First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 17

Let us review the preceding in a few words.

The progressive march of modern civilization increases gradually, and in proportion, more or less as quickly, the number of those who are driven to resort to charity.

What remedy would work for such problems?

At first, the idea of public almsgiving occurs to the mind, public almsgiving in all its forms, sometimes as free money, sometimes hidden in the form of a salary, sometimes accidental and temporary, for certain situations, permanent and regular for other situations.  But a deeper examination will soon demonstrate that this remedy, which seems so natural and effective, is very dangerous; it only offers deceptive short term relief to individual suffering, and it poisons the wounds of society in whatever way it is administered.

Only private charity remains; this only produces useful effects.  Its weakness itself guarantees it from danger; it gives comfort to much misery without causing any.  But in the presence of the progressive development of industrial classes and all evils civilization mixes in with the inestimable good to which it leads, private charity seems very weak.  It was sufficient in the Middle Ages, when religious ardor gave it immense energy, and when its task was easier to fulfill; what would happen in our own day when the burden it must carry is heavy, and its energy has been reduced?  Individual charity is a powerful agent that society must not distrust, but to which it would be imprudent to confide itself.  It is one of the means and cannot be the only one.

What remains to be done?  Where should we turn? How can we lighten the suffering, that one can predict, but not cure?

Until now, I have examined financial means to alleviate misery.  But are these the only means?  After reflecting on relieving misfortune, would it not be useful to find ways to prevent it? Can one not slow down rapid displacement of the population, such that men do not quit the land in favor of industrial work until the latter can provide for their needs?  Can the sum of national wealth not continue to grow unless a part of those who produce it come to curse the prosperity they helped bring about?  Is it impossible to establish a more regular and fixed relationship between production and consumption of manufactured goods?  Can one not facilitate the accumulation of savings among the working class, which permits them to wait for better times without dying during economic crises?

Here the horizon stretches in all directions in front of me.  My subject grows larger; I see a career opening before me, but at this time I cannot follow it.  The present memoir, too short for the subject I address, already exceeds the limits I believed I should set.  The measures with which one can hope to fight poverty in a preventive way will be the subject of a second work, with which I plan to pay tribute next year to the Academic Society of Cherbourg.

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End of the second part of the first memoir

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 16

I am certainly very far from wanting to put benevolence on trial, which is one of the msot beautiful and sacred of virtues.  But I think there is no principle so good, all of whose consequences one must deem as also good.  I believe that benevolence ought to be a strong, rational virtue, not a weak, ill-considered taste; that one must not do the good that pleases the giver the most, but the most truly useful good for the receiver; not those that alleviate the miseries of a few completely, but those that serve the well being of the greatest number.  I can only appraise benevolence in this way; understood another way, it is still a sublime instinct, but does not merit the name of virtue in my eyes.

I recognize that individual charity nearly always produces useful results.  It is attracted to the greatest miseries, follows bad fortune silently, and repairs in an improvisatory and quiet way the evil that it has done.  It shows up everywhere where there are unfortunates to help; it grows with their sufferings, and nevertheless one cannot without imprudence count on it, for a thousand accidents could delay or stop its workings; one does not know where it will be met with, and it is not informed of all suffering.

I admit that the association of charitable persons, in regularizing their efforts, can give more activity and power to individual benevolence; I recognize not only the usefulness, but the necessity of public charity for inevitable misfortune, such as the weakness of childhood, the infirmities of old age, sickness, madness; I also admit its usefulness during times of public calamity such as escape from God's hands from time to time and come to announce his anger to the nations.  The alms of the State is then also as instantaneous, as unforeseen, and as temporary as the calamity itself.

I hear of public charity opening schools for the children of the poor and providing free of charge to the intelligence the means of acquiring by work the needs of the body.

