Poverty
BY JOHN H. GIRDNER, M.D.
I HAVE just read Mr. Robert Hunter’s book entitled “Poverty.” It contains much valuable information, mostly in the form of statistics and references to other publications concerning the poor in different parts of the United States and England. It is a good book of reference; but to my mind its principal virtue is as a thought provoker. The question, “What are you going to do about poverty?” stares the reader in the face from between the lines on every page, and it haunts him after he has laid the book aside.
We of the United States are accustomed to boast of our material wealth and prosperity. When the writer or the orator wishes to wring the hearts of his audience and deceive them into the belief that ours, as conducted at present, is the very best of all governments, he draws a harrowing picture of the dreadful suffering of the poor of London; and then we pull the Stars and Stripes a little more closely about us, and, as that other Pharisee, we thank God that we are not like other men. Before we shed any more tears over the poor of London let us see if we cannot find use for our tears nearer home.
Mr. Charles Booth made a thorough and exhaustive investigation into the conditions of poverty in London in 1891. He found that 1,300,000, or about 30 per cent. of the population of that city were unable to obtain the necessaries of life. This 30 per cent. were “living in conditions, if not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it.”
Mr. B. S. Rountree made a similar investigation in the typical provincial town of York, England. He found that about 28 per cent. of the inhabitants of York were living in destitution. Mr. Rountree adds: “We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty of London as exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation shows that the proportion of poverty in London is practically equaled in what may be regarded as a typical provincial town, we are forced to the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent. of the town populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty.”
Let us turn from England to the United States, and see how much poverty there is in our own country, among our own workmen, or producing class.
The report of the State Board of Charities for New York State shows that an average of about 26 per cent. of the population were aided, by both private and public charities, during each of the three years 1897, 1898 and 1899; and according to the report of the official statistician of the city of Boston for 1903 more than 20 per cent. of the entire population of that city were aided by the public authorities alone. This does not include private charities. In fact, all statistics of charitable works are defective, because they can never include the efforts to relieve suffering and poverty made by those who do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.
Commenting on the above statistics from Boston and New York State, Mr. Hunter says: “If the figures are correct as published, the persons in New York State in distress in 1897, and in Boston in 1903, would equal proportionatelythe number of those in poverty in London.”
Here are other facts about poverty worth remembering: “In the face of widespread poverty, there have not been for over half a century in England so few paupers, either actually or proportionately, as there are now. The population of England has increased from 18,000,000 persons in 1851 to 29,000,000 in 1889. During this period the number of paupers actually fell off. London has lost in pauper population fifteen times as fast as she has gained in general population.”
On the other hand, the returns from the almshouses in the United States show that the number of paupers increased almost as fast as population during the decade from 1880 to 1890. In Hartford, Conn., which is said to be the richest per capita city in the United States, the number of paupers increased 50 per cent. during this same decade.
Now, when you hear a Republican spellbinder draw harrowing word-pictures of poverty among the English workmen, and paint glowing pictures of the marvelous wealth and happy condition of the workmen in our own country, and when you read editorials in subsidized protectionist newspapers about the “miseries of the working classes” in free trade England and the great prosperity among the highly protected workmen of the United States, just remember that according to the best information obtainable about twenty-five to thirty persons out of every hundred living in the towns and citiesboth in England and the United Statessuffer from poverty. And for the past forty years poverty has steadilydecreasedin England and steadily and rapidlyincreasedin the United States. And no amount of ranting by the spellbinder or misrepresentation by the editor can alter these facts.
Mr. Hunter is of the opinion that 70,000 New York children go to school underfed. This statement caused astonishment and doubt in some quarters. But I contend that any trained physician who will note the very large percentage of anemic faces among the children as they issue from the public schoolhouses of this city will agree with me that Mr. Hunter’s estimate of 70,000 underfed children is most likely far below the mark.
The Children’s Aid Society and other charitable organizations maintain a number of industrial schools for poor children in this city. The total daily average of children attending these schools is 10,707. Inspector Lecktrecker recently made a thorough investigation into the condition of these children. Mr. Lecktrecker’s report goes into great detail. Summed up, the report shows that of the 10,707 children attending these industrial schools 8,852 are actually underfed by reason of poverty at home. It was found that the best breakfast that any of these 8,852 children had was a piece of bread and a cup of tea or coffee. A diet not only inadequate for nourishment, but actually destructive to a child’s nervous system.
A grown-up person only requires enough nourishment to repair the waste, wear and tear incident to the daily activities of brain and muscle. A child not only requires this, but it requires added nourishment for the growth and development of all the tissues of its body. No wonder we are raising up a class of people in this city which I have called in another place “Newyorkitics.” No wonder there is an ever-increasing procession of broken-down brains and nervous systems heading for the hospitals for insane. No wonder that crime is on the increase. What better can be expected from adults whose brains and nerves have been starved and stunted from birth?
