MISS WILLARD ON “POVERTY.”

White Ribbon, Volume 1, Issue 4, 1 October 1895, Page 1

MISS WILLARD ON “POVERTY.”

We shall never see the golden age “ until the golden rule becomes the rule for gold.” Under the search-light of knowledge in *hese later days it is folly for us longer to ignore the mighty power of poverty to induce evil habits of every kind. Under the procedure of relentless competition men are ground into dust by a heavier heel than old-time tyrannies could boast, and they seek forgetfulness in those indulgencies, whose hallucinations deteriorate body and soul. They drink and debauch themselves, they gamble, they seek gross scenes of amusement and revelry ; on the one hand they try to forget, and on the other to crowd into the brief space given them for recreation the utmost possible amount of sensation and delirium.

I know that this position which I take, with a full understanding of the criticism it must involve in certain minds, will he controverted by the statement that the alcohol insanity, the opium craze, and the folly of base amusement are not confined to the hand-workers of the world But it has passed into a proverb that the unemployed rich and the unemployed poor live along strangely paraded lines in respect to their mdulgencies and tastes, hut the plutocrats form a very small group compared with the great army of wage workers; and it is universally admitted that the habit of drink and other disintegrating modes of living are slowly dying out among the intelligent and fairly comfortable classes that live in the temperate zone between the two extremes. Nothing short of wilful ignorance can account for the continued ignoring of poverty as perhaps the chief procuring cause of the brutal drinking habits with which whole areas of population are distempered throughout the English-speaking world. Those words of Holy Writ are ominously true in the present condition of things : “ Let him drink and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.’ In view of these considerations, it is more than short-sighted folly, it is unpardonable stubbornness not to say criminal apathy, in us as I emperance workers if we do not clasp hands of intelligent and earnest sympathy with the wage-worker and the unemployed. We must lengthen our cords and strengthen our stakes until they reach so far over into the camp of our bread-earning brethren that ours shall be for evermore two “ camps allied in thought and purpose to bring in the better day. We must he able to see that the eight-hours law is a temperance measure, a purity measure, a Ciospel measure, and nothing less; for by means of the eight-hours law one-third more men and women among those now unemployed can find standing room in the bread-winning battalions, where they

can fight for a free and independent life and a wellordered home. For the living wage means not only that the wage-earner shall live, but that he shall live well. Ruskin has wisely said that there is no wealth but life, and it is the duty of the nation to clear away the impediments that hold honest and industrious people from coming to their own, developing their best capacities, enjoying that life “ more abundant ” to which every human heart is drawn by an instinct as irresistible as the force that draws the tides towards the sun. Poverty and dependence are the curse of women and all the world. For this reason I am an avowed advocate of such a change iu social conditions as shall stamp out the disease and contagion of poverty even as medical science is stamping out leprosy, smallpox, and cholera ; and I believe the age in which we live will yet be characterised as one of those dark, dismal and damning ages when some people were so dead to the love of their kind that they left them in poverty without a heartacne or a blush.