p. 109My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
In your 20th letter, you rightly object to much that is said by “pressmen, parsons, and politicians” with reference to the misery of the masses; but I am not so sure that you improve much on their doctrine. They say that the misery of the people is due to their own sin: you say that “it is due to the sins, negligences and ignorances of those who rob them.” I am afraid, Mr. Blatchford, that you both go too far in opposite directions. There is a little truth in both statements; but, as usual with all extremes, they want mixing not only with each other, but with other truths which will make a blend unlike both.
No doubt you are right in objecting to the common habit of attributing the state of the poor to the fact that they are idle, shiftless, and drunken. They are so in multitudes of cases as a matter of fact; but the question is, how come they to be so? The answer cannot be given in a breath. The cause is not simple. It comprises a number of elements. It partly lies in the system under which they live: partly also in their own native tendencies. Their state calls for compassion more than censure. Incessant drudgery necessitated by their poverty makes it possible for their higher powers to develop. There is great excuse for their tendency to intemperance; they work too long, and not in wholesome trades, and in unhealthy places. Their situation is responsible for their characteristics, and calls for pity and reasonable efforts of mitigation.
At the same time, it is not true that “the real culprits are the grasping employers, jerry builders, slum lords, and knaves who grow rich by selling poisoned liquor.” The fact is, Mr. Blatchford, it is impossible to put your finger upon the real p. 110 culprits. All classes of society are in a bog together. There is not one of the poor but would be to-morrow what the jerry builders and slum lords are to-day if they had the opportunity; and there is not one of the jerry builders and slum lords who would not contract all the disfiguring vices of the poor if they were in their place. It is not so much a distribution of guilt that is possible, as a recognition of the universal misfortune and its specific cause. As to what this cause is, your arguments and declamations suggest no answer. You thrash the branches of the tree. But there is a root to the tree; so long as this root exists, the branches will be reproduced, however much you may cut them down. You cannot reform from the top: you must begin at the bottom; and in this matter, the bottom is out of your reach. The whole of society is victim to the evil.
To rail at the more fortunate classes does not bring a remedy; it only causes exasperations. It makes the poor more discontented with their lot, and the rich more fearful of conceding even reasonable demands. To the poor it seems an incontrovertible doctrine that their sorrows are due to the grasping monopoly of the rich. But the rich know how unreasonable it is to set down at their door sorrows which they have done nothing to cause, which they are powerless to remove, and which would not be ended if the whole of their wealth were distributed among the poor to-morrow.
The misery of the people is partly the result of the unequal distribution of the means of life; but you make a mistake in calling this a robbery perpetrated by the rich. All sensible people must feel this way of putting it to be an outrage on justice and commonsense. The rich are as much the creatures of a system as the poor, and if the poor were in the place of the rich, they would no more think themselves guilty of robbery, or of coming down from their position, than the rich do; they would resist being divested of their riches with all the reckless tenacity and determination with which men on a sinking ship scramble into the boats, or men in a burning house rush to the doors.
If the misery of the poor is the result of a wrong system, cease swearing at the rich, and enquire, rather, why is the system wrong? And is it possible to get a right system out of materials which are in themselves incapable of being combined into a right system? This is going deeper than your enquiries reach, but only as deep as p. 111 the subject demands. I have already indicated the cause of the failure of all systems—the self-interested, time-serving, evil nature of man in the mass, rendering him incapable of contriving or sanctioning those legislative arrangements which wisdom would require for his true well-being; and secondly, his inability in a physical sense to successfully cope with the mutinous oppositions and clamours of brute force that are certain, sooner or later, in all societies to break out against that which is wise and good. Man wants wise and firm and irresistible handling.
You cannot alter the state of man by altering the system of man’s incompetent arrangements. Socialism would only be a new form of fallible and corrupt government, and would necessarily give us only the same evil in another shape. You are to be excused for thinking it would secure the blessing you desire. You are to be sympathised with in your advocacy of the claims of the poor. Your loud and impassioned denunciation of their wrongs must touch a chord in every benevolent heart. But you are only like the captain swearing at the wind; it is no use. The wracking storm goes on its way. Men cannot control nature, and they cannot control the state of man. There is One who can, though men shut their eyes to Him. Jesus of Nazareth, who stilled the storm on the Sea of Galilee, will yet calm the larger storm of human life that rages everywhere.
If you believe in him, as you seem to indicate in various parts of your book, you ought to allow for his work, and not write as if he had never appeared on the scene. If you do not believe in him, I can only feel pity inexpressible at the task you have undertaken, a task so hopeless though so noble. You cannot “give the people healthy homes, human lives, and a due measure of amusements; pure meat and drink.” The materials for such a gift exist on the face of the earth, doubtless, but they require super-human wisdom and power to put and keep them together. It is out of human power to do it. The people require what you cannot give them; they require divine law, divine oversight, divine guidance, divine life, worship and love. They will get these when a divine kingdom administers affairs in all the earth (Dan. ii. 44). Till then, all that is possible is to work in harmony with the divine ends contemplated in the present evil state—which are revealed in the Bible.
