DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WORK
278. =The Fact of Misery.=--A brief study of the conditions in which a
city's toilers live and work and play makes it plain that the people
have to contend with numerous difficulties. Large numbers of them are
in misery, and there are few who are not living in constant fear of
it. To a foreigner who did not understand America, it would seem
incredible that misery should be prevalent in the midst of wealth and
unbounded natural resources, when mines and factories are making
record-breaking outputs, when harbors are thronged with ships and the
call for workers goes across the sea. But no one who visits the
tenements and alleys of the city fails to find abundant evidence of
misery and want. People do not live in dark rooms and dirty
surroundings from choice, sometimes as many as two thousand in a
single block. They do not willingly pay a large percentage of their
earnings in rent for a tenement that breeds fever and tuberculosis.
They do not feed their babies on impure milk and permit their children
to forage among the garbage cans because they care nothing for their
young. They do not shiver without heat or lose vitality for lack of
food until they have struggled for a comfortable existence to the
point of exhaustion. Misery is here as it is in the Old World cities,
and it leads to weakness and disease, drunkenness, vice, and crime.
279. =Easy Explanations.=--It is impossible to unravel completely the
skein of difficulties in which the people are enmeshed, or to simplify
the causes of the tangle. It is easy to blame a person's wretchedness
on his individual misconduct and incompetency, to say, for example,
that a man's family is sick and poor because he is intemperate. There
might be truth in the charge, but it would probably not be the whole
truth. It is easy to go back of the circumstance to the weak will of
the man that made him a prey to impulse and appetite and kept him
primitive in his habits, but that alone would not explain conditions.
It is easy to charge misery upon the ignorance of the woman in the
home who is wasteful of food and does not know how to provide for her
family, or to charge lack of common sense to the home-makers when they
try to raise six children on an income that is not enough for two. It
is very common to lay all misery at the door of the capitalist who
underpays labor and feels no responsibility for the life conditions of
his employee. No one of these explains the presence of misery.
It is easy to propose to society a simple remedy like better housing,
prohibition, or socialism, when the only correct diagnosis of
conditions demands a prolonged and expensive course of treatment that
involves surgical action in the social body. It is easy to raise money
for charity, to endow hospitals, and to talk about made-to-order
schemes for ending unemployment, poverty, and panic, but it is soon
discovered that there is no panacea for the evils that infest society.
Back of all personal misconduct or misfortune, of all social specific
or cure-all, is the fundamental difficulty that misery exists, that
its causes are complex, and that all efforts to provide efficient
relief on a large scale have failed, as far as history records.
280. =Poverty and Its Extent.=--Misery appears commonly in the form of
sickness, vice, and poverty. One of these reacts upon another, and is
both the cause and the result of another. Mental and moral incapacity,
ignorance of hygiene, weakness of will, habits that seem incurable,
all of these produce the first two in a seemingly hopeless way;
poverty appears to be incurable above the rest. It is poverty that
prevents fortifying the will by increasing physical stamina and moral
courage, it is poverty that drives a man; to drink or desperation, and
it is poverty that prescribes the unfavorable surroundings that do so
much to keep a man down. Poverty is a danger flag that indicates the
probability of deeper degradation and calls for the individual or
group that is better off to lend a hand. Poverty is a goad, a thorn
in the flesh of society, that is pushing it along the road of social
reform. Private philanthropy, legislative enactment, and much talking
are being tried as experiments to find a solution of the difficulty,
but theorists and practitioners are not yet in full agreement as to
the way out.
There are, of course, different degrees of poverty, ranging from the
helpless incompetents at the bottom of the scale to those who are in a
fair degree of comfort, but who have so little laid aside for a rainy
day that they live in constant fear of the poorhouse. Some struggle
harder than others, and maintain an existence on or just above the
poverty line--these are technically the poor. Charles Booth defines
the poor as those "living in a state of struggle to obtain the
necessaries of life." A few cease to struggle at all and, if they
continue to live, manage it only by living on permanent charity--these
are the paupers. This is a distinction that is carefully made by
sociologists and is always convenient.
