# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 07/Discourse 4

IV.
A SERMON OF POVERTY. PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 14, 1840.
"The destruction of the poor is their poverty." —Proverbs x. 15.
Last Sunday something was said of riches. To-day I ask your attention to a "Sermon of Poverty." By poverty, I mean the state in which a man does not have enough to satisfy the natural wants of food, raiment, shelter, warmth, and the like. From the earliest times that we know of, there have been two classes of men, the rich who had more than enough, tho poor who had less. In one of the earliest books which treats of the condition of men, we find that Abraham, a rich man, owns the bodies of three hundred men that are poor. In four thousand years, the difference between rich and poor in our part of America is a good deal lessened, not done away with. In New England property is more uniformly distributed than in most countries, perhaps more equally than in any land as highly civilized. But even here the old distinction remains in a painful form and extended to a pitiful degree.
At one extreme of society is a body called the rich, men who have abundance, not a very numerous body, but powerful, first through tho energy which accumulates money, and secondly through the money itself. Then there is a body of men. who are comfortable. This class comprises tho mass of the people in all the callings of life. Out of this class the rich men come, and into it their children or grandchildren commonly return. Few of the rich men of Boston were sons of rich men; still fewer grandsons; few of them perhaps will be fathers of men ​ equally rich; still few or grandfathers of finch. Then there in the class that is miserable. Some of them are supported by public charity, some by private, some of thorn by their toil alone—but altogether they form a mass of men who only stay in the world, and do not live, in the best sense of that word.
Such are the great divisions of society in respect to property. However, tho lines between these three classes are net sharp and distinctly drawn. There are no sharp divisions in nature; but, for our convenience, we distinguish classes by their centre, where they are most unlike, and not by their circumference, where they intermix; and resemble each other. The line between the miserable and comfortable, between the comfortable and rich, is not distinctly drawn. The centre of each class is obvious enough, while the limits thereof are a dissolving view.
The poor are miserable. Their food is the least that will sustain nature,—not agreeable, not healthy; their clothing scanty and mean, their dwellings inconvenient and uncomfortable, with roof and walls that let in the cold and the rain—dwellings that are painful and unhealthy; in their personal habits they are commonly unclean. Then they are ignorant; they have no time to attend school in childhood, no time to read or to think in manhood, even they have learned to do either before that. If they have the time, few men can think to any profit while the body is uncomfortable. The cold man thinks only of the cold; the wretched of his misery. Besides this, they are frequently vicious. I do not mean to say they are wicked in the sight of God. I never see a poor man carried to gaol for some petty crime, or even for a great one, without thinking that probably, in God's eye, the man is far better than I am, and, from the State's prison or scaffold, will ascend into heaven and take rank a great ways before me, I do not mean to say they are wicked before God; but it is they who commit the minor crimes, against decency, sobriety, against property and person, and most of the major crimes, against human life. I mean that they commit the crimes that get punished by law. They crowd our courts; they tenant your gaols; they occupy your gallows. If some man would write a book describing the life of all the men hanged in Massachusetts for fifty years ​ past, or tried for some capital offence, and show what class of society they were from, how they wore bred, what influences were about them in childhood, how they passed their Sundays, and also describe the configuration of their bodies, it would help us to a valuable chapter in the philosophy of crime, and furnish mighty argument against the injustice of our mode of dealing with offenders.
Poverty is the dark side of modern society. I say modern society, though poverty is not modern, for ancient society had poverty worse than ours, and a side still darker yet. Cannibalism, butchery of captives after battle, frequent or continual wars for the sake of plunder, and the very of the weak—these were the dark side of society in four great periods of human history,—the savage, tho barbarous, the elastic, and tho feudal. Poverty is the best of these five bad things, each of which, however, has grimly done its service in its day.
