In forma pauperis

“ To say to the poor, Ye shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the water of affliction, and be very miserable while here, required not so much a stretch of heroic faculty in any sense, as due toughness of bowels. If paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in multitude. ”

“ It is reluctance on the part of the poor man to become a pauper which forms the mighty barrier against the extension of pauperism. ... There is not a labourer in the country, however well paid he might be, who might not become a pauper at the first moment of his decaying strength or declining wages. ”

“ There are 1,100,000 paupers on the books, and not a tenth of them will be taken off by any revival whatever, for not a tenth of them are workers. The rest are children—350,000 of them alone—widows, people past work, cripples, lunatics, incapables, human drift of one sort or another, the detritus of commerce and labour, a compost of suffering, helplessness, and disease. ”

“ It is represented by a simple thread, which one wears under one’s clothes after a pauper has touched it, as a sign that poverty is holy, and that it will save the world. There is nothing good except in poverty; and since I have received the price of Les Blandices, I feel that I am unjust and harsh. ”

“ They found that the amiable, careless, unquestioning alms-giving was breeding a class of paupers, people who did not seek work nor wish to work, but who lived, and who meant to live, by beggary, who bred their children to do likewise, and whose haunts and associations and habits became great nurseries of crime. ”

“ It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between poverty and pauperism, for, by confounding them, poverty is dishonoured and pauperism countenanced. Supply poverty with means and it vanishes; but pauperism is the more confirmed. ”

“ No more afoot the poor man roams; in gorgeous car he scoots; we’ve mortgages upon our homes, our furniture, our boots. We’ve banished all the ancient cares, we paint the country red, we live like drunken millionaires, and never look ahead. The paupers, on the poorhouse lawn, are waiting in a group; they know we’ll all be there anon, to share their cabbage soup; they see us in our costly garb, and say: “Their course is brief; we see the harbingers that harb of bankruptcy and grief.” Be patient, paupers, for a span, ye friendless men and dames! ”

“ His vast wealth aggravated his natural cowardice—crafty men are invariably cowards, and their audacities under the compulsion of their ravenous greed are like a starving jackal's dashes into danger for food. ”

“ There are many, it is true, who, from their indolence or extravagance, or other vicious habits, fall into poverty and distress, and become a burthen on the public, who are so vile and degenerate as not to feel the wretchedness of their situation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I think that the artificial distinctions in society, the separation between the higher and the lower orders, the aristocracy of wealth and education, are the very rock of pauperism, and that the only way to eradicate this plague from our land will be to associate with the poor, and the wicked too, just as our Redeemer did. ”

“ Is human want so wicked that it should be unblessed with even a glance at the pleasant things of creation? Has the pauper—because pauper—no further claim upon the earth, save for his final bed—the grave? The rustic unions, with their forlorn blank walls, cry, yes!
If God punish man for crime, as man punishes man for poverty, woe to the sons of Adam! ”

“ It breeds weakness, anarchy, and at last ruin to society. And then the effeminate and luxurious, terrified for their money and their comfort, fly from an unwholesome tenderness to an unwholesome indignation ”

“ They entirely ignore the whole question of pauperisation by the Poor Law, of which we have had, and still have, such bitter experience in this country—a question which appears to most Poor Law administrators to be of vital importance. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they profess to be able to cure pauperism by making everyone a pauper. ”

“ You who see your betters, bearing up under this shame every day, meekly suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever step down from your prosperity and wash the feet of these poor wearied beggars? ”

“ Even now, sitting here with you, I cannot believe I was wicked. You will not misconstrue my words, but—but life is not always the same, is it? How inexpressibly cruel a great city may be with glaring wealth flaunting itself in the pinched face of poverty. ”

“ It seems, for example, to be a serious omission that in its chapter upon the causes of pauperism it submits the question to no psychological analysis, and altogether ignores the old and well-recognised distinction between poverty and pauperism. ”

“ How dare I--how dare I?--yes, that is what they would have said--How dare I encourage pauperism by giving money to little boys and girls and ragged men and women, whom I have never seen in my life before, whom I have never heard of in my life before? ”

“ And since, when I returned to the fortress, not one of my followers accompanied me (for I was penniless) I began to ponder deeply.
"A curse, a curse on a life of poverty! There is sound sense in the verse:
Even relatives are sure
Scornfully to treat the poor;
Pride is docked, and virtue's moon
Loses luster, waning soon;
Friends that were, disgusted fly;
Sorrows breed and multiply;
Comes the imputation then
Of the sins of other men.
When man is crushed by poverty
And stricken down by fate,
His best of friends become his foes,
And tried affection, hate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only sobs and sighs, but moaning and beating of little fists together, and outcries of soul-felt agony stifled against the bedside, and temples pressed into knitted palms, because of one who "sought not to be acquainted," but offered money—money!—in pity to a poor—shame on her for saying that!—a poor nigresse. ”

“ Look at the damnable callosity of the rich and educated who swill themselves in the rottenness of their wealth in the face of the horrible want and misery of the poor: and the poor who not only suffer the misery and insult of it, but grovel before the ruffians who souse them in it. They haven't the sense or pluck of rabbits. ”