It is difficult to estimate the extent of poverty with any accuracy,
but a few estimates of skilled observers indicate its wide extent.
Charles Booth thought that thirty per cent of the people of London
were on or below the poverty line. Robert Hunter has declared that in
1899 eighteen per cent of the people in New York State received aid,
and that ten per cent of those who died in Manhattan received pauper
burial. Alongside these statements are the various estimates of 80,000
persons in almshouses in the United States, 3,000,000 receiving public
or private aid, with a total annual expense of $200,000,000. The
number of those who have small resources in reserve are many times as
great, but industrious, frugal, and self-respecting, they manage to
take care of themselves.
281. =Causes of Poverty.=--It is still more difficult to speak exactly
of the relative importance of the causes of poverty. Investigation of
hundreds of cases in certain localities makes it plain that poverty
comes through a combination of several factors, including personal
incompetence or misconduct, misfortune, and the effects of
environment. In Boston out of one thousand cases investigated
twenty-five years ago (1890-91), twenty per cent was due to drink, a
figure nearly twice as much as the average found in other large
cities; nine per cent more was due to such misconduct as
shiftlessness, crime, and vagrancy; while seventy per cent was owing
to misfortune, including defective employment and sickness or death in
the family. Five thousand families investigated at another time in New
York City showed that physical disability was present in three out of
four families, and unemployment was responsible in two out of three
cases. In nearly half the families there was found defect of
character, and in a third of the cases there was widowhood or
desertion or overcrowding. Added to these were old-age incapacity,
large families, and ill adjustment to environment due to recent
arrival in the city.
Taking these as fair samples, it is proper to conclude that the causes
commonly to be assigned to poverty are both subjective and objective,
or individual and social. It was formerly customary to throw most of
the blame on the poor themselves, to charge them with being lazy,
intemperate, vicious, and generally incompetent, and it is useless to
deny that these appear to be the direct causes in great numbers of
instances, but as much of the negro and poor white trash in the South
was found to be due to hookworm infection, so very many of the faults
of the shiftless poor in the cities are due more indirectly to lack of
nourishment, of education, and of courage. Over and over again, it may
be, has the worker tried to get on better, only to get sick or lose
his job just as he was improving his lot. The tendency of opinion is
in the direction of putting the chief blame upon the disposition of
the employer to exploit the worker, and the indifference of society to
such exploitation; it is the discouraging conditions in which the
working man lives, the uncertainty of employment and the high cost of
living, the danger of accident and disease that constantly hangs over
the laborer and his family, that devitalizes and disheartens him, and
casts him before he is old on the social scrap heap.
Summing up, it is convenient to classify the causes of poverty as
individual and social, including under the first head ignorance,
inefficiency, illness or accident, intemperance, and immorality, and
under the second unemployment, widowhood, or desertion, overcrowding
and insanitation, the high cost of living versus low wages, and lack
of adjustment to environment.
Poverty is one of those social conditions that appear in all parts of
the country, even in the smaller villages, but it is more dreadful and
wide-spread in the great cities. In smaller communities the cases are
few and can be taken care of without great difficulty; to the larger
centres have drifted the poor from the rural regions, and there
congregate the immigrants who have failed to make good, until in large
numbers they drain the vitals of the city's strength. Yet the problem
of poverty is not new. It would be difficult to find any ancient city
that did not have its rabble or mediæval village without its
"ne'er-do-weel"; and in every period church or state or feudal group
has taken its turn in providing relief. In recent years the principle
of bestowing charity has been giving way to the principle of
destroying poverty at the roots by removing the causes that produce
it. This is no easy task, but experience has shown that it is the only
effective way to get rid of the difficulty.
