May 1890 — National Conference of Charities and Correction, Baltimore MD

I have not been able to assent to the report of the Chairman of the Committee on Indoor and Outdoor Relief, only because, as it seems to me, it does not draw the distinction which is necessary between public and private relief.

I admit, of course, that there are persons who need relief (that is, help) with their own homes, and that both Pitt’s argument and Mr. Sanborn’s argument apply to such: “Great care should be taken, in relieving their distresses, not to throw them into the great class of vagrant and homeless poor.” Such people, however, are to my mind, not proper subjects for relief at all; for what is public relief, and upon what grounds is it to be justified? Public relief is money paid by the bulk of the community (every community is of course composed mainly of those who are working hard to obtain a livelihood) to certain members of the community; not, however, voluntarily or spontaneously by those interested in the individuals receiving it, but paid by public officers from money raised by taxation. The justification for the expenditure of public money (money raised by taxation) is that it is necessary for the public good. That certain persons need certain things is no reason for supplying them with those things from the public funds. Before this can be rightly done, it is necessary to prove that it is good for the community at large that it should be done.

It is always necessary, also, in considering the expenditure of public funds, to give up the vague notion that these funds come from an indefinitely large central source of supply, which can be drawn upon constantly without affecting any one. There is no such central source of supply. Every dollar raised by taxation comes out of the pocket of some individual, usually a poor individual, and makes him so much the poorer, and therefore the question is between the man who earned the dollar by hard work, and needs it to buy himself and his family a day’s food, and the man who, however worthy and suffering, did not earn it, but wants it to be given to him to buy himself and his family a day’s food. If the man who earned it wishes to divide it with the other man, it is usually a desirable thing that he should do so, and at any rate it is more or less his own business; but that the law, by the hand of a public officer, should take it from him and hand it over to the other man, seems to be an act of gross tyranny and injustice, which, if carried far enough and repeated often enough, leads to a condition of things where there is not sufficient produced for everybody, and therefore all suffer, the men who earn the dollars as well as those who do not earn them.

It is good for the community that no one should be allowed to starve therefore, it is a legitimate thing that the public money should be used to prevent such a possibility, and this justifies the giving of public relief in extreme cases of distress, when starvation is imminent. Where, however, shall be found the proof that starvation is imminent? Only by putting such conditions upon the giving of public relief that, presumably, persons not in danger of starvation will not consent to receive it. The less that is given, the better for every one, the giver and the receiver; and, therefore, the conditions must be hard, although never degrading. On the contrary, they must be elevating, and this is by no means incompatible with severity.

To those who object that, because the community relieves a person, that person should not therefore be reduced to pauperism by being placed in an institution, the only answer is that the receiving of relief from the community constitutes pauperism, and the refuge from pauperism is either in self-support or else in the giving of help from private sources. Because certain persons think that certain other persons need help is no doubt the best reason why they should help them, but not a good reason why they should require the community to help them.

There are undoubtedly many, many persons who do need help, and many, many more who would be glad to get it, and who think they need it; and many, many more who do not think they need it, but who still would take it if offered to them. Where is the line to be drawn? If there were a store of public property created by no individuals, the result of no personal exertion or labor, — for instance, were the United States still possessed of all the property, lands, mines, etc. which have in the past belonged to the people, and were all these now rented, and the surplus income not required for the expenses of government divided per capita among the citizens of the United States, is there any individual, rich or poor, who would refuse to receive his share? And, if not, why not? Simply because there would be no unpleasant conditions attached to receiving it. There would be no stigma connected with it, because every one would recognize that he had a right to receive it, that it was public property, and that he was in exactly the same position as every other citizen of the United States. Then, further, what would be the effect of this payment upon the character and upon the conduct of the people of the United States? Excuse the extravagance of the supposition, and say, for the sake of illustration, that the sum paid to each man and woman over twenty-one years of age was $500 a year. Would there not be quite a large proportion of the community who now earn $500 a year who would, upon being assured of this income, cease to work for a living? Some of these, so ceasing, would devote themselves to higher pursuits than earning a living, ― to study, to art, to philanthropy. Some, on the contrary, would spend their substance in riotous living, and would become much less worthy, much less decent, than ever before in their lives. But all who ceased to work for a living would, undoubtedly, very soon become less fitted to earn a living, would become less energetic, less skilled in a money-making direction, less able to succeed. And what would be the effect on the children? Would they, with the assurance of $500 yearly income upon reaching their majority, probably be as energetic, as self-reliant, as fitted to earn a living, as they would have been without this assurance? Does experience prove that the children of persons who do not have to exert themselves have the same independence and the same power to support themselves as the children of those differently situated?

We have been speaking of an income paid to every member of the community, regardless of his own exertions or character, and we have assumed that this income came from a source of wealth, the rent of public property, not created by individuals; but could there be any such source of wealth? The rents of public property would have to be derived from the energy and industry of the men who used it; and were these and those who followed them to content themselves with the $500 coming to each of them from the public treasury, and therefore cease to produce, very soon the lands and the mines themselves would lose value, the rents would fall because of the want of industry of the people, and the community would lose a part, at least, of its regular income, and be driven to earn its own living again by the sweat of the brow; but it would have lost many of the qualities upon which success in earning a living depends. The people would earn a worse living than they used to, and would be distinctly less “well off ” than before the distribution of the public property began, until they recovered their energy and industry. Now, this is, as I have said, simply an extravagant supposition; but, considering what human nature now is, were these conditions possible, are not such the results which must follow the general acquisition of an income which should accrue to each citizen of the United States without any exertion on his part? At any rate, experience shows that this is exactly the effect on those who receive public relief, except that to the unfortunate diminishing of the energy and earning capacity of the recipients is also added a moral degradation, because there is a stigma attached to public relief, arising from the fact that the money received is actually the property of individuals taken from them against their will and not belonging to the public; and it is necessary to overcome a sense of shame before any one is content to become a pauper, and the loss of this sense of shame in itself constitutes a distinct moral degradation, and leads to still further deterioration of character.

If the advocates of public relief contend that there should be no stigma attached to its receipt, the answer is that, in that case, the tendency would be toward the condition where the whole people would be ready to accept an income from so-called public funds, and that the resulting loss of energy and industry would be sufficient to plunge any nation into a greater poverty than any now suffers. Public relief does not have an enervating effect upon the character of those who receive it because they are different from other human beings, but because they are human beings, and are actuated by exactly the same motives as the rest of the race. It is not because paupers are primarily more lazy than other people that they will not work for a living if they can be supported without working. If you will consider, you will find that you do not know any one (or, if you do, you regard him or her as a most extraordinary individual) who works for a living when it is not necessary, when the living is supplied from some source without any conditions which are dishonorable or irksome. The whole difference between a pauper and any of the rest of us who do not earn our own living is that he wants and gets very little, while we want and get a great deal, and that our views of what are honorable and dishonorable conditions differ materially from his.

Of course, to be logical, I ought to go on to the position which Dr. Chalmers took, that it would be better for the community that there should be no public relief, indoor or outdoor, none in the poorhouse and none outside the poorhouse; but I am not prepared to go quite so far as this, for I do think that, besides energy and the power of work, there are other human faculties which need developing, and that the community should acknowledge an obligation to succor, and even to support, those of its members who are absolutely unable to fight the battle of life, and that there should be a sure refuge from starvation. So far as this refuge is furnished from the funds raised by taxation, however, I am persuaded, as I have said, that the only safe way to provide it is under such stringent conditions that no one shall be tempted to accept it except in an extremity, and under such conditions, also, as will as soon as possible make the recipient of help able to support himself again and do his part in supporting others. I mean that public relief should be indoor relief, inside the doors of an institution, where cure and education should be the primary objects aimed at, cure of disease, moral, mental, and physical, and education in self-control and self-dependence. The community may well say to any of its members: “If you cannot support yourself by your own work, it is a pity. We will support you by our work; but we will not make it so pleasant for you that you will desire to continue the condition, and we will train your mind and body so that you will be able soon to undertake the care of yourself.”

