common sense to the home-makers when they
try to raise six children on an income that is not enough for two. It
is very common to lay all misery at the door of the capitalist who
underpays labor and feels no responsibility for the life conditions of
his employee. No one of these explains the presence of misery.

It is easy to propose to society a simple remedy like better housing,
prohibition, or socialism, when the only correct diagnosis of
conditions demands a prolonged and expensive course of treatment that
involves surgical action in the social body. It is easy to raise money
for charity, to endow hospitals, and to talk about made-to-order
schemes for ending unemployment, poverty, and panic, but it is soon
discovered that there is no panacea for the evils that infest society.
Back of all personal misconduct or misfortune, of all social specific
or cure-all, is the fundamental difficulty that misery exists, that
its causes are complex, and that all efforts to provide efficient
relief on a large scale have failed, as far as history records.

280. =Poverty and Its Extent.=--Misery appears commonly in the form of
sickness, vice, and poverty. One of these reacts upon another, and is
both the cause and the result of another. Mental and moral incapacity,
ignorance of hygiene, weakness of will, habits that seem incurable,
all of these produce the first two in a seemingly hopeless way;
poverty appears to be incurable above the rest. It is poverty that
prevents fortifying the will by increasing physical stamina and moral
courage, it is poverty that drives a man; to drink or desperation, and
it is poverty that prescribes the unfavorable surroundings that do so
much to keep a man down. Poverty is a danger flag that indicates the
probability of deeper degradation and calls for the individual or
group that is better off to lend a hand. Poverty is a goad, a thorn
in the flesh of society, that is pushing it along the road of social
reform. Private philanthropy, legislative enactment, and much talking
are being tried as experiments to find a solution of the difficulty,
but theorists and practitioners are not yet in full agreement as to
the way out.

There are, of course, different degrees of poverty, ranging from the
helpless incompetents at the bottom of the scale to those who are in a
fair degree of comfort, but who have so little laid aside for a rainy
day that they live in constant fear of the poorhouse. Some struggle
harder