Wealth & Money Quote by Josiah Strong

Strong’s line lands like a sermon disguised as a statistic: cities don’t just contain inequality, they concentrate it until it becomes impossible to ignore. The power is in the comparative frame - “than elsewhere” - which turns the city into a moral laboratory. Urban life is not merely where wealth and poverty coexist; it is where both extremes intensify, side by side, in full view. That visibility matters. In a rural setting, deprivation can be dispersed and privately endured; in the city, it becomes a daily collision between storefront abundance and tenement scarcity.

As a clergyman writing in the Gilded Age’s shadow, Strong is doing more than observing an economic pattern. He’s building an indictment and recruiting urgency. The doubled phrasing (“richer… poorer”) reads like a drumbeat, a rhetorical escalation that mimics the very widening gap he describes. Then comes the clincher: “as a rule.” He’s not allowing readers to comfort themselves with exceptions, or treat the problem as a few unfortunate cases. Inequality is presented as structural, predictable, almost lawlike.

The subtext is both pastoral and political. Strong is speaking to middle-class Protestant audiences who benefited from urban growth but feared what it produced: labor unrest, immigrant neighborhoods, moral “disorder.” His formulation suggests that the city amplifies not only money but social consequence - resentment, temptation, instability. The intent is to push responsibility upward: if riches grow greater in proximity to greater poverty, wealth can’t plausibly claim innocence. It is implicated by adjacency.