You see my argument is that the work of the mass of every community is an absolute necessity, in order to provide for it the means of living; that no human being will work to provide the means of living for himself if he can get a living in any other manner agreeable to himself (you will observe that I do not say men will not work, but that they will not work for a living); and that the community cannot afford to tempt its members who are able to work for a living to give up working for a living by offering to provide a living otherwise; and that public relief must be confined to those who cannot work for a living, and the only way to test whether they can or cannot is to make the living provided by the public always less agreeable than the living provided by the individual for himself, and the way to do this is to provide it under strict rules inside an institution.

The practice of any community in this particular is a matter of great importance, for there can be no question that there is an inverse ratio between the welfare of the mass of the people and the distribution of relief. What some one has called “the fatal ease of living without work and the terrible difficulty of living by work” are closely interrelated as cause and effect; and if you will permit me, I will try to show by a short allegory what this relation is.

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Once upon a time there lived in a valley, called the Valley of Industry, a people who were happy and industrious. All the goods of this life were applied to them by exhaustless subterranean springs of water, which they pumped up into a great reservoir on the top of a neighboring hill, the Hill of Prosperity, from which it flowed down, each man receiving what he himself pumped up, by a small pipe which led into his own house, a moderate amount of pumping on the part of everyone keeping the reservoir well filled.

Finally, a few of the inhabitants of the Valley, more keen than the rest, reflected that it was unnecessary to weary themselves with pumping, so long as everyone else kept at work. The Hill of Prosperity looked very attractive; and they therefore mounted to a convenient point, and put a large pipe into the reservoir, through which they drew off copious supplies of water without further trouble. The number of those who gave up pumping and withdrew to the Hill was at first so small that the loss did not add very much to the work of the mass of the people, who still kept to their pumping, and it did not occur to them to complain; but those who could followed the others up the Hill until it was all occupied, and by this time, although those who remained in the Valley did find their pumping a good deal harder than it was when all who used the water joined in the work, yet every one had become so accustomed to some people using the reservoir water without doing any pumping that it had come to be considered all right, and still there were no complaints. Meanwhile, the people on the Hill of Prosperity having nothing to do but enjoy the prospect, some of them began to explore the neighboring country, and soon discovered another valley at the foot of the Hill, running parallel with the Valley of Industry, and called the Valley of Idleness, and in it were a few people who had wandered from the former Valley (for the two were connected at the farther end), and who were living in abject misery, with no water, and apparently no means of getting any, so long as they stayed where they were. The people from the Hill of Prosperity were very much shocked at the suffering they found. “What a shame!” they cried. “The poor things have no water! We have plenty and to spare, so let us lead a pipe from the reservoir down into their Valley.” No sooner said than done: the pipe was carried into the Valley of Idleness, and the people were made more comfortable. But as soon as the news was brought into the Valley of Industry, some of the pumpers who were tired or weak, and some who were only lazy, left their pumping, and hastened into the neighboring Valley, to enjoy the “free” water; but the pipe was not very large, and soon there was want and suffering again, and the people from Prosperity Hill were much disturbed, and decided to lay down another small pipe, which they did. But the result was the same, for the new supply of water attracted more people from the Valley of Industry. And so it went on, new pipe, more people, new pipe, more people, until the inhabitants of Prosperity Hill were full of distress about it, and exclaimed, “It seems a hopeless task to try to make these people happy and comfortable!” And they would have given up in despair, but a new idea occurred to them; and they said, “They do not seem to know how to take very good care of their children, and we will therefore take their children from them, and teach them to be comfortable and happy.” So they built large, fine houses for the children, and they carried water in large pipes into the houses. And some of them said, “Let us put faucets, so as to teach them to turn on the water when they need it.” But others said: “Oh, no! How troublesome it is to have to turn a faucet when you need water! Let them have it as we do, free.” And sometimes one or other would suggest that, perhaps, after all, it was not quite right to waste so much of the water from the reservoir, and that the large pipe itself, which supplied the Hill of Prosperity, ought to have some means of checking the flow; but the answer was. “It is necessary and right that the water should be wasted; for otherwise the people in the Valley of Industry would have nothing to do, and they would starve.” Usually, however, the Prosperity Hill people were too much engaged in taking care of the inhabitants of the Valley of Idleness to give much thought to those of the Valley of Industry; and their anxiety was quite magnified, for they had to keep up a perpetual watchfulness, the people increasing so fast that it was necessary constantly to lay more pipe to keep them from the most abject suffering, and even this device never succeeded for very long, as I have said.

In fact, no one thought much about the Valley of Industry or its people. Those in the Valley of Idleness only thought of them long enough to reflect how silly they were to keep on pumping all the time and making their backs and arms ache, when they might have water without any exertion, by simply moving into their Valley. The children born in the Valley of Idleness did not even know there was a Valley of Industry, or any pumps, or any pumpers, or a reservoir: they thought the water grew in pipes, and ran out because it was its nature to. As for the people of the Hill of Prosperity, they were, as we have seen, rather confused in their views in this particular; and, besides thinking that their waste of the water from the reservoir was what kept the people in the Valley of Industry from starving, they used to also say sometimes: “How good it is for those people to have such nice, steady work to do! how strong it makes their back and arms! how it hardens their muscles! What a nice, independent set of people they are! and what a splendid opportunity of pure, life-giving water they get out of our reservoir!”

Meanwhile, you can imagine, though they could not, that it was rather hard on the men in the Valley of Industry, not only to have the water they pumped up drawn off at the top to supply two other communities, but also to have their own ranks thinned and their work increased by the loss of those who were tempted into the Valley of Idleness, to live on what the Prosperity Hill people and the Valley of Idleness people like to call euphemistically “free water,” because they got it free, though actually it was not free at all; the Valley of Industry people paid for it with their blood and muscle.

I might go on to tell you how the situation was still further complicated and made harder for them, and indeed for almost everyone, when a few of them obtained control of the inexhaustible subterranean springs; but here, I think, the allegory may end for the purposes of this Conference, and it seems to me to teach a lesson which we may well heed.

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I have so far considered only the effect of relief upon the character of the recipient, from the point of view of the public welfare and the injury done to the community, as a whole, by the lowering of the producing power, the energy and industry of its members. This view is the most important; but because of its very importance, because it deals with the welfare of the whole community, it is not apt to appeal so strongly to our sympathies as considerations which affect individuals, and I shall therefore turn now to the effect on individual men and women of presenting to them the temptations of relief. You will observe that I no longer say public relief; for I do not wish here to discriminate between public and private relief, the evil effects upon the individual man or woman receiving any relief (as distinguished from the help of friends) being about equal. We have seen that it is not in human nature to refuse any gift which comes hampered by no disagreeable or dishonorable conditions; we have seen also that energy and the power of self-support must be diminished, as are all other faculties, by disuse; and, these two statements being accepted as facts, it follows that no greater injury can be done to a human being, whose whole success and happiness in life consist in his power of exerting himself and supporting himself, than to tempt him by the offer of gifts, which will not support him, but which will lead him to suppose that he need not support himself, and therefore will induce him to give up the use of his self-supporting faculties. Can anything more certain be devised for destroying manhood?

As it is now given, relief seems to have all the disadvantages it possibly can have, and none of the advantages. It serves to weaken the character, to excite the gambling spirit, the recklessness and extravagance which come of chance gains; but it does not give the quiet and peace, the power to live for worthier objects than mere physical support, which an assured income supplies, while it also destroys all the incentives to activity, energy, and industry which are usually supplied by the struggle to “make a living.”

I am becoming more and more strongly convinced that the giving of relief in the manner which is now the custom is a cruel injury to those who receive it, both because it does produce such ruin of all the faculties which constitute what we call character, and also because it offers what to any but a heroic nature must be an overwhelming temptation.

When we consider the hardships, the struggles, the sufferings, of the mass of those who are commonly called the working people, of those who earn from day to day the support of themselves and their families, when we remember how much hard work it takes to earn one dollar, and often how hard it is even to get the hard work to do, and then think of the reckless way in which a dollar is given here, there, and everywhere, often simply for the asking, can we wonder that many succumb to the temptation to ask? The contempt for “charity” (I hate so to debase the beautiful word, but that is the use to which it has come) which the mass of honest and hard-working people most fortunately feel is their only shield and defence against the temptation so constantly held out to them; but the temptation is potent enough to decoy its thousands within the baleful influence of “relief ” — getting, and, once under the spell, the salvation of the victim seems impossible, for the rewards are too great on that side and the struggle too severe on this. Imagine a poor, sickly woman, with little children to support. By hard work, which makes her back and head ache to the limit of endurance, she may earn a dollar a day, and keep her children from starvation. By asking for relief, by begging from door to door, she can make more in one day than a week’s work will bring. Except for her pride, except for her self-respect, what can weigh with her in favor of the badly paid work as against the well-paid begging? Has any human being the right, instead of going to her assistance in her extremity, so to tempt her to degradation? Or imagine the man who by a month’s work can earn fifty or sixty dollars. He has a sick wife. He has three or four little children. He knows there is plenty of money in the hands of benevolent persons. He writes a letter, setting forth his straits. He receives $25 in return. Can that man ever again be free from the temptation to gain another $25 by the writing of another letter, instead of spending twelve weary days in getting it? You see, these people are not in comfortable circumstances. They cannot have what they want, often not what they need, even by making all the exertion of which they are capable. Then, if to them comes the temptation to get it all without any exertion, is it not, as I have said, heroic, if they resist? and is it possible that any one with a heart and a conscience and an imagination can be willing to stand as the tempter where the temptation is so dire and the results of giving way mean moral ruin?

It seems unnecessary to say that, if it were a question of giving an income sufficient to live decently upon to certain persons for life, the moral effect would not be so bad, would often not be bad at all; but the trouble here is as to the choice of the favored persons and the danger of indefinitely enlarging the number of pensioners until the resources for their support and for the support of the community as a whole were brought so low as to cause extended and general suffering, and therefore the only way for the public to supply any such comfortable living is to supply it under conditions which so far detract from or at least counterbalance its comfort as to make the number of persons ready to accept it self-limited. As to what may and ought to be done in this direction by those persons who, having a large share of the goods of this world, are called upon to help those who have less, I can only say that I think there are many poor, feeble, suffering women, now struggling for their daily bread, whom it would be a very desirable thing to supply with an income sufficient to keep them in comfort to the end of their lives, and that the injury to their characters would be no more and no other than the injury of resting in comfort to the characters of the many strong and happy women who now live on incomes which they do not earn.

Finally, the real condemnation of relief-giving is that it is material, that it seeks material ends by material means, and therefore must fail, in the nature of things, even to attain its own ends. For man is a spiritual being, and, if he is to be helped, it must be by spiritual means. As Mazzini has said: “The human soul, not the body, should be the starting-point of all our labors, since the body without the soul is only a carcass; while the soul, wherever it is found free and holy, is sure to mould for itself such a body as its wants and vocation require.”

Those who claim that relief must be given, even though it does destroy the character, because without it they fear that there may be physical suffering, besides forgetting the fact that it makes more suffering than it cures, forget also the awful question: — “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Source: Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections at the Seventeenth Annual Session Held in Baltimore, MD., May 14-21, 1890, ed. Isabel C. barrows (Boston: Press of Geo. H. Ellis, 1890), pp. 81-91.