There is no poverty among the Gaboon negroes. Put them in our latitude, and it soon comes. Nay, as they get to learn the wants of cultivated men, there will be a poorer class even in the torrid zone. Poverty prevails in every civilized nation on earth; yes, in every savage option in austere climes. Let us look at some examples. England is the richest country in Europe. I mean she has more wealth, in proportion to her population than any other in a similar climate. Look at her possessions in every corner of the globe; at her armies, which Europe cannot conquer; at her ships, which weave the great commercial web that spreads all round about the world; at home what factories, what farms, what houses, what towns, what a vast and wealthy metropolis; what an aristocracy—so rich, so cultivated, so able, so daring, and so "on conquered.
But in that very English nation the most frightful poverty exists. Look at the two sister islands: this the queen, and that the beggar of all nations; the rose and the shamrock ; the one throned in royal beauty, the other bowed to the dust, torn, and trampled under foot. In that capital of the world's wealth, in that centre of power far greater than the power of all the Caesars, there is the most squalid poverty. Look at St. Giles's and St. James's—that the earthly hell of want and crime, this the worldly heaven ​ of luxury and power! Put on the one side tho stately nobility of England, well bom, well bred, armed with tho power of manners, the power of money, the power of culture, and the power of place, and on the other side put the beggary of England, the two million paupers who are kept wholly on public or private charity; the three million labourers who formerly fed on potatoes, God knows what they feed on now, and all tho other hungry sons of want who are kept in awe only by the growling lion who guards tho British throne; and you see at once the result of modern civilization in the ablest, the foremost, the freest, the most practical, and the richest nation in the old world.
Even here in Now England, a country not two hundred and fifty years old, a litte patch of cleared land on the edge of the continent, we hear of poverty which is frightful to think of. It is a serious question, what shall be done for the poor? There are few that can tell what shall be done with them, or what is to become of them. Want is always here in Boston. Misery is here. Starvation is not unknown. What is now serious will one day be alarming. Even now it is awful to think of the misery that lurks in this Christian town. New England in fifty years has increased vastly in wealth, but poverty increases too. There has been a great advance in the productiveness of human labour; with our tools a man can do as much rude work in one day as he could in three days a hundred years ago. I mean work with the axe, the Slough, the spade; of nicer work, yet more; of the most delicate work, see what machines do for him, The end is not yet; soon we shall have engines that will whittle granite, as a gang of saws cleaves logs into broad smooth boards. Yet with all this advance in the productiveness of human toil, still there is poverty. A day's work now will bring a man greater proportionate pay than ever before in New England. I mean to say that the ordinary wages for an ordinary day's work will support a man comfortably and respectably longer than they ever would before. On the whole, the price of things has come down and the price of work has gone up. Yet still there are the poor; there is want, there is misery, there is starvation. The community gives more than ever before; a ​ bettor public provision is made for the poor, privato benevolence is more active and works far more wisely—yet still there is poverty, want, misery, unremoved, unmitigated, and, many think, immitigable!
Now I am not going to deny that poverty, like other forms of suffering, plays n part in the economy of the human race. If God's children will not work, or will throw away their bread, I do not complain that He sends them to bed without their supper—to a hard bed, and a narrow, and a cold. "Earn your breakfast before you eat it," is not merely the counsel of Poor Richard, but of Almighty God ; it is a just counsel, and not hard. 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 tho process of development, not to the nature of man, or the higher forms of social life towards which he is advancing. If God be absolutely good, then only good things are everlasting. This general opinion, which comes from my religion as well as my philosophy, affects my special opinion of the history and design of poverty. I look on it as on cannibalism, the butchery of cap Axes, the continual war for the sake of plunder, or on Slavery; yes, as I look on the diseases incidental to childhood, things that mankind live through and outgrow; which, painful as they are, do not make up the greatest part of the entire life of mankind. If it shall be said that I cannot know this, that I have not a clear intellectual perception of the providential design thereof, or the means of its removal, still I believe it, and if I have not the knowledge which comes of philosophy, I have still faith, the result of instinctive trust in God.
Let us look a little at the causes of poverty. Some things we see best on a large scale. So let us look at poverty thus, and then come down to the smaller forms thereof.
