we may find our strength. The memory of an Oxford student who freely gave up his life to help his fellow-citizens will long live in the hearts of all Oxford men, to silence a cynical despair and to shame an epicurean indifference. His example will perpetually remind us of the service which a great university might render to a great nation. II. TOYNBEE HALL.1 Since Toynbee's death his Oxford friends and student admirers have built to his memory a noble monument upon the site of his early labors among the workingmen of East London. Toynbee Hall is a living monument, and not a mausoleum. It is a building which might not improperly be called a university club in the workingmen's quarter of London. It is a very different institution from those comfortable and attractive places of social resort, the West End clubs of London, although the so-called university settlement in Whitechapel is not without its material and social attractions. Oxford and Cambridge men live there in Toynbee Hall like civilized young Englishmen, with all the appliances for health and creature comfort that modern art can suggest; but Toynbee Hall is something more than a well-appointed city club. It is a beacon light of intelligence and moral culture in a dark and uncultivated district. Toynbee Hall is the educational center for the workingmen of East London and for their families. In the building there are class rooms where men and women, boys and girls, are gathered for evening instruction. Lectures and lessons are given upon practical subjects, such as the laws of health, improved modes of living, food, cooking, eating, and drinking; upon books, art, music, morals, and the best things that human beings can learn and do. Concerts, debates, talks, instruction in political economy, English history and English politics, etc., are given in Toynbee Hall. The best talent of our mother country has been called into requisition for the benefit of the workingmen of London. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, author of the best history of modern England, lectures in Toynbee Hall upon his chosen specialty. Into the dark alleys and dusky courts of the tenement-house quarter of London have come such glimpses of the great outer world of historic life and of the higher mountain ranges of human thought and action as were never before seen from the low plane of human existence in that workingmen's district. The people of the East End look with favor upon those young enthusiasts of Oxford and Cambridge, who teach and lecture in those pleasant class rooms of Toynbee Hall. Gentle manners, kindly natures, and social good will to men are here seen by the laboring classes in concrete, visible form. Good morals, religious life, art, education, and refinement are here seen as object lessons. Toynbee Hall men do not often preach; they practice certain principles which have been talked about in England for many hundred years. The influence of Toynbee Hall upon the university men who spend useful vacations there is also remarkable. One of these earnest workers, in response to a question concerning his part of the work of Toynbee Hall, said : I would rather not say what Toynbee has done for me, it has done so much for every side of me. And I think that we are now well known and accepted among the workingmen of the outer hamlets. I find them not only glad but proud to come and visit us and be associated with us. They set us thinking about them, and I suppose we set them thinking about us. I only hope they find it as interesting and edifying as we do. The chief practical lesson they have taught me is that of sticking to whatever they take up with; their greatest drawback is, I think, a want of background. Politically they have little background of history; morally they are wanting in background of character. * * * If we do anything for them at all, I think we give them a greater knowledge and a better belief in human kind. 1 On "The Work of Toynbee Hall," see an article by Philip Lyttelton Gell in the Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. VII, pp. 57-64. A little magazine called The Toynbee Hall Record is authoritative on the current work of this institution. Another student replied: What do we do at Toynbee? I should say this: We see life under varying conditions and new aspects and attempt to partake in the life we see. We learn much; we unlearn more. We have, too-and this is the most important of all-we have the opportunity not only of enlarging our culture and our sympathies, of gaining broader views and a more catholic standpoint, but of building up a new system of relationship side by side with our old, of forming around the hall a new world of student friends, and guest friends, acting and reacting on one another. The example of educated young men carrying seeds of culture from university storehouses to the common people of England was quickly followed by the educated young women of Girton and Newnham colleges. An establishment similar to that of Toynbee Hall was formed in Southwark by young lady students who spend portions of their vacations in educational and social work among the women and children of this lowly district. It is possible that this and other social experiments in England were partly suggested to the college women by those powerful novels of Walter Besant: All Sorts and Conditions of Men, and The Children of Gibeon; but the pioneer influence of Edward Denison and Arnold Toynbee will always be cordially recognized by university men and women. The time is not far distant when philanthropic