But let us not imagine that we have got our axe into the roots of poverty and are in a fair way to abolish it. This is one of the most dangerous fallacies of our age; and against that comfortable assurance I, knowing well all that has been done, plead that not one of our reforms makes for the abolition or the material restriction of poverty. We pension the very aged worker and the still more aged widow: on the pauper scale. We build substantial, if rather cheerless, homes for the destitute, and we put warm, if ignominious, clothing on the back of the orphan. We appoint minimum wages, and permit maximum prices. We have labour bureaux, and district visitors, and a Salvation Army, and a Church Army. All of which means that we give a drink to the crucified; it might be well to study if we can cease to crucify.
The plain man or woman who earnestly wishes to help in the improvement of life will inquire first, and most resolutely, what the actual range and depth of poverty are; will study, secondly, how far our measures of reform afford us any hope of curtailing it; and will, in the third place, ask whether there is any other way of action which does offer some hope of restricting, if not removing, the evil.
In the mind of many people poverty means that somewhere in the darker depths of our cities, happily remote from the shopping centres, there are a number of people who, from lack of skill or excess of drink, cannot find regular employment, and must live. ... One does not know exactly how they live, but certainly on unpleasantly short and dry rations. In earlier times one dropped a half-sovereign into the poor-box at church for these creatures, if they would come to church and learn resignation. To-day one subscribes to the Charity Organisation Society or the Salvation Army, or joins one of the many enterprising associations which are going to make the poor richer without making the rich poorer. We have a social conscience. We believe in _laissez-faire_, but, being humane, we will not push it to extremes. At the same time, being sensible men, we are not going to push humanitarianism to extremes. The phrase-maker is the great benefactor.
For a first acquaintance with poverty I would recommend a man to spend a few hours, some Saturday evening, among those markets of the poor which still line many of our more dingy thoroughfares. As the night draws on, and the oil-lamps begin to flare and splutter over the stalls, the grim courts and narrow streets of the district discharge their grey streams of life upon the market. There is plenty of laughter, you observe; there are plenty of round-faced matrons, with clean, honest eyes and comfortable dress. "We ain't got much money, but we do live," I heard one of them remark, in an interval between bursts of raillery. The wives of regularly employed, and often not ill-paid, workers are there, as well as poorer folk. But study some of the quieter figures which move slowly among the throng or linger enviously before the cheap shops. Notice the puny, shrivelled infants, with quaint staring eyes, which, at the door of the public-house, lie lightly in the arms of women whose faces are bloated with drink and coarse food: the lean and ragged boys and girls, with hollow and prematurely sharpened eyes, who hang about the fruit-stalls, ready to dart upon the rotten castaways, or foster, in darker spots, the premature sex-development which will drain their scanty strength: the woman who, with drawn face, waits near the Red Lion to see how many shillings her sodden brute of a husband will at length hand her for a week's shopping: the weary old couple who have seen better days, and now pass in silence through the babel of vulgarity: the haggard-faced widow in mouldy black who hides her paltry Sunday dinner in a worn bag: the eager eyes of the poorer hawkers, which light up pathetically when a penny comes their way: the men whose faces change at a drunken jibe into such faces as we have seen behind the bars of a cage in a zoological garden, and the crowd of men, women, and children rushing to enjoy the gratuitous spectacle of a fight: the cheap, middle-aged prostitute, whose features are a caricature of the features of woman.