But there is at least an equally large number of families who, though they may not be regular applicants for municipal and other charity, are yet unable to get on without undergoing greater or less privations and self-denials. It can hardly be believed how much this wide-spread distress tends to the demoralization of the poor. Without education, without intellectual incentive, without religious consolation, and even without a day of rest; constantly fighting for bare existence; weighed down by bodily suffering, the better feelings of these unfortunates have become so blunted that they think only of gratifying their unceasing, never quite satisfied material wants. The disuse of the Sunday solemnities has weaned them even from bestowing a proper care on their persons. They rarely possess any other dress than the one worn in the work-shop. Still worse, if possible, is the state of the quarters, or holes, in which they are domiciled. Besides a wretched couch, an old table, some broken chairs and crockery, one meets there nothing but filth and offensive odors. Parents and children sleep in one close room; the children run wild in the streets, and thus deteriorate morally and mentally before they perish physically.
Such an element of the population can only be redeemed morally and religiously by relief of their material misery. No amelioration of their condition is otherwise possible. Wherever the church desires to interfere, she must be prepared with material aid--must send the Sister of Mercy as well as the priest. A sort of brutishness has been engrafted on this pauperism, and until it is eliminated no improvement can be seriously attempted. When modern science, therefore, represents man as a purely animal organism, the conclusion is perhaps not so very illogical after all. By systematically degrading the disinherited working classes into a race of human beings inferior in many essential features to the savage, modern political economy has to a certain extent furnished this theory with an illustration. The savage still experiences the necessity of prayer, a want which the modern proletarian has long ceased to feel; the religious necessity is either dulled or destroyed in him, because the religious sentiment has been torn from his heart. For this reason also the reconciliation of the proletarian with Christianity is frequently surrounded by far greater difficulties than the conversion of the downright heathen. The Christian, corrupted by our so-called progress, stands perhaps lowest in the scale of humanity.