Necessitarianism

“ VI. The poor also will be tempted to use unlawful means to supply their wants. [108] How many by the temptation of necessity have been tempted to comply with sinners, and wound their consciences, and lie and flatter for favour or preferment, or to cheat, or steal, or over-reach! ”

“ If we go to the bottom of the matter we will recognise that even in the most famous passages of the Sermon on the Mount there is contained an indirect injunction to voluntary poverty, and thereby to the denial of the will to live. ”

“ And here, where we feel most of all the need of guidance, it must be confessed that few authors venture to speak with much definiteness. The instance, indeed, of a man placed in extreme necessity, all quote and explain in nearly identical language. Should anyone be reduced to these last circumstances, so as to be without means of subsistence or sufficient wealth to acquire them, he may, in fact must, take from anywhere whatever suffices for his immediate requirements. If he begs for the necessities of life, they cannot be withheld from him. ”

“ If there were those who because of idleness and vice were indisposed to provide for themselves, we should find a way of inspiring them with a better mind. But, if this were a thoroughly Christian country, there would be no willing workers dwelling anywhere near the borders of want. There are resources here which are ample for the abundant supply of all human needs; if ours were a completely Christianized society, the needs of those who were able and willing to work would be abundantly supplied. ”

“ So, in like manner, is the necessity of almsgiving, except in cases of accident, the opprobrium of our civilisation: and those who desire the welfare of society,—spiritual and moral, as well as material,—will refuse to stimulate almsgiving, which aggravates the evils it professes to alleviate, and will apply all the means in their power to supersede the necessity of it. We can see for ourselves that men are most degraded and miserable where the spurious charity of almsgiving most abounds ”

“ That we should relieve the necessities of the poor, who will deny it? But that a social system which year by year witnesses the increase of the pauper class, and the increase of their miseries, stands condemned before the tribunal of Religion, of justice, how long will it take before that is understood and taken to heart? The facts of righteousness are few and simple, but to apply them how mighty, how difficult a task. ”

“ Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring class the love of independence, the privilege of self-respect, the disdain of being patronized or petted, the desire to accumulate, and the ambition to rise.... Whilst I will not be the sycophant of the great, I cannot become the parasite of the poor." [14] This habit of mind was expressed in a general opposition to institutions and policies which interfered with individual freedom. ”

“ Now the present system, while better than nothing, is fraught with many serious objections, with which I am sure my Indian readers will agree.
1. The weakest must inevitably go to the wall. It is the strong able-bodied lusty beggar who is bound to get the best of it in struggles such as I have above described, although he is just the one who could and ought to work and who least needs the charity. He is able also to cover more ground than the weak and sickly. To the latter the struggle for existence is necessarily very severe, and while needing and deserving help the most they get the least. ”

“ Then, says he again, if this holy man was so liberal to the poor when he was a poor man himself, and stood in need of charity for the support of his own body, do you not think he would take it well now, when he is grown so rich and wants nothing, if some poor woman having a family of children at home ready to starve, or daughters in danger of being under a necessity to prostitute themselves for want of portions, or a husband sick in bed, and destitute of all comforts ”

“ The system of compulsory charity by poor's rates, of which the absolute necessity can hardly be questioned, has connected with it on both sides some of the most odious and malevolent feelings that can agitate humanity. ”

“ At the other end of the scale, we have the parasitic class of the beggars or thieves. They, too, are not personally responsible for the conditions into which they are born. But they are not only to be pitied individually, but to be regarded, in the mass, as involving social disease and danger. ”

“ Expedients must take the place of habits; necessity must be their law instead of prescription; the chains of conventionality—as strong among the lowest as among the highest—drop from their limbs, and the man rises up from the ruins of the slave and beggar. ”

“ It seems to me a great evil, and to imply blame to us in some way that 600,000 persons should be living in a condition which has this sort of feeling attached to it. Is it because it is a crime in itself to be poor, or because the way in which we treat poverty has led persons to think it so? Or is it because we relieve those who do not need or deserve relief, and so have continually the feeling that we are imposed upon? ”

“ Though nothing would be more unjust and tyrannical, than to prevent the generous and humane from contributing to the relief of the Poor and necessitous, yet, as giving alms to beggars tends so directly and so powerfully to encourage idleness and immorality, to discourage the industrious Poor, and perpetuate mendicity, with all its attendant evils, too much pains cannot be taken to guard the Public against a practice so fatal in its consequences to society. ”

“ It is easy to browbeat a poor man who wants bread and cheese for himself and his family, by calling his demands materialistic, and advising him to turn his mind to the future state, where he will have the best of Dives. It is equally easy to ascribe the demands to mere envy and selfishness, or to those evil-minded agitators who, for their own wicked purposes, induce men to prefer a guinea to a pound of wages. But, after all, there is something in the demand for fair play and for the means of leading decent lives, which requires a better answer. ”

“ These words refute the Director of mystical practice, who said: “He whose poverty is compulsory is more perfect than he whose poverty is voluntary; for if it be compulsory, he is the creature (ṣan`at) of poverty, and if it be voluntary, poverty is his creature; and it is better that his actions should be free from any attempt to gain poverty for himself than that he should seek to acquire it by his own effort.” ”

“ What remedy then shall we find for these three disorder; and first, to prevent stealing from necessity, let every one be supplied with a moderate subsistence, which may make the addition of his own industry necessary; second to prevent stealing to procure the luxuries of life, temperance be enjoined; and thirdly, let those who wish for pleasure in itself seek for it only in philosophy, all others want the assistance of men. ”

