Poverty and Merit

...Some of this comment is rather interesting in its suggestion of a growing fatalism in matters social, a waning belief in the power of good will to accomplish anything of permanent benefit—strongly typical of the age in which we have lived...

...The poor man, as Mr...

...It would be interesting, did time allow, to verify the context from which Mr...

...Everyone who has had any first-hand acquaintance with the poor knows that poverty and lawlessness rub shoulders and that the poor man and the wastrel live in a community which is not without its effect upon the habits of thought of the poor man, however deserving...

...To expect the virtues of the poor man to have the same seemly and engaging aspect or the same social value as the virtues of the economically secure is an idle hope...

...The very word "inevitably" suggests that a great deal has gone before that would make bad testimony for any charge against the poor of being the authors of their own misery...

...His contacts with the law are rough ones— "Move on there I" and "Keep walking...

...Activities of the most unsocial nature may be at their roots...

...Seeing them at work upon the lower rungs of the social ladder, he is in a far better position to judge them at their true value than those who witness the ascent from nearer the top...

...To propound the general undeservingness of the poorer brother as a contributing factor to his misfortune is a handy salve for those who can promise nothing to soften his hard case...

...But the important point to notice is that they need not do so necessarily...

...As time passes and even the generation that looked upon these foredoomed faces dies out from among us, the memory of them will remain, a heartening and sustaining thought in the stress of a material struggle from which the vision seems to recede ever further...

...At least they are safe...

...In order that the indictment may have no air of being based on ex parte evidence, it is reinforced from what even in absence of knowledge that would put us into possession of Dr...

...For this reason, if for no other, the comments on the failure of capitalism to "satisfy"1 made by Lady Cynthia Mosely, who is the daughter of Olympic Earl Curzon, and the wife of a member of the British Parliament recruited by socialism from the well-cushioned classes, have attracted an attention in the English-speaking press of two countries they would have failed to secure if made by speakers or thinkers professionally committed to a change in the world's system for carrying on...

...A recent sermon by the rector of Saint George's, in Stuyvesant Square, New York, is invoked to shake a belief, dating from more idealistic days, that the poor are poor largely through no fault of their own...

...Cole's evidence has been extracted...

...Shrewdness, forcefulness, even of a physical sort, a faculty for exploiting others' necessities, a hard and closed fist, are quite as likely to be the factors of a new fortune, as any of the qualities that Dr...

...Wherever the guilt and responsibility of the men who began the war may lie, the sacrifice of those who brought it to an end stands out, clear of reproach, singularly noble and devoted, even among devotions which seem today to be the sole recompense the world reaped for four years of strife and agony...

...The poor," declares Dr...

...Neither are the qualities which lift a man out of economic dependence and into prosperity any secret to the poor man...

...To abuse the opposite party when a case is hopelessly unsound is an old maxim of the bar...

...It is rather surprising that an examination into the ways by which property is acquired and their effect upon the degree of respect with which it is regarded from age to age does not attract the attention of some...

...They may include, and often do, clean-living, thrift, self-respect and a worthy determination to escape from the promiscuity of poverty...

...But to assume that they invade his integrity and that his moral code, rough and devoid of humbug as it may be, is not in all essentials as rigid as that of the well-to-do is counter to the experience of all who really know the poor...

...being the general terms in which civic regulations reach his consciousness...

...Our purpose, however, in taking notice of the incident is not to reexamine the economic grounds of poverty, but to comment in passing upon a current confusion between the sort of qualities that lift a man out of poverty and the sort of qualities whose lack should merit the animadversion of a minister of a gospel which preaches it as a beatitude...

...Chesterton has quite lately told us, lives "in the valley of the shadow of the policeman...

...Reiland's social complexion, is pretty safe to regard as an opposite pole of thought...

...In the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them...

...Reiland would be able to praise from the pulpit of Saint George's...

...They even breed in him a perverse but natural sympathy with the law-breaker who is bold or cunning enough to affront his master successfully...

...POVERTY AND MERIT HE world at large has a keen sense of incongruity and a lively sense of social distinctions...

...An editorial printed in the New York Times of September 29, sets out this latest view upon what its author admits are "monstrous iniquities in the social lot" with a good deal of plausibility...

...G. D. H. Cole, the English Guild Socialist, is quoted as authority for the statement that the vast residue of humanity whose poverty revolts and angers the reformer, is "inevitably lacking in many qualities—notably driving force and constructive imagination...

...Vice and crime being near neighbors, do not register upon his mind the initial shock that the gently nurtured feel at their contact...

...Reiland, with all the air of making an unhappy but not altogether untimely discovery, "include those who lack good qualities...

...Age shall not wither them, nor time condemn...