Part 24 (1/2)
have lived in the apprehension of having the bulk of their possessions seized by envious rulers or fellow citizens. Not many years ago Vanderbilt suddenly bought fifty million dollars of four per cent Government bonds, simply, it is believed, for the purpose of s.h.i.+fting the enormous risk of active employment upon shoulders which would be less apt to excite popular manifestations of greed should the Commune bring about its foolish and chaotic reign. The cares of great wealth are a cla.s.s of the most serious burdens borne by humanity.
THEY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
in making up the account between the citizen who has all he needs and the citizen who has to spare for others who will pay him a profit. Men who have lived in constant dread of poverty have been astonished, upon being stranded on that sh.o.r.e of ill-repute to find the sun s.h.i.+ning more brightly and the birds singing more cheerily than when, driven with the ever multiplying engagements of business, they had no slumber which was not an imaginary hurrying into a bank-president's parlor, and no conversation which was not distressing some impatient caller in an ante-room.
BUT ACTUAL, HARSH, GRINDING WANT
is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune. It lowers the human being at once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats. Men on board a s.h.i.+p, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched state conceivable. The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once.
No man trusts anybody else. Each expects the others to pounce upon him to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed. From this baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the consideration of other conditions of life still above us. Let us, then, view poverty as
A REAL, ACTIVE, ”INCONVENIENCE,”
as the French wit has put it. ”One solitary philosopher maybe great, virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty,” says Isaac Iselin, ”but not a whole people.” ”Poverty” says Lucian, ”persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it.” ”It requires a great deal of poetry to gild the pill of poverty,” says Madame Deluzy; ”and then it will pa.s.s for a pleasant dose only in theory; the reality is a failure.”
”A generous and n.o.ble spirit” says Dionysius, ”cannot be expected to dwell in the breast of men who are struggling for their daily bread.”
”HOW LIKE A RAILWAY TUNNEL
is the poor man's life,” says Bovee, ”with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!” ”Poverty,” says Euripides, ”possesses this disease--through want it teaches a man evil.” ”Poverty,” says Saadi, ”s.n.a.t.c.hes the reins out of the hands of pity,” which is true only in one sense.
MANY PEOPLE ARE GOOD
who would not be so good were they poorer, but the Irish in Ireland are perhaps the poorest and at the same time the most pious people of whom we read or hear. ”Poverty makes man satirical, soberly, sadly, bitterly satirical,” says Friswell. ”Men praise it,” says Alexander Smith,
”AS THE AFRICAN WORs.h.i.+PS MUMBO JUMBO--
from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate it.” ”It oft deprives a man of all spirit and virtue,” says Ben Franklin; ”it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.”
THE SCENES OF DARKEST POVERTY
in this land of ours are surely the results of ignorance and folly. With the crops which follow each other in our favored region of the earth, and with members.h.i.+p in any mutual aid society, the industrious poor man of America has an a.s.surance that no picture so black can be drawn of his lot ”in the rainy day.” We cannot reform human nature. When men cheat, steal, lie, and remain idle, they must suffer the results of their deeds, and, at present, those whom they drag down with them must also suffer. But, with industry and sobriety a.s.sured,
THE FANGS OF POVERTY
have been drawn, for the poor man in sickness receives his support, and in health contributes his small share to his sick brother. In leaving this painful branch of so vital a portion of any book devoted to the improvement of humanity, let us abjure each other to fly from the sins of idleness and waste, that make this dark panorama in a world which could be bright, and which, rolling along in its foolish fas.h.i.+on, even now gives promise of exceeding joy in the future. Work and save and give work! This is the light of the world, the open sesame of the millennium?
Let us come again to the follies of
FALSE POVERTY.
How ridiculous that one should _suffer_ from want of a frill or a furbelow! ”I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man _poor_,” says the eloquent Edmund Burke; ”I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men.” ”It is the great privilege of poverty” says Dr. Johnson, ”to be happy unenvied, to be healthy without physic, and to be secure without guard.” Is it not ridiculous for the poor man, by aping the habits of the rich, to spurn some of the greatest blessings attaching to our life? Thus, as Dr. Johnson says: