POVERTY AND OPTIMISM.
91HERE are people of whom one might almost say that a
What we have been saying is, we think, a common experience, specially among the poor, and is, we suppose, the reason why certain philanthropists and moralists regard the inculcation of anxiety as a sovereign remedy for all the evils to which the poor man and his children are heirs. If the poor would but look forward as we look forward, say they ; if they would but realize how intensely precious is their health ; how fearful a risk they run when they lose their work ; how imperative it is that they should never waste a penny or an hour, and what ceaseless thought and care are necessary to the proper upbringing of children, we should no longer be dis- tressed by the sight of so much squalor, and the problem of poverty which is at present set before every Government in Europe would be solved.
It is almost impossible to see much of the very poor and not fall into this way of thinking. , Their optimism is sometimes heroic, often exasperating, and always amazing. They live— so we who are not of them assure one another—close to a preci- pice, at the bottom of which is destitution, hunger, and the workhouse. An illness or sudden loss of employment, a change of fortune on the part of their employers, a change in fickle public taste, may send them at any moment over the edge. Yet for a whim they will risk the fall ; they will not take due pre-. cautions against it; the sight of their children's danger causes them little distress, and that though they have seen many and many a man fall over and have never seen any climb up again. Of all the terrors which beset the path of the very poor sickness is, one would have thought, the very worst ; yet it appears to be one of those least feared. Even the critics who take the most favourable view of the present Insurance scheme must admit that it has a cold reception at the hands of those whose supposed anxiety it was designed to relieve. Let any champion of the Act discuss it with any group of poor men, and he will come away with one strange misstate- ment ringing in his ears : "I am never ill," his interlocutors will say to him. The hard-worked professional man would hardly take a hundred pounds to tempt fate in such a fashion. Every evil that he fears would crowd upon his mind. The suffering of sickness, its wretched enforced idleness, the sad social descent which comes of serious loss of money, and
which may involve—in a literal sense—the degrading of his children, form picture after picture in his imagination. The horizon of the less well-off professional man is never free from the clouds of care. Small wonder that he is often nervous and not seldom bitter. Are the really rich anxious ? he wonders. Probably if he is a doctor he will answer this question in the affirmative and talk of heart-complaints brought on by money troubles; anyhow he will probably conclude that even the rich have not the immunity from anxiety enjoyed by the very poor. Not that the poor are happier than the rich— they all wish to be rich, while no rich man genuinely desires to be poor—but that they know the secret of an anodyne for which their more fortunate brethren seek in vain. Supposing that all the good people who preach care to them could take away that anodyne, would the happiness of the world be increased ? Some people seem to think so. But surely it is a very open question whether without it their troubles would not be too much for them, whether they would not take the heart out of them altogether. Is it not we who should learn from them in this matter rather than they from us ?
The general sum of happiness would certainly be increased if they could make over to the educated a little of their peculiar courage. What can account for it ? We suppose that like most courage it is the result of discipline. We are always hearing that discipline is the very thing that the poor lack, especially in youth. But what careless speakers mean when they lament this loss for the lower classes is drill rather than discipline. The discipline of endurance and the discipline of danger are always forming the characters of the poor, and they are able, there can be no doubt, to face the greater evils of existence, illness, destitution, and death from natural causes with greater calm than those who have had more training for life, but who have not been brought up under fire, so to speak, though they may be perhaps more ready to embrace the risks of pleasurable adventure. The consola- tions of religion are open to rich and poor alike, but the rich man, if he is without faith, will as a rule regard death as "the dark," struggle to avoid the thought of it, or lament with bitter impotence its inevitable necessity, and with his doctor's help will strain every nerve to avoid it. The optimism of the poor man stands him in good stead even here. The dead are "better off," he fancies, even if he be a secularist, and the thought of dying troubles him not at all
The moral effects of anxiety present a very curious problem —on the one hand, spurring men to do right ; on the other, demoralizing them by fear. It poisons life, yet it haa medicinal qualities. Christianity deprecates anxiety and inculcates the taking of short views to an extent not in accordance with the fashionable wisdom of to-day. Had this counsel a directly moral aim, or was it inspired by compassion for the multitude P Who shall say ? It is at least legitimate to imagine that compassion inspired in part the Christian deprecation of anxiety, we might almost say of fore- thought. To say the truth, it is difficult to prove the moral value of an unanxious disposition. If its great moral value can be proved, it throws a light upon the moral precedence which is undeniably given to the poor in the Gospel. Certainly faith comes more easily to those who have no instinctive dread of the future, and the bitterness which breeds scepticism and comes of fear is leas likely to get a hold on the mind. Children are not anxious and they are held up in the New Testament as an example to their elders. It is hardly possible to-day to say what social level is most prolific of saints. If some great man of letters, some man with the genius of a Shakespeare, were to arise and were to set himself to paint for the world the ideal man of this generation, the best man, as we of to-day conceive the best, from what class would he take his hero ? The moral instinct of humanity and the moral inspiration of Christianity always chime. He would probably take him from among the poor.
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