I. There may be a natural and organic cause. The people of Lapland, Iceland, and Greenland are a poor people compared with the Scotch, the Danes, or the French. There is a natural and organic cause for theft ​ poverty in the soil and climate of those countries, which cannot be changed. They must emigrate before they can become rich or comfortable in our sense of the word. Hence their poverty is to be attributed to their geographical position. Put the Now Englanders there, oven they would be a poor people. Thus the poverty of a nation may depend on the geographical position of the nation.
Suppose a race of men has little vigour of body or of mind, and yet the same natural wants an a vigorous race; put them in favourable circumstances, in a good climate, on a rich soil, they will be poor on account of the feebleness of their mind and body; put them in a stern climate, on a sterile soil, and they will perish. Such is the case with the Mexicans. Soil and climate are favourable, yet the people are poor. Suppose a nation had only one-third part of the Laplander's ability, and yet needed the result of all his power, and was put in the Laplander's position, they would not live through the first winter. Had they been Mexicans who came to Plymouth in 1620, not one of them, it is probable, would have seen the next summer. Take away half the sense or bodily strength of the Bushmans of South Africa, and though they might have sense enough to dig nuts out of the ground, yet the lions and hyenas would eventually eat up the whole nation. So the poverty of a nation may come from want of power of body or of mind.
Then if a nation increases in numbers more rapidly than in wealth, there is a corresponding increase of want. Let the number of births in England for the next ten years be double the number for the last ten, without a corresponding creation of new wealth, and the English are brought to the condition of the Irish. Let the number of births in Ireland in like manner multiply, and one-half the population must perish for want of food. So the poverty of a nation may depend on the disproportionate increase of its numbers.
Then an able race, under favourable outward circumstances, without an over-rapid increase of numbers, if its powers are not much developed, will be poor in comparison with a simile race under similar circumstances, but highly developed. Thus England, under Egbert, in the ninth ​ century, was poor compared with England under Victoria, in the nineteenth century. The single town of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, or even Sheffield, is probably worth many times the wealth of all England in the ninth century. So tho poverty of a nation may depend on its want of development.
Old England and New England are rich, partly through the circumstances of climate and soil, partly and chiefly through tho great vigour of tho race, with only a normal increase of numbers, and partly through a more complete; development of tho nations. Such are the chief natural and organic causes of poverty on a large scale in a nation.
II. The causes may be political. By political, I mean such as are brought about by the laws, either the fundamental laws, the constitution, or the minor laws, statutes. Sometimes the laws tend to make the whole nation poor. Such are the laws which force the industry of the people out of tho natural channel, restricting commerce, agriculture, manufactures, industry in general. Sometimes this is done by promoting war, by keeping up armies and navies, by putting tho destructive work of lighting, or the merely conservative work of ruling, before the creative works of productive industry. France was an example of that a hundred years ago. Spain yet continues such, as she has been for two centuries.
Sometimes this is done by hindering the general development of the nation, by retarding education, by forbidding all freedom of thought. The States of the Church are an example of this when compared with Tuscany; all Italy and Austria when compared with England; Spain, when compared with Germany, France, and Holland.
Sometimes this is brought about by keeping up an unnatural institution—as Slavery, for example. South Carolina is an instance of this, when compared with Massachusetts. South Carolina has many advantages over us, yet South Carolina is poor while Massachusetts is rich.
Sometimes this political action primarily affects only the distribution of wealth, and so makes one class rich and another poor. Such is the case with laws which give all the real estate to the eldest son, laws which allow property to be entailed for a long time or for ever, laws which ​ cut men off from the land. Those laws at first seem only to make one class rich and the other poor; and merely to affect the distribution of wealth in a nation; but they are unnatural, and retard the industry of the people, and diminish their productive power, and make the whole nation less rich. Legislation may favour wealth and not men—property which is accumulated labour, rather than labour which is the power that accumulates property. Such legislation always endangers wealth in tho end, lessening its quantity and making its tenure uncertain.
Two things may bo said of European legislation in general, and especially of English legislation. First, that it has aimed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and keep it there. Hence it favours primogeniture, entails monopolies of posts of profit and of honour. Second, it has always looked out for the proprietor and his property, and cared little for the man without property; hence it always wanted the price of things high, the wages of men low, and, in addition to natural and organic obstacles, it continually put social impediments in the poor man's way. In England no son of a labourer could rise to eminence in tho law or in medicine, scarcely in the church; no, not even in the army or navy.
These two statements will bear examination. The genius of England has demanded these two things. The genius of America demands neither, but rejects both; demands the distribution of property, puts the rights of man first, the rights of things last. Such are the political causes, and such their effects
III. Then there aio social causes which make a nation poor. Such ore the prevalence of an opinion that industry is not respectable; that it is honourable to consume, disgraceful to create ; that much must be spent, though little earned. The Spanish nation is poor in part through the prevalence of this opinion.
Sometimes social causes seem only to affect a class. The Pariahs in India must not fill any office that is well paid. They are despised, and of course they are poor and miserable. The blacks in New England are despised and frowned down, not admitted to the steamboat, the omnibus, to the school-houses in Boston, or even to the meeting-house with white men ; not often allowed to work in ​ company with the whites; and so they are kept in poverty. In Europe the Jews have been equally despised and treated in tho same way, but not made poor, because they are in many respects a superior race of men, and because they have the advantage of belonging to a nation whose civilization is older than any other in Europe; a nation especially gifted with the faculty of thrift; a tribe whom none but other Jews, Scotchmen, or New Englanders, could outwit, over-reach, and make poor. No Ferdinand and Isabella, no inquisition could so completely expel them from any country, as the superior craft and cunning of the Yankee has driven them out of New England. There are Jews in every country of Europe, everywhere despised, and maltreated, and forced into the corners of society, but everywhere superior to the men who surround them. Such are the social causes which produce poverty.
Now, let us look at the matter on a smaller scale, and see the cause of poverty in New England, of poverty in Broad Street and Sea Street. From the great mass let me take out a class who are accidentally poor. There are the widows and orphan children who inherit no estate; the able men reduced by sickness before they have accumulated enough to sustain them. Then let me take out a class of men transiently poor, men who start with nothing, but have vigour and will to make their own way in the world. The majority of the poor still remain—the class who are permanently poor. The accidentally poor can easily be taken care of by public or private charity; the transient poor will soon take care of themselves. The young man who lives on six cents a day while studying medicine in Boston, is doubtless a poor man, but will soon repay society for the slight aid it has lent him, and in time will take care of other poor men. So these two classes—the accidental and the transient poor—can easily be disposed of.
What causes have produced the class that is permanently poor? What has just been said of nations, is true also of individuals.
First, there are natural and organic causes of poverty. Some men are born into the midst of want, ignorance, idleness, filthiness, intemperance, vice, crime; their earliest ​ associations are debasing, their companions bad. They are born into the Iceland of society, into the frigid zone, some of them under the very pole-star of want. Such men are born and bred under the greatest disadvantages. Every star in their horoscope has a malignant aspect, and sheds disastrous influence. I do not remember five men in New England, from that class, becoming distinguished in any manly pursuit,—not five. Almost all of our great men and our rich men came from the comfortable class, none from the miserable. The old poverty is parent of new poverty. It takes at least two generations to outgrow the pernicious influence of such circumstances.
Then much of the permanent poverty comes from the lack of ability, power of body and of mind. In that Iceland of society men are commonly born with a feeble organization, and bred under every physical disadvantage; the man is physically weak, or else runs to muscle and not brain, and so is mentally weak. His feebleness is the result of the poverty of his fathers, and his own want in childhood. The oak tree grows tall and large in a rich valley; stunted, small, and scrubby on the barren sand.
Again, this class of men increase most rapidly in numbers. When the poor man has not half enough to fill his own mouth, and clothe his own back, other backs are added, other mouths opened. He abounds in nothing but naked and hungry children.
Further still, he has not so good a chance as the comfortable to get education and general development. A rude man, with superior abilities, in this century, will often be distanced by the well-trained man who started at birth with inferior powers. But if the rude man begin with inferior abilities, Inferior circumstances, incumbered also with a load becoming rapidly more burdensome, you see under what accumulated disadvantages he labours all his life. So to the first natural and organic cause of poverty, his untoward position in society; to the second, his inferior ability; and to the third, the increase of his family, excessively rapid, we must add a fourth cause, his inferior development. An ignorant man, who is also weak in body, and besides that, starts with every disadvantage, his burdens annually increasing, may be expected to con​ tinue a poor man. It is only in most extraordinary cases that it turns out otherwise.
To these causes we must add what comes therefrom as their joint result: idleness, by which the poor waste their time; thriftlessncss and improvidence, by which they lose their opportunities and squander their substance. The poor are seldom so economical as tho rich; it is so with children, they spoil tho furniture, soil and rend their garments, put things to a wasteful use, consume heedlessly and squander, careless of to-morrow. The poor are the children of society.
To these five causes I must add intemperance, the great bane of the miserable class. I feel no temptation to be drunken, but if I were always miserable, cold, hungry, naked, so ignorant that I aid not know tho result of violating God's laws, had I been surrounded from youth with tho worst examples, not respected by other men, but a loathsome object in their sight, not eve: respecting myself, I can easily understand how the temporary madness of strong drink would be a most welcome thing. The poor are the prey of the rum-seller. As the lion in the Hebrew wilderness eateth up the wild ass, so in modern society the rum-seller and rum-maker suck the bones of the miserable poor. I never hear of^a great fortune made in the liquor trade, but I think of the wives that have been made widows thereby, of the children bereft of their parents, the fathers and mothers whom strong drink has brought down to shame, to crime, and to ruin. The history of the first barrel of rum that ever visited New England is well known. It brought seme forty men before the bar of the court. The history of the kst barrel can scarcely be much better.
Such are the natural and organic causes which make poverty.
With the exception of laws which allow the sale of intoxicating drink, I think there are few political causes of poverty in New England, and they are too inconsiderable to mention in so brief a sketch as this. However, there are some social causes of our permanent poverty. I do not think we have much respect for the men who do the rude work of life, however faithfully and well—little respect for work itself; The rich man is ashamed to have ​ begun to make his fortune with his own hard hands; even if the rich man is not, his daughter is for him. I do not think we have cared much to respect the humble efforts of feeble men; not cared much to have men dear, and things cheap. It has not been thought the part of political economy, of sound legislation, or of pure Christianity, to hinder the increase of pauperism, to remove the causes of poverty; yes, the causes of crime—only to take vengeance on it when committed!
Boston is a strange place; here is energy enough to conquer half the continent in ten years; power of thought to seize and tame the Connecticut and the Merrimack; charity enough to send missionaries all over the world; but not justice enough to found a high school for her own daughters, or to forbid her richest citizens from letting bar-rooms as nurseries of poverty and crime, from opening wide gates which lead to tho almshouse, the gaol, the gallows, sad earthly hell!
Such are the causes of poverty, organic, political, social. You may see families pass from the comfortable to the miserable class, by intemperance, idleness, wastefulness, even by feebleness of body and of mind; yet, while it is common for the rich to descend into the comfortable class, solely by lack of the eminent thrift which raised their fathers thence, or because they lack the common stimulus to toil and save, it is not common for the comfortable to fall into the pit of misery in New England, except through wickedness, through idleness, or intemperance.
It is not easy to study poverty in Boston. But take a little inland town, which few persons migrate into, you will find the miserable families have commonly been so, for a hundred years; that many of them are descended from the "servants," or white slaves, brought here by our fathers; that such as fall from the comfortable classes are commonly made miserable by their own fault, sometimes by idleness, which is certainly a sin: for any man who will not work, and persists in living, eats the bread of some other man, either begged or stolen—but chiefly by intemperance. Three-fourths of the poverty of this character is to be attributed to this cause.
