Who Shall Take Care Of Our Poor?
No. II.
The point of view in which we propound this problem is that of the adequacy of the Christian Church, by its organic institutions, to counteract, in America, those social and political aberrations which, in the eastern hemisphere, have developed and maintained the scourge of pauperism. On this question, history is prophecy; an incomplete prophecy, yet containing all the principles of action which a plastic intelligence and fresh inspiration from its fountain life may enable the church to adapt to our present exigencies.
Under myriad forms and faces, pauperism is the sphinx that devours every society which cannot, within a certain time, find its solution, unless wars have anticipated its fate.
Result of international wars, and source of intestine wars—those irruptions of organized crime—pauperism is the ulcer on the leg of civilization which betrays the impurity of its blood.
It behoves us on the threshold of this inquiry to distinguish between accidental impoverishment, and pauperism as an organic malady, which develops, as in Great Britain, pari passu with population and even with the increase of wealth.
An earthquake devastates Peru, prostrates its cities and destroys its harvests: its inhabitants suffer the greatest privations, but having ready access to the soil in that prolific climate, little or no chronic pauperism will result. The white population of our immense South has been recently reduced by war to an extreme distress. Flanders, Germany, France, the most prosperous countries of Europe, have been scourged still more severely; yet industrious generations suffice to efface the trace of war. Pestilences, which decimate the population of a country, yet respect property, and do not pauperize the survivors, but the contrary; for they have freer access to the means of production. But why is it that Great Britain—the old monarch of the seas, with her predatory grasp on the neck of the Indies, with all her stupendous machinery of production, and fearing no enemy from abroad—is rotting with pauperism amid peace and wealth, perishing like an old eagle, condemned to starvation by the excessive curvature of his overlapping beak? Behold our mother country, she whose laws and institutions we are now in the main reproducing, she whose crimes against charity we reorganize by exposing our soil to the cupidity of speculators, whose pauperism we inherit by emigration, and whose fate we must share, as certainly as the same causes produce the same effects, unless we reform in our youth.
One hope, one faith, one path of social salvation, remains for us both and for all the world—namely, cooperative Christian association, that, baffling pride and greed, restores to the workman the produce of his work, and renders the practical love of our neighbor the means of satisfaction for our own needs, whether of the senses or the soul. Now, Rochdale and its kindred co-operative enterprises, whose success is so encouraging in England; the masons and other artisan associations of Paris, like the trades co-operations of Barcelona and the old Italian cities; even the Hanseatic League, so monastic in its discipline—all proceed in direct line from the Columbans, the Cistercians, and other religious orders of the Benedictine group, who initiated the agricultural Christianity of Europe. The seed sown in the mediaeval heart did not rot amid that dissolution of society which is called the Reformation. It has survived the oppressions of aristocracy and capital no longer tempered by monastic orders; it has survived the internecine competition of our modern proletariat; and now the same organic type, under new names, puts forth its leaf, buds, blooms, and fruits.
"If we look," says Balmes, "at the different systems which ferment in minds devoted to the study of pauperism and its remedies, we shall always find there association under one form or another. Now, association has been at all times one of the favorite principles of Catholicity, which, by proclaiming unity in faith, proclaims unity in all things. If we examine the religious institutions characteristic of Europe in its darkest period of ignorance, corruption, and social dissolution, we observe that the monks of the west were not content with sanctifying themselves; from the first they influenced society. Society had need of strong efforts to preserve its life in the terrible crisis through which it had to pass. The secret of strength is in the union of individual forces, in association. This secret has been taught to European society as by a revelation from heaven."
Sufficient attention has not perhaps been paid to the merit of the industrial organization, introduced into Europe from the earliest ages, and which became more and more diffused after the twelfth century. We allude to the trades-unions and other associations, which, established under the influence of the Catholic religion, had pious foundations for the celebration of their feasts, and for assisting each other in their necessities.
