COMFORT AND POVERTY.
A number of friendly critics have insisted that of course the Thirteenth Century was far behind later times in the comfort of the people. Poverty is supposed to have been almost universal. Doubtless many of the people were then very poor. Personally, I doubt if there was as much poverty, that is, misery due to actual want of necessaries of life, as there is at the present time. Certainly it was not emphasized by having close to it, constantly rendering the pains of poverty poignant by contrast, the luxury of the modern time. They had not the large city, and people in the country do not suffer as much as people in the city. In recent years, investigations of poverty in England have been appalling in the statistics that they have presented. Mr. Robert Hunter, in his book Poverty, has furnished us with some details that make one feel that our generation should be the last to say [{473}] that the Thirteenth Century was behind in progress, because so many of the people were so poor. Ruskin once said that the ideal of the great nation is one wherein there must be "as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human creatures." I am sure that, tried by this standard, the Thirteenth Century in Merrie England is ahead of any other generation and, above all, far in advance of our recent generations.
By contrast to what we know of the merrie English men and women of the Thirteenth Century, I would quote Mr. Hunter's paragraphs on the Poverty of the Modern English People. He says:
"A few years ago, England did not know the extent of her own poverty. Economists and writers gave opinions of all kinds. Some said conditions were 'bad,' others said such statements were misleading; and here they were, tilting at each other, backward and forward, in the most ponderous and serious way, until Mr. Booth, a business man, undertook to get at the facts. No one, even the most radical economist, would have dared to have estimated the poverty of London as extending to 30 per cent of the people (as it proved). The extent of poverty—the number of underfed, underclothed in insanitary houses—was greater than could reasonably have been estimated."
Some of the details of this investigation by Mr. Booth were so startling that some explanation had to be found. They could not deny, in the face of Mr. Booth's facts, but they set up the claim that the conditions in London were exceptional. Then Mr. Rountree made an investigation in York with precisely the same results. More than one in four of the population was in poverty. To quote Mr. Hunter once more:
"As has been said, it was not until Mr. Charles Booth published, in 1891, the results of his exhaustive inquiries that the actual conditions of poverty in London became known. About 1,000,000 people, or about thirty per cent of the entire population of London, were found to be unable to obtain the necessaries for a sound livelihood. They were in a state of poverty, living in conditions, if not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it. In many districts, considerably more than half of the population were either in distress or on the verge of distress. When these results were made public, the more conservative economists gave it as their opinion that the conditions in London were, of course, exceptional, and that it would be unsafe to make any generalizations for the whole of England on the basis of Mr. Booth's figures for London. About ten years later, Mr. B. S. Rountree, incited by the work of Mr. Booth, undertook a similar inquiry in his native town, York, a small provincial city, in most ways typical of the smaller towns of England. In a large volume in which the results are published, it is shown that the poverty in York was only slightly less extensive than that of London. In the summary, Mr. Rountree compares the conditions of London with those of York. His comments are as follows: 'The proportions arrived at for the total populations living in poverty in London and York respectively were as under:
London—30.7 per cent
York—27.84 per cent
The proportion of the population living in poverty in York may be regarded as practically the same as in London, especially when we remember that Mr. Booth's information was gathered in 1887-1892, a period of only average trade prosperity, whilst the York figures were collected in 1899, when trade was unusually prosperous.'"
He continues: "We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty in London as exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation shows that the proportion of poverty in London is practically equalled in what may be regarded as a typical provincial town, we are faced by the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent of the town populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty."