Is poverty a malady of the individual or of society? To answer this
question is to determine how to treat the disease. If the individual is
alone responsible for being poor, then he alone is to apply the remedy;
but if society is to blame for poverty, then must society take the steps
to effect a cure. Poverty is an evil. A human being who is starved
physically is starved mentally and morally. Civilization begins when man
has risen above want. Man is only a brute when all of his energies are
absorbed in the effort to get bread.
In the present state of society we have dependence and independence; a few
have escaped from the burdens of toil, but the many are still slaves to
physical wants. But the few enjoy their independence at the expense of
those beneath them, and oftentimes by inflicting wrong and injustice upon
their fellows. Such a condition ought not to be allowed. Prosperity is the
accumulated efforts of mankind. No man has created all the benefits he
enjoys; no one has sowed all that he reaps. The rich man to-day is rich
because he has, by advantageous circumstances, obtained possession of more
than his share of the world’s wealth, or because he has inherited what
others have obtained in the same way, or because by thrift and economy and
good luck he has succeeded in getting money and keeping it.
But what makes the poor man? Not one thing, or one condition. He is the
victim sometimes of his own follies, vices or laziness, although he is
often not to be blamed for his poverty. There are individual cases where
doubtless destitution is the child of misfortune, but the general poverty
of the world, and of this country in particular, cannot be charged to any
such account.
In our land there is a balance every year to the credit of wealth, but is
it not true that this balance finds its way to the pockets already filled,
rather than to those that are empty? _What diverts the products of labor
from the hands of labor?_ Find out that, and then we will begin to give
labor its due. There is enough produced every year to make every person in
the land better off at the end of the year. Why are so few richer, and so
many poorer, or, at least, no better off? There is one thing sure,—labor,
thrift, economy, virtue and good habits are to be commended and
encouraged, while idleness, vice, profligacy and bad habits are to be
condemned and discouraged. We do not look to any external change in
society for a remedy for poverty, but rather to an internal change in man.
It is not social revolution that will help the world, but humanity—the
willingness to do what is right.
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“It rains on the just and the unjust,” but rarely just enough on either.