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?
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.
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