Charity And Charities

Charity And Charities. The word “charity,” or love, represents the principle of the good life. It stands for a mood or habit of mind and an endeavour. From it, as a habit of mind, springs the social and personal endeavour which in the widest sense we may call charity. The two correspond. Where the habit of mind has not been gained, the endeavour fluctuates and is relatively purposeless. In so far as it has been gained, the endeavour is founded on an intelligent scrutiny of social conditions and guided by a definite purpose. In the one case it is realized that some social theory must be found by us, if our action is to be right and consistent; in the other case no need of such a theory is felt. This article is based on the assumption that there are principles in charity or charitable work, and that these can be ascertained by a study of the development of social conditions, and their relation to prevalent social aims and religious or philosophic conceptions. It is assumed also that the charity of the religious life, if rightly understood, cannot be inconsistent with that of the social life.

The history of charity is a history of many social and religious theories, influences and endeavours, that have left their mark alike upon the popular and the cultivated thought of the present day. The inconsistencies of charitable effort and argument may thus in part be accounted for. To understand the problem of charity we have therefore (1) to consider the stages of charitable thought—the primitive, pagan, Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian elements, that make up the modern consciousness in regard to charity, and also the growth of the habit of “charity” as representing a gradually educated social instinct. (2) We have also to consider in their relation to charity the results of recent investigations of the conditions of social life. (3) At each stage we have to note the corresponding stage of practical administration in public relief and private effort—for the division between public or “poor-law” relief and charity which prevails in England is, comparatively speaking, a novelty, and, generally speaking, the work of charity can hardly be appreciated or understood if it be considered without reference to public relief. (4) As to the present day, we have to consider practical suggestions in regard to such subjects as charity and economic thought, charity organization, friendly visiting and almonership, co-operation with the poor-law, charity and thrift, parochial management, hospitals and medical relief, exceptional distress and the “unemployed,” the utilization of endowments and their supervision, and their adaptation to new needs and emergencies. (5) We have also throughout to consider charitable help in relation to classes of dependants, who appear early in the history of the question—widows and orphans, the sick and the aged, vagrants and wayfarers.

First in the series come the charities of the family and of hospitality; then the wider charities of religion, the charities of the community, and of individual donors and of mutual help. These gradually assumed importance in communities which consisted originally of self-supporting classes, within which widows and orphans, for instance, would be rather provided for, in accordance with recognized class obligations, than relieved. Then come habitual almsgiving, the charitable endowment, and the modern charitable institution and association. But throughout the test of progress or decadence appears to be the condition of the family. The family is the source, the home and the hearthstone of charity. It has been created but slowly, and there is naturally a constant tendency to break away from its obligations and to ignore and depreciate its utility. Yet the family, as we now have it, is itself the outcome of infinite thought working through social instinct, and has at each stage of its development indicated a general advance. To it, therefore, constant reference must be made.

Part I.—primitive Charity

The study of early communities has brought to light the history of the development of the family. “Marriage in its lowest phases is by no means a matter of affection or companionship”; and only very slowly has the position of both parents been recognized as implying different but correlative responsibilities towards their child. Only very slowly, also, has the morality necessary to the making of the family been won. Charity at earlier stages is hardly recognized as a virtue, nor infanticide as an evil. Hospitality—the beginning of a larger social life—is non-existent. The self-support of the community is secured by marriage, and when relations fail marriage becomes a provision against poverty. Then by the tribal system is created another safeguard against want. But apart also from these methods of maintenance, at a very early stage there is charitable relief. The festivals of the solstices and equinoxes, and of the seasons, are the occasions for sacrifice and relief; and, as Christmas customs prove, the instinct to give help or alms at such festival periods still remains. Charity is concerned primarily with certain elemental forces of social life: the relation between these primitive instincts and impulses that still influence charity should not, therefore, be overlooked. The basis of social life is also the basis of charitable thought and action.

In regard to the charity of the early community, we may take the 8th century B.C. as the point of departure. The Odyssey (about 800 B.C.) and Hesiod (about 700 B.C.) are roughly parallel with Amos (816-775), and represent The early community. two streams of thought that meet in the early Christian period. The period covered by the Odyssey seems to merge into that of Hesiod. We take the former first, dealing with the clan-family and the phratry, which are together the self-maintaining unit of society, with the general relief of the poor, with hospitality, and with vagrancy. In Hesiod we find the customary law of charity in the earlier community definitely stated, and also indications of the normal methods of neighbourly help which were in force in country districts. First of the family and brotherhood, or phratry. The family (Od. viii. 582) included alike the wife’s father and the daughter’s husband. It was thus a clanlike family. Out of this was developed the phratry or brotherhood, in which were included alike noble families, peasants and craftsmen, united by a common worship and responsibilities and a common customary law (themis). Zeus, the god of social life, was worshipped by the phratry. He was the father of the law (themis). He was god of host and guest. Society was thus based on law, the brotherhood and the family. The irresponsible man, the man worthy of no respect or consideration, was one who belonged to no brotherhood, was subject to no customary law, and had no hearth or family. The phratry was, and became afterwards still more, “a natural gild.” Outside the self-sustaining phratry was the stranger, including the wayfarer and the vagrant; and partly merged in these classes was the beggar, the recognized recipient of the alms of the community. To change one’s abode and to travel was assumed to be a cause of reproach (Il. ix. 648). The “land-louper” was naturally suspected. On the other hand, a stranger’s first thought in a new country was whether the inhabitants were wild or social (δίκαιοι), hospitable and God-fearing (Od. xiii. 201). Hospitality thus became the first public charity; Zeus sent all strangers and beggars, and it was against all law (θέμις) to slight them. Out of this feeling—a kind of glorified almsgiving—grew up the system of hospitality in Greek states and also in the Roman world. The host greeted the stranger (or the suppliant). An oath of friendship was taken by the stranger, who was then received with the greeting, Welcome (χαῖρε), and water was provided for ablution, and food and shelter. In the larger house there was a guests’ table. In the hut he shared the peasant’s meal. The custom bound alike the rich and the poor. On parting presents were given, usually food for the onward journey, sometimes costly gifts. The obligation was mutual, that the host should give hospitality, and that the guest should not abuse it. From early times tallies were exchanged between them as evidence of this formal relationship, which each could claim again of the other by the production of the token. And further, the relationship on either side became hereditary. Thus individuals and families and tribes remained linked in friendship and in the interchange of hospitalities.