But I am deeply convinced that all regular, permanent administrative systems whose goal it is to provide for the needs of the poor will cause more misery than it will cure, corrupt the population it wishes to help and console, will reduce the rich to nothing more than the farmers of the poor, dry up the incentive for thrift, will stop the accumulation of capital, compromise trade, weigh down human activity and industry, and finish by bringing about a violent revolution in the State, when the number of those receiving alms will have become nearly as large as the number of those who give them, and when the poor can no longer draw from the impoverished upper classes enough resources to provide for their needs, they will find it easier to despoil them at once of their property than to ask for help.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 15

Since my voyage to England, the Poor Laws have been modified.  Many English flatter themselves that these reforms will effect great changes in the lot of the poor, on their morality, and on their number.  I would like to be able to share these hopes, but I cannot.  The English of our own days have recast anew in the new law the same principle adopted by Elizabeth 250 years ago.  Like this princess, they have imposed the obligation to support the poor upon society.  That is enough; all the abuses that I have tried to describe are contained in that principle as the tallest oak is in the acorn that a child can hold in his hand.  Only time is required for growth and development.  To want to establish a law  that comes regularly, permanently, and uniformly to the aid of the poor, without their numbers growing, without their sloth growing with their needs, their idleness with their vices, is to plant a seed, then to be astonished that a stem appears, then leaves, later, flowers, finally, fruits, which, scattering from afar, will cause to one day appear a green forest from the entrails of the earth.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 14

Lord X said to me, "Here are the evil effects produced by these laws. The most direct consequences of this legislation on the poor is to make abandoned children, the neediest of the poor, the public's responsibilty.  From there was born the desire to mkae the community responsible for the support of illegitimate children that their parents would have been able to support.  From there also comes the investigation of paternity put forth by the communities, whose proof depends upon the woman.  What other means is there of finding out such information?  In requiring communities to take responsibility for illegitimate children and permitting them to research paternity to lighten the burden, we have facilitated the misconduct of lower class women.  Illegitimate pregnancies almost always improve their material situation.  If the child's father is rich, they can discharge upon him the responsibility of raising the fruit of their common mistakes; if he is poor, they pass the responsibility off on society.  The help that is given to them nearly always is more than is required by a newborn.  They enrich themselves through their own vices, and it often happens that a single young woman who has been a mother several times makes a more advantageous marriage than a young virgin who has nothing to offer but her virtues.  The former makes a sort of dowry by her infamy.

I repeat that I wanted to change nothing in this passage from my diary; I have reproduced it using the same words because it seemed to me that it conveyed the impressions I wanted to share with the reader with simplicity and truth.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 13

After the poor abandoned woman came five or six tall vigorous men.  They were in the flower of youth; they had an air or almost insulting firmness.  They complained that the administrators of their community refused to give them work, or, if no work was available, benefits.

Lord X, whom I accompanied, told me, "You have just seen a small sample of some of the numerous abuses caused by the Poor Laws.  This old man who came forward first probably has enough to live on, but he thinks he has the right to demand that one support him in comfort, and he does not blush to ask for public charity, which has lost its painful and humiliating stigma among the people.  That young woman, who looks honest and unhappy, would certainly be helped by her father-in-law if the Poor Laws did not exist, but interest silences in the latter the cry of shame and he unloads onto the public a debt that he himself should discharge.  As for the youths who came forward last, I know them; they live in my village: they are very dangerous citizens, delinquents in fact; they will dissipate in a few moments the money they earn because they know that the State will come to their aid; so you see that the at the first difficulty, which was their own fault, they came to us."

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 12

I cannot find a better way to complete this sad picture than in transcribing here the following excerpt from my notes on England.

I traveled across Great Britain in 1833.  Others were struck by the country's interior prosperity; I wondered at the secret worry that weighed visibly on the mind of all the residents.  I thought that great troubles must be lurking under the brilliant cloak that Europe admired.  This idea led me to examine pauperism with particular attention, this immense and hideous wound on a body full of health and vigor.

I lived at the time in the house of a large landowner in the south of England; it was the time when justices of the peace met to decide on claims made by the poor against their communities or the communities against the poor.  My host was a justice of the peace, and I accompanied him to court regularly.  In my notes from the journey I find this picture of the first audience at which I assisted; it summarizes in a few words and describes what happened.  I transcribe it exactly here to preserve upon the picture the simple seal of truth:

The first individual who came before the justices of the peace was an old man; his face was fresh and rosy, he was wearing a wig, and was dressed in an excellent black suit; he looked like a landlord, however, he approached the bar and complained vigorously about the injustice of the administrators of his village.  This man was poor and they had unjustly reduced the sum he received from public charity.  They were rehearing the case to give the administrators of the community a chance to present their side.

