OR let him go to Edinburgh, the "modern Athens," of which Scotsmen
speak with pride, and in buildings from whose roofs a bowman might strike
the spires of twenty churches he will find human beings living as he would
not keep his meanest dog. Let him toil up the stairs of one of those monstrous
buildings, let him enter one of those "dark houses," let him close
the door, and in the blackness think what life must be in such a place. Then
let him try the reduction to iniquity. And if he go to that good charity
(but, alas! how futile is Charity without Justice!) where little children
are kept while their mothers are at work, and children are fed who would
otherwise go hungry, he may see infants whose limbs are shrunken from want
of nourishment. Perhaps they may tell him, as they told me, of that little
girl, barefooted, ragged, and hungry, who, when they gave her bread, raised
her eyes and clasped her hands, and thanked our Father in Heaven for His
bounty to her. They who told me that never dreamed, I think, of its terrible
meaning. But I ask the Duke of Argyll, did that little child, thankful for
that poor dole, get what our Father provided for her? Is He so niggard? If
not, what is it, who is it, that stands, between such children and our Father's
bounty? If it be an institution, is it not our duty to God and to our neighbor
to rest not till we destroy it? If it be a man, were it not better for him
that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the depths
of the sea? — The Reduction to Iniquity (a reply to the Duke of Argyll),
The Nineteenth Century, July, 1884
WE are so accustomed to poverty that even in the most advanced
countries we regard it as the natural lot of the great
masses of the
people; that we take it as a matter of course that even
in our highest civilization
large
classes should want the necessaries of healthful
life, and the vast majority
should only get a poor and pinched living by the
hardest toil. There are professors of political economy who
teach that
this condition
of
things is
the result of social laws of which it is idle to
complain! There are ministers of religion who preach that this
is the
condition which
an all-wise,
all-powerful
Creator intended for His children! If an architect
were to build a theater so that not more than one-tenth of
the audience
could see
and hear, we
should call him a bungler and a botcher. If a man were
to give
a feast and provide
so little food that nine-tenths of his guests must
go away hungry, we should call him a fool, or worse. Yet so
accustomed
are we to
poverty, that even
the preachers of what passes for Christianity tell
us that
the great Architect of the Universe, to whose infinite
skill all nature
testifies,
has made such
a botch job of this world that the vast majority
of the human creatures whom He has called into it are condemned
by the
conditions
he has imposed
to want,
suffering, and brutalizing toil that gives no opportunity
for the development
of mental powers — must pass their lives in a hard struggle to merely
live! — Social Problems
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