Under the same patronage of Zeus and the same laws of hospitality were vagrants and beggars. The vagrant and loafer are sketched in the Odyssey—the vagrant who lies glibly that he may get entertainment, and the loafer who prefers begging to work on a farm. These and the winter idlers, whom Hesiod pictures—a group known to modern life—prefer at that season to spend their time in the warmth of the village smithy, or at a house of common resort (λέσχη)—a common lodging-house, we might say—where they would pass the night. Apparently, as in modern times, the vagrants had organized their own system of entertainment, and, supported by the public, were a class for whom it was worth while to cater. The local or public beggars formed a still more definite class. Their begging was a recognized means of maintenance; it was a part of the method of poor relief. Thus of Penelope it was said that, if Odysseus’ tale were true, she would give him better clothes, and then he might beg his bread throughout the country-side. Feasts, too, and almsgiving were nearly allied, and feasts have always been one resource for the relief of the poor. Thus naturally the beggars frequented feasts, and were apparently a recognized and yet inevitable nuisance. They wore, as part of their dress, scrips or wallets in which they carried away the food they received, as later Roman clients carried away portions of food in baskets (sportula) from their patron’s dinner. Odysseus, when he dresses up as a beggar, puts on a wallet as part of his costume. Thus we find a system of voluntary relief in force based on a recognition of the duty of almsgiving as complete and peremptory as that which we shall notice later among the Jews and the early Christians. We are concerned with country districts, and not with towns, and, as social conditions that are similar produce similar methods of administration, so we find here a general plan of relief similar to that which was in vogue in Scotland till the Scottish Poor Law Act of 1845.

In Hesiod the fundamental conceptions of charity are more clearly expressed. He has, if not his ten, at least his four commandments, for disobedience to which Zeus will punish the offender. They are: Thou shalt do no evil to suppliant or guest; thou shalt not dishonour any woman of the family; thou shalt not sin against the orphan; thou shalt not be unkind to aged parents.

Part II.—Charity among the Greeks

Society in a Greek state was divided into two parts, citizens and slaves. The citizens required leisure for education, war and government. The slaves were their ministers and servants to enable them to secure this leisure. The Greek state. We have therefore to consider, on the one hand, the position of the family and the clan-family, and the maintenance of the citizen from public funds and by public and private charities; and on the other hand the condition of the slaves, and the relation between slavery and charity.

The slaves formed the larger part of the population. The census of Attica, made between 317 and 307 B.C., gives their numbers at 400,000 out of a population of about 500,000; and even if this be considered excessive, the proportion of slaves to citizens would certainly be very large. The citizens with their wives and children formed some 12% of the community. Thus, apart from the resident aliens, returned in the census at 10,000, and their wives and children, we have two divisions of society: the citizens, with their own organization of relief and charities; and the slaves, permanently maintained by reason of their dependence on individual members of the civic class. Thus, there is no poverty but that of the poor citizens. Poverty is limited to them. The slaves—that is to say, the bulk of the labouring population—are provided for.

From times relatively near to Hesiod’s we may trace the growth and influence of the clan-family as the centre of customary charity within the community, the gradual increase of a class of poor either outside the clan-family or eventually independent of it, and the development of a new organization of relief introduced by the state to meet newer demands. We picture the early state as a group of families, each of which tends to form in time a separate group or clan. At each expansion from the family to the clan the members of the clan retain rights and have to fulfil duties which are the same as, or similar to, those which prevailed in the family. Thus, in Attica the clan-families (genos) and the brotherhoods (phratria) were “the only basis of legal rights and obligations over and above the natural family.” The clan-family was “a natural guild,” consisting of rich and poor members—the well-born or noble and the craftsman alike. Originally it would seem that the land was divided among the families of the clan by lot and was inalienable. Thus with the family was combined the means of supporting the family. On the other hand, every youth was registered in his phratry, and the phratry remained till the reforms of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.) a political, and even after that time a social, organization of importance.

First, as to the family—the mother and wife, and the father. Already before the age of Plato and Xenophon (450-350 B.C.) we find that the family has suffered a slow decline. The wife, according to later Greek usage, was married as a child, hardly educated, and confined to the house, except at some festival or funeral. But with the decline came criticism and a nobler conception of family life. “First, then, come laws regarding the wife,” writes the author of the so-called Economics of Aristotle, and the law, “thou shalt do no wrong; for, if we do no wrong, we shall not be wronged.” This is the “common law,” as the Pythagoreans say, “and it implies that we must not wrong the wife in the least, but treat her with the reverence due to a suppliant, or one taken from the altar.” The sanctity of marriage is thus placed among the “commandments” of Hesiod, beside the duty towards the stranger and the orphan. These and other references to the Pythagoreans suggest that they, possibly in common with other mystics, preached the higher religion of marriage and social life, and thus inspired a deeper social feeling, which eventually allied itself with the Christian movement.

Next, as to parents and children: the son was under an obligation to support his father, subject, after Solon’s time, to the condition that he had taught him a trade; and after Solon’s time the father had no claim for support from an illegitimate son. “The possession of children,” it was said (Arist. Econ.), “is not by nature for the public good only, but also for private advantage. For what the strong may gain by their toil for the weak, the weak in their old age receive from the strong... Thus is the nature of each, the man and the woman, prearranged by the Divine Being for a life in common.” Honour to parents is “the first and greatest and oldest of all debts” (Plato, Laws, 717). The child has to care for the parent in his old age. “Nemesis, the minister of justice (δίκη), is appointed to watch over all these things.” And “if a man fail to adorn the sepulchre of his dead parents, the magistrates take note of it and inquire” (Xen. Mem. ii. 14). The heightened conception of marriage implies a fuller interpretation of the mutual relations of parent and child as well; both become sacred.

Then as to orphans. Before Solon’s time (594 B.C.) the property of any member of the clan-family who died without children went to the clan; and after his time, when citizens were permitted to leave their property by will, the property of an intestate fell to the clan. This arrangement carried with it corresponding duties. Through the clan-family provision was made for orphans. Any member of the clan had the legal right to claim an orphan member in marriage; and, if the nearest agnate did not marry her, he had to give her a dowry proportionate to the amount of his own property. Later, there is evidence of a growing sense of responsibility in regard to orphans. Hippodamus (about 443 B.C.), in his scheme of the perfected state (Arist. Pol. 1268), suggested that there should be public magistrates to deal with the affairs of orphans (and strangers); and Plato, his contemporary, writes of the duty of the state and of the guardian towards them very fully. Orphans, he proposes (Laws, 927), should be placed under the care of public guardians. “Men should have a fear of the loneliness of orphans ... and of the souls of the departed, who by nature take a special care of their own children.... A man should love the unfortunate orphan (boy or girl) of whom he is guardian as if he were his own child; he should be as careful and diligent in the management of the orphan’s property as of his own—or even more careful still.”

To relieve the poverty of citizens and to preserve the citizen-hood were objects of public policy and of charity. In Crete and Sparta the citizens were wholly supported out of the public resources. In Attica the system was different. The citizens were aided in various ways, in which, as often happens, legal or official and voluntary or private methods worked on parallel lines. The means were (1) legal enactment for release of debts; (2) emigration; (3) the supply of corn; (4) poor relief for the infirm, and relief for the children of those fallen in war; (5) emoluments; (6) voluntary public service, separate gifts and liberality; (7) loan societies.

Two forms of charity have still to be mentioned: charity to the stranger and to the sick. It will be convenient to consider both in relation to the whole classical period.

With the growth of towns the administration of hospitality was elaborated.

Round the temples, at first probably village temples, the organization of medical relief grew up. Primitive medicine is connected with dreams, worship, and liturgical “pollution,” punishment and penitence, and an The sick. experimental practice. Finally, systematic observation and science (with no knowledge of chemistry and little of physiology) assert themselves, and a secular administration is created by the side of the older religious organization.

At three centres more particularly, Rhodes, Cnidos and Cos, were the medical schools of the Asclepiads. If one may judge from an inscription at Athens, priests of Asclepius attended the poor gratuitously. And years afterwards, in the 11th century, when there was a revival of medicine, we find (Daremberg, La Médecine: histoire et doctrines) at Salerno the Christian priest as doctor, a simple and less palatable pharmacy for the poor than for the rich, and gratuitous medical relief.

Besides the temple schools and hospitals there was a secular organization of medical aid and relief. States appointed trained medical men as physicians, and provided for them medical establishments (ἰατρεῖα, “large houses with large doors full of light”) for the reception of the sick, and for operations there were provided beds, instruments, medicines, &c. At these places also pupils were taught. A lower degree of medical establishment was to be found at the barbers’ shops. Out-patients were seen at the iatreia. They were also visited at home. There were doctors’ assistants and slave doctors. The latter, apparently, attended only slaves (Plato, Laws, 720); they do “a great service to the master of the house, who in this manner is relieved of the care of his slaves.” It was a precept of Hippocrates that if a physician came to a town where there were sick poor, he should make it his first duty to attend to them; and the state physician attended gratuitously any one who applied to him. There were also travelling physicians going rounds to heal children and the poor. These methods continued, probably all of them, to Christian times.

It has been argued that medical practice was introduced into Italy by the Greeks. But the evidence seems to show that there was a quite independent Latin tradition and school of medicine (René Brian, “Médecine dans le Latium et à Rome,” Rev. Archéol., 1885). In Rome there were consulting-rooms and dispensaries, and houses in which the sick were received. Hospitals are mentioned by Roman writers in the 1st century A.D. There were infirmaries—detached buildings—for sick slaves; and in Rome, as at Athens, there were slaves skilled in medicine. In Rome also for each regio there was a chief physician who attended to the poorer people.

