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Chapter 2 - Poverty -
From Poverty by James Platt

This chapter expands on the first, by exploring in more depth the causes and history of poverty. It establishes and the author provides evidence, that the cure for poverty lies not with society, but with with the poor themselves.

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Chapter 2 - Poverty -
From Poverty by James Platt

Page Number and brief taster

Chapter 1 - Introduction

19 - The poor reform themselves; they will soon reform their surroundings.

20 - Poverty is not a modern disease,
product of civilization...

21 - We hear much of the misery and privation of the poor, the poorest...

22 - God's laws are fixed and immutable; misery, illness, death, await the nation or man who breaks them.

23 - till 1834 the administration of relief was entrusted to the churchwardens

24 - As an occupier, a man is rateable for all land which he occupies in the parish

25 - They regard the Poor Law and charitable help of the district as a kind of entailed inheritance

26 - save for the morrow that must come to all, when to work is impossible

27 - We do not want poor - houses in every parish; we want real workhouses

28 - The equals in natural ability and in moral character of any peer or peeress in the land

29 - Our treatment of the criminal, the state of our gaols, exhibit signs of progress, of more humanity, and less of the animal in human nature

30 - Numbers in their nature imply poverty. In a fair distribution among a vast multitude, none can have much

31 - When the poor rise to destroy the rich, they act as wisely for their own purposes as when they burn mills

32 - It is not only poverty that scares content: I have been where poverty is - alas!

33 - If we are to be rich, never forget we were once poor

34 - Nation's yearly expenditure upon drink, and its indirect cost in wasted lives, vice, and crime

35 - The authority of a Parliamentary Committee, to reduce or retard the nation's wealth equal to one-sixth of the wealth produced

36 - Absurd to say drink is caused by public-houses putting temptation in the way of the miserable beings who drown their troubles in drink

37 - None can tell so well what would suit, and serve, and please a class, as men of that class themselves

38 - Man must believe that misery is the result of wrong-doing; he must believe that man is a free agent to find redemption by right-doing

39 - Relief, so given, did not make the poor any richer, but only served to perpetuate poverty

40 - The miseries of the poor are depicted not as the miseries of the deserving poor, but the miseries of the undeserving poor

41 - Poverty! The word embraces a wider area than is generally embraced by the term poor, which is understood to apply to.

42 - The contest between the plebeians and the patricians partook very much of the nature - of a struggle - between poverty and riches

43 - Many free men, in order to avoid destitution, surrendered their liberty and became serfs.

44 - The last thing the poor cared for was to heighten their poverty, to bring one more wretch into the world, to give another serf to their lord

Chapter 3 - Progress and Poverty

Books - Factual

Sociology

Poverty by James Platt

© Peter Smith 2008