The Poor Are a Gold Mine

“Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless. For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian church, I discovered that there were ninety-one residents and forty-one staff members, only a handful of whom had any direct contact with the objects of their ministrations” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, pp. 125-126).