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Samuel A. Barnett and Henrietta O. Barnett.
St. Jude’s, Whitechapel: May 1888.
PRACTICABLE SOCIALISM.
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I.
THE POVERTY OF THE POOR.[1]
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ssss1 Reprinted, by permission, from the National Review of July 1886.
It is useless to imagine that the nation is wealthier because in one column of the newspaper we read an account of a sumptuous ball or of the luxury of a City dinner if in another column there is the story of ‘death from starvation.’ It is folly, and worse than folly, to say that our nation is religious because we meet her thousands streaming out of the fashionable churches, so long as workhouse schools and institutions are the only homes open to her orphan children and homeless waifs. The nation does not consist of one class only; the nation is the whole, the wealthy and the wise, the poor and the ignorant. Statistics, however flattering, do not tell the whole truth about increased national prosperity, or about progress in development, if there is a pauper class constantly increasing, or a criminal class gaining its recruits from the victims of poverty.