Pauperization

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yes, gentlemen—for while I would use caution, I will not indulge in cowardice—yes, and your starving population is willing to purchase that pabulum of life; not, indeed, with wealth,—for, like the poor disciples of a poorer master, they shake their tattered garments, and say, 'Silver and gold we have none,' but they are willing to purchase food with the well-strained sinews of nervous industry, with the sweat of their honest brows. ”

“ The poor, whom at such vast cost and with such parade of machinery it relieves, are often demoralized. There is neither worth nor joy to be got out of the pauper, who has learned to measure success in life by skill in evading inquiry. 168And, what is most striking of all, the Poor Law has allowed a mass of poverty to accumulate which has led to the erection of charity upon charity, and is still, by its squalor, its misery and hopelessness, a disgrace and a danger to the nation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not think that it is a sound or beneficial principle that a pauper, however indolent and however vicious, should have an absolute right to relief at the expense of the industrial portion of the community. ”

“ But when luxury was brought into fashion, and they came to be honoured who lived magnificently, though they had in themselves no qualities to distinguish them from the basest of slaves, the most virtuous men were exposed to scorn if they were poor; and that poverty, which had been the mother and nurse of their virtue, grew insupportable. ”

“ 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 degradation of pauperism is far worse than that of slavery, and of all pauperism none surely exceeded in cruelty this which fell to the lot of the English Labourer. Pampered at first, led even into a coarse luxury, he was rapidly let down until he was treated to such degradations as being put up to auction, and his labour sold to the highest bidder, or to being made to drag gravel carts like a beast of burden. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the first place, there has been reform of the poor laws. So corrupt had this system become, that a distinct caste had well nigh sprung into permanent existence, families having been known to subsist in idleness for five generations solely by means of skilful appropriation of public and private charities.
The law giving to paupers the preference in all cases where any public work was to be done, operated badly. Good workmen might starve for want of work: by declaring themselves paupers they obtained employment. ”

“ So much for the boasted charity of the dominant class in Great Britain! By its enormous drain upon the public purse, and its vast monopoly of that soil which was given for the use of all, it creates millions of paupers—wretches without homes, without resources, and almost without hope; and then, to prevent themselves from being hurled from their high and luxurious places, and from being devoured as by ravenous wolves, they take the miserable paupers in hand, separate families, shut them up, as in the worst of prisons, and give them something to keep life in their bodies. ”

“ Therefore he chose poor men as his ministers, and those who left all to follow him, and was himself an example of poverty. Even so is the handling of riches and of money, not merely their possession and ownership, the enemy of uprightness. ”

“ Thus wealth and poverty contributed alike to the ruin of the republic. The rich employed their wealth in the acquisition of power, and their power in every kind of oppression and rapine for the acquisition of more wealth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The clothing of the workmen in contrast with the gorgeous apparel of the fashionable bon ton; the furnishings of the hovels of the poor and the mansions of the rich placed side by side; the coarse and homely fare of the wealth producer compared with the dainty viands of the non-producer; all told more plainly than words the story of undeserved poverty, and in millions of cases, the abject want and misery of the most useful [Pg 299] classes of society, in striking contrast with the unearned abundance of the idle, and for all practical purposes, the useless rich. ”

“ To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of the labourer, we must substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go to the cause of the evil, in nothing else is there the slightest hope. ”

“ It is statesmanship to rid the community of nuisances, to feed the poor and prevent stealing and robbery, but it should not be called 'a charity.' The paupers take their provision as their right, feel no gratitude, acquire no ambition, no industry, no culture. ”

“ Instead of that hideous, importunate, idle, licentious poverty, as pernicious to the police as to morality, we should see the poverty of the earlier ages, humble, modest, frugal, robust, industrious, and laborious. ”

“ Now, it is not a very honorable proceeding for any government to pit its own so-called “pauper laborers”—or laborers that are on the verge of pauperism—against similar laborers in all other countries: and all for the sake of putting the principal proceeds of their labor into the pockets of a few employers. ”

“ The author of the Essay, to assist his argument, transposes the question. He represents the labouring class of the community as a set of useless, supernumerary paupers, living on charity, or on the labour of the industrious proprietor. If this representation had any foundation, I should be ready to admit that these interlopers had no claim on any part of the surplus produce of others as a debt of justice. They must owe every thing to favour, and would be entirely at the mercy of their benefactors. Every reader must perceive, how little this account is in any degree near the truth. ”

“ We may observe, that the manufactures, the laborious part of mankind, the poor's rates, and the number of paupers, will everlastingly go hand in hand; they will increase and decrease together; we cannot annihilate one, but the others will follow, and odd as the expression may sound, we become rich by payment and poverty. If we discharge the poor, who shall act the laborious part? ”

“ It has been calculated that only two per cent in every community succeed in reaching the pauper class. The tendency is for all the labors of the working-class to be ultimately turned upon the unfortunate wealthy class. ”

“ It is from the century preceding the one now under review that the era of pauperism commences. In fact, the moment that villenage began to give way, pauperism and mendicity appeared. So long as the inhabitants of the large estates, whether of the church or the laity, were so much property, they must be maintained just as the cattle were; but so soon as they became free men, and received not food, clothing, and lodging, but wages for their work, they became liable to the destitution which times of scarcity, sickness, or old age naturally brought. ”

“ How can we expect a crowd of unfortunates to whom we have given neither principles nor morals to remain quiet spectators of the abundance, the luxury, the unjustly acquired riches of so many corrupt individuals, who seem to insult the general poverty, and are only rarely disposed to relieve it? ”

“ Well I the unquestionable result of all the facts collected, unseen, shunned, covered by the economists with their silence, is that pauperism is constitutional and chronic in society as long as the antagonism between labor and capital continues, and that this antagonism can end only by the absolute negation of political economy. ”

“ Prior to the show-day of the pauper children to the purveyor or cotton master, the most illusive and artfully contrived falsehoods were spread, to fill the minds of those poor infants with the most absurd and ridiculous errors, as to the real nature of the servitude, to which they were to be consigned. ”

“ Even if the poor had been actually no poorer in these flush days than they had been when manners were simpler, the glaring contrasts would have been maddening. But multitudes of them were, no doubt, not only relatively but positively poorer; the destruction of the guilds of labor, the displacements in industry, had left great numbers not only of the peasantry and the artisans but also of the poorer nobles in practical destitution. ”

“ The manufacturing millionaire appears before us as the victim of the same harsh destiny as the penniless crossing-sweeper, and the banker of Lombard Street is overshadowed by the same blighting poverty as the lumper of Wapping. Proudhon, in a powerful passage, describes pauperism as invading modern society at both extremes ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 they grown pampered and insolent? Have they changed places with the rich? Have they been cunning enough, by means of the poor-laws, to draw off all their wealth and superfluities from the men of property? ”

“ 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. ”