After this healthy and petulant old man came a young pregnant woman, whose clothing indicated recent poverty and who wore on her wearied features the traces of suffering.  She said that her husband left home some days ago on a sea voyage, and that since then she had received no news or heard from him; she applied for public alms, but the poor administrator hesitated to grant it to her. The father-in-law of the woman was a wealthy merchant who lived in the town where the hearings were taking place, and they hoped that he would want to take the responsibility of supporting his daughter-in-law during his son's absence; the justices of the peace summoned this man, but he refused to take on the duties that nature imposed upon him and that the law did not require him to undertake.  The magistrates insisted; they tried to awaken a feeling of remorse or compassion in this man's egoistic soul, but failed, and the community was required to pay the support claimed.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 11

Public charity exerts no less negative an influence on the liberty of the poor than on its morality.  This is easily shown: from the moment that one made it a community duty to provide for the poor, it immediately and necessarily followed that each community was only responsible for those poor who resided in their territory; it is the only way to equalize the public burden resulting from the law and to keep proportion between the number of poor and the means to support them.  But since in countries that have organized government charity, private charity is practically unknown, the result is that he whose misfortunes and vices have rendered unable to earn a living is condemned on pain of death, not to leave the village where he was born.  If he leaves, he travels in enemy territory; the individual interest of the communities more active than the best organized national police denounces his arrival, watches what he does, and if he wishes to settle in a new place, is pointed out to the authorities anad brought bback to the place he left.  By their Poor Laws, the English have immobilized one sixth of their population.  They have fixed them to the earth like the serfs of the Middle Ages.  Serfdom forced man to stay in his place of birth against his will; government charity prevents him from wanting to leave.  I see only this difference between the two systems.  The English have gone farther and they have drawn from the principle of public benefits even worse consequences and from which I think escape is permissible.  English towns are so fearful that a new indigent might become their responsibility and obtain residence in their midst that when a stranger of unpromising appearance arrives in their community and stays temporarily, or when some unforeseen misfortune strikes him, the municipal authorities make haste to demand a deposit against probable future misery, and if the stranger cannot provide it, he must leave.

Thus does public charity not only deprive the English poor of their mobility, but also that of all those menaced by poverty.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 10

I have said that the inevitable result of government charity is to maintain in idleness the majority of the poor and to support them in leisure at the expense of those who work.

If leisure in wealth, hereditary leisure, bought by service or work, leisure surrounded by public consideration, accompanied by contentment of spirit, interested in intellectual pursuits, made moral by the exercise of thought: if this kind of leisure, I say, has given rise to so many vices, what of a degraded leisure, acquired by the shirking of duty, brought about by misconduct, that one enjoys in ignominy and that only becomes tolerable in proportion to the extent that the soul of the sufferer succeeds in corrupting and degrading itself?

What can one hope for a man whose position can not improve, because he has lost the consideration of his peers, the first condition of all progress, whose fortune could not be worse, because, reduced to the satisfaction of the most pressing needs, he is assured that they will always be satisfied.  What action remains to the conscience and human activity of a being so limited in all aspects, who lives without hope or fear because he knows the future as an animal does, because he does not know the circumstances of destiny, focused as he is on the present and what it can offer by way of ignoble and temporary pleasures to a coarsened nature?

Read all the books written in England on pauperism; study the inquiries carried out by the British Parliament; follow the discussions that have taken place in the House of Lords and in the communities on this difficult question; only one complaint will resound in your ears: one deplores the state of degradation to which the inferior classes of this great people have fallen!  The number of illegitimate children grows continually, that of criminals rises rapidly; the indigent population is increasing beyond measure; the spirit of providing for the future and thrift are becoming more and more foreign to the poor; while the rest of the country becomes more enlightened, the habits more refined, tastes more delicate, manners more polite--the poor remains immobile, or is regressing; one would say it is returning to barbarism, and, placed in the middle of the marvels of civilization, it seems to approach, by its ideas and tastes, savage man.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 14

The audience continued.  A young woman presented herself at the bar; the supervisor of the poor of her community followed her with a child.  She approached, giving no sign of hesitation; modesty did not make her even lower her eyes.  The supervisor accused her of having had the child in her arms outside of marriage.

