Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
The other is to deal with the body of the slum, the houses, streets, and
shops; and so to reconstruct them that they shall steadily react on the
people and change their character. Both can be done, both are being
done, but so feebly and partially, in such tiny spots of change, under
such heavy opposition and heavier indifference, that the gain is
heart-breakingly slow. While one playground is being made, while one new
method of education is being introduced, a thousand babies die, a
thousand children become criminals, a thousand wretched men and women
sink to the hopeless grade, are lost to society, become diseased tissue,
and are miserably sloughed off through asylum, prison, and hospital.
The cause of the delay is this: We are treating social disease by local
application. We find, as it were, a tubercle or boil upon the body
politic, we apply all manner of treatment-the poultice, the
counter-irritant, the excising knife of capital punishment; but we
forget, or do not know, that this local trouble, however poignantly
conspicuous, is on a living body, and is caused and maintained by
diseased conditions in that body, far beyond the material boundaries of
that location.
We must, of course, use prompt and strong measures in these most painful
spots; but the treatment necessary to prevent the formation of these
conspicuously evil places must be applied to all of us. It is as
necessary for the right education and stimulus to be applied to the rich
and well-to-do as to the poor, to the isolated farmer in the field as
well as the crowded sweater in the shop; and not only those methods
touching the people’s character, but the other, the prompter ones,
touching their physical conditions.
There are certain physical conditions in the social body, brick and
mortar conditions, which are affecting us all for evil, and which can be
readily changed. There are, also, certain economic relations in that
body, affecting us all for evil, that can equally be changed. We need to
see these in their true importance; as affecting not only the immediate
individuals concerned, but as so affecting the whole structure of
Society as to inexorably produce the conspicuous evils with which we are
so painfully familiar. Once recognised, our duty is clear—a glad, swift,
forward movement bringing joy and gain to all.
What are these general conditions?
One is the economic position of woman, which involves false sex
relations, including all forms of prostitution; maintains primitive
individual instincts and checks social ones, and is largely responsible
for the morbid action of social economics. Another is the maintenance of
domestic industry; which, as I have shown in another book, prevents the
development of the home, the progress of woman, the right education of
the child, and the normal progress of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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