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Campbell, "Poverty and Vice," 1890
for the poor than for the rich. The immortal shepherd of Salisbury
Plain, for example: who can forget the glow of sympathy with which we
read long ago the words in which is chronicled his soul-felt satisfaction
that salt has been given for his potatoes when the potatoes of myriads
more deserving were saltless. Analyze the story and hundreds of its
kind, and for each and all is the lesson in contentment very beautiful
for the rich to gaze upon, but vicious to the core in its effect for both.
Only out of wants and ever-increasing wants can progress be born,
and it was the death of progress that spoke in every word of the gospel
preached by this school.
Granted at once that there are certain conditions in life which it
may be counted in great degree true that poverty and virtue are close
neighbors if not synonyms. But they are conditions very remote from
anything we must deal with in our crowded cities and towns. Long ago,
a world-weary but very worldly-wise old king wrote from his watch
tower in Jerusalem, "The destruction of the poor is their poverty."
Each one of us to whom the interior of a Fourth Ward tenement
house has become familiar, knows how literally true that is, and what
actual destruction of moral fibre is in the fact of having been born into
such atmosphere. There are moral microbes no less than the physical
ones with which we have lately been contending. Their entrance is no
less insidious and no less certain and their action infinitely more fatal
than "la grippe" and its effects.
Take the life that must be lived from hour to hour in one of those
tenements, where the least competent and thus most wretchedly paid
laborers of many orders are massed. Two rooms are comparatively
luxurious. For many there is but one, and in this one, there may be not
only the family proper, but lodgers who take their stipulated share of
the floor, and thus add to the family income. Old and young, every
relation of life; every fact that is bound up with mere bodily existence
and its demands, is practically promiscuous. Baby eyes see--baby
ears hear from the beginning of conscious existence, all the foulness
born of dirt, over-crowding, want and privation of every nature. Lust in
its lowest phase:--the animal want of creatures not yet evolved from
the animal, is the chief form of satisfaction known, and with it is
foulness which Zola himself might hesitate to depict. It cannot be said
to be deliberate choice. It is rather the inevitable result of abominable
conditions and the miracle is that any virtue of any order can remain.
Taking the next phase where two or more rooms are possible,
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