She admitted it without shame.  Because she was poor, and if the illegitimate child's father remained unknown, she would become the community's responsibility, the supervisor urged her to name the father; the tribunal had her swear an oath.  She named a peasant who lived nearby.  This man, present at the hearing, obligingly admitted the fact, and the justices of the peace required him to support the child.  The father and mother retired without the incident giving rise to the least emotion in an assembly well used to such spectacles.

After that young woman came another.  This one came voluntarily; she confronted the magistrates with the same forward insouciance as the first.  She declared herself to be pregnant and named the father of the child who was to be born; he was absent.  The tribunal named another day to hear her case.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 9

The poor person who demands alms in the name of the law is in a more humiliating position than one who asks his fellows for pity in the name of the One who looks upon rich and poor with the same eyes and subjects them to equal laws.

But this is not all: individual charity establishes precious links between rich and poor.  The former is interested by his giving itself in the lot of the one whose misery he is trying to alleviate; the latter, sustained by help he had no right to expect and that he perhaps did not even hope to receive is attracted towards the former by gratitude.  A moral connection has been established between two classes that so many interests andd passions conspire to separate, and, divided by fortune, their wills bring them closer; it is not so with government charity.  This leaves the alms and takes away the morality.  The rich, who is despoiled of some part of his surplus without being consulted, sees only in the poor man an avid stranger called in by the legislator to partake of his property.  The poor, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit one cannot refuse him and that does not satisfy him; for public alms, which assure subsistence, does not make life any happier or more comfortable than private charity does; government charity does not obviate the fact that there are poor and rich in society, that some cannot look around without hate and fear, while others cannot think of their hardships without despair and envy.  Far from uniting in one people, these two rial nations that have existed since the world began and that are called the rich and the poor, it breaks the only link that could be established between them, it ranges them, each under his own banner, it counts them, puts them in their places, and pits them one against the other.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 8

If you closely study the state of the populations that have had such laws in effect for a long time, you will readily find that it has pernicious effects on morality as much as on public prosperity, ad that it corrupts men as much as it impoverishes them.

In general, nothing elevates and sustains the human spirit at so high a level as the idea of rights.  One finds in the idea of right something grand and virile that removes the supplicant quality from the demand, and raises the supplicant to the level of the grantor. But the right of a poor person to obtain help from society has this particular quality, that instead of elevating the heart of the person who exercises the right, it debases it. In countries where the law does not offer such a recourse, the poor person, requesting individual charity, recognizes, it is true, that his situation is inferior to that of his peers; but he realizes it in secret and only once; from the moment an indigent is inscribed on the poor register in his parish, he can, no doubt, claim benefits with assurance, but what is the obtaining of this right if not an authentic admission of misery, weakness, and bad conduct of him who obtains it?  Ordinary rights are confirmed upon men because of some personal advantage they have gained over their peers.  This right is given in recognition of inferiority.  The first calls attention to the advantage and affirms it; the second calls attention to the inferiority and gives it legal status.

The more the former is grand and assured, the more they are honored.  The more the latter is permanent and extended, the more it degrades.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 7

But even supposing that there is always work to do, who will have the responsibility of determining its urgency, of supervising its execution, and of determining the price?  The supervisor, independently of his qualities as an important magistrate, will have the talents, the energy, the specialized knowledge of a competent industrialist; he will find in his sense of duty what personal interest itself is powerless to create: the courage to limit to sustained and productive ends the least energetic, most vicious segment of the population.  Would it be wise to boast?  It is reasonable to think this feasible?  Solicited by the needs of the poor, the supervisor will impose false work, or as is nearly always done in England, will pay salaries without requiring work.  Laws should be made for men, not for ideals that human nature can not attain, or that are present only in the rare few.

