A Few Words About the Devil Part 13

Any such doctrine as that "the poor shall never cease out of the land;"

or that we are to be content with the station in life into which it has pleased G.o.d to call us; or that we are to ask and we shall receive, must no longer avail. Schiller most effectively answers the advocates of prayer:

"Help, Lord, help!

Look with pity down!

A paternoster pray; What G.o.d does, that is justly done, His grace endures for aye."

"Oh, mother! empty mockery, G.o.d hath not justly dealt by me: Have I not begged and prayed in vain; What boots it now to pray again?"

Labor's only and effective prayer must be in life action for its own redemption; action founded on thought, crude thought, and sometimes erring at first, but ultimately developed into useful thinking, by much patient experimenting for the right and true.

POVERTY: ITS EFFECTS ON THE POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.

"Political Economy does not itself instruct how to make a nation rich, but whoever would be qualified to judge of the means of making a nation rich must first be a political economist."--John Stuart Mill.

"The object of political economy is to secure the means of subsistence of all the inhabitants, to obviate every circ.u.mstance which might render this precarious, to provide everything necessary for supplying the wants of society, and to employ the inhabitants so as to make the interests accord with their supplying each other's wants."--Sir James Stewart.

On one occasion in the world's history, a people rose searching for upright life, who had previously, for several generations, depressed by poverty and its attendant hand-maidens of misery, prowled hunger-striken and disconsolate, stooping and stumbling through the byways of existence. A mighty revolution resulted in much rough justice and some brutal vengeance, much rude right, and some terrific wrong. Among the writers who have since narrated the history of this people's struggle, some penmen have been a.s.siduous and hasty to search for, and chronicle the errors, and have even not hesitated to magnify the crimes of the rebels; while they have been slow to recognize the previous demoralizing tendency of the system rebelled against. In this pamphlet it is proposed to very briefly deal with the state of the people in France immediately prior to the grand convulsion which destroyed the Bastile Monarchy, and set a glorious example of the vindication of the rights of man against opposition the most formidable that can be conceived; believing that even in this slight ill.u.s.tration of the condition of the ma.s.ses in France who sought to erect on the ruins of arbitrary power the glorious edifice of civil and religious liberty, an answer may be found to the question: "What is the effect of poverty on the political condition of the people."

In taking the instance of France, it is not that the writer for one moment imagines that poverty is a word without meaning in our own lands.

The clamming factory hands in the Lancans.h.i.+re valleys, the distressed ribbon weavers of Conventry, and the impoverished laborers in various parts of Ireland and Scotland would be able to give us a definition of the word fearful in its distinctness. But in England poverty is happily partial, while in France in the eighteenth century poverty was universal outside the palaces of the n.o.bles and the mansions of the church, where luxury, voluptuousness, and effeminacy were regnant. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries travelers in France could learn from "the sadness, the solitude, the miserable poverty, the dismal nakedness of the empty cottages, and the starving, ragged population, how much men could endure without dying." On the one side a discontented, wretched, hungry ma.s.s of tax-providing slaves, and on the other a rapacious, pampered, licentious, spendthrift monarchy. This culminated in the refusal of the laborers to cultivate the fertile soil because, the tax-gatherer's rapacity left an insufficient remnant to provide the cultivator with the merest necessaries of life. Then followed "uncultivated fields, unpeopled villages, and houses dropping to decay;"

the great cities--as Paris, Lyons, and Bordeaux--crowded with begging skeletons, frightful in their squallid disease and loathsome aspect.

Even after the National a.s.sembly had pa.s.sed some measures of temporary alleviation, the distress in Paris itself was so great that at the gratuitious distributions of bread "old people have been seen to expire with their hand stretched out to receive the loaf, and women waiting in their turn in front of the baker's shop were prematurely delivered of dead children in the open streets." The great ma.s.s of the people were as ignorant as they were poor; were ignorant indeed because they were poor.

Ignorance is the pauper's inalienable heritage. When the struggle is for the means of subsistence, and these are only partially obtained, there is little hope for the luxury of a leisure hour in which other emotions can be cultivated than those of the mere desires for food and rest--sole results of the laborious monotonousness of machine work; a round of toil and sleep closing in death--the only certain refuge for the worn out laborer. Without the opportunity afforded by the possession of more than will satisfy the immediate wants, there can be little or no culture of the mental faculties. The toiler badly paid and ill-fed, is separated from the thinker. n.o.bly-gifted, highly-cultured though the poet may be, his poesy has no charms for the father to whom one hour's leisure means short food for his hungry children clamoring for bread.

