Definitions of Poverty and Pauperism.--Poverty is a relative term,
difficult to define, but as generally employed in sociological writings
at the present it means that economic and social state in which persons
have not sufficient income to maintain health and physical efficiency.
All who do not receive a sufficient income to maintain the minimum
standard of living necessary for efficiency are known as the "poor," or
are said to live below the poverty line.
Pauperism, on the other hand, is the state of legal dependence in which
a person who is unable or unwilling to support himself receives relief
from public sources. This is, however, legal pauperism. The word as
popularly used has come to mean a degraded state of willing dependence.
A pauper in this popular sense is a person unwilling to support himself
and who becomes a social parasite.
Poverty is closely related to dependence or pauperism, because it is
frequently the anteroom, so to speak, to pauperism, although only a
small proportion of those who live in poverty actually become dependent
in any one year.
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