CHAPTER VIPAUPER-MAKING
Thereis a story of a rich woman—an Austrian, perhaps—who was chilled through by a long drive on a bitter winter day.
“Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of the village.”
She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderated.”
The theory back of this story is the popular one: that the great comfort of great wealth hardens the rich, makes them insensible to privation. The fact is the reverse—at least so far as America is concerned. Nowhere in the world is the value of wealth so grossly, so ludicrously over-estimated as among our plutocrats—not unnaturally, since theironly title to distinction is their wealth, and a man cannot but reverence that which makes him distinguished. Nowhere, therefore, are the discomforts of poverty so exaggerated as in the palaces of our very rich. And so eager are the men as well as the women for opportunities to exercise their emotions over poverty and destitution that they are rapidly creating a huge pauper class. Demand is creating supply.
The poor give to the poor through sympathy. The rich give to the poor through pity. The sympathetic poor are many, and so their pennies and food-donations, small in the single, pile up mountainously in the total. But they are sparsely and more or less judiciously, because intelligently, distributed. The very rich are, comparatively, though not absolutely, many; and they almost all give what seems to the ordinary run of well-to-do people very large sums. They give carelessly, freely. Though warned by often-exposed abuses, they never take warning. Each new fraud finds them credulous and eager. They want to give; they want to show that they are generous and helpful; to caution them is to irritate them.
Thus pauperization is a vast and thriving industry.It is said, and there is no reason to doubt it, that there are several hundred families on Manhattan Island—enough to populate a small city—that have lived well for years wholly upon charity, no member of them ever doing any work beyond writing begging letters or patrolling begging routes. In addition there are thousands of families supported in large part by relief got from rich men and rich women. And the same state of affairs is found wherever the very rich, living exclusive and aloof lives, have built their palaces.
To play Lord or Lady Bountiful is such a self-gratifying part. It is the traditional, the conventional part of the very rich toward the very poor. Beggars are so voluble in thanks. It sounds so well to talk of “my worthy poor,” of what “I am doing for charity.” So many hours that would otherwise be boresome can be filled with receiving and patronizing cringing, slathering paupers or with nosing about tenements, receiving on every floor noisy showers of blessings in exchange for less than the price of a supper after the theatre.
The whole business lessens the vanity-disturbing doubts that sometimes will arise even among the very rich as to the validity of the distinctions in thisDemocracy between “upper class” and “lower classes.” In some cases the motive is higher. In many cases there is an admixture of the higher motive. But the persistence of the very rich in face of the plain showings of the harm they do makes it impossible entirely to acquit large numbers of them.
The pauperization plants of plutocracy fall into three classes—the public, the semi-public and the private.
The politicians have expanded, where they have not out and out established, the public plants. Instead of making the people realize the truth—that these plants are their property, paid for out of their wages and giving service to them not as charity, but as their hard-earned, paid-for right, the politicians turn them into favor-distributing centres, centres for the distribution of alms in exchange for political power. The semi-public plants for the manufacture of paupers are the gifts of very rich men, usually men who made their own money; after the first generation the very rich do not as a rule go in for large public gifts. It is never profitable or just to examine deep into motives; sufficient to say that, with a few exceptions, these semi-publicphilanthropic institutions for giving something in exchange for nothing are avoided by all but such of the poor as don’t mind thinking themselves paupers or being looked on and treated as paupers.
Finally, there are the private pauperization plants. From them might be excepted those of the rich men and the rich women who have gone into the relief business in a systematic way and operate through thoroughly organized, carefully and competently conducted bureaus. Their theory of helping is not exactly consistent with the old American idea of “root hog or die,” but neither is it wholly exploitation of their own personal vanity without any regard to the merits of applicants. They give relief, but they try to make sure that relief is, according to their very liberal notion of necessity, needed.
Probably all but a very few of the families that are famous throughout the country for wealth have organizations of this kind. But there are upward of ten thousand millionaires concentrated in a few cities, several hundred of them multi-millionaires. The overwhelming majority of these go in for philanthropy, not on the carefully organized system,but more or less haphazard giving, with never thorough investigation, often with no investigation whatever.
