Result of international wars, and source of intestine wars—those irruptions of organized crime—pauperism is the ulcer on the leg of civilization which betrays the impurity of its blood.
It behoves us on the threshold of this inquiry to distinguish between accidental impoverishment, and pauperism as an organic malady, which develops, as in Great Britain, pari passu with population and even with the increase of wealth.
An earthquake devastates Peru, prostrates its cities and destroys its harvests: its inhabitants suffer the greatest privations, but having ready access to the soil in that prolific climate, little or no chronic pauperism will result. The white population of our immense South has been recently reduced by war to an extreme distress. Flanders, Germany, France, the most prosperous countries of Europe, have been scourged still more severely; yet industrious generations suffice to efface the trace of war. Pestilences, which decimate the population of a country, yet respect property, and do not pauperize the survivors, but the contrary; for they have freer access to the means of production. But why is it that Great Britain—the old monarch of the seas, with her predatory grasp on the neck of the Indies, with all her stupendous machinery of production, and fearing no enemy from abroad—is rotting with pauperism amid peace and wealth, perishing like an old eagle, condemned to starvation by the excessive curvature of his overlapping beak? Behold our mother country, she whose laws and institutions we are now in the main reproducing, she whose crimes against charity we reorganize by exposing our soil to the cupidity of speculators, whose pauperism we inherit by emigration, and whose fate we must share, as certainly as the same causes produce the same effects, unless we reform in our youth.
One hope, one faith, one path of social salvation, remains for us both and for all the world—namely, cooperative Christian association, that, baffling pride and greed, restores to the workman the produce of his work, and renders the practical love of our neighbor the means of satisfaction for our own needs, whether of the senses or the soul. Now, Rochdale and its kindred co-operative enterprises, whose success is so encouraging in England; the masons and other artisan associations of Paris, like the trades co-operations of Barcelona and the old Italian cities; even the Hanseatic League, so monastic in its discipline—all proceed in direct line from the Columbans, the Cistercians, and other religious orders of the Benedictine group, who initiated the agricultural Christianity of Europe. The seed sown in the mediaeval heart did not rot amid that dissolution of society which is called the Reformation. It has survived the oppressions of aristocracy and capital no longer tempered by monastic orders; it has survived the internecine competition of our modern proletariat; and now the same organic type, under new names, puts forth its leaf, buds, blooms, and fruits.
"If we look," says Balmes, "at the different systems which ferment in minds devoted to the study of pauperism and its remedies, we shall always find there association under one form or another. Now, association has been at all times one of the favorite principles of Catholicity, which, by proclaiming unity in faith, proclaims unity in all things. If we examine the religious institutions characteristic of Europe in its darkest period of ignorance, corruption, and social dissolution, we observe that the monks of the west were not content with sanctifying themselves; from the first they influenced society. Society had need of strong efforts to preserve its life in the terrible crisis through which it had to pass. The secret of strength is in the union of individual forces, in association. This secret has been taught to European society as by a revelation from heaven."
Sufficient attention has not perhaps been paid to the merit of the industrial organization, introduced into Europe from the earliest ages, and which became more and more diffused after the twelfth century. We allude to the trades-unions and other associations, which, established under the influence of the Catholic religion, had pious foundations for the celebration of their feasts, and for assisting each other in their necessities.
We must recognize here that highly effective organizations of labor had taken root in Europe, either by the initiative of the religious orders, (to whom the north owed its civilization,) or in the congenial atmosphere of Catholicity; that in this organization, co-operation, the Christian spirit, had supplanted or prevented internecine competition, the secular spirit; that this system of labor rendered pauperism impossible and elevated the working classes to a plane of virtue, of dignity and prosperity elsewhere unattained; that it had conquered and kept its ground against feudal oppression and aggression, by a series of bloodless battles in which wisdom and patience, self-control and forethought, perseverance and the love of honorable uses, vindicated the political superiority of the Christian principle; finally that it possessed within itself vigorous reproductive or propagative forces, and had indeed become the manifest destiny of Europe at that epoch when schism in the church sowed everywhere hatreds and discord, and denatured civilization, substituting the ideal of individualism for that of solidarity. Hence, incoherence and destructive competition alike in the market as in the church. For labor, its result is pauperism; for piety, despair.
Besides the religious motives which brought property into the hands of the monks, there is another title, remarks Balmes, which has always been regarded as one of the most just and legitimate. The monks cultivated waste lands, dried up marshes, constructed roads, restrained rivers within their beds, and built bridges over them. Over a considerable portion of Europe, which was in a state of rude nature, the monasteries founded here and there have been centres of agriculture and the arts of social life. Is not he who reclaims the wilderness, cultivates it, and fills it with inhabitants, worthy of preserving large possessions there?
The religious and moral influence of the monks contributed greatly, in early European epochs, to the respect of property as well as persons against attacks which were so frequent in the turbulent ages succeeding the overthrow of the Roman empire by barbarian nations, that in some countries almost every castle was a den of robbers, from which its chief overlooked the country and sallied forth to collect spoils.
The man who is constantly obliged to defend his own is also constantly led to usurp the property of others: the first thing to do to remedy so great an evil was to locate and fix the population by means of agriculture, and to accustom them to respect property, not only by reasons drawn from private interest, but also by the sight of large domains belonging to establishments regarded as inviolable, and against which a hand could not be raised without sacrilege. Thus religious ideas were connected with social ones, and they slowly prepared an organization which was to be completed in more peaceable times.