Talking Poverty
Two quotes on poverty. The first was written by George MacDonald in 1883 and appears in his children’s fantasy novel The Princess and Curdie:
“Yes,” she went on, “you have got to thank me that you are so poor, Peter. . . . Things come to the poor that can’t get to the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter—one that no man ever coveted, and but a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that, like other privileges, may be terribly misused.”
Eighty years later, President Lyndon Johnson announced his War on Poverty in a Special Message to Congress on March 16, 1963:
Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.
Okay, class; discuss.
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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