19.  Many rich people cannot understand how the very poor can help each other, because they do not realize upon what infinitesimal amounts of food or money often hangs the life of one of the poorest classes.  Lord Shaftesbury had understood this terrible truth when he started his Flowers and Watercress Girls’ Fund, out of which loans of one pound, and only occasionally two pounds, were granted, to enable the girls to buy a basket and flowers when the winter sets in and they are in dire distress.  The loans were given to girls who had “not a sixpence,” but never failed to find some other poor to go bail for them.  “Of all the movements I have ever been connected with,” Lord Shaftesbury wrote, “I look upon this Watercress Girls’ movement as the most successful....  It was begun in 1872, and we have had out 800 to 1,000 loans, and have not lost 50l. during the whole period....  What has been lost—­ and it has been very little, under the circumstances—­has been by reason of death or sickness, not by fraud” (The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. iii. p. 322.  London, 1885-86).  Several more facts in point in Ch.  Booth’s Life and Labour in London, vol. i; in Miss Beatrice Potter’s “Pages from a Work Girl’s Diary” (Nineteenth Century, September 1888, p. 310); and so on.

20.  Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen, cheap edition, London, 1870, p. 110.

21.  Our Seamen, u.s., p. 110.  Mr. Plimsoll added:  “I don’t wish to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them; for, notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these qualities are not in such constant exercise.  Riches seem in so many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors, and their sympathies become, not so much narrowed as—­so to speak—­ stratified:  they are reserved for the sufferings of their own class, and also the woes of those above them.  They seldom tend downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of courage... than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British workman’s life”—­and of the workmen all over the world as well.

22.  Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. i. pp. 137-138.

CONCLUSION

If we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the analysis of modern society, in connection with the body of evidence relative to the importance of mutual aid in the evolution of the animal world and of mankind, we may sum up our inquiry as follows.