Can Poverty Be Abolished

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Title:     Can Poverty Be Abolished
Author: Lemuel K. Washburn [More Titles by Washburn]

Is poverty a malady of the individual or of society? To answer this question is to determine how to treat the disease. If the individual is alone responsible for being poor, then he alone is to apply the remedy; but if society is to blame for poverty, then must society take the steps to effect a cure. Poverty is an evil. A human being who is starved physically is starved mentally and morally. Civilization begins when man has risen above want. Man is only a brute when all of his energies are absorbed in the effort to get bread.

In the present state of society we have dependence and independence; a few have escaped from the burdens of toil, but the many are still slaves to physical wants. But the few enjoy their independence at the expense of those beneath them, and oftentimes by inflicting wrong and injustice upon their fellows. Such a condition ought not to be allowed. Prosperity is the accumulated efforts of mankind. No man has created all the benefits he enjoys; no one has sowed all that he reaps. The rich man to-day is rich because he has, by advantageous circumstances, obtained possession of more than his share of the world’s wealth, or because he has inherited what others have obtained in the same way, or because by thrift and economy and good luck he has succeeded in getting money and keeping it.

But what makes the poor man? Not one thing, or one condition. He is the victim sometimes of his own follies, vices or laziness, although he is often not to be blamed for his poverty. There are individual cases where doubtless destitution is the child of misfortune, but the general poverty of the world, and of this country in particular, cannot be charged to any such account.

In our land there is a balance every year to the credit of wealth, but is it not true that this balance finds its way to the pockets already filled, rather than to those that are empty? What diverts the products of labor from the hands of labor? Find out that, and then we will begin to give labor its due. There is enough produced every year to make every person in the land better off at the end of the year. Why are so few richer, and so many poorer, or, at least, no better off? There is one thing sure,—labor, thrift, economy, virtue and good habits are to be commended and encouraged, while idleness, vice, profligacy and bad habits are to be condemned and discouraged. We do not look to any external change in society for a remedy for poverty, but rather to an internal change in man. It is not social revolution that will help the world, but humanity—the willingness to do what is right.

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“It rains on the just and the unjust,” but rarely just enough on either.

[The end]
Lemuel K. Washburn's essay: Can Poverty Be Abolished

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