ten new members there might be a number of
fine fellows who would lend their talents to the
work of the Guild; and (3) if the Guild be an
advantage to its present members, it would
prove so to the ten men whom it has room for,
but has decided to exclude. When the time
came for voting on the proposition, the mover
so graphically pictured what the fees of ten
more members would purchase, and in what
ways the new members could benefit the club
and the club benefit them, that his motion was
carried unanimously. Let it be observed that
the organiser of the club had ruled without
obtruding his personality, or constraining the
free play of private judgment. This method of
reasoning together and waiting until the com-
mon consciousness of the members is prepared,
before introducing any revolution or reform, isThe Personality of the Leaders of a Guild. 125
applied even in the clubs of boys and girls
between the ages of twelve and sixteen. We
are preparing our young people to struggle
for political and industrial progress within the
bounds of social order.XX.
Moral and Civic Instruction in the Guild.
Let us here consider the kind of social in-
struction which the personal influence of the
organiser of a club can impress upon the
character of the members during their regular
weekly meetings. It has long been felt by
many educators that the most important
branch of knowledge—moral and civic instruc-
tion—is almost wholly omitted from the com-
mon school curriculum. Children under twelve
years of age, when most of them leave school,
are too young to appreciate many of the moral
and civic problems. Also the mechanical rela-
tion of teacher to pupil might destroy the effect
of such teaching. But the club meeting lends
itself admirably to an older intimate friend of
the members for instructing them in whatever
details of right conduct they may be ignorant
of, and for warning them ; for inspiring them to
love the right, for shaming them out of coward-Moral and Civic Instruction in the Guild. 127
ice or hypocrisy or any bad habit, and for
encouraging them to fight against besetting
faults. The moral influence of the Guild is
more like that of home-life than of school.
The character of the leader and affection for
him give weight to his word, and make civic
instruction, not merely an intellectual clearing
up, but an emotional quickening. He can reach
the will, he can destroy bad habits and build
up good ones. He can do this by giving all the
minutest reasons for the habit he wishes them
to form, and by attaching his approval to the
good habit and his moral condemnation to
the bad. Take such elementary instruction as
that concerning cleanliness of the body. If
you wish to induce young men and women
who have never been accustomed to the use
of a tooth-brush, to purchase and to use daily
that article of toilet, it is not sufficient to
tell them that one ought to have self-respect
enough and regard enough for others to keep
the body cleanly. No ordinary person will
transform that abstract and general rule into
the specific moral commandment: “ Thou shalt
buy a tooth-brush for 6<Z. to-morrow, and use it
every night and morning! ” Yet this is the128
A‘etghbourfiood Guilds.
commandment that must be made to haunt the
conscience of nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of every thousand of the working people, before
they will go and do the thing, and thus begin
that levelling upward in trifling habits which
will do more than all law and administration to
break down the barriers of prejudice between
the classes and the masses. The only way to
make this special commandment haunt people’s
imagination is to point out to them the specific
evil consequences which neglect of the teeth
will bring to health, to beauty, to one’s own
comfort, and to that of those around. Nay, I
have even found it necessary to speak privately
to individuals, and make them promise that
they will buy a tooth-brush before I see them
again; and then, every week or two, if I have
reason to think they are neglecting this duty,
to plead with them again, and if I have found
they have been careful, to show my pleasure
and to praise the improvement in their personal
appearance. Having given so fully one illus-
tration, it is not necessary for me to illustrate
how all other rules of personal cleanliness are
inculcated. It must be evident that such a
method, and only such a one, can overcome badMoral and Civic Instruction in the Guild. 129
habits and form good ones. In the same way
as with cleanliness, so right habits in exercise,
sleep, eating, ventilation are enjoined and en-
forced. Likewise with the mental habits,—
training of the judgment, the imagination, the
sympathies, the temper.
Of the wider social duties and the method
of enjoining them in the Guild, it will not be
necessary to speak of more than three here,
—one in reference to young women, one to
young men, and one to parents. The im-
prudence and folly and ignorance of young
working girls concerning marriage is simply
terrible. No one has told them of the horrors
of wedded life with a drunkard. No one has
warned them against falling in love because
of superficial charm, against being flattered
by gifts of gold ornaments and invitations to
theatres. No one has told them what traits of
character and what principles of conduct they
ought to demand in the man whom they will
accept. No one has given to them the view
of married life as an intellectual and moral
comradeship of the gravest responsibility.
No one has explained to them the laws of
heredity, so that they would inquire whether
K130	Neighbourhood Guilds.
the parents and family of the man who
proposes to them are addicted to drink, or
are affected with maladies that descend
from generation to generation. No one has
told the girl the necessity of not being familiar
with young men, and pictured how one step
leads to another, until all may be lost. It is
the fashion to attribute the degradation of a
large class of women to necessity—to say that
the alternative to shame is starvation; but
thousands fall where not starvation, but simply
plain clothes,—the absence of ostrich feathers
and big earrings—form the alternative; and in
all these cases the cause is not the wage system,
but the equally iniquitous system of letting
young women remain ignorant of danger and
exposed to temptation. The school cannot
give this instruction, nor provide the influence
and protection; neither can the home of the
poor family. But the Guild can and does give
this timely moral information and warning.
The lady who has charge of a young women’s
club will plead with them for prudence, and
warn them against danger, as she would if her
own sister were wilful and ignorant. More
than this, the lady counsellor of the club willMoral and Civic Instruction in the Guild. 131
point out the necessity that good women shall
join together to protect one another. She will
bring home the bearing of low wages upon
the morality of women, and the effect of trades
unions and women’s friendly societies in re-
moving occasions to vice.
Equally can young men be guarded against
dangers of folly and appetite. There is
much talk—which, however, seldom reaches
working lads—about purity; but the manly
and effective reasons of prudence and justice
are seldom given. The dangers of licence,
however, may be so presented as to prove
an absolute determent with youths who have
average intelligence and self-interest, if they
are at the same time provided with good com-
panionship and diversions, as in the Guild.
And the plea for justice to women, the presen-
tation of the meanness and cowardice of using
another human being, and that a woman, to
her harm, for one’s own momentary pleasure,
■even though she wishes it, will be sure to
purify the character and secure the right con-
duct of any youth not already given over to
evil. But along with these appeals to self-
interest and to justice towards women, the132
Neighbourhood Guilds.
Guild leader will give friendly advice, and will
point out the bearing of temperance, health,
clean conversation, and mental occupation upon
this aspect of conduct. It seems not to be
known that throughout the working classes
almost the only advice given to lads by men is
that chastity in young men is detrimental to
health. The Guild leader will make the mem-
bers see that practically this advice is a lie,
and that, even if it were true, it would be no
justification for licence, since we constantly
recognise that there are many things we must
not do, although they might be slightly better
for health. The whole of our well-being
and that of mankind, he will teach them,
is the only test of right conduct. Such is
the moral instruction which will be received
by the young men who belong to the Neigh-
bourhood Guild, such the guidance that would
be brought to the working classes in general,
should the Guild spread throughout London.
But it must not be supposed that the points
of morality mentioned here are made unduly
or even eminently prominent in the Guild;
there is no tendency in the clubs to dwell
morbidly upon these phases of evil. On th©Moral and Civic Instruction in the Guild. 133
contrary, the principle of the Guild workers
is to divert the mind from this subject as
much as is safe for the members.
As to the moral instruction of parents of the
lowest class, it is ordinarily said, “ It is hopeless
to try to do anything for the grown-up people.
Care for the children! ” But this despair for
the parents is not well considered: It is true
that many of their habits are hopelessly fixed;
but however ignorant and bad the elders are,
their interest in their children is sincere and
strong, and if they receive enlightenment, they
are sure to take wiser care of the health,
education, and character of their children.
Such instruction, by means of lectures and dis-
cussions, can be given in the older people’s
clubs. It must be evident, also, that unless
the co-operation and sympathy of mothers and
fathers be enlisted, the difficulty of influencing
children of degraded parentage will be very
great. Here, then, is the special kind of in-
struction which will have effect upon grown-up
people, if nothing else will; and it is not simply
the lowest class of mothers and fathers who
need it, but throughout society there prevails a
low and worldly standard of parental duty.134
Neighbourhood Guilds.
No matter how well-to-do the neighbourhood
might be, in which a Guild was planted, this
phase of social work would not be super-
fluous.XXI.
The Moral Discipline op the Guild.
In connection with the civic instruction
given in the clubs and the influence exercised
by the organiser, mention must be made of
the moral discipline exercised by the club
itself upon every member. One who had not
had experience would scarcely believe what
a powerful, and I might say terrible, instru-
ment of punishment a club can bring to bear
upon any one of its members. Permanent
expulsion may have as baneful an influence
upon the character of any delinquent as im-
prisonment has upon a criminal. It really
means, to a great degree, social ostracism.
