In our Library - where Books are free

Books - Factual

Sociology

Poverty - by James Platt

Attila or another - an epidemic that slays its thousands because a nation has not been cleanly; the lacerating of a mother's heart when, in her carelessness, she has let her child cut its finger with a knife. The penalty has to be paid, sometimes at the moment,
sometimes long after; for the sins of the father are visited not only on his children, but on his children's children, and so on to the cud, Nature claiming her inexorable due. And when I go down to the slums I have been talking to you about, how dare I say that these wretched people, living in squalor and ignorance and misery, are only paying the penalty for their own mistakes and crimes?

You look at their narrow, retreating, monkey - like foreheads, the heavy and hideous jowl, the thick neck, and the furtive eye; you think of the foul air they have breathed from then infancy, of the had water and unwholesome food they have consumed, of the dense ignorance in which they have been allowed to grow up; and how can you say that this immoral existence is anything but inevitable? Wrong - doing - the breaking of the universal laws of existence, the subversion of those conditions which produce a
settled, wholesome, orderly social life - is not necessarily personal; it may be national; it may have been continued through centuries, until the results have been so stamped into the character of the nation - or into the condition of a part of a nation - that they almost seem ineradicable" (William Black).

Poverty is caused by impotency and defect, prodigality, debauchery, want of thrift. All nations, at all times, seem to have recognized that the poor ought to be maintained. If the