But what exactly is poverty? Destitution of property; indigence; want of convenient means of subsistence; need. That is what the dictionary says poverty is. Want of convenient means of subsistence is the want of some one or all of the five chemical substances called proximate principles, which we take and must haveto sustain animal life. The continual absence of these chemical substances from the human stomach, together with lack of clothing sufficient to protect the body against the elements, causes physical pain or suffering with degeneration and final death of the animal body. This is a literal scientific definition of the word poverty as applied to the animal or material man.
The adulteration of food which is carried on to such an alarming extent in the United States is an important factor in this poverty or underfeeding question. Even those who are able to buy a sufficientquantityof food have no assurance that thequalityis such as will properly nourish their bodies.
When you satisfy the cravings of hunger by putting into the human stomach watered milk, or cheese which is part wax, or sugar mixed with plaster of Paris, or chocolate which contains only a suggestion of the rich cacao beans, or any of the adulterated articles of food for sale especially in the poorer sections of the city, you not only tax the system to digest and dispose of a quantity of useless and maybe poisonous material, but every tissue in the body is thereby robbed of its proper nourishment.
It is as much, or more, poverty and underfeeding to fill the stomach with material which does not contain the fiveproximate principles,i.e., nourishment, as not to fill it at all. The laws against substitution and adulteration of human food and drink ought to be more stringent than the laws against horse stealing. Yet, as I am informed, all efforts at such legislation are invariably met with the cry that it will interfere with thebusiness interestsof the country. Here, as in so many other instances, when an attempt is made to secure common justice and protection for the lives and property and rights of the plain people, we run up against thebusiness interests. The curse of this country today is that everything, even human life, must be sacrificed when necessary to thebusiness interests.
The industry captains are killing and maiming the people now just as the military captains used to do, and for the same objects—to satisfy greed and selfishness.
The negro slave in the South in slavery days was further removed from poverty and the fear of poverty than any man I have ever known. When his day’s work was finished he came home from the field or the shop and he found a substantial, well-cooked dinner awaiting him. After dinner he went to his comfortable cabin and sat before a blazing log fire, or, in warm weather, he sat out under the stars, fanned by the night winds. His wife and children were nearly always around him, as were his companions, the other slaves belonging to his master and the plantation.
This man did not have a single care or responsibility on earth. He did not have to meet a grinding landlord next day demanding rent. He did not have to cudgel his brains to find a way to meet a note due next week. He did not have to pay for food, clothes, light and heat for himself and his family. That pang of anguish so familiar to us all when we think of the possibility of our loved ones suffering from want and the fear of want when we are gone never wrung the heart of that black man. Child labor as it exists under the present system was unknown to the children of the black slaves. “Over the hills to the poor-house,” when age and decrepitude had made him no longer useful, had no terrors for the black slave. The “system” of slavery made it perfectly certain that his owner would provide food, clothes and shelter for him in his old days, and for his children, no matter what happened. This black man, slave as he was, had a better guarantee against poverty and the fear of poverty for himself and family than any life insurance company can give. Even Mr. Tom Lawson could not find fault with the security of this policy.
Another thing the slave father did not have to worry about was sicknessin his family. When one of his children became ill an ambulance from a charity hospital did not back up in front of the negro quarters, cart the child off to become one patient more in Ward No. ——, and serve as “material” for a clinical lecture while it lived, and as “material” for the dissecting-table after it was dead. No, nothing of the kind happened. When the slave became ill the best medical skill and nursing were provided, and, if need be, the patient was taken to the “big house” where the master lived so the mistress could superintend the treatment, and in case of death the body was put in a neat coffin, and a procession composed of all the blacks and whites on the plantation followed the remains to the colored graveyard on the hill, burial services were read, a hymn sung and the body lowered to its final resting-place. This is a glimpse at the condition of the slave in life and death in slavery days. I am not putting in a brief in favor of chattel slavery. I was born an abolitionist. My father was a slave-owner and my early life was spent in the midst of it, yet I abhorred the system as a child, and that abhorrence has grown with years. But I am now writing about poverty, and my point is: that chattel slavery as it existed in the South is the only state of society I know of in which poverty and the fear of poverty among the workers or producing class were absolutely abolished by law.
Under the old system the negro was a slave, you say. So he was. But if I read Mr. Hunter’s book aright, the laborer under the present industrial system is also a slave. The laborer has a vote now and the slave did not. Yes, but the slave had a full dinner-pailall the timeand the white voting laborer has not. The comparative value between his vote and a full dinner-pail in the mind of the white laborer under the present system was demonstrated in the election of 1896 and 1900, when he gladly gave his vote to the Republican Party for themere promiseof a full dinner-pail.