undertakings like Toynbee Hall and Southwark will be seen in all the large towns and cities of America. Indeed, such foundations are already laid in the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, and many other towns. In connection with Toynbee hall, in East London, is carried on one branch of that larger work called "University Extension." The London Society for the Extension of University Teaching has already dozens of educational centers in the great metropolis, and during the past year has reached thousands of students in that city alone. One of these educational centers is Toynbee Hall, where, at evening hours, various extension courses are given to workingmen upon subjects of natural science, English history and English literature. The published fragments of Toynbee's remarkable lectures on "The Industrial Revolution" show what kind of economic thought was developed by one of Oxford's University Extension lecturers as early as 1882. If the blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church, the ideas of Arnold Toynbee and of Dr. Arnold, for whom he was named, will yet be the salvation of "Darkest England." An interesting perpetuation of Arnold Toynbee's scientific work may be seen in the "Toynbee trust lectures," given in such places as Newcastle, Truro, Camborne, Redruth, Falmouth, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, and Bolton by economic specialists like L. L. F. R. Price, H. L. Smith, and that devoted friend of University Extension and Oxford summer schools, W. A. S. Hewins. The Toynbee trust lecturers are appointed not merely to give local lectures, but to study and report upon economic and social questions which have been locally studied in industrial centers. III. TOYNBEE HALLS IN AMERICA. The Neighborhood Guild1 in Forsyth street, New York, was founded in 1887 by Dr. Stanton Coit, a graduate of Amherst College, who first among Americans made a careful study of Toynbee Hall in London. The New York experiment differed from the English establishment in that the leaders of the guild did not live in their own clubhouse, but took lodgings in a respectable tenement house and devoted their energies to the improvement of the surrounding neighborhood. Although the work was started by Dr. Coit single-handed, he was soon joined by other college graduates, some of whom were theological students. Their work was largely educational and social. They formed boys' clubs upon this simple constitution: "Order is our See article on "The Neighborhood Guild in New York," by Charles B. Stover, Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. VII, pp. 65-70. basis, friendship our principle, and improvement our aim." The clubs met on appointed evenings in places rented by the guild and they were supported, like all clubs, by membership fees and special contributions. Many people in New York gave practical assistance to the guild. Young ladies lent a helping hand in the organization of girls' clubs, where evening classes were instituted upon a plan similar to that adopted for the boys. Occasionally the clubs were brought together for a social evening party, so that newly acquired habits of civility and good order, rare qualities among young barbarians, could be put into practice. Out of the experience of the Neighborhood Guild grew a still more interesting experiment, very similar, in fact, to that undertaken by the college women of England among the working girls of Southwark. A graduate of Smith College, class of 1883, Miss Fine, was the secretary of the Neighborhood Guild, and at the same time a teacher of mathematics in a fashionable uptown school. She volunteered to undertake the management of a woman's college mission or college settlement for practical social work among the poorer people of a particular neighborhood in New York City. From the start, the project was strongly supported by graduates and students representing American colleges for women. An old-fashioned house was rented in Rivington street, once a fashionable but now a poorer part of the city, and there under the protection of a matron, and with Dr. Robbins, a resident lady physician, Miss Fine organized her social and educational mission. She associated with herself competent graduates from American colleges, women with money, leisure, and sense for serious work. These ladies came into residence for definite periods, paid their own expenses, and engaged in such educational classes or neighborhood visitations as seemed expedient. Opportunity was thus afforded, under skillful direction and prudent conditions, for young women to acquire by observation and practical work some real knowledge of the actual life of the poorer classes and of the economic problems connected with their social and moral improvement. With the exception of the managers, the young lady workers came only for a short period of two months or a few weeks, and then gave place to others, who came and paid their own expenses, precisely as girls do at a boarding school for the privileges of education in French, music, art, history, and literature. The Rivington Street Settlement was simply a kind of graduate school in economics and sociology, with practical lessons in a tenement-house district-a kind of sociological laboratory. With the development and further extension of this college settlement work in America, we are not here concerned. The psychological connection of the original experiment in Rivington street, New York, with the historic examples set by Toynbee Hall and the Neighborhood Guild is