The picture gallery, replete with the finest works of our greatest masters, is forbidden ground to the pitman, the plowman, the poor pariahs to whom the conceptions of the highest art-treasures are impossible. The beauties of nature are almost equally inaccessible to the dwellers in the narrow lanes of great cities. Out of your narrow wynds in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and on to the moor and mountain-side, ye poor, and breathe the pure life-renewing breezes. Not so; the moors are for the sportsmen and peers, not peasants; and a Scotch Duke--emblem of the worst vices of a corrupt and selfish, but fast-decaying House of Lords--closes miles of heather against the pedestrian's foot. But even this paltry oppression is unneeded. Duke Despicable is in unholy alliance with King Poverty, who mocks at the poor mother and her wretched, ragged family, when from the garret or cellar in a great Babylon wilderness they set out to find green fields and new life.

Work days are sacred to bread, and clothes, and rent; hunger, inclement weather, and pressing landlord forbid the study of nature 'twixt Monday morn and Sat.u.r.day night, and on Sunday G.o.d's ministers require to teach a weary people how to die, as if the lesson were not unceasingly inculcated in their incessant toil. Oh! horrid mockery; men need teaching how to live. According to religionists, this world's bitter misery is a dark and certain preface, "just published," to a volume of eternal happiness, which for 2,000 years has been advertised as in the press and ready for publication, but which after all may never appear.

And notwithstanding that every-day misery is so very potent, mankind seem to heed it but very little. The second edition of a paper containing the account of a battle in which some 5,000 were killed and 10,000 wounded, is eagerly perused, but the battle in which poverty kills and maims hundreds of thousands, is allowed to rage without the uplifting of a weapon against the common enemy.

The poor in France were awakened by Rousseau's startling declaration that property was spoliation, they knew they had been spoiled, the logic of the stomach was conclusive, empty bellies and aching brains were the predecessors of a revolution which sought vengeance when justice was denied, but which full-stomached and empty-headed Tories of later days have calumniated and denounced.

Warned by the past, ought we not to-day to give battle to that curse of all old countries--poverty? The fearful miseries of the want of food and leisure which the poor have to endure are such as to seriously hinder their political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. Those who desire that men and women shall have their rights of citizens, should be conscious how low the poor are trampled down, and how incapable poverty renders them for the performance of the duties of citizens.h.i.+p. So that the question of political freedom is really determined by the wealth or poverty of the ma.s.ses; to this extent, at any rate, that a poverty-stricken people must necessarily, after that state of pauperism has existed for several generations, be an ignorant and enslaved people.

The problem is, how to remove poverty, as it is only by the removal of poverty that the political emanc.i.p.ation of the nation can be rendered possible. It has been ascertained that the average food of the agricultural laborer in England is about half that alloted by the jail dietary to sustain criminal life. So that the peasant who builds and guards his master's haystack gets worse fed and worse lodged than the incendiary convicted for burning it down.

How can this poverty be removed and prevented?

I quote the reply from one who has written most elaborately in elucidation of the views of Malthus and Mill: "There is but one possible mode of preventing any evil--namely, to seek for and remove its cause.

The cause of low wages, or in other words of Poverty, is overpopulation; that is, the existence of too many people in proportion to the food, of too many laborers in proportion to the capital. It is of the very first importance that the attention of all who seek to remove poverty should never be diverted from this great truth. The disproportion between the numbers and the food is the _only real cause_ of social poverty. Individual cases of poverty may be produced by individual misconduct, such as drunknness, ignorance, laziness, or disease; but these and all other accidental influences must be wholly thrown out of the question in considering the permanent cause, and aiming at the prevention of poverty. Drunknness and ignorance, moreover, are far more frequently the _effect_ than the cause of poverty. Population and food, like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side; but the ratio of increase of the former is so immensely superior to that of the latter, that it is necessarily greatly _checked_; and the checks are of course either more deaths or fewer births--that is, either positive or preventive."

Unless the _necessity_ of the preventive or positive checks to population be perceived; unless it be clearly seen, that they must operate in one form, if not in another; and that _though individuals may escape them, the race can not_; human society is a hopeless and insoluble riddle.

