Extreme poverty

“ So far we have endeavoured to measure poverty by the application of a standard of actual material comfort. But this, while furnishing a fair gauge of the deprivation suffered by the poor, does not enable us to measure it as a social danger. There is a depth of poverty, of misery, of ignorance, which is not dangerous because it has no outlook, and is void of hope. Abate the extreme stress of poverty, give the poor a glimpse of a more prosperous life, teach them to know their power, and the danger of poverty increases. ”

“ Poverty, especially extreme poverty, is a multidimensional, multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be fought with economic measures only, but requires action in many different areas and the introduction of intersectoral policies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But because extreme poverty and social exclusion are growing worse and traditional social policies, mostly benefits based, have been a chronic flop, rarely reaching the poorest sectors and offering them nothing of lasting value in escaping from their situation, other ways of coming at the problem have begun to gain acceptance. ”

“ These estimates, beyond their obvious discrepancies and inadequacies, show that, in so far as we do have a clearer picture of poverty, the phenomenon is evidently worsening - not only in developing countries but in countries in transition and industrialized countries as well. ”

“ Poverty, a paradox in one of the most prosperous regions on Earth, affects more than 52 million people. Practically one person in seven is threatened by poverty and social exclusion in Europe as a whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The potential earnings of the labor thus going to waste, the cost of the reckless, improvident and idle habits thus generated; the pecuniary loss, to consider nothing more, suggested by the appalling statistics of mortality, and especially infant mortality, among the poorer classes; the waste indicated by the gin palaces or low groggeries which increase as poverty deepens; the damage done by the vermin of society that are bred of poverty and destitution—the thieves, prostitutes, beggars, and tramps ”

“ The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of starvation and ruin. ”

“ I replied, "how it was possible that this country could ever have been cursed with poverty as the normal condition of the masses of the people while the few were rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and held those masses bound by fetters that they could not break." ”

“ Summing up, it is convenient to classify the causes of [267] poverty as individual and social, including under the first head ignorance, inefficiency, illness or accident, intemperance, and immorality, and under the second unemployment, widowhood, or desertion, overcrowding and insanitation, the high cost of living versus low wages, and lack of adjustment to environment.
Poverty is one of those social conditions that appear in all parts of the country, even in the smaller villages, but it is more dreadful and wide-spread in the great cities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of whom do the poor in every nation consist, but of the lame, the sick, the infirm, the aged, or children unprovided for? Of those, the number, in proportion to the total number of inhabitants, will be pretty nearly the same at all times; for it is nature that produces this species of helpless poverty. It would then appear that there is another species of poverty, not of nature's creation, that comes in and destroys the proportion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A recent Heritage Foundation study examines the incidence of the bedrock problems of poverty—mal­nutrition, crowded housing and lack of ac­cess to medical care. It concludes that 8.7 million Americans, or just 3.7% of the pop­ulation, make up the nation’s “hardship population”—the truly poor. ”

“ Why, that here is to be found a population of paupers squatted upon patches of land quite incapable of their support; and in seasons of famine and sickness, especially in a country where labor is below its value, and employment inadequate to the demand that is for it, this same population becomes a helpless burthen upon it—a miserable addition to the mass of poverty and destitution under which it groans. ”

“ Deprivation for the many and luxury for the few have degraded our national life at both ends of the scale. At the one end, "thirteen millions on the verge of hunger," physically and morally deteriorated through poverty and unloveliness. At the other, the inheritors of the earth, "senseless conduits through which the strength and riches of their native land are poured into the cup of the fornication of its capital." ”

“ And hence, increase of population, so far as it has yet anywhere gone, does not mean a reduction, but an increase, in the average production of wealth.
Look simply at the facts. Can anything be clearer than that the cause of the poverty which festers in the centres of civilization is not in the weakness of the productive forces? In countries where poverty is deepest, the forces of production are evidently strong enough, if fully employed, to provide for the lowest not merely comfort but luxury. ”

