Social misery

“ The Genesis of the Depressed Classes.—So complex a problem, it might be said at once, cannot manifestly have a simple explanation, yet this has been the mistake of many social thinkers of the past. They have sought some single simple explanation of human misery, and particularly in its form of economic distress or poverty. ”

“ In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;—the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ A well-known social reformer, for whose work and opinions I have the greatest respect, has written:—"It is a fact apparent to every thoughtful man, that the larger portion of the misery that constitutes our social question arises from indulgence, gluttony, drink, waste, profligacy, betting, and dissipation." ”

“ In a misery of this sort, admitting some few lenitives, and those too but a few, nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind drudge through life. It may be urged, perhaps, in palliation of this, that at least the rich few find a considerable and real benefit from the wretchedness of the many. ”

“ In all classes of society we find discontent. I leave completely out of the question those who lack the necessities of life. One cannot with justice count in the number of malcontents those from whom hunger, cold, and misery [72] wring complaints. I am considering now that multitude of people who live under conditions at least supportable. Whence comes their heart-burning? Why is it found not only among those of modest though sufficient means, but also under shades of ever-increasing refinement, all along the ascending scale, even to opulence and the summits of social place? ”

“ I should be glad to have explained to me, what kind of misery a free being, whose heart is at ease and whose body is in health, can possibly suffer. I would ask also, whether a social or a natural life is most likely to become insupportable to those who enjoy it. ”

“ As the conditions of human misery become more clearly revealed to humanity, and their evil effects on the social system become more apparent, greater efforts will be {452} put forward—greater than ever before—in the care of dependents, defectives, and delinquents. ”

“ I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, [23] accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers.” ”

“ so long as the three problems of the age,—the debasement of man by the proletariat, the ruin of woman by the force of hunger, the destruction of children in the darkness,—shall not be solved; so long as anywhere social syncope shall be possible: in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery shall remain on earth, books like this cannot fail to be useful.
HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, 1862.
TABLE OF CONTENTS FANTINE.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
VICTOR HUGO (1828) Vol. ”

“ Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor? ”

“ Opening their eyes in this scene, which the guilty thoughtlessness of successive generations has rendered little better than a vast lazar house, evil example, gloom, unregulated tempers, repining and misery are their first and last spectacles. They advance into life to repeat the errors of their parents, to make common stock of their misery anew, to multiply the number of the unhappy, or perhaps worse, to tenant hospitals, and the receptacles of human ignorance and misery. ”

“ Driven from their natural employ, they must either have recourse to a cruel drudgery which they were not formed, and are generally unable, to endure; or wander after subsistence in the paths of shame and misery, at once a disgrace, a burthen, and a terror to society. ”

“ The truckle-beds of poor girls are suddenly covered with silk and lace,—and in that is worse misery; by the side of misfortune there is vice, the one urging the other. Such a society requires prompt succour. ”

“ Could you take a nearer survey of some of those very picturesque groups which you admire, I think you would turn away from them with heart sickness; you would there behold every variety of disease, vice, poverty, filth, and famine—human misery in its most disgusting and saddening form. ”

“ What forms of human misery and degradation presented themselves during one short walk which I once took there with a friend employed upon a mission of mercy!
Disease in its most frightful form, panting to inhale a little fresh air. Squalid misery, the result of the gin-shop—decent misery ready to starve. Women shut up in one room with great heartless, brutal, disobedient boys—sickness resting untended upon its solitary bed. Wailing infants—scolding mothers—human nature under its most abject and degraded forms. No thrift, no economy, no attempt at cleanliness and order. ”

“ A melancholy spectacle, indeed, was it to behold an entire population so steeped in misery, so utterly inured to wretchedness, that they felt no shame at its exposure, but rather a sort of self-exultation at any opportunity of displaying a more than ordinary amount of human suffering and sorrow;—to hear them how they caressed their afflictions, how they seemed to fondle their misfortunes, vying with each other in calamity, and bidding higher and higher for a little human sympathy. ”

