Our subject will be taken between the medium we have spoken of as answer to the wise man's prayer, and that destitution which we must style infamous, either to the individual or to the society whose vices have caused that stage of poverty, in which there is no certainty, and often no probability, of work or bread from day to day,—in which cleanliness and all the decencies of life are impossible, and the natural human feelings are turned to gall because the man finds himself on this earth in a far worse situation than the brute. In this stage there is no ideal, and from its abyss, if the unfortunates look up to Heaven, or the state of things as they ought to be, it is with suffocating gasps which demand relief or death. This degree of poverty is common, as we all know; but we who do not share it have no right to address those who do from our own standard, till we have placed their feet on our own level. Accursed is he who does not long to have this so—to take out at least the physical hell from this world! Unblest is he who is not seeking, either by thought or act, to effect this poor degree of amelioration in the circumstances of his race.
We take the subject of our sketch, then, somewhere between the abjectly poor and those in moderate circumstances. What we have to say may apply to either sex, and to any grade in this division of the human family, from the hodman and washerwoman up to the hard-working, poorly-paid lawyer clerk, schoolmaster, or scribe.
The advantages of such a position are many. In the first place, you belong, inevitably, to the active and suffering part of the world. You know the ills that try men's souls and bodies. You cannot creep into a safe retreat, arrogantly to judge, or heartlessly to forget, the others. They are always before you; you see the path stained by their bleeding feet; stupid and flinty, indeed, must you be, if you can hastily wound, or indolently forbear to aid them. Then, as to yourself, you know what your resources are; what you can do, what bear; there is small chance for you to escape a well-tempered modesty. Then again, if you find power in yourself to endure the trial, there is reason and reality in some degree of self-reliance. The moral advantages of such training can scarcely fail to amount to something; and as to the mental, that most important chapter, how the lives of men are fashioned and transfused by the experience of passion and the development of thought, presents new sections at every turn, such as the distant dilettante's opera-glasses will never detect,—to say nothing of the exercise of mere faculty, which, though insensible in its daily course, leads to results of immense importance.
But the evils, the disadvantages, the dangers, how many, how imminent! True, indeed, they are so. There is the early bending of the mind to the production of marketable results, which must hinder all this free play of intelligence, and deaden the powers that craved instruction. There is the callousness produced by the sight of more misery than it is possible to relieve; the heart, at first so sensitive, taking refuge in a stolid indifference against the pangs of sympathetic pain, it had not force to bear. There is the perverting influence of uncongenial employments, undertaken without or against choice, continued at unfit hours and seasons, till the man loses his natural relations with summer and winter, day and night, and has no sense more for natural beauty and joy. There is the mean providence, the perpetual caution to guard against ill, instead of the generous freedom of a mind which expects good to ensue from all good actions. There is the sad doubt whether it will do to indulge the kindly impulse, the calculation of dangerous chances, and the cost between the loving impulse and its fulfilment. Yes; there is bitter chance of narrowness, meanness, and dulness on this path, and it requires great natural force, a wise and large view of life taken at an early age, or fervent trust in God, to evade them.
It is astonishing to see the poor, no less than the rich, the slaves of externals. One would think that, where the rich man once became aware of the worthlessness of the mere trappings of life from the weariness of a spirit that found itself entirely dissatisfied after pomp and self-indulgence, the poor man would learn this a hundred times from the experience how entirely independent of them is all that is intrinsically valuable in our life. But, no! The poor man wants dignity, wants elevation of spirit. It is his own servility that forges the fetters that enslave him. Whether he cringe to, or rudely defy, the man in the coach and handsome coat, the cause and effect are the same. He is influenced by a costume and a position. He is not firmly rooted in the truth that only in so far as outward beauty and grandeur are representative of the mind of the possessor, can they count for any thing at all. O, poor man! you are poor indeed, if you feel yourself so; poor if you do not feel that a soul born of God, a mind capable of scanning the wondrous works of time and space, and a flexible body for its service, are the essential riches of a man, and all he needs to make him the equal of any other man. You are mean, if the possession of money or other external advantages can make you envy or shrink from a being mean enough to value himself upon such. Stand where you may, O man, you cannot be noble and rich if your brow be not broad and steadfast, if your eye beam not with a consciousness of inward worth, of eternal claims and hopes which such trifles cannot at all affect. A man without this majesty is ridiculous amid the flourish and decorations procured by money, pitiable in the faded habiliments of poverty. But a man who is a man, a woman who is a woman, can never feel lessened or embarrassed because others look ignorantly on such matters. If they regret the want of these temporary means of power, it must be solely because it fetters their motions, deprives them of leisure and desired means of improvement, or of benefiting those they love or pity.
I have heard those possessed of rhetoric and imaginative tendency declare that they should have been outwardly great and inwardly free, victorious poets and heroes, if fate had allowed them a certain quantity of dollars. I have found it impossible to believe them. In early youth, penury may have power to freeze the genial current of the soul, and prevent it, during one short life, from becoming sensible of its true vocation and destiny. But if it has become conscious of these, and yet there is not advance in any and all circumstances, no change would avail.
No, our poor man must begin higher! He must, in the first place, really believe there is a God who ruleth—a fact to which few men vitally bear witness, though most are ready to affirm it with the lips.
2. He must sincerely believe that rank and wealth
| "are but the guinea's stamp; |
| The man's the gold;"— |
take his stand on his claims as a human being, made in God's own likeness, urge them when the occasion permits, but never be so false to them as to feel put down or injured by the want of mere external advantages.