Volume I Part 14 (1/2)

Boston is a strange place; here is energy enough to conquer half the continent in ten years; power of thought to seize and tame the Connecticut and the Merrimack; charity enough to send missionaries all over the world; but not justice enough to found a high school for her own daughters, or to forbid her richest citizens from letting bar-rooms as nurseries of poverty and crime, from opening wide gates which lead to the almshouse, the jail, the gallows, and earthly h.e.l.l!

Such are the causes of poverty, organic, political, social. You may see families pa.s.s from the comfortable to the miserable cla.s.s, by intemperance, idleness, wastefulness, even by feebleness of body and of mind; yet while it is common for the rich to descend into the comfortable cla.s.s, solely by lack of the eminent thrift which raised their fathers thence, or because they lack the common stimulus to toil and save, it is not common for the comfortable to fall into the pit of misery in New England, except through wickedness, through idleness, or intemperance.

It is not easy to study poverty in Boston. But take a little inland town, which few persons migrate into, you will find the miserable families have commonly been so, for a hundred years; that many of them are descended from the ”servants,” or white slaves, brought here by our fathers; that such as fall from the comfortable cla.s.ses, are commonly made miserable by their own fault, sometimes by idleness, which is certainly a sin, for any man who will not work, and persists in living, eats the bread of some other man, either begged or stolen--but chiefly by intemperance. Three fourths of the poverty of this character, is to be attributed to this cause.

Now there is a tendency in poverty to drive the ablest men to work, and so get rid of the poverty, and this I take it is the providential design thereof. Poverty, like an armed man, stalks in the rear of the social march, huge and haggard, and gaunt and grim, to scare the lazy, to goad the idle with his sword, to trample and slay the obstinate sluggard. But he treads also the feeble under his feet, for no fault of theirs, only for the misfortune of being born in the rear of society. But in poverty there is also a tendency to intimidate, to enfeeble, to benumb. The poverty of the strong man compels him to toil; but with the weak, the destruction of the poor is his poverty. An active man is awakened from his sleep by the cold; he arises and seeks more covering; the indolent, or the feeble, s.h.i.+ver on till morning, benumbed and enfeebled by the cold. So weakness begets weakness; poverty, poverty; intemperance, intemperance; crime, crime.

Every thing is against the poor man; he pays the dearest tax, the highest rent for his house, the dearest price for all he eats or wears.

The poor cannot watch their opportunity, and take advantage of the markets, as other men. They have the most numerous temptations to intemperance and crime; they have the poorest safeguards from these evils. If the chief value of wealth, as a rich man tells us, be this--that ”it renders its owner independent of others,” then on what shall the poor men lean, neglected and despised by others, looked on as loathsome, and held in contempt, shut out even from the sermons and the prayers of respectable men? It is no marvel if they cease to respect themselves.

The poor are the most obnoxious to disease; their children are not only most numerous, but most unhealthy. More than half of the children of that cla.s.s, perish at the age of five. Amongst the poor, infectious diseases rage with frightful violence. The mortality in that cla.s.s is amazing. If things are to continue as now, I thank G.o.d it is so. If Death is their only guardian, he is at least powerful, and does not scorn his work.

In addition to the poor, whom these causes have made and kept in poverty, the needy of other lands flock hither. The n.o.bility of old England, so zealous in pursuing their game, in keeping their entails unbroken, and primogeniture safe, have sent their beggary to New England, to be supported by the crumbs that fall from our table. So, in the same New England city, the extremes of society are brought together.

Here is health, elegance, cultivation, sobriety, decency, refinement--I wish there was more of it; there is poverty, ignorance, drunkenness, violence, crime, in most odious forms--starvation! We have our St.

Giles's and St. James's; our n.o.bility, not a whit less n.o.ble than the n.o.blest of other lands, and our beggars, both in a Christian city. Amid the needy population, Misery and Death have found their parish. Who shall dare stop his ears, when they preach their awful denunciation of want and woe?

Good men ask, What shall we do? Foreign poverty has had this good effect; it has shamed or frightened the American beggar into industry and thrift.

Poverty will not be removed till the causes thereof are removed. There are some who look for a great social revolution. So do I; only I do not look for it to come about suddenly, or by mechanical means. We are in a social revolution, and do not know it. While I cannot accept the peculiar doctrines of the a.s.sociationists, I rejoice in their existence.

I sympathize with their hope. They point out the evils of society, and that is something. They propose a method of removing its evils. I do not believe in that method, but mankind will probably make many experiments before we hit upon the right one. For my own part, I confess I do not see any way of removing poverty wholly or entirely, in one or two, or in four or five generations. I think it will linger for some ages to come.

Like the snow, it is to be removed by a general elevation of the temperature of the air, not all at once, and will long hang about the dark and cold places of the world. But I do think it will at last be overcome, so that a man who cannot subsist, will be as rare as a cannibal. ”Ye have the poor with you always,” said Jesus, and many who remember this, forget that he also said, ”and when soever ye will, ye may do them good.” I expect to see a mitigation of poverty in this country, and that before long.

It is likely that the legal theory of property in Europe will undergo a great change before many years; that the right to bequeathe enormous estates to individuals will be cut off; that primogeniture will cease, and entailments be broken, and all monopolies of rank and power come to an end, and so a great change take place in the social condition of Europe, and especially of England. That change will bring many of the comfortable into the rich cla.s.s, and eventually many of the miserable into the comfortable cla.s.s. But I do not expect such a radical change here, where we have not such enormous abuses to surmount.

I think something will be done in Europe for the organization of labor, I do not know what; I do not know how; I have not the ability to know; and will not pretend to criticize what I know I cannot create, and do not at present understand. I think there will be a great change in the form of society; that able men will endeavor to remove the causes of crime, not merely to make money out of that crime; that intemperance will be diminished; that idleness in rich or poor will be counted a disgrace; that labor will be more respected; education more widely diffused; and that inst.i.tutions will be founded, which will tend to produce these results. But I do not pretend to devise those inst.i.tutions, and certainly shall not throw obstacles in the way of such as can or will try. It seems likely that something will be first done in Europe, where the need is greatest. There a change must come. By and by, if it does not come peaceably, the continent will not furnish ”special constables” enough to put down human nature. If the white republicans cannot make a revolution peacefully, wait a little, and the red republicans will make it in blood. ”Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,” says mankind, first in a whisper, then in a voice of thunder. If powerful men will not write justice with black ink, on white paper, ignorant and violent men will write it on the soil, in letters of blood, and illuminate their rude legislation with burning castles, palaces and towns. While the social change is taking place never so peacefully, men will think the world is going to ruin. But it is an old world, pretty well put together, and, with all these changes, will probably last some time longer. Human society is like one of those enormous boulders, so nicely poised on another rock, that a man may move it with a single hand. You are afraid to come under its sides, lest it fall. When the wind blows, it rocks with formidable noise, and men say it will soon be down upon us. Now and then a rude boy undertakes to throw it over, but all the men who can get their shoulders under, cannot raise the ponderous ma.s.s from its solid and firm-set base.

Still, after all these changes have taken place, there remains the difference between the strong and the weak, the active and the idle, the thrifty and the spendthrift, the temperate and the intemperate, and though the term poverty ceases to be so dreadful, and no longer denotes want of the natural necessaries of the body, there will still remain the relatively rich and the relatively poor.

But now something can be done directly, to remove the causes of poverty, something to mitigate their effects; we need both the palliative charity, and the remedial justice. Tenements for the poor can be provided at a cheap rent, that shall yet pay their owner a reasonable income. This has been proved by actual experiment, and, after all that has been said about it, I am amazed that no more is done. I will not exhort the churches to this in the name of religion--they have other matters to attend to; but if capitalists will not, in a place like Boston, it seems to me the City should see that this cla.s.s of the population is provided with tenements, at a rate not ruinous. It would be good economy to do it, in the pecuniary sense of good economy; certainly to hire money at six per cent., and rent the houses built therewith, at eight per cent., would cost less than to support the poor entirely in almshouses, and punish them in jails.

