206.
[33] Mr. Horace Mann.
[34] The period of confinement in our States' Prisons differs a good
deal in the various States, as will appear from the following Table.
Whole No.
in prison. Average sentence.
In Conn. 189, March 31, 1841, 7 yrs. 3 mos.
Va. 181, Sept 30, 1839, 6 " 10 "
Mass. 322, Sept. 30, 1840, 5 " 9 "
La. 68, Sept 30, 1839, 5 " 1 "
N. J. 152, Sept. 30, 1840, 4 " 7 "
Ky. 162, Sept. 30, 1839, 4 "
D. C. 79, Nov. 30, 1840, 3 " 8 "
Md. 104, 3 "
Phila. 129, Sept. 30, 1840, 2 " 5 "
The difference between the average term of punishment in Connecticut and
Philadelphia is 300 per cent! If the same result is effected by each,
there has then been a great amount of gratuitous suffering in one case.
[35] I refer to the prisons at Stretton-upon-Dunmore in Warwickshire,
that at Horn near Hamburg, and the one at Mettray near Tours in France.
The French penal code allows the guardian or relatives of an offender
under age to take him from prison on giving bonds for his good behavior.
While these pages were first passing through the press, I learned the
happy effect which followed the execution of the license laws in this
city. In 1846, from the 10th of March to the 24th of April, there were
sent to the House of Correction for intemperance one hundred eighty-nine
persons. During the same period of the year 1847, only eighty-four have
been thus punished! But alas, in 1851 the evil has returned, and the
demon of drunkenness mows down the wretched in Boston with unrestricted
scythe.
IX.
A SERMON OF POVERTY.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 14,
1849.
PROVERBS X. 15.
The destruction of the poor is their poverty.
Last Sunday something was said of riches. To-day I ask your attention to
a sermon of poverty. By poverty, I mean the state in which a man does
not have enough to satisfy the natural wants of food, raiment, shelter,
warmth and the like. From the earliest times that we know of, there have
been two classes of men, the rich who had more than enough, the poor who
had less. In one of the earliest books which treats of the condition of
men, we find that Abraham, a rich man, owns the bodies of three hundred
men that are poor. In four thousand years, the difference between rich
and poor in our part of America is a good deal lessened, not done away
with. In New England property is more uniformly distributed than in
most countries, perhaps more equally than in any land as highly
civilized. But even here the old distinction remains in a painful form
and extended to a pitiful degree.
At one extreme of society is a body called the rich, men who have
abundance, not a very numerous body, but powerful, first through the
energy which accumulates money, and secondly, through the money itself.
Then there is a body of men who are comfortable. This class comprises
the mass of the people in all the callings of life. Out of this class
the rich men come, and into it their children or grandchildren commonly
return. Few of the rich men of Boston were sons of rich men; still fewer
grandsons; few of them perhaps will be fathers of men equally rich;
still fewer grandfathers of such. Then there is the class that is
miserable. Some of them are supported by public charity, some by
private, some of them by their toil alone--but altogether they form a
mass of men who only stay in the world, and do not live in the best
sense of that word.
Such are the great divisions of society in respect to property. However,
the lines between these three classes are not sharp and distinctly
drawn. There are no sharp divisions in nature; but for our convenience,
we distinguish classes by their centre where they are most unlike, and
not by their circumference where they intermix and resemble each other.
The line between the miserable and comfortable, between the comfortable
and rich, is not distinctly drawn. The centre of each class is obvious
enough while the limits thereof are a dissolving view.
The poor are miserable. Their food is the least that will sustain
nature, not agreeable, not healthy; their clothing scanty and mean,
their dwellings inconvenient and uncomfortable, with roof and walls that
let in the cold and the rain--dwellings that are painful and unhealthy;
in their personal habits they are commonly unclean. Then they are
ignorant; they have no time to attend school in childhood, no time to
read or to think in manhood, even if they have learned to do either
before that. If they have the time, few men can think to any profit
while the body is uncomfortable. The cold man thinks only of the cold;
the wretched of his misery. Besides this they are frequently vicious. I
do not mean to say they are wicked in the sight of God. I never see a
poor man carried to jail for some petty crime, or even for a great one,
without thinking that probably, in God's eye, the man is far better than
I am, and from the State's prison or scaffold, will ascend into heaven
and take rank a great ways before me. I do not mean to say they are
wicked before God; but it is they who commit the minor crimes, against
decency, sobriety, against property and person, and most of the major
crimes, against human life. I mean that they commit the crimes that get
punished by law. They crowd your courts, they tenant your jails; they
occupy your gallows. If some man would write a book describing the life
of all the men hanged in Massachusetts for fifty years past, or tried
for some capital offence, and show what class of society they were from,
how they were bred, what influences were about them in childhood, how
they passed their Sundays, and also describe the configuration of their
bodies, it would help us to a valuable chapter in the philosophy of
crime, and furnish mighty argument against the injustice of our mode of
dealing with offenders.
