Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/276

 Our present poor laws keep the injured laboring man from starvation. According to law, at least, nobody need starve. Whether in reality this never happens I do not know. But this is not enough in order to let the men look contentedly into the future and to their own old age. The present bill intends to keep the sense of human dignity alive which even the poorest German should enjoy, if I have my way. He should feel that he is no mere eleemosynary, but that he possesses a fund which is his very own. No one shall have the right to dispose of it, or to take it from him, however poor he may be. This fund will open for him many a door, which otherwise will remain closed to him and it will secure for him better treatment in the house where he has been received, because when he leaves he can take away with him whatever contributions he has been making to the household expenses.

If you have ever personally investigated the conditions of the poor in our large cities, or of the village paupers in the country, you have been able to observe the wretched treatment which the poor occasionally receive even in the best managed communities, especially if they are physically weak or crippled. This happens in the houses of their step-mothers, or relatives of any kind, yes also in those of their nearest of kin. Knowing this, are you not obliged to confess that every healthy laboring man, who sees such things, must say to himself: "Is it not terrible that a man is thus degraded in the house which he used to inhabit as master and that his neighbor's dog is not worse off than he?" Such things do happen. What protection is there for a poor cripple, who is pushed into a corner, and is not given enough to eat? There is none. But if he has as little as 100 or 200 marks of his own, the people will think twice before they oppress him. We have been in a position to observe this in the case of the military invalids. Although only five or six dollars are paid every month, this actual cash amounts to something in the household where the