“ See the pauperism, want, licentiousness, intemperance and crime in the midst of us; see the havoc made of woman; see the poor deserted by their elder brother, while it is their sweat which enriches your ground, builds your railroads, and piles up your costly houses. The tall gallows stands in the back-ground of society, overlooking it all; where it should be the blessed gospel of the living God. ”

“ This very sentiment, which our cultivation refines, fosters, makes supreme, is encountered by that harsh and cruel evil which grows also with the growth of civilization—poverty—civilized poverty. Oh, 'tis a frightful thing, this well-born, well-bred poverty! There is a pauper state, which, loathsome as it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. ”

“ But, the PAUPERS? Ought they to share in the making of the laws? And why not? What is a pauper; what is one of the men to whom this degrading appellation is applied? A very poor man; a man who is, from some cause or other, unable to supply himself with food and raiment without aid from the parish-rates. And, is that circumstance alone to deprive him of his right, a right of which he stands more in need than any other man? Perhaps he has, for many years of his life, contributed directly to those rates; and ten thousand to one he has, by his labour, contributed to them indirectly. ”

“ The works for which adult paupers, under supervision and with the natural stimulus of pay, are fit, are numerous. But there are two for which they are unfit, attending to sick and attending to children. All grown-up paupers are paupers from defect—moral defect, intellectual defect, physical defect. It has been found by actual experiment that no training can make these grown-up ones such as we ought to put about sick or children. ”

“ Looking at the actual state of things at the worst time of the poor-law, and seeing how small were the prospects of stirring the languid mind of the pauper to greater forethought, he thought that he might assume the constancy of an element which varied so slowly. ”

“ Are those who, in the prosperity proceeding from their unceasing and ill-paid toil, added their quota to the succour of others, now that poverty has fallen on them, to be left the sport of fortune and the slaves of suffering? ”

“ Why make the poor as guilty as the great?
⁠To show the great, those mightier sons of Pride,
⁠How near in vice the lowest are allied;
⁠Such are their natures, and their passions such,
⁠But these disguise too little, those too much:
⁠So shall the man of power and pleasure see
⁠In his own slave as vile a wretch as he;
⁠In his luxurious lord the servant find
⁠His own low pleasures and degenerate mind ”

“ The same family, in the two extremes of life, childhood and old age, exhibits pauperism as either the reality or promise of a criminal career. From the fact that pauperism exists as a parasite upon productive society, and preys upon society to its permanent injury, and makes no return, it will be regarded in this paper as an equivalent to crime against property. ”

“ The poor in London may be born for nothing, nursed for nothing, clothed for nothing, educated for nothing: they may he put out apprentice for nothing, and have medicine and medical attendance all their lives for nothing. The pauper is thus born, nursed, clothed, fed, educated, established and physicked all for nothing. He begins a pauper and dies a pauper, and at the expense of the parish he is provided with a shroud, coffin, pall and burial-ground. ”

“ All that was good, pure, unselfish,—whether among Royalists or Republicans,—swept to the shambles, and the deathsmen left alone in the pomp and purple of their victims! Nobler paupers than Jean Nicot would despair; and Poverty would rise in its ghastly multitudes to cut the throat of Wealth, and then gash itself limb by limb, if Patience, the Angel of the Poor, sat not by its side, pointing with solemn finger to the life to come! ”

“ When we say that pauperism has decreased we are juggling with words, because the actual burden of pauperism and the actual number of de facto paupers is far larger than it has ever been before in the history of the country. ”

“ Again gloom has brooded over the dwellings of the poor, and evil passions have wrought there, in proportion 144to the pressure of want,—the main spring of the vast machinery of moral evil by which society is harrowed and torn. ”

“ Above all, while thousands of unfortunate wretches languish in poverty, whatever we make use of beyond the wants and necessary expenses of our station, is an inhumanity to, and a theft from, the poor. These are refinements of devotion, say they; and, in matters of expense and profusion, nothing is excessive or blameable, according to the world, but what may tend to derange the fortune. ”

“ Or even suppose the hireling servant, glutted with prosperity, should tip off his cronies or give the whole scheme away out of spite? There would be nothing for it but flight and, in a fresh state of destitution, a recalling of poverty which had been driven off. Gods and goddesses, how ill it fares with those living outside the law; they are always on the lookout for what is coming to them! ”

“ Instead of adapting himself to circumstances and going in to make his pile, he began to tramp around from place to place, making speeches against the rich and well-to-do, and stirring up discontent among the poor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There we were, poor, ragged, hungry wretches, without anything beautiful in our lives, so miserable and hopeless that I didn't even know it wasn't the right thing to be a pauper, and that animal ran up a great wall in our faces so that we couldn't see the grass—curse him! ”

“ Under such circumstances, what marvel that the poor man becomes unthrifty, reckless and desperate? I know how common it is to complain of the extravagance of the poof. Often there is reason for the complaint. It is a wrong thing, and immoral, for. a man with a dependent family to spend all his earnings, if it be possible to live with less. ”