I
Andrew Carnegie once said in an address to a young men’s Bible class:
“The cry goes up to abolish poverty, but it will indeed be a sad day
when poverty is no longer with us. Where will your inventor, your
artist, your philanthropist, your reformer, in fact, anybody of note,
come from then? They all come from the ranks of the poor. God does not
call his great men from the ranks of the rich.”
That is not altogether true. The notable men do not all come from the
ranks of the poor, though Mr. Carnegie does, and that gives him the
right to point out the sweet “uses of adversity,” as did Shakspeare and
many others. The rich supply their quota of men naturally great, but
through lack of a sufficiently sharp incentive many of these give us
less than the best that is in them. When God is giving out genius he
does not study the assessment rolls.
As to the rest, Mr. Carnegie is quite right. A world without poverty
would be a world of incapables. Poverty may be due to one or more of
many causes, but in a large, general way it is Nature’s punishment for
incapacity and improvidence. Paraphrasing the poet, we may say that
some are born poor, some achieve poverty, and some have poverty thrust
upon them—“by the wicked rich,” quoth the demagogue. Dear, delicious,
old demagogue!—whatever should we do if all were too rich to support
him, and his voice were heard no more in the land?
Frequently a curse to the individual, poverty is a blessing to the
race, not only because by effacing the unfit (Heaven rest them!) it
aids in the survival of the fit; not only because it is a school of
fortitude, industry, perseverance, ingenuity, and many another virtue;
but because it directly begets such warm and elevating sentiments as
compassion, generosity, self-denial, thoughtfulness for others—in a
word, altruism. It does not beget enough of all this, but think what we
should be with none of it! If there were no helplessness there would
be no helpfulness. That pity is akin to love is sufficiently familiar
to the ear, but how profound a truth it is no one seems to suspect.
Why, pity is the sole origin of love. We love our children, not because
they are ours, but because they are helpless: they need our tenderness
and care, as do our domestic animals and our pets. Man loves woman
because she is weak; woman loves man, not because he is strong, but
because, for all his strength, he is needy; he needs _her_. Minor
affections and good will have a similar origin. Friendship came of
mutual protection and assistance. Hospitality is vestigial; primarily
it was compassion for the wayfarer, the homeless, the hungry. If among
our “rude forefathers” none had needed food and shelter, we should have
to-day no “entertaining,” no social pleasures of any kind.
Poverty is one kind of helplessness. It is an appeal to “what we have
the likest God within the soul.” In its relief we are made acquainted
with ingratitude. Ingratitude, like spanking, or ridicule, or
disappointment in love, hurts without harming. It is a bitter tonic,
but wholesome and by habit may, doubtless, become agreeable. This,
therefore, is how we demonstrate one of the advantages of poverty:
Without poverty there could be no benevolence; without benevolence, no
ingratitude—whereby human nature would lack its supreme credential.
I go further than Mr. Carnegie; not only do I think poverty necessary
to progress and civilization, but I am persuaded that crime, too, is
indispensable to the moral and material welfare of the race. In the
ever needful effort to limit and suppress it; in the immemorial and
incessant war between the good and the evil forces of this world;
in the constant vigilance necessary to the security of life and
property; in the strenuous task of safe-guarding the young, the weak
and the unfortunate against the cruelty and rapacity ever alurk and
alert to prey upon them—in all these forms of the struggle for our
racial existence are generated and developed such higher virtues
and capabilities as we have. A country without crime would breed a
population without sense. In a few generations of security its people
would suffer a great annual mortality by falling over their feet. They
would be devoured by their dogs and enslaved by their cows.
Poverty and crime are teachers in Nature’s great training school.
Does it follow that we should cease to resist them—should encourage
and promote them? Not at all; their best beneficence is found in our
struggle to suppress, overcome or evade them. The hope of eventual
success is itself a spiritual good of no mean magnitude. Let all the
chaplains of our forces encourage and hope and pray for that success;
but for my part, if I thought victory imminent or possible, I should
run away.
Some Chicago millionaires once set afoot a giant scheme for settling
the slum population of our great cities on farms. This was a project
foredoomed to failure: one might as well attempt to colonize on the
hills the fishes of the sea. The experiment of taking the slumfolk
from the slums and making them agriculturists has been tried again and
again, always with the best intention, always with the worst result:
in a few years all are back again in the congenial slums. Of course it
ought not to be that way; these unfortunate persons ought not to have
inherited from countless generations of urban ancestors the tastes,
feelings and capacities binding them to their mode of life as strongly
as the children of prosperity are bound to theirs. The mysterious
suasion of their environment ought not to exert its incessant,
irresistible pull. The call of the slum should sound through their
very dreams with a less iron authority. If with our superior wisdom we
had made this world—you and I—men and women of all degrees would turn
their faces ever to the light, and the line of least resistance would
lead always upward. Their tastes and their instincts would never war
with their interests, and the longer one had remained in bondage to the
taskmasters of Egypt the more eagerly one would seek the Promised Land,
the more contentedly dwell in it. In the world as we have it matters
are differently ordered. The way to help the slumfolk is to improve the
slums; not enough to drive them out—there should be no worse places for
them to go to; just enough to give them a not altogether intolerable
prosperity where they are. Earth has no more hopeless being than a
renovated slum-dweller, uncongenially prosperous and inappropriately
clean.