THOMAS CHALMERS and the
GODLY COMMONWEALTH
Chapter 7
THE VISION FADES
With the breakup of the Established Church of Scotland,
the State moved rapidly to assert increased authority over poor relief. The
Royal Commission of Inquiry into Scottish poor relief, appointed by the
Government in 1843, had proceeded with its investigation throughout the final
months of the Church-State conflict. On 23 March 1843, several weeks before the
Disruption, Chalmers had appeared before the Commission, and delivered a
poignant defence of his parish community ideal for Church-directed poor relief.
After the Disruption, however, his parish community ideal seemed only more
Utopian, and the testimony of William Pulteney Alison and his supporters proved
more convincing to the Commission. Late in May 1844, the Royal Commission
finally published its report, recommending that the principles of the English
poor law be extended to Scotland. Accordingly, the Government proceeded to
draft a new Scottish poor law bill. The Scottish public, meanwhile, had been
profoundly shocked by the Commission's report, with its revelations of
appalling social conditions, particularly in the urban slums. The report
stirred an immediate public outcry. In early June 1844, Adam Black, Lord
Provost of Edinburgh, issued an urgent appeal to all the city churches for a
united effort to combat urban poverty and degradation. Soon another voice was
also heard. Disappointed by the failure of the Free Church to embrace his
vision of the godly commonwealth, and deeply disturbed by the Commission's
report, Chalmers had determined upon a final campaign for his Christian
communal ideal.
In June and July 1844, he delivered a series of public
lectures in Edinburgh, in which he announced the beginning of a new Church
Extension campaign to create no fewer than sixty additional working-class
territorial churches in the city. The Royal Commission on Scottish poor relief,
he asserted, had opened the nation's eyes to the suffering and human
degradation in the urban slums. There was a growing and just rage among the
working classes directed toward a social elite which for too long had ignored
their needs. The Royal Commission had recommended that increased State action,
particularly a new poor law based upon the English act of 1834, was necessary
to preserve the social fabric. But Chalmers could not accept this judgement.
Legal poor relief and 'bastille' workhouses, he argued, would in fact increase
social devisiveness and further degrade the poor. Only the dissemination of
Christian and moral principles among all social classes would restore the bonds
of communal benevolence and educate the poor to communal responsibility. For
thirty years, he had struggled to implant his Christian communal ideal in the
nation. But looking about himself now, he perceived only the triumph of the
Voluntary principle. Everywhere, there were only gathered churches, competing
with one another to attract the financial support of middle- and upper-class
Christians, while ignoring the poor and the irreligious, who, it was argued,
demonstrated no 'demand' for religion. The churches had withdrawn from their
social welfare responsibilities. This evil could not be allowed to continue.
Despite his poor health, he decided to make one final attempt to realize his
parish community ideal. He would begin in Edinburgh. But eventually, he
maintained, the sixty proposed working-class territorial churches in Edinburgh
would serve as an inspiration to the entire nation.
To create the new
churches, he appealed to Christian philanthropists in Edinburgh to form
societies of about twenty members. Each society would select a destitute
district of the city as its field of operation, and begin a territorial
operation consisting in three distinct programmes. First, the society would
divide the district into twenty sub-districts, or 'proportions', with a society
member assigned to each proportion to conduct regular household visitations,
collect information regarding neighbourhood needs, encourage church and school
attendance, and organize a neighbourhood sabbath school for children and a
prayer meeting for adults. Secondly, the society would organize a district
school, with a salaried schoolmaster, supported by modest fees from the
students. Thirdly, the society would employ a salaried missionary to conduct
regular sabbath services for the district inhabitants. The cost of the entire
operation, Chalmers maintained, would be modest (perhaps £100 per annum),
and would be met by contributions from society members. In a few years, the
combined action of the three programmes would create a viable working-class
Christian community in the district. The new working-class community would then
undertake, through its own efforts, the expense of erecting a church and school
building. Working class community leaders would assume the responsibility for
visitations, sabbath schools, and prayer meetings. Its task complete, the
original voluntary society of philanthropists would be disbanded, and a new
working class territorial church would assume an equal place among the existing
churches in the city. This emphasis upon creating working class lay leadership
represented a significant shift in Chalmers's social thought. In St. John's, he
had placed permanent authority in the hands of middle, and upper, class people.
His later home mission experiments at St. Andrews and the Water of Leith had
also emphasized middle, and upper, class paternalism. As a result, he had
inspired considerable effort and sacrifice from wealthy Evangelicals, but
little or no working-class enthusiasm. Now, he made full working-class
participation the clear and definite goal. If the working-classes were to be
redeeemed by self-reliance and communal benevolence, they would have to assume
responsibility for their communities. While the initial effort for cultivating
the impoverished irreligious neighbourhoods would be made by outside
upper-class philanthropists, their primary purpose would be to prepare the
working-class community for self-sustained growth.
The key to Chalmers's
new campaign lay in the concept of interdenominational effort. He had now
relinquished all hope for a Free Church territorial 'establishment'. He
appealed, therefore, to philanthropists from all Protestant denominations -
Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterian seceders,
Free Churchmen - to join him by forming local community-building societies. On
the surface, the interdenominational effort would assume the form of
competition. Each of the sixty proposed working-class territorial churches
would have to be affiliated with an existing denomination. Affiliation, in
turn, would depend upon which denomination's members assumed the greater part
of the financial and visitation effort in the initial organization of the
distict. 'Woe betide the hin'most!' he exclaimed. 'Let us all set forth - let
us strive to outrun each other in this good work - see who will get
congregations formed soonest, and who will form most. Chalmers had failed to
reach the poorest working-class neighbourhoods with his Church Extension
campaign of the 1830s, because, he believed, the Government had refused to
provide the endowment grant. He had also failed to reach them through the Free
Church. Now, he based his hope upon a vigorous interdenominational competition.
There was, meanwhile, another goal to be achieved through interdenominational
effort. Ultimately, he argued, competition between the denominations would lead
to co-operation in a shared social ideal. The participating denominations would
gradually realize that their doctrinal differences were subordinate to the
practical Christian duty of benevolence. He confessed to having little
appreciation for the theological differences separating the denominations -
'for those people, who ... speak of standing up for every "pin in the
tabernacle.'" If the denominations could co-operate to restore the Christian
communal ideal, 'there is no saying what the effect may be'. 'The most blessed
result', he observed, 'would follow from such a plan of intermingling
cooperation, not only to the district toward which their labours would be
directed, but also to themselves. The line of demarcation which separates the
various denominations would in that way be trodden and retrodden, so soon to be
altogether effaced and invisible. Eventually, his godly commonwealth of parish
communities would be created, not, as he had previously anticipated, by either
the Established Church or the Free Church, but by a union of the Protestant
denominations.
It was an ambitious programme, and a token of Chalmers's
tenacity. Despite the failure of Church Extension, the trauma of the
Disruption, and his disappointment with the Free Church, he refused to
relinquish his ideal of the godly commonwealth. At the public meeting in
February 1842, it will be recalled, Chalmers had promised that once the
existing outgoing congregations had been provided with ministers and churches,
he would return to his 'old work of Church Extension'. He now resolved to
fulfil this promise. With sincere concern for the suffering of the working
class, he refused to relent in what he believed was their only hope for a
better life - their moral and spiritual regeneration. Weary of the incessant
denominational strife of the last decade, he now appealed for Church union,
which would be achieved through interdenominational co-operation in a
territorial home mission. The campaign represented his final appeal for unity
of Christian purpose. He refused to be deterred by those who dismissed his
vision as unrealistic. 'Utopian-ism!' he exclaimed defiantly. 'Who are the
Utopians?' Surely not those who believed with him that human nature was
essentially the same the world over, and that those 'brought up in the smoke of
factories, and amid the ringing din of our mills', nevertheless possessed a
soul and conscience, which could be stirred by Christian teaching and human
kindness. From the experience of a long career, he assured his audiences that
his proposed community-building operation was practical in any district of the
country. To prove his point, he announced that he was beginning a model
operation in the West Port, one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden
districts in Edinburgh. If his operation succeeded in the West Port, he argued,
it could be emulated anywhere.
