Gems from George: Poverty Unnatural -- continued

WE are so accustomed to poverty that even in the most advanced countries we regard it as the natural lot of the great masses of the people; that we take it as a matter of course that even in our highest civilization large classes should want the necessaries of healthful life, and the vast majority should only get a poor and pinched living by the hardest toil.  There are professors of political economy who teach that this condition of things is the result of social laws of which it is idle to complain!  There are ministers of religion who preach that this is the condition which an all-wise, all-powerful Creator intended for His children! If an architect were to build a theater so that not more than one-tenth of the audience could see and hear, we should call him a bungler and a botcher. If a man were to give a feast and provide so little food that nine-tenths of his guests must go away hungry, we should call him a fool, or worse. Yet so accustomed are we to poverty, that even the preachers of what passes for Christianity tell us that the great Architect of the Universe, to whose infinite skill all nature testifies, has made such a botch job of this world that the vast majority of the human creatures whom He has called into it are condemned by the conditions he has imposed to want, suffering, and brutalizing toil that gives no opportunity for the development of mental powers — must pass their lives in a hard struggle to merely live! — Social Problems — Chapter 8: That We All Might Be Rich