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Chapter 2 - Poverty
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From Poverty by James Platt
Page 28
unpalatable it may be. They have no greater enemy
than men like Mr. George, who tries to persuade them that they are
poor because others are rich, and who argues, in his reply to the
Duke of Argyll, as if all men were born equal in physical, moral,
and mental powers: "If the Duke thinks all classes have gained
by the advance in civilization, let him go into the huts of the
Highlands. There he 1nay End countrymen of his, men and
women, the equals in natural ability and in moral character of any
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peer or peeress in the land, to whom
the advance of our wondrous age has brought no gain ..... These
human beings are in natural parts and powers just such human beings
as may be mot at a royal levee, at a. gathering of scientific
men, or inventors, or captains of industry. That they so live
and do work is not because of their stupidity, but because of
their poverty - the direct and indisputable result of the denial
of their natural rights." (Nineteenth Century, July, 1884]. Let
us hope they are sensible enough to laugh at such nonsense. I
much doubt if they he the "Poor man's friend," who are so fond
of exaggerating his importance; and it seems to me that instead
of making out the present as worse than heretofore for the labouring
masses, it had been a truer kindness to depict the past as it
was, with its stripes and serfdom, hunger, thirst, and cold -
its manifold miseries, of which we could not form a true, a sufficiently
deep conception, because of our want of information. We are too
apt to think of the past as a sort of second Eden, to which we
allow our thoughts to wander back with vain regrets and hopeless
pinings. But no one who has lived half a century can fail to be
aware of the altered condition of things between now and then,
politically and socially, if not morally. It may be that in the
past there were not the complaints heard about the lot of the
working man that there is now; but had he the power to complain
fifty years ego that he has new; whilst, further back in the days
of merry England," the condition of the labouring class was most
lamentab1e - ground down, oppressed to the earth, or used at home
or abroad to expiate, in the blood and slaughter of his fellow
- slaves,
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© Peter Smith 2008
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