The Parable of the Coach [1]
Edward Bellamy
One
of the most powerful images found in Looking Backward is Bellamy's
description to his utopian readers of the social conditions of the nineteenth
century. In order to contrast the egalitarian environment of
“…By way of attempting to give the reader some
general impression of the way people lived together in those days [1880s &
1890s], and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another,
perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a
prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged
toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and
permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the
difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was
covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These
seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their
occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the
merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and
the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life
to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after
him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but
on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be
wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and
at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling
to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and
help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was
naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the
apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant
cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.
But
did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered
intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in
the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had
they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them?
Oh, yes; commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who
had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the
road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such
times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging
under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were
trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called
forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such
times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope,
exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in
another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy
salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a
great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of
general relief when the especially bad piece of road was gotten over. This
relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always
some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose
their seats. …”
On a New Philosophy: That
Poverty Is the Best Policy [2]
William
Graham Sumner
It is commonly asserted that there are in the
… It is very popular to pose as a "friend of humanity," or a
"friend of the working classes." The character, however, is quite
exotic in the United States…. the greatest part of the preaching in America
consists in injunctions to those who have taken care of themselves to perform
their assumed duty to take care of others. Whatever may be one’s private
sentiments, the fear of appearing cold and hard-hearted causes these
conventional theories of social duty and these assumptions of social fact to
pass unchallenged ....
Certain ills belong to the hardships of human life. They
are natural. They are part of the struggle with Nature for existence. We cannot
blame our fellow-men for our share of these. My neighbor and I are both
struggling to free ourselves from these ills. The fact that my neighbor has
succeeded in this struggle better than I constitutes no grievance for me.
Certain other ills are due to the malice of men, and to the imperfections or
errors of civil institutions.....
… A man who is present as a consumer, yet who does not contribute either by
land, labor, or capital to the work of society, is a burden. On no sound
political theory ought such a person to share in the political power of the
State. He drops out of the ranks of workers and producers. Society must support
him. It accepts the burden, but he must be cancelled from the ranks of the
rulers likewise. So much for the pauper. About him no more need be said....
…Those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call the weak
are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are
wasted. They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise
and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to
realize any better things. Whether the people who mean no harm, but are weak in
the essential powers necessary to the performance of one’s duties in life, or
those who are malicious and vicious, do the more mischief, is a question not
easy to answer.
The humanitarians, philanthropists, and reformers, looking at the facts of life
as they present themselves, find enough which is sad and unpromising in the
condition of many members of society.... In their eagerness to recommend the
less fortunate classes to pity and consideration they forget all about the
rights of other classes; they gloss over all the faults of the classes in
question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent
new theories of property, distorting rights and perpetrating injustice, as any
one is sure to do who sets about the re-adjustment of social relations with the
interests of one group distinctly before his mind, and the interests of all
other groups thrown into the background. When I have read certain of these
discussions I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be
respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one’s own way
and earn one’s own living, and that the only really admirable person was the
good-for-nothing. The man who by his own effort raises himself above poverty
appears, in these discussions, to be of no account. The man who has done
nothing to raise himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock
about him, bringing the capital which they have collected from the other class,
and promising him the aid of the State to give him what the other had to work
for. In all these schemes and projects the organized intervention of society
through the State is either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to
become the protector and guardian of certain classes. The agents who are to
direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists....
Here it may suffice to observe that, on the theories of the social philosophers
to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judicious living: Poverty
is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people;
if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.
,,,
That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the
attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of the
neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically clear to us during our
first months of residence at Hull-House. One day a boy of ten led a tottering
old lady into the House, saying that she had slept for six weeks in their
kitchen on a bed made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son
died, although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her son had
"once worked in the same shop with Pa she thought of him when she had
nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by saying that our house was
so much bigger than theirs that he thought we would have more room for beds.
The old woman herself said absolutely nothing, but looking on with that
gripping fear of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living embodiment of that
dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County Infirmary
themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who are making their last
stand against it.
This look was almost more than I could bear for only a few
days before some frightened women had bidden me come quickly to the house of an
old German woman, whom two men from the country agent's office were attempting
to remove to the
The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of
drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of normal living--a symbol of
all she was asked to renounce. For several years after this summer I invited
five or six old women to take a two weeks' vacation from the poorhouse which
was eagerly and even gaily accepted. Almost all the old men in the
… The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the early days
of Hull-House, paralleled by the inadequacy of the charitable efforts of the
city and an unfounded optimism that there was no real poverty among us. Twenty
years ago there was no Charity Organization Society in Chicago and the Visiting
Nurse Association had not yet begun its beneficial work, while the relief
societies, although conscientiously administered, were inadequate in extent and
antiquated in method.
As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of
general principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of their
destruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one rainy day
from the office of the county agent with her arms full of paper bags containing
beans and flour which alone lay between her children and starvation. Although
she had no money she boarded a street car in order to save her booty from
complete destruction by the rain, and as the burst bags dropped "flour on
the ladies' dresses" and ""beans all over the place," she
was sharply reprimanded by the conductor, who was the further exasperated when
he discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he would,
almost in front of Hull-House. She related to us her state of mind as she
stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares disappearing; she admitted
she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a little," but, curiously
enough, she pronounced her malediction, not against the rain nor the conductor,
nor yet against the worthless husband who had been set up to the city prison,
but, true to the Chicago spirit of the moment, went to the root of the matter
and roundly "cursed poverty."
… In the latter part of the summer of 1895, I served as a
member on a commission appointed by the mayor of Chicago, to investigate conditions
in the county poorhouse, public attention having become centered on it through
one of those distressing stories, which exaggerates the wrong in a public
institution while at the same time it reveals conditions which need to be
rectified. However necessary publicity is for securing reformed administration,
however useful such exposures may be for political purposes, the whole is
attended by such a waste of the most precious human emotions, by such a tearing
of living tissue, that it can scarcely be endured. Every time I entered
Hull-House during the days of the investigation, I would find waiting for me
from twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in the suspected
institution, all in such acute distress of mind that to see them was to look
upon the victims of deliberate torture. In most cases my visitor would state
that it seemed impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if
these stories were true, something must be done. Many of the patients were
taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to meet the sullen
hostility of their attendants and with their own attitude changed from
confidence to timidity and alarm.
This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of
public officials was made clear to us in an early experience with a peasant
woman straight from the fields of
We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to
secure support for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows, damages for
injured operators, furniture from the clutches of the installment store. The
Settlement is valuable as an information and interpretation bureau. It
constantly acts between the various institutions of the city and the people for
whose benefit these institutions were erected. The hospitals, the county
agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the people who need
them most. Another function of the Settlement to its neighborhood resembles
that of the big brother whose mere presence on the playground protects the
little one from bullies….
[1] The “Parable of the Coach” is from the first chapter of
Edward Bellamy’s book, Looking Backward. This book details the fictional story of Julian West,
a wealthy young Bostonian who enters a hypnotic sleep in 1887 and awakes 113
years later. In the society to which he awakens, the squalor of
[3] Addams, Twenty Years at