POVERTY
THE MEANING OF POVERTY—PERSONAL AND GENERAL CAUSES—POVERTY IN A
PROSPEROUS SOCIETY DUE CHIEFLY TO MALADJUSTMENT—ARE THE POOR THE
“UNFIT”?—WHO IS TO BLAME FOR POVERTY?—ATTITUDE OF SOCIETY TOWARD THE
POOR—FUNDAMENTAL REMEDIES.
The most practical definition of poverty is that now widely adopted
which relates it to function, and calls those the poor whose income is
not sufficient to keep up their health and working efficiency. This
may be vague but is not too much so to be useful, and is capable of
becoming quite definite through exact inquiry. At least it indicates
roughly a considerable portion of the people who are poor in an obvious
and momentous sense of the word.
Being undernourished, the poor lack energy, physical, intellectual and
moral. Whatever the original cause of their poverty, they cannot, being
poor, work so hard, think so clearly, plan so hopefully, or resist
temptation with so much steadfastness as those who have the primary
means of keeping themselves in sound condition.
Moreover, the lack of adequate food, clothing and housing commonly
implies other lacks, among which are poor early training and education,
the absence of contact with elevating and inspiring personalities, a
narrow outlook upon the world, and, in short, a general lack of social
opportunity.
The poor are not a class in the sense of having a distinct psychical
organization. Absorbed in a discouraging material struggle, or perhaps
in the sensuality and apathy to which a discouraging outlook is apt
to lead, they have no spirit or surplus energy adequate to effectual
coöperative endeavor on their own initiative, or even to grasping
the benefits of existing organization. As a rule they get far less
from the law and its administration, from the church, the schools,
the public libraries and the like, than the classes more capable of
self-assertion, and this is particularly true in a _laissez-faire_
democracy, such as ours, which gives rights pretty much in proportion
to the vigor with which they are demanded. It is this lack of common
consciousness and purpose that explains the ease with which, in all
ages, the poor have been governed, not to say exploited, from above.
And if they are getting some consciousness and purpose at the present
time, it is largely for the very reason that they are less inveterately
and hopelessly poor now than in the past.
The familiar question whether poverty is due to personal or social
causes is in itself somewhat fallacious, as smacking of a philosophy
that does not see that the personal and social are inseparable.
Everything in personality has roots in social conditions, past or
present. So personal poverty is part of an organic whole, the effect
in one way or another, by heredity or influence, of the general life.
The question has significance, however, when we understand it as asking
whether or not the cause is so fixed in personality that it cannot
be counteracted by social influences. We find that in a community
generally prosperous a part of the people—say ten per cent.—are
poor in the urgent sense indicated above. The practical question is,
Are these people poor from causes so established in their characters
(however originating) that the rest of the community can do nothing
effectual for them, or are they plastic to forces which might raise
them to a normal standard of living?
As to this—leaving out the various extreme opinions which attend all
such questions—there is a fair measure of agreement among competent
observers somewhat to the following effect: There is a considerable
number of individuals and families having intrinsic defects of
character which must always keep them poor so long as they are left
in the ordinary degree of self-dependence. The great majority of the
poor, however, have no ineradicable personal weakness but are capable
of responding to influences which might raise them to a normal standard
of living. In other words, the nine-tenths of the community which is
not poor might conceivably bring influences to bear which would—in a
healthy manner and without demoralizing alms-giving—remove all but a
small part of the poverty of the other tenth. It is only a question
of putting into the matter sufficient knowledge and good will. As to
the view, still not uncommon, that the laziness, shiftlessness and
vice of the poor are the source of their difficulties, it may be said
that these traits, so far as they exist, are now generally regarded
by competent students as quite as much the effect as the cause of
poverty. If a man is undervitalized he will either appear lazy or will
exhaust himself in efforts which are beyond his strength—the latter
being common with those of a nervous temperament. Shiftlessness, also,
is the natural outcome of a confused and discouraging experience,
especially if added to poor nutrition. And as to drink and other
sensual vices, it is well understood that they are the logical resource
of those whose life does not meet the needs of human nature in the
way of variety, pleasantness and hope. There are other causes of vice
besides poverty, as appears from its prevalence among the unresourceful
rich, but there can be no doubt that good nurture, moderate work,
wholesome amusement and a hopeful outlook would do away with a great,
probably the greater, part of it. There are, no doubt, among the poor,
as among the well-to-do, many cases of incurable viciousness and
incompetence, but it would be no less unjust and foolish to assume that
any individual is of this sort than to give up a scarlet fever patient
because some will die of that disease in spite of the best treatment.
