The Golden Censer Part 24

have lived in the apprehension of having the bulk of their possessions seized by envious rulers or fellow citizens. Not many years ago Vanderbilt suddenly bought fifty million dollars of four per cent Government bonds, simply, it is believed, for the purpose of s.h.i.+fting the enormous risk of active employment upon shoulders which would be less apt to excite popular manifestations of greed should the Commune bring about its foolish and chaotic reign. The cares of great wealth are a cla.s.s of the most serious burdens borne by humanity.

THEY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

in making up the account between the citizen who has all he needs and the citizen who has to spare for others who will pay him a profit. Men who have lived in constant dread of poverty have been astonished, upon being stranded on that sh.o.r.e of ill-repute to find the sun s.h.i.+ning more brightly and the birds singing more cheerily than when, driven with the ever multiplying engagements of business, they had no slumber which was not an imaginary hurrying into a bank-president's parlor, and no conversation which was not distressing some impatient caller in an ante-room.

BUT ACTUAL, HARSH, GRINDING WANT

is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune. It lowers the human being at once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats. Men on board a s.h.i.+p, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched state conceivable. The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once.

No man trusts anybody else. Each expects the others to pounce upon him to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed. From this baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the consideration of other conditions of life still above us. Let us, then, view poverty as

A REAL, ACTIVE, "INCONVENIENCE,"

as the French wit has put it. "One solitary philosopher maybe great, virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty," says Isaac Iselin, "but not a whole people." "Poverty" says Lucian, "persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it." "It requires a great deal of poetry to gild the pill of poverty," says Madame Deluzy; "and then it will pa.s.s for a pleasant dose only in theory; the reality is a failure."

"A generous and n.o.ble spirit" says Dionysius, "cannot be expected to dwell in the breast of men who are struggling for their daily bread."

"HOW LIKE A RAILWAY TUNNEL

is the poor man's life," says Bovee, "with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!" "Poverty," says Euripides, "possesses this disease--through want it teaches a man evil." "Poverty," says Saadi, "s.n.a.t.c.hes the reins out of the hands of pity," which is true only in one sense.

MANY PEOPLE ARE GOOD

who would not be so good were they poorer, but the Irish in Ireland are perhaps the poorest and at the same time the most pious people of whom we read or hear. "Poverty makes man satirical, soberly, sadly, bitterly satirical," says Friswell. "Men praise it," says Alexander Smith,

"AS THE AFRICAN WORs.h.i.+PS MUMBO JUMBO--

from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate it." "It oft deprives a man of all spirit and virtue," says Ben Franklin; "it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright."

THE SCENES OF DARKEST POVERTY

in this land of ours are surely the results of ignorance and folly. With the crops which follow each other in our favored region of the earth, and with members.h.i.+p in any mutual aid society, the industrious poor man of America has an a.s.surance that no picture so black can be drawn of his lot "in the rainy day." We cannot reform human nature. When men cheat, steal, lie, and remain idle, they must suffer the results of their deeds, and, at present, those whom they drag down with them must also suffer. But, with industry and sobriety a.s.sured,

THE FANGS OF POVERTY

have been drawn, for the poor man in sickness receives his support, and in health contributes his small share to his sick brother. In leaving this painful branch of so vital a portion of any book devoted to the improvement of humanity, let us abjure each other to fly from the sins of idleness and waste, that make this dark panorama in a world which could be bright, and which, rolling along in its foolish fas.h.i.+on, even now gives promise of exceeding joy in the future. Work and save and give work! This is the light of the world, the open sesame of the millennium?

Let us come again to the follies of

FALSE POVERTY.

How ridiculous that one should _suffer_ from want of a frill or a furbelow! "I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man _poor_," says the eloquent Edmund Burke; "I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men." "It is the great privilege of poverty" says Dr. Johnson, "to be happy unenvied, to be healthy without physic, and to be secure without guard." Is it not ridiculous for the poor man, by aping the habits of the rich, to spurn some of the greatest blessings attaching to our life? Thus, as Dr. Johnson says:

"POVERTY, IN LARGE CITIES

is often concealed in splendor and often in extravagance." The tendency of people in comfortable circ.u.mstances to move out of a pleasant cottage into a brick house with two inches of marble-front is a sorrowful one.