The selection of the West Port
demonstrated Chalmers's flair for the dramatic. Sixteen years earlier, the
district had achieved national notoriety.as the scene of the nefarious deeds of
Burke and Hare, two Irish immigrants who made their living smothering drunks,
prostitutes, and aged derelicts in the lodging houses for sale as cadavers to
the Edinburgh University medical faculty. Their celebrated trial had first
awakened the public to the sordid underworld of urban Scotland. While critics
had questioned the extent of real poverty in the St. John's parish of Glasgow,
there was no doubt that the West Port population was as poor, ignorant, and
irreligious as could be found anywhere in Britain. The West Port district was
in the south-west portion of Edinburgh's Old Town, under the shadow of the
Castle rock. The main road through the district wound down a gradual slope from
the edge of the city to the Grassmarket - the traditional site for public
hangings in Edinburgh. Immediately to the north of the district was a
cattle-market and slaughterhouse. A number of closes, or narrow alleys,
branched off from the main road, each forming a separate neighbourhood. At the
north-eastern end of the West Port, near the Grassmarket, stood a number of
large, ramshackle tenements, like that at 'number one West Port', which
according to the 1841 census schedule housed 180 lodgers, mainly unmarried
labourers, journeymen, and female servants. To the south-west, there were
smaller family dwellings, housing more substantial master masons, butchers,
blacksmiths, and shoemakers. No map of the exact district of 2,000 inhabitants
selected by Chalmers has survived. While it included the main West Port road,
it evidently did not include all the adjoining closes.
Some idea of the
district's social composition was revealed by the 1841 census schedules for the
main West Port road, and three closes, Killie Brae, Stevenson's Close, and St.
Cuthbert's Close, which most certainly were included. The population of this
area was 836, of whom 348, or 42 per cent, were born outside Edinburgh, and
110, or 13 per cent, were described as Irish. Occupations were listed for 353
individuals. The largest occupational category was that of general field or
farm labourer (70), many of whom had probably recently arrived in the city in
search of work. Other major occupations listed were female servants (29),
shoemakers and apprentices (25)( street-hawkers and pawnbrokers (21), smiths,
nailers, and apprentices (21), and carters (10). Virtually all were independent
tradesmen or labourers in small manufacturing shops, reflecting the fact that
Edinburgh was not an industrial city. Geographical mobility among West Port
inhabitants was high. Of a random sample of thirty families with children under
five years of age taken from the 1841 census, only six families remained in the
area in 1851. Mobility among single lodgers in the overcrowded tenements was
even higher: most inhabitants left the district at the first opportunity. A
survey conducted by Chalmers and his associates in September 1844 revealed that
of 411 families surveyed only 45 families belonged to a Protestant church and
70 families were practising Roman Catholics. Of over 400 school-age children,
only 122 attended school. The challenge confronting Chalmers, then, was
twofold. First, he had to create a sense of community among the impoverished
and fluid population. Secondly, he had to convince them of the value of
religious and moral instruction. The West Port exhibited the collapse of the
traditional Christian communal ideal in urban Scotland.
Chalmers had, in
fact, proposed a territorial church-building operation in the West Port as far
back as Januay 1839, when he had delivered a public lecture on the subject, and
requested subscriptions and volunteers. The collapse of the Church Extension
movement, however, had delayed the project until May 1844, when he began
communicating with James Ewan, a young salaried agent of the Edinburgh City
Mission, a Dissenter-dominated voluntary society. Ewan was conducting sabbath
services on behalf of the City Mission in the old Portsburgh courthouse for the
West Port and Grassmarket districts. After receiving permission from the City
Mission directors, Ewan agreed to assist in Chalmers's West Port territorial
operation. Chalmers, meanwhile, gathered a group of supporters, and on 27 July
1844, the first meeting of the West Port Local Society was held in the
Portsburgh court-house. By this date, he had recruited ten voluntary visitors -
seven middle-class professional men from Edinburgh's wealthy New Town and three
respectable West Port inhabitants, selected by Ewan from his congregation. With
Ewan's help, Chalmers had also divided the West Port district into twenty
proportions of about 100 inhabitants each. At the initial meeting, each of the
ten visitors was assigned a proportion and requested to begin regular household
visitations immediately. The Society, meanwhile, agreed to meet on a weekly
basis, in order to allow the visitors to share with one another reports of
their progress and problems. Chalmers experienced difficulty in recruiting the
additional ten visitors needed to fill all twenty proportions . The prospect of
walking alone through the dangerous West Port closes and stairs was enough to
intimidate all but the most intrepid. None the less, by early January, he had
managed to recruit at least one, and in some cases two visitors for each
proportion. The visitors formed the vanguard of the West Port
community-building operation, with responsibility for permeating the district
with religious and moral principles, creating a demand for a church and school,
and encouraging communal cohesion and responsibility. Each visitor was to
become closely acquainted with the inhabitants of his proportion. He was to
introduce them to the gospel and encourage their attendance at Ewan's City
Mission sabbath services at the Portsburgh court-house. Above all, he was to
encourage working-class participation in the operation, informing the
inhabitants of the Society's plan to establish a church, school, and other
programmes in the district, but assuring them that their assistance was
crucial. Chalmers avoided giving strict directions to his visitors, preferring
that they should use their initiative to respond creatively to the unique
conditions in each neighbourhood. He was also concerned to dispel the myth that
a territorial operation could not succeed without his personal supervision. 'Be
assured', he informed the Society on 6 September 1844, 'that our doings will be
regarded as far more imitable [by philanthropists elsewhere in the country] if,
instead of being stimulated by the personal influence of any one individual,
they are quietly and perseveringly performed by each man doing his duty. He was
confident that, in a short time, each visitor would develop a warm, sympathetic
relationship with the inhabitants of his proportion. In marked contrast to his
St. John's experiment of 1819-24, Chalmers did not involve his West Port
visitors in the distribution of poor relief. The Society maintained no
poor-relief fund, and visitors were discouraged from distributing private gifts
from their own resources. He would not have his West Port Local Society become
simply another voluntary charity society, distributing money on behalf of the
upper and middle classes. Nor did he wish to create a competition among the
inhabitants for material charity, which would subvert the basic communal
purpose of the operation. The only means for the long-term improvement of West
Port social conditions, he believed, was to encourage self-help and communal
responsibility among the working-class inhabitants themselves. Indeed, a
fundamental purpose of the operation was to emancipate the working classes from
any need for middle- and upper-class charity. He later explained to the
Countess of Effingham in 1846: 'I have raised no fund and recommended no method
for providing for the temporal wants of the inhabitants of the West Port -
convinced that if this formed any ostensible part of our proceedings, it would
vitiate and distemper our whole system and raise an insuperable barrier in the
way of achieving a pure Christian and moral good among the families of our
district.
Although he refrained from distributing material charity,
Chalmers did instruct his visitors to be sensitive to social conditions. They
were to seek jobs or apprenticeships for the unemployed, petition the Edinburgh
Town Council to close local taverns and remove public health nuisances, and
bring cases of extreme destitution or illness to the attention of the city
poor-relief authorities Above all, they were to encourage the poor to develop
habits of regular saving. Chalmers placed great hope upon a plan for a West
Port district savings bank, open exclusively to West Port inhabitants and
operated with the assistance of the visitors. Through participation in a
district savings bank, he believed, the inhabitants would learn self-reliance
and foresight, while at the same time accumulating enough capital to carry them
through periods of unemployment in reasonable comfort. On 9 May 1845, following
an address to a meeting of West Port inhabitants, Chalmers formally opened the
new bank. According to the plan, the visitors solicited 'penny-a-week' deposits
during their visitation rounds. An individual's savings then accumulated in a
West Port district bank office until they reached one shilling. At this point,
an interest-bearing account was opened for the individual in the National
Security Savings Bank of Edinburgh. Money could be withdrawn from this account
only with the written permission of the West Port savings bank treasurer. By
January 1846, over sixty separate accounts had been established. Although the
deposits were small, Chalmers was satisfied that a fair beginning had been
made.
Chalmers, it will be noted, placed heavy burdens of responsibility
upon his voluntary visitors. Armed with moral and religious principles, they
provided the operation's primary thrust into the district. They did not bring
with them material charity. Rather, they endeavoured to organize the West Port
into a self-respecting and self-sustaining working-class community. At their
weekly Society meetings, the visitors discussed their experiences, while
Chalmers provided them with occasional instruction in what he regarded as the
latest innovations in philanthropic activity - emphasizing public sanitation,
temperance, and savings banks. None the less, the burdens placed upon the
voluntary visitors were onerous, and their progress was slow. Some visitors
demonstrated initiative, organizing weekly neighbourhood prayer meetings and
achieving some noticeable improvement in their proportions during the initial
months. But for most, as will be seen, the personal dangers of household
visiting, the horrors they often discovered in the overcrowded tenements, and
their inability to communicate with the inhabitants, proved
disheartening.
