Article April 2, 1910 Issue

POVERTY AND RICHES

HON. CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK.

Innumerable, indescribable, at times even fantastic, monstrous, and well-nigh incredible, are the processes through which human beliefs are formed and nurtured; whether we speak of such as individual or collective, as exceptional or general, as ancient or modern, as national, racial, or climatic. Innumerable and indescribable, also, are the complex influences of these beliefs upon human consciousness, character, and conduct. They are constantly at work, both in the waking and in the sleeping hours of mortals, shaping their ideals, hopes, fears, desires, emotions, and incentives. They work as the sculptor works: he first fashions in plastic clay, and then he chisels his work in marble. Some of these beliefs are radiant, beautiful, and serene; they seem to bring a light from heaven with them; but there are others that are tyrants, deceivers, obstructionists, robbers. Under the basilisk glance and breath of some of them the very flowers wither and all beauty departs from the earth.

Especially when the term "poverty" and the term "riches" are used in relation to material conditions, we may observe that the human belief of poverty and the human belief of riches are contraries but not opposites, and particularly so in the bodily discords which they manifest. While they have many differences, they have also many things in common. For example, the origin of the belief of poverty is fear; and there are certain accompanying beliefs,—the belief of humiliation, the belief of despondency, the belief of inferiority, the belief of human dependence, and so on. The belief of riches is primarily an outgrowth of the belief of poverty, with accompanying beliefs such as that of pride, of power, of superiority, of ostentation, and so on.

The accompanying beliefs of poverty and the accompanying beliefs of riches are likewise contraries but not opposites. This is illustrated when a person who has suffered all his years under a belief of poverty, and has manifested its accompanying beliefs, suddenly suffers from the contrary belief of newly acquired wealth, and manifests its accompaniments of arrogance, ostentation, etc. What is termed the polarity of the earth furnishes a useful simile. Those imagined spots, called respectively the North Pole and the South Pole, are antipodal, and yet they are accompanied with the similar beliefs of insufficient heat and light, of protracted snow and ice, of intense cold, of the absence of vegetation, etc.; all of them are to be referred to the belief that those spots on the earth receive the rays of the sun less powerfully.

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