The British are giving honor this year to a 19th-century member of Parliament who demonstrated a solution to America’s social problems.

Lord Shaftesbury died 100 years ago after an influential career in both houses of the Parliament in England.

     

He might have become prime minister if he had set his sights on political power and P!estige, instead of helping the poor.

“Whatever may be true in the 20th century, in Shaftesbury’s day an interest in social questions was certainly not a passport to political office,” comments biographer Georgina Battiscombe.

Yet he wound up having as much influence as any prime minister, especially in guiding England’s adjustment to the industrial revolution.

Shaftesbury has not been so well known in the United States, perhaps because he never sought high political office. He’s been overshadowed by Queen Victoria and prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone.

But the lessons of Shaftesbury’s life are pertinent today, in the political debate over social issues such as poverty, the homeless, child abuse and neglect and alcohol abuse.

Shaftesbury was born in 1801, just as the industrial revolution was sweeping through England, sending thousands of people into urban areas for factory work and underground coal mining.

In his novels, Charles Dickens popularized the misery of the working conditions which sent men, women and children to work 15 hours a day or more, ruined the eyes of many and crippled countless others with backbreaking labor.

Shaftesbury grew up on the other side of the tracks from the poor people he helped so much. But he was cal led through his conversion to Jesus Christ to advance a wide range of remedies to these social problems, using the Bible as his primary guide.

Politically it would be difficult to classify him as a liberal or conservative in today’s terms. He was a member of the Tory party, in opposition to the Whigs or Liberals.

With respect to correcting the injustices of his time, he was far ahead of both political parties in proposing legislative answers. Child labor laws began with Shaftesbury’s efforts, along with a long campaign to limit the factory work day to 10 hours.

He was instrumental in advancing more humane treatment for the mentally ill as well. He was one of the early advocates of what’s called public health today, campaigning for sanitary standards and clean water in urban areas.

We tend to take his contributions for granted today, but his contemporaries came to recognize his monumental achievements. The Duke of Argyle summed up his life at the end of the 19th century this way: “All the great reforms of the past 50 years have been brought about, not by the Liberal party, nor by the Tory party, but by the labors of one man-the Earl of Shaftesbury.”

He never assumed that government alone could resolve these problems. He saw the need for cooperation between church and state to come up with solutions. In his spare time he gave countless hours to establish “ragged schools,” or orphan homes for the many unwanted children who roamed the streets of London and other cities. He was involved in dozens of other private efforts to help the poor as well, with a vision for the church and the state working together to accomplish common objectives.

His biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, details the personal problems he overcame in the process, including a tendency toward severe mental depression and hypersensitivity as well as destructive personal treatment at a young age from his parents.

“Humanly speaking he could hardly be expected to achieve anything remarkable either for himself or for his fellow men,” she sums up. “Both by temperament and by circumstance he seemed destined at best to a small success, at worst to complete failure. No man has in fact ever done more to lessen the extent of human misery or to add to the sum total of human happiness.”

Reprinted by permission from The Indianapolis News. Rus Pulliam is a writer for this newspaper.