“ The strain of our hurried, over-worked life has something to do with this. Poverty has more. For these are all of the poor. It is the harvest of sixty and a hundred-fold, the "fearful rolling up and rolling down from generation to generation, through all the ages, of the weakness, vice, and moral darkness of the past." ”

“ Poverty goes on increasing, and like the spider in an empty house, spreads her thin grey pall over the kingdom, widening swiftly, though imperceptibly. Our population, though of necessity hungry and idle, are surprisingly quiet. The loans and gratuities proposed by Government, are but drops in a sandy desert ”

“ As the well-to-do look with anxiety to the loss of their property and the consequent sinking to some lower plane of moderate poverty, so the poor look with shuddering or, at last, with despair to sinking into the slough of this hopeless state for which there is no name, because none has been devised adequate to describe its desperate misery. Often but a block, or even but a wall divides the reeking slum where they creep and fester and rot, from the broad, well-lighted, smooth-paved avenue where irresponsible wealth goes clattering by in its wild orgy of extravagance and reckless mirth. ”

“ Parliamentary reports have again and again revealed to us the miseries endured by certain portions of our working population. They have described the people employed in factories, workshops, mines, and brickfields, as well as in the pursuits of country life. We have tried to grapple with the evils of their condition by legislation, but it seems to mock us. Those who sink into poverty are fed, but they remain paupers. Those who feed them, feel no compassion; and those who are fed, return no gratitude. There is no bond of sympathy between the givers and the receivers. ”

“ They live among and on the poor, and one of the bitterest trials of poverty is the continual presence and preying of these parasites who like other vermin pursue them and cannot be kept off. Their only common crime is desperate, infinite poverty—poverty beyond hope, for they have nothing—not work, nor the hope of work—not even the power to work, if it should be offered them. ”

“ The terrible famine of 1877-8 was the cause of the death of millions of people, and left scores of millions without house, food or clothing; they were driven forth as wanderers on the face of the earth without home, without hope. The Government does nothing whatever in these cases. The people who wish to live must find the means to live, and what impressed me all through my wanderings was the absolute science to which poverty is reduced. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ This poverty, arising, as it does, from so many causes, has propagated itself with a rapidity which is startling; for every one knows that poverty is proverbially prolific. And yet it is a grievous anomaly to reflect that a country so far steeped in misery and destitution as to have nearly one-half of its population in a state of most pitiable pauperism, possesses a soil capable of employing and maintaining three times the number of its inhabitants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And in the meantime, the population continues to increase!
“Illth.”
It is sometimes said that during this grotesquely hideous march of civilization from bad to worse, wealth is increasing side by side with misery. Such a thing is eternally impossible; wealth is steadily decreasing with the spread of poverty. But riches are increasing, which is quite another thing. The total of the exchange values produced in the country annually is mounting perhaps by leaps and bounds. ”

“ We have traced the want and suffering that everywhere prevail among the working classes, the recurring paroxysms of industrial depression, the scarcity of employment, the stagnation of capital, the tendency of wages to the starvation point, that exhibit themselves more and more strongly as material progress goes on, to the fact that the land on which and from which all must live is made the exclusive property of some. ”

“ All these dwellings, it may be added, do not wear the same aspect of prosperous neatness; but even where poverty is present, it is unaccompanied by that sullen gloom and melancholy squalidness which, in other countries, is the painful indication and result of long-endured privation. And here, we must also remember, poverty and famine are not always inseparable companions. ”

“ Thus, while on one hand there is incessantly going on an accumulation of capital, wealth, and power into a steadily diminishing number of hands, there is, on the other hand, a constantly growing insecurity of livelihood for the mass of wage-earners, an increasing disparity between human wants and the opportunity [331] of acquiring the means for their satisfaction, and a steady physical and mental deterioration among the more poverty-stricken of the population. ”