Quoting John Stuart Mill, the writer from whom the foregoing extracts have been made, proceeds:

"The great object of statesmans.h.i.+p should be to raise the habitual standard of comfort among the working cla.s.ses, and to bring them into such a position as shows them most clearly that their welfare depends upon themselves. For this purpose he advises that there should be, first, an extended scheme of national emigration, so as to produce a striking and sudden improvement in the condition of the laborers left at home, and raise their standard of comfort; also that the population truths should be disseminated as widely as possible, so that a powerful public feeling should be awakened among the working cla.s.ses against undue procreation on the part of any individual among them--a feeling which could not fail greatly to influence individual conduct; and also that we should use every endeavor to get rid of the present system of labor--namely, that of employers, and employed, and adopt to a great extent that of independent or a.s.sociated industry. His reason for this is, that a hired laborer, who has no personal interest in the work he is engaged in, is generally reckless and without foresight, living from hand to mouth, and exerting little control over his powers of procreation; whereas the laborer who has a personal stake in his work, and the feeling of independence and self-reliance which the possession of property gives, as, for instance, the peasant proprietor, or member of a copartners.h.i.+p, has far stronger motives for self-restraint, and can see much more clearly the evil effects of having a large family."

The end in view in all this is the attainment of a greater amount of happiness for humankind. The rendering life more worth the living, by distributing more equally than at present its love, its beauties, and its charms. In one of his most recent publications, Mr. John Stuart Mill observes:

"In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, every one who has a moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find tins enviable existence, if he escape the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering, such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection. Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration, can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education and proper control of noxious influences, while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe."

In a former pamphlet, "Jesus, Sh.e.l.ly, and Malthus," the reader's attention was entreated to this grave question. In a few pages it is impossible to do more than erect a fingerpost to point out a possible road to a given end. To attempt in a narrow compa.s.s to give complete details, would be as unwise as it would be unavailing. My desire is rather to provoke discussion among the ma.s.ses than to obtain willing auditors among the few, and I affirm it, therefore, as a proposition which I am prepared to support, "That the political conditions of the people can never be permanently reformed until the cause of poverty has been discovered and the evil itself prevented and removed."

WHY DO MEN STARVE?

Why is it that human beings are starved to death, in a wealthy country like England, with its palaces, its cathedrals, and its abbeys; with its grand mansions, and luxurious dwellings, with its fine inclosed parks, and strictly guarded preserves; with its mills, mines, and factories; with its enormous profits to the capitalist; and with its broad acres and great rent rolls to the landholder? The feet that men, old, young, and in the prime of life; that women, and that children, do so die, is indisputable. The paragraph in the daily journals, headed "Death from Starvation," or "Another Death from Dest.i.tution," is no uncommon one to the eyes of the careful reader.

In a newspaper of one day, December 24, 1864, may be read the verdict of a London jury that "the deceased, Robert Bloom, died from the mortal effects of effusion on the brain and disease of the lungs, arising from natural causes, but the said death was accelerated by dest.i.tution, and by living in an ill-ventilated room, and in a court wanting in sanitary requirements;" and the verdict of another jury, presided over by the very Coroner who sat on the last case, "that the deceased, Mary Hale, was found dead in a certain room from the mortal effects of cold and starvation;" as also the history of a poor wanderer from the Glasgow City Poor House found dead in the snow.

In London, the hive of the world, with its merchant millionaires, even under the shadow of the wealth pile, starvation is as busy as if in the most wretched and impoverished village; busy, indeed, not always striking the victim so obtrusively that the coroner's inquest shall preserve a record of the fact, but more often busy quietly, in the wretched court and narrow lane, up in the garret, and down in the cellar, stealing by slow degrees the life of the poor.

Why does it happen that Christian London, with its magnificent houses for G.o.d, has so many squalid holes for the poor? Christianity from its thousand pulpits teaches, "Ask and it shall be given to you," "who if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" yet with much prayer the bread is too frequently not enough, and it is, alas! not seldom that the prayer for bread gets the answer in the stone of the paved street, where he lays him down to die. The prayer of the poor outcast is answered by hunger, misery, disease, crime and death, and yet the Bible says, "Blessed be ye poor."' Ask the orthodox clergyman why men starve, why men are poor and miserable; he will tell you that it is G.o.d's will; that it is a punishment for man's sins. And so long as men are content to believe that it is G.o.d's will that the majority of humankind should have too little happiness, so long will it be impossible effectually to get them to listen to the answer to this great question.

Men starve because the great bulk of them are ignorant of the great law of population, the operation of which controls their existence and determines its happiness or misery. They starve because pulpit teachers have taught them for centuries to be content with the state of life in which it has pleased G.o.d to call them, instead of teaching them how to extricate themselves from the misery, degradation, and ignorance which a continuance of poverty entails.

