quality. Pauperism is associated in the minds of many with vice and crime, and it is true that these are often its ultimate development. But for all that they are not of its essence. Many a pauper is at first neither vicious nor criminal. Many people who are both vicious and criminal are not paupers. The first step in pauperism is to the average man analogous to the loss of virtue in a woman. He is never quite the same again. Though there are some who have the strength of will to resist its further stages, yet to the many it means the gradual mildew of the spirit, the blunting of energy both physical and moral, and the loss of responsibility and self-control. It is an insidious thing, and attacks human nature on its weakest side, the side of its indolence, and the danger is common to rich and poor. It is the outward expression of the economic law, which is as inexorable as the law of gravitation, that average human nature, like everything in the physical world, follows the line of least resistance, or, in other words, takes life in the easiest way. The pauper is not so much a poor person as a poor creature. There are paupers among the rich as well as among the poor, but they have had at least the opportunities of higher education and different environment. The poor have no such safeguard. The first step downwards, once taken, leads to an abyss which has no bottom. Many of us will remember one of George Eliot's best known characters who "at first had no thoughts that were base, but because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant … he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds that make men infamous. … He betrayed every trust that he might keep himself safe—yet calamity overtook him." Pauperism is the loss of grit, initiative, gumption, self-respect—what you
