Human Physiology. 

 CHAPTER V. 



POVERTY AND ITS EVILS. 



-A Network of Evils The Root of all The First Step in Reform Condi- 

 tion of Agricultural Labourers Former Condition of the Poor- 

 Recent Slavery of Women and Children Horrors of the Workhouse 

 Dwellings of the Poor Crowding, Filth, and Indecency Berk- 

 shire Cottages London Lodgings English Yeomen Condition of 

 Children Physical Effects of Poverty Social Rights and Duties. 



PREMATURE mortality, we have seen, exists chiefly among the 

 poor ; but the bad air, the crowd-poison, gendered in the filthy 

 haunts of poverty often invades the luxurious dwellings of the 

 rich. With poverty we find ignorance, drunkenness, brutality, 

 vice, and crime. Poverty drives men to drink ; and drink 

 increases poverty. Poverty causes ignorance ; and ignorance 

 keeps men poor Poverty and ignorance produce disease ; and 

 -disease intensifies poverty and ignorance. We are bound in a 

 network of evils, each depending upon and causing the others. 

 But poverty in one class, the result of the love of money in 

 other classes, lies at the root of all. The monopoly of Ian i : 

 the gathering of the great bulk of the wealth of the country 

 into the hands of a few ; the greed of gold, and the power 

 which it gives to the manufacturing, trading, and professional 

 classes, are coincident with the miserable wages of agricultural 

 and much artizan labour, the wretched and crowded dwellings 

 of the poor, the privation of every comfort and the conditions 

 of decency and health, the wasting disease, the welcome death. 

 "Care," says Coleridge, "like a foul hag, sits on us all; one 

 class presses with iron foot upon the wounded heads beneath, 

 and all struggle for a worthless supremacy." The first thing to 

 be done for the poverty-stricken masses is to house and clothe 

 them decently to give them the first conditions of health and 