Poverty is the dark side of modern society. I say modern society, though
poverty is not modern, for ancient society had poverty worse than ours
and a side still darker yet. Cannibalism, butchery of captives after
battle, frequent or continual wars for the sake of plunder, and the
slavery of the weak--these were the dark side of society in four great
periods of human history, the savage, the barbarous, the classic and the
feudal. Poverty is the best of these five bad things, each of which,
however, has grimly done its service in its day.
There is no poverty among the Gaboon negroes. Put them in our latitude,
and it soon comes. Nay, as they get to learn the wants of cultivated
men, there will be a poorer class even in the torrid zone. Poverty
prevails in every civilized nation on earth; yes, in every savage nation
in austere climes. Let us look at some examples. England is the richest
country in Europe. I mean she has more wealth in proportion to her
population than any other in a similar climate. Look at her possessions
in every corner of the globe; at her armies which Europe cannot conquer;
at her ships which weave the great commercial web that spreads all round
about the world; at home what factories, what farms, what houses, what
towns, what a vast and wealthy metropolis; what an aristocracy--so rich,
so cultivated, so able, so daring, and so unconquered.
But in that very English nation the most frightful poverty exists. Look
at the two sister islands: this the queen, and that the beggar of all
nations; the rose and the shamrock; the one throned in royal beauty, the
other bowed to the dust, torn and trampled under foot. In that capital
of the world's wealth, in that centre of power far greater than the
power of all the Caesars, there is the most squalid poverty. Look at St.
Giles and St. James--that the earthly hell of want and crime, this the
worldly heaven of luxury and power! Put on the one side the stately
nobility of England, well born, well bred, armed with the power of
manners, the power of money, the power of culture and the power of
place, and on the other side put the beggary of England, the two million
paupers who are kept wholly on public or private charity; the three
million laborers who formerly fed on potatoes, God knows what they feed
on now, and all the other hungry sons of want who are kept in awe only
by the growling lion who guards the British throne; and you see at once
the result of modern civilization in the ablest, the foremost, the
freest, the most practical and the richest nation in the old world.
Even here in New England, a country not two hundred and fifty years old,
a little patch of cleared land on the edge of the continent, we hear of
poverty which is frightful to think of. It is a serious question what
shall be done for the poor; there are few that can tell what shall be
done with them, or what is to become of them. Want is always here in
Boston. Misery is here. Starvation is not unknown. What is now serious
will one day be alarming. Even now it is awful to think of the misery
that lurks in this Christian town. New England in fifty years has
increased vastly in wealth, but poverty increases too. There has been a
great advance in the productiveness of human labor; with our tools a man
can do as much rude work in one day as he could in three days a hundred
years ago. I mean work with the axe, the plough, the spade; of nicer
work, yet more; of the most delicate work, see what machines do for him.
The end is not yet; soon we shall have engines that will whittle
granite, as a gang of saws cleaves logs into broad smooth boards. Yet
with all this advance in the productiveness of human toil, still there
is poverty. A day's work now will bring a man greater proportionate pay
than ever before in New England. I mean to say that the ordinary wages
for an ordinary day's work will support a man comfortably and
respectably longer than they ever would before. On the whole, the price
of things has come down and the price of work has gone up. Yet still
there are the poor; there is want, there is misery, there is starvation.
The community gives more than ever before; a better public provision is
made for the poor, private benevolence is more active and works far more
wisely--yet still there is poverty, want, misery unremoved, unmitigated,
and, many think, immitigable!
Now I am not going to deny that poverty, like other forms of suffering,
plays a part in the economy of the human race. If God's children will
not work, or will throw away their bread, I do not complain that He
sends them to bed without their supper--to a hard bed and a narrow and a
cold. "Earn your breakfast before you eat it," is not merely the counsel
of Poor Richard, but of Almighty God; it is a just counsel, and not
hard. But is poverty an essential, substantial, integral element in
human civilization, or is it an accidental element thereof, and
transiently present; is it amenable to suppression? For my own part, I
believe that all evil is transient, a thing that belongs to the process
of development, not to the nature of man, or the higher forms of social
life towards which he is advancing. If God be absolutely good, then only
good things are everlasting. This general opinion which comes from my
religion as well as my philosophy, affects my special opinion of the
history and design of poverty. I look on it as on cannibalism, the
butchery of captives, the continual war for the sake of plunder, or on
slavery; yes, as I look on the diseases incident to childhood, things
that mankind live through and outgrow; which, painful as they are, do
not make up the greatest part of the entire life of mankind. If it shall
be said that I cannot know this, that I have not a clear intellectual
perception of the providential design thereof, or the means of its
removal, still I believe it, and if I have not the knowledge which comes
of philosophy, I have still faith, the result of instinctive trust in
God.
