Poverty Blights whole cities,

Spreads horrible pestilences, strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it.

What you call crime is nothing. A murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then, what do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses

of life. There are not 50 genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions

of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people.

They poison us morally and physically.

They kill the happiness of society.

They force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties

for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss.

Only fools fear crime. We all fear poverty.

George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 38, The Politics of the Future

Care Hardy was born in Lanarkshire in Scotland in 1856.

His family of two adults and nine children,

lived in a one-room cottage. The family's economic necessity forced him to get his first job at the age of seven, working as an errand boy for a baker for the sum of four shillings sixpence a week.

A formal education was out of the question under these circumstances, although somehow his mother taught him to read and write in the

evenings. His stepfather worked for a shipbuilding company, and in the course of a labor dispute,

the shipyard went on a six-month lockout. His mother's ability to work

during this lockout was impaired because she was pregnant, and then because she had just given

birth. The family had had to sell everything that they owned. There was no food in the house,

and little cares four and sixpence a week was the family's only income.

One Friday morning, Care walked the two miles to work in the rain, which made him 15 minutes

...