Once the visitation effort was begun, Chalmers turned his
attention to the establishment of a West Port territorial school, and requested
William Gibson, superintendent of schools for the Free Church, to help locate a
suitable schoolmaster. Gibson recommended Alexander Sinclair, a young teacher
who had achieved notable success with working-class youth in Greenock. Late in
October 1844, Chalmers invited Sinclair to join his operation, promising him
national exposure for an experiment in 'plebian education'. He made no attempt
to conceal the grim reality of West Port conditions, but he reaffirmed his
belief that intellect was not a function of social class or environment. 'Be
assured', he informed Sinclair, 'that you will meet with a full average of
talent among the ragged children of this outlandish population. Our great
object in fact is to reclaim them from their present outlandishness and raise
them to a higher platform. Sinclair accepted the challenge, and on 11 November
1844 the West Port school was opened. Classes were held in large furnished
rooms above a deserted tannery, only a few feet from the tenement where Burke
and Hare had dispatched their victims. There were in fact three separate sets
of classes under Sinclair's superintendence. First, young boys attended a day
school, taught by Sinclair. Secondly, young girls attended Sinclair's day
school with the boys in the morning, and in the afternoon received instruction
in domestic skills from a Miss Rodgers. Thirdly, adolescents and young adults,
of both sexes, attended an evening school for two hours each week-night, taught
by a Mr Thomson. The teachers were assisted by several 'monitors', advanced
students from the nearby Free Church Normal Academy for teacher
training.
The basic curriculum at the school consisted in reading,
writing, natural science, geography, and Bible study. There was also additional
instruction in English grammar, mathematics, and Latin available to the 'lad
o'pairts' who demonstrated special promise or interest. School fees were a
modest 2s. per quarter for day school pupils, and l/6d. for evening students -
about a quarter of the fees required at other Edinburgh schools. Publicly,
Chalmers insisted that the fees were mandatory, and he instructed the visitors
to collect the fees during their visitation rounds. The fees, he argued, were
necessary to impress the families with the value of education. Privately,
however, he and Sinclair agreed that no child should be excluded for
non-payment, as this would punish children for parental irresponsibility. At no
point between November 1844 and March 1846 (the only period for which
information on fee payments exists), did more than half the pupils pay their
fees, and consequently the schools remained dependent upon funding by the
Society. School attendance, meanwhile, increased steadily. In November 1844, 64
attended the day school, and 57 the evening classes. By November 1845,
attendance had grown to 250 and 70 respectively.
The success of the
schools encourged additional welfare and educational programmes. In December
1844, a laundry room and public bath were constructed in rooms adjoining the
school, and a 'bleaching field' for drying clothing was set up on property
behind the tannery. All school children were regularly bathed, and boys
received periodic haircuts at the Society's expense. In April 1845, Chalmers
established a district lending-library in the deserted tannery, with an adult
reading-room offering several newspapers and journals. In May 1845, a nursery
school was begun, with a divinity student hired as the teacher. Nor did
Chalmers neglect his old plan for district sabbath schools. Initially, he
requested each visitor to establish a sabbath school in his proportion. The
visitors, however, were already overburdened with other responsibilities, and
by September 1845 only three sabbath schools had been formed. In October,
Chalmers made a fresh start - organizing a separate West Port Sabbath School
Society of twenty-two voluntary teachers, mainly women. The sabbath-school
movement now progressed rapidly, and by March 1846, about 150 pupils were
receiving regular sabbath instruction.
On 6th August 1845, Chalmers held
a public exhibition of the West Port schools, inviting a number of influential
Edinburgh citizens to the old tannery to view the classrooms and other
facilities, and to observe an oral examination of the children. The day went
beautifully. The children performed well, and afterwards Chalmers joined them
for strawberries and cream - a look of benign contentment upon his face as he
sat amid the noise and confusion of the excited youngsters. 'Smile as one
might,' Hugh Miller, editor of the Witness newspaper, observed of the
exhibition in his paper a few days later, 'there is no mistaking the fact, that
the minds of these children, which save for this school, would in all
probability have slept on for life, were fully awakened.
While the
schools were being organized, Chalmers was also working to create a West Port
Free Church congregation. Before the beginning of his operation, it will be
recalled, James Ewan was conducting services for the City Mission in the
Portsburgh court-house, with an average attendance of 50 at the morning service
and 100 at the evening. Although Ewan was not a Free Church member, Chalmers
decided that he would make an excellent minister for the proposed West Port
Free Church. In November 1844, Ewan's services were moved from the court-house
to the schoolrooms above the tannery, and Ewan was enrolled in the Free Church
College, in preparation for Free Church ordination. Chalmers's plan went awry,
however, when in January 1845 Ewan was discovered to have augmented his meagre
£40 per annum City Mission salary by accepting a bribe while arbitrating
a financial dispute between two West Port inhabitants. The City Mission
requested Ewan's resignation. Although Chalmers's Society retained Ewan's
services and now took on the payment of his £40 per annum salary,
Chalmers decided he could not risk appointing Ewan minister.
In early
February 1845, Chalmers decided upon William Tasker for the West Port ministry.
Tasker, a former school teacher and home missionary in Port Glasgow, had
entered the Free Church College in late 1843. He was a superior student, and
had a bright future ahead of him. Nevertheless, at Chalmers's invitation, he
relinquished his considerable prospects elsewhere and committed himself to the
West Port. Free Church leaders in Scotland had intended Tasker for the pleasant
rural parish of Kilmalcolm, and were enraged when they learned that Chalmers
had enlisted him. 'Edinburgh has the command of more than one half of our
preachers', Chalmers's long-time supporter, Patrick MacFarlan, complained to
another Free Church leader on 6 March 1845. 'If Dr. C. cannot find one so
well-fitted as Mr. Tasker for the district in which he takes so deep an
interest, he is at least in a better situation than we are who can find none at
all for Kilmalcolm.' Chalmers's visionary interdenominational campaign,
MacFarlan argued, should not be allowed to deprive real Free Church
congregations of needed ministers. But his remonstrances were in vain, and in
April 1845, Tasker began work as the West Port missionary, with a salary of
£100 per annum (later raised to £150) paid by the West Port Local
Society. Tasker pursued his duties with dogged determination, visiting
families, assisting in the schools, and conducting three services each Sunday.
Chalmers gave Tasker valuable assistance, accompanying him on visitation
rounds, and occasionally preaching for him (which attracted vast crowds and
large collections). The two men became close comrades, with shared enthusiasm
for the practical details of West Port progress. Chalmers found this return to
the parish ministry exhilarating, redolent with the memories of younger days.
He felt a satisfaction in immediate, personal relationships with the West Port
poor, which he had missed in his national campaigns. There was again a sense of
communal belonging, and of performing manifest service. Chalmers and Tasker
soon created a regular congregation of over 200 West Port
inhabitants.
It had been Chalmers's original plan that the working-class
congregation itself would gradually accumulate the capital needed to build a
church. But he now grew impatient to provide the nation with a more substantial
symbol of West Port progress. In the summer of 1845, he purchased property in
the district for £330, supplied by the West Port Local Society, and in
January 1846 he began soliciting public contributions for a new building to
replace the now overcrowded tannery. Plans for a simple but dignified brick
structure, large enough to accommodate church, schoolrooms, meeting-hall,
library, laundry, and other facilities, were drawn up by a noted Edinburgh
architect. The building was completed in early 1847, at a cost of
£2,007.34 Chalmers dedicated the church on 19 February 1847. Tasker was
ordained to the ministry, and the West Port Territorial Church was admitted
into the Free Church. The completion of the new church, 'the child of Dr.
Chalmers' old age', marked for him the fulfilment of the communal vision for
urban society, which he had first introduced in Glasgow over three decades
before. 'I wish', he wrote to an American correspondent on 27 March 1847, 'to
communicate what to me is the most joyful event of my life. I have been intent
for 30 years on the completion of a territorial experiment, and I have now to
bless God for the consummation of it.
His achievements were impressive.
In less than three years, he had organized well-attended schools and a
substantial Free Church congregation in perhaps the most destitute and
crime-ridden district in the city. Hundreds, hitherto untouched by organized
philanthropy and religion, had been provided with opportunities for education,
better hygiene, and neighbourhood worship. None the less, some questions
remain. Had Chalmers in fact fulfilled his promises in his lectures in the
summer of 1844? Had his visitors succeeded in creating a viable,
self-sustaining working-class community? Had he emancipated the West Port
working-classes from the need for middle- and upper-class charity, or produced
significant improvements in social conditions? In truth, despite the very
considerable achievements, his West Port territorial experiment had proved less
than successful in three central purposes of the operation.
