Further still, he has not so good a chance as the comfortable to get education and general development. A rude man, with superior abilities, in this century, will often be distanced by the well-trained man who started at birth with inferior powers. But if the rude man begin with inferior abilities, inferior circumstances, encumbered also with a load becoming rapidly more burdensome, you see under what accumulated disadvantages he labors all his life. So to the first natural and organic cause of poverty, his untoward position in society; to the second, his inferior ability; and to the third, the increase of his family, excessively rapid, we must add a fourth cause, his inferior development. An ignorant man, who is also weak in body, and besides that, starts with every disadvantage, his burdens annually increasing, may be expected to continue a poor man. It is only in most extraordinary cases that it turns out otherwise.
To these causes we must add what comes therefrom as their joint result: idleness, by which the poor waste their time; thriftlessness and improvidence, by which they lose their opportunities and squander their substance. The poor are seldom so economical as the rich; it is so with children, they spoil the furniture, soil and rend their garments, put things to a wasteful use, consume heedlessly and squander, careless of to-morrow. The poor are the children of society.
To these five causes I must add intemperance, the great bane of the miserable class. I feel no temptation to be drunken, but if I were always miserable, cold, hungry, naked, so ignorant that I did not know the result of violating God's laws, had I been surrounded from youth with the worst examples, not respected by other men, but a loathsome object in their sight, not even respecting myself, I can easily understand how the temporary madness of strong drink would be a most welcome thing. The poor are the prey of the rum-seller. As the lion in the Hebrew wilderness eateth up the wild ass, so in modern society the rum-seller and rum-maker suck the bones of the miserable poor. I never hear of a great fortune made in the liquor trade, but I think of the wives that have been made widows thereby, of the children bereft of their parents, of the fathers and mothers whom strong drink has brought down to shame, to crime, and to ruin. The history of the first barrel of rum that ever visited New England is well known. It brought some forty men before the bar of the court. The history of the last barrel can scarcely be much better.
Such are the natural and organic causes which make poverty.
With the exception of laws which allow the sale of intoxicating drink, I think there are few political causes of poverty in New England, and they are too inconsiderable to mention in so brief a sketch as this. However, there are some social causes of our permanent poverty. I do not think we have much respect for the men who do the rude work of life, however faithfully and well—little respect for work itself. The rich man is ashamed to have begun to make his fortune with his own hard hands; even if the rich man is not, his daughter is for him. I do not think we have cared much to respect the humble efforts of feeble men; not cared much to have men dear, and things cheap. It has not been thought the part of political economy, of sound legislation, or of pure Christianity, to hinder the increase of pauperism, to remove the causes of poverty, yes, the causes of crime—only to take vengeance on it when committed!
Boston is a strange place; here is energy enough to conquer half the continent in ten years; power of thought to seize and tame the Connecticut and the Merrimack; charity enough to send missionaries all over the world; but not justice enough to found a high school for her own daughters, or to forbid her richest citizens from letting bar-rooms as nurseries of poverty and crime, from opening wide gates which lead to the almshouse, the jail, the gallows, and earthly hell!
Such are the causes of poverty, organic, political, social. You may see families pass from the comfortable to the miserable class, by intemperance, idleness, wastefulness, even by feebleness of body and of mind; yet while it is common for the rich to descend into the comfortable class, solely by lack of the eminent thrift which raised their fathers thence, or because they lack the common stimulus to toil and save, it is not common for the comfortable to fall into the pit of misery in New England, except through wickedness, through idleness, or intemperance.
It is not easy to study poverty in Boston. But take a little inland town, which few persons migrate into, you will find the miserable families have commonly been so, for a hundred years; that many of them are descended from the "servants," or white slaves, brought here by our fathers; that such as fall from the comfortable classes, are commonly made miserable by their own fault, sometimes by idleness, which is certainly a sin, for any man who will not work, and persists in living, eats the bread of some other man, either begged or stolen—but chiefly by intemperance. Three fourths of the poverty of this character, is to be attributed to this cause.
Now there is a tendency in poverty to drive the ablest men to work, and so get rid of the poverty, and this I take it is the providential design thereof. Poverty, like an armed man, stalks in the rear of the social march, huge and haggard, and gaunt and grim, to scare the lazy, to goad the idle with his sword, to trample and slay the obstinate sluggard. But he treads also the feeble under his feet, for no fault of theirs, only for the misfortune of being born in the rear of society. But in poverty there is also a tendency to intimidate, to enfeeble, to benumb. The poverty of the strong man compels him to toil; but with the weak, the destruction of the poor is his poverty. An active man is awakened from his sleep by the cold; he arises and seeks more covering; the indolent, or the feeble, shiver on till morning, benumbed and enfeebled by the cold. So weakness begets weakness; poverty, poverty; intemperance, intemperance; crime, crime.