That much of our poverty is involuntary may be proved, if proof be necessary,
by the magnitude of charitable work that aims to help only the "deserving
poor"; and as to undeserving cases — the cases of voluntary poverty — who
can say but that they, if not due to birth and training in the environs of
degraded poverty, 35 are the despairing culminations of long-continued struggles
for respectable independence? 36 How can we know that they are not essentially
like the rest — involuntary and deserving? It is a profound distinction
that a clever writer of fiction 37 makes when he speaks of "the hopeful
and the hopeless poor." There is, indeed, little difference between
voluntary and involuntary poverty, between the "deserving" and
the "undeserving" poor, except that the "deserving" still
have hope, while from the "undeserving" all hope, if they ever
knew any, has gone.
35. The leader of one of the labor strikes of the early
eighties, a hard-working, respectable, and self-respecting man, told
me that the deprivations which he himself suffered as a workingman were
as nothing compared with the fear for the future of his children that
he felt whenever he thought of the repulsive surroundings, physical and
moral, in which, owing to his poverty, he was compelled to bring them
up.
Professor Francis Wayland, Dean of the Yale law school,
wrote in the Charities Review for March, 1893: "Under our eyes and
within our reach, children are being reared from infancy amid surroundings
containing every conceivable element of degradation, depravity and vice.
Why, then, should we be surprised that we are surrounded by a horde of
juvenile delinquents, that the police reports in our cities teem with
the exploits of precocious little villains, that reform schools are crowded
with hopelessly abandoned young offenders? How could it be otherwise?
What else could be expected from such antecedents, from such ever-present
examples of flagrant vice? Short of a miracle, how could any child escape
the moral contagion of such an environment? How could he retain a single
vestige of virtue, a single honest impulse, a single shred of respect
for the rights of others, after passing through such an ordeal of iniquity?
What is there left on which to build up a better character?
In the Arena of July, 1893, Helen Campbell says, "It
would seem at times as if the workshop meant only a form of preparation
for the hospital, the workhouse and the prison, since the workers therein
become inoculated with trade diseases, mutilated by trade appliances,
and corrupted by trade associates till no healthy fiber, mental, moral
or physical, remains."
Such testimony is abundant. But no further citation is
necessary to arouse the conscience of the merciful and the just, and
any amount of proof would not affect those self-satisfied mortals whom
Kipling describes when he says that "there are men who, when their
own front doors are closed, will swear that the whole world's warm."