Something yet more may be done, in the way of furnis.h.i.+ng them with work, or of directing them to it; something towards enabling them to purchase food and other articles cheap.

Something might be done to prevent street beggary, and begging from house to house, which is rather a new thing in this town. The indiscriminate charity, which it is difficult to withhold from a needy and importunate beggar, does more harm than good.

Much may be done to promote temperance; much more, I fear, than is likely to be done; that is plainly the duty of society. Intemperance is bad enough with the comfortable and the rich; with the poor it is ruin--sheer, blank and swift ruin. The example of the rich, of the comfortable, goes down there like lightning, to shatter, to blast, and to burn. It is marvellous, that in Christian Boston, men of wealth, and so above the temptation which lurks behind a dollar, men of character otherwise thought to be elevated, can yet continue a traffic which leads to the ruin and slow butchery of such ma.s.ses of men. I know not what can be done by means of the public law. I do know what can be done by private self-denial, by private diligence.

Something also may be done to promote religion amongst the poor, at least something to make it practicable for a poor man to come to church on Sunday, with his fellow-creatures who are not miserable--and to hear the best things that the ablest men in the church have to offer. We are very democratic in our State, not at all so in our church. In this matter the Catholics put us quite to shame. If, as some men still believe, it be a manly calling and a n.o.ble, to preach Christianity, then to preach it to men who stand in the worst and most dangerous positions in society; to take the highest truths of human consciousness, the loftiest philosophy, the n.o.blest piety, and bring them down into the daily life of poor men, rude men, men obscure, unfriended, ready to perish; surely this is the n.o.blest part of that calling, and demands the n.o.blest gifts, the fairest and the largest culture, the loftiest powers.

It is no hard thing to reason with reasoning men, and be intelligible to the intelligent; to talk acceptably and even movingly to scholars and men well read, is no hard thing if you are yourself well read and a scholar. But to be intelligible to the ignorant, to reason with men who reason not, to speak acceptably and movingly with such men, to inspire them with wisdom, with goodness and with piety, that is the task only for some men of rare genius who can stride over the great gulf betwixt the thrones of creative power, and the humble positions of men ignorant, poor and forgot! Yet such men there are, and here is their work.

Something can be done for the children of the poor--to promote their education, to find them employment, to s.n.a.t.c.h these little ones from underneath the feet of that grim Poverty. It is not less than awful, to think while there are more children born in Boston of Catholic parents than of Protestant, that yet more than three fifths thereof die before the sun of their fifth year s.h.i.+nes on their luckless heads. I thank G.o.d that thus they die. If there be not wisdom enough in society, nor enough of justice there to save them from their future long-protracted suffering, then I thank G.o.d that Death comes down betimes, and moistens his sickle while his crop is green. I pity not the miserable babes who fall early before that merciful arm of Death. They are at rest. Poverty cannot touch them. Let the mothers who bore them rejoice, but weep only for those that are left--left to ignorance, to misery, to intemperance, to vice that I shall not name; left to the mercies of the jail, and perhaps the gallows at the last. Yet Boston is a Christian city--and it is eighteen hundred years since one great Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost!

I see not what more can be done directly, and I see not why these things should not be done. Still some will suffer: the idle, the lazy, the proud who will not work, the careless who will voluntarily waste their time, their strength, or their goods--they must suffer, they ought to suffer. Want is the only schoolmaster to teach them industry and thrift. Such as are merely unable, who are poor not by their fault--we do wrong to let them suffer; we do wickedly to leave them to perish. The little children who survive--are they to be left to become barbarians in the midst of our civilization?