Sanitary and social lectures and essays / by Charles Kingsley.

  • Kingsley, Charles, 1819-1875.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary and social lectures and essays / by Charles Kingsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    servants as persons. A lady can go into a poor cottage, lay down the law to the inhabitants, reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell them how to set things right, which, if she had the doing of them, I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they. She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a shilling, as something sweet after the medicine ; and she can go out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs : but with the servants it is not so. She knows their cha- racters; and, what is more, they know hers; they know her private history, her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power, and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work with them, because, if she does, she will be forced to carry it out; and it cannot be cold, dry, perfunctory, official: it must be hearty, living, loving, personal. She must make them her friends; and perhaps she is afraid of doing that, for fear they should take liberties, as it is called—which they very probably will do, unless she keeps up a very high standard of self-restraint and earnestness in her own life—and that involves a great deal of trouble, and so she is tempted, when she wishes to do good, to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside, who, as she fancies, know nothing about her, and will never find out whether or not she acts up to the rules which she lays down for them. Be