We can progress only through this same sad tendency, but how many happy homes are thus ruined! It requires much brains to count the ultimate cost. There is hardly an article of furniture in the old home which does not look out of place in the new. There is additional work to be done which had been entirely overlooked. The servant is a grievious expense.

We do not get the result of her work--only the profit. If she earn the one hundred and fifty million dollars we get only the fifteen million dollars. She must be "kept"--must add her clothes to the wash, her meat to the dish, her bed-room to the house. She breaks with a smile. She scatters as the sower who goeth forth to sow. From every conceivable cranny creep forth disburs.e.m.e.nts--the expenses of the rich man creeping like tigers upon his poor but vainer neighbor. O, pshaw! why will men and women do it? If those two fine spirits, Prudence and Economy look down upon us, such houses must attract attention only by seeming to mark out upon the earth they cover the writing at Belshazzar's feast--

THE MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,

of the nineteenth century. I know of an actual instance of a family being forced to eat the bread of charity within the walls of a house for which they had engaged to pay, and had so far paid, the sum of two thousand dollars a year as rent! What foolish thing a vain human being will not do is a more difficult problem than what he will do. If we had no rich people to fire up our self-conceit, we would be happier, though we rose more slowly; yet are we to be despised for being willing to throw the blame so freely from our shoulders. "Poverty is," says Cobbett, "except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is

A GREAT AND FATAL WEAKNESS,

though arising in this country from the fas.h.i.+on of the times themselves." Let us shake off this fatal weakness. That man is a coward who, from whatever reason, keeps up the expenditure of a rich man a moment longer than his income will warrant it.

"POVERTY IS ONLY CONTEMPTIBLE

when it is felt to be so," says Bovee. "That man," says Bishop Paley, "is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, who suffers the pains of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man, properly speaking, poor, but he." "The poor are only they who seem poor," says Emerson, "and poverty consists in feeling poor." Doubtless you are familiar with the story of the unhappy Sultan to whom the Magi, traveling from the East to his relief, could give no hope unless he could get and wear the s.h.i.+rt of a happy man. Proclamation went forth to all the lands of the empire, offering glittering rewards for a happy man. At last learned doctors and experts, who had gone out into the outer regions, brought in a shepherd, who was vowed to be an entirely happy man. But lo! when he came before the Magi, it was found that

HE HAD NO s.h.i.+RT!

The men who have caught this circling planet in the palms of their hands, as G.o.d grasps the inconceivable universes, were born poor and struggled in adversity; the men who have throttled the fiery lightning, and chained the fire and the water into willing servitude, were poor boys; the men who have developed the human imagination into a thing almost perfect and unapproachable were poor boys; the men who have led millions of their Maker's feet, were poor both in youth and age. Bear it then, in mind, that all honorable endeavors to ease the yoke of life are good; that all repinings whatsoever are totally ridiculous, and mostly dishonorable.

FACTS ABOUT PROGRESS.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Tennyson.

One of the pillars upon which the atheists and social iconoclasts and demolishers base their erroneous philosophy is a seeming belief that the men of to-day work harder for a living than the men of olden times. Now I will lay hold of this pillar, and, although I be not Samson, I may yet hope to rend an ill-constructed edifice. With the aid of a few figures and a little history the mind may possibly discern, through the centuries behind us, some evidence of that progress which Victor Hugo has called "the stride of G.o.d."

It is reasonable to suppose that the poor man, during the period of his veritable history, has always, when not suffering severe privation, eaten nearly the same amount of food in any given number of hours. We may, I think, judge of the amount of work cast to his lot if we can find the ruling values of several of the articles of food which have contributed to sustain his life. I have chosen the earlier civilization of England in my examples, not because the Book of Exodus, the Pyramids, and the temples of Baalbec and Karnac fail to betray the needed evidences of almost super human toil, but because the authorities at my disposal touching upon earlier times fail to furnish me

THE SATISFACTORY COMMERCIAL DATA

also needed as a parallel. Let us, then, put our laborer in England in the year 1350. He had at that time so far progressed that, under certain very restricted circ.u.mstances, his life was preserved, and he was allowed to earn wages for his labor. He worked fourteen hours for a legal day's work in winter and fifteen hours in summer, but I have everywhere in the following statements computed his hours as fourteen.

If he were a common laborer he received one penny. If he were

A SKILLED FIELD HAND,