I find that the ablest and most experienced workers have generally the
most confidence as to what may be done even with the apparently lazy,
shiftless or vicious by bringing fresh suggestions, encouragements and
opportunities to bear upon them. And it is only a small portion of the
poor that are even apparently lazy, shiftless or vicious; the majority
comparing not unfavorably with the well-to-do classes in these respects.
Leaving aside general conditions which may depress whole nations or
races, the main cause of poverty in a prosperous country like the
United States is without doubt some sort of maladjustment between
the individual, or the family or neighborhood group, and the wider
community, by reason of which potential capacity does not yield its
proper fruit in efficiency and comfort. This is evidently the case,
for example, with the sort of poverty most familiar in our American
cities; that due to the transplanting of vast numbers of Europeans to
a society, not too good for them as we carelessly assume, but out of
connection with their habits and traditions. The Italians, Slavs and
Russian Jews who just now throng our cities are by no means deficient,
on the whole, either in intelligence, industry or thrift; and those who
know them best find them prolific in some qualities, such as artistic
sensibility of various kinds, in which America is otherwise rather
deficient. But the process of adaptation to our industrial conditions
is trying and leaves many in poverty and demoralization.
Among the native population also, poverty and the moral degradation
which is often found with it is due largely, perhaps chiefly, to
various kinds of maladjustment between the working classes and the
industrial system—to loss of employment from periodical depressions
or from the introduction of new methods, to the lack of provision for
industrial education, to the perils attending migration from country to
city, and so on.
What shall we say of the doctrine very widely, though perhaps not very
clearly, held that the poor are the “unfit” in course of elimination,
and are suffering the painful but necessary consequences of an
inferiority that society must get rid of at any cost? A notion of this
kind may be discovered in the minds of many men of fair intelligence,
and is due to remote, obscure and for the most part mistaken
impressions of the teaching of Malthus and Darwin.
The unfit, in the sense of Darwin and of biology in general, are those
whose hereditary type is so unsuited to the conditions of life that it
tends to die out, or at least suffer relative diminution in numbers,
under the action of these conditions—as white families tend to die
out in the tropics. In other words, they have an inferiority due to
heredity, and this inferiority is of such a character that they do not
leave as many children to continue their race as do those of a superior
or fitter type.
It is very questionable whether any great part of the poor answer the
description in either of these respects. As to the first, it is the
prevailing opinion with those most familiar with the matter that their
inferiority, except possibly where a distinct race is in question, as
with the Negroes, is due chiefly to deficient nurture, training and
opportunity, and not to heredity. This view is supported by the fact
that under the conditions which a country of opportunity, like the
United States, affords, great masses of people rise from poverty to
comfort, and many of them to opulence, showing that the stock was as
capable as any. Something of this sort has taken place with German and
Irish immigrants, and is likely to take place with Jews, Slavs and
Italians.
As to elimination, it is well known that only poverty of the most
extreme and destructive kinds avails to restrict propagation, and that
the moderately poor have a higher rate of increase than the educated
and well-to-do classes. It is, in fact, far more the latter that are
the “unfit” in a biological sense than the former.
The truth is that poverty is unfitness, but in a social and not a
biological sense. That is to say, it means that feeding, housing,
family life, education and opportunity are below the standards that
the social type calls for, and that their existence endangers the
latter in a manner analogous to that in which the presence of inferior
cattle in a herd endangers the biological type. They threaten, and to
a greater or less degree actually bring about, a general degradation
of the community, through ignorance, inefficiency, disease, vice,
bad government, class hatred (or, still worse, class servility and
arrogance) and so on.
But since the unfitness is social rather than biological, the method
of elimination must also be social, namely, the reform of housing and
neighborhood conditions, improvement of the schools, public teaching of
trades, abolition of child-labor and the humanizing of industry.
That there are strains of biological unfitness among the
poor—hereditary idiocy, or nervous instability tending toward vice and
crime, for example—is not to be denied, and certainly these should be
eliminated, but poverty, far from effecting elimination, is perhaps
their main cause. This will, no doubt, be duly considered by students
of the new science of eugenics, for which those of us who approach
social problems from another point of view may yet have the highest
regard and expectation. Only a shallow sort of mind will suppose
there is any necessary conflict between biological and psychological
sociology.