“ But the despair and disgust of life, to which both these and her private letters give such uncompromising and eloquent expression, indubitably reflect her feelings at this moral crisis—the feelings of one who having openly braved the laws of society, to become henceforward a law unto herself, recognises that she has only found her way to fresh sources of misery. ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ Our plays of poverty and squalor, now the only ones that are true to the life of the majority of living men, will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read only by historical students of social pathology. ”

“ Society, perhaps, may then feel its obligation to so many unfortunate wretches for supporting, with resignation, the horrible existence which leaves them just sufficient life to feel the worst pangs of humanity. Yes: to live at such a price is virtue! Yes, society thus organized, whether it tolerates or imposes so much misery, loses all right to blame the poor wretches who sell themselves not through debauchery, but because they are cold and famishing. ”

“ These are extreme instances, but they are also in a measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.
Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. ”

“ Never was a situation so singularly terrible as mine, in every possible respect, as a member of an extensive society, as a citizen of an inferior division of the same society, as a husband, as a father, as a man who exquisitely feels for the miseries of others as well as for his own! But alas! so much is everything now subverted among us, that the very word misery, with which we were hardly acquainted before, no longer conveys the same ideas; or rather tired with feeling for the miseries of others, every one feels now for himself alone. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The child of shame and remorse, devoted now to misery, no relief appearing to alleviate her distress, no soothing sound bespeaking a heart sympathizing in her sorrows, is totally given up to affliction: the displeasure of relations, if she have any living, the cold neglect of former friends, and the unfeeling scorn of the world, forbid approach to consolation; employment in the common walks of industry even is denied; and poverty, or the dread of actual starvation, leaves no alternative but the last direful one—prostitution. ”

“ One refined life, led in moderation and within the bounds of decency, of what is commonly called a virtuous household, one family life, absorbing as many working days as would suffice to maintain thousands of the poor that live in misery hard by, does more to corrupt people than thousands of wild orgies by coarse tradesmen, officers or artisans given to drunkenness or debauchery, who smash mirrors and crockery for sheer fun. ”

“ There is no actual want, no threatening danger of it. Yet, the poor find a gruesome pleasure in dwelling in the midst of their horrors, and the roll of their organ of misery churns along on an endless chain. ”

“ Under miserable conditions of life, shy vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse of what work and life might and ought to be, finds the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery; but that misery has its purpose in the scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of society ”

“ 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. ”

“ But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere, comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery. ”

“ It is the greed of gain, the dislike of legitimate work, the desire for usurious interest, the weak senseless refusal to be guided by the experience of others, which bring misery to families as to individuals. ”

“ Each of you goes through a foolish, innocent routine, with a clear conscience and the applause of the poor multitude; and the result is misery, misery, misery. Not random misery, here and there, such as you harmless creatures might chance on by the way, but a fearful consistent scheme of deeply-calculated, universal misery—a thing of hellish contrivance, worthy of the fiery genius of the sulphur pit. ”

“ I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice. ”

“ For myself, twenty-three years of study and observation have convinced me that poverty is the prime cause of intemperance, and that misery is the mother and hereditary appetite the father of the drink hallucination.... ”

“ The question strikes at the root of many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. ”

“ There is commonly no obvious reason, and the answer is often a sense of rebellion and a bitterness out of which comes, perhaps, recklessness, divorce, or suicide.
Why am I poor while others are rich? Why do I have to do work I do not like? ”

“ Of all the cases cited, and pretty much the whole globe is passed over in the survey, in which vice and misery check increase by limiting marriages or shortening the term of human life, there is not a single case in which the vice and misery can be traced to an actual increase in the number of mouths over the power of the accompanying hands to feed them; but in every case the vice and misery are shown to spring either from unsocial ignorance and rapacity, or from bad government, unjust laws or destructive warfare. ”