Chapter XVI: Section 5: Poverty and Civilisation

A modern writer is burdened by many words that carry an erroneous meaning, and one of these is the word "civilisation." Intended to mean "The Art of Living," this word, by wrong usage, now implies that our method of combining mental culture and bodily comfort is the highest, noblest, and best way to live. Yet this implication is by no means certain. On the contrary, the spectacle of our social life would bring tears to eyes undimmed by the industrial traditions of the past hundred years. This I know to be true, having once travelled to London in the company of a young girl who came from the Thirteenth Century. She had lived some twelve years on the Low Sierra of Andalusia, where in a small sunlit village she may have vainly imagined our capital to be a city with walls of amethyst and streets of gold, for when the train passed through that district which lies to the south of Waterloo, the child wept. "Look at these houses," she sobbed; "_Dios mio_, they have no view."

[Footnote 15: Memorandum issued by the Dominions Royal Commission, December 3, 1915 (p. 2).]

[Footnote 16: Prince Kropotkin, _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_, 1899, chapter iii.]

[Footnote 17: Vide _The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine_, by S. O'Brien (Longmans, 1921).]

[Footnote 18: William Cobbett, _Social Effects of the Reformation_. Catholic Truth Society (H. 132), price 2_d_.]

[Footnote 19: Quoted by F.P. Atkinson, M.D., in _Edinburgh Medical Journal_, September 1880, p. 229.]

[Footnote 20: Ibid., p. 234.]

[Footnote 21: Charles S. Devas, _Political Economy_, 1901, p. 199.]

[Footnote 22: _British Medical Journal_, July 23, 1921, p. 131.]

[Footnote 23: Quoted in _Tablet_, November 5, 1921, p. 598.]

[Footnote 24: Quoted from _America_, October 29, 1921, p. 31.]