All laws that establish public charity on a permanent basis will create an idle and lazy class living at the expense of the industrious, hardworking class.  If this is not its immediate consequence, it is its inevitable one.  It reproduces all the vices of the monastic system without the high standards of morality and religion that often come with it.  Such a law is a poisoned see, planted deep inside the legislation; circumstances like those in America can prevent it from growing rapidly, but they do not destroy it, and if the generation that passed it escapes its influence, it will devour the well-being of generations to come.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 6

Holding in his hands the sufferings or the joys, the life or death of a considerable portion of his fellow human beings, of the most disordered, turbulent, coarsest portion, will he hot recoil from the use of this terrible power?  And if one finds one of these fearless men, can one find several more?  Nevertheless, these functions can only be exercised over a small area; one must appoint a large number of citizens.  The English have been obliged to place poor inspectors in each community.  What inevitably came of all this?  Misery being ascertained, the causes of the misery remain uncertain: one is patent fact; the other proved by reasoning that is always debatable; the granting of help never resulting in more than a mistake impacting society indirectly; the refusal of help resulting in immediate bad results for the poor and the inspector himself, the choice of the latter can not be doubted.  The law will ahve declared that only blameless misery will be helped; in practice, all misery will receive help.  I will make similar arguments, equally supported by experience on the second point.

One wants alms to be the price of work.  First of all, are there always public projects to work on?  Are they equally distributed throughout the country, such that one would never encounter a district with plenty of public work to do, and few indigents to help; while another district has plenty of poor to support and little work?  If this difficulty shows up in all epochs, might it not become insurmountable when, because of the progressive development of civilization, the progress of the population, the effects of the poor laws themselves, the number of indigents reaches, as in England, a sixth, others say a fourth, of the total population?

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 5

We have gone far from the beautiful and seductive theory that I outlined earlier.  Is it possible to escape the evil consequences of a good principle?  As far as I am concerned, I admit that I consider them inevitable.

Here, one stops me by saying:  you suppose that, whatever the cause of the misery, the misery will be alleviated; you add that the public's assistance will relieve the poor from the obligation to work; this is to propose a doubtful situation.  What prevents society, before giving assistance, to inquire about the reason for the need?  Why should a work requirement not be imposed on a legitimately poor person who addresses himself to the public's pity?  My reply is that English law has thought of these measures, but they have failed, and this is easily understood.

Nothing is more difficult to distinguish than the nuances that separate an undeserved misfortune from one produced by vice.  Now much  misfortune has been the result of both!  What deep knowledge about a man's character and the circumstances in which he has lived are required to pass judgment on such a subject; what wisdom, what discernment, what cold and inexorable reason!  Where could one find a magistrate who will ahve the conscience, the time, the talent, and the means to dedicate himself to such an examination?  Who will dare to allow a poor man to die because his situation is his own fault?  Who will hear his cries and deliberate on his vices?  At the sight of the misery of our peers, personal interest itself is silent; will the interest of the public treasury then be more powerful?  And the soul of the poor inspector remains inaccessible to these emotions, always beautiful, even when on the wrong path, will it remain closed to fear?

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 4

Nearly two centuries and a half have passed since the principle of public charity was accepted by our neighbors; one can now judge the fatal consequences that have flowed from the adoption of this principle.  Let us examine them one by one.

The poor man, having an absolute right to society's help, and finding everywhere a public administration whose duty it is to give it to him, one sees, reborn and generalized after a short time, the abuses with which the Reformation rightly reproached some of the Catholic countries.

Man, like any other organism, has a natural passion for idleness.  There are, however, two motivations that induce him to work: the need to live and the desire to improve the conditions of his existence.  Experience has shown that the majority of men can only be sufficiently interested enough to work by the first of these motivations, and that the second only works on a small number.  But a charitable organization, open indiscriminately to all in need, or a law that gives to all the poor, regardless of the reasons behind their poverty, a right to public support, weakens or destroys the first stimulus, leaving only the second intact.  The English peasant, like the Spanish one, if he does not feel a strong desire to improve the lot into which he was born and to rise above his situation, a weak desire easily abandoned by most--the peasant of these two countries, I say, has no interest in work, or if he oes work, he has no interest in saving; he either remains idle, or spends the precious fruit of his labor carelessly.  In both countries, one gets to the same result by different cuases, which is that it is the most generous, active, hardworking part of the nation that dedicates its help to provide a livelihood to those who do not work, or who make a bad use of their labor.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 3

As time passed, England grew more and more committed to the acceptance of the principle of government charity.  Pauperism grew more quickly in Great Britain than anywhere else.  General causes and others specific to this country produced this sad result.  The English had outstripped the other nations of Europe in civilized life; all the reflections I previously made apply particularly well to them, but there are others that are peculiar to them alone.

