TWO WAYS OF GETTING FED

Above, in the Bread Line, are men who are evidently not hoboes. Lack of employment has forced them to stand here for hours until. after midnight, they are handed a cup of soup and chunk of breadby charity. Below, is a flashlight of a debutante dinner given by one of the wealthiest women in New York. The center of the table is transformed into a Japanese garden; perfect miniature islands with tiny trees and plants are surrounded by the water of a lake in which fish are swimming. The guests, in fancy costumes, will toy with the expensive food and wines. (Photos by Brown Bros.)

to persist that fails to make the provision for the physical health and social decency of the people upon whom its organization depends for effort and

energy.

According to this definition of poverty as "a standard of life below that which will provide for physical efficiency and social decency," poverty is not pauperism. The pauper depends upon the community for support. Tens of thousands of people who live in poverty, have never accepted a penny in charity. Thus, if the family income is insufficient under reasonably careful management to buy the outside worker sufficient warm clothing to withstand the rigors of a northern winter, the family is in poverty. A serious illness of the breadwinner may so reduce the family income that it is forced to live at the margin of subsistence. Such a family is in poverty. Where clothes are so patched and darned that the other children in the school are making fun; or where the father and mother do not go to church or to public meetings because their clothes are shabby, the family is in poverty. This poverty exists whether outside help is accepted or not. Every family that is living on an income that will not provide for physical health and social decency is in poverty.

3. The Trail of Poverty

Apologists are not lacking who find in poverty a great incentive, a training ground for character, a

well-spring for stimulus, for integrity and fine living. One man, who had been extremely poor in his boyhood, recently wrote an essay entitled, "Why I Believe in Poverty." But when his own son graduated from an expensive preparatory school, instead of sending him to the street, to enjoy the blessings of poverty, he picked out one of the most exclusive of the smaller colleges, and entered him there.

A man who had once had a very severe case of typhoid fever-hanging for four weeks between life and death-boasted that since he recovered from the fever, more than twenty years back, he had never experienced a day of illness. There was a suggestion, in his manner of relating his experience, that his young hearers should indulge in a thorough-going case of typhoid if they wished to be well. There was at least one serious objection to taking the advice suppose the balance turned the wrong way and you failed to pull through!

Of

Men and women a-plenty have risen from poverty, but for each such case there are a dozen or a score where the balance has turned the wrong way. those who do recover from the effects of poverty, many bear the physical and spiritual scars of the struggle to their graves.

If poverty were such a blessing as some folks would have us believe, is it not strange that the whole community should dread it and hate as it dreads and hates no other contagious disease? And, stranger

still, that for each thousand that have learned of poverty at first hand by living in it and escaping from it, not one sends his children back into the slough for the building of their bodies and the saving of their souls?

The fact is that poverty is horrible. Those who are most familiar with poverty-who have observed it and analyzed it critically, find it unrelieved by any mitigating circumstance.

After years spent in the work of one of the largest New York charity societies, Robert Bruere sets down his general impressions of poverty in these terms: "Day after day, month after month, I saw strong men compelled by the starvation of their wives and children to submit to the humiliation of accepting alms; of women whose infants were undersized because they had gone hungry for months before their babies were born; children barefooted and ragged in the midst of winter, for whom their teachers asked clothing so that they might attend school; the honorable and able-bodied poor forced, by conditions over which they exercised no control, to mingle with dissipated and decrepit paupers, with the scrofulous, and those most tragic creaturesmen and women-beaten in the fight for a living." This picture, seen by Mr. Bruere in one large city, is repeated and reiterated whenever those who are most familiar with poverty detail their experiences.

"The Good Samaritan, Incorporated," Robert W. Bruere. Harpers, May, 1910, p. 833.

An article on the New York subway workers by William H. Matthews, president of the City Board of Child Welfare, gives an enlightening description of poverty in the families of men who are doing some of the most necessary work in the City of New York.

Mr. Matthews had been interested in relieving unemployment. When he offered a man a subway job, he was met with the retort, "Yes, I'll take a job in the subway if there ain't anything else to offer, but how in hell is a man going to support his family on a dollar and a half a day? Tell me that?"

Mr. Matthews, in answering the question, takes the reader to visit a number of families of the unskilled workers who received a dollar and a half a day. The first family lived "in the top floor back” of a dilapidated looking rear tenement. Matthews climbed the stairs at about half-past eight, and knocked at the door, which was opened by a ten-year-old boy.

Mr.

"His look was a bit frightened, as was also that of his six-year-old brother who was sitting on a backless chair in a corner of the kitchen. Kitchen, did I say? Yes, it was the kitchen, living room and dining room combined, plus a single bed which crowded the little stove and dining table for room. Off this room was another, still smaller, with a little window opening on an air-shaft. Here the bed was three-quarter size. One might sit on the edge of

* Survey, October 2, 1915.