* * * * *
Let us look a little at the causes of poverty. Some things we see best
on a large scale. So let us look at poverty thus, and then come down to
the smaller forms thereof.
I. There may be a natural and organic cause. The people of Lapland,
Iceland and Greenland are a poor people compared with the Scotch, the
Danes, or the French. There is a natural and organic cause for their
poverty in the soil and climate of those countries, which cannot be
changed. They must emigrate before they can become rich or comfortable
in our sense of the word. Hence their poverty is to be attributed to
their geographical position. Put the New Englanders there, even they
would be a poor people. Thus the poverty of a nation may depend on the
geographical position of the nation.
Suppose a race of men has little vigor of body or of mind, and yet the
same natural wants as a vigorous race; put them in favorable
circumstances, in a good climate, on a rich soil, they will be poor on
account of the feebleness of their mind and body; put them in a stern
climate, on a sterile soil, and they will perish. Such is the case with
the Mexicans. Soil and climate are favorable, yet the people are poor.
Suppose a nation had only one third part of the Laplander's ability, and
yet needed the result of all his power, and was put in the Laplander's
position, they would not live through the first winter. Had they been
Mexicans who came to Plymouth in 1620, not one of them, it is probable,
would have seen the next summer. Take away half the sense or bodily
strength of the Bushmans of South Africa, and though they might have
sense enough to dig nuts out of the ground, yet the lions and hyenas
would eventually eat up the whole nation. So the poverty of a nation may
come from want of power of body or of mind.
Then if a nation increases in numbers more rapidly than in wealth, there
is a corresponding increase of want. Let the number of births in England
for the next ten years be double the number for the last ten, without a
corresponding creation of new wealth, and the English are brought to the
condition of the Irish. Let the number of births in Ireland in like
manner multiply, and one half the population must perish for want of
food. So the poverty of a nation may depend on the disproportionate
increase of its numbers.
Then an able race, under favorable outward circumstances, without an
over-rapid increase of numbers, if its powers are not much developed,
will be poor in comparison with a similar race under similar
circumstances, but highly developed. Thus England, under Egbert in the
ninth century, was poor compared with England under Victoria in the
nineteenth century. The single town of Liverpool, Manchester,
Birmingham, or even Sheffield, is probably worth many times the wealth
of all England in the ninth century. So the poverty of a nation may
depend on its want of development.
Old England and New England are rich, partly through the circumstances
of climate and soil, partly and chiefly through the great vigor of the
race, with only a normal increase of numbers, and partly through a more
complete development of the nations. Such are the chief natural and
organic causes of poverty on a large scale in a nation.
II. The causes may be political. By political, I mean such as are
brought about by the laws, either the fundamental laws, the
constitution, or the minor laws, statutes. Sometimes the laws tend to
make the whole nation poor. Such are the laws which force the industry
of the people out of the natural channel, restricting commerce,
agriculture, manufactures, industry in general. Sometimes this is done
by promoting war, by keeping up armies and navies, by putting the
destructive work of fighting, or the merely conservative work of ruling,
before the creative works of productive industry. France was an example
of that a hundred years ago. Spain yet continues such, as she has been
for two centuries.
Sometimes this is done by hindering the general development of the
nation, by retarding education, by forbidding all freedom of thought.
The States of the Church are an example of this when compared with
Tuscany; all Italy and Austria, when compared with England; Spain, when
compared with Germany, France, and Holland.
Sometimes this is brought about by keeping up an unnatural
institution--as slavery, for example. South Carolina is an instance of
this, when compared with Massachusetts. South Carolina has many
advantages over us, yet South Carolina is poor while Massachusetts is
rich.
Sometimes this political action primarily affects only the distribution
of wealth, and so makes one class rich and another poor. Such is the
case with laws which give all the real estate to the oldest son, laws
which allow property to be entailed for a long time or forever, laws
which cut men off from the land. These laws at first seem only to make
one class rich and the others poor, and merely to affect the
distribution of wealth in a nation, but they are unnatural and retard
the industry of the people, and diminish their productive power, and
make the whole nation less rich. Legislation may favor wealth and not
men--property which is accumulated labor, rather than labor which is the
power that accumulates property. Such legislation always endangers
wealth in the end, lessening its quantity and making its tenure
uncertain.
Two things may be said of European legislation in general, and
especially of English legislation. First, That it has aimed to
concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and keep it there. Hence it
favors primogeniture, entails monopolies of posts of profit and of
honor. Second, It has always looked out for the proprietor and his
property, and cared little for the man without property; hence it always
wanted the price of things high, the wages of men low, and in addition
to natural and organic obstacles it continually put social impediments
in the poor man's way. In England no son of a laborer could rise to
eminence in the law or in medicine, scarcely in the church; no, not even
in the army or navy.
