While you are determined to have the _rich_ neighbourhoods, you must have the poor ones elsewhere. When you have gathered the poor round you, built for them, taught them, purified their houses and habits by your near presence, by all means talk about the claims of neighbourhood. But till then you must, I believe, take a wider outlook, and think of the neighbourhoods you have left, where moreover those who indirectly serve you earn their bread. You who are merchants' wives and daughters, nay, even those of you who buy the merchants' goods, have the dock-labourers no claims upon you? If the question, Who is my neighbour? is asked by you, how do you think God answers it from heaven when He looks down and sees the vast multitudes of undisciplined poor by whose labour you live, and the few heroic workers whose lives are being spent for those poor almost forsaken by you?
And if some of you went there to give what little of leisure, what little of strength, you have to spare, would your own neighbourhood suffer? I fancy not. For it seems as if usually where there are few poor and many rich living near together, the former become dependent in fat unenergetic comfort on the latter; and if this be such a neighbourhood, a few finding a call for their sympathy and help elsewhere might do good to all. It might be a real blessing to the place where you live to transfer to other and needier districts some of the superfluous wealth and unneeded care which from its very abundance may be spoiling and pampering your native poor. What a good thing it might be if each of your congregation here would undertake to help with money and with workers some poor district where wise principles were being strenuously and faithfully worked out. Only remember, though you may send your money, and send it to those who use it wisely, the gift is a very poor one compared with that of yourselves. It is _you_ who are wanted there, your love, your knowledge, your sympathy, your resolution--above all, your knowledge; for if you saw, you could not leave things as they are. For instance, on a summer evening sultry as this, there are thousands of families who have no place to sit in but one close room, in which the whole family has eaten, slept, washed, cooked. It is stifling. They go to the doorstep; their neighbours are at their steps. It gets hotter, the children swarm in the narrow court; the dust flies everywhere; the heat, the thirst is insufferable, the noise deafening, the crowd bewildering; they go to the public-house: do you wonder? It may be there are a few spaces unbuilt over close by, but who will open the gates for them, plant a few flowers, put a few seats? The garden of Lincoln's Inn Fields is certainly kept very lovely; but how few eyes are allowed to see it; Red Lion Square is a howling ugliness; the Board School playgrounds are closed on Saturday;[5] the little graveyard in Drury Lane[6]--half the graveyards in London--are close locked and barred, and left in ugliness too; the Quakers are actually deciding to sell for building purposes their ancient burial-ground near Bunhill Fields.[7] Can they not afford to let the place allotted to their dead be consecrated to the poor and become a place of rest to the weary living before their pilgrimage is over? Money, money, money, to spend where we see its effect in parks, or villas, or cosy suburban houses, and not a glimpse of what we might do with it in the districts where the poor live and die.