The industrial class of England did not only provide for the needs and wants of the English people, but for a large part of humanity.  Her well being or misery did not only depend on what happened in Great Briten, but in a way everything that happened under the sun affected her.  When a resident of the Indies reduces his expenses and limits his consumption, some English manufacturer will suffer.  England, then, is the country where the farmer is most strongly attracted to industrial work and also finds himself most exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune.

After a century, an event that could be considered a phenomenon happened in England, if one compares it with the situation in the rest of the world.  For 100 years, land ownership divided unceasingly in all known countries; in England, it agglomerated unceasingly.  Medium-sized estates disappeared into vast domains, large scale agriculture displaced small farms.  The explanations for this perhaps would not fail to be of interest, but they would lead me far from my subject: the fact is enough, it is constant.  The result is that, while the farmer is solicited by his own interests to leave the plow and go into factory work, he is, in a way, pushed despite himself to do it by the agglomeration of real estate.  It takes proportionally a lot fewer workers to cultivate a large estate than small fields.  He lacks land, and industry calls.  This double movement carries him along.  Of 25 million people who live in Great Britain, only 9 million are agricultural workers; 14 million, or nearly two thirds follow their perilous opportunities in commerce and industry*.  Pauperism therefore has had to increase faster in England than in other countries whose level of civilization was equal to that of the English.  Enlgand, having admitted the principle of government charity, could not leave it.  Thus, English poor laws have reflected, for 200 years, a long development of the Elizabethan laws.

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* In France, the industrial class is yet only 1/4 of the population.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 2

The only European country that has systematized and applied the theories of public charity on a grand scale is England.

During the time of the religious revolution that changed the face of England, under Henry VIII, nearly all the monastic communities of the kingdom were dissolved, and as the property of these communities passed into the hands of the nobles and were not at all distributed among the people, the result was that the number of existing poor stayed the same, while the means by which their needs were to be provided for were in part destroyed.  The number of poor people then increased rapidly, and Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, struck by the repellent appearance of the people's misery, wished to substitute an annual subsidy, furnished by the communities, for the alms that were dramatically reduced by the dissolution of the monasteries.

A law* passed in the 43rd year of the reign of that princess required that poor inspectors be appointed in each parish, that these inspectors have the right to tax the residents to support poor invalids and to provide work for the rest of the poor.

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* See:
1.  Blackstone, book I chapter 4
2.  The principal results of the 1833 inquiry on the state of the poor in the book entitled Extracts from the information received by his Majesty's commissioners as to the administration and operation of the Poor Laws
3.  The report of the Poor Laws commissioners
4.  Finally, the 1834 law that resulted from this work.

First Memoir on Pauperism, Second Part, Post 1

There are two types of doing good works: one, which induces each person to relieve, according to his means, the ills he finds around him.  This type is as old as the world; it began with human misery; Christianity has made a divine virtue out of it and calls it charity.  The other type, less instinctive, more reasoned, less enthusiastic, and often more powerful, induces society itself to see to the misfortunes of its members and to systematically watch over the relief of their misery.  This type was born of Protestantism and only developed in modern societies.

The first is a private virtue; it escapes social action.  The second, on the contrary, is carried out and regulated by society.  It is on this second type that we especially concentrate.

On the surface, there is no idea grander or more beautiful than public charity.

Society, examining itself constantly, measuring its injuries each day and working to cure them; society, at the same time that it assures to the rich enjoyment of their property, safeguarding the poor from the excesses of their misery, demands from some a portion of their surplus to provide necessities to others.  There is certainly in the presence of this impressive sight something that elevates the spirit and that could not fail to move the soul.

Why must experience come to destroy part of these beautiful illusions?