Put out of the club, he is in many cases shut
off practically from all respectable companion-
ship. I have known of one young man who
sank into the criminal class through defiance
Of this punishment. On the other hand, I
have known others to be spurred on to a new
135136	Neighbourhood Guilds.
life by the hope of being reinstated in the
Guild. The last severity of punishment, un-
conditional expulsion, we have learned, ought
not to be resorted to except in extreme cases.
I tremble to think what might have become
of certain girls, had they been expelled, as the
young women’s club of one of the Guilds
would have caused them to be, except for a plea
for mercy by the counsellor of the club. The
categorical imperative never speaks in a more
severe and unconditional tone than through
the corporate conscience of a young people’s
club. It is only when they have been trained
to moderation, that they do not carry out
the extreme rigour of their law. It is only
by experience that they learn to apportion
punishment to the degree of the malevolent
intent of the transgressor, and to the danger
to the Guild of letting the culprit go unpun-
ished. Gradually they recognise the differ-
ence between suspensions for six, four, or
two weeks, with or without formal apology
before the committee or before the whole
club. The moral discipline of such punish-
ments is increased, naturally, in proportion
as it is felt to be mild and just. I haveThe 'Moral Discipline of the Guild.
137
known young men nineteen years old to cry as
if their hearts would break, when told that, by
vote of their club, they must stay away from
the Guild for six months; and upon their
return at the end of that time I have known
them to show no symptoms of the old faults
for which they had been punished. The ex-
perience of the Guild goes to show that the
strongest motives, if not the highest, that lead
to conduct helpful to the community, are the
praise and blame of the community as a whole.
No less remarkable is the influence of the Guild
upon those who wish to enter it than upon
those already members; for the former also
are constrained by this same motive to con-
form to its standard.XXII.
What Classes of People the Guild may
Reach.
As to the question often asked, “What class
does the Neighbourhood Guild reach ? ” it
must have become clear that there is in its
nature nothing to make it inapplicable to
every class of society, from the aristocracy
down to the very lowest dregs of the slums.
All would depend upon the kind of neighbour-
hood it was in, and the class of people it
attempted to draw. In Kentish Town it was
deemed desirable that the lowest should not be
especially aimed at for the first Guild, in order
that it should more easily furnish a corps of
workers to assist in the establishment of other
Guilds. The young men are plumbers, coal-
shovellers, organ and piano factory hands, and
builders’ labourers, with a sprinkling of skilled
mechanics and clerks. They are not what is
called “ poor people,” but are typical of the
138What Classes of People the Guild may Reach. 139
average honest working class,—the class which
the Guild believes will prove the saviours of the
unemployed, the idle, and the vicious. Yet they
are not well-to-do; they have a hard time of it
whenever thrown temporarily out of work; the
families live in small houses, and let out rooms
to lodgers. Many of the young men repair
their own boots.
Morally these young men are temperate,
industrious, reverent, and above the average of
society, I should think, in personal morality.
The young women all work in the various fac-
tories of the district, or are dressmakers. They
receive five to ten shillings a week, and work
ten hours a day; they live at home, and consti-
tute that class which does more harm to women
who have to support themselves entirely, than
any other; because they sell their labour for
what will not pay for their own living, being
supported in part by the other members of the
family. They are not of the class commonly
known as “ the factory girl; ” that class seems
scarcely to exist in Kentish Town. Their
dress is good and clean, their face and figure
indicate a frail constitution, or at least fine
feminine texture. They often faint in the140
Neighbourhood Guilds.
evening because of the hard work in the factory.
They are proud and sensitive.
