2. The social causes of poverty.
The social causes of poverty are also numerous. Unemployment is one of them, and it is in many cases due to no fault of the individual worker. More often it is the outcome of a serious imperfection in our industrial organization (see p. [417]). The underpayment of the worker, particularly the underpayment of women and children in industry, has also contributed to the problem of poverty. It means that the workers are under-nourished and therefore unable to maintain their normal strength; they are unable to save anything for use in case of sickness or old age, and hence have to fall back upon the agencies of private or public assistance whenever misfortune comes. Minimum wage laws (see p. [416]) aim to protect society from having to pay the penalty which results, both directly and indirectly, from the underpayment of labor. Unsanitary conditions of living, bad housing, and overcrowding are causes of poverty—they are social causes because society creates such conditions and permits them to continue. Unsanitary conditions lead to illness, and illness results in unemployment. But they are also, in a sense, the effects of poverty; they are conditions of life to which, under our present social and economic organization, the poor are compelled to submit by reason of their poverty.
Defects in our educational system have been productive of more poverty than people commonly imagine. It is not without significance that poverty is always widespread in those countries and those regions where illiteracy and ignorance are prevalent. Compulsory public education is one of the greatest measures for the prevention of poverty that the world has ever devised. |Relation of the school system to poverty.| While the system of public education in the United States is exceedingly efficient on the whole, it is nevertheless true that many thousands of children are growing up without enough education to ensure them a fair chance of success in life.
Some would also include our immigration policy among the social causes of poverty. Until recent years these immigrants were permitted to come in almost unrestricted numbers; they concentrated, for the most part, in large cities; they contributed to overcrowding and by their competition for labor forced down the level of wages in unskilled employments. The causes of poverty, in short, are not all traceable to the faults or misfortunes of the individual. Society as a whole is responsible for some of them.[[261]]
How We Deal with the Problem of Poverty.—The public attitude in regard to the problem of poverty has undergone a marked change during the past fifty years. For many centuries poverty was looked upon as the result of human perverseness, the outcome of purely individual causes which were likely to endure as long as human nature remained the same. |Older methods of dealing with the poor.| It was taken for granted that the poor would be with us always; that poverty could not be prevented by any action on the part of society, and that the only thing to do was to punish the shiftless while helping the worthy poor by giving them public and private aid. The measures for the relief of the poor taken by the governments of various European countries and by most American communities until comparatively recent years were based upon this attitude. Those who could work and would not were branded as vagrants and put in jail. Those who were in poverty through sickness, accident, old age, degeneracy, intemperance, or other individual causes were taken into such institutions as hospitals, infirmaries, almshouses, homes for inebriates, and the like. The people were everywhere encouraged to give alms to the poor, but the prevention of poverty by organized social action received little or no attention.
The modern attitude.
The public attitude, especially the attitude of the more enlightened part of the public, has now changed or is changing. We know from a careful study of the problem that poverty is no more an essential concomitant of civilized life than were piracy, slavery, bubonic plague, or universal drunkenness in years now long gone by. Poverty can be eradicated as these things have been, although not by any means so easily. The individual causes of poverty, of course, will always be at work. Old age will continue to come upon mankind, and we can hardly hope under any circumstances to get rid of sickness and accidents entirely. But society can at least bring it about that old age, illness, and accident, not to speak of unemployment and other social causes, will no longer bring inevitable poverty in their train. Attention is now being given, therefore, to measures of prevention; and almsgiving has come to be recognized as a mere makeshift way of dealing with the problem. It is like trying to put an end to all diseases and to wipe illness off the face of the earth by merely giving people medicine after they become sick.
The Temporary Remedies.—The only permanent solution for the problem of poverty is the removal of the underlying causes. This, however, cannot be accomplished in a day, and in the meantime various measures of temporary alleviation must be provided by the public authorities and by private organizations.
Indoor relief.
Public provision for the care of the poor takes two forms known respectively as indoor and outdoor relief. By indoor relief is meant the care of the poor in institutions maintained by the state, county, or city. There was a time when paupers of all types were herded together into the same poorhouse, but it is now the policy to provide, so far as practicable, different public institutions for the sick, the mentally defective, the aged, and the young. Hence, in many states we have hospitals for chronic cases, institutions for the feeble-minded, homes for the aged, institutions for the care of orphans, schools for the blind, and so on.