The great task of humanity is the abolition of poverty. The great benefactors of humanity are the great industrial organizers of this day, because, in spite of individual selshness,{sic} they are planning production on a scale that will in the end provide for all.
It is worth while to discuss and to realize what real poverty means. If we can realize its meaning every one of us must be more anxious to relieve, as far as we can, the poverty around us, and especially anxious to work for the social betterment that shall one day wipe out poverty forever
Poverty means dirt.
The thoughtless and comfortable have a way of saying: "The poor might at least be clean." But cleanliness is a LUXURY; it demands leisure and peace of mind, as well as bathtub, soap, hot water and good plumbing. The very poor cannot be clean.
Poverty means ignorance, and it means ignorance handed down from father to son.
Poverty means drunkenness. The pennies of POOR men and POOR women pay for more than half the vile whiskey, gin and other poisons that men buy to help them forget.
Poverty and its sister, Ignorance, fill the jails and the insane asylums.
Poverty is the mother of disease, and it fills the hospitals.
Tens of thousands of consumptives alone are murdered every year by poverty. They are too poor to do that which is required to save their lives. ——
The great men of the world do not emerge from poverty, from squalor.