WHY   I   BELIEVE   IN
POVERTY
AS THE RICHEST EXPERIENCE
THAT CAN COME TO A BOY

BY
EDWARD BOK

BOSTON AND HEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
MDCCCCXV

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY EDWARD BOK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1915

A FOREWORD

THE article in this little book was published in The Ladies’ Home Journal for April, 1915. Much to the surprise of the author, the call for copies was so insistent as to exhaust the edition of the magazine containing it. As the demand did not appear to be supplied, the article is now reprinted in this form. It is sent out with the hope of the author that it may still further fulfill its mission of giving the stimulant of encouragement wherever it is needed.

E. B.

October
Nineteen hundred and fifteen

WHY I BELIEVE IN POVERTY

AS THE RICHEST EXPERIENCE THAT CAN COME TO A BOY

I MAKE my living trying to edit the “Ladies’ Home Journal.” And because the public has been most generous in its acceptance of that periodical, a share of that success has logically come to me. Hence a number of my very good readers cherish an opinion that often I have been tempted to correct, a temptation to which I now yield. My correspondents express the conviction variously, but this extract from a letter is a fair sample:—

It is all very easy for you to preach economy to us when you do not know the necessity for it: to tell us how, as for example in my own case, we must live within my husband’s income of eight hundred dollars a year, when you have never known what it is to live on less than thousands. Has it ever occurred to you, born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth, that theoretical writing is pretty cold and futile compared to the actual hand-to-mouth struggle that so many of us live, day by day and year in and year out—an experience that you know not of?

“An experience that you know not of”!

Now, how far do the facts square with this statement?

Whether or not I was born with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth I cannot say. It is true that I was born of well-to-do parents. But when I was six years old my father lost all his means, and faced life at forty-five, in a strange country, without even necessaries. There are men and their wives who know what that means: for a man to try to “come back” at forty-five, and in a strange country!

I had the handicap of not knowing one word of the English language. I went to a public school and learned what I could. And sparse morsels they were! The boys were cruel, as boys are. The teachers were impatient, as tired teachers are.

My father could not find his place in the world. My mother, who had always had servants at her beck and call, faced the problems of housekeeping that she had never learned nor been taught. And there was no money.

So, after school hours, my brother and I went home, but not to play. After-school hours meant for us to help a mother who daily grew more frail under the burdens that she could not carry. Not for days, but for years, we two boys got up in the gray cold winter dawn when the bed feels so snug and warm to growing boys, and we sifted the cold ashes of the day-before fire for a stray lump or two of unburned coal, and with what we had or could find we made the fire and warmed up the room. Then we set the table for the scant breakfast, went to school, and directly after school we washed the dishes, swept and scrubbed the floors. Living in a three-family tenement, each third week meant that we scrubbed the entire three flights of stairs from the third story to the first, as well as the doorsteps and the side-walk outside. The latter work was the hardest: for we did it on Saturdays with