epend upon it, where there is a Pauper, there is a sin; to
make one Pauper there go many sins. Pauperism is our Social Sin grown
manifest; developed from the state of a spiritual ignobleness, a
practical impropriety and base oblivion of duty, to an affair of the
ledger. Here is not now an unheeded sin against God; here is a concrete
ugly bulk of Beggary demanding that you should buy Indian meal for it.
Men of reflection have long looked with a horror for which there was no
response in the idle public, upon Pauperism; but the quantity of meal it
demands has now awakened men of no reflection to consider it. Pauperism
is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid unveracities and
god-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving cants and jesuitisms, that
exist among us. Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false
pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he
does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or
other. His sham-work oozes down; finds at last its issue as human
Pauperism,--in a human being that by those false pretences cannot live.
The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it
but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian
quagmire of our affairs? Workhouse Paupers; immortal sons of Adam rotted
into that scandalous condition, subter-slavish, demanding that you would
make slaves of them as an unattainable blessing! My friends, I perceive
the quagmire must be drained, or we cannot live. And farther, I
perceive, this of Pauperism is the corner where we must _begin_,--the
levels all pointing thitherward, the possibilities lying all clearly
there. On that Problem we shall find that innumerable things, that all
things whatsoever hang. By courageous steadfast persistence in that, I
can foresee Society itself regenerated. In the course of long strenuous
centuries, I can see the State become what it is actually bound to be,
the keystone of a most real "Organization of Labor,"--and on this Earth
a world of some veracity, and some heroism, once more worth living in!

The State in all European countries, and in England first of all, as I
hope, will discover that its functions are now, and have long been, very
wide of what the State in old pedant Downing Streets has aimed at;
that the State is, for the present, not a reality but in great part a
dramatic speciosity, expending its strength in practices and objects
fallen many of