In other countries poverty is a misfortune—with us it is a crime.

The line contrasts two social attitudes toward deprivation: in some places, poverty is treated as an unfortunate condition deserving sympathy, while “with us” it is treated as moral failure or culpability. Bulwer-Lytton’s phrasing suggests a critique of a society that criminalizes or stigmatizes the poor—through law, policing, or public opinion—rather than addressing structural causes. The epigrammatic antithesis (“misfortune” vs. “crime”) sharpens the indictment: it implies that the poor are punished twice, first by hardship and then by social condemnation. Read broadly, it anticipates later Victorian debates about the Poor Laws, vagrancy, and the tendency to equate economic status with character.