Why I Believe in Poverty

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Bok Edward William. Why I Believe in Poverty

A FOREWORD

WHY I BELIEVE IN POVERTY

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I MAKE my living trying to edit the “Ladies’ Home Journal.” And because the public has been most generous in its acceptance of that periodical, a share of that success has logically come to me. Hence a number of my very good readers cherish an opinion that often I have been tempted to correct, a temptation to which I now yield. My correspondents express the conviction variously, but this extract from a letter is a fair sample: —

It is all very easy for you to preach economy to us when you do not know the necessity for it: to tell us how, as for example in my own case, we must live within my husband’s income of eight hundred dollars a year, when you have never known what it is to live on less than thousands. Has it ever occurred to you, born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth, that theoretical writing is pretty cold and futile compared to the actual hand-to-mouth struggle that so many of us live, day by day and year in and year out – an experience that you know not of?

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Now, how far do the facts square with this statement?

Whether or not I was born with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth I cannot say. It is true that I was born of well-to-do parents. But when I was six years old my father lost all his means, and faced life at forty-five, in a strange country, without even necessaries. There are men and their wives who know what that means: for a man to try to “come back” at forty-five, and in a strange country!

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