First, the
visitation effort, intended to permeate the West Port with Christian communal
purpose, had in fact collapsed. Many visitors, as mentioned earlier, had
rapidly grown disheartened in confronting conditions of poverty and human
degradation which were. alien to their whole experience. Despite their good
intentions, they found themselves unable to communicate with many inhabitants,
such as the mother Tasker had discovered pawning a loaf of bread in front of
her hungry children for drink, or the participants in a funeral whom he found
collapsed in drunken stupor around the corpse. They distributed religious
tracts (indeed, by June 1846, the visitors reported having distributed over
4,000 tracts), but to what purpose in a district where most inhabitants were
illiterate? They introduced Bible teachings, and gave moral advice, but to what
effect? In truth, they would have required more training and stricter direction
in order to penetrate the barrier of social class and recognize the real needs
of the district. But as Chalmers had become increasingly enthusiastic about the
church, schools, and other programmes, he had neglected attending the weekly
meetings of the visitors. Gradually, visitors began quitting the Society, while
even those who remained ceased regular household visiting. By September 1846,
the Society had been forced, because of lack of visitors, to reduce the number
of proportions from twenty to fourteen. Of these, two were unoccupied, two had
been assigned visitors only within the last three weeks, and one had received
no attention from its visitor for several months. Only six visitors reported
having even entered their assigned proportions during the previous month. Of
the ten original visitors of July 1844, only two remained.
At the 6
September meeting, William Wilson, the most active of the original visitors,
confessed 'his district to be sinking into a worse condition than ever'. He had
given up his weekly prayer meeting, 'owing to the bad attendance'. At the same
time, the Society expressed its despondency over 'the increasing immorality and
destitution which prevails in the West Port'. This was, in fact, the last
meeting of the West Port Local Society. Chalmers attempted to revive the
vistitations with a letter to the Society on 26 September, in which he
apologized for his frequent absences and promised to exercise more leadership
in the future. His letter, however, was too late. The Society had dissolved and
the visitations ceased. The West Port visitors had been among the most
dedicated and determined Christian philanthropists in Edinburgh. Their failure
demonstrated more than simply Chalmers's flagging power to inspire sustained
voluntary philanthropic activity. Rather, it raised serious questions about the
effectiveness of purely voluntary effort in the urban slums of the
1840s.
Secondly, the operation had not served to emancipate the West
Port working-class community from dependence upon outside middle- and
upper-class charity. On 7 March 1845, Chalmers had asserted in a public meeting
at Glasgow that a territorial operation for a population of 2,000, such as that
in the West Port, could be successfully pursued at a cost of £100 per
annum. Several months later, in a public lecture at Edinburgh on 27 December
1845, he raised this estimate slightly to £150 per annum. He had also
argued that within a few years, the working-class community would become
self-sustaining and assume the responsibility for building and supporting its
own church and schools. But in fact, the West Port expenses were far greater
than Chalmers claimed. The initial costs for constructing the schoolrooms and
other facilities in the deserted tannery, and for providing books, paper, soap,
haircuts, heating, etc. had been high. Further, in part because of the
ineffectiveness of his voluntary workers, Chalmers had been forced to rely to a
greater degree than anticipated upon salaried agents. By 1846, the West Port
Society was supporting two missionaries (Tasker and Ewan) at a cost of
£190 per annum, and four schoolteachers at £150 per annum. It also
employed eight part-time monitors and a part-time librarian.
During the
first sixteen months, Chalmers received and spent at least £1,137 in
outside donations for his West Port operation. He may, in fact, have received
and disbursed far more than this amount, for it is difficult to ascertain
precisely the financial arrangements. In marked contrast to his St. John's
experiment and Church Extension campaign, in which he had been very forward in
publicizing the financial details, he was secretive about West Port finances.
The funds were originally kept in a bank account under the authority of several
Society business managers. In May 1845, however, Chalmers cleared this account,
and deposited the funds in two personal accounts. On 11 October 1845, moreover,
he informed the Society that he would no longer regard himself obliged to
reveal the amounts he received or disbursed. He evidently intended to conceal
the growing costs of the operation. If these costs had become public knowledge,
critics might have argued that a West Port operation could succeed only where
there was a Chalmers to mobilize donations from wealthy admirers.
Nor
would such criticism have been unjustified. Between September 1844 and January
1846, for instance, James Lenox, a wealthy New York lawyer of Scottish descent,
donated £1,000 to Chalmers for his West Port operation, on the condition
that the gifts remained anonymous. Lenox had never visited Scotland, and his
donations were largely an expression of personal admiration for Chalmers.
According to William Hanna, £5,500 in outside donations were spent on the
West Port operation between 1844 and 1852. Even after 1852, moreover, the West
Port church continued to draw large subsidies from the Free Church Sustentation
Fund. Chalmers should not be faulted for the amounts spent. There was almost
certainly no financial mismanagement. None the less, the fact remains that the
West Port operation had consumed nearly ten times the amount of outside
financial assistance he had claimed it would require, and that the operation
had not become financially self-sustaining. At a similar rate of expenditure
for other operations, it would have required over £300,000 for the sixty
territorial operations he had requested for the Edinburgh slums alone in his
1844 lectures - nearly three times the sum that had been collected for the
general fund during the entire Church Extension campaign of the
1830s.
Finally, Chalmers's operation did not effect significant
improvement in West Port social conditions. By 1851, to be sure, Tasker's
congregation included more than 400 communicants, while the system of day,
evening, and sabbath schools provided instruction to 470 children and young
adults. The church and schools attracted a group of upwardly mobile
working-class families, prepared to pursue opportunities for social advancement
and respectability. Most of these people, however, eventually left the West
Port district, only travelling back from other neighbourhoods to attend
Tasker's services or the West Port school. The church and school, in fact,
functioned largely upon a 'gathered church' principle, attracting the new
working-class elite which began to take shape with improving economic
conditions in the 1850s. The great mass of West Port inhabitants, however,
remained rootless, impoverished, and often lawless. As late as 1869, Tasker
complained to the Edinburgh Lord Provost that the overcrowded tenements
remained the same 'sink of social and moral pollution' that they had been when
'Dr. Chalmers and I set up our Church and Schools in 1844'. The West Port, in
fact, remained one of the worst slum districts in Edinburgh throughout the
nineteenth century. Religious and moral instruction alone had not proved
sufficient to transform it into the closely-knit community Chalmers had
envisaged.
II
At the same time as he was pursuing his West
Port model operation, Chalmers had worked vigorously to create public
enthusiasm for his interdenominational community-building campaign. In 1844 and
1845, he published three articles in the North British Review, in which he
again repeated the arguments in favour of his parish community ideal. Only a
vigorous territorial ministry, he argued, would preserve the nation from the
growing evils of pauperism and working-class political disaffection. A new
Scottish poor law, such as that recommended by the Royal Commission, would only
aggravate social divisiveness and class conflict. In March 1845, he delivered a
public lecture in Glasgow, describing the West Port operation as the
culmination of his earlier St. John's experiment and urging Glasgow
philanthropists, particularly those who had participated with him in the St.
John's experiment and the Church Extension campaign, to join him by beginning
similar territorial operations. In Many 1845, it will be recalled, he resigned
his convenership of the Free Church Sustentation Fund. He now pledged to devote
his remaining strength to his interdenominational campaign. In 1845, moreover,
he assumed an active role in organizing Scottish participation in the
'Evangelical Alliance' of Reformed Protestant denominations in Britain, Europe,
and America, which was being organized by his friend, the English Dissenter,
Edward Bickersteth. He endeavoured in particular to direct the attention of the
Alliance to his territorial plan. In the introductory essay to a volume of
Essays on Christian Union, published in London by supporters of the Alliance in
late 1845, he developed his argument that an interdenominational urban mission
enterprise would provide the catalyst for Church union. Urban poverty, he
argued, was a pressing problem in the entire Western world, and demanded a
co-operative territorial mission among all Protestant denominations.