These two statements will bear examination. The genius of England has
demanded these two things. The genius of America demands neither, but
rejects both; demands the distribution of property, puts the rights of
man first, the rights of things last. Such are the political causes, and
such their effects.
III. Then there are social causes which make a nation poor. Such are the
prevalence of an opinion that industry is not respectable; that it is
honorable to consume, disgraceful to create; that much must be spent,
though little earned. The Spanish nation is poor in part through the
prevalence of this opinion.
Sometimes social causes seem only to affect a class. The Pariahs in
India must not fill any office that is well paid. They are despised, and
of course they are poor and miserable. The blacks in New England are
despised and frowned down, not admitted to the steamboat, the omnibus,
to the school-houses in Boston, or even to the meeting-house with white
men; not often allowed to work in company with the whites; and so they
are kept in poverty. In Europe the Jews have been equally despised and
treated in the same way, but not made poor, because they are in many
respects a superior race of men, and because they have the advantage of
belonging to a nation whose civilization is older than any other in
Europe; a nation specially gifted with the faculty of thrift; a tribe
whom none but other Jews, Scotchmen, or New Englanders, could outwit,
over-reach, and make poor. No Ferdinand and Isabella, no inquisition
could so completely expel them from any country, as the superior craft
and cunning of the Yankee has driven them out of New England. There are
Jews in every country of Europe, everywhere despised and maltreated, and
forced into the corners of society, but everywhere superior to the men
who surround them. Such are the social causes which produce poverty.
* * * * *
Now let us look at the matter on a smaller scale, and see the cause of
poverty in New-England, of poverty in Broad street and Sea street. From
the great mass let me take out a class who are accidentally poor. There
are the widows and orphan children who inherit no estate; the able men
reduced by sickness before they have accumulated enough to sustain them.
Then let me take out a class of men transiently poor, men who start with
nothing, but have vigor and will to make their own way in the world. The
majority of the poor still remain--the class who are permanently poor.
The accidentally poor can easily be taken care of by public or private
charity; the transient poor will soon take care of themselves. The young
man who lives on six cents a day while studying medicine in Boston, is
doubtless a poor man, but will soon repay society for the slight aid it
has lent him, and in time will take care of other poor men. So these two
classes, the accidental and the transient poor, can easily be disposed
of.
What causes have produced the class that is permanently poor? What has
just been said of nations, is true also of individuals.
First, there are natural and organic causes of poverty. Some men are
born into the midst of want, ignorance, idleness, filthiness,
intemperance, vice, crime; their earliest associations are debasing,
their companions bad. They are born into the Iceland of society, into
the frigid zone, some of them under the very pole-star of want. Such men
are born and bred under the greatest disadvantages. Every star in their
horoscope has a malignant aspect, and sheds disastrous influence. I do
not remember five men in New England, from that class, becoming
distinguished in any manly pursuit,--not five. Almost all of our great
men and our rich men came from the comfortable class, none from the
miserable. The old poverty is parent of new poverty. It takes at least
two generations to outgrow the pernicious influence of such
circumstances.
Then much of the permanent poverty comes from the lack of ability, power
of body and of mind. In that Iceland of society men are commonly born
with a feeble organization, and bred under every physical disadvantage;
the man is physically weak, or else runs to muscle and not brain, and so
is mentally weak. His feebleness is the result of the poverty of his
fathers, and his own want in childhood. The oak tree grows tall and
large in a rich valley, stunted, small, and scrubby on the barren sand.
Again this class of men increase most rapidly in numbers. When the poor
man has not half enough to fill his own mouth, and clothe his own back,
other backs are added, other mouths opened. He abounds in nothing but
naked and hungry children.
Further still, he has not so good a chance as the comfortable to get
education and general development. A rude man, with superior abilities,
in this century, will often be distanced by the well-trained man who
started at birth with inferior powers. But if the rude man begin with
inferior abilities, inferior circumstances, encumbered also with a load
becoming rapidly more burdensome, you see under what accumulated
disadvantages he labors all his life. So to the first natural and
organic cause of poverty, his untoward position in society; to the
second, his inferior ability; and to the third, the increase of his
family, excessively rapid, we must add a fourth cause, his inferior
development. An ignorant man, who is also weak in body, and besides
that, starts with every disadvantage, his burdens annually increasing,
may be expected to continue a poor man. It is only in most extraordinary
cases that it turns out otherwise.
To these causes we must add what comes therefrom as their joint result:
idleness, by which the poor waste their time; thriftlessness and
improvidence, by which they lose their opportunities and squander their
substance. The poor are seldom so economical as the rich; it is so with
children, they spoil the furniture, soil and rend their garments, put
things to a wasteful use, consume heedlessly and squander, careless of
to-morrow. The poor are the children of society.