Poverty and Compassion

...When thou doest alms," the Gospel reads, "let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth...

...Probably itwould shock them to learn that the word "Victorian" has come to suggest an artificial and ultimately unrealistic code of morals, for the Victorians insisted on a practical ethic: [It] did not celebrate heroism, or genius, or nobility, or spiritual grace...

...If they failed to understand all the causes and dimensions of their problems or to accomplish all they hoped by way of improvement," writes Himmelfarb, "a later generation, aware of its own failures (in spite of its greater sophistication and experience), may be more forgiving of the Victorians than they were of themselves...

...Ruskin's choice of words was telling...

...30 William McGurn Among the various characteristics of the age in which we live," wrote John Ruskin, "one of the most notable appears to me the just and wholesome contempt in which we hold poverty...

...Infinite—not measured by need or means, not organized or supervised, but given freely and received freely, without conditions or limits...

...Whatever their faults and blindnesses, the Victorians would never have let themselves off the hook that easily—not only because they expected more of the poor but because they were not content to rest on their good intentions...

...Instead," as Himmelfarb notes, "the son became an agnostic in religion and an evangelical in economics...

...Its virtues were more pedestrian: respectability, responsibility, decency, industriousness, prudence, temperance...

...The Victorians thought this a promiscuous encouragement of bad habits...

...But the seeds of separation probably had as much to do with the divorce of morality from religion...

...Increasingly poverty began to be seen as an objective condition, and as capitalism democratized wealth to a hitherto-unimagined degree, the persistence of poverty came to be regarded as something of a scandal...

...The rise of industrial society, the wealth it bred, and the concomitant decline in religion wrought a transformation in the way the public thought about the less fortunate...

...In Poverty and Compassion, Gertrude Himmelfarb tracks this change in perceptions through the major personalities and institutions of the late Victorian era...

...The COS operated under precisely the opposite dictate...

...And their science required the left hand to know precisely what the right hand was doing, and made it a solemn obligation not to give to everyone who asketh...

...Today we seem to have come full circle, as our commitment to the poor is measured by the number of dollars spent on them rather than any improvement in their condition...

...physical appetites are to me the devil," she confessed in her diary...

...O f course, without the authority of traditional religion, it required an almost superhuman effort to push what were essentially everyday (now "middle-class") virtues...

...The Victorians prided themselves on their obsession with facts and consequences over feelings and intentions...

...The divorce was finalized when the services and benefits provided by the state were made available to everyone regardless of need...

...These virtues depended on no special breeding, talent, sensibility, or even money...

...Up until roughly the nineteenth century, no one really spoke of poverty...

...It was the welfare state that finally brought about the divorce of morality from social policy," writes Himmelfarb...

...The stiff upper lip was not a cliche but a code...

...theirs was a constant effort to measure the actual effects of their actions and to come up with precisely the right standard to tell them how they were doing...

...The Fabians provide excellent examples of what came later, in particular their fascination with eugenics and, ultimately, the Soviet Union...

...Not surprisingly, many of the apostles of this new Social Gospel—among them T. H. Green, F H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet —were children of clergymen...

...In traditional Christianity, for example, charity has always had more to do with the spiritual liberation of the donor than the physical relief of the recipient...

...They were the virtues of citizens, not of heroes or saints—and of citizens of democratic countries, not aristocratic ones...

...In the policy sense, yes...

...Beatrice Webb, to name one, displayed an almost Manichean loathing for the flesh...

...The shift in emphasis from the hereafter to the here and now, while not necessarily hostile to the religious impulse, had obvious consequences for personal behavior...

...As Himmelfarb puts it, "They were all in favor of government for the people but not necessarily of or by the people...

...Though these figures by no means agreed on problems and solutions, they were united by what the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb called the William McGurn is the Washington bureau chief of National Review "time spirit": "the union of faith in the scientific method with the transference of the emotion and self-sacrificing service from God to man...

...No one epitomized it more than Charles Booth, whose figure looms large in this book...

...The father of Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall, though not a preacher, very much wanted him to become an Evangelical minister...

...There were only "the poor," a natural if lamentable feature of the human condition ("The poor always ye have with you...

...What Himmelfarb says of the Charity Organization Society (COS) applies to the Victorians in general: [Theirs] was not the gift prescribed by the evangelist: "Give unto everyone that asketh thee...

...T is easy to see where certain popularr misconceptions about fuddy-duddy Victorians came from: however new their social philosophy, they still held that character was paramount and that "the aim of social policy was to encourage the poor to become respectable, responsible, and moral...

...For all their preoccupation with character, the logic of the Victorians' exertions paradoxically led society in a different direction...

...For the "driving mission" of most of these reformers, says Himmelfarb, was not just to give but "to infuse a sense of proportion into the sentiment of compassion, to make compassion proportionate to and compatible with the proper ends of social policy...

...While the Victorians 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 were not heroic in a larger-than-life sense, their tenacity and stamina were of awesome dimensions...

...The more secular these reformers were, the more Puritan became their disposition...

...Over the two decades that saw him publish his seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London, Booth also ran a steamship company, traveling to America and Brazil for months at a time, despite chronic ill health...

...That gift was an end in itself, not so much a means of relieving the needy as a manifestation of the divine spirit, the infinite love of God expressing itself in infinite compassion for man...

...Theirs was a "religion of charity" presided over by a "church of charity" and governed by a "science of charity...

...And in precisely this sense—the attempt to bring scientific discipline to bear on societal problems—the late Victorians might better be understood as the first real moderns rather than the last of the old traditionalists...

...As poverty came to be seen as an objective condition imposed by circumstance, the emphasis on personal responsibility grew less important...

...The original crop of reformers, still drawing on the religious capital of their immediate past, could assume that their moral code was just and proper, and this doubtless prevented them from embracing a great many practices against which they could raise no rational objection...

...It could have been the epitaph for many...

...Nor religious ones...

...While they may have shed traditional Christian theology, they retained its moral core and made up in zeal what they lacked in belief...

...Though they were frequently generous with their own time and money, they are more properly considered social workers than altruists...

...They were common, everyday virtues, within the capacity of ordinary people...