If you are wrong in laying the misery of the poor at the door of the rich, your opponents are certainly not much more right in maintaining p. 112 the cheap and shallow doctrine that the misery of the poor is due to their own sin. There is a good deal of stupid selfishness in this doctrine. It is an easy solution of the problem, flattering to the self-esteem and soothing to the comfort of the better classes, but having only a modicum of truth in it. Much popular misery is due to popular sin doubtless; but to what is the popular sin due?
To put the whole responsibility of this upon the poor is as reasonable as it would be to blame the Africans for being black and cannibals. The Africans being black, and (some tribes of them) given to man-eating, is a reason why we cannot make intimates of them; but it is no reason why we should say they are to blame for their unsociable habits. How can a poor little black, with his ebony shining skin and his polished ivory teeth and his grinning face, help growing up to be what his father and mother were before him? It is his misfortune to have an incapable mind and bad neighbours, and a dreadful training. He can be helped by those who may be able to take him away from his baneful surroundings, and bring him up in a right way; but to blame him is neither just nor helpful.
So to rail at the unlovely poor, and say that their sufferings are due to their own vices and follies, is a folly of which it is impossible that discerning or human persons can be guilty. No doubt the poor suffer from their folly and their vices, but then their folly and their vices are due to their surroundings, as you contend. You want to convince me of this. You needn’t. I am convinced. It seems to me that any man of observation must be convinced on this point. But then it also seems to me that my conviction goes deeper than yours. You seem to think that the poor have no share at all in the responsibility for their miserable state. You are bound to revise this opinion if you consider that all the poor are not in the same state. Many are industrious, sober, thrifty, and happy, where others, quite as well off, are idle, intemperate, improvident and wretched. The difference lies in the ways, and not in the circumstances of the two classes. Your denial that the misery of the poor is due in any degree to their own sin is contrary to self-evident fact; you give yourself needlessly away to opponents in this denial. It is due largely to other causes which make the poor what they are. Recognise all the facts, and your arguments will be safe, but then you will have to alter some of your conclusions. You seem to think that the wealthy classes are in a good state because p. 113 they have plenty to eat and drink, and plenty of time to please themselves. In this you undoubtedly make a great mistake. The Bible is much nearer a true philosophy of the case in saying that while poor men are vanity, the rich men are a lie; that is, they seem to be happy, but they are not. Upon a sufficiently wide view, Solomon’s verdict will be endorsed, “All is vanity and vexation of spirit.”
It is a curious illusion that is at the bottom of the contrary opinion. Every man appears at his best under the eyes of his fellows. Those who see him are apt to take the impression of how he feels habitually from what he seems at the moment of his intercourse with them. They meet him in the street it may be, or at a meeting, or in a friend’s house, and under the stimulus of sociality, he seems blithe and nimble and healthy and happy. They put him in their mental album (as it were) as a fellow that is at the top of the tree of good fortune, and the ideal of what they would wish to attain. They make a mistake altogether. They know nothing of him in the interval. They cannot feel his real feelings, but form an impression from a transitory sunlit aspect. If they could follow him into his quiet hours, they would find him subject to the same weariness and anxieties and mental vacuities and distresses which they experience; and they would very likely find that he has put them just where they would have put him. He has conceived of them as happy, fortunate people, and cursed himself in his own misery that he is not like them.
The fact is, the whole world is a misleading picture to every individual composing it. The optimistic views come from looking at the world objectively, but inaccurately; the pessimistic views, which are truer views, come from one’s own actual experience within.
The tired man who has had a long trudge on a cold highway looks at the top of a passing ’bus with a feeling of envy at the people who are in Elysium there. The people on the top of the ’bus, chilled to the bone with a long ride, look down at the pedestrian and think how well off that fellow must be who is keeping the cold out of his bones by exercise.
Every man is wearied of his own way, and sees his neighbour’s way as a pleasant change from his own. Much of it is illusion. So it is with rich and poor. The rich have their anxieties and frets that take away appetite, and they envy the poor with no responsibilities. p. 114 The poor, often lacking bread, feel as if they could do with any amount of anxiety, if bread and butter were sure.
The fact is, they are all in evil plight together. The rich have a little less evil than those who live in squalor, but they are equally subject with them to a constitutional weakness of body and mind which no alteration of the social system can cure. The sufferings of the rich do not strike the eye so glaringly because they are concealed under a decent veil of reserve. The well-to-do are not so outspoken and unblushing in their ways, because they fear each other. The poor have no fear of public opinion, and therefore all the deformity comes out to view. But the human species is one, and their woes are common. You make a mistake in supposing the well-to-do are not subject to the evils of their race; they may not know the want of food, but there are other wants which afflict more keenly.
Thus your opponents are wrong (some of them), and you are not right. You will see by this time where the third view comes in and unites all in a harmonious body of truth. It is a little true what your opponents say, that the misery of the poor is contributed to by their own unwise ways. It is a little true what you say that it is largely due to a wrong distribution of the wealth of the world. But there is another truth that neither takes into account. The whole world is groaning under evil in one form or other because the world and its Maker are not friends. You may smile a pitying smile at the enunciation of this view. But it is not so superficial as this generation imagines. It is deep truth that will stand the wear.—Do forgive
Your admiring, though demurring friend,
JOHN SMITH.