First Memoir on Pauperism, First Part, Post 14

Let us not indulge in dangerous illusions, let us look at the future of modern societies calmly and with tranquillity.  Let us not allow ourselves to be carried away by the vision of its grandeur; let us not get discouraged by the sight of its miseries.  Inasmuch as the development of civilization will continue, one will observe the standard of living of the majority continue to rise; society will become closer to perfect, more knowledgeable; life will be easier, more pleasant, more luxurious, longer; but at the same time, let us expect the number of those who will need the support of their peers to collect some fraction of these goods to increase unceasingly.  One will be able to slow this double movement down; the particular circumstances in which different peoples are placed will speed up or suspend its course; but it will  be in no one's power to stop it.  Let us make haste to find the means to attenuate the inevitable evils that are already easy to predict.

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End of the first part of the first memoir

First Memoir on Pauperism, First Part, Post 13

The progress of civilization does not only expose man to new miseries; it induces society to relieve miseries that, in a half savage state, one does not think of.  In a country where the majority is badly dressed, badly housed, badly fed, who thinks of giving clean clothes, nealthy food, a convenient home to the poor?  In England, where the majority possesses all these things, one views their lack as a horror; society believes that it is a duty to come to the aid of those who are deprived of them, and to cure the ills that are not even perceived elsewhere.

In England, the average standard of living to which one must aspire is set higher than in any other country in the world.  This fact alone facilitates the spread of pauperism in this country.

If all these reflections are true, one will easily come to the conclusion that the richer a nation is, the people who resort to public charity must multiply, because two very powerful causes lead to that end: in these nations, the class most naturally exposed to need increases continually, and on the other end, needs increase and diversify without limit; the occasion to find oneself exposed to some of them becomes more frequent each day.

First Memoir on Pauperism, First Part, Post 12

Man is born with needs and he creates needs for himself.  He gets the former from his physical constitution, the latter from habit and education.  I have shown that in the beginning, man scarcely had more than natural needs, only wanting to live, but in the proportion that the pleasures of life have become more extensive, he has developed the habit of indulging in some of them, and the result is that they have become as necessary to him as life itself.  I will city the use of tobacco, because tobacco is a luxury good that has penetrated almost into the desert and that has created an artificial enjoyment among the savages that they must obtain at all costs.  Tobacco is nearly as indispensable to the Indians as food; they are just as tempted to resort to the charity of their peers when they are deprived of one as the other.  They have, therefore, a reason to beg that their fathers did not have.  What I have said about tobacco applies to a variety of articles that one does not deny to oneself in civilized life.  The more a society is rich, industrious, prosperous, the more the pleasures of the majority become varied and permanent; the more they are varied and permanent, the more they are assimilated by habit and example as real needs.  Civilized man is therefore infinitely more exposed to the vicissitudes of fate than the savage.  What happens to the latter very infrequently can happen incessantly and in very ordinary circumstances to the former.  Along with the set of his pleasures, he has extended the set of his needs and has cleared a larger space in his life for the blows of fortune.  This is why the poor of England appears rich to the French poor; and the French to the Spanish poor.  What the Englishman lacks was never in the Frenchman's possession.  And so it is as one goes down the social ladder. In highly civilized societies, the lack of a multitude of items causes misery; in a savage state, poverty consists of not finding something to eat.

First Memoir on Pauperism, First Part, Post 11

I have only spoken of the case in which a population restrains its wants.  Many other causes can bring about the same effect: overproduction by other citizens, foreign competition...

The industrial class that serves the well-being of others so powerfully is then more exposed than others to sudden and irremediable misfortune.  In the great fabric of human societies, I consider the industrial class as having received from God the special and dangerous mission of catering to the material happiness of everyone else through risk and peril.  But the natural and inevitable movement of civilization unceasingly tens to increase the proportion of those in it.  Each year, needs multiply and diversify, and with them grows the number of individuals who hope to create greater comfort in working to satisfy these new needs rather than staying in agriculture: a great subject for the statesmen of today to meditate on!

This is the principal cause of what is happening in wealthy societies, where comfort and indigence are to be found in greater numbers than before.  The industrial class, which provides for the pleasures of the majority, has exposed itself to miseries that would be all but unknown if this class did not exist.

Nevertheless, additional causes contribute to the gradual development of pauperism.