Читать книгу The Story of a Working Man's Life - Francis Mason - Страница 11

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IN England, when bread and meat are dear, the poor people break the windows of the bakers' and butchers'-shops; or, what is equally rational, they get up a "strike" against their employers for higher wages. In 1813, the shoemakers in York struck for an advance of wages, and, although my father was opposed to the measure, yet the majority of the society, to which he was necessitated to belong, was against him, and to that authority he had to submit, as much as if the king, lords and commons had been against him although the existence of the society and all action by it was contrary to Act of Parliament, but the statute-books are filled with Acts of Parliament which are never enforced.

As there was no work to be had in York, my father concluded to go to Hull, the principal sea-port in Yorkshire, about forty miles east of York. The removal was intended to be temporary, but my father never saw York again, though he lived twenty years afterwards. I was glad to accompany him, for I wanted to see the world, so the "strike" was quite acceptable to me.

It was the middle of winter, and there had been a considerable fall of snow, but it was a fine, frosty morning, when we turned our faces to the "wolds," which is a name given to the district we had to cross, literally signifying "woods," but is applied in Yorkshire to hills, though Webster says, "Sometimes a lawn or plain;" but whether woods or hills, or lawn or plain, we found the "wolds" about as uninteresting a country as I have ever seen either before or since. There were a few rolling hills, a barren as the fig-tree that Christ cursed, but the most of the way was over a level country occupied by farmers, with now and then a lifeless little village.

We walked thirty miles before dark, and reached Beverley, a neat little town of considerable antiquity with a minster thirteen hundred years old. Its original name was Beverlac, or "Beaver Lake," but there has been neither lake nor beaver there in historic times, though it is known that the beaver formerly inhabited England. In the twelfth century the price of a beaver's skin was fixed at 120 pence. We were hospitably entertained at Beverley for the night by a friend of my father's, and after breakfast next morning we walked into Hull.

Hull is one of the four largest sea-ports in Great Britain, and lies at the junction of the little river Hull with the large river Humber, which is here four miles wide. No river in England receives so many tributaries, and drains so large an extent of country as the Humber. It is, in fact, the Mississippi of England, and Hull is its New Orleans. Its basin extends from the border of Northamptonshire on the south, to the hills of Westmoreland on the north, a distance of nearly half the length of England from north to south.

The country around Hull is as flat as that around New Orleans or Calcutta, and the highest tides come up within a few feet of the level of the streets. The marvel is that it has not been washed away by the sea, which is only twenty miles distant by a wide estuary. Tradition says that the sea did once roll in and so change the face of the country by its ravages, that the river Hull, which then ran into the Humber on the west of the town, had its mouth filled up, and a new outlet was formed on the east where its mouth now is.

The German Ocean, which is separated from the Humber on the east by a narrow, flat peninsula, is making steady inroads on the land. At one place, six or eight hundred yards out to sea, is the "site of the ancient church of Aldborough," and a long series of villages on the coast have been washed into the sea within a few centuries.

Hull is famous for being the headquarters of the whale fishery, and the prosperity of the town used to depend very much on the success of the whale-men. When the ships returned at the close of the season "clean," having caught no fish, the shipowners were out of pocket, the sailors and their families out of bread, and all business suffered.

The foreign ships that frequent the port are principally from the opposite shore of the continent—from Holland, from Hamburg, from Denmark, Sweden and Russia. The Dutch vessels always attracted my attention from their clean and neat appearance, and the Russian for their dirtiness. The Russian sailors would drink the oil out of the street lamps, and eat anything that any living being could eat.

The shop in which we first worked in Hull is immortalized in my memory by the brutality of the journeyman who rented it. His wife was a very quiet, inoffensive woman, but he frequently told a story of striking her once with his fist on the side of the head, and, as she reeled and was about to fall, he struck her another blow on the other side, and she stood erect again, owing to the blows being so nicely balanced that they neutralized each other. This he narrated in a shop of six or eight men as a capital joke.

