of material wealth without any increase of human strain? It is evident that poverty is not any longer necessary because the nation cannot make enough wealth to "go all around." 2. The main cause of poverty is inequality of opportunity, because such inequality implies a waste of productive power upon the one hand, bad distribution or waste of consuming power on the other. There is something pathetic in reading the history of the great Chartist movement to recall the enthusiastic confidence of the workers of that day in the immediate efficacy of mere political machinery. Give us, they said, shorter Parliaments, ballot, etc., and the will of the people will find free expression in legislation for the common good. Most of the six points of the Charter, not all, have been won, but now we need a new People's Charter with six new points: a) The value and the use of land for the People. b) Public ownership of the effective highways of the country, railways, tramways, canals, and suppression of the abuses of "shipping conferences," controlling transport on our waterways. c) Public organisation of credit and insurance, essentials of modern business. d) Full freedom of education; equal access for all to the social fund of culture and of knowledge. e) Equal access to public law. The entire cost of justice to be defrayed out of the public purse, and the machinery of the law courts free to all citizens. f) The assertion of the popular power to tax or control any new form of monopoly or inequality which may spring up in the changing conditions of modern communities. It is right to add that, not even so interpreted, can this charter stand alone. Opportunities proverbially belong to the young. There is a mass of poverty which is past the age of opportunity, but which no wise or humane nation can ignore. For this reason the curative policy here expounded needs to be supplemented by palliative measures which cannot be defended as organic reforms, but which belong to the realm of public charity. Those who realise, not merely as a sentimental phrase but a scientific truth, the responsibility of society for poverty will not grudge the most generous outlay of public money for dealing gently and humanely with the debilitated and often demoralised lives which form the social wreckage of our nation. See also 112. 222. What Mobility Really Involves. The Lot of the Workingman. 228-245 on Some Structures Designed to Meet the Difficulties in Which the Worker Finds Himself. Property for Use; Property for Power. 369. 370. 413. 414. Property at Its Zenith. Some Suggestions Concerning the Direction of A Vision of Social Efficiency. 274. SUGGESTED CURES FOR POVERTY A1 Whatever may be true of more primitive communities, the characteristic note of modern poverty is its association, not with personal misfortunes peculiar to individuals, but with the economic status of particular classes and occupations. The problem of poverty, as our generation understands it, is not primarily why certain people fall into distress. It is why the product of industry is distributed in such a way that, whether people fall into distress or not, large groups among them derive a meager, laborious, and highly precarious living from industries from which smaller groups appear to derive considerable affluence. The problem of preventing poverty is not primarily to assist individuals who are exceptionally unfortunate. It is to make the normal conditions under which masses of men work and live such that they may lead a healthy, independent, and selfrespecting life when they are not exceptionally unfortunate; so that, when they are exceptionally unfortunate, misfortune may not descend upon them with the crushing weight with which it falls today upon large sections of the working classes, for many of whom an accident or an error means economic ruin. Improve the character of individuals by all means-if you feel competent to do so-especially of those whose excessive incomes. expose them to peculiar temptations. This is a good in itself which needs no justification. But unemployment, short time, and low wages fall upon the just and the unjust alike. And assuming an absurd assumption-that you have eliminated all those whose personal I Adapted by permission from R. H. Tawney, "Poverty as an Industrial Problem," Memoranda on Problems of Poverty, II, 10-18. (The Ratan Tata Foundation, University of London, 1913.) characteristics cause them to fall below the average in energy and foresight, there still remains the fact that the normal conditions of the normal worker are precarious, that the barrier which separates him from actual distress is thin, and that his economic prospects are to a great extent, except in a very few well-organized industries, beyond control of himself or of persons like himself. If I am told that individuals here and there do in fact succeed by exceptional effort or good fortune in doing what is called "rising," I answer that this is no doubt, so far as it goes, a matter for congratulation, but that it leaves almost unaltered the general problems arising from the existence of economic inequality. "Sweating" does not disappear from our towns because a certain number of those who are sweated become, as they do, sweaters in their turn, any more than tadpoles disappear from our ponds because a large number of them are annually converted into frogs; and the vision of an Elysium to be attained by continuing to play with marked cards and simply shuffling the pack, by everyone who is squeezed now watching for his opportunity of squeezing in the future, is, happily, as impracticable as it is sordid. The reason for holding that the main problem with which the student of social conditions is concerned is not so much that of the man below the margin as that of the low normal standard, must be justified by an appeal to experience. It is that if any group of people have what may be called, for want of a better phrase, adequate economic resisting power, they may usually be relied upon themselves to protect the weaker members of the group against the principal