Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/347

 THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY.

POVERTY means a condition where there is lack of the neces- saries of life. The preservation of the life of the body is a necessity, and the man who does not possess the means necessary to such preservation is poor. Whether it be directly through starvation, or indirectly through sickness brought on by insuffi- cient nourishment, poverty must necessarily lead to the extinction of the physical life. The individual's instinctive love of life will not allow him to submit to this result without resistance, and so in one way or another, according to the circumstances in which he lives, he struggles against it. He will either beg the means of subsistence from his fellows, or, if this fails, he will resort to fraud or force in his efforts to obtain it. This means that he will strive to escape want by secret or forcible appropriation of the necessary means of subsistence. But so far as begging and force fail, whether it be because his fellow-men are also poor, or because they take sufficient precautions to protect themselves against fraud and force, so far the condition of poverty continues to exist, and that consequence of physical degeneration makes its appearance which penetrates the whole being through disease, through moral neglect, and through embitterment of soul. Where wider circles of population fall into this condition we speak of collective poverty, in contrast to individual poverty.

There is this great difference between poverty and all other human conditions, that the man who suffers from it has at his disposal no means of resistance out of his own power; that here there is no service rendered which furnishes a claim for a counter- service, as is the case in all other human relations. Hence when help is rendered to the poor, be it by the individual or by society in its various forms, the question is always of a service without return. For this reason, therefore, such service cannot without further ceremony be left to the general principles governing economics and equity which otherwise regulate the relation between service and counter-service. There are many other points

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