To Poverty – L.M.S., 1/27/1893

Republished from our predecessor publication Lucifer the Light Bearer

Poverty! Miserable, sickening curse of a plenteous earth, what horrors are conjured at your name!
Shameful shadow, falling like a pall over the bright glow civilization would boastfully send forth, you
darken every dream of beauty and purity that mortals dare to dwell upon. You drive him to despair,
you hound him to the prison door, you call forth the evil within him to fight your own encroachments,
and you crush to earth his aspirations, his genius. Needless, hideous phantom that you are—thing
created not of Nature, but of men—what mystical words will banish you forever? Has the whole human
race lost the key to your existence? Is there no “Presto, change!” in the vocabulary of suffering humanity
that will transform you into something less like a fantasma of the black art? You have no excuse for being.
You push your ugly shadow around under the eaves of palaces, beneath the richest storehouses and
through the grandest, wealthiest streets, with the audacity of Satan himself; you go and brood like a
great bird of prey over the green, fertile fields of the farmer; you sit like a grim specter on the hearth of
the man who digs more wealth from the bowels of the earth than a hundred like him can use; you are
the hated but familiar friend of desolate, tired, work-worn women; and you make little fiends, or idiots,
or automata of the children who should be frisking and laughing all day long in the glad sunshine. You
are the most brazen-faced curse that the world knows, for you act as though we wanted you and there was
no such thing as proceeding without you. You have no business here. Nature planned her arrangements with
the express purpose of keeping you out of her domains, and man’s brains and muscles are strong enough
to grind your wicked shadow into atoms—if he could lay hands on you. But you know better than that.

You are the evil genius called up by so many methods and in so many different shapes that neither
you nor your conjurors can be seized in a firm, sure grip. You will not assume a definite form, nor tell
what master summoned you—and thus you elude while you haunt and torture us all. Where you cannot
creep, you send a dim, terrible resemblance of yourself—a specter that can walk where it will—in the
palace, in the quiet home, in the counting rooms where gold is heaped; that can drive men to deeds
even you cannot evoke, beauty and truth from the soul of man. It is fear of poverty. We spend much
time in studying you, you monster; we puzzle over the problem of where you come from and how we
are to annihilate you, as we never puzzled over our school-day problems. We devote a great deal of
thought and learning to you; we analyze, pick you to pieces, turn you over and over; and some of us
who see how impossible it is to get rid of you try to make out you are not so hideous after all—probably
a blessing cleverly disguised—always for somebody else, however. No individual ever gave you a
welcome on his own account yet. Oh, you are an important monster—you get notice enough, and
that, with your impudence, is all you want. Some of us have an idea how you sneaked into the world
and how it is you keep your grip here so well. And we have designs on you. Wait till we—not know
you better; heavens, we know you but too well—but till we find all your weak points; till we find where
all the strings that direct your baleful creepings run to; and then your days are numbered! We are
very philosophic about you. We who have studied you. We can discuss you in the abstract with great
composure; but the miserable little details of everyday life, where you creep about and pinch and
annoy and distract us—there you have us yet.

The miserable way you have of crowding in calculation of the butcher’s bill and contents of the slim purse
between the lines of our best literary efforts; of mixing up plans of making our clothes last through another
season with the constructive elements of an elaborate essay; of tearing down the halo which a feebly growing
renown builds about an author, and making him or her appear the most commonplace personage—there is
where your power over us never wanes. People imagine an author (as we used in childish days to imagine
a king, always sitting in state with a crown on his head and a shining scepter in his hand) sitting at a desk
in elegant composure, ready at any moment to converse with the most awe-inspiring personages as sensibly
as he writes. And you, miserable desecrater of all beautiful fancies, you tear away the halo and show him
up to some admiring visitor, splitting wood by the back door in a ragged coat, or sifting ashes in the ash-box,
looking the dustiest, forlornest object in the world. And your hateful, unbanishable ghost stalking at his side
makes him forget his own ability till he talks like an imbecile. To a woman your shadow is heavier and darker.
She may succeed in weaving many sweet thoughts in other minds about her individuality. She lives in a golden
atmosphere—to others. But let them come nearer where you lower, and she is but a plain, shabby, stammering
woman, scrubbing the floor perhaps as energetically as your stupidest victim. It is not always where you do your
worst that you cause the most suffering. Your victims starve and freeze to death; they pine in prisons and die in
the gutters; but they feel no more exquisite pangs of pain than does the spirit made sensitive by the civilization
which pretends it cannot do without you—that must endure your modified, ceaseless presence. No, you have
no acceptable apology for crowding among us uninvited. You go tagging along after wealth as though you were
its shadow; and I suppose if wealth will pile itself into towers it will cast just such shadows; but we don’t want you.
And when enough of us find out you don’t belong here, and that even wealth, whose servile slave you seem to
be, never asked you here—remember—you go!

Editors Interjection:
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