BOOKS.
THE CHARITIES OF EUROPE.*
M. DE LIEFDE has hit upon a great subject, but we cannot say his work has been well done. It would be difficult to imagine a better topic, or one which is less known than the working of charity upon the Continent, but upon the broad question the author has told us little or nothing. Ile has never mentioned the most interesting arrangements of all, the schemes by which Con- tinental benevolence contrives to postpone or avoid a measure for the relief of the poor, or those vast societies by which Rome strives to reconcile her doctrine that almsgiving is meritorious with the economic laws recognized by the science of the nineteenth century. He has simply described certain foundations, usually German, in which faithful men have endeavoured to carry out ideas of an organization holier and more catholic than that of modern society, and we cannot honestly say that he has described them well. His accounts are interesting no doubt. Any accounts of establishments so novel and so little known to Englishmen would be interesting, but the style of the narrator gives them no ad- ditional charm. He has no theory, no thread on which to string his narratives, he is devoid almost entirely of the spirit of criticism, while he fills his pages with reflections which must seem, we think,
to evangelicals a little trite, and are to other men not a little impertinent. What is the use, when one wants description, of a terminology borrowed from that of sermons, of describing a cottage,
for example, as "faithfully propped by the repairing skill of grate- ful piety,"—or exclaiming,." What a wonderful, irresistible power of growth there is in even the smallest grain, when sown in faith, dewed by prayer, and mused by love!" or, observing, "Such knocks at the door of the heavenly bank are too telling not to be heard," or inserting sentences like these ?— " The problem which was tO' he grappled with was, how to win the confidence of young liars and thieves who distrusted everybody ; how to make obedience a pleasure to young rascals who were resolved to obey nobody ; and how to reconcile with an orderly and decent life young vagabonds who claimed the liberty of turning day into nigh% of running half-naked about the streets, and of dining off potatoe-skins and other offal, with a pudding of tallow, such as is used for greasing shoes, by way of an additional dainty. This problem only faith in a Divine Saviour could solve."
Faith no doubt will make young liars and thieves decent people, and is perhaps the only emotion which will,—though, as Becky Sharp once said, it is easy to be respectable upon five thousand a year,—but is faith really necessary to induce young lads to prefer decent food to tallow pudding? Surely the tuition of the stomach will do that much, and this defect of realism, this muddle of civilizing influences with influences purely spiritual, deforms much of M. de Liefde's work, importing into it the one tone which the religious minds of to-day find it so difficult to endure. There is not one word, for example, in the following passage with which we disagree, and scarcely one which we would not rather have
seen omitted .
* The Clarifies of Europe- Ily1L.de Liefds., Leaden; ettail114 "It is true that the Church, a few centuries later, sanctioned the foundation of such societies, and even recognized monastic orders, with all the apparatus of their rules and costumes, as holy institutions of God. But history tells us plainly enough that these fruits in the field of the Church never sprang from the seed which the Apostle sowed, but from the tares which, even in his days, false teachers had begun to spread, in their carnal attachment to the rites and customs of the Mosaic dis- pensation. It stands to reason that those who wanted to introduce cir- cumcision into the Church of the Gentiles must also have desired to see its preachers and elders dressed like the priests of Jerusalem, and its minor officials separated into a special tribe like the Levites. The system of separating the office-bearers of the Church into a kind of caste, and of symbolizing their spiritual position by their dress, belongs entirely and essentially to the dispensation of the Law. The Gospel, on the contrary, preaches the universality of our priesthood and brother- hood ; it teaches us that all priestly vestments are insignificant, and that everything which makes a separation between brother and brother, and is an offence and a rock of stumbling, should be for ever put away."
Why not discuss the value of symbolism in English, as M. de Liefde would discuss the value of realism in painting, instead of employing a terminology which suggests the only literary produc- tions Englishmen never will read, average parochial sermons?
Still the work is valuable ; for its information, though not well put together. and conveyed in the artificial dialect of a dying. school, will be to the majority of readers almost entirely new. The book is really an account of certain great organizations on the Continent for reformatory or educational purposes, with short and highly eulogistic biographies of their founders, generally men like Muller of Bristol, in whom a vehement faith serves as foundation for unusual organizing power. The first is one of the most valuable. This is an association founded by the Candidat Wichern, which among Catholics would have been known as the Teaching Brotherhood of Hamburg, but among German Protes- tants is known as the Rauhe Hans of Horn, a little village near the free city. Hamburg, it appears, in 1832 had a great many bastards. The fact strikes M. de Liefde with horror,—though if he knew London equally well he might believe a high average of illegitimacy a sign of comparative virtue, as inconsistent with the prevalence of "the sin of great cities,"—and it also struck Candi- dat Wichern. He resolved to remedy it, not at its root, by preaching the value of marriage and sexual fulelity, but by re- deeming the unfortunate children, and after many efforts "his faith created money, brick, and mortar." In English, Wichern being an energetic and philanthropic person, raised a subscription, and founded a small institution near Hamburg, in which he re- ceived twelve of the boys whom we are accustomed to call "city Arabs." These twelve he educated upon the family system, treating them as free children—his cardinal principle was that any one might depart who pleased—and as he possessed an immense talent for government and a clear determination to govern, and to govern despotically, the boys grew up civilized members of society. The scheme attracted attention, Wichern is a perfect adminis- taator, funds flowed in, and a number of houses have been erected upon the same plan. They are all full of children, and all supply materials for the practical education of the "Brethren," a number of young men who visit the institution to be trained in administrative work Young men of the artizan and teacher class were invited to live with the children for two or three years, and to become their friends, their leaders, and teachers. Before their admission they required to know some trade, which they could teach the children. In each family- house accommodation was made for six or seven of them. Here, while they were teaching, they were to be learning how to deal with the ignorant, the neglected, and the lost, in order to rescue them from rain and to bring them back to Christ. They were to be supported inde- pendently of the children's establishment. Their board and lodging were to be paid to the establishment; not out of their own pockets of course, for the pockets of most of them were empty. Subscriptions and donations were solicited for the support of the Brethren's Institution as a separate thing from the children's establishment. The appeal was not based upon the ground of their being the superintendents and teachers of the children, but on the ground of their being in the course of train- ing for the work of the Inner Mission at large. It was a society not merely for the benefit of the Rauhe Hans, but of the whole of Protes- tant Germany."
