Dole

“ We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous and too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away. ”

“ We have the option, in the case of families who need actual subsistence, of putting them on the dole or putting them to work. They do not want to go on the dole and they are one thousand percent right. ”

“ It creates semi-human relations between social classes, so that a small dole seems to be a full discharge of obligations toward the poor, and manly independence and virtue may be resented as offensive. ”

“ There were all those who were away fighting, those who were brought in to us wounded or dying, the noble women of the people, who stood for hours and hours in the queue to get the necessary dole of bread, meat, and milk for their poor little ones at home. ”

“ If these aids are not abundantly rendered, more must be done in the way of money gifts. Winter is coming; the sufferers must be sustained; and they cannot live on the present dole. Then let us each go to work, to do what we can. ”

“ The poor slave, on his hard, pine plank, but scantily covered with his thin blanket, sleeps more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclines upon his feather bed and downy pillow. Food, to the indolent lounger, is poison, not sustenance. ”

“ Besides this dole, there are always, on the days it is given at least thirty other pitchers, called by-pitchers, brought by other neighbouring poor, who partake of the remaining broth, and the broken victuals that is at that time distributed. Likewise at Queen's College in Oxford, provisions are to this day frequently distributed to the poor at the door of their hall, under the denomination of a DOLE."— [Ducarel's] "Anglo-Norman Antiquities, considered in a Tour through part of Normandy," p. 81.
[173] Fine.
[174] So in Ben Jonson's "Epicæne," act i. sc. ”

“ People who had been in the habit of devoting a day or two to cleaning up a year's social debts and went up and down the streets dropping doleful calls like wreaths on headstones, walked in unannounced of mornings. ”

“ By skimping the dole to what will just prevent actual starvation, and by the tests and inquiries and degrading conditions of organized charity, they try to draw the line between those who cannot find work and those who do not want to. ”

“ Were fruit or flowers more plenty, in the vale.
They were not poor;—can that be poverty
Where each day brings its own? there is no food
Like that ourselves have gained, no sleep like that
Which is the rest of labour. ”

“ From all the land rises the hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward, from asylum and workhouse—the cry of the people who have not enough to eat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not enough to eat. ”

“ The small recompense to the labourer himself is symbolised by the extreme poverty with which the man and woman are clothed, whilst the degrading nature of the toil, as in the far famous “Man with the Hoe,” is brought before us in the rugged types of the labourer and his wife. ”

“ To the gallery people the starvation in the garret, the separation of husband and wife, the wail of the little children for bread, the agony of the mother over the cradle of her sick baby, the struggle with poverty, the heartlessness of the cruel landlord who wants the rent, and the roughness of the officials who are called in to persecute virtue in distress, are all so many items in their own daily life. ”

“ In taking my leave of this beautiful vale, I have to express my deep shame, as an Englishman, at beholding the general extreme poverty of those who cause this vale to produce such quantities of food and raiment. This is, I verily believe it, the worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility; and as to food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them! ”

“ At the time when thou shalt end thy days, and finish thy life, distribute thine inheritance. Fodder, a wand and burdens, are for the ass; and bread, correction, and work, for a servant. If thou set thy servant to labour, thou shalt find rest, but if thou let him go idle, he shall seek liberty. A yoke and a collar to bow the neck, so are tortures and torments for an evil servant. Send him to labour, that he be not idle; for idleness teacheth much evil. ”

“ Just imagine the scene—a village or hamlet, or the poorer quarter of a small country town with squalid surroundings, marking a poverty which in this age has no equal; a poor, old, lonely woman whose long life of sordid misery, of hunger and the diseases that huddle closely around want, hopeless,195 despairing, recognising her fate through the prolonged physical torture with which age and infirmity rendered her unable even to attempt to cope. ”

“ We are told that 'the poor shall never cease out of the land;' and can poverty exist unattended by its consequent evils? Would it not, on our part, be a profitable exercise, were we sometimes to leave our warm fireside, during the inclemency of the weather, and visit the huts and cottages of the poor, to examine for ourselves how they are clad, and how they are warmed and fed? ”

“ You give us bread, you give us shelter, you give us clothes, you give us employment; and you carry audacity, folly, cruelty, stupidity, and absurdity to the pitch of believing that we are grateful. The bread is the bread of servitude; the shelter is a footman's bedroom; the clothes are a livery; the employment is ridiculous, paid for, it is true, but brutalizing. ”

“ When the service was over, I walked with the humane and conscientious gentleman whose duty it was to take that walk, that Sunday morning, through the little world of poverty enclosed within the workhouse walls. It was inhabited by a population of some fifteen hundred or two thousand paupers, ranging from the infant newly born or not yet come into the pauper world, to the old man dying on his bed. ”

“ The idea that the poor multiplied "like lice and fleas" seems to have haunted our fathers like a nightmare. Nor did ever a nation inflict such penalties on poverty. It is but literal truth to say that in England poverty is a crime. ”

“ The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all,
Expired, and thousands perished in the fall!
There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast Temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies. ”

