Poverty alleviation

“ Of course, if we are convinced that the improvement of the condition of the poor is to be found in the extension of material relief, then all questions of distinction between Poor Law and charity sink into insignificance. Our duty is plain. We have by all means in our power to bring about that condition, and to augment the volume of relief from every possible source.
No one probably will assent to the suggestion that material relief is the cure for poverty. On the contrary, every one appears to recognise—in theory at least—that material relief may do great harm. ”

“ Now there is a tendency in poverty to drive the ablest men to work, and so get rid of the poverty, and this I take it is the providential design thereof. Poverty, like an armed man, stalks in the rear of the social march, huge and haggard, and gaunt and grim, to scare the lazy, to goad the idle with his sword, to trample and slay the obstinate sluggard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We felt the full force of the heavy hand of poverty--the most stinging kind of poverty too, that which still holds up its head and keeps an outside appearance. Far more grinding is this than the poverty inherited from generations which is not ashamed of itself, and has not as an accompaniment the wounded pride and humiliation which attacked us. ”

“ It is poverty that prevents fortifying the will by increasing physical stamina and moral courage, it is poverty that drives a man; to drink or desperation, and it is poverty that prescribes the unfavorable surroundings that do so much to keep a man down. Poverty is a danger flag that indicates the probability of deeper degradation and calls for the individual or [265] group that is better off to lend a hand. Poverty is a goad, a thorn in the flesh of society, that is pushing it along the road of social reform. ”

“ 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 ”

“ That degree of poverty which involves in it the inability to procure the necessaries of life without the charitable assistance of the Public, is, doubtless, the heaviest of all misfortunes; as it not only brings along with it the greatest physical evils, pain,—and disease, but is attended by the most mortifying humiliation, and hopeless despondency. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Volumes could be padded in showing how this can be done, but we can demonstrate in this brief work how poverty can be obliterated as a feature of our national life, and if it does not make justice more even-handed for all, and the people of this country as prosperous as any on earth, then the fault must be in the plan itself, and not in the resources which we possess, for of those we have enough to empty every poorhouse in the land, and eighty-five per cent. ”

“ And even if it be admitted that the tendency to multiply must ultimately produce poverty, it cannot from this alone be predicated of existing poverty that it is due to this cause, until it be shown that there are no other causes which can account for it—a thing in the present state of government, laws, and customs, manifestly impossible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Society is constantly engaged in endeavouring, feebly, slowly, and blindly, to relieve the stress of poverty, and the industrial weakness of low-skilled labour, by laying hands upon certain functions and certain portions of wealth formerly left to private individuals, and claiming them as social functions and social wealth to be administered for the social welfare. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moreover, when we extend our view in history we find that poverty has been oftentimes in the past even much more prevalent than it is at present. This question of poverty is, in other words, a world-old question and is intimately bound up with the question of material civilization—that is, man's conquest of nature—and with social organization,—the relations of men to one another. At certain times in history certain institutions like slavery have either obviated or concealed poverty, and particularly its extreme expressions, in dependence and legal pauperism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of private property in land, which are currently relied on or proposed for the relief of poverty and the better distribution of wealth, and have found them all inefficacious or impracticable.
There is but one way to remove an evil—and that is, to remove its cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. ”

“ In the face of all this experience it is not extravagant to say that the means of relief used last winter developed the causes of poverty. It may be that if all the poor were self-controlled and honest, and if all charity were wise, poverty would still exist; but self-indulgence, lies, and unwise charity are causes of poverty, and these causes have been strengthened. ”

“ If the social maladjustment which is undoubtedly the cause of the bulk of modern poverty were done away with, it is safe to say that it would be reduced to less than one third of its present dimensions. ”

“ The foregoing analysis shows that life in extreme poverty consists of an accumulation of mutually reinforcing misfortunes: poor living conditions, insalubrious housing, unemployment, ill health, lack of education, marginalization, etc., a veritable "horizontal vicious circle" of poverty, to use the words of those concerned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every civilization has produced a cluster of institutions and practices that enabled a few rich and privileged to live in affluence at the expense of the impoverished many. This juxtaposition of riches and poverty is the logical outcome of a system of social relations designed to provide the few with comfort and luxury while the many are forced to accept penury and hardship. Exploitation, carried to its logical conclusion, permits and requires a parasitic minority to live in abundance while the majority must content itself with scarcity, extending to death from malnutrition. ”

“ But is poverty an essential, substantial, integral element in human civilization, or is it an accidental element thereof, and transiently present; is it amenable to suppression? For my own part, I believe that all evil is transient, a thing that belongs to the process of development, not to the nature of man, or the higher forms of social [Pg 340] life towards which he is advancing. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand, those {8} who are engaged in social service often exaggerate the causes of poverty that are external to the individual. Bad industrial conditions and defective legislation seem to them the causes of nearly all the distress around them. Settlement workers are likely to say that the sufferings of the poor are due to conditions over which the poor have no control. ”

“ In taking the instance of France, it is not that the writer for one moment imagines that poverty is a word without meaning in our own lands. The clamming factory hands in the Lancashire valleys, the distressed ribbon weavers of Coventry, and the impoverished labourers in various parts of Ireland and Scotland, would be able to give us a definition of the word fearful in its distinctness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All this time the poor people were being reduced to the utmost poverty, and every right and opportunity for personal and civil advancement was taken from them. They were left to grope on in intellectual darkness. ”

“ The idea that the poor multiplied "like lice and fleas" seems to have haunted our fathers like a nightmare. Nor did ever a nation inflict such penalties on poverty. It is but literal truth to say that in England poverty is a crime. ”