These are days when men do their hardest work for money, when
they scramble and struggle and strike each other down in the
effort to reach wealth. And it is not possible to blame them.
They are trying to escape from poverty, from a disaster worse
than any prairie fire or other physical danger.
Dire poverty is the worst of curses. It combines every kind of
suffering, physical, mental, moral, and in the end it means
either death or degradation.
The great task of humanity is the abolition of poverty. The
great benefactors of humanity are the great industrial organizers
of this day, because, in spite of individual selshness,{sic} they
are planning production on a scale that will in the end provide
for all.
It is worth while to discuss and to realize what real poverty
means. If we can realize its meaning every one of us must be
more anxious to relieve, as far as we can, the poverty around us,
and especially anxious to work for the social betterment that
shall one day wipe out poverty forever
Poverty means dirt.
The thoughtless and comfortable have a way of saying: "The poor
might at least be clean." But cleanliness is a LUXURY; it
demands leisure and peace of mind, as well as bathtub, soap, hot
water and good plumbing. The very poor cannot be clean.
Poverty means ignorance, and it means ignorance handed down from
father to son.
Poverty means drunkenness. The pennies of POOR men and POOR
women pay for more than half the vile whiskey, gin and other
poisons that men buy to help them forget.
Poverty and its sister, Ignorance, fill the jails and the insane
asylums.
Poverty is the mother of disease, and it fills the hospitals.
Tens of thousands of consumptives alone are murdered every year
by poverty. They are too poor to do that which is required to
save their lives. ----
The great men of the world do not emerge from poverty, from
squalor.
They come from very modest homes, from the log cabin, and from
the towpath, as advertised. They come from those whose fathers
and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers had at least enough
to eat, and enough fresh air to give them pure blood and proper
nourishment for their brains.
Poverty destroys ambition, inventive power and the capacity to
struggle.
A starved body produces a starved brain. The greatest genius
that ever lived could not think better than a child of ten if you
deprived him of food for ten days.
What can you expect of the inferior minds that have been half fed
through a lifetime, or through several generations?
Do you know what made the Revolution and changed conditions in
France? It was not poverty. Not a single poor man was a leader
in that Revolution. Every one of them was well fed, had a well-
nourished brain--Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Desmoulins,
Mirabeau--every one a well-fed brain in a vigorous body.
The labor unions and the great strikes, although sometimes unwise
and unreasonable, are great blessings to the Nation. They compel
the worker to get such pay as will feed himself and his children,
giving the Nation well-fed brains. The Union is the enemy of
poverty, and for that reason especially it is an agent for good.
----
As poverty breeds ignorance, so ignorance breeds poverty. The
greatest enemy of poverty is the Public School. Work and vote,
therefore, for public school betterment.
Miserable women walk the streets by thousands on cold Winter
nights--poverty has put them there.
Hundreds of thousands of children are born only to struggle for a
few years through a stunted infancy--poverty digs their graves.
For one genius that has fought and conquered in spite of poverty
ten thousand have sunk out of sight in the fight against the
worst of enemies.
Don't waste time extolling the blessings of poverty--use your
energies to diminish poverty's curse, and to improve humanity by
giving it the full efficiency which freedom from worry alone can
give.