WHY I BELIEVE IN POVERTY

EDWARD W. Bok

A number of my very good readers cherish an opinion that often I have been tempted to correct, a temptation to which I now yield. My correspondents express the conviction variously, but this extract from a letter is a 5 fair sample:

It is all very easy for you to preach economy to us when do not know the necessity for it: to tell us how, as, for exyou ample, in my own case, we must live within my husband's income of eight hundred dollars a year, when you have never Io known what it is to live on less than thousands. Has it ever occurred to you, born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth, that theoretical writing is pretty cold and futile compared to the actual hand-to-mouth struggle that so many of us live, day by day and year in and year out—an experience that you know not of?

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"An experience that you know not of"! Now how far do the facts square with this statement? Whether or not I was born with the proverbial "silver spoon in my mouth" I cannot say. It is true that I was born of well20 to-do parents. But when I was six years old my father lost all his means and faced life at forty-five, in a strange country, without even necessaries. There are men and their for a man to try to wives who know what that means"come back" at forty-five, and in a strange country! I had the handicap of not knowing one word of the English language. I went to a public school and learned

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So, after school hours, my brother and I went home, but not to play. After-school hours meant for us to help a mother who daily grew more frail under the burdens that she could not carry. So, not for days but for years, we two boys got up in the gray, cold winter dawn, when the bed feels so snug and warm to growing boys, and we sifted the cold ashes of the day before's fire for a stray 15 lump or two of unburned coal, and with what we had or could find we made the fire and warmed up the room. Then we set the table for the scant breakfast, went to school, and directly after school we washed the dishes, swept, and scrubbed the floors. Living in a three-family 20 tenement, each third week meant that we scrubbed the entire three flights of stairs from the third story to the first, as well as the doorsteps and the sidewalk outside. The latter work was the hardest, for we did it on Saturdays with the boys of the neighborhood looking on none too kindly, 25 or we did it to the echo of the crack of the ball and bat on the adjoining lot!

In the evening, when other boys could sit by the lamp or study their lessons, we two boys went out with a basket and picked up wood and coal in the neighboring lots, or 30 went after the dozen or so pieces of coal left from the ton of coal put in that afternoon by one of our neighbors, with the spot hungrily fixed in mind by one of us during the

it. But-and here is the pivot of my strong belief in poverty as an undisguised blessing to a boy-I believe in poverty as a condition to experience, to go through and then to get out of-not as a condition to stay in. "That's 5 all very well," some will say, "easy enough to say, but how can you get out of it?" No one can definitely tell another that. No one told me. No two persons can find the same way out. Each must find his way for himself. That depends on the boy. I was determined to get out of to poverty because my mother was not born in it, could not stand it, and did not belong in it. This gave me the first essential-a purpose. Then I backed up the purpose with effort and a willingness to work, and to work at anything that came my way, no matter what it was so 15 long as it meant "the way out." I did not pick and choose; I took what came and did it in the best way I knew how, and when I didn't like what I was doing I still did it well while I was doing it, but I saw to it that I didn't do it any longer than I had to do it. I used 20 every rung in the ladder as a rung to the one above. It meant effort, of course,-untiring, ceaseless, and unsparing, and it meant work, hard as nails. But out of the effort and the work came the experience, the upbuilding, the development, the capacity to understand and sympa25 thize, the greatest heritage that can come to a boy. And nothing in the world can give that to a boy, so that it will burn into him, as will poverty.

That is why I believe so strongly in poverty, the greatest blessing in the way of the deepest and fullest expe30 rience that can come to a boy; but, as I repeat, always as a condition to work out of, not to stay in.