indicated by the following "Appeal for a New Work," issued February 12, 1889, by Miss Katharine Lee Bates, of Wellesley College, and Miss Vida D. Scudder, of Boston: Nearly everyone knows something about the work done and the idea embodied in the Universities Settlement in East London which goes by the name of Toynbee Hall. Here the young men of Oxford and Cambridge live among the working people, teaching them, amusing them, meeting them freely, showing them from day to day and hour to hour the possibility of beautiful, simple, well-ordered lives. Such work as this answers to a need not national but universal; the need of escaping from the class isolation produced by the mechanical laws of modern society, into a normal, simple, wholesome fellowship with our fellowmen. Educated Englishmen have felt this necessity summon them with imperative voice. If Englishmen, why not Americans? * * *It is hoped that there may be established among the poorer working people of one of our great cities a settlement of college women, analogous in spirit and aim to that at Toynbee Hall. * The plan is not new; for over a year it has been quietly taking shape. But it could not be carried out unless a head could be found for the work, who should organize and direct our scattered forces. She must be a college woman of wisdom, experience, and devotion, and there are not many such. * Miss Fine is at present at the head of the * * * * Neighborhood Guild in Forsyth street, New York; a work among the poor, which has been carried on by means of clubs and classes with success for two years. Arnold Toynbee died March 9, 1883, but the soul which he embodied and the ideals which he transmitted from an historic predecessor, Edward Denison, and from those spiritual teachers, Profs. T. H. Green1 and Benjamin Jowett,2 will live and grow forever. Toynbee Hall is an institution in which risen souls continue to live a larger, more abundant life. "Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows." Toynbee's Christian gospel of educational and social service is visibly extending throughout England and the United States. It is impossible to mention here the living institutions, the men and women, that have been inspired by Toynbee's example. The many college and social settlements' that have sprung up in the Anglo-American world since the planting of Toynbee Hall show the multiplying and ever-widening spheres of influence created by a single human life divinely spent. American college graduates, young men and young women, sometimes become discouraged at the vastness and hopelessness of popular ignorance. They sit down in despair before the monster wrongs and iniquities of American economic and political life. They forget that the only possibility for uplifting the masses, and for any social and political regeneration whatever, lies in work that is nearest home. It is from constant improvements of the local situation, from the establishment of local connections in our towns and cities with the great moral, social, and educational ideas of our time that general reform is to proceed. To all Americans who are willing to do something for the elevation of society by modern methods of educational extension, I would recommend a thoughtful consideration of these words of Arnold Toynbee: "Languor can only be conquered by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be kindled by two things: An ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and a definite, intelligent plan for carrying out that ideal into practice." 1 The Witness of God and Faith. Two lay sermons by the late T. H. Green. Edited with an introductory notice by the late Arnold Toynbee, M. A., tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1886. For a further study of Thomas Hill Green's philosophy, see his Prolegomena to Ethics, edited by A. C. Bradley. Oxford, 1884. 2 See Jowett's College Sermons. The American extension of the life and theories of Arnold Toynbee was partly due to F. C. Montague's biography of the man in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Vol. VII, and Jowett's sketch of his pupil in Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, London, 1884. A portrait of Arnold Toynbee, copied from a photograph sent me from Oxford by Mrs. Toynbee, now hangs in the historical lecture room at the Johns Hopkins University. Another copy may be seen in the frontispiece to Mr. Montague's biography of Toynbee in the University Studies above mentioned. An English pen portrait describes Toynbee as having "an oval face, a high forehead crowned with masses of soft brown hair, features very clearly cut, a straight nose, and a rather large, full-lipped mouth, only needing more color to produce the impression of beauty." Articles on Arnold Toynbee by H. B. Adams appeared in the Chautauqua Assembly Herald, August 4, 1888, and in The Charities Review, November, 1891. The present chapter is a revision and expansion of the articles named. In Gunton's Magazine, January, 1896, was published a paper on Toynbee and his work by Dr. M. McG, Dana. 4 There is a published Bibliography of College, Social, and University Settlements, compiled by M. Katharine Jones, of the College Settlements Association. The number, variety, and growing activities of these academic settlements will impress the observer with the vast possibilities of this interesting social work by college graduates. It is a form of laboratory work in social science and ought to be fostered by every church, college, or university which desires to be in touch with the living age. |