The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. GISBORNE, JANUARY 11 1902 DRAWBACKS OF POVERTY.

Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 311, 11 January 1902, Page 2

The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. GISBORNE, JANUARY 11 1902 DRAWBACKS OF POVERTY.

In leading Home journals there has hecn a controversy on the point raised hy Mr Carnegie, who never ceased to decry the advantage ol wealth, though lie never casts aside that which he dedares brings to a man misery and not happiness. Dealing with people in the Oui Country the Spectator states that if Mr Carnegie means (in recounting the blessings of poverty) that ordinary wealth is no help to happiness, people will perhaps not agree with him. The poor, and especially the educated poor, have three troubles, any two of which arc not fatal to happiness, but inimical to its enjoyment. They are insecure, they arc nearly powerless to provide for their children’s future, and -they have insufficient freedom. However good in his trade a man may be lie ifi liable to be thrown out by illness, by misfortune—the failure, for instance, of an employer—or—and this cause, to the disgrace of our age, is glowing more frequent every year—by the advance of age, which diminishes quickness and suggests possible claims for pensions. To say .of a man so placed that property will not . make him happier is nonsense, admitted nonsense, for if it is true all our teaching about the virtue of thrift and the utility of saving is but feeble hypocrisy. The second drawback is positive misery to scores of thousands, wiio know That at their death their children, and especially their daughters, must descend in the scale of life or suffer the horn ly repeated pains of penury. The efforts made on the Continent to avoid this evil mould all the laws of society and all the habits of life, and even here, where it is less fought against, it poisons a multitude of homes. 1 No,” did you say ? Then ask the clergy about themselves and hear the tales they tell. There are hundreds of parsonages and manses in England—this class is quoted because it is blameless and the facts are known— Where men cannot sleep for thinking of their children’s future. Is "wealth,” by which we mean surplus money, no source of happiness to them ? Tho third evil of poverty, striking all alike who have insufficient, is a great deal hidden everywhere by habit, but it is i„ most real one. Not to be able to choose one’s work, never to be able to rest from it. never to have one's own way or to gratify one’s own tastes, but to be tied, as it were, to a wheel Ihese are not sources of happiness, and we do not suppose that Mr Carnegie thinks they are, though some lccUiitrs on the vanity of riches occasionally speak as if they did.