A grown-up person only requires enough nourishment to repair the waste, wear and tear incident to the daily activities of brain and muscle. A child not only requires this, but it requires added nourishment for the growth and development of all the tissues of its body. No wonder we are raising up a class of people in this city which I have called in another place “Newyorkitics.” No wonder there is an ever-increasing procession of broken-down brains and nervous systems heading for the hospitals for insane. No wonder that crime is on the increase. What better can be expected from adults whose brains and nerves have been starved and stunted from birth?
But what exactly is poverty? Destitution of property; indigence; want of convenient means of subsistence; need. That is what the dictionary says poverty is. Want of convenient means of subsistence is the want of some one or all of the five chemical substances called proximate principles, which we take and must have to sustain animal life. The continual absence of these chemical substances from the human stomach, together with lack of clothing sufficient to protect the body against the elements, causes physical pain or suffering with degeneration and final death of the animal body. This is a literal scientific definition of the word poverty as applied to the animal or material man.
The adulteration of food which is carried on to such an alarming extent in the United States is an important factor in this poverty or underfeeding question. Even those who are able to buy a sufficient quantity of food have no assurance that the quality is such as will properly nourish their bodies.
When you satisfy the cravings of hunger by putting into the human stomach watered milk, or cheese which is part wax, or sugar mixed with plaster of Paris, or chocolate which contains only a suggestion of the rich cacao beans, or any of the adulterated articles of food for sale especially in the poorer sections of the city, you not only tax the system to digest and dispose of a quantity of useless and maybe poisonous material, but every tissue in the body is thereby robbed of its proper nourishment.
It is as much, or more, poverty and underfeeding to fill the stomach with material which does not contain the five proximate principles, i.e., nourishment, as not to fill it at all. The laws against substitution and adulteration of human food and drink ought to be more stringent than the laws against horse stealing. Yet, as I am informed, all efforts at such legislation are invariably met with the cry that it will interfere with the business interests of the country. Here, as in so many other instances, when an attempt is made to secure common justice and protection for the lives and property and rights of the plain people, we run up against the business interests. The curse of this country today is that everything, even human life, must be sacrificed when necessary to the business interests.
The industry captains are killing and maiming the people now just as the military captains used to do, and for the same objects—to satisfy greed and selfishness.
The negro slave in the South in slavery days was further removed from poverty and the fear of poverty than any man I have ever known. When his day’s work was finished he came home from the field or the shop and he found a substantial, well-cooked dinner awaiting him. After dinner he went to his comfortable cabin and sat before a blazing log fire, or, in warm weather, he sat out under the stars, fanned by the night winds. His wife and children were nearly always around him, as were his companions, the other slaves belonging to his master and the plantation.
This man did not have a single care or responsibility on earth. He did not have to meet a grinding landlord next day demanding rent. He did not have to cudgel his brains to find a way to meet a note due next week. He did not have to pay for food, clothes, light and heat for himself and his family. That pang of anguish so familiar to us all when we think of the possibility of our loved ones suffering from want and the fear of want when we are gone never wrung the heart of that black man. Child labor as it exists under the present system was unknown to the children of the black slaves. “Over the hills to the poor-house,” when age and decrepitude had made him no longer useful, had no terrors for the black slave. The “system” of slavery made it perfectly certain that his owner would provide food, clothes and shelter for him in his old days, and for his children, no matter what happened. This black man, slave as he was, had a better guarantee against poverty and the fear of poverty for himself and family than any life insurance company can give. Even Mr. Tom Lawson could not find fault with the security of this policy.
Another thing the slave father did not have to worry about was sickness in his family. When one of his children became ill an ambulance from a charity hospital did not back up in front of the negro quarters, cart the child off to become one patient more in Ward No. ——, and serve as “material” for a clinical lecture while it lived, and as “material” for the dissecting-table after it was dead. No, nothing of the kind happened. When the slave became ill the best medical skill and nursing were provided, and, if need be, the patient was taken to the “big house” where the master lived so the mistress could superintend the treatment, and in case of death the body was put in a neat coffin, and a procession composed of all the blacks and whites on the plantation followed the remains to the colored graveyard on the hill, burial services were read, a hymn sung and the body lowered to its final resting-place. This is a glimpse at the condition of the slave in life and death in slavery days. I am not putting in a brief in favor of chattel slavery. I was born an abolitionist. My father was a slave-owner and my early life was spent in the midst of it, yet I abhorred the system as a child, and that abhorrence has grown with years. But I am now writing about poverty, and my point is: that chattel slavery as it existed in the South is the only state of society I know of in which poverty and the fear of poverty among the workers or producing class were absolutely abolished by law.
Under the old system the negro was a slave, you say. So he was. But if I read Mr. Hunter’s book aright, the laborer under the present industrial system is also a slave. The laborer has a vote now and the slave did not. Yes, but the slave had a full dinner-pail all the time and the white voting laborer has not. The comparative value between his vote and a full dinner-pail in the mind of the white laborer under the present system was demonstrated in the election of 1896 and 1900, when he gladly gave his vote to the Republican Party for the mere promise of a full dinner-pail.