ON A NEW REGIME FOR WORKING

MEN AND THEIR WIVES.

To the rich, Socialism has

|N the midst of great noise and tumult, the noise of the captains and the neighings of the horses, the shoutings of victory or the grievous weepings for the dead; in the midst, too, of European preparations for war-Socialism seems advancing amongst us, very noiselessly, but surely. Whether this be a fact to be deplored, or not, is a question. always been represented as a pillaging enemy; to the poor, as the most beneficent of friends. So at one time it was said, "Here is a Radical! take care of your pockets!" but when men came to understand that the best of men wished for a reform from the root of the evil, and that “radical” really did not mean anything poisonous, its professors were allowed to be respectable. There is an immense dread of Socialism, perhaps because people do not understand the word. Charles Kingsley, and other great and good men, who are to-day very much like moderate Conservatives, started as “Christian Socialists,” and their idea of Christian Socialism was beneficent and beautiful. It was very much the same

as Coleridge's, Cottle's, and Southey's Pantisocracy—a government of everybody: where there should be no Autocracy, or one government; Plutocracy, or money government; Bureaucracy, or red-tape government; Democracy, or mob government; or select Oligarchy, the government of a few chosen (perhaps self-chosen) people. Everybody was to do good, and to avoid evil. There were to be no soldiers, no police, no robbers, and nobody but he who was good, in the commonwealth. What a very pleasant place it would have been to live in! What a pity it was that Coleridge could not raise money to go out to America to found this! and if he had founded his Pantisocracy, and it had been " located" in Virginia, between the armies of Lee and Grant, with what fluttering white garments and green olive-branches would these Pantisocrats have marched forward and have endeavoured to have made peace!

Nevertheless, with all our failures-and every earnest, good man has had his dream of peace, and would have wiped every little tear, and filled every empty mouth-Socialism is coming; that is, we are growing more and more into bands, brotherhoods, clubs, and societies; and individuality is dying out. Here, in our very stronghold of domesticity and patriarchal government, our leading philanthropists are setting up "Working Men's Clubs " and "Dining Rooms," and doing away with the necessity for a working man's wife at all. The direst Socialist who ever preached inflated wickedness could do no more harm to the family than these good men will do. There can be, however, without dreaming of impossible

idealities, little or no question that the condition of our working men wants improvement. Work is honourable to all men: it is the first necessity, the primal law. "This we commanded you," says St. Paul, "that if any would not work, neither should he eat." It follows, as a natural corollary, that he who works well and earnestly should feed well. Unless he be well fed, he will lose health, and not be able to work; yet it must be accepted as a fact, that some of our hardest workers are badly fed and badly housed; and this effect is frequently produced, not through the insufficiency of their pay, but through the ignorance and the insufficiency of knowledge and management on the part of their wives.

Hence we have, on the part of the benevolent, an attempt to do by public means, and by large and systematic endeavours, that which should result from private endeavours on the part of the family. "Every one must have seen with pleasure," wrote a clergyman to the editor of one of our daily papers, "the accounts given in your paper of the proposed restaurants for the poor." Why so? These restaurants will of necessity, and to a large extent, separate a working man from his family. That they will do well and cheaply that which is now done poorly and inefficiently, is true enough. The present writer was invited to one of these establishments, where a meal of soup and bread, meat and potatoes, was furnished for fourpence. But a working man with a large family cannot afford to pay fourpence a head for a single meal every day. The clergyman referred to goes on to say that, as one well acquainted with the habits of the poor, he could bear witness to the

shocking waste, and to the unnecessarily bad living, to which the poor man is subjected. But, as he says, the fact of making a common table, and of dining and eating in common, must give rise to many grave reflections; and his first reflections, as indeed the first thoughts of all of us on the subject, are forced into somewhat the following shape :-Why are such refreshment-rooms necessary? Why cannot the poor man dine in comfort at home? The answer is a serious one: "I fear," he writes, "that we must lay the blame upon the wife."

Though this should not be the case, it is unquestionably so; and the charge-a very serious one, and a cruel one to bootis too true. The wife is incompetent, generally incompetent, to make her home comfortable, on account of habits previously formed. If she is the daughter of one of the working classes, there is no reason why this should be the case. She should have seen the necessity for management, arrangement, industry, and cleanliness. But she, too often, is neither industrious, competent, nor cleanly. The girls of the working classes are brought up on a wrong principle, or on no principle at all. The love of dress is taught them by their mothers, or by foolish companions and neighbours around them. This love, a very natural one, and when properly directed resulting beneficially, is fostered in many schools by teaching the children fancy work and embroidery; whereas, what a girl wants who is hereafter to become the wife of a working man, is a thorough knowledge of plain work; to be skilful and rapid with her needle; to know how to cut out and

to make her own clothing; to patch and to mend. A schoolmistress of a village school, who had observation and a thinking mind, and who used both, was one day asked the cause of her profound melancholy. She answered that she was so because her life was thrown away; that she was teaching children useless things, and all her work did no good; and that she was so bound down by custom, and the rules of the school, that she could effect no reform.

Well, after some time, generally very short, and insufficient for proper instruction, especially so when the wrong things are taught, and the scholars are not old enough to think for themselves, the girl leaves school; and after an interval spent at home, in a house generally badly managed and disorderly, she enters domestic service. Here, if everything were properly managed, she might hope to learn a great deal. Domestic service should be as honourable as it is undoubtedly useful. In the "good old times," or at least in the olden times, which, with all their faults, had something about them we might venerate, the son of the nobleman entered the family of the prince, the son of the gentleman that of the nobleman, and the son of the yeoman that of the gentleman, that he might learn something of life, and that, by being early taught how to serve, he might in good time know how to command. Society is now altered considerably for the worse. When the girl first enters service she becomes freer from restraint than she was in her mother's home; and not having had instilled into her the first habit, and the most useful of all habits, of education, that of a readiness and fit