We must recognize here that highly effective organizations of labor had taken root in Europe, either by the initiative of the religious orders, (to whom the north owed its civilization,) or in the congenial atmosphere of Catholicity; that in this organization, co-operation, the Christian spirit, had supplanted or prevented internecine competition, the secular spirit; that this system of labor rendered pauperism impossible and elevated the working classes to a plane of virtue, of dignity and prosperity elsewhere unattained; that it had conquered and kept its ground against feudal oppression and aggression, by a series of bloodless battles in which wisdom and patience, self-control and forethought, perseverance and the love of honorable uses, vindicated the political superiority of the Christian principle; finally that it possessed within itself vigorous reproductive or propagative forces, and had indeed become the manifest destiny of Europe at that epoch when schism in the church sowed everywhere hatreds and discord, and denatured civilization, substituting the ideal of individualism for that of solidarity. Hence, incoherence and destructive competition alike in the market as in the church. For labor, its result is pauperism; for piety, despair.
Besides the religious motives which brought property into the hands of the monks, there is another title, remarks Balmes, which has always been regarded as one of the most just and legitimate. The monks cultivated waste lands, dried up marshes, constructed roads, restrained rivers within their beds, and built bridges over them. Over a considerable portion of Europe, which was in a state of rude nature, the monasteries founded here and there have been centres of agriculture and the arts of social life. Is not he who reclaims the wilderness, cultivates it, and fills it with inhabitants, worthy of preserving large possessions there?
The religious and moral influence of the monks contributed greatly, in early European epochs, to the respect of property as well as persons against attacks which were so frequent in the turbulent ages succeeding the overthrow of the Roman empire by barbarian nations, that in some countries almost every castle was a den of robbers, from which its chief overlooked the country and sallied forth to collect spoils.
The man who is constantly obliged to defend his own is also constantly led to usurp the property of others: the first thing to do to remedy so great an evil was to locate and fix the population by means of agriculture, and to accustom them to respect property, not only by reasons drawn from private interest, but also by the sight of large domains belonging to establishments regarded as inviolable, and against which a hand could not be raised without sacrilege. Thus religious ideas were connected with social ones, and they slowly prepared an organization which was to be completed in more peaceable times.
It is to the protection afforded to farmers by the monasteries in retired places that we owe the dissemination of the people in rural districts, which would have been otherwise impossible. Those who have lived in a country convulsed by war, like our South, can best appreciate this.
Mallet (History of the Swiss, vol. i. p. 105, a Protestant authority) tells us that "the monks softened by their instructions the ferocious manners of the people, and opposed their credit to the tyranny of the nobility, who knew no other occupation than war, and grievously oppressed their neighbors. On this account the government of monks was preferred to theirs. The people sought them for judges, (that is, as umpires.) It was a usual saying that it was better to be governed by the bishop's crosier than the monarch's sceptre."
The kindness and charities performed by the religious orders, remarks Cobbett, (History of the Protestant Reformation,) made them objects of great veneration, and the rich made them in time the channels of their benevolence to the poor. Kings, queens, princes, princesses, nobles, and gentlefolk founded monasteries and convents, that is, erected the buildings and endowed them with estates for their maintenance. Others—some in the way of atonement for their sins, and some from a pious motive, gave while alive, or bequeathed at their death, lands, houses, or money to monasteries already erected. So that in time the monasteries became the owners of great landed estates; they had the lordship over innumerable manors, and had a tenantry of prodigious extent, especially in England, where the monastic orders were always held in great esteem, in consequence of Christianity having been introduced into the kingdom by a community of monks.
One of the greatest advantages attending the monasteries in the political economy of the country was that they of necessity caused the revenues of a large part of the lands to be spent on the spot whence those revenues arose. The hospitals and all the other establishments of the kind had the same tendency, so that the revenues of the land were diffused immediately among the people at large. We all know how the state of a parish changes for the worse when a great land-owner quits his mansion in it, and leaves that mansion shut up, and what an effect this has upon the poor-rates. What, then, must have been the effect of twenty monasteries in every county, expending constantly a large part of their incomes on the spot? If Ireland had still her seven hundred or eight hundred monastic institutions, there would be no periodical famines and typhus fevers there; no need of sunset or sunrise laws shutting the people up at night to prevent insurrections; no projects for preventing the increase of families; no schemes for getting rid of a "surplus population;" no occasion for the people to live on third-rate potatoes—not enough, at that; for their nakedness, their hunger, their dying of hundreds with starvation, while their ports are crowded with ships carrying provisions from their shores, and while an army is fed in the country, the business of which army is to keep the starving people quiet.