Men starve because the teachers have taught heaven instead of earth, the next world instead of this. It is now generally admitted by those who have investigated the subject that there is a tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment nature produces. In the human race, there is a constant endeavor on the part of its members to increase beyond the means of subsistence within their reach. The want of food to support this increase operates, in the end, as a positive obstacle to the further spread of population, and men are starved because the great ma.s.s of them have neglected to listen to one of nature's clearest teachings. The unchecked increase of population is in a geometrical ratio, the increase of food for their subsistence is in an arithmetical ratio. That is, while humankind would increase in proportion as 1, 2, 4, 8,16, 32, 64, 128, 256, food would only increase as 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The more the mouths the less the proportion of food. While the restraint to an increase of population is thus a want of food, and starvation is the successful antagonist of struggling human life, it is seldom that this obstacle operates immediately--its dealing is more often indirectly against its victims. Those who die of actual famine are few indeed compared with those who die from various forms of disease, induced by scarcity of the means of subsistence. If any of my readers doubt this, their doubts may be removed by a very short series of visits to the wretched homes of the paupers of our great cities.

Suicide is the refuge mainly of those who are worn out in a bitter, and, to them, a hopeless struggle against acc.u.mulated ills. Disease, suffering, and misery are the chief causes of the prevalence of suicide in our country, and suicide is therefore one form, although comparatively minute, in which the operation of the law of population may be traced.

From dread of the pangs of poverty, men, women, and children are driven to unwholesome occupations, which destroy not only the health of the man and woman actually employed, but implant the germs of physical disease in their offspring. A starving woman seeking food mixes white lead with oil and turpentine for a paltry pittance, which provides bare existence for her and those who share it; in a few weeks, she is so diseased she can work no longer, and the hospital and grave in turn receive her.

Men and women are driven to procure bread by work in lead mines; they rapidly dig their own graves, and not alone themselves, but their wretched offspring, are death-stricken as the penalty; the lead poisons the blood of parent and child alike. Young women and children work at artificial flower-making, and soon their occupation teaches that Scheele's and Schweenfurth green, bright and pleasing colors to the eye, are death's darts too often fatally aimed.

The occupation may be objected to as unhealthy; but the need for food is great, and the woman's or child's wages, wretchedly little though they are, yet help to fill the mouths at home: so the wage is taken till the worker dies. Here, again, the checks to an increase of population all stop short of starvation--the victims are poisoned instead of starved.

So where some forty or fifty young girls are crowded into a badly ventilated work-room, not large enough for half the number, from early in the morning till even near midnight, when orders press; or in some work-room where slop clothes are made, and twenty-five tailors are huddled together in a little parlor scarce wide enough for three--they work to live, and die slowly while they work. They are not starved, but is this sort of asphyxiation much better? The poor, are not only driven to unhealthy, but also to noisome, dwellings. There are in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, and other large cities, fearful alleys, with wretched houses, and small ill-ventilated rooms, each room containing a family, the individuals of which are crowded together under conditions so wretched that disease, and often speedy death, is the only possible result. In the East of London, ten, eleven, and, in some cases, fourteen persons have been found sleeping in one wretched little room. Is it wonderful that some of these misery-stricken ones die before they have time to starve? From poverty the mother, obliged to constantly work that the miserable pittance she gets may yield enough to sustain bare life, is unable properly to nurse and care for baby-child, and often quick death, or slow but certain disease, ending ultimately in the grave, is the result.

The poor live by wages. Wages popularly signify the amount of money earned by the laborer in a given time; but the real value of the money-wages is the amount in quant.i.ty and quality of the means of subsistence which the laborer can purchase with that money. Wages may be nominally high, but really low, if the food and commodities to be purchased are, at the same time, dear in price. An undue increase of population reduces wages in more than one way; it reduces them in effect, if not in nominal amount, by increasing the price of the food to be purchased; and it also reduces the nominal amount, because the nominal amount depends on the amount of capital at disposal for employ, and the number of laborers seeking employment. No remedies for low wages, no scheme for the prevention and removal of poverty, can ever be efficacious until they operate on and through the minds and habits of the ma.s.ses.

It is not from rich men that the poor must hope for deliverance from starvation. It is not to charitable a.s.sociations the wretched must appeal. Temporary alleviation of the permanent evil is the best that can be hoped for from such aids. It is by the people that the people must be saved. Measures which increase the dependence of the poor on charitable aid can only temporarily benefit one portion of the laboring cla.s.s while injuring another in the same proportion; and charity, if carried far, must inevitably involve the recipients in ultimate ruin and degradation by destroying their mutual self-reliance. The true way to improve the worker, in all cases short of actual want of the necessaries of life, is to throw him entirely on his own resources, but at the same time to teach him how he may augment those resources to the utmost. It is only by educating the ignorant poor to a consciousness of the happiness possible to them, as a result of their own exertions, that you can induce them effectually to strive for it. But, alas! as Mr. Mill justly observes, "Education is not compatible with extreme poverty. It is impossible effectually to teach an indigent population." The time occupied in the bare struggle to exist leaves but few moments and fewer opportunities for mental cultivation to the very poor.

