I

IN ordinary usage the term 'poverty' is applied indifferently to three distinct conditions: economic inequality, economic dependence, and economic insufficiency. A man is said to be 'poor' in mere contrast to his neighbor who is 'rich'; this is economic inequality. Almshouses and public relief minister to those who, in the eye of the state, are 'poor'; this is economic dependence. Midway between the modestly-circumstanced and the outright dependent are the 'poor,' in the sense of the inadequately fed, clad, and sheltered; this is economic insufficiency.

More precise terminology is here possible. The condition of those who are in chronic dependence upon public aid or private relief can be described more accurately as 'pauperism.' It is so obviously misleading to use 'poverty' as a mere correlative of 'riches,' that even common speech in this connection ordinarily substitutes for the substantive some indirection, as 'the poorer classes.' Eliminating pauperism and modest circumstance, the terms 'poor' and 'poverty' remain to be properly applied to those who commonly lack the economic goods necessary for decent and wholesome existence.

The problems of pauperism and of economic inequality are definite and familiar. Their modern phase is notable, less for new extent or greater intensity than for changed social attitude, and their attendant ills are reducible or remediable. As to economic inequality,

the world is not greatly concerned that a few of its citizens are much better supplied than some others, and that these in turn are more amply provided for than many more, so long as the least well-off have enough for a wellordered life. The anti-social methods whereby great fortunes are often amassed and preserved - illegal privilege, predatory acquisition, exploration excite popular resentment rather than the fortunes themselves. This is aggravated by glaring examples of wasteful dissipation or vicious consumption of great possessions. Riches as such, thus become the target for attacks really justified by ill-gotten or ill-used riches. Against that wealth which represents individual superiority -'skill, dexterity, and judgment,' in the phrases of an old writer- there is no social protest, any more than there is interest for the well-fed hindmost in the economic contest by reason of the mere extent to which he is outdistanced.

Pauperism the pathological disorder of the social body still presents glaring evils. But these are being attacked with a devoted courage and an intense energy that compare with the finest efforts in the parallel field of medical science. There is a pitiful smallness in what has been done, compared with the immensity of what remains; but the vista is neither limitless nor hopeless. An aroused social consciousness, finding expression in great public undertakings and in wisely directed private energies, has not only

placed a limit to the increase of pauperism as a positive ill, but, inspired by the analogy of biological method, is everywhere extending diagnosis and preventive treatment.

It is poverty in the sense of economic insufficiency-its wide extent, its tragic consequence, its assumed necessity that forms the real mainspring of modern social unrest, and challenges the best in modern social effort. As never before, the world's conscience is stirred that there should be 'vast numbers of people both in town and country who are brought up with insufficient food, clothing, and house-room, whose education is broken off early in order that they may go to work for wages, who thenceforth are engaged for long hours in exhausting toil with imperfectly nourished bodies. . . . Overworked and under-taught, weary and careworn, without quiet and without leisure, they have no chance of making the best of their mental faculties.'

Little need be said as to the amount of such poverty. Robert Hunter's estimate, eight years ago, that 'about 10,000,000 persons in the United States are in poverty' seemed incredible. But it was at the time in harmony with the findings of Booth and Rowntree, and it has since found confirmation in accredited studies of living conditions in this country and abroad. The social implications of such figures are unmistakable. They mean that a great mass of those whom we are accustomed to regard as the earth's most highly-civilized people are habitually under-supplied with the things, physical and spiritual, which the human structure requires, and that this inadequate provision involves not only joyless life but imperfect existence, destined, if unchecked, to result in under-vitalization and degenerate stock, like the dwarfed growths of bare mountain-sides or the stunted animal-life of arid plains.

This lends tremendous interest to the question: Is such poverty necessary and inevitable? Deliberate opinion emanating from various quarters has from time to time maintained that it is so. Narrow and rigid theologies have assumed that want must exist so that salvation may be acquired in relieving it, and this vicious doctrine has been justified by a perversion of symbolic expressions. Marxian socialism rests its case for social reconstruction less on the evidence of economic want or on vistas of social betterment than on an assumed maleficence of the existing industrial order, whereby an inevitable corollary of capitalistic wealth is exploited labor. Even popular speech often refers, with a certain tacit acquiescence, to the long existence of poverty as proof of its necessity.