“ According to the diarist Nicoll—‘The poverty of the land daily increased, by reason of inlaik of trade and traffic, both by sea and land, the people being poor and under cess, quarterings, and other burdens. Falsets and dyvours [bankrupts] daily increased; sundry of good rank, nobles, gentry, and burgesses, denuncit to the horn, their escheats taken, their persons imprisoned, and deteinit therein till their death. ”

“ The old man would let us go to meeting on Sunday at the village, but if we were not at home by sundown, the cowhide paid the debt. We were slaves yet, and the old man grew poorer and poorer the older he grew, and withal cross, much to our discomfort. ”

“ She did not foolishly suppose that the peasant can claim exemption from the trials and crosses of life, and that sorrow finds no entrance into remote and unfrequented tracts, but she knew that such burdens would not be too heavy for their strength, and that, while living a life of unpretending poverty, they should be free from the slavery of an assumed position, and able to combat the world fairly and honestly. ”

“ Meanwhile the labourer—he whose strong arms have guided the plough, and wielded the spade, he who has made the harvest and tended the cattle—what do our just Land Laws give to him? They give him a wretched home, a pittance sufficient—generally at least—to "keep body and soul together," parish pay when he is ill, the workhouse in his old age, and he sleeps at last in a pauper's grave. ”

“ Of any charitable interest, or humane occupation, to be derived from the poverty of my village neighbors, I very soon found my expectation equally vain. Our village had no poor—none in the deplorable English acceptation of that word; none in the too often degraded and degrading conditions it implies. People poorer than others, comparatively poor people, it undoubtedly had—hard workers, toiling for their daily bread ”

“ In the best houses and most wealthy families there is a contrast of splendour and poverty which is shocking. Their beds and furniture are covered with a profusion of gilding and clumsy ornaments, while the slaves, who serve in the family, and even those who are about the persons of the ladies, are in rags and filthy to the most disgusting degree! ”

“ Hundreds and thousands could have been brought here to this Territory, where they could have had food to eat, raiment to wear, and been taught so as to have a house of their own, could have known how to build a good cabin, lived under their own roof and eaten their own bread; whereas, now they are perishing by scores and hundreds. Do these habits rob the poor? ”

“ This small element had for centuries now been swelled by captives taken in war, and by accessions through misery, poverty, and debt, which drove men to sell themselves and families and wear the collar of servitude. ”

“ There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes, in all the towns and streets of Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. ”

“ When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life. A last I may be going to see my longings to help the workless realised. ”

“ The unsatisfactory state of pauperism to which the law of settlement brought the kingdom, set numbers of heads at work to plan schemes of employing the destitute poor, and Sir Josiah Child proposed that persons should be appointed for this purpose, to be called "the fathers of the poor." ”

“ The land question means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the breaking up of homes; the misery, sickness, deaths of parents, children, wives; the despair and wildness which springs up in the hearts of the poor, when legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital rights of mankind. All this is contained in the land question.
The Lady Poverty By Jacob Fisher
(Contemporary American poet) ”

“ They threaten life,—or, if not life, then liberty,—reducing the abject one to a choice between captivity and starvation. By hook or crook, the poor gentleman or poor lady,—let the one or the other be ever so poor,—does not often come to the last extremity of the workhouse. ”

“ I may note here that during my many chats with the English labourer, in different counties far apart from each other, I have found their chief complaint (when they have one and venture to express it) is not so much the lowness of their wage, or the hardness of their work, as the poorness of their dwellings. ”

“ Are they ever ready to relieve the poor, the needy and distressed? In every city, village and neighborhood, throughout the length and breadth of the North, there are poor, wretched, miserable objects of charity, and here they have an opportunity to give us practical proof of the sincerity of their professions ”

“ I grant, indeed, that slaves are sometimes, by half-feeding, half-cloathing, over-working, and stripes, reduced so low, that they are turned out as unfit for service, and left to perish in the woods, or expire on a dung-hill. ”

“ As far as the peasant excels the king among savages, so far does the society exalted and enriched by the struggles of labour excel the state in which Poverty feels no disparity, and Toil sighs for no ease. ”

“ Ignorant, superstitious, and condemned to a life of unrequited toil and unredressed wrongs, the mental and moral condition of the agricultural poor was wretchedly low. Huddled together in mud cottages, through the rotten thatches of which the rain penetrated; clothed with rough garments that were seldom changed night or day; feeding on coarse food, and that in insufficient quantities,—their physical condition was one of extreme misery. ”

“ A bell gives all the signals; every slave, at the assigned hour in the morning, is forthcoming to his labour, or his case is reported, either as one of idleness, obstinacy, or sickness, in which case he is sent to the hospital, and there is attended by a physician, who, for the most part, has a yearly salary for attending to all the sick of the plantation. ”

“ But if we have not these establishments, how are the poor to obtain relief, but by becoming mendicants? and when their physical powers are prostrated by age, sickness, or accident, what shall be done with them? ”

“ A merciless banditti of tax-gatherers did not march through the land plundering and torturing, but the labourer was just as effectually stripped by as merciless a horde of landlords, among whom the soil had been divided as their absolute possession, regardless of any rights of those who lived upon it. ”

“ By one means, therefore, or by the other, either by hook or by crook, they must needs depart away, poor wretched souls—men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and the whole household, small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requires many hands. ”