THE POVERTY OF GENTLEFOLK.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIII, Issue XVIII, 3 August 1912, Page 10

THE POVERTY OF GENTLEFOLK.

''If a sorrow's crown of sorrow be remembering happier things, surely the pang and pain of poverty must be very poignant in the heart of the poor gentlewoman'or gentleman. The haughty pride of the poor is peculiarly intense in those who have known sweeter days. Not long ago an old gentleman died in stoical solitude in a London by-street, and for a moment the whole metropolis paused to grieve over the tragical pathos of his death. He had been an officer, but his heroic dignity forbade him to seek alms from his old regiment. He preferred to let hunger slowly eat him away, and up to his last breath he kept his honor unstained and his numan pride unbroken," writes Mr James Douglas in the Daily News and Leader. "Hunger ate out his heart, but when his old regiment heard the high tale of his valiant martyrdom it gave him a soldier's* funeral. The irony of it hiu-t our conscience. We could not stoop to the ignominy of chiding his brave folly, because the temper of it was so fine. And in ourselves we ached with a dim sense of collective guilt. < Hut the tide of life rolled over the old soldier's, grave, and we forgot, as we are fated to forget, all these uncomfortable glimpses into the grey abyss of poverty. The great mundane system must go on, and the wheels of labor and pleasure must revolve, although they crush the weakling, the helpless, and the unfortunate. It is only too true that it is better to be publicly and ostentatiously poor than to be secretly and privately poor. In the lower depths of poverty it is not easy to hide from human pity. The very fact that the poor are denied the doubtful boon of privacy is at once a curse and a blessing. It is only in the middle class that the art of starving to death can be securely practised. The instinct of benevolence does not reach out in these times to the middle-classes, who are so often ground into powder by the dreadful millstones of gentility, whose weight tends to grow heavier every day. But justice compels us to admit that the lot of the artisan is frequently more gracious than the lot of the cultured indigents who strive so quixotically to 'keep up their position' till the end. 'ey „ cannot dig ; to beg they are ashamed. They live in an exile on the very edge of famine, pushed over inch by inch in a ghastly isolation. For these derelicts the State can do little. At any rate, we know that many of them die like the derelicts of the Titanic, who died amid the Atlantic silences chewing the cork torn from their lifebelts."