The truth is, there is no country in the world outside of heathen nations, where woman is more degraded than in the lowest stratum of English society. She holds a far better position in heathen Burmah. It is the constant habit of the men to beat their wives. The women usually speak of their husbands as "our masters," and they are the everlasting drudges of their families. There is no American society, I am happy to say, that can make any approach to the coarseness and brutality of the lowest English society. The children are educated by kicks and cuffs and curses; and there is no place so distasteful to them as home. Neither father, mother, nor child attends any religious assembly, and, so far as I can see, they have not a particle more of Christianity than the Chinese or Burmese, while they are much below them in manners and habits.

There are none whose interest is so much concerned in reclaiming these men as the moral and religious working men, because the public draws no nice distinctions, and is apt to set down the character of the whole class by that of the worst specimens. And low as these men are, they are not hopeless; but they are far more approachable for good by men of their own class than they are by clergymen, whose preaching they regard as an exercise of their trade. Those who are most hopeful should be got away from their bad associates into a better moral atmosphere. When a patient is suffering from a disease that is induced or aggravated by miasmata, the physician orders him out of the region where the miasma prevails. Medicine has little effect while the patient is under the influences which produce and continue the disease. Morals and physics are here governed by the same laws. It is of no use to preach to a drunken man in a ditch. Help him out of the ditch, and then preach to him afterwards.

Working men converted at mature age might be made more useful to their own class than any other instrumentality. They need no more education than they have, to go directly to the angles of opposition in the minds of their shop-mates, and they know from their own experience, the kind of artillery best adapted to batter them down. Then, men who are converted in their midst, who stay in their midst, are perpetual preachers of the grace of God, even when they say nothing.

Deacon Tilden, of Canton, Massachusetts, was a man of considerable talent, and an interesting speaker. He might have been picked up, sent to the schools, and after being duly crammed with the dead languages, made into an indifferent minister; but he remained in Canton an able deacon, and with his equally gifted wife, talked to his fellow-farmers, and did a work among them, that none of the ministers could do, and which he could not have done had he become a minister.

More lay agency is required for working men. We need people to address them who have a great deal of common sense, the sense, knowledge and mode of thought that is common to working men, and little more. It is the more effectual by being free from extraneous matter, or such knowledge and modes of thought as belong to other classes.

The great fault of our preaching to these men is that it is adapted to others, to the best informed in the meeting-house, not to those least informed. The preachers originally from the working classes, as many are, have worked themselves out of those classes by their learning, and bring into their preaching, what indeed they are compelled to do to be tolerated in an enlightened congregation, a vast amount of knowledge and thought which has no response in the minds of working men.

Kg Tha-byu was the most effectual preacher with the untaught Karens we ever had, and he was the most ignorant. He had very few thoughts, but those were grand ones, and everything else he deemed rubbish: The fall of man, his need of a Saviour, the fullness of Christ, and the blessedness of heaven. And he used these thoughts, like an auger, in drilling a rock. It was round, round, round, and round, round, round, until the object was accomplished. The Christian Karens, as they became more fully instructed, could not bear to hear him—they required better educated teachers; but the schools have not turned out his equal, and probably never will, for an untaught assembly.

A church in Westmoreland had written a fraternal letter to the Baptist church in York, and a long elaborate reply was prepared and copied in the best style by a young man connected with the congregation, who was a clerk in a lawyer's office. The letter was adopted by the congregation, but before it was mailed, the committee came to my father privately, and said that the letter was a good one, but did not represent the people who sent it; that they were working men with plain ideas, and all writing a plain hand, but the composition was in a style above them, just as the hand-writing was superior to anything they could write themselves; and they requested my father to write them a letter in his own style and hand, which would better represent the church. He did so; and, unknown to the young lawyer, my father's letter, which was undoubtedly inferior to his as a piece of composition, was sent in its place, because it was nearer the level of working men's thoughts.

My father was a preacher, but he never wore a black coat while preaching, nor did any of the preachers to the churches with which he was connected. To have appeared in the pulpit in a black coat would have been a deadly heresy, and he would have certainly been degraded from the ministry. Black coats were associated with people making a trade of religion, and preaching for money.

My father once tried to introduce written sermons, but they were cried down as "cold pudding." The people had much rather hear a man begin, as one of their exhorters, whom I often suffered under, began when expounding the passage: "And they rolled away the stone." "It was na common stane," he said, "it was na common stane. No, my brethren, it was a marble stane."