Sir Walter Scott thus exposes the nonsense of the "economists on the non-influence of absenteeism." In the year 1817, when the poor stood so much in need of employment, a friend asked the Duke of Buccleugh why his grace did not prepare to go to London in the spring? By way of answer, the duke showed him a list of laborers then employed in improvements on his different estates; the number of whom, exclusive of his regular establishments, amounted to nine hundred and forty-seven men, who, with those whose support depended on their wages, would reckon several thousand; many of whom must have found it difficult to obtain subsistence had the duke not foregone the privilege of his rank in order to provide with more convenience for them. The result of such conduct is twice blessed, both in the means which it employs and in the end which it attains in the general economy of the country. This anecdote forms a good answer to those theorists who pretend that the residence of proprietors on their estates is, a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of the district. Had the duke been residing and spending his revenues elsewhere, one-half of these poor people would have wanted employment and food, and would probably have been little comforted by any metaphysical arguments upon population which could have been presented to their investigation.
"Many such things may be daily heard," says Howitt, "of the present Duke of Portland."
The monks, whose religious character gave them an extraordinary security, as they were the first restorers of agriculture, so they were the first improvers of our gardens. Their long pilgrimage from one holy shrine to another, through France, Germany, and Italy, made them early acquainted with a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs and various fruits, and amongst the ruins of abbeys we still find a tribe of plants that they have naturalized.
Lingard, writing of the consequences of the "Reformation," tells us that "within the realm poverty and discontent generally prevailed. The extension of inclosures, and the new practice of letting lands at rack-rents, had driven from their homes numerous families whose fathers had occupied the same farms for several generations, and the increasing multitudes of the poor began to resort to the more populous towns in search of that relief which had been formerly distributed at the gates of the monasteries. The reformation preachers of the day—Knox, Lever, Gilpin, Latimer—avow that the sufferings of the indigent were treated with indifference by the hard-heartedness of the rich; while, in the pursuit of gain, the most barefaced frauds were justified, robbers and murderers escaping punishment by the partiality of juries or corruptions of judges. They tell us that church-livings were given to laymen or converted to the use of the patrons," etc.
In dealing with that shameful pauperism, the annual reports of which ring in the ears of the British government—"mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" which presaged the fall of Babylon—it behoves us to distinguish the victim poor and the fighting poor. The fighting poor exasperate the evils of poverty by ineffective insurrections against the organized government of the rich. Protesting against injustice and maladministration by strikes, which they cannot sustain, and which soon leave them at the mercy of the employers they have defied, they provoke the severity of the laws by disorderly conduct, by poaching, robbery, arson, etc., necessitating the maintenance of a numerous and rigorous police, and even of standing armies. These withdraw great numbers from productive industry, and double the expenses of government, which must, at last, be borne by the working classes, however indirect the methods of taxation. It is true that the aristocracy in command of armies could enrich England by the spoil of India, or Spain by that of Mexico and Peru; but these ill-gotten gains have cursed alike the robber and the robbed. No country has ever maintained a real prosperity except by home production and the contentment of its producing classes. The fighting poor, not organized in armies under the discipline and pay of governments, but remaining an integral part of the people, are intimately leagued with the victim poor by family ties, and even by the imminence of a common fate, since a wound, a fit of illness, a fraud, the prolonged lack of work, or other misfortune, may depress them into pauperism. This class of poor is the most dangerous element of a nation, and costs in waste and in precautions a great deal more than the sum expended in pauper relief. An administrative method which conciliates this class with the rich, with the established government and public order, is evidently master of the situation. This end has been achieved by the religious organization of labor.