“ The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion. Reward and punishment must be considered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandonment of any given line of conduct. ”

“ One class requires punitive discipline, another needs life-long care, a third—the mentally and morally sound but physically defective—must depend, to its misfortune, on private and public charity. There is no question here of payment for a function, but of ministering to human suffering. ”

“ "Necessity knows no law, and the starving man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread." ”

“ It is the same inability to distinguish between one cause and another which creates the vulgar prejudice against necessity, and which is exposed in a very satisfactory manner by the author of the ‘Inquiry into the Will.’ He says, in a letter written expressly to vindicate himself from having confounded moral with physical necessity, ‘On the contrary, I have largely declared that the connexion between antecedent things and consequent ones which takes place with regard to the acts of men’s wills, which is called moral necessity, is called by the name of necessity improperly ”

“ They are poor; nor can their poverty be measured by the poverty of a resourceless savage, for he knows of nothing else than his poverty; that he should be cold, hungry, houseless, dirty, ignorant, all that is to him as natural as that he should have a skin. But for us, for the most of us, civilization has bred desires which she forbids us to satisfy, and so is not merely a niggard but a torturer also. ”

“ The improvidence of the poor as a valid excuse for ignorance, poverty, and vice, is as inadequate as is the providence of the rich, for their virtue, luxury, and power. The artificial conditions of society are based on false theories of government, religion, and morals, and not upon the decrees of a God. ”

“ And because many sound beggars do refuse to labour so long as they can live from begging alms, giving themselves up to idleness and sins, and, at times, to robbery and other crimes—let no one, under the aforesaid pain of imprisonment presume, under colour of piety or alms to give anything to such as can very well labour, or to cherish them in their sloth,—so that thus they may be compelled to labour for the necessaries of life. ”

“ The history of the mendicant orders is an almost incomprehensible story of wrongheadedness. That poverty is a good is an inversion of common sense. That men do not want what they must have to live is a denial of all philosophy. ”

“ Theologians commonly distinguish three degrees of necessity, as we saw in a former chapter. Extreme necessity is the condition of one who from want is in danger of death or some equally serious evil, and who can do nothing to help himself. If in similar circumstances he can, though with difficulty, do something to help himself, he is said to be in grave necessity. Beggars and the indigent poor generally are in common necessity. ”

“ The healthy, well nourished and well educated class escapes, the poor, ill-nourished, and ignorant class bears the burden until this burden is shifted on society in the form of beggar, defective, imbecile or criminal. ”

“ The incessant toil imposed by poverty on the energies of the poor obdurates their nature; and, allowing no interval for mental culture, permits nothing to interrupt or soften its tendency. The mortifying difficulties experienced by this class of society to obtain, by honest labor, a subsistence for themselves and their natural dependents, have sometimes led them to become depredators upon society, when their constitutional principles, unwarped by indigence, would have secured their obedience to law and their labors for the public good. ”

“ As these people are now-a-days at liberty to leave their voluntary servitude, none are admitted but such as by the weakness of their understanding, and the natural timidity arising from a degree of imbecility, are expected to continue for life in a state of religious bondage. ”

“ It is looked upon as a right and not as a privilege; It is accepted as a favor to the government and not to the recipient, and the almost inevitable tendency is to encourage dependency, foster pride, and create a spirit of arrogance and selfishness. ”

“ By spreading such doctrines far and wide, such an unbridled licentiousness of thought and action was begotten everywhere, that it is no wonder if men of the lower classes, disgusted with their poverty-stricken homes and their dismal workshops, are filled with an inordinate desire to rush upon the homes and the fortunes of the wealthy; no wonder is it that tranquillity is banished from all public and private life, and that the human race seems hurried onward to ruin. ”

“ Those who are entitled either to free education, free meals, free clothing, or to be freely housed, entertained, comforted and blessed, are those who are industrious, prudent, frugal, using the faculties they possess, but who, through sickness, misfortune, or old age, are unable to minister to their own wants ”

“ When wealth and its appliances exist, these things take all the features of extreme care and solicitude for the sufferer; all the agencies of kindness and skill are brought into active exertion, to minister to the rich man in sickness; but when poverty and its evils are present—when the struggle is against the pressure of want, as well as the sufferings of malady, the picture is indeed a dark one. ”

“ No one desired the welfare—or what he conceived to be the welfare—of mankind more sincerely than he did; and he was prepared to buy it at a handsome figure. Yet Heaven refused to sell, and earth, inasmuch as the souls of men are not her possessions, had nothing worth his purchase. ”

“ Thousands and thousands of able, active, industrious men and women are thus, with their families, deprived of the means of subsistence. Theirs is not the case, remember, of men who will not work, and who, therefore, according to the Apostolic rule, may justly be left to bear their own burden: “If any man will not work, neither shall he eat.” ”

“ But there is greater “social compunction,” a deeper sense of society’s responsibility for the existence of poverty, and an earnest inquiry respecting the primary social causes of it. Hence effort is directed not merely to the immediate relief of want and misery through organized charity, but to the cure of poverty through the removal of the causes of destitution. ”

“ Do you not know that numbers of your fellow-creatures are starving, for want of what you have too much of? You ought to have had the express and universal consent of mankind, before appropriating more of the common subsistence than you needed for your own maintenance. ”