Daily Inspiration Quote by Josiah Strong

Urban growth, Strong suggests, is not a neutral story of progress with a few regrettable casualties. It is an engine that manufactures poverty as it expands, swelling the ranks of the poor and sharpening their misery. The sentence is built like a trap: the opening clause (“Not only…”) primes you for a single grim observation, then the second half tightens the screw. More poor people is bad; poorer lives, actively “more wretched,” is worse. He’s not describing a stagnant underclass so much as a city that degrades people faster than it absorbs them.

The intent is moral and mobilizing, which fits a late-19th-century clergyman steeped in Social Gospel anxieties about industrial capitalism. Strong writes at a moment when American cities are ballooning with immigration, tenement housing, factory labor, and new forms of wealth that sit next to new forms of deprivation. His phrasing carries a pastoral indictment: the metropolis isn’t merely crowded; it is spiritually diseased, producing suffering that demands reform, charity, and social discipline.

The subtext is also paternalistic. “The poor” are rendered as a single mass whose “condition” can be measured, judged, and improved from above. For Strong, “wretchedness” is not only economic but moral and civic: vice, disorder, and instability become the implied threats that poverty brings to the city’s future. In a single line, he turns urbanization into a test of the nation’s conscience - and a warning that growth without justice curdles into cruelty.