In the penultimate chapter of St Matthew's gospel, immediately before the account of the betrayal by Judas, the story is told of a visit which Jesus paid to the house of Simon the leper. As he sat eating a woman came and poured a precious ointment over his head. The disciples were indignant, saying, in the words of King James's Bible, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, why trouble ye the woman for she hath wrought a good work upon me? For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.’

St Matthew appears to have regarded Jesus's remark as a conclusive dismissal of the disciples' complaint. The problem of poverty was permanent; it was to be regarded as a sad but inevitable feature of life in society, incapable of cure by human agency.

It is a measure of the extent of the gulf separating us from the preindustrial world that the remark may strike some hearers today as insensitive. We are familiar enough with the notion of relative deprivation but it is now several generations since absolute deprivation was common in industrialised western countries, and poverty is no longer regarded as incapable of cure. Even those at the bottom of the social pyramid are unlikely to starve or to be clad in rags. The industrial revolution has endowed society with productive powers sufficient to secure a far better standard of living for all, though it does not follow that relative differences have also been reduced.