Diurnal inequality

“ But the great cause of inequality remains, and is manifesting itself in the unequal distribution of wealth. The essence of slavery is that it takes from the laborer all he produces save enough to support an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of free labor, under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the gain. ”

“ The moment you rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy, ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty titles, precedences and dignities, and all the detestable fruits of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who lose as among those who gain by it. ”

“ And, indeed, insufficiency of income being the immediate cause of misery, it is fitting that we should know why, misfortune and malevolence aside, the workingman's income is insufficient. It is still the same question of inequality of fortunes, which has made such a stir for a century past, and which, by a strange fatality, continually reappears in academic programmes, as if there lay the real difficulty of modern times. ”

“ With the fact that the division of labor is by nature, pending the attainment of a synthetic organization, an irresistible cause of physical, moral, and mental inequality among men neither society nor conscience have anything to do. That is a fact of necessity, of which the rich man is as innocent as the parcellaire workman, consigned by his position to all sorts of poverty. ”

“ As we put back the hands of the clock's progress, so we recreate inequalities. Life at best is a matter of compensation; it is the disturbance of this balance which makes for injustice and inequality. ”

“ He was struck by the contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets, and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise their native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not help a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor must finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too strongly contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. ”

“ The Church has indicated alms as the single remedy for inequality of wealth and its resultant luxury. What is to be done, however, now that political economy has demonstrated, from the evidence of facts, that alms engenders idleness, mendicity, indolence, and debasement of character, and that it is fundamentally wrong, because it levies an impost on those who work for the profit of those who do not work? ”

“ The unequal distribution by nature of the gifts of body and brain, aided by selfishness and greed on the part of man bring about economic inequality. The disparity of poverty and wealth has appeared on the face of the earth ever since society took to settled life and, with the division of labour, embarked upon earning means of livelihood by different kinds of work. ”

“ Our poet might have been startled at the reply of our political economist. If the nobility, in follies such as these, only preserved their “titles,” while their “lands” were dispersed among the industrious classes, the people were not sufferers. The silly victims ruining themselves by their excessive luxury, or their costly dress, as it appears some did, was an evil which, left to its own course, must check itself; if the rich did not spend, the poor would starve. Luxury is the cure of that unavoidable evil in society—great inequality of fortune! ”

“ Bitterly and unceasingly he murmured that his lot had been cast in the ranks of obscurity and of unsparing labor, while others, by a more fortunate, although no better merited destiny, were born to ease and affluence, and honor and luxury. This thought of the unjust inequality in man's condition, which soon broke forth with all the volcanic energy of the French Revolution, already began to ferment in the bosoms of the laboring classes, and no one pondered these wide diversities with a more restless spirit, or [Pg 15] murmured more loudly and more incessantly than Phlippon. ”

“ He can shew that inequality and iniquitous distribution of wealth and allotment of labor have arisen through an unscientific economic system, and that Man, faulty as he is, no more intended to establish any such ordered disorder than a moth intends to be burnt when it flies into a candle flame. ”

“ The great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labour of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs ”

“ or, in other words, that the great inequality of classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we maintain because we have the religion of inequality, that this constitution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect, under present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class. ”

“ But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -indeed, in some sense was the destruction --of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, andpossessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would conferno distinction. ”

“ It is an old illustration of the different view points of the centuries that precisely this point which you make of the possibility of the wage-earner rising, although it was getting to be a vanishing point in your day, seems to us the most truly diabolical feature of the whole system. The prospect of rising as a motive to reconcile the wage-earner or the poor man in general to his subjection, what did it amount to? ”

“ The slave received subsistence--clothing and shelter--and the wage-earner who could get more than these out of his wages was rarely fortunate. The rate of wages, except in new countries and under special conditions and for skilled workers, kept at about the subsistence point, quite as often dropping below as rising above. ”

“ Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality. ”

“ But the endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society. ”

“ It is the “devil catch the hindmost” of present social adjustments that causes the race and scramble for wealth, in which all considerations of justice, mercy, religion, and sentiment are trampled under foot; in which men forget their own souls, and struggle to the very verge of the grave for what they cannot take beyond. But an equitable distribution of wealth, that would exempt all from the fear of want, would destroy the greed of wealth, just as in polite society the greed of food has been destroyed. ”

“ Inequality was the price of civilization. ”

“ It is in the dusky twilight that Poverty and her mates, Vice and Crime, glide forth from their lairs. They shun daylight the more anxiously since their wretchedness there contrasts more cruelly with the pride of wealth which glitters everywhere ”

