Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/102

98 bettor public provision is made for the poor, privato benevolence is more active and works far more wisely—yet still there is poverty, want, misery, unremoved, unmitigated, and, many think, immitigable!

Now I am not going to deny that poverty, like other forms of suffering, plays n part in the economy of the human race. If God's children will not work, or will throw away their bread, I do not complain that He sends them to bed without their supper—to a hard bed, and a narrow, and a cold. "Earn your breakfast before you eat it," is not merely the counsel of Poor Richard, but of Almighty God ; it is a just counsel, and not hard. But is poverty an essential, substantial, integral element in human civilization, or is it an accidental element thereof, and transiently present; is it amenable to suppression ? For my own part, I believe that all evil is transient, a thing that belongs to tho process of development, not to the nature of man, or the higher forms of social life towards which he is advancing. If God be absolutely good, then only good things are everlasting. This general opinion, which comes from my religion as well as my philosophy, affects my special opinion of the history and design of poverty. I look on it as on cannibalism, the butchery of cap Axes, the continual war for the sake of plunder, or on Slavery; yes, as I look on the diseases incidental to childhood, things that mankind live through and outgrow; which, painful as they are, do not make up the greatest part of the entire life of mankind. If it shall be said that I cannot know this, that I have not a clear intellectual perception of the providential design thereof, or the means of its removal, still I believe it, and if I have not the knowledge which comes of philosophy, I have still faith, the result of instinctive trust in God.

Let us look a little at the causes of poverty. Some things we see best on a large scale. So let us look at poverty thus, and then come down to the smaller forms thereof.

I. There may be a natural and organic cause. The people of Lapland, Iceland, and Greenland are a poor people compared with the Scotch, the Danes, or the French. There is a natural and organic cause for theft