Hampshire House Workshops

Extract

During the nineteenth century the Christian conscience, what was left of it, had become increasingly uneasy by the sight of great poverty and great wealth existing side by side, by the problems presented in the fast growing industrial areas, by the sense that the poor had been dispossessed and that some form of restitution was due to them. John Buskin preached, William Morris practised, one or two rich young men took our Lord at his word and sold all that they had, many of the well-to-do gave much of their time and energy in ‘Social Service’, and men of good will supported charitable works according to their means. The ‘gay nineties’ saw the opening of many clubs for working men in poor parishes, the universities had their settlements or missions, and the late Canon Bartlett founded Toynbee Hall (Whitechapel) with a well planned educational objective. The normal cleavage of society into rich and poor had not then been recognised as constituting two distinct classes —employer and employed—with differing responsibilities to the State; that fateful distinction of status only reached the statute book with the passing of the insurance Act.