Against such postulates of theological convenience, industrial fatalism, and class quietism, the general body of economic students have maintained a doctrine of social hopefulness. Professor Alfred Marshall best voices this opinion in declaring that just as we have outgrown the conviction that slavery, which the classical world regarded as an ordinance of nature, is necessary, so we are abandoning the belief that poverty must exist, or that there need be 'large numbers of people doomed from their birth to hard work in order to provide for others the requisites of a refined and cultured life; while they themselves are prevented by their poverty and toil from having any share or part in that life.' So regarded, poverty is an incident of economic evolution, not an essential of economic structure; its presence implies maladjustment, not normal working; its disappearance is a fair inference from the course of economic progress, and its ultimate passing may be hastened by wise social policy. Is there rational warrant for this belief?

II

The basis of economic well-being is economic surplus. Society can enjoy the conveniences of life only if human effort, as applied to nature, produces more than need be consumed in the course of such production. The history of economic growth has here been progressive. Starting from a rude social order wherein bare and uncertain subsistence was the most that man could wrest, from nature, society has attained an incredible economic productivity by the development of intellectual force and manual dexterity, by the more efficient arrangement of its own powers, and most of all by the discovery and utilization of natural energies. The economic pessimism of a century ago, taking its cue from Malthus, forecast a cyclical return to primitive scarcity, and this threat of over-populated retrogression is still occasionally revived. But social experience and physical law emphasize counter-tendencies, and demonstrate that, as the world grows older, there is a larger mass of economic goods and services, with the resultant possibility of ampler provision for each individual member of society.

The reasons for this are obvious. The goods and services which satisfy economic wants, and so make up the category of wealth, are the results of definite factors-labor, capital, natural agents, and directive intelligenceworking in joint association. As each constituent element increases, whether in amount or in specific efficiency, the resultant product increases. There is, of course, no necessary correspondence between the degree of increase of a given factor and that of the product. Under ordinary circumstances, an increase in that element which has been present in normally efficient ratio - as labor in a well-populated country or

capital in a highly developed state will be attended by a less than corresponding increase in total product. But the lesson of modern industrial history has been that an increase of one factor ordinarily compels a more efficient rearrangement of existing forces, and thus secures a larger product. So long as the supply of laborers augments in amount and in skill, so long as the motives operate that lead to the accumulation of capital by the foregoing of present for future satisfaction, so long as the secret energies of nature continue to be unearthed and utilized, so long as captains of industry are evolved with gifted faculties of leadership,-so long will the total product of industry increase in greater proportion than those whose wants it must supply. This is true even as to primary food. In the last fifteen years the population of the civilized world, excluding China, has been increasing at the rate of about one per cent a year, whereas the average annual increase in the five great cereals, wheat, corn, oats, rye, and barley, has been about 2.5 per cent. In other words, production has increased two and a half times as much as was necessary to keep per-capita consumption constant.

If what is true of cereal food obtains with respect to economic goods in general, and there is convincing evidence that such is the case, if the loaf in the aggregate is not only large enough to satisfy amply the hunger of all who need be fed, but is actually increasing in size relative to the number of claimants, the existence of poverty passes from a problem of economic production into one of economic distribution. There is apparently enough to suffice; the 'national dividend' is abundant and to spare, but the process of allotment seems to give not enough to many and, by inference, too much

to some.

The question immediately presents itself, whether this chronic under-apportioning of the many is a necessary consequence of private property and competitive industry. Collectivism asserts that it is, and demands the socialization of all means of production. As against this, economic individualism magnifies the service of laissez-faire, and maintains that poverty is the mere friction that attends industrial progress. The student of economic activities holds a median position. Reluctant to take a leap in the dark, yet profoundly moved by the compelling evidence of social dislocation, he seeks further light. In so far he reflects the hard-headed sanity of the thinking elements of the community, whose inarticulate creed is the noble declaration of John Stuart Mill, of two generations ago: 'If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices... all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.'

III

Poverty, interpreted as a consequence of defective economic distribution, will inevitably come to three classes of the community: to those who are working but are insufficiently paid; to those who are desirous of working but are periodically unable to obtain employment; and to those who, through mental defect or physical infirmity, find it impossible to secure remunerative employment at all. These categories may be distinguished as the underpaid, the unemployed, the unemployable. The abolition of poverty resolves itself into the assurance of economic sufficiency to the members of these classes.

