Anti-poverty movement

“ The foregoing analysis shows that life in extreme poverty consists of an accumulation of mutually reinforcing misfortunes: poor living conditions, insalubrious housing, unemployment, ill health, lack of education, marginalization, etc., a veritable "horizontal vicious circle" of poverty, to use the words of those concerned. ”

“ We shall undertake three main types of intervention against poverty: The first is to ensure the delivery of basic social services to the poorest communities and to make sure that every poor family has a decent minimum of health, nutrition, housing and education. ”

“ They have to toil like bond-slaves, with no leisure for amusement, education, or any other blessing which elevates or sweetens human life; and after all, they have only half enough of the very first essential of life. The working classes in the towns, are also miserably paid, often half- starved; and are sweated to death in unhealthy sedentary drudgery, such as tailoring, cotton-spinning, weaving, &c."
How can this poverty be removed and prevented? ”

“ According to a recent United Nations publication on the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty, "Of the 5.7 billion people in the world, 1.5 billion are desperately poor and the number is increasing by approximately 25 million a year. ”

“ No remedies for low wages, no scheme for the prevention and removal of poverty can ever be efficacious until they operate on and through the minds and habits of the masses.
It is not from rich men that the poor must hope for deliverance from starvation. It is not to charitable associations the wretched must appeal. Temporary alleviation of the permanent evil is the best that can be hoped for from such aids. It is by the people that the people must be saved. ”

“ A check upon emigration would seem an imperative demand,—not prevention, but some clause which might act to lessen the garbage-heaps dumped upon our shores. Pauperism and disease have no rights as emigrants, and eliminating these would make dealing with mere poverty a much more manageable matter.
The schools exist, and, while painfully inadequate in number, demonstrate what may be done in the future. ”

“ Primitive means for the distribution of charity proved inadequate. To care for all the poor was soon felt to be a work that greatly exceeded the powers of the community. Then there arose a new problem: how to abolish poverty? ”

“ Every reliable investigation that has been conducted into our social conditions reveals an appalling amount of poverty and a still more appalling bitterness in the struggle for life under sordid and heartless conditions. Practically the whole of the vital energy of more than half of our people is consumed in providing bread and butter for their stomachs and a shelter for their heads, and then they do not always succeed. ”

“ Grassroots groups and non-governmental organisations have long advocated a comprehensive approach to extreme poverty. They introduced the understanding that extreme poverty is multidimensional, not only limited to income, but also affecting livelihood, health, education and housing, as well as social, cultural and political participation. ”

“ Only persistent legislation and enforcement of law can make greedy landlords and capitalists do the right thing by the poor, until all society is spiritualized by the new social gospel of mutual consideration and educated to apply it to community life.
283. Pauperism.—Pauperism is poverty become chronic. When a family has been hopelessly dependent so long that self-respect and initiative are wholly gone, it seems useless to attempt to galvanize it into activity or respectability, and when a group of such families pauperizes a neighborhood, heroic measures become necessary. ”

“ It implies, I think, the abolition of Boards of Guardians and of all the special machinery for relief. It implies, perhaps, the abolition of the Poor Law itself. There is no class of “the poor” as there is a class of criminals. Poverty is not a crime, and there are poor among the most honourable of the people. Poverty is a loose and wide term, involving the greater number of the people. There must, therefore, be some loss of self-respect in those of the poor who feel themselves set apart for special treatment. ”

“ Yet the Error in Distribution remains so great, that, while the total population in 1867 was 30,000,000, we have to-day a nation of 30,000,000 poor people in our rich country, and many millions of these are living under conditions of degrading poverty. Of those above the [215] line of primary poverty, millions are tied down by the conditions of their labor to live in surroundings which preclude the proper enjoyment of life or the proper raising of children. ”

“ The action of indiscriminate and spasmodic charity, which still prevails in London and other large centres of riches, is responsible in no small measure for the poverty and degradation of city slums.
"The far-reaching advertisement of irresponsible charity acts as a powerful magnet. Whole sections of the population are demoralized, men and women throwing down their work right and left in order to qualify for relief; while the conclusion of the whole matter is intensified congestion of the labour market--angry bitter feeling for the insufficiency of the pittance, or rejection of the claim." ”

“ They render no useful service; they create no wealth; more often they destroy it." [3]
Next comes B, a thicker stratum of some 100,000, or 111⁄2 per cent., largely composed of shiftless, broken-down men, widows, deserted women, and their families, dependent upon casual earnings, less than 18s. per week, and most of them incapable of regular, effective work. Most of the social wreckage of city life is deposited in this stratum, which presents the problem of poverty in its most perplexed and darkest form. ”

“ The poorer quarters will become still poorer, the sight of squalor, misery, and hunger more painful, the cry of the poor more bitter. For their relief no adequate means are proposed. The last twenty years have been years of progress, but for lack of care and thought the means of relief for poverty remain unchanged. The only resource twenty years ago was a Mansion House Fund, and the only resource available in this enlightened and wealthy year of our Lord is a similar gift thrown—not brought—from the West to the East. ”

“ In a society where poverty means social discredit, where misfortune is treated as a crime, where the prison of the workhouse is a guerdon of failure, and the bitter carking harassment of daily wants unmet by daily supply is ever hanging over the head of each worker, what wonder that money seems the one thing needful, and that every other thought is lost in the frensied rush to escape all that is summed up in the one word Poverty? ”