Slavery was so large a factor in pre-Christian and early Christian society that a word should be said on its relation to charity. Indirectly it was a cause of poverty and social degradation. Thus in the case of Athens, Slavery. with the achievement of maritime supremacy the number of slaves increased greatly. Manual arts were despised as unbecoming to a citizen, and the slaves carried on the larger part of the agricultural and industrial work of the community; and for a time—until after the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.)—slavery was an economic success. But by degrees the slave, it would seem, dispossessed the citizen and rendered him unfit for competition. The position of the free artisan thus became akin to that of the slave (Arist. Pol. 1260 a, &c.), and slavery became the industrial method of the country. Though Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians spent money in ransoming individual slaves and also enfranchised many, no general abolition of slavery was possible. At last through economic changes the new status of coloni, who paid as rent part of the produce of the land they tilled, superseded the status of slavery (cf. above; the system turned to account by Peisistratus). But this result was only achieved much later, when a new society was being created, when the slaves from the slave prisons (ergastula) of Italy joined its invaders, and the slave-owner or master, as one may suppose, unable any longer to work the gangs, let them become coloni.

In Greece the feeling towards the slave became constantly more humane. Real slavery, Aristotle said, was a cast of mind, not a condition of life. The slave was not to be ordered about, but to be commanded and persuaded like a child. The master was under the strongest obligation to promote his welfare. In Rome, on the other hand, slavery continued to the end a massive, brutal, industrial force—a standing danger to the state. But alike in Greece and Rome the influence of slavery on the family was pernicious. The pompous array of domestic slaves, the transfer of motherly duties to slave nurses, the loss of that homely education which for most people comes only from the practical details of life—all this in later Greece and Italy, and far into Christian times, prevented that permanent invigoration and reform of family life which Jewish and Christian influences might otherwise have produced.

Part III.—Charity in Roman Times

The words that suggest most clearly the Roman attitude towards what we call charity are liberalitas, beneficentia and pietas. The two former are almost synonymous (Cicero, De Offic. i. 7, 14). Liberality lays stress on the mood—that of the liber, the freeborn, and so in a sense the independent and superior; beneficence on the deed and its purpose (Seneca, De Benef. vi. 10). The conditions laid down by Cicero, following Panaetius the Stoic (185-112 B.C.) are three: not to do harm to him whom one would benefit, not to exceed one’s means, and to have regard to merit. The character of the person whom we would benefit should be considered, his feelings towards us, the interest of the community, our social relations in life, and services rendered in the past. The utility of the deed or gift graded according to social relationship and estimated largely from the point of view of ultimate advantage to the doer or donor seems to predominate in the general thought of the book, though (cf. Aristotle, Eth. viii. 3) the idea culminates in the completeness of friendship where “all things are in common.” Pietas has the religious note which the other words lack, loving dutifulness to gods and home and country. Not “piety” only but “pity” derive from it: thus it comes near to our “charity.” Both books, the De Officiis and the De Beneficiis, represent a Roman and Stoical revision of the problem of charity and, as in Stoicism generally, there seems to be a half-conscious attempt to feel the way to a new social standpoint from this side.

As from the point of view of charity the well-being of the community depends upon the vigour of the deep-laid elemental life within it, so in passing to Roman times we consider the family first. The Roman family was unique in its Roman times. completeness, and by some of its conditions the world has long been bound. The father alone had independent authority (sui juris), and so long as he lived all who were under his power—his wife, his sons, and their wives and children, and his unmarried daughters—could not acquire any property of their own. Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry.

Under the protection of the head of the family “in dependent freedom” lived the clients. They were in a middle position between the freemen and the slaves. The relation between patron and client lasted for several generations; and there were many clients. Their number increased as state after state was conquered, and they formed the plebs, in Rome the plebs urbana, the lower orders of the city.

In relation to our subject the important factors are the family, the plebs and slavery.

Two processes were at work from an early date, before the first agrarian law (486 B.C.): the impoverishment of the plebs and the increase of slavery. The former led to the annona civica, or the free supply of corn to the citizens, and to the sportula or the organized food-supply for poor clients, and ultimately to the alimentarii pueri, the maintenance of children of citizens by voluntary and imperial bounty. The latter (slavery) was the standing witness that, as self-support was undermined, the task of relief became hopeless, and the impoverished citizen, as the generations passed, became in turn dependant, beggar, pauper and slave.

The great patrician families—“an oligarchy of warriors and slaveholders”—did not themselves engage in trade, but, entering on large speculations, employed as their agents their clients, libertini or freedmen, and, later, their slaves. The constant wars, for which the soldiers of a local militia were eventually retained in permanent service, broke up the yeomanry and very greatly reduced their number. Whole families of citizens became impoverished, and their lands were in consequence sold to the large patrician families, members of which had acquired lucrative posts, or prospered in their speculations, and assumed possession of the larger part of the land, the ager publicus, acquired by the state through conquest. The city had always been the centre of the patrician families, the patron of the trading libertini and other dependants. To it now flocked as well the metoeci, the resident aliens from the conquered states, and the poorer citizens, landless and unable for social reasons to turn to trade. There was thus in Rome a growing multitude of aliens, dispossessed yeomen and dependent clients. Simultaneously slavery increased very largely after the second Punic War (202 B.C.). Every conquest brought slaves into the market, for whom ready purchasers were found. The slaves took the place of the freemen upon the old family estates, and the free country people became extinct. Husbandry gave place to shepherding. The estates were thrown into large domains (latifundia), managed by bailiffs and worked by slaves, often fettered or bound by chains, lodged in cells in houses of labour (ergastula), and sometimes cared for when ill in infirmaries (valetudinaria). In Crete and Sparta the slaves toiled that the mass of citizens might have means and leisure. In Rome the slave class was organized for private and not for common ends. In Athens the citizens were paid for their services; at Rome no offices were paid. Thus the citizen at Rome was, one might almost say, forced into a dependence on the public corn, for as the large properties swallowed up the smaller, and the slave dispossessed the citizen, a population grew up unfit for rural toil, disinclined to live by methods that pride considered sordid, unstable and pleasure-loving, and yet a serious political factor, as dependent on the rich for their enjoyments as they were on their patrons or the prefect of the corn in the city for their food.

In Rome the clan-family became the dominant political factor. As in England and elsewhere in the middle ages, and even in later times, the family, in these circumstances, assumes an influence which is out of harmony with the common The annona civica. good. The social advantage of the family lies in its self-maintenance, its home charities, and its moral and educational force, but if its separate interests are made supreme, it becomes uncharitable and unsocial. In Rome this was the line of development. The stronger clan-families crushed the weaker, and became the “oligarchy of warriors and slaveholders.” In the same spirit they possessed themselves of the ager publicus. The land obtained by the Romans by right of conquest was public. It belonged to the state, and to a yeoman state it was the most valuable acquisition. At first part of it was sold and part was distributed to citizens without property and destitute (cf. Plutarch, Tib. Gracchus). At a very early date, however, the patrician families acquired possession of much of it and held it at a low rental, and thus the natural outlet for a conquering farmer race was monopolized by one class, the richer clan-families. This injustice was in part remedied by the establishment of colonies, in which the emigrant citizens received sufficient portions of land. But these colonies were comparatively few, and after each conquest the rich families made large purchases, while the smaller proprietors, whose services as soldiers were constantly required, were unable to attend to their lands or to retain possession of them. To prevent this (367 B.C.) the Licinian law was passed, by which ownership in land was limited to 500 jugera, about 312 acres. This law was ignored, however, and more than two centuries later the evil, the double evil of the dispossession of the citizen farmer and of slavery, reached a crisis. The slave war broke out (134 B.C.) and (133 B.C.) Tiberius Gracchus made his attempt to re-endow the Roman citizens with the lands which they had acquired by conquest. He undertook what was essentially a charitable or philanthropic movement, which was set on foot too late. He had passed through Tuscany, and seen with resentment and pity the deserted country where the foreign slaves and barbarians were now the only shepherds and cultivators. He had been brought up under the influence of Greek Stoical thought, with which, almost in spite of itself, there was always associated an element of pity. The problem which he desired to solve, though larger in scale, was essentially the same as that with which Solon and Peisistratus had dealt successfully. At bottom the issue lay between private property, considered as the basis of family life for the great bulk of the community, with personal independence, and pauperism, with the annona or slavery. In 133 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus became tribune. To expand society on the lines of private property, he proposed the enforcement of “the Licinian Rogations”; the rich were to give up all beyond their rightful 312 acres, and the remainder was to be distributed amongst the poor. The measure was carried by the use of arbitrary powers, and followed by the death of Tiberius at the hands of the patricians, the dominant clan-families. In 132 B.C. Caius Gracchus took up his brother’s quarrel, and adopting, it would seem, a large scheme of political and social reform, proposed measures for emigration and for relief. The former failed; the latter apparently were acceptable to all parties, and continued in force long after C. Gracchus had been slain (121 B.C.). Already, at times, there had been sales of corn at cheap prices. Now, by the lex frumentaria he gave the citizens—those who had the Roman franchise—the right to purchase corn every month from the public stores at rather more than half-price, 61⁄3 asses or about 3.3d. the peck. This, the fatal alternative, was accepted, and henceforth there was no possibility of a reversion to better social conditions.

The provisioning of Rome was, like that of Athens, a public service. There were public granaries (267 B.C.), and there was a quaestor to supervise the transit of the corn from Sicily and, later, from Spain and Africa, and an elaborate administration for collecting and conveying it. The lex frumentaria of Caius was followed by the lex Octavia, restricting the monthly sale to citizens settled in Rome, and to 5 modii (1¼ bushels). According to Polybius, the amount required for the maintenance of a slave was 5 modii a month, and of a soldier 4. Hence the allowance, if continued at this rate, was practically a maintenance. The lex Clodia (58 B.C.) made the corn gratuitous to the plebs urbana.

The right to relief was dependent on the right of citizenship. Hence it became hereditary and passed from father to son. It was thus in the nature of a continuous endowed charity, like the well-known family charity of Smith, for instance, in which a large property was left to the testator’s descendants, of whom it was said that as a result no Smith of that family could fail to be poor. But the annona civica was an endowed charity, affecting not a single family, but the whole population. Later, when Constantinople was founded, the right to relief was attached to new houses as a premium on building operations. Thus it belonged not to persons only, but also to houses, and became a species of “immovable” property, passing to the purchaser of the house or property, as would the adscript slaves. The bread followed the house (aedes sequantur annonae). If, on the transfer of a house, bread claims were lost owing to the absence of claimants, they were transferred to the treasury (fisci viribus vindicentur). But the savage law of Valentinian, referred to above, shows to what lengths such a system was pushed. Early in its history the annona civica attracted many to Rome in the hope of living there without working. For the 400 years since the lex Clodia was enacted constant injury had been done by it, and now (A.D. 364) people had to be kept off the civic bounty as if they were birds of prey, and the very poor man (pauperrimus), who had no civic title to the food, if he obtained it by fraud, was enslaved. Thus, in spite of the abundant state relief, there had grown up a class of the very poor, the Gentiles of the state, who were outside the sphere of its ministrations. The annona civica was introduced not only into Constantinople, but also into Alexandria, with baleful results, and into Antioch. When Constantinople was founded the corn-ships of Africa sailed there instead of to Rome. On charitable relief, as we shall see, the annona has had a long-continued and fatal influence.

The sportula was a form of charity corresponding to the annona civica. Charity and poor relief run on parallel lines, and when the one is administered without discrimination, little discrimination will usually be exercised in the other. The sportula. It was the charity of the patron of the chiefs of the clan-families to their clients. Between them it was natural that a relation, partly hospitable, partly charitable, should grow up. The clients who attended the patron at his house were invited to dine at his table. The patron, as Juvenal describes him, dined luxuriously and in solitary grandeur, while the guests put up with what they could get; or, as was usual under the empire, instead of the dinner (coena recta) a present of food was given at the outer vestibule of the house to clients who brought with them baskets (sportula) to carry off their food, or even charcoal stoves to keep it warm. There was endless trickery. The patron (or almoner who acted for him) tried to identify the applicant, fearing lest he might get the dole under a false name; and at each mansion was kept a list of persons, male and female, entitled to receive the allowance. “The pilferer grabs the dole” (sportulam furunculus captat) was a proverb. The sportula was a charity sufficiently important for state regulation. Nero (A.D. 54) reduced it to a payment in money (100 quadrantes, about 1s.). Domitian (A.D. 81) restored the custom of giving food. Subsequently both practices—gifts in money and in food—appear to have been continued.

In these conditions the Roman family steadily decayed. Its “old discipline” was neglected; and Tacitus (A.D. 75), in his dialogue on Oratory, wrote (c. xxviii.) what might be called its epitaph. Of the general decline the laws of Caesar and Augustus to encourage marriage and to reward the parents of large families are sufficient evidence.

The destruction of the working-class family must have been finally achieved by the imperial control of the collegia.

As a charitable protest against the destruction of children, in the midst of a broken family life, and increasing dependence and poverty, a special institution was founded (to use Pueri alimentarii. the Scottish word) for the “alimentation” of the children of citizens, at first by voluntary charity and afterwards by imperial bounty.

Part IV.—Jewish and Christian Charity

With Christianity two elements came into fusion, the Jewish and the Greco-Roman. To trace this fusion and its results it is necessary to describe the Jewish system of charity, and to compare it with that of the early Christian church, to note the theory of love or friendship in Aristotle as representing Greek thought, and of charity in St Paul as representing Christian thought, and to mark the Roman influences which moulded the administration of Ambrose and Gregory and Western Christianity generally.

In the early history of the Hebrews we find the family, clan-family and tribe. With the Exodus (probably about 1390 B.C.) comes the law of Moses (cf. Kittel, Hist. of the Hebrews, Eng. trans. i. 244), the central and permanent element Hebrew charity. of Jewish thought. We may compare it to the “commandments” of Hesiod. There is the recognition of the family and its obligations: “Honour thy father and mother”; and honour included help and support. There is also the law essential to family unity: “Thou shalt not commit adultery”; and as to property there is imposed the regulation of desire: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house.” Maimonides (A.D. 1135), true to the old conception of the family (x. 16), calls the support of adult children, “after one is exempt from supporting them,” and the support of a father or mother by a child, “great acts of charity; since kindred are entitled to the first consideration.” To relief of the stranger the Decalogue makes no reference, but in the Hebraic laws it is constantly pressed; and the Levitical law (xix. 18) goes further. It first applies a new standard to social life: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This thought is the outcome of a deep ethical fervour—the element which the Jews brought into the work of charity. In Judges and Joshua, the “Homeric” books of the Old Testament, the Hebrews appear as a passionately fierce and cruel people. Subsequently against their oppression of the poor the prophets protested with a vehemence as great as the evil was intense; and their denunciations remained part of the national literature, a standing argument that life without charity is nothing worth. Thus schooled and afterwards tutored into discipline by the tribulation of the exile (587 B.C.), they turned their fierceness into a zeal, which, as their literature shows, was as fervent in ethics as it was in religion and ceremonial. In the services at the synagogues, which supplemented and afterwards took the place of the Temple, the Commandments were constantly repeated and the Law and the Prophets read; and as the Jews of the Dispersion increased in number, and especially after the destruction of Jerusalem, the synagogues became centres of social and charitable co-operation. Thus rightly would a Jewish rabbi say, “On three things the world is stayed: on the Thorah (or the law), and on worship, and on the bestowal of kindness.” Also there was on the charitable side an indefinite power of expansion. Rigid in its ceremonial, there it was free. Within the nation, as the Prophets, and after the exile, as the Psalms show, there was the hope of a universal religion, and with it of a universally recognized charity. St Paul accentuated the prohibitive side of the law and protested against it; but, even while he was so doing, stimulated by the Jewish discipline, he was moving unfettered towards new conceptions of charity and life—charity as the central word of the Christian life, and life as a participation in a higher existence—the “body of Christ.”

To mark the line of development, we could compare—1. The family among the Jews and in the early Christian church; 2. The sources of relief and the tithe, the treatment of the poor and their aid, and the assistance of special classes of poor; 3. The care of strangers; and, lastly, we would consider the theory of almsgiving, friendship or love, and charity.

1. As elsewhere, property is the basis of the family. Wife and children are the property of the father. But the wife is held in high respect. In the post-exilian period the virtuous wife is represented as laborious as a Roman matron, a “lady bountiful” to the poor, and to her husband wife and friend alike. Monogamy without concubinage is now the rule—is taken for granted as right. There is no “exposure of children.” The slaves are kindly treated, as servants rather than slaves—though in Roman times and afterwards the Jews were great slave-traders. The household is not allowed to eat the bread of idleness. “Six days,” it was said, “must [not mayest] thou work.” “Labour, if poor; but find work, if rich.” “Whoever does not teach his son business or work, teaches him robbery.” In Job xxxi., a chapter which has been called “an inventory of late Old Testament morality,” we find the family life developed side by side with the life of charity. In turn are mentioned the relief of the widow, the fatherless and the stranger—the classification of dependents in the Christian church; and the whole chapter is a justification of the homely charities of a good family. “The Jewish religion, more especially in the old and orthodox form, is essentially a family religion” (C.G. Montefiore, Religion of Ancient Hebrews).

In the early documents of the Church the fifth commandment is made the basis of family life (cf. Eph. vi. 1; Apost. Const. ii. 32, iv. 11—if we take the first six books of the Apost. Const. as a composite production before A.D. 300, representing Judaeo-Christian or Eastern church thought). But two points are prominent. Duties are insisted on as reciprocal (cf. especially St Paul’s Epistles), as, e.g. between husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant. Charity is mutual; the family is a circle of reciprocal duties and charities. This implies a principle of the greatest importance in relation to the social utility of charity. Further reference will be made to it later. Next the “thou shalt love thy neighbour” is translated from its position as one among many sayings to the chief place as a rule of life. In the Didachē or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Jewish-Christian, c. 90-120 A.D.) the first commandment in “the way of life” is adapted from St Matthew’s Gospel thus: “First, thou shalt love God who made thee; secondly, thy neighbour as thyself; and all things whatsoever thou wouldst not have done to thee, neither do thou to another.” A principle is thus applied which touches all social relations in which the “self” can be made the standard of judgment. Of this also later. To touch on other points of comparison: the earlier documents seem to ring with a reiterated cry for a purer family life (cf. the second, the negative, group of commandments in the Didachē, and the judgment of the apocalyptic writings, such as the Revelations of Peter, &c.); and, sharing the Jewish feeling, the riper conscience of the Christian community formulates and accepts the injunction to preserve infant life at every stage. It advocates, indeed, the Jewish purity of family life with a missionary fervour, and it makes of it a condition of church membership. The Jewish rule of labour is enforced (Ap. Const. ii. 63). If a stranger settle (Didachē, xii. 3) among the brotherhood, “let him work and eat.” And the father (Constit. iv. 11) is to teach the children “such trades as are agreeable and suitable to their need.” And the charities to the widow, the fatherless, are organized on Jewish lines.

2. The sources of relief among the Jews were the three gifts of corn: (1) the corners of the field (cf. Lev. xix. &c.), amounting to a sixtieth part of it; (2) the gleanings, a definite minimum dropped in the process of reaping (Maimonides, Laws of the Hebrews relating to the Poor, iv. 1); (3) corn overlooked and left behind. So it was with the grapes and with all crops that were harvested, as opposed, e.g. to figs, that were gathered from time to time. These gifts were divisible three times in the day, so as to suit the convenience of the poor (Maim. ii. 17), and the poor had a right to them. They are indeed a poor-rate paid in kind such as in early times would naturally spring up among an agricultural people. Another gift “out of the seed of the earth,” is the tithe. In the post-exilian period the septenniad was in force. Each year a fiftieth part of the produce (Maim. vi. 2, and Deut. xviii. 4) was given to the priest (the class which in the Jewish state was supported by the community). Of the remainder one-tenth went to the Levite, and one-tenth in three years of the septennium was retained for pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in two given to the poor. In the seventh year “all things were in common.” Supplementing these gifts were alms to all who asked; “and he who gave less than a tenth of his means was a man of evil eye” (Maim. vii. 5). All were to give alms, even the poor themselves who were in receipt of relief. Refusal might be punished with stripes at the hand of the Sanhedrim. At the Temple alms for distribution to the worthy poor were placed by worshippers in the cell of silence; and it is said that in Palestine at meal times the table was open to all comers. As the synagogues extended, and possibly after the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70), the collections of alms was further systematized. There were two collections. In each city alms of the box or chest (kupha) were collected for the poor of the city on each Sabbath eve (later, monthly or thrice a year), and distributed in money or food for seven days. Two collected, three distributed. Three others gathered and distributed daily alms of the basket (tamchui). These were for strangers and wayfarers—casual relief “for the poor of the whole world.” In the Jewish synagogue community from early times the president (parnass) and treasurer were elected annually with seven heads of the congregation (see Abraham’s Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, p. 54), and sometimes special officers for the care of the poor. A staff of almoners was thus forthcoming. In addition to these collections were the pruta given to the poor before prayers (Maim. x. 15), and moneys gathered to help particular cases (cf. Jewish Life, p. 322) by circular letter. There were also gifts at marriages and funerals; and fines imposed for breach of the communal ordinances were reserved for the poor. The distinctive feature of the Jewish charity was the belief that “the poor would not cease out of the land,” and that therefore on charitable grounds a permanent provision should be made for them—a poor-rate, in fact, subject to stripes and distraint, if necessary (Maim. vii. 10; and generally cf. articles on “Alms” and “Charity” in the Jewish Encyclopaedia).

