Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/106

102 company with the whites; and so they are kept in poverty. In Europe the Jews have been equally despised and treated in tho same way, but not made poor, because they are in many respects a superior race of men, and because they have the advantage of belonging to a nation whose civilization is older than any other in Europe; a nation especially gifted with the faculty of thrift; a tribe whom none but other Jews, Scotchmen, or New Englanders, could outwit, over-reach, and make poor. No Ferdinand and Isabella, no inquisition could so completely expel them from any country, as the superior craft and cunning of the Yankee has driven them out of New England. There are Jews in every country of Europe, everywhere despised, and maltreated, and forced into the corners of society, but everywhere superior to the men who surround them. Such are the social causes which produce poverty.

Now, let us look at the matter on a smaller scale, and see the cause of poverty in New England, of poverty in Broad Street and Sea Street. From the great mass let me take out a class who are accidentally poor. There are the widows and orphan children who inherit no estate; the able men reduced by sickness before they have accumulated enough to sustain them. Then let me take out a class of men transiently poor, men who start with nothing, but have vigour and will to make their own way in the world. The majority of the poor still remain—the class who are permanently poor. The accidentally poor can easily be taken care of by public or private charity; the transient poor will soon take care of themselves. The young man who lives on six cents a day while studying medicine in Boston, is doubtless a poor man, but will soon repay society for the slight aid it has lent him, and in time will take care of other poor men. So these two classes—the accidental and the transient poor—can easily be disposed of.

What causes have produced the class that is permanently poor? What has just been said of nations, is true also of individuals.

First, there are natural and organic causes of poverty. Some men are born into the midst of want, ignorance, idleness, filthiness, intemperance, vice, crime; their earliest