THE CHAPTER IV POVERTY 1. Progress and Poverty HE Industrial Régime has centered the attention of men on the material values in life. Itself the embodiment of materialism and devoted to the production of material goods, the Industrial Régime serves as a means of expression for the material interests. Still, wages remain low, and the leader of industry, a unit in a vast machine, finds himself asking what it all means to him and to his children. There remains one other important aspect of the whole problem. While the laborer has contested the wage rate, and while the schools were searching for leadership through the granting of opportunity to all on equal terms, the people of the western world were forming a habit with two names-"Poverty" and "Riches." There are a thousand reasons that rise up to condemn the habit, or, perhaps, better still, the vice of "Poverty" or "Riches." Codes of ethics, religions, moral sayings, logic, experience, understanding, join in a chorus of protest, yet the habit gets a surer and surer hold on its victims. The machine has increased wealth in unheard-of pro(161) 11 portions. Poverty has persisted while riches have multiplied. Despite the machine, or, perhaps, better still, because of the machine, "Poverty" and "Riches" have grown side by side in western civilization. The contrast between "progress and poverty". was set forth vividly by Henry George. Like many another reformer, he felt the problem deeply, but, unlike many another one, he was able to describe it in unforgettable terms. He writes, in his "Introduction:" "The enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil... The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully utilized, large classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts." Poverty is appalling, yet its true significance can be appreciated only when it is contrasted with prosperity. The association of poverty and progress is not only what Henry George called it, "the great enigma of our times," but unless the enigma can be solved, it will prove the undoing of any society that tolerates its presence. No thinking being can escape the issue. Here, in a richly endowed, wealthy land, the avenues of progress and the back alleys of poverty lie side by side. The greater the city, the more splendid its public buildings and private dwellings, the more frightful does this contrast appear. With ease, comfort and luxury in ample abundance, poverty lurks and snarls. The effects of poverty are no less frightful than its presence. It blights communities, neighborhoods, families, children and unborn babies. It curses wherever it touches. The man who has looked the issue in the face; who has seen this affluence and that wretchedness; who has taken pains to inquire; who understands something of the reason for povery and for riches, finds the juxtaposition of the two strange, absurd, grotesque, repulsive, abhorrent, intolerable. These two things, placed side by side, are an affront to his sense of justice as they are a challenge to his manhood. 2. What is Poverty? There are many different standards that may be accepted as the criterion for deciding what is poverty. First, there is starvation. After a human being has starved to death, it is perfectly possible for the doctors to perform an autopsy, and decide that poverty was the cause of death. It is possible for the medical profession to go even farther, and to pick a child out of the schoolroom with the diagnosis, "anemic; poorly nourished." Starvation is not a reasonable measure of poverty because no society can afford starvation. As a social condition in a rich community, it is unspeakably immoral. Even if it is being relied upon as a means of keeping down the surplus of population, it is brutal and wasteful. Subsistence, as a measure of poverty, is open to a similar objection from another point of view. An unvaried diet, ragged clothing and a narrow cell of a house are sufficient to keep some bodies and souls together, but they are not sufficient to keep people personally happy and socially presentable. The people living on such a standard are living below the standard of life accepted by the community. There are many people who believe that the black bread and thin soup of the French peasantry in the eighteenth century would be quite sufficient to keep alive the working population of the United States. Granted that this was true, and granted that industrial efficiency was not a desirable thing to attain, it would still be true that where one group of people is kept on the margin of subsistence, while another group enjoys the good things of life, the first group becomes a subject class, and democracy is destroyed. No industrial group and no social group can hope |