The New York Guild is in the worst district
of the city, and a large proportion of the mem-
bers come from families who know the bitterest
poverty, suffering from the drunkenness and
violence of a father or mother. Let any one who
has access to Jacob Riis’s recent book on “ How
the other Half Lives,” read his description of
the 10th Ward of New York City, where the
Guild is situated, and he will know what class
of people it touches and influences. But while
the Guild aims at reaching the lowest dregs as
well as the lower middle class of society (this
latter, also, because of its mental and social
poverty, being a fit object of attention), it still
does not sentimentally rush directly to the
rescue of the fallen. I have often spoken of
starting always with the best people of a neigh-
bourhood, and through them reaching the
worst. The wisdom and economy of such a
scheme must commend itself to every one. In
the first place, it ennobles and gives scope to
the lives of good people, who have otherwise
little chance of benefiting their fellow-men. In
the second place, a club that is morally ex-What Classes of People the Guild may Reach. 141
elusive, immediately begins to raise the mental
tone of the lowest neighbours, whereas a club
that will take unconditionally all the drunkards
and worthless idlers, will repel, and ought to
repel, all honest and industrious people. Begin
with the best, and the worst will be proud to be
allowed to join; begin with the worst, and you
will never be able to reach the others. And
these others, it must be remembered, although
not dissolute and poverty-stricken, do have to
lead hard and barren lives, so that they, too,
need the privileges of the Guild. They not
only need it, but deserve it, and they being of
service to others, does not plain justice require
the Guild’s method ?
A distinction, however, must be made between
the work of the Guild among its own members,
and that among the people of the neighbour-
hood at large. It is able to reach the very
lowest without admitting them into its fellow-
ship. I have already specified how: it is by
urging men and women to join friendly societies
and trades unions, by securing them hospital
privileges, by finding them work, by sending
them to inebriate asylums, by educating them
generally; in short, by all those means by142	Neighbourhood Guilds.
which the fallen are now being rescued. The
Guild would have a number of committees for
such work: one for the establishment of free
smoking concerts and reading rooms; one for
free lectures and discussions; one for the care of
the sick; one to act as the poor man’s lawyer;
one to find work for the unemployed. The
ease with which the members of a Guild can
find work for any applicant is a fine illus-
tration of the general and unexpected uses to
which it can be put. The members need only
ask in their respective factories whether any
workmen are wanted, and in ordinary states of
trade they will be sure to find employment for
any one in their neighbourhood. During my
two years’ acquaintance with the Guild in New
York, no member was ever longer than four or
five days out of work without having a new
situation found for him. It is possible for the
committee to put itself into touch with many
more employers, and thus extend its efficiency >
A hundred guilds with a hundred local labour
intelligence bureaus in communication with one
another, would solve the problem which one
central bureau could not cope with. The Guild,
however, while doing much in the directionWh-it Classes of People the Guild may Reach. 143
of individual rescue work, would not attempt
to become an employer of labour. Both
factories and shelters which are not self-
supporting, ultimately aggravate the evil they
would cure; or they have no appreciable
effect one way or the other, as is the case
with them in Germany. Instead of such
measures, the Guild recognises as the only
cure for a great part of modern poverty and
the only solution of the problem of enforced
idleness, the abolition of unjust laws which
shut out the working classes from their full
human rights, and the establishment of new
laws to check the evils of unlimited com-
petition and monopoly. The Guild, instead
of competing with other employers of labour,
would throw its energies into movements for
legislative reform. This method could open
up new fields for labour in half the time that
factories could be built for the manufacture
of commodities not demanded in the market.
But questions of legislative reform need
not be entered into here. They have been
touched upon only to indicate the breadth
of action open to the Neighbourhood Guild,
and to remove the prejudice which persons144
Neighbourhood Guilds.
impatient for radical political measures, are
apt to feel toward any institution, which
devotes time and attention to a comprehensive
moral and social education of the people. We
maintain that the very life and hope of a
higher legislative justice, rests upon a more
refined and disciplined social intelligence and
co-operation on the part of wage-earners.
I have pointed out how the Guild may reach
the lowest classes without admitting them into
its fellowship. It should be noticed, however,
that this fellowship is more alluring to the very
poor and neglected than to any other class.
The lowest are attracted to a company of people
who do not “ preach at them,” and who do not
set up a hundred rigid rules to constrain their
deportment and morals, but only invite co-
operation in good works. The lowest also
discover instantly and like the truly democratic
feeling of brotherhood toward them which ani-
mates the leaders of the Guild. The English
poor, however ignorant, coarse in taste, and de-
graded by drink, preserve an exquisite delicacy
in detecting the faintest tinge of patronage in
manner or speech on the part of their would-be
benefactors. Many a kind-hearted but under-What Classes of People the Guild may reach. 145
bred person of wealth attributes his failure to
win the affection of the poor to their ingrati-
tude, whereas it is due to his own inability to
conceal his cloven foot of class pride. The
poorest also have the greatest conscious need
of the opportunities of amusement, of large
rooms, warm fires and bright lights, which the
Guild affords.
