The Problem of Poverty is so vast, complex, and many-sided, that its practical solution must be the work of generations for we have found its causation to be co-extensive with that of civilization itself. In the lathe of destiny, the vast amorphous mass of humanity has been slowly and painfully fashioned into a form that even now but dimly foreshadows some Divine ideal. But what of the chips and the shavings, the heaped-up refuse of ages, the myriads of broken hearts and ruined lives into whose very soul the graving iron has entered? Cast forth as refuse, they were condemned to live under those terrible laws which, while they developed their brethren into forms of strength and beauty, chained them down to an accelerating degeneration from age to age. It is manifestly worse than useless to approach such a problem as this as if it were merely one of the questions of the day. It is the mother of them all. From its teeming womb they sprang, and there, like the yelping brood of Sin, they kennel. In tracing its causes, with a view to palliation and cure, we must enter the domains of Physiology, Pscychology, Morality, Religion, and Politics.
In every age, man’s insight into his own nature is the measure of his power to interpret history. The historian can but read into the canvas of the past his own synthesis of the results of contemporary analysis. If, then, History is but Psychology writ large, what clue can she furnish to guide us through the labyrinth of complexities?
…
Luxury, like a canker, emasculates and enslaves the rich; want, ignorance, and vice, brutalize and make desparate the poor; till at length, what was denied to their prayers is conceded to their threats and the fear of revolution. The world, and especially England, whose traditions we have carried with us, has gone on complacently contemplating the increase of her trade and the progress of her upper-story civilisation, regardless of the pandemonium below.
Quotation: The Problem of Poverty in New Zealand, part II by Professor Duncan Macgregor. New Zealand Magazine. 1876.
Duncan Macgregor (1843-1906) was appointed to the inaugural chair of Moral and Mental Philosophy, Otago University in 1871. The potted biography at the New Zealand Dictionary of National Biography makes interesting reading.