The question of wages and their relation to capital and population, a question which interests a poor man so much, is one on which he formerly hardly ever thought at all, and on which even now he thinks much too seldom. It is necessary to impress on the laborer that the rate of wages depends on the proportion between population and capital. If population increases without an increase of capital, wages fall; the number or compet.i.tors in the labor market being greater, and the fund to provide for them not having increased proportionately, and, if capital increases without an increase of population, wages rise. Many efforts have been made to increase wages, but none of them can be permanently successful which do not include some plan for preventing a too rapid increase of laborers. Population has a tendency to increase, and has increased faster than capital; this is evidenced by the poor and miserable condition of the great body of the people in most of the old countries of the world, a condition which can only be accounted for upon one of two suppositions, either that there is a natural tendency in population to increase faster than capital, or that capital has, by some means, been prevented from increasing as rapidly as it might have done. That population has such a tendency to increase that, unchecked, it would double itself in a small number of years--say twenty-five--is a proposition which most writers of any merit concur in, and which may be easily proven. In some instances, the increase has been even still more rapid. That capital has not increased sufficiently is evident from the existing state of society. But that it could increase under any circ.u.mstances with the same rapidity as is possible to population is denied. The increase of capital is r.e.t.a.r.ded by an obstacle which does not exist in the case of population.. The augmentation of capital is painful. It can only be effected by abstaining from immediate enjoyment.

In the case of augmentation of population precisely the reverse obtains.

There the temporary and immediate pleasure is succeeded by the permanent pain. The only possible mode of raising wages permanently, and effectually benefiting the poor, is by so educating them that they shall be conscious that their welfare depends upon the exercise of a greater control over their pa.s.sions.

In penning this brief paper, my desire has been to provoke among the working cla.s.ses a discussion and careful examination of the teachings of political economy, as propounded by Mr. J. S. Mill and those other able men who, of late, have devoted themselves to elaborating and popularizing the doctrines enunciated by Malthus. While I am glad to find that there are some among the ma.s.ses who are inclined to preach and put in practice the teachings of the Malthusian School of political economists, I know that they are yet few in comparison with the great body of the working cla.s.ses who have been taught to look upon the political economist as the poor man's foe. It is nevertheless among the working men alone, and, in the very ranks of the starvers, that the effort must be made to check starvation. The question is again before us: How are men to be prevented from starving? Not by strikes, during the continuance of which food is scarcer than before. No combinations of workmen can obtain high wages if the number of workers is too great.

It is not by a mere struggle of cla.s.s against cla.s.s that the poor man's ills can be cured. The working cla.s.ses can alleviate their own sufferings. They can, by co-operative schemes, which have the advantage of being educational in their operation, temporarily and partially remedy some of the evils, if not by increasing the means of subsistence, at any rate by securing a larger portion of the result of labor to the proper sustenance of the laborer. Systems of a.s.sociated industry are of immense benefit to the working cla.s.ses, not alone or so much from the pecuniary improvement they result in, but because they develop in each individual a sense of dignity and independence which he lacks as a mere hired laborer. They can permanently improve their condition by taking such steps as shall prevent too rapid an increase of their numbers, and, by thus checking the supply of laborers, they will, as capital augments, increase the rate of wages paid to the laborer. The steady object of each working man should be to impress on his fellow-worker the importance of this subject. Let each point out to his neighbor not only the frightful struggle in which a poor man must engage who brings up a large family, but also that the result is to place in the labor market more claimants tor a share of the fund which has. .h.i.therto been found insufficient to keep the working cla.s.ses from death by starvation.

The object of this pamphlet will be amply attained if it serve as the means of inducing some of the working cla.s.ses to examine for themselves the teachings of Political Economy. All that is at present needed is that laboring men and women should be accustomed, both publicly and at home, to the consideration and discussion of the views and principles first openly propounded by Mr. Malthus, and since elaborated by Mr. Mill and other writers. The mere investigation of the subject will of itself serve to bring to the notice of the ma.s.ses many facts. .h.i.therto entirely ignored by them. All must acknowledge the terrible ills resulting from poverty, and all therefore are bound to use their faculties to discover if possible its cause and cure. It is more than folly for the working man to permit himself to be turned away from the subject by the cry that the Political Economists have no sympathy with the poor. If the allegation were true, which it is not, it would only afford an additional reason why this important science should find students among those who most need aid from its teachings.

THE LAND QUESTION.

LARGE ESTATES INIMICAL TO THE WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE