Ignorance and Want: Industrial Age 1800's

Look here! Two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at his feet and clung upon the outside of his garment.

There was a boy and there was girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their own humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Were angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread. 

To whom do these children belong to? They are Man's.

The boy, he is Ignorance. This girl, she is Want. 

Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware of this boy for on his brow Doom is written. 

Could it be argued that even today Ignorance and Want are the greatest threats to humankind?