282. =Proposed Methods of Solution.=--The solution of the problem of
poverty cannot be found in charity. Properly administered charity is a
helpful means of temporary relief, but if it becomes permanent it
pauperizes. It never will cure poverty. In spite of all charity
organization, poverty increases as the cities grow, until it is clear
that the causes must be removed if there is to be any hope of
permanent relief. A better education is proposed as an offset to
ignorance. Women need instruction in cooking, home making, and the
care of children, for girls graduating from a machine or the counter
of a department store into matrimony cannot reasonably be expected to
know much about housekeeping. Such evils as divorce, desertion,
intemperance, and poverty are due repeatedly to failure to make a
home. Proper hygienic habits, care of sanitation, simple precautions
against colds, coughs, and tuberculosis, make a great difference in
the amount of misery. It is a question worth considering whether the
home end of the poverty problem is not as important as the employment
end. For the man's ignorance and inefficiency it is proposed that the
vocational education of boys be widely extended.
The social causes of poverty lead into other departments of
sociological study, like the industrial problem, and it is useless to
talk about a cure for poverty as an isolated phenomenon, yet there are
certain principles that are necessarily involved. The whole subject of
the poor needs thorough study. Organizations like the charity
societies already have much data. The Russell Sage Foundation in New
York City is making invaluable contributions to public knowledge. The
reports of the national and State bureaus of labor contain a vast
amount of statistical information. All this needs digestion. Then on
the basis of investigation and digestion of information comes prompt
and intelligent legislation for the amelioration of poverty, until the
most shameful conditions in employment and housing are made
impossible. Only persistent legislation and enforcement of law can
make greedy landlords and capitalists do the right thing by the poor,
until all society is spiritualized by the new social gospel of mutual
consideration and educated to apply it to community life.
283. =Pauperism.=--Pauperism is poverty become chronic. When a family
has been hopelessly dependent so long that self-respect and initiative
are wholly gone, it seems useless to attempt to galvanize it into
activity or respectability, and when a group of such families
pauperizes a neighborhood, heroic measures become necessary. The
families must be broken up, their members placed in institutions where
they cannot remain sodden in drink or become violent in crime, and the
neighborhood cleansed of its human débris. Pauperism is a social pest,
and it must be rooted out like any other pest. If it is allowed to
remain it festers; nothing short of eradication will suffice. But when
once it is destroyed living conditions must be so reformed that
pauperism will not recur, and that can be only by constant vigilance
to prevent a continuance of poverty. The problem is one, and its
solution must involve both poverty and pauperism.
284. =Unemployment.=--One of the causes of wide-spread poverty is
unemployment. This is due sometimes to physical weakness or lack of
ability or character, but as often to industrial depression or lack of
adjustment between the labor supply and the employer. There is always
an army of the unemployed, and it has increased so greatly through
immigration and otherwise that it has demanded the serious attention
of sociologists and legislators. Charitable organizations have given
relief, but it is not properly a question of charity; private agencies
have made a business of bringing together the employer and the
employee, but not always treating fairly the employee; permanent free
labor exchanges are now being tried by governments.
The National Conference on Unemployment, meeting in 1914, recommended
three constructive proposals, which include most of the experiments
already tried in Europe and America. These are first the regularizing
of business by putting it on a year-round basis instead of seasonal;
second, the organization of a system of labor exchanges, local and
State, to be supervised and co-ordinated by a national exchange; and
third, a national insurance system for the unemployed, such as has
been inaugurated successfully in Germany and Great Britain.
The problem of unemployment is less complicated than many social
problems, and there is every reason to believe that through careful
legislation and administration it can be largely removed. The problem
of those who are unable to work or unwilling to work is solved by
means of public institutions. The whole problem of poverty awaits only
intelligent, energetic, and united action for its successful solution.
READING REFERENCES
DEVINE: _Misery and Its Causes_, pages 3-50.
HUNTER: _Poverty_, pages 66-105, 318-340.
HENDERSON: _Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents_, second
edition, pages 12-97, 160-209.
CARLTON: _History and Problems of Organized Labor_, pages 431-445.
MARTIN: "Remedy for Unemployment," art. in _The Survey_, 22:
115-117.
BOOTH: _Pauperism._