et people would have sense enough to see
that the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of evil, and
must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane and hygienic
measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a man breaking into my
house and stealing my wife's diamonds I am expected as a matter of
course to steal ten years of his life, torturing him all the time. If
he tries to defeat that monstrous retaliation by shooting me, my
survivors hang him. The net result suggested by the police statistics
is that we inflict atrocious injuries on the burglars we catch in order
to make the rest take effectual precautions against detection; so that
instead of saving our wives' diamonds from burglary we only greatly
decrease our chances of ever getting them back, and increase our
chances of being shot by the robber if we are unlucky enough to disturb
him at his work.

But the thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of
imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and
flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing
compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it
were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be
embraced as St Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, let him be
poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let
him be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science
instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to
spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen
shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for
his old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done for "the
undeserving": let him be poor. Serve him right! Also--somewhat
inconsistently--blessed are the poor!

Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let
him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a
standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have
rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to
his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn
our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect
our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him
by turning the nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty,
hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of oppression
and malnutrition. Let the