Henry Scott Holland

Poverty ... allows them no room to breathe, to grow, to expand. It gives no time for spiritual interests. It chokes back the religious instincts. It offers no opportunities for the play of the higher energies. They are too tired to think, …

Here are poor who, far from discovering their true selves through the pressure of their poverty, find in it a cloud which for ever hides them from themselves.

We have, in our Slum Cities, manufactured a Poverty which, instead of bracing and disciplining our manhood into higher service, tends only to maim and stunt and discredit and degrade it.