How to be poor

food to
the dangers and other inconveniences of the woods, to the risks of hunting and
being hunted. In other words: they preferred comfort to freedom. And — wrongly
in my view — riches to poverty. Minks are only human.
    Freedom means responsibility: equally
shirked by man and ferret. Wearing a mink-coat seems to have a demoralising
effect on both.
    This, however, is not the end of the
story. Act III is yet to be told. And a sad third act it is. One would think
that the little minks, after their strange adventure, lived happily ever after.
Alas, this was not to be. Minks multiply with terrifying rapidity. Most cages —
prior to their release — were occupied by one huge family: all the minks in the
cage belonged to one family: parents and many brothers and sisters. They knew
one another and had got used to one another. After their brief excursion into
the woods the families got mixed up so that total strangers had to share the
same cage and they could not settle down. Vicious fights broke out, they were
at each other’s throats all the time, life became hell. The animal lovers’ good
will has completely destroyed the serenity and happiness of the minks’ lives.
The second moral we learn from this tale is this: we can, as a rule, deal with
our enemies; but God save us from our friends!

Part Two: Public Poverty
     

The Snobbery of the
New Poor

     
    Humanity’s philosophical attitude to poverty has
been changing throughout the ages (although the poor’s own practical attitude
has remained more or less the same). I have already touched upon a related
subject (in the chapter “A Short History of Poverty”) but I must add a few
words... or rather, approach the problem from another angle.
    Quite a few
of the writers and thinkers of ancient Rome were puzzled by this phenomenon.
Seneca, for example, remarked: “It is not the man who has too little, but the
man who craves for more that is poor.” But we all know that the downtrodden,
apathetic and broken poor person is resigned to his fate and that it is the
greedy rich man who wants more and more. In other words, what Seneca suggests
is that the poor person is not poor (because he is resigned to be his fate)
while the real poor person is the rich person (because he craves for more). An
attractive theory but not altogether convincing.
    Seneca’s apologetic approach found no
favour with his contemporary, Jesus Christ, who angrily denounced the rich.
“Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” Perhaps He had some
special information on the subject — He had good connections; perhaps, in this
case, was just wishful thinking. But He was certainly on the s*de of the poor,
unlike His Church, later. The Church served the rich; the Church was dependent
on the rich; the Church, with its vast land properties, was the rich.
The Church repeated Christ’s words but with tongue in cheek: understand, ye
poor, that poor ye must remain. Suffer and toil and sweat and starve and ye
will be splendidly rewarded in the Kingdom of Heaven. And if not, bad luck. So
the poor toiled and suffered and starved and few came back from the grave to
complain. Not only few of the English poor (we know that Englishmen, rich or
poor, dead or alive, hate complaining) but few even of the German or Austrian
poor, who love complaining.
    Never a bitter word from the dead. So
the world slowly got used to the gentle and genteel poor, to people who
modestly and shyly tried to hide their poverty. Bernard Shaw went further. He
declared that the poor should not be modest and shy: they should be thoroughly
ashamed of themselves. “The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is
poverty.” (My italics — not that it matters whose italics they are.)
    The poor were duly ashamed of
themselves, as instructed by Shaw. But not for long. Where Marxism has failed,
Marks-and-Spencerism has triumphed. When I first came to England it was easy to tell the rich from the poor. It was enough to look at them. The poor
could not afford to dress like the rich and did not even want to. If the Kingdom of God was to be theirs, they meant to look poor, in order to avoid any
misunderstanding at that final selection. But Marks-and-Spencerism changed all
that; it defeated the Church — all Churches. People started to look alike. It
became harder and harder to tell the messenger-girl from the director’s wife,
the daily woman from her employer, the worker from the plant manager. There
were still differences,