y must necessarily be passed outside
the circle of family life. The breadwinner can attend neither to works
of piety nor of charity in the way he should, and, consequently, to his
wife it must be left to supply for his defects. She must take his place
in the church, and amid the slums of the poor; she must for him and his
lift her hands in prayer, and dispense his superfluous wealth in
succouring the poverty-stricken. For the Archbishop will have none of
the soothing doctrine which the millionaire preaches to the mob. He
asserts that poverty is not a good thing; in itself it is an evil, and
can be considered to lead only accidentally to any good. When,
therefore, it assumes the form of destitution, every effort must be made
to banish it from the State. For if it were to become at all prevalent
in a nation, then would that people be on the pathway to its ruin. The
politicians should therefore make it the end of their endeavours--though
this, it may be, is an ideal which can never be fully brought to
realisation--to leave each man in a state of sufficiency. No one, for
whatever reason, should be allowed to become destitute. Even should it
be by his own fault that he were brought low, he must be provided for by
the State, which has, however, in these circumstances, at the same time,
the duty of punishing him.

But he remarks that the cause of poverty is more often the unjust rate
of wages. The competition even of those days made men beat each other
down in clamouring for work to be given them, and afforded to the
employers an opportunity of taking workers who willingly accepted an
inadequate scale of remuneration. This state of things he considered to
be unjustifiable and unjust. No one had any right to make profit out of
the wretchedness of the poor. Each human being had the duty of
supporting his own life, and this he could not do except by the hiring
of his own labour to another. That other, therefore, by the immutable
laws of justice, when he used the powers of his fellow-man, was obliged
in conscience to see that those powers could be fittingly sustained by
the commodity which he exchanged for them. That is, the employer was
bound to take note that his employees received such return for their
labour as should compensate them for his use of it. The payment promised
and given should be, in other words, what we would now speak of as a
"living wage." But further, above this mere margin, additional rewards
should be added