The majority of people are most moved by hearing that so many thousand pairs of shoes, so many articles of clothing, or so many loaves of bread are given to the needy and suffering by some benevolent agency.
The experienced friend of the poor will only grieve at such alms, unless they are accompanied with some influences to lead the recipients to take care of themselves. The worst evil in the world is not poverty or hunger, but the want of manhood or character which alms-giving directly occasions.
The English have tried alms until the kingdom seems a vast Poor-house, and the problem of Pauperism has assumed a gigantic and almost insoluble form. The nation have given everything but Education, and the result is a vast multitude of wretched persons in whom pauperism is planted like a disease of the blood—who cannot be anything but dependents and idlers.
In London alone, twenty-five million dollars per annum are expended in organized charities; yet, till the year 1871, no general system of popular education had been formed.
This country has been more fortunate and wiser. We had room and work enough, we provided education before alms, and, especially among our native-born population, have checked pauperism, as it never was checked before in any civilized community.
No one can imagine, who has not been familiar with the lowest classes, how entirely degraded a character may become, where there is an uncertain dependence on public and organized alms. The faculties of the individual are mainly bent on securing support by other means than industry. Cunning, deception, flattery, and waiting for chances, become the means of livelihood. Self-respect is lost, and with it go the best qualities of the soul. True manhood and true womanhood are eaten away. The habit of labor, and the hope and courage of a self-supporting human being, and the prudence which guards against future evils, are almost destroyed. The man becomes a dawdler and waiter on chances, and is addicted to the lowest vices; his children grow up worse than he, and make sharpness or crime a substitute for beggary. The woman is sometimes stripped of the best feelings of her sex by this dependence. Not once or twice only have we known such a woman steal the clothes from her half-starved babe, as she was delivering it over to strangers to care for. There are able-bodied men of this kind in New York who, every winter, as regularly as the snow falls, commit some petty offense, that they may be supported at public expense.
When this disease of pauperism is fairly mingled in the blood of children, their condition is almost hopeless. They will not work, or go to school, or try to learn anything useful; their faculties are all bent to the tricks of a roving, begging life; the self-respect of their sex, if girls, is lost in childhood; they are slatternly, lazy, and dissolute. If they grow up and marry, they marry men of their own kind, and breed paupers and prostitutes.
We know of an instance like this in an Alms-house in Western New York. A mother, in decent circumstances, with an infant, was driven into it by stress of poverty. Her child grew up a pauper, and both became accustomed to a life of dependence. The child—a girl—went forth when she was old enough to work, and soon returned with an illegitimate babe. She then remained with her child. This child—also a girl—grew up in like manner, and, occasionally, when old enough, also went forth to labor, but returned finally, with her illegitimate child, and at length became a common pauper and prostitute, so that, when the State Commissioner of Charity, Dr. Hoyt, visited, in his official tour, this Poor-house, he found four generations of paupers and prostitutes in one family, in this place!
The regular habitues of Alms-houses are bad enough; but it has sometimes seemed to me that the outside dependents on an irregular public charity are worse. They are usually better off than the inmates of Poor-houses, and, therefore, must deceive more to secure aid; the process of obtaining it continually degrades them, and they are tempted to leave regular industry for this unworthy means of support.
"Outdoor relief" is responsible for much of the abuses of the English pauper administration.