Nor am I discounting or forgetting one single pang of the keen hardships that such a struggle means. I would not to-day exchange my years of the keenest hardship that a boy can know or pass through for any single experience that could have come to me. I know what it means, not to earn a dollar, but to earn two cents. I know the value of money as I could have learned it or known it in no other way. I could have been trained for my life-work in no surer way. I could not have arrived at a truer understanding of what it means to face a day without a penny in hand, not a loaf of bread in the cupboard, not a piece of kindling wood for the fire--with nothing to eat, and then be a boy with the hunger of nine and ten, with a mother frail and discouraged! "An experience that you know not of"! Don't I? And yet I rejoice in the experience, and I repeat: I envy every boy who is in that condition and going through it. But--and here is the pivot of my strong belief in poverty as an undisguised blessing to a boy--I believe in poverty as a condition to experience, to go through, and then to get out of: not as a condition to stay in. "That's all very well," some will say; "easy enough to say, but how can you get out of it?" No one can definitely tell another that. No one told me. No two persons can find the same way out. Each must find his way for himself. That depends on the boy. I was determined to get out of poverty because my mother was not born in it, could not stand it, and did not belong in it. This gave me the first essential: a purpose. Then I backed up the purpose with effort and a willingness to work, and to work at anything that came my way, no matter what it was, so long as it meant "the way out." I did not pick and choose: I took what came, and did it in the best way I knew how; and when I didn't like what I was doing I still did it well while I was doing it, but I saw to it that I didn't do it any longer than I had to do it. I used every rung in the ladder as a rung to the one above. It meant effort, of course, untiring, ceaseless, and unsparing, and it meant work, hard as nails. But out of the effort and the work came the experience; the upbuilding; the development; the capacity to understand and sympathize; the greatest heritage that can come to a boy. And nothing in the world can give that to a boy, so that it will burn into him, as will poverty. That is why I believe so strongly in poverty, the greatest blessing in the way of the deepest and fullest experience that can come to a boy. But, as I repeat: always as a condition to work out of, not to stay in. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE· MASSACHUSETTS U.S.A. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Why I Believe in Poverty, by Edward Bok