“ You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of “overpopulation.” But your slaves are beyond caring for your cries; they breed like rabbits; and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness, and murder. In the midst of the riches which their labor piles up for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. ”

“ Do you expect me to sit and listen patiently to your wild theories of social reform? You asked me one day why the wages of the idle rich was wealth and the wages of hard work was poverty, and I told you that I worked harder in one day than a tunnel digger works in a life-time. ”

“ For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. ”

“ And, on the other hand, life here, as much as elsewhere—the struggling mass—is as savagely pushed by necessity as any mass anywhere. Our labor unrest is as great, our poverty as keen; five per cent, or so it is alleged, of the population controlling ninety-five per cent of the wealth; thirteen per cent of the population illiterate; at the top gorgons of financiers as fat and comfortable and dictatorial as any the world has ever seen and as unpatriotic and un-American, in so far as its original theory goes, as may be. ”

“ In the midst of poverty that means hunger and nakedness, disease and death, we have the shameless flaunting of insane luxury. And to what purpose? To challenge the envy of the vain and the foolish, to dazzle the minds of the poor and inflame the lusts of the criminal. ”

“ There is, of course, a progressive reduction in the price of labor, accompanying this progressive increase of the number condemned, by impealable laws, to this low and hard condition.—There they are, forever toiling and sweating in the dark and cheerless abodes of poverty, aliens to the society in which they breathe, whose comforts are ever in an inverse ratio to the sum of general prosperity. ”

“ And what is civilization, but an increase of human disparities? The more the luxury of the few, the more startling the wants, and the more galling the sense, of poverty. Even the dreams of the philanthropist only tend towards equality ”

“ Wealth has accumulated itself into masses; and poverty, also in accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed, uncommunicating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than Epicurus’s gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living chaos of ignorance and hunger welters, terrific in its dark fury, under their feet. ”

“ But quite apart from them there is an enormous mass of labour which is just merely wasted; many thousands of men and women making nothing with terrible and inhuman toil which deadens the soul and shortens mere animal life itself.
All these are the slaves of what is called luxury, which in the modern sense of the word comprises a mass of sham wealth, the invention of competitive Commerce, and enslaves not only the poor people who are compelled to work at its production, but also the foolish and not overhappy people who buy it to harass themselves with its encumbrance. ”

“ But wages are being reduced to the point where the home is only a sleeping-barrack and a lunch-counter for supper and breakfast. Remember that poor wages mean long hours; and long hours that exhaust all the energy of the laborer mean ignorance; and ignorance, when it is finished, means immorality.
There is only about so much vital force in the average human being. If all this force is put into one's daily toil, there is none left for helpful conversation, for sympathetic communion at home, for uplifting reading, or for worship. ”

“ The seventh day of August saw Lord and Lady Dilworth titled beggars, steering their course along the blue and slippery waves of the Atlantic, to be participators in the loathing poverty which always exists in homes sought after destruction, degradation, and reckless extravagance.
So soon may the house of gladness and mirth be turned into deepest grief! How the wealthiest, through sheer folly, are made to drink the very essence of poverty and affliction in its purest form! ”

“ Only when extravagance and idleness, in short, a dissolute life, set in, on the one hand, and poverty and excessive work on the other, matters were completely changed. In the future, extravagance, idleness and dissoluteness will be impossible, but misery, want and privation will be impossible likewise. There is an abundance for all. ”

“ The revelation of existing poverty and misery is, often wrongly, taken to be a proof of the increasing degradation of the working-men, and the cause has been ascribed to the grasping cruelty of capitalists. ”

“ The chances are that there is not a single wretched beggar suffering under the luxury and oppression of the rich who feels anything like as keenly as I do either the injustice, the cruelty, and the horror of their oppression of and contempt for the poor; or the grinding humiliation and misery which befall the great majority of the workers, the real producers of all that makes life possible. ”

“ The scale, in this light of the New Jerusalem, seemed completely rearranged; or, to put it more simply, the wants, the gratifications, the aspirations of the “poor,” as expressed in the shops (which were the shops of the “poor”) , denoted a new style of poverty; and this new style of poverty, from street to street, stuck out of the possible purchasers, one’s jostling fellow-pedestrians, and made them, to every man and woman, individual throbs in the larger harmony. One can speak only of what one has seen, and there were grosser elements of the sordid and the squalid that I doubtless never saw. ”