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.

    17/320 (page 5)
    IN THE HOUSEHOLD. 6 >•] not deceived, I say, in this case also. Fancy not that they know nothing about you. There is nothing secret which shall not bo made manifest; and what you do in the closet is surely proclaimed (and often with exagge- ration enough and to spare) on the house-top. These poor folks at your gate know well enough, through servants and tradesmen, what you are, how you treat your servants, how you pay your bills, what sort of temper you have; and they form a shrewd, hard esti- mate of your character, in the light of which they view all that you do and say to them; and believe me, that if you wish to do any real good to them, you must begin by doing good to those who lie still nearer to you than them. And believe me, too, that if you shrink from a hearty patriarchal sympathy with your own servants, because it would require too much personal human intercourse with them, you are like a man who, finding that he had not powder enough to fire off a pocket-pistol, should try to better matters by using the same quantity of ammunition in an eighty-four pound gun. For it is this,human friendship, trust, affection, which is the very thing you have to employ towards the poor, and to call up in them. Clubs, societies, alms, lending libraries are but dead machinery, needful, perhaps, but, like the iron tube without the powder, unable to send the bullet forth one single inch ; dead and useless lumber, without humanity; without the