It seems impossible to make people in the habit of keeping themselves clean believe that dirt is not necessarily or even frequently a proof positive of poverty overwhelmed by adversity against which it has made an honest struggle. And the rich people who like the “Bountiful” pose refuse to believe that almost all honest destitution is relieved by its neighbors and relatives, that nine out of ten cases of destitution are fraudulent, that all the street beggars are liars, that no one need go hungry or shelterless or cold if he will apply to the public or semi-public institutions ready to relieve. So, we have Lord and Lady Bountiful relieving grown people of the necessity of “hustling,” and, worst of all, encouraging them to bring up their children as paupers and beggars.
So scandalous has this industry of pauper-making become that in every city’s highways there are now children openly begging, telling their whining lies of various more or less ingenious kinds, pretending to sell newspapers or pencils or shoe-strings to give a color of respectability to their shamelessness,or, rather, to the shamelessness of their parents.
The passing generation—the rustling, hustling, money-grabbing generation—is usually rather shrewd in its philanthropies, as well as generous. The “old man” was a car-driver, or a brakeman, or a plow-boy, or a peasant’s son. He has poverty’s sympathy with poverty, but also poverty’s suspicion of the cause of poverty. Thus, our cities have got and are getting libraries, hospitals, free dispensaries, free technical schools of various kinds, model tenements, and the like. Millions on millions are given annually by “self-made” men, most of it as wisely as giving can be.
But shrewd as these men are, they often fail to see the difference between the sympathetic, unselfish, man-to-man individual help they as poor boys got from people of their own kind in better circumstances, and this general, unequal, pitying, condescending charity which gives indiscriminatingly something that is of value only to the self-respecting, and too often takes away in exchange all, or nearly all, self-respect.
Still, though these “self-made” men give and give largely and with many mistakes, they havethe fear of pauper-making ever in mind. And when they give to individuals they try to be doubly careful.
In the second generation—what used to be but is no longer the spendthrift generation—the very rich retrench in the matter of large benefactions. The family position is established. None of the members of it has ever known what it is to be hungry or cold without knowing just where to turn for food and warmth. Sympathy, which was the sentiment in the first generation, now becomes pity. Man-to-man is changed into “Bountiful” and his or her “worthy poor.” And we have the pauper-plant in full blast.
Each day every rich man or woman who is at all well known receives large numbers of begging letters—from beggars in Maine and in Texas, in Florida and in Washington, in all parts of the Union. They want loans. They want notes or mortgages paid. They want pianos and trousseaus. They want pensions for crippled sons or daughters. Or they want anything from old clothes to several thousand dollars to buy a farm or a store. The apparent effrontery of these requests disappears as the letters are read and theamazing, even pathetic, simplicity of the writers stands out.
Curiously enough, some of these requests, preposterous though they are, are granted. A skilfully written letter sent to a certain kind of rich person at just the right moment has been known to produce amazing results. No reader of this book, however, need advise a beggar of his acquaintance to try it. The two cents postage would be far more likely to bring a return if invested in stocks of the mines of the mountains in the moon. There are many of the rich who have every begging letter that is at all reasonable or plausible thoroughly investigated by a secretary—or by some local agent of a corporation in which the recipient happens to be interested. Pity for the “worthy poor” is an extremely potent force in the plutocracy.
But it is local pauper-making that has the greatest fascination for the rich man or woman who does not care to go into charity on the Carnegie or Rockefeller or Armour scale, or to take the trouble to organize a bureau that works with precision and without any advertisement of its owner. The “agony stories” cooked up by the newspapers arenoted, the slums are ransacked, the parasites on “charity,” both those who honestly deceive themselves and those who deliberately “graft,” are eagerly welcomed and listened to. Thus there are a good many thousands of rich city dwellers with incomes ranging from twenty thousand to several hundred thousands a year, each of whom has his or her circle of “worthy poor,” or gives regularly to those myriad petty enterprises of misdirected or barefacedly fraudulent charity which enlist the activities of so many “workers.”
