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Chapter 2 - Poverty
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From Poverty by James Platt
Page 42
much that is interesting, more especially at the
present time, when those who ought to know better are trying to
make people believe that the "poor "have not benefited
by the "progress" we have made. In Egypt, where the system
of caste, which was afterwards so fully developed in India, originated,
the lower class, as far back as history takes us, were doomed to
poverty,
while luxury and profusion were reserved for the priests and
warriors, who constituted the upper class. The famine which
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arose under the eighteenth dynasty
obliged the Egyptians to sell their persons or their labour to
the kings, by whom they were treated as mere machines. Babylon
and Nineveh present us with a similar spectacles - enormous wealth
amongst the great, and penury and servitude amongst the humbler
classes. In Persia, the people, according to Herodotus, were distributed
into ten tribes, and the three lowest of them were in a state
of poverty. Greece presents us with the aspect of a small number
of citizens, with an enormous number of slaves. But even amongst
the citizens, poverty and misery must have existed to a great
extent, for, although the historians are reticent upon this point,
there is little doubt that this was one of the main causes of
such frequent emigrations, resulting in the establishment of many
colonies along the Italian and Asiatic shores and elsewhere, as
also for the law that in Sparta permitted the poor to expose their
infants. In Rome, in its earlier days at least, the contest between
the plebeians and the patricians partook very much of the nature
- of a struggle - between poverty and riches. Surrounded by enemies,
and almost constantly engaged in warfare - which subjected the
cultivators of the soil to have their lands and houses frequently
pillaged, , and the fruit of their labours all destroyed - many
were plunged into abject poverty, and the severe laws regarding
debtors only served to increase their misery; only the patricians,
as a rule, were able to lend. money, and thus the contest between
debtor and creditor was, in its origin, identical with that between
the plebeians and the patricians. As Rome extended, the gulf between
the poor and the rich became. still Wider, notwithstanding
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© Peter Smith 2008
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