Pauperism

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we find two Unions externally identical, of which the one has double the pauperism of the other, we know that the process of pauperisation has set in, and that large numbers of the poor have been tempted to give up the struggle for life and to surrender their independence. We know also that calamity overtakes them, and that of all policies this is the most inhuman.
Such appear, then, to be the main features of the problem of pauperism. Its main antidote heretofore has been the discipline of life which has enforced prudence, self-restraint, and self-sacrifice for the sake of others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the moment they enter upon such work, or attempt in any [Pg 78] way to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, they find that a strong, clear head is as necessary as a warm heart. The problem how to deal with pauperism—the very same difficulty which has hitherto baffled the wisest of our statesmen—meets them at the threshold of their works. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Behind pauperism there were great social questions, the discontent and misery of great masses of the labouring population. Whatever reforms might be made in other parts of the natural order, here were difficulties enough to task the wisdom of legislators and speculators upon legislative principles. ”

“ From a condition approaching pauperism they were at once placed above want; they could earn money, and spend it as they pleased; and could gratify their tastes and desires without restraint, and without rendering an account to anybody. ”

“ If you were able and willing to pay rents of all the poor people you know, and clothe their children, you would soon produce a condition of settled pauperism among them. Large and frequent favors of a financial nature are an injury to anyone, even if it is your son or brother. ”

“ Yet, when the statistics of pauperism were collected and studied, it was shown that indiscriminate alms giving is an action rather evil than good, its tendency being not only to maintain, but actually to produce, idle and miserable paupers. In our time a large proportion of the public and private funds, distributed among the poor, is spent in actually diminishing their industry, frugality, and self reliance. ”

“ It is good to speak on such questions with diffidence: but it has certainly never yet been proved that pauperism was a less heavy burden or a less serious social evil during the last quarter of the seventeenth century than it is in our own time. ”

“ To speak more specifically, the leading facts to which the evils that, in one shape or other, are continually forcing themselves upon the attention of society, may be reduced, appear to be—1st. The existence of an intolerable mass of misery, including in the term both recognized and official pauperism, and the unrecognized destitution that preys, like a consuming ulcer, in the heart of our large cities and densely peopled manufacturing districts. ”

“ In order to deal effectively with pauperism, it is necessary to know the causes which lead to the impoverishment of individuals and masses of individuals, and to be familiar with the condition, manners, customs, habits, prejudices, feelings, and superstitions of the poor. ”

“ The present work is very far from being offered as a general view of that peculiar branch of pauperism, which includes the many wandering classes of mankind that are supported by the casual and irregular bounty of others, or by means that have at least the appearance of industry or honourable ingenuity ”

“ It may seem strange to discuss pauperism in relation to marriage and to speak of it as a hereditary factor, but it is necessary to discuss it, because considerable ignorance prevails on the subject, it being generally confused with poverty. There is a radical difference between pauperism and poverty. ”

“ Five of your six last letters now before me are filled with appeals for abatements of rent, loans to carry out improvements, stipends for schoolmasters, doctors, scripture-readers, and a tribe of other hangers-on, that really seem to augment in number as the pauperism of the people increases. ”

“ Anything that encourages pauperism, anything that relaxes the manly fibre and lowers self-respect, is an unmixed evil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Therefore, when I find in the tenth chapter of Proverbs this: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty,' I shake hands with the author, and travel with him for this trip at least. The prophet does not say that their destruction is ignorance, or vice, or sin, or any of the ordinary blossoms of poverty which it is the fashion to refer to as its root. He tells us the truth—the destruction of the poor is their poverty. ”

“ Those who know by experience the miseries of poverty should be compassionate to those who suffer the like, but they are inexcusably barbarous if they be injurious to them. 2. How imperious and griping those commonly are who, being indigent and necessitous, get into power. If a prince prefer a poor man, he forgets that ever he was poor, and none shall be so oppressive to the poor as he, nor squeeze them so cruelly. The hungry leech and the dry sponge suck most. Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride without mercy. ”

“ Instead, therefore, of applauding “happy poverty,” which applause is so much the fashion of the present day, I despise the man that is poor and contented; for, such content is a certain proof of a base disposition, a disposition which is the enemy of all industry, all exertion, all love of independence. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But these, on the other hand, prefer ignorance to wisdom, turning their wealth into stone, that is, into pearls and Indian emeralds. And they squander and throw away their wealth on fading dyes, and bought slaves; like crammed fowls scraping the dung of life. “Poverty,” it is said, “humbles a man.” [665] By poverty is meant that niggardliness by which the rich are poor, having nothing to give away. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Yes, little Paul, but do not ask the rich, they will not answer you because if they did they would have to say, ‘The world is such a bad place for poor people because we, the rich, are greedy, selfish, vile,’ and no person likes to say that about himself. But go to the poor people, ask them, ‘Why do you eat dry bread though you work hard, while the idle rich eat cake? Why are your children pale, thin and ill while the rich children are rosy, fat and healthy? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We must remember that it is part of our peculiar English system, the result of our boasted Poor Law, to discredit the very word poverty, by refusing to discriminate between the poor in the scriptural sense, who are honourable and even noble, and the pauper in the modern sense, who is almost always the scum of a corrupt social order, in four cases out of five a drunkard, and in the fifth case the product of some one else's moral failings. It requires quite an effort for us to see and realize what the Scriptures mean by the poor. ”

“ Can it be that the gifts of the Creator may be thus misappropriated with impunity? Is it a light thing that labor should be robbed of its earnings while greed rolls in wealth—that the many should want while the few are surfeited? ”

“ Are the poor governed by the rich—and well? Do the shrewd rule the ignorant, and to their advantage? Do the strong control the weak, and to their advantage? Are the inefficient well or badly housed, well or badly nourished, neglected, left to stew in their own juice of misery and live and die as best they can, or are they looked after, as the religionist and moralist suggest and hope for? ”

“ Out upon the folly which, in estimating human misery, allows aught to bear comparison with the agony of the poor! I use the word poor relatively; I call not those poor to whom honesty brings self-respect, whose habits and whose means have gone together, and whose industry is its own support. But those are the poor whose exertion supplies not their wants—to whom cold, hunger, and weariness, are common feelings; who have known better days—to whom the past furnishes contrast, and the future fear. ”