If any class of wage-earners in regular employment is paid less than enough to

maintain wholesome existence, it must be either because the mode of wagedetermination is socially unsound, or because, although itself sound, it is perverted by impeding forces. Economic opinion has long inclined to the latter view, and denied that an insufficient wage is a necessary implication of modern industrial contract.

Whether wages are governed by the cost of 'producing the laborer,' or by the laborer's standard of life, or by the ratio of the labor force to the size of the employing funds, or by the residuum left from other distributive shares, or by the specific productivity imputable to labor, and each such theory of wages has in turn been accepted, economists maintain, in contradistinction to the Marxian socialists, that there is nothing inherent in any one such theory of wages to preclude the toiler from securing an economically sufficient wage. If he fail to do so, it is by virtue of his relatively weaker position in industrial bargaining as compared with the capitalist employer.

To some extent this may be remedied by fortifying his competitive strength, and this substitution of collective for individual wage-adjustment is the purpose of modern trade-unionism; or it may be corrected by restraining the monopolistic control of the labor demand, and this is one of the designs of governmental check upon industrial combination. Where labor organizations are lacking in effectiveness or in wisdom, where industrial combinations are all-powerful and short-sighted, recourse must be had to the state to define the least favorable conditions of employment. In this manner legal enactment has heretofore established a competitive base line as to the length of the workingday, the employment of women and children, and the safe-guarding of dangerous processes. The same inter

an

vention will establish as a statutory minimum wage for less than which it shall not be lawful for employers to contract or laborers to engage amount sufficient to maintain a working-man's family in decency. The effect of such a legally imposed minimum wage may be increased production through heightened efficiency, or it may be reduction of the entrepreneur's profits if such profits be abnormally high, or it may be increased cost to the consumer with some ultimate redistribution of social surplus. In any event the present class of under-paid wage-earners will no longer be foredoomed to poverty.

The recurring inability of competent workmen to find employment is a cruel incident of modern industrial life. More, perhaps, than any other single cause it is responsible for the economic injury and mental bitterness of selfrespecting toilers. To be able and eager to work, and to be unable to secure a job, to rear a family in respectability, and to see comfort, self-support, even decency, slip away through no assignable fault is social injustice. Rodbertus and succeeding socialistic opinion have insisted that this periodic labor discharge is a phase of anarchical production, and that chronic unemployment and recurring crises are inevitable consequences of the capitalistic régime. But from the days of Jean Baptiste Say and James Mill economic thinkers have set forth that a 'universal glut' is inconceivable, that apparent over-production is in reality misdirected production or partial under-consumption, that inability of competent workmen to secure employment is the symptom of temporary industrial dislocation in which too many men have undertaken to do some things, and too few others, and that the remedy is a gradual readjustment of demand and supply.

Much of the best social thought and effort of our day is being expended in the search for less wasteful and less sluggish correctives of cyclical and seasonal unemployment than are involved in the formula of demand and supply. Labor exchanges for the more economical distribution of labor-congestion and for the 'decasualization' of the labor market; compulsory education and technical training for the avoidance of 'blind alley' occupations; residential decentralization for the settlement of town-workers in the country, where employment upon their holdings may be had when industrial work temporarily fails; labor colonies for the 'work-shy,' — are features of a rational programme whose triple end is to aid the worker in keeping his job when he has it, to regain it speedily if he lose it, and to escape the physical and moral retrogression that comes swiftly with involuntary idleness.

The adequate payment of the employed, the industrial absorption of the unemployed, still leave one inevitable element of poverty -the dependence of those who, by reason of old age, illness, or infirmity, are unemployable' at any economically sufficient wage. Some part of this incompetence is the sequel of under-payment and unemployment. Men whose physical vigor is sapped by under-vitalization, or whose moral independence is weakened by recurring idleness, tend by sheer law of disuse to become economically unserviceable. The largest part results, however, from the failure of the modern toiler to provide for the disability incident to sickness, accident, or old age. Whether the omission be due to lack of means, to lack of foresight, or to lack of insuring devices, the end is the same. There comes an impairment of economic efficiency with no compensating provision.

Remedial effort here also will be