What the Catholic Church once did for England, under military feudalism, she can do again, and more, because the present financial and industrial feudalism is pacific in its tendencies and susceptible of being harmonized with the interests of the church and of labor by co-operative association; whereas the former feudalism existed for war, was essentially opposed to the spirit of Christianity, to the honor of productive industry, and the prosperity of the people. Now, what is cure for Great Britain may be prevention for America, which undergoes, like England, the yoke of industrial feudalism. Allowing for the category of accidents, for relief needed by the infirm, etc., vastly the larger proportion of pauperism remains to be prevented by opportune employments, of which the soil serves as the basis. Let the religious orders reacquire everywhere, by all legitimate means, the control of large bodies of land, which they shall withhold from speculation, which they shall either administrate by leases or by direct culture, and on which they shall establish the arts of fabrication. Then they may subdue the world with its own weapons, commanding capital and labor, conciliating them in Christian action, and producing wealth without sacrificing the producer to the product. They would lease farms or hire workmen according to local and temporary expediency, but in either case they would constitute, as of old, a bulwark between the people and speculators, and they would reattach the masses by intimate household ties. This begins as of old with the voluntary assumption of social burdens, especially with the care of the sick and infirm. By organizing a high order of attractive social life at its rural institutions, where it is so much easier to find healthful work for either sex and every age, the church will counteract that destructive fascination which the city now exerts over the country-folk. In restoring and upholding an order of yeomanry, subject to its general administration of agriculture, but free in a scope of action sufficient to content them, within a predetermined plan, the Catholic Church would counterpoise the present league of the Church of England with its aristocracy, as its corporate philanthropies would counterpoise the corporate selfishness of simple business firms.
Pursuing the noble initiative which the Jesuit order took in the work of education, especially in Paraguay, it remains for the church to second the views of American legislation in the foundation of art and labor-schools, or agricultural and polytechnic institutes, for the support of which public lands were appropriated in 1842, although Minnesota alone has had the wisdom to protest against the malversation of this fund to the comparatively sterile work of our common schools.
It is not by any means an unreasonable assumption that, after a few years of experience and discipline for the teachers, art and labor-schools, embracing all the departments of rural and domestic economy with religious and social training, may be made self-supporting. From that day their popularity will be assured, and pauperism will be well-nigh eradicated, together with the vices and crimes which it engenders. The diploma of such an institution might confer either a lease of land or an appointment to some office of social use and profit. The administration of the schools and charities of the church would supply a great many such places.
We shall not ask whether it be not expedient and just to oblige every family, in so far as it may be competent, to provide for its own poor, because modern civilization has not the patriarchal basis, the family has no such collective unity or substantial existence among us, as formerly in Palestine, or still in the Arab douar. At most can the family be held responsible for its minors, since its authority does not extend beyond this class; but we remark that the largest proportion of pauperism is due to the neglect of efficient education during the years of minority; so that with the actual population of the world, and even in the most thickly settled countries, there need be no such thing as pauperism, if the productive energies of the whole people received during childhood and youth a practical direction; while the diplomas of our labor and art-schools conferred valid titles to the use of the soil or other means of remunerative employment. If to organize such education for the children of poor families be regarded as beyond the province of our governments or secular powers, how much more extravagant must this seem for the children of the rich, who are, however, exposed every day to become poor, and whose wasteful idleness subtracts so much from the possible resources of mankind? Is it not self-evident that the influence of religious organizations has every advantage over secular authority in reforming education while rendering it universal? At once personal and corporate, they can take an initiative which is refused to governments or which governments decline. Now, as in the middle ages, in civilized as in savage or barbarous states, they can restore to labor its religious honor, they alone can successfully combat the idleness and vices of fashionable dissipation, they can substitute the arbitrament of Christian equity for that of fire and sword, and while pouring oil on our troubled waters, they can teach by example as well as by precept, those wholesome restraints which prevent the increase of a local population faster than the means of its subsistence.
If pauperism in this country is chiefly exotic, it is none the less real, and none the less afflictive or disastrous. If an obvious remedy exist in our vast tracts of unoccupied land, it is so much the more urgent to organize while directing the tide of emigration by the spirit of Christianity. By colonizing emigrants under the guidance of religious orders we obviate the twofold evils of their pauperism and their isolation.