Social degradation

“ Hence it has become one of the most fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at the root of our worst social evils. ”

“ If in many instances he is degraded, by moral and political slavery to the practice of the basest vices it engenders, and that below the level of ordinary degradation; let us reflect that the corruption of the best produces the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a peculiar state of social institution may be expected to cease so soon as that relation is dissolved. ”

“ In the same manner, if, either from the influence of the social institutions of a country, or from the operation of natural causes which human power is unable to control, there is a class of men too low, and degraded, and miserable to be reached by the ordinary inducements to daily toil, so certain are they to grow corrupt and depraved, that degradation has become in all languages a term almost synonymous with vice. ”

“ So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved ”

“ By that inevitable law of action and reaction which prevails alike in moral and social as in physical phenomena, the community which has so large a portion of its members in a condition of ignorance and brutality, must, throughout its whole body, partake of the degradation which exists within it, and must be affected, by the very contact, in all its feelings, sentiments, and purposes, through the gross and ignorant passions which such an association cannot fail to arouse. ”

“ It is, therefore, the wretched material condition of the poorer masses and the ignorance, stupidity, brutality, and degradation accompanying these, together with the apathy of the rich and intelligent classes to their situation, which are the latent causes of our social broils, the recent riot included. In speaking of the pecuniary conditions and the sufferings of the lowest masses, let it be understood that no reference is intended to the present economical relations of labor and price, as compared with those of other times. I refer to the status of the poorest classes in society ”

“ In this mood he totally disregards the laws of society and seizes every opportunity that presents itself to prey upon it and he thus becomes an anti-social being. Through all ages up to the present, society has at the cost of much effort and suffering been progressing, stage by stage, towards a higher order. ”

“ I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner—a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons—such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. ”

“ This prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added unto us, without any further trouble on our part. ”

“ Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses—the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that changed from day to day. ”

“ The awful thing is the vast extent of misery and distress which prevails, and the evidence of the rotten foundation on which the whole fabric of this gorgeous society rests, for I call that rotten which exhibits thousands upon thousands of human beings reduced to the lowest stage of moral and physical degradation, with no more of the necessaries of life than serve to keep body and soul together, whole classes of artisans without the means of subsistence. ”

“ Society may escape from the pestilence and may survive the famine; but the demon of ignorance, with his grim adjutants of vice and riot, will pursue her into her most peaceful haunts, destroying our institutions, and converting into a wilderness the paradise of social and domestic life. ”

“ Ah! the want that shivers with the bitter cold—therein lies the excess of social injustice, the most terrible of schools, where the poor learn to realise their sufferings, where they are roused to indignation, and swear to make those sufferings cease, even if in doing so they annihilate all olden society! ”

“ I became a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the United States, and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons.
I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. ”

“ The problem of abnormality—crime, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, etc. How far is abnormality the unavoidable manifestation of inborn tendencies of the individual, and how far is it a matter of deficient social organization,—the failure of institutional influences? There is a quantitative difference of efficiency between individuals, but if there is hardly a human attitude which if properly controlled and directed could not be used in a socially useful and productive way, must there remain a permanent qualitative difference between socially normal and anti-social actions? ”

“ The hatred and contempt of all classes of society as necessarily attend him in his wanderings as his own shadow.... Equally repulsive to every grade of society, he stands isolated and alone, a solitary monument of the degradation of which human nature is capable. ”

“ He who sees in the struggle something artificial, produced by bad men, may perhaps attribute to the creator of the disturbance bad motives for this knavery, for this frivolous and malicious upsetting of social rest. ”

“ The disease inherent in her being, that deadly outcome of social tyranny which perverts the generous elements of youth into mere seeds of destruction, developed day by day, blighting her heart, corrupting her moral sense, even setting marks of evil upon the beauty of her countenance. ”

“ Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more general one—distinguished from the preceding by including them all and more—that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city, are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew. It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed. ”

“ He repairs to his lodgings, and there, too, all his moral sensibilities are shocked and outraged, by seeing a class of men and women hopelessly degraded, cut off by law and custom from all opportunity of emerging from their debasement; whom no talent, taste, or virtue can ever redeem to the pleasures and the rights of social intercourse. ”

“ For a man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself to right them in so far as he has strength, there is disappointment and bitterness. ”

“ How far wrong we should be in such an environment simply to contrast the delinquent with the honest man! It is two social states that are contrasted; the one is based upon comfortable means, sociability, mutual protection, useful work, and thrift; the other upon poverty, isolation, egoism, and unproductive labor. And in the great urban agglomerations, pauperism, mendicity and vagrancy, idleness, the spirit of adventure, prostitution, the dissipation of strength, everything, in short, naturally concurs in developing social anemia. ”

“ Sir, I need not again refer to the great dangers to the community at large from crime, from epidemic, from fire, arising out of the neglect of a great evil, nor to the far worse misery and degradation inflicted upon the poorest classes of the people by the existence of these wretched houses which, whilst they exist, are sure to be inhabited. ”

“ Not a few find it hard to keep the moral poise in the whirlpool of mental distraction. It is these effects of the urban environment that help to explain the social derelicts that abound in the cities. It is the weakness of human nature, along with the economic pressure, that accounts for the drunkenness, vice, and crime that constitute so large a problem of city life and block the path of society's development. ”

“ But if it be true—as we believe it to be—that the working and producing classes of the community are suffering unexampled hardship, and that not of a temporary and exceptional kind, but from the operation of some vicious and baneful element which has crept into our social system, it then becomes our duty to attempt to discover the actual nature of the evil ”

“ I have now, I venture to hope, established two important principles in relation to human progress. In the first place, I have shown that modern ideas as to the necessity of dealing directly with some of our glaring social evils, such as race degeneration and the various forms of sexual immorality, are fundamentally wrong [146] and are doomed to failure so long as their fundamental causes—widespread poverty, destitution, and starvation—are not greatly diminished and ultimately abolished. ”

“ And restoration is indeed the very centre of our problem in dealing with the social misfit. For our task with the pauper and the criminal is that of making each capable of entering freely and vitally into the fellowship of free men.
Yet when we have dealt with the social misfit there will remain, life being what it is, a number of people in every community for whom the burden of life has proved too heavy or whose lives are clouded by sickness or loneliness or death. ”

“ In judging of the relation of the lower to the higher stages of civilization, it is essential to gain some idea how far it may have been affected by such degeneration. What kind of evidence can direct observation and history give as to the degradation of men from a civilized condition towards that of savagery? In our great cities, the so-called ‘dangerous classes’ are sunk in hideous misery and depravity. ”

“ The wrong that produces inequality; the wrong that in the midst of abundance tortures men with want or harries them with the fear of want; that stunts them physically, degrades them intellectually, and distorts them morally, is what alone prevents harmonious social development. ”

“ Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. ”

“ So that the huge mass of men who are compelled by folly and greed to make harmful and useless things are sacrificed to Society. I say that this would be terrible and unendurable even though they were sacrificed to the good of Society—if that were possible; but if they are sacrificed not for the welfare of Society but for its whims, to add to its degradation, what do luxury and fashion look like then? ”

“ The swift process of reduction of the masses into a condition of depravity and degradation, as is evinced by the number of men out of employment, shows us clearly where we are going. We cannot deny it. No thinking man, no reasoning man, no friend of his kind, can ignore the fact that we are going rapidly on to a precipice. ”

“ Civic neglect is a third cause of delinquency and crime. Young people are released from the public schools, often without proper home training and supervision, and drift about in a highly complex urban environment, full of commercialized and vicious devices for preying upon the curious431 and the unsuspecting. (4) Social injustice, for example in industry, arouses feelings of hatred of class against class, and leads to criminal acts. ”

“ This involves a strain on both, which increases in direct proportion to our socialization, and, so far, has resulted in the ultimate destruction of the social organism acted upon by such irreconcilable forces. ”

“ Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the nation’s manhood into scrofula, [194] cowardice, cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. ”