Extreme poverty is a scourge that draws its victims down from depths to lower depths; that makes life a bitter struggle for the bare crumbs that hold body and soul together. When these are not forthcoming it drives the weak, despairing struggler to crime in order to keep himself from starving, or if he is still too proud to steal, to beg, or to go to the poorhouse he ends his life, rather than wait for the slow cruel process of starvation to quench it out. Every year poverty claims its tens of thousands of innocent victims among the little children who die of disease and neglect in damp, foul cellars where the sun never enters. It sweeps them into mills and factories where, robbed of the rights of childhood, they become warped and twisted men and women, full of bitterness, discontent, unrest and unsatisfied ambitions and longings. It drives multitudes to crime, to insanity, to death. In short, poverty is responsible for more ignorance and crime, more discontent and unhappiness, more suicides and ruined ambitions, more wrecked hopes and homes than almost anything else. Verily "the destruction of the poor is their poverty."
If we are to progress as a race, as a civilization, we must, emphatically, drive this crushing poverty disease from our midst. Instead of lauding its blessings, as some do, it is our duty to get away from it, and to help others to do so.
The poverty disease, the poverty curse, is not a decree of Providence. It is largely the result of ignorance. Every human being on this earth could be living in comfort if they knew the powers locked up in themselves and were willing to work and make the best use of them. If the poverty antidotes were as generally known as are the poison antidotes there would be no poor people.
Human beings in the aggregate are in much the same position regarding the poverty antitoxin as the medical profession in regard to newly discovered antitoxin for some terrible disease. Physicians do not know how to apply it safely and effectively, and until practice has established its great value its use is limited. When the knowledge and the use of the poverty remedy become general the disease will be conquered.
As the race becomes more intelligent and better educated we eliminate a multitude of conditions to which people formerly thought they were born, and that there was no escape from them. Many evils which have been conquered by science and education were at one time regarded as scourges sent by God to punish us for our sins, to chasten us. Diseases which struck terror to the hearts of human beings a hundred years ago, and from which they fled in horror, are not feared at all to-day. Intelligence and science have mastered the great plagues which in the Middle and Dark Ages carried off their terrified victims by the million. We have no fear of those plagues to-day, because we have obliterated their causes. We know now that the prevention of those frightful epidemics is merely a matter of sanitation, scientific hygiene, intelligent, healthful living. We know that they were scourges forged by ignorance and not "judgments" of God.
Is it not reasonable to believe that, having conquered so many of the enemies of the race by intelligent thought and scientific methods, we can conquer them all by similar means? Poverty is a plague, a mental disease which can be conquered by intelligent scientific methods. We know its causes and we can remove them. They are largely mental.
It is not necessary to call in a physician to treat the poverty disease. The sufferer can be his own physician. He can heal himself. If you are afflicted with the disease, and want to know how to get rid of it, read the next chapter.