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 tho lazy, to goad the idle with his sword, to trample and slay the obstinate sluggard. But he treads also tho feeble under his feet, for no fault of theirs, only for the misfortune of being born in the rear of society. But in poverty there is also a tendency to intimidate, to enfeeble, to benumb. The poverty of the strong man compels him to toil; but with the weak, the destruction of the poor is his poverty. An active man is awakened from his sleep by tho cold; he arises and seeks more covering; the indolent, or the feeble, shiver on till morning, benumbed and enfeebled by the cold. So weakness begets weakness; poverty, poverty; intemperanoe, intemperance ; crime, crime.
Everything is against the poor man; he pays the dearest tax, the highest rent for his house, the dearest price for all ho eats or wears. The poor cannot watch their opportunity, and take advantage of the markets, as other men. They have the most numerous temptations to intemperance and crime; they have the poorest safeguards from these evils. If the chief value of wealth, as a rich man tells us, be this—that "it renders its owner independent of others," then on what shall the poor men lean, neglected and despised by others, looked on as loathsome, and held in contempt, shut Ont even from the sermons and the prayers of respectable men? It is no marvel if they cease to respect themselves.
The poor are the most obnoxious to disease; their children are not only most numerous, but most unhealthy. More than half of the children of that class perish at the age of five. Amongst the poor, infectious diseases rage with frightful violence. The mortality in that class is amazing. If things are to continue as now, I thank God it is so. If Death is their only guardian, he is at least powerful, and does not scorn his work.
In addition to the poor, whom these causes have made and kept in poverty, the needy of other lands flock hither. The nobility cf Old England, so zealous in pursuing their game, in keeping their entails unbroken, and primogeniture safe, have sent their beggary to New' England, to Be supported by the crumbs that fall from our table. So, in the ​ same New England city, the extremes of society are brought together. Here is health, elegance, cultivation, sobriety, decency, refinement—I wish there was more of it; there is poverty, ignorance, drunkenness, violence, crime, in most odious forms—starvation! We have our St. Giles's and St. James's; our nobility, not a whit less noble than the noblest of other lands, and our beggars, both in a Christian city. Amid the needy population, misery and death have found their parish. Who shall dare stop his ears, when they preach their awful denunciation of want and woe?
Good men ask, "What shall we do?" Foreign poverty has had this good effect; it has shamed or frightened the American beggar into industry and thrift.
Poverty will not be removed till the causes thereof are removed. There are some who look for a great social revolution. So do I; only I do not look for it to come about suddenly, or by mechanical means. "We are in a social revolution, and do not know it. While I cannot accept the peculiar doctrines of the Associationists, I rejoice in their existence. I sympathize with their hope. They point out the evils of society, and that is something. They propose a method of removing its evils. I do not believe in that method, but mankind will probably make many experiments before we hit upon the right one. For my own part, I confess I do not see any way of removing poverty wholly or entirely, in one or two, or in four or five generations. I think it will linger for some ages to come. Like the snow, it is to be removed by a general elevation of the temperature of the air, not all at once; and will long hang about the dark and cold places of the world. But I do think it will at last be overcome, so that a man who cannot subsist will be as rare as a cannibal. "Ye have the poor with you always," said Jesus; and many who remember this, forget that He also said, "And whensoever ye will ye may do them good." I expect to see a mitigation of poverty in this country, and that before long.
It is likely that the legal theory of property in Europe will undergo a great change before many years; that the right to bequeath enormous estates to individuals will be cut off; that primogeniture will cease, and entailments be broken, and all monopolies of rank and power come ​ to an end, and so a great change take place in the social condition of Europe, and especially of England. That change will bring many of the comfortable into the rich class, and eventually many of the miserable into the comfortable class. But I do not expect such a radical change here, where we have not such enormous abuses to surmount.
I think something will be done in Europe for the organization of labour, I do not know what; I do not know how; I have not the ability to know, and will not pretend to criticize what I know I cannot create, and do not at present understand. I think there will be a great change in the form of society; that able men will endeavour to remove the causes of crime, not merely to make money out of that crime; that intemperance will be diminished; that idleness in rich or poor will be counted a disgrace; that labour will be more respected; education more widely diffused; and that institutions will be founded, which will tend to produce these results. But I do not pretend to devise those institutions, and certainly shall not throw obstacles in the way of such as can or will try. It seems likely that something will be first done in Europe, where the need is greatest. There a change must come. By and by, if it does not come peaceably, the continent will not furnish "special constables" enough to put down human nature. If the white republicans cannot make a revolution peacefully, wait a little, and the red republicans will make it in blood. "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," says mankind, first in a whisper, then in a voice of thunder. If powerful men will not write justice with black ink, on white paper, ignorant and violent men will write it on the soil, in letters of blood, and illuminate their rude legislation with burning castles, palaces, and towns. While the social change is taking place never so peacefully, men will think the world is going to ruin. But it is an old world, pretty well put together, and, with all these changes, will probably last some time longer. Human society is like one of those enormous boulders, so nicely poised on another rock, that a man may move it with a single hand. You are afraid to come under its sides, lest it fall. When the wind blows, it rocks with formidable noise, and men say it will soon be down upon us. Now ​ and then a rude boy undertakes to throw it over; but all the men who can got their shoulders under, cannot raise the ponderous mass from its solid and firm-net base.
Still, after all these changes have taken place, there remains the difference between the strong and the weak, the active and the idle, the thrifty and the spendthrift, the temperate and the intemperate; and, though the term poverty ceases to be so dreadful, and no longer denotes want of the natural necessaries of tho body, there will still remain the relatively rich and the relatively poor.
But now something can be done directly to remove the causes of poverty, something to mitigate their effects; we need both the palliative charity, and the remedial justice. Tenements for the poor can be provided at a cheap rent, that shall yet pay their owner a reasonable income. This has been proved by actual experiment, and, after all that has been said about it, I am amazed that no more is done. I will not exhort the churches to this in the name of religion—they have other matters to attend to; but if capitalists will not, in a place like Boston, it seems to me the city should see that this class of the population is provided with tenements, at a rate not ruinous. Ii would be good economy to do it, in the pecuniary sense of good economy; certainly to hire money at six per cent., and rent the houses built therewith at eight per cent., 'would cost leas than to support the poor entirely in almshouses, and punish them in gaols.
Something yet more may be done, in the way of furnishing them with work, or of directing them, to it; something towards enabling them to purchase food and other articles cheap.
Something might be done to prevent street beggary, and begging from house to house, which is rather a new thing in this town. The indiscriminate charity, which it is difficult; to withhold from a needy and importunate beggar, does more harm than good.
Much may be done to promote temperance; much more, I fear, than is likely to he done; that is plainly the duty of society. Intemperance is bad enough with the comfortable and the rich; with the poor it is ruin—sheer, blank, and swift ruin. The example of the rich, of the comfortable, goes down there like lightning, to shatter, to blast, and to ​ burn. It is marvellous, that in Christian Boston, men of wealth, and be above the temptation which lurks behind a dollar, men of character otherwise thought to be elevated, can yet continue a traffic which leads to the ruin and slow butchery of such masses of men. I know not what can be done by means of the public law. J do know what can be done by private self-denial, by private diligence.
Something also may be done to promote religion amongst the poor, at least something to make it practicable for a poor man to come to church on Sunday, with his fellow-creatures who are not miserable—and to hear the beat things that the ablest men in the church have to offer. We are very democratic in our State, not at all so in oar church. In this matter tho Catholics put us quite to shame. If, as some men still believe, it be a manly calling and a noble to preach Christianity, then to preach it to men who stand in the worst and most dangerous positions in society; to take the highest truths of human consciousness, the loftiest philosophy, the noblest piety, and bring them down into tho daily life of poor men, rude men, men obscure, unfriended, ready to perish; surely this is the noblest part of that calling, and demands the noblest gifts, the fairest and the largest culture, the loftiest powers.
It is no hard thing to reason with reasoning men, and be intelligible to the intelligent; to talk acceptably and even movingly to scholars and men well read, is no hard thing, if you are yourself well read and a scholar. But to be intelligible to the ignorant, to reason with men who reason not, to speak acceptably and movingly with such men, to inspire them with wisdom, with goodness, and with piety,—that is the task only for some men of rare genius who can stride over the great gulf betwixt the thrones of creative power, and the humble positions of men ignorant, poor, and forgot! Yet such men there are, and here is their work.
Something can be done for the children of the poor—to promote their education, to find them employment, to snatch these little ones from underneath the feet of that grim poverty. It is not less than awful to think, while there are more children born in Boston of Catholic parents than of Protestant, that yet wore than three-fifths thereof ​ die before the sun of their fifth year shines on their luckless hoods, I thank God that thus they die. If there be not wisdom enough in society, nor enough of justice there to save them from their future long-protracted suffering, then I thank God that Death comes down betimes, and moistens his sickle while his crop is green. I pity not the miserable babes who fall early before that merciful arm of Death. They are at rest. Poverty cannot touch them. Let the mothers who bore thorn rejoice, but weep only for those that are left—loft to ignorance, to misery, to intemperance, to vice that I shall not name; left to the mercies of the gaol, end perhaps the gallows at the last. Yet Boston is a Christian city—and it is eighteen hundred years since one great Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost!
I see not what more can be done directly, and I see rot why these things should not be done. Still some will suffer; the idle, the lazy, the proud who will not work, the careless who will voluntarily waste their time; their strength, or their goods—they must suffer, they caught to suffer. Want is the only schoolmaster to teach them industry and thrift. Such as are merely unable, who are poor not by their fault—we do wrong to let them suffer; we do wickedly to leave them to perish. The little children who survive—are they to be left to become barbarians in the midst of our civilisation?
Want is not an absolutely needful thing, but very needful for the present distress, to teach us industry, economy, material world—waiting to serve. "What would you have thereof?" says God. "Pay for it and take it, as you will; only pay as you go!" There are hands to work, heads to think; strong hands, hard heads. God is an economist; He economizes suffering; there is never too much of it in the world for the purpose it is to serve, though it often falls where it should not fall. It is here to teach us industry, thrift, justice; It will be here no more when we have learned its lesson. Want is here on sufferance; misery on sufferance; and mankind can eject them if we will. Poverty, like all evils, is amenable to suppression.
Can we not end this poverty—the misery and crime it thrift, and its creative arts. ​ brings? No, not to-day. Can wt not lessen it? Soon as we will. Think how much ability there is in this town—cool, far-sighted talent. If some of the ablest men directed their thoughts to the reform of this evil, how much might be done in a single generation; and in a century—what could not they do in a hundred years? "What better work is there for noble men? I would have it written on. my tombstone: "This man had but little wit, and less fame, yet he helped remove the causes of poverty, making men better on and better;" rather by far than this: "Here lies a great man; he had a great place in the world, and great power, and great fame, and made nothing of it, leaving the world no better for his stay therein, and no man better off."
After all the special efforts to remove poverty, the great work is to be done by the general advance of mankind. We shall outgrow this, as cannibalism, butchery of captives, war for plunder, and other kindred miseries have been outgrown. God has general remedies in abundance, but few specific. Something will be done by diffusing throughout the community principles and habits of economy, industry, temperance; by diffusing ideas of justice, sentiments of brotherly love, sentiments and ideas of religion. I hope everything from that—the noiseless and steady progress of Christianity; the snow melts not by fanlight, or that alone, but as the whole air becomes warm. You may in cold weather melt away a little before your own door, but that makes little difference till the general temperature rises. Still, while the air is getting warm, you facilitate the process by breaking up the obdurate masses of ice, and putting them where the sun shines with direct and unimpeded light. So must we do with poverty.
It is only a little that any of us can do—for anything. Still we can do a little; we can each do by helping towards raising the general tone of society: first, by each man raising himself; by industry, economy, charity, justice, piety; by a noble life. So doing, we raise the moral temperature of the whole world, and just in proportion thereto. Next, by helping those, who come in our way; nay, by going out of our way to help them. In ​