They came in numbers, and were divided among the children's houses, in which they form a separate "family," but play the part of monitors, and are the intermediaries between the children and their parents, when they have any. They teach trades and help on the administration, and so great is the reputation for power of government which they have thus acquired, that within twenty- five years "not less than 787 applications came in for Brethren. Two hundred and fifty-two were wanted as house-fathers or assistants in reformatories, 59 in workhouses, 57 as visitors of the poor, 93 as teachers in popular schools, 40 as house-fathers in orphanages, 170 for prisons, 36 for hospitals, and 80 for various philanthropic purposes. These applications came from all parts of the globe ; most of course from Germany, but many also from Holland, France, England, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Poland, the Danubian Principalities, Turkey, America, and the Southern Asiatic Archipelago." Over them Dr. Wichern, now Director- General of all prisons and reformatories in Prussia, exercises an autocratic control :—
" Dr. Wichern and his Committee exact from the Brethren such abject submission as even an abbot would scarcely require from his monks. They are not only the leading men of the Brotherhood, but they are also its autocratic directors. A young man who enters the House as a Brother, learns from the regulations for admission that he is not to con- sider the House as a school of training for some future optional occupa- tion in the sphere of missions, but as the centre of a great work, into the service of which he is taken from the moment he pats his foot on the threshold. There are young men who stay for one or two years in the House merely to learn missionary duties, and then leave it to choose their own field of labour; but such young men are only guests—they are not members of the Brotherhood. A Brother is a person who is supposed to have resigned his own will as to choosing his field of labour. Dr. Wichern and his Committee choose for him. They may send him out as a schoolmaster, or as a prison officer, or as a hospital nurse. Theymay send him to the banks of the Vistula, of the Tiber, or of the Mississippi. But in whatever capacity, or to whatever quarter of the globe they may send him, he has no voice in the matter. When sent out, he is, as it were, hired out by Dr. Wichern to the party who is to em- ploy him and all contracts and future arrangements are settled be- tween that party and the Doctor. During the time of his service, he is of course entirely under the direction and control of those who employ him. Neither Dr. Wichern nor his Committee claim any right what- ever of interfering with his work. But he is not at liberty to give up his situation without the permission of the Committee, to whom also his employers must give notice if they desire to dismiss him. When he returns to the Rauhe Hans, he is certain to find shelter and support till he is sent out again."
In fact Dr. Wichern is a Protestant Loyola, and succeeds. His- " Brethren " or subjects choose dreadful tasks, such as burying those dead of typhus, or watching wounded in the outposts of a German army, and scatter over the world to bring in children within the pale of Christianity and civilization. They work well, and their children, it is said, succeed in life, a fact we can very readily believe. Administrative power like that of Dr. Wichern is- very rarely indeed thrown away, and German lads taught for years to study and to labour, strictly disciplined, but not altogether de- prived of individuality, are as likely to get on as Anglo-Saxons.. Their origin has nothing to do with the matter. In a very few years of such training—remember six monitors to every twelve lads—the old free and evil city life must become a dream, and all but the very strongest take a permanent impress from the new mould. A Society of Jesus is in fact formed, which during the life of its Protestant Loyola will probably work successfully, and may exist some time after his death. The boys cannot help themselves, and, as M. de Liefde informs us, the " Brethren " are carefully selected from the artisan class, which is accustomed to be in-service, and therefore does not feel the autocracy of the Direc- tor-General, who is besides a capable man, as at all painful. How far such a system, depending as it does on individual genius, and fatal, as M. de Liefde believes it to be, to individual liberty, can be relied on for general use, we should better understand if the author had described even one man who had endured the training, but this he has not done. He has described the frame- work, and given some hints as to the mode of management, but this is all, and though it has an interest, it is not sufficient material for an outsider's opinion.
The remaining articles are of the same kind, reasonably good, but not specially able, accounts of great foundations, most of them- for the training of neglected children, and all more or less suc- cessful. The reader who knows nothing of them will find M.. de Liefde interesting, but the reader who wishes to understand their inner working or the details of their organization.must refer to fuller accounts, and in neither will he find that philosophical estimate of the value of different schemes which M. de Liefde should, we think, have supplied. The book is well illustrated and admirably got up, but Messrs. Strahan, if we may judge by their expenditure upon it, have exaggerated its true value to them- selves.
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