On
27 December 1845, Chalmers invited a group of Edinburgh civic leaders to the
Royal Hotel, in the city's New Town. The purpose of the meeting, he explained
to his guests, was to report that the Edinburgh campaign which he had announced
in his public lectures in the summer of 1844 was now under way. First, he
asserted, his West Port model territorial operation was making substantial
progress. Indeed, he argued, the West Port model had already demonstrated
conclusively that a successful territorial operation could be pursued in any
district of the country for the modest cost of £150 per annum. Secondly,
and most important, he announced that his West Port model was beginning to
inspire additional territorial efforts in the Edinburgh slums. No fewer than
five districts for territorial operations, he claimed, had been mapped out by
new local visiting societies in the city's destitute Old Town, which promised
to establish 'a chain of forts all the way from the South Bridge to the Main
Point'. In addition to these five 'forts', he understood that the Duchess of
Gordon had promised to pay the expenses for an operation at the lower end of
the Canongate, and that members of the Revd James Robertson's United Secession
congregation in the Vennel might undertake an operation in the Grassmarket. In
a word, it appeared that Chalmers's plan for organizing Edinburgh into
Christian communities would soon be fulfilled.
He now appealed for still
more effort and financial donations. He described again the elements of his
plan, emphasizing the need to enlist the active participation of the
working-class inhabitants of a district in the community-building operation. 'I
don't think', he observed, 'that you will achieve any permanent good for the
population, unless you list them as fellow-workers in, or at least fellow
contributors to the cause. I think that a great and radical error in the
management of our population has just proceeded from the idea that they are
utterly helpless and unable to do anything for themselves ... Unless you enlist
their co-operation, you will never achieve anything like permanent good'for
them.' The entire campaign must be interdenominational. He bristled at
accusations by critics that his campaign was in fact an underhanded manoeuvre
to secure interdenominational contributions for extending his Free Church. 'Who
cares about the Free Church,' he exclaimed, 'compared with the Christian good
of the people of Scotland? Who cares for any Church, but as an instrument of
Christian good? For, be assured that the moral and religious well-being of the
population is infinitely of higher importance than the advancement of any
sect.' (Little did his critics realize the extent of his disappointment with
the Free Church.)
Impressed by Chalmers's apparent progress, the
Edinburgh City Mission now attempted to establish an institutional structure
for his campaign. At a public meeting on 30 January 1846, chaired by the Whig
Lord Provost, Adam Black, the City Mission directors announced a plan by which
each territorial operation established by Chalmers's West Port model would send
one delegate to a City Mission general committee. This committee, headed by a
salaried, full-time superintendent, would advertise the campaign, collect
subscriptions, and supervise the operations on city-wide level. Because of
ill-health, Chalmers was unable to attend the meeting, but he sent a letter of
encouragement which was read aloud and published in the report of .the
proceedings. On 28 February 1846, moreover, he sent further recommendations to
Charles Spence, the City Mission secretary. He opposed too much central
direction over the individual operations, which he feared might discourage
local initiative. But he agreed that a general committee would be valuable for
collecting and administering a central mission fund, from which local
operations could draw according to their needs. In short, the effort should be
pursued along the lines of his former Church Extension campaign, with a balance
of local initiative and central direction. It was interesting that the
Dissenter, Adam Black, who ten years before had caustically compared Chalmers's
territorial communities to Robert Owen's Utopian 'parallelograms', should now
assume a leading role in organizing Chalmers's teritorial campaign. With the
Established Church broken up, Black had evidently reconsidered his former
objections to a territorial ministry, at least among the urban working
classes.
Despite initial progress and City Mission support, Chalmers's
campaign soon lost momentum. Most of the proposed territorial operations which
he had described in his address of December 1845 collapsed during the next few
months. The 'chain of forts', in Edinburgh's Old Town never materialized. Only
three operations modelled upon his West Port experiment were actually pursued -
two in Edinburgh, and one in Glasgow. These apparently had some success in
extending church accommodation and educational opportunities, but like the West
Port operation, they required considerable financial contributions and did not
radically transform their working-class districts. After several months of
effort, the City Mission relinquished its plan for the general committee, and
by late 1846 Chalmers's campaign was effectively finished.
His concept
of a territorial urban mission for the revival of Christian communal sentiment
had failed to capture the imagination of Scottish philanthropists. Despite his
new emphasis upon working-class participation and interdenominational
co-operation, Chalmers's West Port operation had represented essentially the
same social position that he had advocated in Kilmany over three decades before
- that only religious and moral instruction, directed towards restoring
traditional Christian values, would secure the welfare of the working classes.
But by the mid-1840s, public interest in his godly commonwealth ideal had
waned, hastened by the failure of Church Extension and the Disruption. In
August 1845, the new Scottish poor law received the Royal assent, and secular
poor-law districts and workhouses began to replace the traditional system of
parish poor relief. The secular State also began to extend its influence in the
areas of public health and education, and the Scottish churches increasingly
withdrew from social welfare. Chalmers's West Port operation had represented an
impressive effort to revive the social ideal to which he had devoted most of
his life's work; but he now lacked the energy and tenacity of his younger days.
With the failure of his territorial mission in 1846, he began to realize that
Scotland had changed radically since his youth in rural Anstruther and Kilmany,
and that these changes perhaps could not be reversed.
In December 1846,
shortly after the collapse of Chalmers's final church extension effort, Richard
Oastler, the celebrated Tory factory reformer, travelled to Scotland to agitate
for the Ten Hours Bill, a proposed Parliamentary measure to limit the working
day for factory labour. Oastler placed particular emphasis upon gaining
Chalmers's support. For a significant portion of Scotland's middle and upper
classes, Chalmers remained the most dedicated 'friend of the working classes';
yet he had consistently opposed factory legislation. Through Chalmers's friend
and former student, George Lewis, Oastler managed to obtain an interview with
him. So important did Oastler regard the conversation, that he later wrote a
full account of it from memory.
At first, Chalmers expressed his total
opposition to Oastler's campaign. He was, he claimed, an advocate of free
trade, who had long opposed State intervention in industry and commerce, as
well as in social welfare. Only the Christian and moral education of the
working classes would rescue them from their present misery. But Oastler
refused to accept Chalmers's objections. Throughout his career, Oastler
insisted, Chalmers had in fact opposed Classical Liberal economics, especially
the Liberal economists' emphasis upon self-interest and the 'invisible hand'.
'The Christian', Oastler asserted, in paraphrase of Chalmers's often-expressed
sentiments, 'knows that Society is one compact body, each individual member
being dependent on the rest, each requiring the protection of all. The
Free-Trader, on the contrary, persuades himself that each member is a separate
piece of independence, an isolated self.' Oastler reviewed at length the
horrors of factory conditions, horrors that Chalmers himself had vividly
described in his 1832 debate with J. R. McCulloch. Only Parliamentary
legislation, Oastler maintained, could now preserve the Christian commonwealth
against the growing evils of unrestrained industrial capitalism. Chalmers
suddenly relented. He did not relinquish his lifelong support for free trade.
But he did now pledge his full support to Oastler's Ten Hours Bill, and gave
him a letter of introduction to several influential friends. At a public
meeting in Edinburgh on 24 December 1846, Oastler was able to announce that
Chalmers was now a participant in the Ten Hours movement, an endorsement of no
small consequence for the movement in Scotland. It was, for Chalmers, a
significant conversion. With the collapse of his territorial church and
community-building campaign, he began to acknowledge that the State was perhaps
the only available regulator of social relations with sufficient power to
preserve the weak from the strong.
In the autumn of 1845, the potato
crop in Ireland, and in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, had failed,
leaving literally hundreds of thousands facing starvation. This was followed by
an even worse failure in the autumn of 1846. The famine was the great tragedy
of nineteenth-century British history, and a tragedy peculiarly localized on
the Celtic fringe. In November 1846, Chalmers assumed an active role in
organizing the famine-relief effort, and issued urgent appeals for
subscriptions. Largely through his efforts, the Free Church collected over
£15,000, assuming the leading role among Scottish churches in the relief
effort. In the early months of 1847 the situation grew more urgent. Typhus and
other epidemic diseases swept through the famine-stricken populations, and
numerous cases of death by starvation began to be reported.
Private
philanthropy, meanwhile, was proving insufficient. Many, in fact, refused to
contribute to relief efforts, on the grounds that it would only encourage the
'notorious' lack of foresight and 'moral restraint' among the Gaelic poor of
Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. The poor, had brought their misery upon
themselves; to support them through the famine would only be to attempt to
circumvent Malthus's iron law of population - an attempt doomed to failure.