“ Moreover, the massing of the poor in large centres of population, producing larger areas of solid poverty, presents new dangers and new difficulties in the application of remedial measures.
However we may estimate progress, one fact we must recognize, that the bulk of our low-skilled workers do not yet possess a secure supply of the necessaries of life. ”

“ When we bear in mind that these houses are also the workshop of large numbers of the poor, and know how the work done in the crowded, tainted air of these dens brings as an inevitable portion of its wage, physical feebleness, disease, and an early death, we recognize the paramount importance of that aspect of the problem of poverty which is termed "The Housing of the Poor."
So much for the quality of the shelter for which the poor pay high prices. Turn to their food. In the poorest parts of London it is scarcely possible for the poor to buy pure food. ”

“ With the income kept where it is made all this is would be changed, for then, instead of having work only a part of the time, and poor wages besides, the laborer, when his work for private parties gave out, could get work from the local Government, which always has it to give, and the money to pay for it. And should a laborer here and there through some unforeseen cause, be forced by poverty and age to accept food and shelter that he cannot pay for, his relations can provide for him, for the getting of the mere food and clothing will not be the momentous question that it is now. ”

“ That any system of relief to the able-bodied that does not lead to the increase of food, or articles that may be exchanged for food, will diminish the capital of the country, and that just in proportion as capital decreases, poverty will increase.
That, therefore, any measures of relief for the able-bodied ought to have for their object the encouragement of the employment of labour by private individuals in productive works; and that the efficacy of their action, as a stimulus to encourage and force such employment, will be the measure of their utility. ”

“ You have met poverty, ignorance, and sin.
You have met Poverty. You know families whose weekly income is under the price of a bottle of good wine; men dwarfed in stature, crippled in body, the inmates of a hospital for want of sufficient food; women aged and hardened, broken in spirit because their homes are too narrow for cleanliness or for comfort; children who die because they cannot have the care which preserves the children of the rich. ”

“ Society is constantly engaged in endeavouring, feebly, slowly, and blindly, to relieve the stress of poverty, and the industrial weakness of low-skilled labour, by laying hands upon certain functions and certain portions of wealth formerly left to private individuals, and claiming them as social functions and social wealth to be administered for the social welfare. ”

“ So far from one form of relief being the substitute for another, relief leads to more relief, and there is constant and continuous increase. There is little or no co-operation between the administering bodies, and no reasoned plan for dealing with the problem of poverty. Everything is piecemeal and chaotic. And as the result we have an ever-growing proletariat population, chiefly composed of casual labourers, who are maintained in turn (and sometimes simultaneously) by Poor Law Guardians, Distress Committees, Education and Health Authorities, and other public bodies. ”

“ This is the opening of a new epoch in the history of English poverty. The landless man appears for good. The ownership of the soil no longer carries with it the heavy social obligations to maintain men on it. The labourer becomes a mere convenience in profit making, to be employed when it suits the landlord and farmer, and to be turned upon the road when his labour is not profitable.
Moreover, both preceding the Black Death and in the time of Sir Thomas More, the grievances of urban unemployment had been felt. ”

“ States should foster and promote participation by the poorest people in the decision‐making process in the societies in which they live, in the promotion of human rights and in efforts to combat extreme poverty. ”

“ But just as such a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress—just as closer settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population—so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. ”

“ Our poorest classes have neither the time, the energy, or the desire to be clean, thrifty, intellectual, moral, or religious. In our haste we forget that there is a proper and necessary order in the awakening of desires. At present our "slum" population do not desire to be moral and intellectual, or even to be particularly clean. Therefore these higher goods must wait, so far as they are dependent on the voluntary action of the poor. What these people do want is better food, and more of it; warmer clothes; better and surer shelter; and greater security of permanent employment on decent wages. ”

“ I see that many humane people are asking what can be done to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. I don't know whether there is any society which looks after the wives and children of malefactors, and lends them a helping hand, if they deserve it, to tide over the absence of their sole source of income; but if there is not, I fancy here is work for idle hands to do, and a source for charity that, worked with discrimination and care, might alleviate one of the crushing evils to which poor families are liable. ”

“ But I am myself satisfied that the scheme is capable of a far deeper influence on the condition of the poor, when the volunteers shall rise to the perception that, in dealing with poverty, they must aim at prevention rather than at cure; at saving those under their influence from sinking to the Poor-law Level, rather than merely obtaining relief for them when they have reached that low point. Few of my fellow-workers have as yet grasped the idea that their best success would be to develop the resources of the poor themselves, instead of letting them come upon the rates, or continue upon them. ”

“ The society does not confine its operations to these two branches, but aims at improving the condition of the poor, by enabling them to help themselves rather than by giving them alms. It has, accordingly, originated inquiry into the causes of distress and poverty, and has issued reports upon night refuges, soup-kitchens, crêches or public day nurseries, dispensaries, district visiting, systematic inquiry into the cases of applicants for relief and employment, and kindred subjects. ”

“ The philosophy underlying the work of the Standing Committee on Poverty Alleviation underscores the desirability of ceasing to consider the poor as a burden for society and confirms that it is the common interest of both rich and poor, donor and recipient, to give absolute priority to the struggle against poverty, in national and international programmes. ”

“ In conclusion, the fight to eradicate poverty requires not only detailed knowledge of the causes and factors which give rise to, aggravate and perpetuate it, but also of its impact on human rights and fundamental freedoms as a whole. ”