A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
It is not from rich men that the poor must hope for deliverance from
starvation. It is not to charitable associations the wretched must
appeal. Temporary alleviation of the permanent evil is the best that can
be hoped for from such aids. It is by the people that the people must be
saved. Measures which increase the dependence of the poor on charitable
aid can only temporarily benefit one portion of the laboring class while
injuring another in the same proportion; and charity, if carried far,
must inevitably involve the recipients in ultimate ruin and degradation
by destroying their mutual self-reliance. The true way to improve the
worker, in all cases short of actual want of the necessaries of life,
is to throw him entirely on his own resources, but at the same time to
teach him how he may augment those resources to the utmost. It is only
by educating the ignorant poor to a consciousness of the happiness
possible to them, as a result of their own exertions, that you can
induce them effectually to strive for it. But, alas! as Mr. Mill justly
observes, "Education is not compatible with extreme poverty. It is
impossible effectually to teach an indigent population." The time
occupied in the bare struggle to exist leaves but few moments and fewer
opportunities for mental cultivation to the very poor.
The question of wages and their relation to capital and population, a
question which interests a poor man so much, is one on which he formerly
hardly ever thought at all, and on which even now he thinks much too
seldom. It is necessary to impress on the laborer that the rate of wages
depends on the proportion between population and capital. If population
increases without an increase of capital, wages fall; the number or
competitors in the labor market being greater, and the fund to provide
for them not having increased proportionately, and, if capital increases
without an increase of population, wages rise. Many efforts have been
made to increase wages, but none of them can be permanently successful
which do not include some plan for preventing a too rapid increase
of laborers. Population has a tendency to increase, and has increased
faster than capital; this is evidenced by the poor and miserable
condition of the great body of the people in most of the old countries
of the world, a condition which can only be accounted for upon one of
two suppositions, either that there is a natural tendency in population
to increase faster than capital, or that capital has, by some means,
been prevented from increasing as rapidly as it might have done. That
population has such a tendency to increase that, unchecked, it would
double itself in a small number of years--say twenty-five--is a
proposition which most writers of any merit concur in, and which may be
easily proven. In some instances, the increase has been even still more
rapid. That capital has not increased sufficiently is evident from
the existing state of society. But that it could increase under any
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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