POVERTY, CRIME AND VICE
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. WhenGod 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. Thatpity 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 needsher. 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 therecould 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 encourageand 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. Thecall 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.
That there is in this country a deep-seated and growing distrust of the rich by the poor is a truth which every right-headed and right-hearted man is compelled to perceiveand deplore. That many of the rich have thoughtlessly and selfishly done much to provoke it is equally obvious and equally deplorable; but largely, I think, it is due to the pernicious teachings of those of both classes who find a profit in promoting it. For neither the rich nor the poor constitute a brotherhood bound by the ties of a common interest; and on the whole, it is well that they do not, for loyalty in defense is usually associated with loyalty in aggression, and those accustomed to stand together for their rights too frequently think that the best foothold is found upon the rights of those opposing them. Not all the rich are men of prey, but to those who are, no quarry is more alluring than the other rich, not only in the way of direct spoliation in business, but by catching the pennies of the applauding poor through that kind of apostasy that poses as superior virtue.
A great part of the sullen animosity of poverty to wealth is undoubtedly the product of mere envy, one of the black elements of human nature whose strength and activity are commonly underestimated, even by the most discerning observers, which of all modern pessimists, Schopenhauer seems most clearly to have perceived. Hatred of the wealthy bythe poor, of the great by the obscure, of the gifted by the dull, is so admirably disguised by the servility with which it is not inconsistent, so generally concealed through consciousness of its disgraceful character, as to have escaped right appraisement by all but the most penetrating understandings.
In producing this antipathy of class to class many other factors are concerned, among them the notion, carefully fostered by demagogues, that, naturally and without reference to personal worth, the rich man despises the poor man. The fact that most of our rich men were once poor is permitted to cut no figure in the matter; as is the fact that annually in this country more than one hundred million dollars are given away by the rich in merely those benefactions large enough to attract public attention. “Not so very much,” says the demagogue, “considering how many of them there are.” But when engaged in showing how large a proportion of the country’s wealth is owned by how few persons, he sings another song.
The hatred is not mutual; the wealthy do not dislike and despise their less fortunate, less capable, less thrifty, lucky, enterprising or ambitious fellow-men. The element ofenvy is not present to feed the rancor. Nor is there any profit in the business of kindling and keeping alight the fires of hostility to the poor; the demagogue has among the rich no professional antagonist practisinghismethods.
True, the wealthy do, as a rule, hold themselves aloof from the poor; even usually from those with whom they associated before their days of prosperity; sometimes from their own less prosperous relatives. There are several reasons; the inexperienced “capitalist” who suspects that none of them is valid can try his luck at making no change in his associations. He will be wiser after a while, but will have fewer friends and less ready money. It will be more economical to learn from some one who has prospered before him—even from a person known to have merely a fair salary and not known to have any dependents.
Doubtless “colossal” fortunes have their disadvantages, chiefly, I think, to those in possession; but as a general proposition, money-making may safely be permitted, for there is no way under the sun to get any good out of money except by parting with it. One may pay it to a tradesman for goods; the tradesmanpays it to another, but eventually it goes to the man that makes the goods, the workman. Or one may lend it on interest, the borrower lending it again at a higher interest, or investing it; it may pass through a dozen hands, but the ultimate man pays it out for labor—the sole purpose and meaning of the entire series of transactions. All the money in the world, except the small part hoarded by misers or lost, is paid out for labor, flows back in converging streams as capital, and is again distributed in wages. Does the socialist know this? He knows nothing; he learned it from Karl Marx and Upton Sinclair. The man who, making money in his own country, spends it in another, may or may not be mischievous to his countrymen; that depends on what he buys. To his race he is harmless and beneficial.
On the whole, the unfortunate rich man, cowering as a prisoner in the dock before the austere tribunal of public opinion, has a pretty good defense if he only knew it. As he seems imperfectly provided with counsel and is not saying much himself, it would be only just for the court to enter a plea of not guilty for him, and to hear a little more testimony than that so abundantly proffered by swift and willing witnesses for the prosecution.
Abolition of poverty is not all that our reformers propose—they would abolish all that is disagreeable. Let us suppose them to have accomplished their amiable purposes. We have, then, a country in which are no poverty, no contention, no tyranny or oppression, no peril to life or limb, no disease—and so forth. How delightful! What a good and happy people! Alas, no! With poverty have vanished benevolence, providence, and the foresight which, born of the fear of individual want, stands guard at a thousand gates to defend the general good. The charitable impulse is dead in every breast, and gratitude, atrophied by disuse, has no longer a place among human sentiments and emotions. With no more fighting among ourselves we have lost the power of resentment and resistance: a car-load of Mexicans or a shipful of Japanese can invade our fool’s paradise and enslave us, as the Spaniards overran Peru and the British subdued India. (Hailers of “the dawn of the new era” will, I trust, provide that it dawn everywhere at once or here last of all.) Having no oppression to resist andno suffering to experience, we no longer need the courage to defy, nor the fortitude to endure. Heroism is a failing memory and magnanimity a dream of the past; for not only are the virtues known by contrast with the vices, they spring from the same seed, grow in the same soil, ripen in the same sunshine, and perish in the same frost. A fine race of mollycoddles we should be without our sins and sufferings! In a world without evils there would be one supreme evil—existence.
We need not fear any such condition. Progress is infected with the germs of reversion; on the grave of the civilization of to-day will squat the barbarian of to-morrow, “with a glory in his bosom” that will transfigure him the day after. The alternation is one that we can neither hasten nor retard, for our success baffles us. If, for example, we could abolish war, disease and famine, the race would multiply to the point of “standing room only”—a condition prophesying war, disease and famine. Wherefore the wisest prayer is this: “O Lord, make thy servant strong to fight and impotent to prevail.”
1900.