Kitabı oku: «Why I Believe in Poverty», sayfa 4

Then, in turn, I became a reporter during the evenings, an office boy day-times, and learned stenography at midnight!

My correspondent says she supports her family of husband and child on eight hundred dollars a year, and says I have never known what that means. I supported a family of three on six dollars and twenty-five cents a week – less than one half of her yearly income. When my brother and I, combined, brought in eight hundred dollars a year we felt rich!

I have for the first time gone into these details in print so that my readers may know, at first hand, that the

Editor of the “Ladies’ Home Journal” is not a theorist when he writes or prints articles that seek to preach economy or that reflect a hand-to-hand struggle on a small or an invisible income. There is not a single step, not an inch, on the road of direst poverty that I do not know or have not experienced. And, having experienced every thought, every feeling, and every hardship that come to those who travel that road, I say to-day that I rejoice with every boy who is going through the same experiences.

Nor am I discounting or forgetting one single pang of the keen hardships that such a struggle means. I would not to-day exchange my years of the keenest hardship that a boy can know or pass through for any single experience that could have come to me. I know what it means, not to earn a dollar, but to earn two cents. I know the value of money as I could have learned it or known it in no other way. I could have been trained for my life-work in no surer way. I could not have arrived at a truer understanding of what it means to face a day without a penny in hand, not a loaf of bread in the cupboard, not a piece of kindling wood for the fire – with nothing to eat, and then be a boy with the hunger of nine and ten, with a mother frail and discouraged!