OR let him go to Edinburgh, the "modern Athens," of
which Scotsmen speak with pride, and in buildings from
whose roofs a bowman might strike the spires of twenty
churches he will find human beings living as he would not
keep his meanest dog. Let him toil up the stairs of one
of those monstrous buildings, let him enter one of those
"dark houses," let him close the door, and in the
blackness think what life must be in such a place. Then
let him try the reduction to iniquity. And if he go to
that good charity (but, alas! how futile is Charity
without Justice!) where little children are kept while
their mothers are at work, and children are fed who would
otherwise go hungry, he may see infants whose limbs are
shrunken from want of nourishment. Perhaps they may tell
him, as they told me, of that little girl, barefooted,
ragged, and hungry, who, when they gave her bread, raised
her eyes and clasped her hands, and thanked our Father in
Heaven for His bounty to her. They who told me that never
dreamed, I think, of its terrible meaning. But I ask the
Duke of Argyll, did that little child, thankful for that
poor dole, get what our Father provided for her? Is He so
niggard? If not, what is it, who is it, that stands,
between such children and our Father's bounty? If it be
an institution, is it not our duty to God and to our
neighbor to rest not till we destroy it? If it be a man,
were it not better for him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck and he were cast into the depths of the
sea? — The Reduction to Iniquity (a reply to the
Duke of Argyll), The Nineteenth Century, July, 1884
WE are so accustomed to poverty that even in the most
advanced countries we regard it as the natural lot of the
great masses of the people; that we take it as a matter
of course that even in our highest civilization large
classes should want the necessaries of healthful life,
and the vast majority should only get a poor and pinched
living by the hardest toil. There are professors of
political economy who teach that this condition of things
is the result of social laws of which it is idle to
complain! There are ministers of religion who preach that
this is the condition which an all-wise, all-powerful
Creator intended for His children! If an architect were
to build a theater so that not more than one-tenth of the
audience could see and hear, we should call him a bungler
and a botcher. If a man were to give a feast and provide
so little food that nine-tenths of his guests must go
away hungry, we should call him a fool, or worse. Yet so
accustomed are we to poverty, that even the preachers of
what passes for Christianity tell us that the great
Architect of the Universe, to whose infinite skill all
nature testifies, has made such a botch job of this world
that the vast majority of the human creatures whom He has
called into it are condemned by the conditions he has
imposed to want, suffering, and brutalizing toil that
gives no opportunity for the development of mental powers
— must pass their lives in a hard struggle to
merely live! — Social Problems
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