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9
to the poverty of the poor or extends mendicity has a proportional
effect in diminishing longevity; longevity therefore
exists in an inverse ratio to the poverty of a town community.
If the agencies which have had an effect in ameliorating
the condition of the poor can be traced, we shall find some
at least of the influences that have been instrumental in
reducing the death rate. In this respect no other factor, in
my opinion, may be considered equal with, or can even be
compared to, education.
Education, by the initiation of the young in the elementary
principles of knowledge, has opened the portals of
innumerable avenues leading to remunerative employment,
closed to the ignorant and untaught. The children of the
pauper and mendicant are withdrawn from the atmosphere
of vice and intemperance to which their fathers have
become acclimatized, and arc placed under supervision
in the schoolroom; under the bracing influence of discipline,
habits of industry arc formed, the powers of reasoning arc
strengthened, and the judgment becomes more evenly
balanced. The young man enters life with an improved
chance of success; he is capable of forming a wider estimate
of virtue and vice, of the certain emoluments of the former
and the inevitable disadvantages of the latter.
Pauperism has thus been attacked and partially overcome.
The wider intelligence of our age has adopted a more excellent
remedy than that which had credit with the last generation.
Our fathers attempted to rid themselves of pauperism,
on the one hand, by the legislative enactment of pains and
penalties ; on the other hand, by the lavish and indiscriminate
distribution of charity; but in spite of these measures,
whether alone or in combination, pauperism refused either
to be banished by coercion or bought out by dole.