Better to let nature take its course and remove by starvation the redundant
population, than to attempt to keep it alive by artificial means. The Whigs,
moreover, were now back in office. In their commitment to the doctrine of
laissez-faire, their Government was hesitant to provide State relief in any
significant amounts, and indeed was attempting to close the public-works
projects, soup-kitchens, and other relief facilities currently in
operation.
Chalmers was appalled by such attitudes. It was, he asserted
in a letter published in the Edinburgh Witness on 6 March 1847, 'presumptuous
and unwarrantable in the highest degree' to attribute the famine to the faults
of the suffering poor themselves. It was not the Christian's place to condemn
his fellow man; rather, he should do all in his power to relieve suffering,
according to the simple Scriptural law of compassion. 'If the agonies and cries
of those dying creatures', he warned, "do not reach our ears to the awakening
of an effectual compassion, it may be that they shall reach the ears of Him who
sitteth above, to the effect of a fearful retribution upon ourselves.' Above
all, he demanded more substantial Government relief grants to supplement
private philanthropy. 'It would have been wrong, certainly, in the public to
have abstained from their subscriptions in the hope that Government would do
all. But is it right in the Government to abstain from their grants in the hope
that we, the public, will do all?'
Chalmers developed these ideas
further in a long article, 'The Political Economy of a Famine,' published in
the North British Review in May 1847. Only a massive redistribution of national
wealth, he argued, would save the British nation from the horror and guilt of
mass starvation within its shores. He agreed with Daniel O'Connell that at
least £30,000,000 was now needed. Private philanthropy would not be
sufficient to raise such a sum. Rather, the Government must raise most of the
money through massive direct taxation upon the luxuries of the wealthy. The
nation must finally transcend the doctrines of laissez-faire economics,
forsaking its 'deification' of commercial and industrial expansion in favour of
the higher glory of compassion. Nor, he insisted, would mere grants of State
relief assistance be enough. There must be a Parliamentary Commission to
supervise the distribution of relief, and to halt profiteering by grain
merchants. Further, this Commission must broaden its inquiry to include a
large-scale survey of social conditions in Ireland, in preparation for major
land reform and poor-law reform once the crisis was over. In describing his
plan for massive State intervention in the economy, he cited his first major
work of political economy, the 1808 Enquiry into the Extent and Stability of
National Resources. He reaffirmed his adherence to the basic principles of this
work - that massive Governmental taxation and management of the economy were
necessary to preserve the common welfare against self-interested commercial and
industrial elites. In 1808, the occasion for his appeal for increased State
intervention had been the Napoleonic threat to Britain's independence; now it
was the threat of starvation to a significiant portion of Britain's population.
In his conclusion, Chalmers promised to publish several more articles in the
North British Review detailing his plans for reform of the Irish land tenures
and poor law.
His social thought had finally run full circle. With the
collapse of his church extension effort in 1846, and the prospect of mass
starvation in Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, he returned to
many of his 1808 views. His Evangelical Christian faith remained unshaken, but
he now accepted that the power of the Church and private Christian philanthropy
to preserve the general social welfare against the self-interest of the few was
declining. He began to relinquish his ideal of the godly commonwealth directed
by a territorial national Church, and to regard the State as the only
institution capable of enforcing social justice. It was ironic that his
attempts to inspire a private relief effort in Scotland should have been
shadowed by the very Malthusian doctrines which he had helped to disseminate.
In fairness, however, it must be observed that Chalmers had never allowed his
Malthusian views to supersede Christian compassion, nor suggested that the
'redundant' population should be allowed to starve. It is interesting to
speculate on what views he might have expressed in his proposed North British
Review articles - whether he would have retreated still further from his
opposition to legal poor relief and the secularization of social welfare in the
wake of the famine. But although the proposed articles were never written, one
thing is fairly certain: like so many other dreams, Chalmers's godly
commonwealth ideal succumbed to the grim realities of the great famine of
1846-7, which both devastated the Celtic population and destroyed his
confidence in the sufficiency of purely voluntary benevolence.
Early in
May 1847, Chalmers travelled to London in the company of his son-in-law, John
Mackenzie. His primary purpose in the journey was to deliver oral testimony
before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to investigate
Free Church complaints of difficulties in obtaining sites for new churches. A
number of landed proprietors, including the powerful Duke of Sutherland, had
persisted in refusing to sell property to the Free Church. In some districts,
particularly in the Highlands where individual landholdings were vast, this
made it impossible for congregations to build churches. Chalmers appeared
before the Committee on 12 May. Sir James Graham, evidently hearing of
Chalmers's dissatisfaction with some of the positions taken by the Free Church,
pressed him hard during the examination about the entire Disruption
controversy, hoping for a partial recantation that might open the way for
eventual reconciliation. But Chalmers refused to back down from his position
that it was the State's refusal to recognize the Church's spiritual
independence which had forced the Disruption. Frustrated, Graham grew
increasingly caustic in his questioning, and the examination degenerated into a
cruel but unsuccessful attempt to catch Chalmers in inconsistencies. Chalmers
held his ground remarkably well, until finally the other Committee members were
obliged to silence Graham and end the testimony. There had been no
recantation.
While in London, Chalmers took the opportunity to call upon
old acquaintances. He visited and prayed with the widow of his brother James,
who had died a few years before. 'It was a serious interview,' he wrote his
wife, 'and my brother's faithful and vivid picture has haunted me ever since.'
On 14 May, he called upon Thomas Carlyle and his wife at Chelsea. Carlyle
raised the subject of the Disruption and the 'Free Kirk War', but Chalmers had
no desire to speak of this, and 'softly let it drop'. Instead, they spoke of
Chalmers's territorial community ideal, and of his boyhood friend from the
Anstruther district, the painter, Sir David Wilkie, who had died a few years
before. Chalmers had just been viewing Wilkie's work in the National Gallery,
and he now related how Wilkie had often struggled 'long and to no purpose'
before he could capture precisely the right symbol to convey the moral message
in one of his romantic pastoral paintings. The conversation circled around the
communal virtues of rural Scotland in which Chalmers and Carlyle had been
raised, and which both had struggled to convey to a rapidly changing nation.
'Chalmers', Carlyle later recalled, 'was very beautiful to us during that hour;
grave, not too grave, earnest, cordial; face and figure very little altered,
only the head had grown white, and in the eyes and features you could read
something of a serene sadness, as if evening and silent star-crowned night were
coming on, and the hot noises of the day were growing unexpectedly
insignificant to one. '
Chalmers arrived back in Edinburgh on the
evening of 28 May, after an overland journey that included a visit to his
sister in Gloucestershire. He was weary from the trip, and rested in bed most
of the following day. Friends and family were concerned about his health, but
vjiiuimeu he waved off their anxieties. 'I do not by any means feel unwell,' he
informed a caller whom he received at his bedside, 'I only require a little
rest.' On Sunday, 30 May, he attended worship, and called upon his old friend
from the Kilmany district, Janet Coutts. He was too weary to conduct family
worship that evening, but promised to lead family prayer in the morning. He
retired early, 'bidding his family remember that they must be early tomorrow'
for prayer, and wishing all 'a general good-night'. But the next morning, he
was not up as promised. At eight, the housekeeper entered the room to wake him.
She found him sitting half-erect in bed, leaning against the headboard. He had
been dead for hours. Apparently he had succumbed to a sudden heart failure
shortly after leaving his family the night before.
Chalmers was buried
in Edinburgh on 4 June 1847. The funeral service was held in Free St. Andrew's
church, in the presence of the Free Church General Assembly and deputations
from the Presbyterian Churches of England and Ireland. Following the service, a
procession of over 2,000 mourners, headed by the Magistrates and Town Council,
began a slow, winding march of three miles through the city to the Grange
cemetery. Most of the shops and businesses were closed for the solemn event,
and the route was lined with an estimated 100,000 silent spectators. As the
procession moved through the Old Town, it was joined by the congregation of the
West Port church. It was a gloomy day, with a heavy mist and a raw east wind.
