My Lady Poverty

THE American traveler in Europe constantly encounters the flattering notion that all Americans are rich. This is of course not quite true. That we all mean to be rich would be nearer the truth; and that all of us hope to be rich would be truer still.

But this is not to be. It must be evident by this time, by reason of the low prices of what used to be called securities and the high prices of what are still known as commodities, that the only hope for the most of us lies in the rediscovery of the beauties of poverty. We have been apostates from her. We must be reconverted. What the times demand is a new Saint Francis to preach this gospel to a distracted world. I do not put myself forward as such a preacher. The most I would aspire to is acting perhaps as his Forerunner.

Captious critics may interrupt to call upon us to stand and deliver a definition of poverty and riches, but we reply that these reflections are only for persons mature enough to know the difference. If any reader really does not know being rich from being poor, or cannot tell a rich man from a poor one, this parable is not for him. Even children understand this distinction and begin the categories of perhaps the most familiar of social analyses, ‘Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.’ To be incapable of these elementary social distinctions is to be a moron and with the morons stand. We accept also the distinction between poor man and beggar man; we see no beauty in beggary. The poverty we would defend is that which cannot have nearly all it thinks it wants.

The best approach to the advantages of poverty is doubtless by way of the drawbacks of wealth. Who has not observed the agony endured by wealthy persons who see 50, 65, or even 77 per cent of their comfortable incomes wrung from them by a socialistic state masquerading as the very stronghold of capitalism? Does poverty smart under any greater sense of wrong? Indeed an ingenious Englishman has recently shown that that mythical being, the man with an unlimited income, would under modern conditions have literally nothing to live on, since he would have to pay an unlimited income tax.

Consider the rich man. Keen, rapacious individuals interested in promoting investment and speculation haunt his pathway with designs upon his purse. Meantime charitable people are gathered in groups out in suburban drawing-rooms or high up in metropolitan office buildings plotting how to approach him. He is a hunted thing, a focus of attack for the inventor and the promoter, the swindler and the philanthropist. No wonder that instead of living in care-free accessibility like you or me he has to be hedged about with mahogany rails, glass partitions, secretaries, clerks, and telephone operators. For he dare not even answer the telephone. He might by so doing be suddenly precipitated into the undesirable presence of one of his natural enemies above mentioned. He cannot know the thrill of curiosity, sometimes almost pleasurable, with which you and I unhook the receiver.

The rich man has to ride perilously along the crowded street among ponderous trucks and reckless taxis while we walk safely on the solid pavement or ride securely with sixty or eighty of our peers in the intimate social contact of a spacious modern street car, with a coachman and footman (democratically designated as motorman and conductor) to anticipate our every wish. Having sat all the morning in a swivel chair in his office or an easy-chair at his club, he now sits on luxurious cushions, the very thing he ought not to do, for it is precisely this continued sedentary life that is throwing him inevitably into the arms of the specialist. It would be far better for him if he were with us in the street car, hanging athletically on to a strap and now and then swaying pleasantly out of the perpendicular. But that expeditious and economical reducing exercise is forever closed to him, like answering the telephone.

And this is only the beginning. Consider his distractions. How enormously life’s problems are simplified through limitation! Your purse is limited; then so are your problems. You do not have to decide whether you will go to the North Cape or make the Alaska trip or go to Lake George or Palm Beach or Coronado or a dozen other places. If you could really go anywhere absolutely regardless, how hard it would be to choose! And this hardship the rich actually experience.

Nor can wealth so fully rejoice in the simplicity of friendship. It has not the freedom of expression allowed to poverty. For one thing, there are the newspapers continually nosing about. Then the rich are oppressed with the apprehension of being ‘used.’ And the estate of affluence does not invite the social relation of friendship so readily as does the intimate, heroic adventure of poverty. The rich are, moreover, constantly belabored by socialists, economists, industrialists, publicists, and fanatics of all kinds, who do not know any of them, or they would have seen what thoroughly inoffensive people most of them are — and all for no earthly reason except that they are rich, for which in most cases they are of course in no wise responsible.

