https://ia600409.us.archive.org/2/items/poverty01huntgoog/poverty01huntgoog.pdf
From the International Socialist Review of January 1905:
Mais"Poverty." — A Review.* MR. ROBERT HUNTER, of New York, has just produced a work which I have no hesitation in pronouncing the greatest contribution to sociological literature that has appeared during the past year, and this year has been a year fruitful of works in this field. Many reviewers attempt to compare it with such works as that of Charles Booth in London. In reality, its field is so utterly different as to afford no ground for a fair comparison. Booth's work is that of the patient investigator, this, of the thinker who correlates facts in order to show their effects and relations. To be sure this book contains the results of much direct investigation, and Booth's contains valuable generalizations. Yet the line between the two classes of work is fairly distinct. Mr. Hunter's work is a study of those who in a land of plenty must live below the standard of animal comfort. In order to arrive at the number of those who constitute the subject matter of his work, he approaches the subject from various points of view. The number of evictions, of cases of tuberculosis, of pauper burials, of dispensary patients, of accidents to workers, are used as checks against estimates founded on more direct studies of poverty. And he finally comes to the conclusion, which is certainly extremely conservative when considered in connection with the facts that he presents, that at least ten million people are to be considered as living in chronic poverty. Those who are distinctly paupers and in whom the desire to escape from that condition has been crushed, are differentiated from the workman who lives and works and produces wealth in constant poverty.
Robert Hunter
Still the line between the two is a never shifting one. The unemployed working man must sooner or later become a pauper unless he possesses unusual strength of character. His comments on the unemployed are well worth quoting at length:—
It reflects very grievously upon the justice of our social system that so many men, willing to work, should be unable to find work to do. The history of the world has perhaps never shown more abject victims of chance than the modern propertyless workman. A man possessing his own tools or land may always employ himself, and, although it may at times be necessary for him to sell his products for a very low price, he need not, except in extraordinary times, become dependent upon others for relief. The tools of the modern workman are the machine; both it and the land are owned by others. He cannot work on the land or at the machine except by permission of another. If the owner does not find it profitable to employ him, the workman must remain idle. At certain seasons of the year this idleness is compulsory to workmen by the tens of thousands, and at times of business depression by the hundreds of thousands. Without savings adequate to supply his needs, and with his income wholly dependent upon an intermittent demand for his labor, circumstances are apt to arise sooner or later that will force him either to commit crime against property or to depend upon public relief for sustenance. If the state of dependence continues long, habitual pauperism or vagrancy is quite likely to result. In other words, these outcasts from industry have before them the choice of three evils—starvation, crime or relief by charity.It is useless, as he points out, to advise the workman to save against the coming of the inevitable rainy day, since he can only do this at the expense of present suffering for himself and family. This is especially true in America, where the tremendous pressure of modern industry compels that the human machine be well fed if it is to be run at all. In the chapter on "The Vagrant" he is not satisfied with any of the superficial reasonings of the Wyckoff's, Riis' and the charity organization workers. He sees plainly that "even if these vagrants could be forced back into the working class they would only augment the distress in the mass which makes up the reserve of labor."
One of the great causes of poverty is sickness. But sickness is both a cause and an effect of poverty. It is always with the poor, and the pictures which he draws of sickness in the tenements have a literary power in vivid painting of facts that should stir the soul of every reader to an endeavor to abolish the social conditions which make such things necessary. Yet the poor are compelled to live in tenements with death rates two and three times as great as exist in more favorable localities. We are ordinarily inclined to boast of the superiority of American conditions in these respects. Yet Mr. Hunter says:
I dare say that no other nation has so many needless deaths or so many cases of illness wholly due to preventable industrial causes as the United States of America.... There was once a Great Black Plague. It was the consternation of the people of the time when it grew and flourished. Those who were able to do so fled from the cities which it ravaged. It lived a year and caused the death of two or three million people. It was probably the result of filthy, undrained streets and vile tenements.
"The Great White Plague" has lived for centuries and centuries; it was known before the time of Christ. It has caused the death of millions and millions of people; it will this year cause the death of over one million more. One hundred and fifty thousand people in the United States alone will this year die of the disease. Within the next twelve months not less than fifteen thousand of the people of New York City, some of whom will be our neighbors, friends, and even perhaps our relatives, will bow down before the Great White Plague.
It is a needless plague, a preventable plague. It is one of the results of our inhuman tenements; it follows in the train of our inhuman sweatshops; it fastens itself upon children and young people because we forget that they need playgrounds and because we are selfish and niggardly in providing breathing spaces; it comes where the hours of labor are long and the wages small; it afflicts [the children who are sent to labor when they should yet be in] school; the plague goes to meet them. It is a brother to the anguish of poverty, and wherever food is scant and bodies half clothed and rooms dark this hard and relentless brother of poverty finds a victim.
It is more kind to the old, who have every reason for dying, than it is to the young, who have no reason for dying. It takes, as it were, an especial delight in mowing down the bread-winners of wage-earning families at the sweetest and most treasured period of their lives—at the time when they are having the first joys of married life and bringing into the world their little ones.
The children of the poor "who are sent to labor when they should yet be in school."
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