accident of life; whereas, if they have not, merely to supplement their immediate needs is often to pour sand through a sieve, a process at once tantalising and degrading to the performer, and positively maddening to the subjects of his operations, who want not to be given their living by someone else but to earn it under fair conditions for themselves. It is in proportion to its possession of such resisting power that a class is able, when some larger protective apparatus than the family is needed, to build up its own institutions with its own habits and ideals, to interpose a whole network of personal relationship between the individual and either the offensive intrusion of sympathetic outsiders or the bare machinery of bureaucracy. It is in Lancastershire, where labour is protected by factory acts and trade unions, not in East London, where it is not, that family life, cooperation, friendly societies, education, social institutions for a hundred different purposes, find their fullest development. Is it beyond the power of society to increase this capacity for resistance in those of its members who are in a weak position? Certainly not provided it really desires to do so. It is done in one sphere by public health legislation, in another by factory legislation, in a third by education. It is done by action which substitutes regular for casual employment, for example by employing a permanent staff on a weekly wage, which is the practice at some docks on the continent, instead of engaging men by the half-day, which is the practice, as far as I know, at all docks in England. It is done by taxation which transfers economic surpluses from private individuals to the public. It is done by direct intervention to raise wages, and could and should be done far more vigorously and persistently. It is a mistake to think that economic resisting power, if it develops at all, must always develop spontaneously. The possession of it depends on a combination of factors which none but the most fortunate individual can determine for himself-the distribution of property, the organization of industry, the regularity of employment, the level of wages, the healthiness of the environment; and when it is absent it is little use urging individuals to display the characteristics which develop spontaneously when it is present. To expect an English agricultural labourer to exercise the thrift of a small landed proprietor, or a bricklayer's labourer the independence and professional pride of a cotton-spinner, or a dock labourer, whose life is a weekly gamble between £2 and nothing, the foresight of an official with a quarterly salary, is like asking people to be clean in Manchester or free from sickness on the West Coast of Africa. Since one cannot skip a generation, the administrator concerned with the alleviation of existing destitution will always have his hands full. But on a long view social science, like medical science, is most practical when it least considers what is immediately practicable. No one would suggest that it would have been better to spend the money devoted to discovering the bacillus which produces sleeping sickness to alleviating more of the individuals suffering from that disease; and no one should suggest that work on industrial or sanitary administrative organization is wasted because it does not immediately alleviate poverty. It is less urgent, I would suggest, for the student of poverty to devote himself to the consideration of the palliatives with which the administrator, who lives in the present, is concerned, than it is to endeavor to discover whether these things. are really necessary or not. BI Poverty is as unnecessary as malaria or yellow fever. Let that be stated once and for all. But there is a right way and there are multitudes of wrong ways of trying to cure any of these maladies. The so-called orthodox economist believes that if the state would do a few right things it would then be unnecessary to do the thousand and one wrong or ineffective things now being advocated in behalf of "labor." Not only is poverty unnecessary, but we can have any degree of equality we want if we are willing to pay the price and if we are willing to work in harmony with economic law rather than against it. Moreover, we can have this equality without attacking the competitive system, the institution of private capital, of freedom of contract, of freedom of initiative and enterprise, or any of the social institutions which have helped us thus far in our progress. equality as between different occupations, and still leave every man to conduct his own business, everyone to find his own employment, every farm, shop, store, and factory to be run as private enterprises. This would be as much better than socialism as a living organism is better than a machine. We can have After all is said that can be said about poverty, we come back in our saner moments to the question, Why does the poor man's labor sell for so little? Why does his service bring so low a price? This is a question of value and price. Until we are willing to face this question and reason it out as we would the question of the price of anything else, we shall never get very far. The question of the low price of the poor man's labor resolves itself into the two questions, Why is the demand for his labor so small? and, Why is the supply so large? When we are in a position to answer these two questions we shall then, but not before, be able to suggest constructive remedies. That is, we can then begin to study how to make the demand greater and how to make the supply smaller. Working along this line, we can go as far in the direction of equality as we really care to, provided we are willing to work consistently and accept the consequences of equality when they come. We shall also find that equality is quite consistent with the private ownership of capital, with the competitive system, with freedom of initiative, freedom of enterprise, etc. I Adapted by permission from T. N. Carver, Essays in Social Justice, pp. 349– 51. (Harvard University Press, 1915.) |