The women are the most persistent and unreasonable offenders in this respect. Partly through idleness, partly through a craving to have occupation and a sense of usefulness, partly through a profound pity for their apparently unfortunate sisters, they pour out capital for pauper-plants and search diligently for “worthy poor” to pauperize.
Among the long-very-rich there is notable shyness of the larger kinds of giving. No doubt at bottom this is due to increasing selfishness, increasing absorption in amusements of the wholly selfish kinds. It costs more and more every year to play the rich man’s part; more and more imagination is brought to bear in developing it, both by rich meneager to find new ways of showing off and by ingenious poor men inventing new ways of making a living out of the rich upon whose extravagance they thrive. The rich man, even where his income is huge, is often pinched. He hates to give—he may find that his giving has compelled him to forego a most attractive investment or has compelled him to abstain from some new expensive luxury or pleasure. He hoards, to be ready for such emergencies. Then if he has several children, he wants to leave each of them as rich as possible so that they can all live in the style to which they have been accustomed, the style in which their friends and associates live. For worship of wealth you must look among the long-very-rich. Those who pass Mammon’s statue with a nod or a half-ashamed crook of a reluctant knee will have the pleasure of seeing very, very many of the rich “old families” flat in the dust, noses plowing it, and not a bit ashamed.
Is this drying up of the charity of “philanthropy” wholly a matter for regret?
Several years ago a few young Americans from various parts of the country began to spend their summer vacations at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.They were young; they were poor; they were obscure; they were hard-worked and hard-working as well; they were profoundly indifferent to money or money gain; they were not even bothering especially about fame. They had as their common bond a passion for science. They had as their common aim the satisfying of that divine curiosity which makes the man who has it toil incessantly and unweariedly over ways more arduous and through wildernesses more dangerous than those that baffled the seekers after the Holy Grail. They longed—these earnest, poor, obscure young Americans—to penetrate to Nature’s innermost laboratory, her workshop of workshops, her temple of temples, there to surprise her supreme secret—the mystery of the origin of life.
Fifteen summers of this pursuit, free from self-seeking or sordidness or jealousy, free from fame’s flatteries, and the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole became famous wherever the human intellect is respected. Its Knights of Science have not reached their goal—their Holy Grail. But under the inspiration of the triple vow of Science for her Knights—poverty, self-immolation and obedience to truth—they have had adventuresand have made discoveries so strange, so passing strange, so wonderful, that all Americans are intensely proud of this American institution, at once so small and so majestically great.
Then came the proposal to endow this little laboratory with part of the Carnegie millions and to erect it into a rich and aristocratic palace of science. At first glance the proposal seemed as admirable as the purpose that prompted it. And yet——
This is a day when the numerous newcomers among our multi-millionaires are so pouring out the millions that it looks as if presently the necessity for struggle, the incentive to struggle, in the development of brain power, would be almost wholly removed. In the progress of the race, wealth in possession has played a very small part—has more often interfered to blight than to bless. Wealth possessed means ease and power without effort, and a sense that the goal has been reached. It means the mind at rest, tending to sloth and slumber, with life’s greatest fears and greatest incentives removed. Above all, it means an atmosphere of self-complacency and satiety and languor that insensibly relaxes the strongest fibre.
Carnegie millions may help to keep a-burning the light in that plain little temple of science at Woods Hole—may, if judiciously used. But not if they stifle the splendid, self-sacrificing, self-unconscious enthusiasm which set that light a-blazing. The lesson is wider than the instance—far wider. It was wealth and patronage that rotted the splendid intellect of Greece; wealth again, and patronage, that brought the Renaissance to an abrupt, inglorious end. And how much the English intellect in its long period of most brilliant achievement owed to the contempt of the English dominant classes—that of birth and that of commerce—for scientists, writers and “those kinds of cattle!”