Middle-class missionaries—Ward Stafford and his female colleagues—took their places with an entirely different approach to the problem. As evangelicals they preached that poverty and disorder resulted neither from original sin nor God’s design but from failed families and bad moral choices. “The sufferings of the poor in this, and other cities,” Stafford insisted, “are the immediate effect of ignorance and vice.” Charity was useless among men who drank, avoided work, and brutalized their families. The poor did not need handouts. They needed preaching, moral instruction, and the spiritual
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