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‘There Is a Cure for Consumption, BUT
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OU can cure consumption with
good food, fresh air and sun
light—POVEßTY stands in the
way.
You can cure drunkenness
with education, good pay, good
food, cheerful surroundings, freedom from
anxiety—POVEßTY stands in the way.
You can put an end to crime with proper
care of mothers, proper feeding of children,
proper playgrounds, decent living conditions-
POVERTY stands in the way.
♦ # *
The little boy sits on the door step of a
tenement, coughing, painfully drawing his
breath, his weak white hands folded in his lap.
his thin, poor feet resting on the hot pavem?rt
He is in the second stage of consumption.
The physician passing knows that he
COULD be cured, but poverty stands in the
way.
He needs the sunlight, green grass, trees
and the running water. They are not far away,
but poverty separates the child from them.
ABSOLUTELY.
The child soon to die needs good food,
plenty of sleep in fresh air and cheerful sur
roundings. There is plenty of good food,
plenty of fresh air in the work!—but poverty
stands between them and the sick child.
He and tens of thousands like him. in one
single great city, are doomed to the sufferings
of consumption and to premature death, be
cause poverty stands between them and the
cure that is absolute and certain.
♦ .♦ *
Every man in his day’s journey passes
such a child as the One in this picture—or
knows where many such may be found.
But each passes by. comforting himself
with the thought that he gives so much to this
charity or that, or saying to himself (hat it
would make no difference if he saved that
ONE particular child, or twenty—the result in
the long run would be the same.
The world is accustomed and hardened to
suffering and poverty, and the general feeling
The Big Wolf Poverty Stands in the Way of
the Sunlight, the Fresh Air, the Food, the Clean
Water with Which Consumption Must Be Fought.
Poverty CA USES Consumption and PREVENTS
Cure, .Just as Poverty Causes Drunkenness and
Dirtiness, Ignorance and Vice. The Greatest
Cui 'se of All Curses Is Poverty. Man’s First
Task Is to Abolish Poverty—and Then Use Wisely
the . Wealth and Opportunities That Will Come
When Poverty Shall Have Been Destroyed.
is, “There is no use in trying, conditions can
not be altered, and anyhow I am not responsi
ble.” It is the old cry of Cain when asked
about the brother whom he had killed. “Am I
my brother’s keeper?”
It is the cold logic of the Greek philoso
phers that said civilization w ithout slavery was
impossible.
It is the reasoning indifference of those
that saw the galley slaves chained to their
oars and sinking with the galley, and those that
saw the witnesses tortured with the rack and
the thumb screw and saw innocent men and
women burned in the name of God.
Then as now the cry was. “What’s the use,
what can I do?”
# ♦ ♦
Fortunately, our civilization, like the indi
viduals in it. has periods in which conscience
comes to life and protest is heard.
We DO establish camps, and playgrounds,
stations for distributing food, where children
such as the hoy in this picture can be saved for
a useful life.
We HAVE abolished the slavery of the
human body, that the philosophers said must
endure always. And we have substituted for
the human slaves that rowed in the galleys
slaves without nerves, slaves of iron in our
steamships, slaves with steel fingers in our
mills.
To our mechanical slaves of iron and brass,
run by steam and electricity, we still tie down
human beings that are wage slaves. Conscience
some day will free them, as conscience has
freed slaves in the galleys.
-* e ♦
Conscience and human intelligence will
some day free from disease, suffering and
poverty the child in this picture and the mill
ions of others doomed as he is doomed.
This earth can produce ten thousand times
as much as is needed by those upon it. We al
ready possess the power to PRODUCE enough,
we lack only the conscience to DISTRIBUTE
the needed wealth and drive out the poverty
that is the foster mother of disease, drunken
ness. crime, ignorance and superstition.
Rome had one great enemy, and in the
Roman Senate Cato every day declared “Car
thage must be destroyed.” And Carthage at
length was destroyed, burned, and the site
ploughed up and sprinkled with salt.
The cry of civilization, never ceasing,
should be, “POVERTY must be destroyed.”
Poverty is not to be destroyed by charity—
which is a makeshift and an aggravation—but
by intelligence and conscience, by diverting the
power of the ablest men from selfish AC
CUMULATION to generous DISTRIBUTION.
Poverty can be destroyed and it is even
now gradually being destroyed by public edu
cation, public thinking, industrial co-operation
and organization.
Great changes come suddenly—as the men
of the French Revolution and of every other
revolution have proved. The change from dark
night to the blaze of day is swift.
« * * TT
Already men as individuals begin to real
ize their responsibilities. . And w here they once
left their money after death to save their own
souls and bribe the Divinity-into selling them
paradise, they now spend their money, while
they live for the education and the health of
their brothers, and trust to Divinity to do the
fair thing later without any cash inducement
Only the ignorant man to-day imagines
that he can buy immunity or happiness here
after. The powerful and intelligent man
knows that his money can buy only ON THIS
EARTH and he begins to spend it for the ben
efit of others ON this earth.
Eventually we shall begin to do as a na
tion, and then as united nations, w hat the in
dividual is doing already.
Eventually, poverty will be destroyed, and
with it drunkenness, idleness, ignorance, > u ‘
perstition. hatred and w ar will disappear— then
such pictures as that on this page will be u n
known, civilization WILL BEGIN, and mc n
will wonder how they ever endured and to!
erated the horrible conditions of this da)-
Poverty must be destroyed;