p. 14 | PROSPERITY AND POVERTY by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 16, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 50.

PROSPERITY AND POVERTY.

By Editor

MANKIND is greatly blessed of God despite the curse of sin which rests upon the earth. It is now true as in the days of the psalmist:— "Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it, Thou greatly enrichest it; the river of God is full of water; Thou providest them grain, when thou hast so prepared the earth. Thou waterest its furrows abundantly; Thou settest the ridges thereof; Thou makest it soft with showers; Thou blessest the springing thereof. Thou crownest the year with Thy goodness; and Thy paths drop fatness. They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness; And the hills are girded with joy. The pastures are clothed with flocks; The valleys also are covered over with grain; they shout for joy, they also sing."

God thus bestows His bounties despite of sin, that man may learn the same lessons of generosity and benevolence toward his fellows; that freely as he has received so freely may he give to the poor and needy on every side. But selfish man regards not God or His gifts. He takes them as a matter of course, and seeks to possess even those which come to his fellows.

There is plenty in this world to-day for all its needs—plenty of land upon which to live and to furnish food for earth's teeming millions, plenty of food to feed her hungry children, plenty of linen and cotton and wool and leather to clothe them, plenty of building materials to properly house, plenty of all things that men may eat and drink and praise God for His bounties. Barns and granaries and storehouses are bursting with grain, fruit crops are abundant, and there are mighty fortunes uncounted, doing even their possessors no good.

Existing Poverty.

And yet there is poverty, dire poverty. In one block in New York City more than 30,000 human beings hive and swelter and stew, and barely exist in their wretched tenements. In Chicago the same shameful thing is repeated; and there are many more districts in both cities as bad or worse. In London, "the most Christian city" of the world, two and three and four families have been found in one room, living under such conditions that the commonest decency is impossible, conditions in which the wealthy would not keep his horses, cattle, or hogs. There is room for fifty George Peabodys in the great city, the center of the wealth of the world, its supremacy disputed only by New York. Sweat-shops exist in abundance, and men and women and children grind out their lives under unsanitary conditions as parts of ceaseless, soulless machines, under soulless corporations and heartless employers. Men are often crowded out of work by female and child labor. Good food is plenty, but it can not be obtained for wife and children, whose faces grow pinched and wan. Clothing is loading the shelves of stores, oftentimes made cheap by a system that wrings the very life-blood from the toiler, but the poor can not buy it. His rich neighbor—his equal playmate when a boy—revels now in luxury a few blocks away in a brownstone mansion, while he starves in a hut. This and much more is not a fancy picture; it is "repeated o'er and o'er" in every large city of our land, in greater number still among the crowded masses of the Old World. As a result of it, Socialism, Nihilism, and Anarchy flourish, and rulers tremble on their thrones. And the Huns, predicted by Macaulay, are sweeping down upon this land.

Manly, Generous Employers.

We are glad that there are thousands of corporations and firms and employers who are not oppressing their employees, who are paying good wages to men working under as clean, sanitary conditions as the work they are doing will permit. We know that in this "era of prosperity" there has been work in abundance, and wages have been constantly rising in many lines of business. We know also that many can find little to do, many small dealers are constantly going to the wall, and the individual is sacrificed to the exigencies of trade.

It is not the great middle classes which cause the trouble and unrest. There are thousands of firms which carry on their business on extremely close margins, paying all the wages the business can possibly bear. It is the extremes which arouse enmity between class and class. It is the difference between the wretched hovel and tenement of the East Side and the grand mansion of the West End. It is even more than this the lack of all feeling on the part of the rich for the miseries of the poor. If helped at all it is in a patronizing way that demeans the manhood of the afflicted, that he may be made to feel the great gulf which divides them in the social scale. And yet the poor man knows in his own heart that his hopes, his aspirations, his enjoyment of the beautiful and good are as high, as noble, as keen, as appreciative, as those of his patronizing benefactor, a benefactor often by wealth ill-gotten or inherited. There beat as noble hearts, as refined feelings, as true souls, as keenly sensitive minds underneath the fustian or denim as on the inner side of the satin or broadcloth. It is actual suffering and injustice in many cases, it is the flaunting of untold wealth and vulgar display in the faces of the toilers in many more; it is the treatment of men as things, as mere parts of machines, in many other cases, which harden the hearts of men and develop class hatred.