What, after all, is the good of being rich? Suppose you have a wardrobe full of raiment. You can wear but one suit at a time, except in the coldest weather. The possession of scores of others, as even Epictetus observed, is a purely mental matter. You are pleasantly conscious that you have others, one of which you might have been wearing or may wear another time. But this is a mere state of mind. In point of fact you have on but one costume, just like everybody else. You may even be harassed by the thought that you should have worn one of the others, in which case even the mental balance is against you. Or even that moths or burglars are after them, or that while you are wearing this one the others are going out of style.

There is no denying that some rich people are happy. But does not this disconcerting fact prove upon examination to be explained by their having retained, even amid the disadvantages of wealth, the point of view of poverty? This is probably why some very rich men down to old age cling to the fiction that they are poor. The honor and the worth of poverty have no more enthusiastic endorsers than the rich. Nowhere are there such firm believers in it as they. They know and do not hesitate to declare that it is good for us. This is not because they do not wish us well, but solely because they have experienced, some of them, the sterling worth of being poor. (It is a curious fact that those of them who were never poor are not nearly so certain about this.) What, if anything, do rich men brag about? Not how rich they are, but how poor they once were. Caddies tell me that affluent golfers freely dilate to them, in the privacy of the fairway, on how they used to work for fifty cents a day and with what difficulty they got what they call their ‘start.’ This striking endorsement of poverty from an unexpected and unprejudiced quarter should convince the most dubious.

The very achievement of wealth, which is its chief distinction, is made from a starting point of poverty, and is itself in reality just one more proof of the worth of being poor. Is it not precisely out of being poor that men grow rich? Human energy, like gas, has to be condensed to be utilized; and poverty is the great condenser. Under its powerful pressure we push, pull, lift, pound, drive, and develop a degree of power of which we did not dream. And, in all candor, where had you rather be, in a silken box with the proconsul, or on scratch in the arena?

Poverty speaks a universal language. Hunger and thirst are alike the world over, and he is to be pitied who has not experienced them in a measure. And of course the rich, having most of them been poor, know this and, when they wish to enjoy themselves, play at being poor, and strive, by camping or touring, to find hunger, fatigue, and thirst. It is not much fun eating if you are never hungry.

Is it not the simple truth that the rich find their chief happiness in importing into their existence the joys of poverty? The competitions of sport are designed to recover some of the conditions of poverty. What would sport be if the richer man always won at golf or tennis? It is because the decision is sought on terms of sheer personal prowess, irrespective of Dun’s or Bradstreet’s, that sport attracts the rich as it does the poor. But this is simply returning to the conditions of poverty. We have heard much of aping the rich, but one of the chief enjoyments of wealth may be described as aping the poor.

But why speak of camping out? In pursuit of hardship the rich have long since sailed past that star. The other night a distinguished soldier informed me that there was nothing like a tent to live in, and the very next day a spirited woman said with an air of conviction that a tent was altogether too stuffy a place to sleep in and the truest happiness was found in a pack trip through Western mountains with nothing overhead at night but stars. Why do the rich insist upon exchanging the comforts of home for such hardships? It is because there is a charm about the conditions of poverty which even wealth cannot dispense with.

But it would be a mistake to go on and, taking advantage of the reader’s overwrought nerves, rouse in his breast a positive pity for the rich, and a deep but hopeless yearning to do something to relieve their condition. They too have their pride; they do not want our pity. The thing about them, in fact, that I find most wearing is the violence with which they hold their prejudices; but perhaps this is because I hold my own so violently.

A few years ago there lived in the Middle West an energetic and promising young brakeman. He was a steady fellow, was happily married and had a good home. Unfortunately his father, who was a railroad engineer, instead of attending strictly to his duties became interested in devising some kind of attachment for Pullman cars, and produced an invention. The consequence is that his son is now an idle vagrant. He leads a roaming, restless life. His summers he spends at a cottage with seven bathrooms which he has built in the North woods. In the winter he occupies a furnished flat in town, except for an occasional visit to Palm Beach or when he takes his wife North for the hunting season. I cannot learn that he has any occupation. He can hardly be said to have even a home; and all through no fault of his, but simply because his father’s mind wandered — a very dangerous habit, most of all in a locomotive engineer.