Nevertheless, as the funeral procession reached the Grange cemetery, it found
the surrounding fields already filled with thousands of mourners. 'The
appearance', recalled one observer, 'was that of an army.' 'Never before, in at
least the memory of man,' the Witness reported the following day, 'did Scotland
witness such a funeral.... It was the dust of a Presbyterian clergyman that the
coffin contained; and yet they were burying him amid the tears of a nation, and
with more than kingly honours. '
III
Chalmers had been a man of
one seminal vision - the elevation of the nation through a communal social
ideal, based upon a shared Christian purpose. The social dislocations of early
industrialization had convinced him that social happiness would not be achieved
by the iron laws of the market economy. While he acknowledged the role of
self-interest in the economy, he argued that it alone was not enough to
preserve the larger social fabric. Rather, individuals had to subordinate
self-interest to the general welfare and embrace the values of communal
responsibility and benevolence. True freedom for the individual would be
achieved only through conscious subordination of self-interest to a Divine
purpose. His godly commonwealth ideal offered a communal alternative to the
social anxieties and suffering of early industrialization - a turning backward
to an idealized past, when, he assured the nation, the social orders had lived
in communal harmony, and sacrificed together for common ideals represented by a
national covenant with God. Chalmers was a communitarian, part of a rich early
nineteenth-century communitarian movement that included such varied figures as
William Godwin and Robert Owen. His considerable influence in Britain indicated
that a large portion of the population was profoundly disturbed by the rate of
social change in the early industrial era, and longed to return to a stable
social organization characterized by close, personal
interrelationships.
With his communal vision, Chalmers provided a social
direction to the early nineteenth-century Evangelical revival. His Evangelical
piety embraced not only an intense passion for men's souls, but also a genuine
concern for their temporal happiness, which for him meant not only a degree of
material comfort, but also human companionship, and faith in a loving and
forgiving God. He was an inspiring preacher, who motivated the educated middle
and upper classes with a combination of Evangelical piety and communal
benevolence. Some of his specific remedies for the social suffering in early
nineteenth-century Britain, to be sure, were misguided - for instance, his
demand for the total abolition of assessment-based legal poor relief, and his
insistence that religious and moral instruction alone would greatly improve the
condition of the working classes. None the less, his demand that Christians
express their faith through social service, and his support for the extension
of popular education and church accommodation, constituted significant steps
towards improving social conditions. By encouraging middle- and upper-class
Evangelicals to enter the urban slums on visitation programmes, moreover, he
helped to increase public awareness of social conditions and to foster debate
over the causes and cures of industrial poverty, which had considerable impact
upon later developments in social policy.
Chalmers's influence was
limited mainly to the educated upper and middle classes, and especially to the
young. He managed to inspire impressive voluntary efforts from lay-visitors and
sabbath-school teachers, who embraced his Christian communal vision with
enthusiasm. He never succeeded, however, in inspiring the same enthusiasm among
the working classes. Despite his concern for their moral and material welfare,
he neither gained their full confidence, nor convinced them that their
condition would improve within his ideal parish communities. The new industrial
working classes were being lost to organized religion during the nineteenth
century, and Chalmers proved unable to reverse this trend. None the less, he
was a great theorist of an Evangelical pastoral ministry, whose influence upon
the clergy and laity of the Church helped to alleviate some of the worst
suffering of the early industrial revolution - until the secular State began to
realize that neither the Church nor private philanthropy was sufficient to meet
the social challenges, and that new systems of social service administration
had to be developed under State authority.
Chalmers was also a
considerable ecclesiastical politician, who extended the social influence of
the Scottish Establishment. In the late 1830s, he created a personal ascendancy
within the Church of Scotland unlike any since the era of John Knox. With his
Church Extension Committee, and (after 1837) his dominance of the hierarchy of
Church courts, he managed to consolidate his power at virtually every level of
Church activity. The Church Extension campaign of 1834-41 was the climax of his
career. Through this campaign, he thwarted the Voluntary threat of
disestablishment, formed a solid Evangelical majority around his godly
commonwealth ideal, and created over 220 parish churches, most of them in the
new urban centres. He convinced a considerable portion of the Scottish nation
(although not the British Government) that the Establishment had to be made
sufficient to provide religious and moral instruction to every inhabitant, not
simply the wealthy or those with previous Christian conviction. For a time, it
appeared that he would realize his vision; but in the final event, the State
refused to provide the endowments that were necessary to enable the Church to
expand to the urban slums, and the movement collapsed. In truth, the British
State ultimately had no intention of allowing the Church of Scotland to
reassert the authority it had once held over Scottish society. It was committed
to defending the rights of Dissenters, which would have been threatened within
Chalmers's ideal Evangelical commonwealth. Perhaps more important, the State
was beginning to expand its own administrative authority, and in particular was
endeavouring to create administrative uniformity in such matters as poor relief
throughout every part of Britain and Ireland. Some kind of conflict between the
militant Evangelical Church of Scotland and the expanding British State had
become almost inevitable by the late 1830s. This conflict finally surfaced in
the non-intrusion controversy, and later developed into the more fundamental
controversy over the Church's spiritual independence. Once the conflict had
begun, the State's condition for peace was the Church's acknowledgement of the
State's sole and absolute sovereignty. There could be, both the civil courts
and Parliament declared, no 'two kingdoms' - spiritual and temporal - with
shared authority over Scottish society; there could be no 'spiritual
independence' for the Established Church. But Chalmers would not acquiesce. He
chose to lead the Disruption, rather than passively witness the humiliation of
his Church.
The Disruption represented the final failure of his godly
commonwealth ideal. His attempts to revive it through the Free Church, and
later through his interdenominational church-building campaign, proved
unsuccessful. Indeed, the Disruption was not only the greatest failure of
Chalmers's career, but also a tragedy for organized religion in Scotland. It
broke up the Establishment, ensuring that the Church would never again exercise
the same influence over Scottish society as it had before 1843. For the
remainder of the nineteenth century, Scottish religious life was characterized
by competition between the residual Establishment, the Free Church, and the
Dissenters, which thwarted the revival of any national feeling of Christian
community. Chalmers has been blamed for the Disruption, and characterized as
the 'evil genius' behind the decline of religious influence in Scottish
society. In many respects, to be sure, he did contribute to the growing tension
between Church and State in the years prior to the Disruption. One of the great
ironies of his career was that although a superb ecclesiastical politician, he
was never able to function effectively in secular politics.
In part,
this resulted from his failure to understand either the conventions or the
dominant personalities of political life. Further, he was an idealist, and once
firmly convinced of the righteousness of his causeonce he believed he was
representing God's will for mankind - he found it difficult to retreat from his
principles. He tended to regard his opponents as enemies of God's cause and to
indulge in expressions of 'moral loathing' for Voluntaries, Whigs, Tories, or
any group or individual who thwarted his purpose. The same stubborn tenacity
which had characterized him as a young man, struggling for a church living or
university chair, remained with him after his Evangelical conversion and his
discovery of a larger social vision. He looked for truth in the Bible, in
Church traditions, and in his own reason, rather than in the political
Constitution, or the debates between adversary groups in the political forums
of Parliament and the public press. In many respects, the very characteristics
which had enabled him to rise to leadership within the militant Evangelical
Church of the 1830s - his tenacity, single-mindedness, and certainty in his
principles - made it difficult for him to lead the Church in retreat before the
civil courts and Government in the 1840s. Adding to these difficulties,
moreover, was his opposition to privileged elites - an opposition which
remained a powerful motivating force throughout his life. The British State was
dominated by such elites - the landed interest, rising commercial and
industrial interests, and professional politicians. He found it difficult to
understand or respect these holders of real power.
However, Chalmers
should not be held entirely responsible for the bitter controversies which led
to the Disruption. Leading politicians, including Melbourne, Peel, and
Aberdeen, demonstrated lack of understanding for the conventions of the Church
of Scotland, and a tendency to dismiss Chalmers as a 'madman' or 'scoundrel'
when he refused to accept their demands. If he hated their 'privilege', they,
in turn, often treated him with contempt, and evidently sought to discredit him
personally, as a means of breaking up the Evangelical ascendancy and restoring
the Church to quiescence. They failed in this attempt, for in the final
analysis the issues at stake in the Church" State controversy - endowments for
new churches, the need for an increased popular voice in the administration of
church patronage, the 'spiritual independence' of an Established Church -
transcended the personalities involved. Despite all the bitter consequences of
the Disruption, Chalmers had surely been right in the stand he had taken.
Although it had meant sacrificing his godly commonwealth vision, he and the
Evangelicals had delivered a powerful message to the modernizing British State
- that a Christian Church, whether Established or not, must be independent from
State authority in matters of internal spiritual discipline, and must be free
to pursue its spiritual mission to the whole of society.
