COMPARATIVE POVERTY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2106, 5 July 1894, Page 46

COMPARATIVE POVERTY.

With fiDgera weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags Plying her needle and thread. Stitch 1 stitch t stitch 1 In Poverty, Hunger, and Dirfc, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, Would that its tone could reach the rich, She sang this Song of the Shirt. - Hood. To be poor is a very elastic term as applied to people on different rungs of the social ladder. To the homeless poor in great cities Hue London, New York, and even in Melbourne and Sydney, it means to be absolutely without the necessaries of life. No food, no fire to warm the aching limbs, the nakedness of which is hardly covered by the few thin raga procurable ; no home, the only resting place some recess in gateway, bridge, or pier, or upon the grass in the public grounds ; no hope of better times to come ; with many, no recollection even of brighter days gone by; — in short, a living death. This is poverty indeed. Hardly less cruel is the life led by the victims of sweating — those poor crea-

tures who sit in the foul air of some wretched garret, the single living and sleeping apartment of a whole family, sometimes even occupied by more than the members of one family, sewing from early morning till late at night, earning thereby barely sufficient to keep body and soul together — cramped with cold, sinking from want of nourishment and fresh air, with eyes dimmed by straining in a bad light, and very often too in the midst of disease.

Then there are the poor who eke out a miseraMe and precarious living in the streets, on their feet the whole long day, entreating the passors-by to buy their matches or their flowers ; others again by sweeping doorsteps and crossings or by blaokiDg boots seek to earn the penny that will stava of! the pangs of absolute starvation a few hours longer. A step higher is what is oalled poverty among the small tradespeople — the wretched hand-to-mouth existence, the hard work, scheming, and worry in a business which is made almost devoid of profit by competition, where every penny has to be turned over twice before It is spent, and where one error in judgment in buying or selling may mean the lobs of the hard earnings of weeks. Another step higher in the social scale brings us to the army of ill-paid olerks struggling along on salaries quite inadequate to keep their wives and families in anything approaching comfort — their whole lives spent in incessant grinding brain work from one year's end to the other, crushing out all aspirations and ambitions — everything beyond the all-absorbing problem of how to make both ends meet. No matter how tired or sick, the thought of rest is out of the question, for rest wiuld mean so much deducted from the already meagre remuneration. To this class may be added daily governesses, photographers' assistants, retoucherp, struggling artists, and writers, who have only the proceeds of their own efforts to depend upon to keep themselves, and perhaps others. Another step or two and we come to the clergy, doctors, and other professional men who have to keep up a certain good appearance, whose wives and daughters have to be

well dressed, and whose houses mast be fairly well appointed. They, too, have their poor, who themselves only know how they have to stint and pinch in every direction in order to keep up the neQessary outward appearance. Perhaps none feel poverty more acutely than those who — whatever' may be the opinion of others — consider themselves paupers, through having had their incomes suddenly reduced from co many thousands to something like the same number of hundreds. Used to being surrounded by every luxury and in a position to gratify every whim, in their new circumstances they feel that it would be almost better to be dead than reduced to such depths of want, and some will even pose as martyrs on an income that to the poor clerks, clergy, governesses, &c. would be a veritable mine of wealth.

Although there is plenty of poverty in our own towns, it is, of course, only in large oities that we meet with these extreme cases ; but in any place it is noticeable that it is only among the very poorest that any degree of real sympathy for one another is displayed. The higher the class the more callous they bscome of each other's want, and the more they keep aloof from one another. One exception must be made, however, and that is in -the case of artists and actors. The sympathy they display for fellow craftsmen in distress is genuine and heartfelt, and the reputation they possess for standing by each other in trouble is proverbial. Suddenly-acquired poverty has a very different effect upon different people. With some it is really beneficial, bringing out in them good qualities and abilities that would never have been discovered under the somnolent cloak of wealth. With others it is most disastrous, the loss of money meaning the loss of all that brought them what compensated for their inability to make life

pleasant, as a result of their only pos r easing a modicum of brains of their own. It is, however, a painful fact tbat in any case loss of wealth means loss of friends.