inese coolies. It can be
most clearly seen by comparing it with the old, more individual,
charitable, and (as the Eugenists might say) sentimental view of
poverty. In Goldsmith or Dickens or Hood there is a basic idea that
the particular poor person ought not to be so poor: it is some
accident or some wrong. Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim are fairy princes
waiting for their fairy godmother. They are held as slaves, but rather
as the hero and heroine of a Spanish or Italian romance were held as
slaves by the Moors. The modern poor are getting to be regarded as
slaves in the separate and sweeping sense of the negroes in the
plantations. The bondage of the white hero to the black master was
regarded as abnormal; the bondage of the black to the white master as
normal. The Eugenist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence
of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of
Cratchit; but, as a matter of fact, we have here a very good instance
of how much more practically true to life is sentiment than cynicism.
The poor are _not_ a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk
about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact,
what Dickens describes: "a dustbin of individual accidents," of
damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility. The class very
largely consists of perfectly promising children, lost like Oliver
Twist, or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things,
like most dustbins. But the Eugenist delusion of the barbaric breed in
the abyss affects even those more gracious philanthropists who almost
certainly do want to assist the destitute and not merely to exploit
them. It seems to affect not only their minds, but their very
eyesight. Thus, for instance, Mrs. Alec Tweedie almost scornfully
asks, "When we go through the slums, do we see beautiful children?"
The answer is, "Yes, very often indeed." I have seen children in the
slums quite pretty enough to be Little Nell or the outcast whom Hood
called "young and so fair." Nor has the beauty anything necessarily to
do with health; there are beautiful healthy children, beautiful dying
children, ugly dying children, ugly uproarious children in Petticoat
Lane or Park Lane. There are people of every physical and mental type,
of every sort of health and breeding, in a single back street. They
have nothing in common but the wrong we do them.
The important point is, however, that there is more fact and realism
in the wil
|