Society: Its Origin and Development

by Henry K. Rowe

DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WORK

278. The Fact of Misery.—A brief study of the conditions in which a city's toilers live and work and play makes it plain that the people have to contend with numerous difficulties. Large numbers of them are in misery, and there are few who are not living in constant fear of it. To a foreigner who did not understand America, it would seem incredible that misery should be prevalent in the midst of wealth and unbounded natural resources, when mines and factories are making record-breaking outputs, when harbors are thronged with ships and the call for workers goes across the sea. But no one who visits the tenements and alleys of the city fails to find abundant evidence of misery and want. People do not live in dark rooms and dirty surroundings from choice, sometimes as many as two thousand in a single block. They do not willingly pay a large percentage of their earnings in rent for a tenement that breeds fever and tuberculosis. They do not feed their babies on impure milk and permit their children to forage among the garbage cans because they care nothing for their young. They do not shiver without heat or lose vitality for lack of food until they have struggled for a comfortable existence to the point of exhaustion. Misery is here as it is in the Old World cities, and it leads to weakness and disease, drunkenness, vice, and crime.

279. Easy Explanations.—It is impossible to unravel completely the skein of difficulties in which the people are enmeshed, or to simplify the causes of the tangle. It is easy to blame a person's wretchedness on his individual misconduct and incompetency, to say, for example, that a man's family is sick and poor because he is intemperate. There might be truth in the charge, but it would probably not be the whole truth. It is easy to go back of the circumstance to the weak will of the man that made him a prey to impulse and appetite and kept him primitive in his habits, but that alone would not explain conditions. It is easy to charge misery upon the ignorance of the woman in the home who is wasteful of food and does not know how to provide for her family, or to charge lack of common sense to the home-makers when they try to raise six children on an income that is not enough for two. It is very common to lay all misery at the door of the capitalist who underpays labor and feels no responsibility for the life conditions of his employee. No one of these explains the presence of misery.

It is easy to propose to society a simple remedy like better housing, prohibition, or socialism, when the only correct diagnosis of conditions demands a prolonged and expensive course of treatment that involves surgical action in the social body. It is easy to raise money for charity, to endow hospitals, and to talk about made-to-order schemes for ending unemployment, poverty, and panic, but it is soon discovered that there is no panacea for the evils that infest society. Back of all personal misconduct or misfortune, of all social specific or cure-all, is the fundamental difficulty that misery exists, that its causes are complex, and that all efforts to provide efficient relief on a large scale have failed, as far as history records.

280. Poverty and Its Extent.—Misery appears commonly in the form of sickness, vice, and poverty. One of these reacts upon another, and is both the cause and the result of another. Mental and moral incapacity, ignorance of hygiene, weakness of will, habits that seem incurable, all of these produce the first two in a seemingly hopeless way; poverty appears to be incurable above the rest. It is poverty that prevents fortifying the will by increasing physical stamina and moral courage, it is poverty that drives a man; to drink or desperation, and it is poverty that prescribes the unfavorable surroundings that do so much to keep a man down. Poverty is a danger flag that indicates the probability of deeper degradation and calls for the individual or group that is better off to lend a hand. Poverty is a goad, a thorn in the flesh of society, that is pushing it along the road of social reform. Private philanthropy, legislative enactment, and much talking are being tried as experiments to find a solution of the difficulty, but theorists and practitioners are not yet in full agreement as to the way out.

There are, of course, different degrees of poverty, ranging from the helpless incompetents at the bottom of the scale to those who are in a fair degree of comfort, but who have so little laid aside for a rainy day that they live in constant fear of the poorhouse. Some struggle harder than others, and maintain an existence on or just above the poverty line—these are technically the poor. Charles Booth defines the poor as those "living in a state of struggle to obtain the necessaries of life." A few cease to struggle at all and, if they continue to live, manage it only by living on permanent charity—these are the paupers. This is a distinction that is carefully made by sociologists and is always convenient.

It is difficult to estimate the extent of poverty with any accuracy, but a few estimates of skilled observers indicate its wide extent. Charles Booth thought that thirty per cent of the people of London were on or below the poverty line. Robert Hunter has declared that in 1899 eighteen per cent of the people in New York State received aid, and that ten per cent of those who died in Manhattan received pauper burial. Alongside these statements are the various estimates of 80,000 persons in almshouses in the United States, 3,000,000 receiving public or private aid, with a total annual expense of $200,000,000. The number of those who have small resources in reserve are many times as great, but industrious, frugal, and self-respecting, they manage to take care of themselves.

281. Causes of Poverty.—It is still more difficult to speak exactly of the relative importance of the causes of poverty. Investigation of hundreds of cases in certain localities makes it plain that poverty comes through a combination of several factors, including personal incompetence or misconduct, misfortune, and the effects of environment. In Boston out of one thousand cases investigated twenty-five years ago (1890-91), twenty per cent was due to drink, a figure nearly twice as much as the average found in other large cities; nine per cent more was due to such misconduct as shiftlessness, crime, and vagrancy; while seventy per cent was owing to misfortune, including defective employment and sickness or death in the family. Five thousand families investigated at another time in New York City showed that physical disability was present in three out of four families, and unemployment was responsible in two out of three cases. In nearly half the families there was found defect of character, and in a third of the cases there was widowhood or desertion or overcrowding. Added to these were old-age incapacity, large families, and ill adjustment to environment due to recent arrival in the city.

Taking these as fair samples, it is proper to conclude that the causes commonly to be assigned to poverty are both subjective and objective, or individual and social. It was formerly customary to throw most of the blame on the poor themselves, to charge them with being lazy, intemperate, vicious, and generally incompetent, and it is useless to deny that these appear to be the direct causes in great numbers of instances, but as much of the negro and poor white trash in the South was found to be due to hookworm infection, so very many of the faults of the shiftless poor in the cities are due more indirectly to lack of nourishment, of education, and of courage. Over and over again, it may be, has the worker tried to get on better, only to get sick or lose his job just as he was improving his lot. The tendency of opinion is in the direction of putting the chief blame upon the disposition of the employer to exploit the worker, and the indifference of society to such exploitation; it is the discouraging conditions in which the working man lives, the uncertainty of employment and the high cost of living, the danger of accident and disease that constantly hangs over the laborer and his family, that devitalizes and disheartens him, and casts him before he is old on the social scrap heap.

Summing up, it is convenient to classify the causes of poverty as individual and social, including under the first head ignorance, inefficiency, illness or accident, intemperance, and immorality, and under the second unemployment, widowhood, or desertion, overcrowding and insanitation, the high cost of living versus low wages, and lack of adjustment to environment.