On Our Attitude to the Poor
From a speech by Aldous Huxley, 1934

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was universally taken for granted that the poor belonged to a different and inferior species. In nineteenth-century novels, for example, the Poor are spoken of as though they were a curious race of African savages - odd creatures with customs that at the best were laughable or quaintly touching, and at the worst were downright repulsive. Some of the Poor, it is true, came rather nearer to being fully human. These were the beings beautifully described as `the Deserving Poor'. But, alas, the Deserving Poor were few and far between. Most of the Poor were definitely undeserving, and good care was taken by those in authority to see that they got no more than they deserved.

Things are certainly better than they were. But traces of the old mentality still persist. People in official positions, people in any sort of authority, even, in too many instances, the givers of charity feel themselves justified in assuming towards men and women with small incomes an attitude which they would never dream of assuming towards men and women with large incomes. Who ever heard, for example, of the Deserving Rich? And who ever heard of a rich person going round interrogating other rich persons, to find out whether they really were deserving? The thing would be regarded - and rightly regarded - as the grossest impertinence, an infringement of the most elementary rights of spiritual privacy. And yet this sort of infringement is constantly being made upon the rights of people with small incomes. There is a whole class of well-meaning people who still seem to believe that impertinence towards the very poor is not only justifiable, but actually virtuous. How passionately these same people complain whenever, for any reason, they are momentarily treated as though they themselves were poor! Passport formalities, for example, arouse in them a fury which can only find vent in letters to The Times and unprintable conversation. These outraged travellers may thank their stars that they are not regularly treated like the very poor and destitute. For the life of the destitute, even on their native soil, is one long succession of pass-port formalities and interfering impertinences. And, unlike the rich, they have no Times to write to.