One Incident of Many.

An incident of less than a score of years ago may serve to illustrate this. It was the year 1885 in beautiful England, rich with memories and incidents of all the opposites of life. The writer was walking in one of its fine, smooth, country roads in one of the best agricultural shires of the island. He had as his companion a gentleman of culture, of largeness of heart, of breadth of mind, of noble instincts, of liberty-loving principles, of pity for the poor and oppressed, of strong faith in God, of keen observation, and one who had had, even for a public man, more than ordinary opportunities for observation among the common people of two continents. How sweet was the balmy air on that early summer day, redolent with the perfume of the fragrant hawthorn! How inviting looked the fields and groves of "Merrie England!" And yet at the entrance to every forest and grove and field, with their cooling shade and soft green carpet, was the legend-warning to poachers or trespassers to beware. The whole of the surrounding country so far as could be seen belonged to the Earl of—. The income of one large farm of the estate went to feed his lordship's kennel of dogs, much better kept than many of his tenants. Right there were the extremes of luxurious wealth and dire poverty, so manifest in England then and since.

We talked of the wretched inequality existing; of how good tradesmen and artificers were then walking the streets of the great cities aweary and despairing, seeking rest in labor to earn even a mere pittance, their wives and children hungry and starving, crowded into rooms and wretched tenements unworthy the name house, not to say home. We talked of the wealth squandered in races, in sport, in gambling, in drunkenness; of the fertile land given up to a few hares to minister to the pleasure of a few "titled" men; of the poor who were dying of want under the shadow of the mansions of those who were rolling in wealth, oftentimes wrung from the underfed muscles and nerves of the poor; of classes of workmen represented by the match-box makers of Europe, who work for so small a pittance, and in such a condition of perennial starvation that their employers could not furnish them the wretched paste lest the hungry steal it for his needs. Of the tyranny and sordidness and heartlessness, of the love of money we talked, till the righteous indignation of our friend could no longer be suppressed, and burst forth: "I tell you, M—, if I were not a Christian, I would be a nihilist." And thousands of others who know somewhat of justice, but who have no hope in Eternal Justice, think the same way without the "if." And it is upon these feelings, engendered by the unjust extremes of life, that skillful agitators play their

Marseillaises of discontent and revolution. It is the Spirit of God, the fear of God, that restrains men from what must eventually come upon all the world, —a repetition, in different forms, of the revolution in France, unless there is some change in the attitude of the two classes. God knows we do not ask nor wish for such a condition of things. We plead against it; but its coming is predicted by the "more sure Word of Prophecy."

That to which we point the reader is the Gospel of Christ, and His coming eternal reign. Amid all the strife of war and bloodshed, amid all the injustice of trade and commerce and law, amid all the persecution and misery and death, will be heard, by him who listens, God's voice to the oppressed of earth, "Come." Jesus says, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come; . . . and whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely." At the best, reader, this life, this world of sin, is disappointing. It is but the fitting-up place for the one eternal world to come. It is open to all who will come by Christ. No warning to poachers will meet the weary-footed traveler who comes in the name of King Jesus. No gate is barred to the poor of earth. The exceeding riches of God's grace and glory are free, free to all who will come to Him and submit to His eternally beneficent and joyous rule. O poor of earth, why lose this world and the better one to come? Why not make the Lord your God by yielding to Him now, and placing your cause in His hands? We know that one will sneer, and another laugh, but those that put their trust in God "shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end." Isa. 45:17; 50:7.