As an
ecclesiastical politician, Chalmers had also advanced the laicization of the
Church. The Moderate party of the early years of the nineteenth century, with
its social ideal of 'enlightened elitism', had discouraged any popular voice in
the appointment of parish clergy, and neglected the traditional lay offices of
elder and deacon. Chalmers's Evangelical ministry, however - in particular his
organization of sabbath-school teachers into what amounted to a third lay
office, his Church Extension campaign, and his advocacy of the right of heads
of families in a parish to veto an unacceptable presentation - represented a
major attempt to increase the role of the laity in Church affairs.
In
all these efforts, to be sure, his emphasis had been upon middle-and
upper-class lay participation. In the West Port operation of the 1840s,
however, he also began to perceive the need for increased working-class lay
participation in Church affairs. Although not a political democrat, Chalmers's
policies which extended lay authority helped to ensure that Church life
reflected the movement towards democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. Here
again, his lifelong opposition to privilege had been translated into positive
action. It was this aspect of Chalmers's work that most impressed many American
observers, among them Charles Richmond Henderson, the late nineteenth-century
advocate of the 'social gospel' and Professor of Sociology at the University of
Chicago. 'The lofty and noble figure of Dr. Chalmers', Henderson observed in
the American Journal of Theology in January 1900, 'characterizes the transition
from clerical and aristocratic dominance to modern democracy in church and
state.'
Along with his impact upon ecclesiastical life, Chalmers also
made significant contributions to the development of method and theory in the
administration of charity, particularly in the urban environment. In his work
in St. John's, the Water of Leith, and the West Port, he provided a model of
Christian philanthropy, which influenced the development of social work as an
independent discipline. Three themes of his social ideal exercised particular
influence. First, there was the principle of 'locality', or the idea that
social activists should focus upon improving conditions in a small and
well-defined territorial district. Secondly, there was his principle of
'aggression', or the concept that activists should regularly visit the
households of a district, seeking out the 'invisible' victims of poverty,
convincing the ignorant of the value of education, and reaching to the immoral
with kindness, concern, and advice. Thirdly, there was his emphasis upon moral
and religious intruction as the most effective response to poverty, and his
opposition to legal 'pauperism' as a degrading influence upon the poor. Every
effort, he argued, had to be made to preserve the self-respect and independence
of the poor. Only when there was no other recourse should an individual be
granted material charity; and then that charity should be combined with careful
investigations by visitors, and be given discreetly, in order to avoid public
stigma upon the recipient. From the early 1820s, voluntary charity societies
throughout Britain had begun adopting Chalmers's principles, particularly as
they were described in his Christian and Civic Economy, published between 1819
and 1826. Chalmers's writings also apparently had some influence upon the
development of the Elberfeld system of poor-relief visitations in Rhenish
Prussia, which was established in its mature form in 1853, and which inspired
similar operations in towns and villages throughout Germany. It was, however,
upon the Charity Organization Society of London, founded in 1869, over twenty
years after his death, that Chalmers's teachings exercised their most direct
influence. The COS assumed a major role in rationalizing and refining the
techniques of charitable administration and visiting; within twenty-five years,
it had disseminated its principles to over eighty-five corresponding
organizations in British cities and towns. The founders of the COS, and
especially its first secretary, Charles Loch, had regarded Chalmers as their
'patron saint'. Their movement borrowed heavily from his ideas, including the
principles of local territorial administration, household visitations, thorough
investigation of all applicants for relief, and the use of educational methods
to encourage independence and social responsibility among the poor. The COS, to
be sure, made some departures from Chalmers's teachings, advocating, for
instance, State involvement in social welfare, and regarding assessment-based
legal poor-relief as an absolute necessity in industrial society.
In the
United States, advocates of the 'social gospel' in the late nineteenth-century
urban centres also discovered Chalmers's writings, in part through the
publications of the London COS. In 1900, Charles Richmond Henderson of the
University of Chicago published an abridged edition of Chalmers's Christian and
Civic Economy, with a lengthy commentary recommending the work as a model for
rational Christian philanthropy in industrial society. Chalmers's pragmatic and
comprehensive approach to social problems, Henderson argued, had established
him as one of the pioneers in the development of the science of sociology. In
her highly influential text on social work, Social Diagnosis, first published
in 1917, the American reformer, Mary Richmond, credited Chalmers for being one
of the founders of case work in social welfare administration, citing his
emphasis upon systematic visitations and investigation of relief
recipients.
Chalmers also made significant contributions to educational
reform, and particularly to the extension of popular education. He was, indeed,
primarily an educator, spending most of his career as a university professor.
His Christian communal ideal rested largly upon the education of all men in a
set of shared Christian and moral ideals. As a university professor, he
contributed to reforms in patronage and financial administration. He helped to
broaden the study of moral philosophy in Scotland, rejecting the obsessive
concern with epistemology that had characterized the eighteenth-century 'common
sense' school, and giving fresh emphasis to questions of practical ethics. He
was not an original theologian, and his posthumously published Edinburgh
lectures in theology, the two-volume Institutes of Theology, has been a
disappointment to many of his supporters. The most original aspect of the
Institutes is the organization of the work, which in many respects is in the
form of an extended Evangelical sermon. Beginning with the 'disease' of mankind
- man's innate sinfulness and alienation from God - he demonstrates how only
the doctrines of salvation in Scripture can penetrate beyond the mere symptoms
of man's alienation and reach to the actual disease. In truth, the Institutes-
reveals a mind struggling against doubts about some of the harsher doctrines of
scholastic Calvinism and seeking a more personal form of Christianity - while
at the same time concerned not to challenge openly the Calvinist orthodoxy of
the Westminster Confession which he was bound by his professorial office
to.uphold. The experience of Erskine of Linlathen and Macleod Campbell had
evidently made a profound impact on Chalmers, and his concern for the
ecclesiastical organization and Evangelical mission of the Church discouraged
him from experimenting in his lectures or in print with new theological ideas.
In another, more peaceful time, Chalmers might have been a first-rate
theologian, but he did not perceive the turbulent 1830s and 1840s to have been
such a time.
His real impact as a Professor of Divinity lay in his
regular lecture-hall discussion of such subjects as pastoral visiting and
counselling, administration of charity, and political economy - which until his
professorship were not regarded as proper subjects in the Divinity Hall. He
also encouraged his students to gain practical experience through missionary
work in the Edinburgh slums. If the Church, he believed, were to assume a more
decisive social role, its candidates for the ministry would require a broad
exposure to the social, economic, and political challenges confronting society.
He succeeded in training a generation of dedicated parish ministers sensitive
to the challenges of rapid urbanization and industrialization. His influence
helped to broaden the scope of education in divinity throughout
Scotland.
But probably more important were his contributions to the
development and expansion of popular education. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, his
parish day-schools and sabbath-schools became models for similar efforts
throughout Scotland. He had demonstrated not only that it was possible to
establish inexpensive territorial schools in urban working-class districts, but
also that there was a tremendous demand for educational opportunity among the
urban working classes. Even in the grim West Port of Edinburgh, the inhabitants
embraced education as affording hope for their children to enjoy a decent life.
Chalmers argued with eloquence and power that society owned every individual
the opportunity to receive a good education, in order to fulfil his human
potential. Indeed, society could only neglect this obligation at the peril of
profound upheaval. Chalmers's Church Extension campaign created dozens of
parish schools as well as parish churches, while the Free Church later
continued his emphasis upon the extension of popular education. His efforts
helped to preserve Scotland's Reformation heritage of the 'democratic
intellect' into the industrial era.
Chalmers failed to realize his
vision of the godly commonwealth. His life was, in one sense, a tragic
disappointment. He lived long enought to witness the collapse of the Church
Extension campaign of 1838, the breakup of the Establishment in 1843, the
rejection of his social ideal by the majority of the Free Church by 1845, and
the failure of his final interdenominational Church Extension campaign by 1846.
After his death in 1847, his godly commonwealth vision faded rapidly from the
public imagination, lost amid the sectarian controversies of the later
nineteenth century, and overshadowed by the new materialistic visions of
capitalism and State socialism. None the less, in striving for his ideal, he
had also made substantial and lasting contributions to ecclesiastical, social,
and educational reform. In the final analysis, perhaps the greatest
contribution of Chalmers and his godly commonwealth ideal was an inspirational
one - encouraging others to strive for social improvement with a sustained and
unselfish commitment to God and the future good of mankind. 'We never met with
an individual', one of his students later recalled, 'who had the power Dr.
Chalmers possessed of lifting the mind above earthly views.' He was, in many
respects, an emphatically practical social reformer, with well-defined
programmes for the reorganization of the nation. But he was also a visionary,
who touched the conscience of his age.
THE END
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