Items related to Lecture on Poverty
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 Excerpt: ... Poverty in its Relation to Intemperance. BY ARTHUR SHERWELL, M.P. In attempting to diagnose so complicated a social evil as that of poverty there is always a very real danger that the sense of proportion will be lost and undue emphasis be laid upon partial causes, or even upon subordinate factors which dominate the attention by the very obviousness of their existence. The economic factors in the problem are intricate and sometimes obscure, whereas the moral factors lie upon the surface of social life and appeal very powerfully in individual cases. The conjunction of poverty and intemperance is a fact of common experience, but every student of science knows that the conjunction of two evils is not of itself sufficient to establish causal relations. That the two evils are intimately related is a commonplace of observation and experience, but the extent of the relationship and its precise character are not, in the nature of things, capable of exact statement or definition. The generalisations familiar to much of the propagandist work of the temperance movement do not and cannot pretend to scientific accuracy. They are to be understood rather as emphatic statements of a relationship which in innumerable cases is so clear and direct as to be incapable of denial or doubt. They do not rest so much upon systematic and detailed investigation as upon broad observation of personal and social life. In this respect they approximate very closely to the generalisations concerning the connection of drink with crime. When learned judges utter dicta to the effect that one-half or three-fourths of the whole of crime arises from intemperance, their assertions are not to be understood as statements of fact scientifically ascertained, but rather as rough representations of the ...
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