But its pre-eminent merit, as regards class
distinctions, is its ability to break down the
foolish prejudice and hatred of each class for
the one just below it. When the Guild in
Kentish Town was first established, the “ junior
clerks” who joined it were inclined not to
recognise in the street the working lads, whom
—rather than forego the loaves and fishes—
they were willing to be friends with in the club.
I talked to them privately. When one youth
protested that his conduct was quite justifiable,
that it was beneath him to greet socially in the
street a rough working-man with soiled hands
and clothes, I found it necessary to inform
him that he was quite mistaken in imagining
himself to be a gentleman simply because he
wore white cuffs and smart neck-ties. I also
advised the club to expel any one who presumed
L146
Neighbourhood Guilds.
to set himself up above any other member.
The result is that, since then, there has been no
trace of petty class distinction in the Guild,
although it includes greater differences of edu-
cation and wealth than before.XXIII.
Not a Mere Drop in the Ocean.
Nearly every reform, if it be of the kind that
must begin in a small way and expand gradually
by the multiplication of small centres, is con-
tinually met at first by the discouraging criticism
that it is a mere drop in the ocean. Persons
who are accustomed to survey the total sum
of injustice and misery in the world, and have
not yet submitted their impatient spirit to the
humble method of historic evolution, demand
reform by one gigantic leap. Such persons
would do well to bear in mind the advice con-
tained in the saying: “ Enthusiasm only for
great things, but in small things fidelity." By
their contempt for fidelity in small things,
many enthusiasts to-day fail of genuine human
service, and discourage others from reform
work.
It is, moreover, a question whether any
M7148
Neighbourhood Guilds.
reform cau be designated as small when it
illustrates a mighty principle, and may be the
beginning of a great upward movement. A
Neighbourhood Guild seems to me significant,
no matter how small it is. Instead of a drop
in the ocean, it seems rather to be like a seed
in the ground, which, by good chance, may in
time clothe acres of waste land with a garment
of green.
Nor is it necessary for such an institution
to assume gigantic proportions before it can
accomplish a great reform. A small number of
workers might transform more than one ugly
feature of life in modern London into some
semblance of the human ideal. Give me only
a hundred young men and young women trained
and devoting their whole time and talent to
such moral and civic instruction among the
people of Loudon as 1 have mentioned above,
and I guarantee so to reduce by their efforts
the vice, drunkenness, and uncleanliuess of the
people, that iu ten years from now statisticians
will have to record a rapid decline in these evils,
aud assign it to the influence of the hundred
teachers of the Neighbourhood Guild.
In conclusion, it should be observed that theNot a Mere Drop in the Ocean.
149
work of organising the mental and moral life
of the people about the family and the neigh-
bourhood, although it would bring many imme-
diate satisfactions to the people, would be no
mere palliative, reconciling them to the evils
of the present industrial system. The hot-
headed agitator makes a blunder injurious to
his own cause when he advocates the policy
of letting things get just as bad as can be, of
allowing the logic of unlimited competition to
run to its direful extreme, and of granting no
present boon to the people, for fear it might
lull their newly-awakened spirit back into the
old torpor of inactive contentment. Be assured,
that the more you give to the people, the more
will be demanded of you; whereas, the more
they sink under suffering, the less able will
they ever be to rise up and challenge their
oppressors.
It is, however, illogical to infer, as I have
known more than one person to do, that, be-
cause the Neighbourhood Guild scheme does
not aim at overthrowing the wage-system and
the private ownership of land and capital, it is
therefore in league with the present order of
society, and that its reforms are a mere patch-
M150	Neighbourhood Guilds.
work of the dominant system. Instead of being
regarded as a component part of the social
mechanism of to-day, it should rather be classed
with those various anticipations, in miniature,
of a new order of society—that order which
men would still need to create, had the present
industrial regime been swept away, had land
and capital been nationalized, and had the
changes proved equal to the hope of the
socialists. What else would men do with their
leisure hours and increased means of enjoyment
than forthwith proceed to the social recon-
struction of their mental and moral life, on
some such lines as have been indicated in these
pages ?
Unlike the many utopian dreams of the
earlier communism, the scheme I have been
proposing does not seek to isolate a group of
families from contact with their surrounding
society, or to disregard the present conditions
and motives of life. On the contrary, it plants
itself in the midst of the modern city, believing
that in it there is already room to lay at least
the foundations of the New and Perfect City.