As to the question, who is to blame for poverty, let us remember that
the whole question of praise or blame is one of point of view and
expediency. Blame the poor if it will do them any good, and sometimes,
perhaps, it will, but not so often probably as the well-to-do are apt
to imagine. It used to be thought that people must always be held
responsible for their condition, and that the main if not the only
source of improvement was to prod their sense of this responsibility;
but more thoughtful observation shows that it is not always a good
thing to urge the will. “Worry,” says an experienced worker,[129] “is
one of the direct and all-pervading causes of economic dependence,”
and he asserts that “Take no thought for the morrow” is often the
most practical advice. Many indications, among them the spread of
“mind-cure” doctrines and practices, point to a widely felt need
to escape from the waste and unrest of an over-stimulated sense of
responsibility.
The main blame for poverty must rest upon the prosperous, because they
have, on the whole, far more power in the premises. However, poverty
being due chiefly to conditions of which society is only just beginning
to become conscious, we may say that in the past nobody has been to
blame. It is an unintended result of the economic struggle, and is
“done with the elbows rather than the fists.” But consciousness is
arising, and with it comes responsibility. We are becoming aware of
what makes poverty and how it can in great part be done away with, and
if accomplishment does not keep pace with knowledge we shall be to
blame indeed.
All parts of society being interdependent, the evils of poverty are
not confined to one class, but spread throughout the whole; and the
influence of a low standard of living is felt in the corruption of
politics, the prevalence of vice and the inefficiency of labor. The
cause of the poor is therefore the cause of all, and from this point
of view those of them who in spite of weakness, discouragement and
neglect keep up the fight for a decent life and shun dependence and
degradation, should be regarded as heroic defenders of the general
welfare, deserving praise as much as the soldier at the front. If we
do not so regard them, it is because of our lack of intelligence and
social consciousness.
In a truly organic society the struggles and suffering of a poor
class would arouse the same affectionate and helping solicitude as is
felt when one member of a family falls ill. In contrast to this, the
indifference or somewhat contemptuous pity usually felt toward poverty
indicates a low state of community sentiment, a deficient we-feeling.
Respect and appreciation would seem to be due to those who sustain the
struggle successfully, and sympathetic help to those who are broken
down by it. Especially brutal, stupid and inexpedient—when we think of
it—is the old way of lumping the poor with the degenerate as “the lower
class,” and either leaving them to bear their discredited existence as
best they may, or dealing out to them a contemptuous and unbrotherly
alms. The confusion with the degraded of those who are keeping up the
social standard in the face of exceptional difficulties is as mean and
deadly a wrong as could well be.
In so far as there is an effective, self-conscious Christian spirit
in the world, thought, feeling and effort must concentrate wherever
there is injustice or avoidable suffering. That this takes place so
slowly and imperfectly in the matter of poverty is largely owing to a
lack of clear perception of what ought to be done. I suppose there is
no doubt that if mere gifts could wipe out poverty it would be wiped
out at once. But people are now, for the most part, just sufficiently
informed to see the futility of ordinary alms, without being instructed
in the possibilities of rational philanthropy. Rational philanthropy
is coming, however, along with an excellent literature and a body
of expert persons who unite humane enthusiasm with a scientific
spirit.[130]
The fundamental remedy for poverty is, of course, rational organization
having for its aim the control of those conditions, near and remote,
which lead people into it and prevent their getting out. The most
radical measures are those which are educational and protective in a
very broad and searching sense of the words—the humanization of the
primary school system, industrial education, facilities for play,
physical training and healthy amusement, good housing, the restriction
by law of child labor and of all vicious and unwholesome conditions,
and, finally, the biological precaution of stopping the propagation of
really degenerate types of men.
If we can give the children of the poor the right start in life, they
will themselves, in most cases, develop the intelligence, initiative,
self-control and power of organization which will enable them to
look out for their own interests when they are mature. The more one
thinks of these questions the more he will feel that they can only be
solved by helping the weaker classes to a position where they can help
themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[129] An editorial writer in Charities and the Commons, presumably
Professor Devine, the author of Principles of Relief, and other works
on rational charity.
[130] “Our children’s children may learn with amazement how we thought
it a natural social phenomenon that men should die in their prime,
leaving wives and children in terror of want; that accidents should
make an army of maimed dependents; that there should not be enough
houses for workers; and that epidemics should sweep away multitudes
as autumn frost sweeps away summer insects.” Simon N. Patten, The New
Basis of Civilization, 197.