3. Great stress is laid by the Jews on the duty of gentleness to the poor (Maim. x. 5). The woman was to have first attention (Maim. vi. 13). If the applicant was hungry he was to be fed, and then examined to learn whether he was a deceiver (Maim. vii. 6). Assistance was to be given according to the want—clothes, household things, a wife or a husband—and according to the poor man’s station in life. For widows and orphans the “gleanings” were left. Both are the recognized objects of charity (Maim. x. 16,17). “The poor and the orphan were to be employed in domestic affairs in preference to servants.” The dower was a constant form of help. The ransoming of slaves took precedence of relief to the poor. The highest degree of alms-deed (Maim. x. 7) was “to yield support to him who is cast down, either by means of gifts, or by loan, or by commerce, or by procuring for him traffic with others. Thus his hand becometh strengthened, exempt from the necessity of soliciting succour from any created being.”

If we compare the Christian methods we find but slight difference. The absoluteness of “Give to him that asketh” is in the Didachē checked by the “Woe to him that receives: for if any receives having need, he shall be guiltless, but he that has no need shall give account, ... and coming into distress ... he shall not come out thence till he hath paid the last farthing.” It is the duty of the bishop to know who is most worthy of assistance (Ap. Con. ii. 3, 4); and “if any one is in want by gluttony, drunkenness, or idleness, he does not deserve assistance, or to be esteemed a member of the church.” The widow assumes the position not only of a recipient of alms, but a church worker. Some were a private charge, some were maintained by the church. The recognized “widow” was maintained: she was to be sixty years of age (cf. 1 Tim, v. 9 and Ap. Con. iii. 1), and was sometimes tempted to become a bedes-woman and gossipy pauper, if one may judge from the texts. Remarriage was not approved. Orphans were provided for by members of the churches. The virgins formed another class, as, contrary to the earlier feeling, marriage came to be held a state of lesser sanctity. They too seem to have been also, in part at least, church workers. Thus round the churches grew up new groups of recognized dependents; but the older theory of charity was broad and practical—akin to that of Maimonides. “Love all your brethren, performing to orphans the part of parents, to widows that of husbands, affording them sustenance with all kindliness, arranging marriages for those who are in their prime, and for those who are without a profession the means of necessary support through employment: giving work to the artificer and alms to the incapable” (Ep. Clem, to James viii.).

4. The Jews in pre-Christian and Talmudic times supported the stranger or wayfarer by the distribution of food (tamchui); the strangers were lodged in private houses, and there were inns provided at which no money was taken (cf. Jewish Life, p. 314). Subsequently, besides these methods, special societies were formed “for the entertainment of the resident poor and of strangers.” There were commendatory letters also. These conditions prevailed in the Christian church also. The Xenodocheion, coming by direct succession alike from Jewish and Greek precedents, was the first form of Christian hospital both for strangers and for members of the Christian churches. In the Christian community the endowment charity comes into existence in the 4th century, among the Jews not till the 13th. The charities of the synagogue without separate societies sufficed.

We may now compare the conceptions of Jews and Christians on charity with those of the Greeks. There are two chief exponents of the diverse views—Aristotle and St Paul; for to simplify the issues we refer to them only. Greek, Jewish and Christian thought. Thoughts such as Aristotle’s, recast by the Stoic Panaetius (185-112 B.C.), and used by Cicero in his De Officiis, became in the hands of St Ambrose arguments for the direction of the clergy in the founding of the medieval church; and in the 13th century Aristotle reasserts his influence through such leaders of medieval thought as St Thomas Aquinas. St Paul’s chapters on charity, not fully appreciated and understood, one is inclined to think, have perhaps more than any other words prevented an absolute lapse into the materialism of almsgiving. After him we think of St Francis, the greatest of a group of men who, seeking reality in life, revived charity; but to the theory of charity it might almost be said that since Aristotle and St Paul nothing has been added until we come to the economic and moral issues which Dr Chalmers explained and illustrated.

The problem turns on the conception (1) of purpose, (2) of the self, and (3) of charity, love or friendship as an active force in social life. To the Greek, or at least to Greek philosophic thought, purpose was the measure of goodness. To have no purpose was, so far as the particular act was concerned, to be simply irrational; and the less definite the purpose the more irrational the act. This conception of purpose was the touchstone of family and social life, and of the civic life also. In no sphere could goodness be irrational. To say that it was without purpose was to say that it was without reality. So far as the actor was concerned, the main purpose of right action was the good of the soul (ψυχή); and by the soul was meant the better self, “the ruling part” acting in harmony with every faculty and function of the man. With faculties constantly trained and developed, a higher life was gradually developed in the soul. We are thus, it might be said, what we become. The gates of the higher life are within us. The issue is whether we will open them and pass in.

Consistent with this is the social purpose. Love or friendship is not conceived by Aristotle except in relation to social life. Society is based on an interchange of services. This interchange in one series of acts we call justice; in another friendship or love. A man cannot be just unless he has acquired a certain character or habit of mind; and hence no just man will act without knowledge, previous deliberation and definite purpose. So also will a friend fulfil these conditions in his acts of love or friendship. In the love existing between good men there is continuance and equality of service; but in the case of benefactor and benefited, in deeds of charity, in fact, there is no such equality. The satisfaction is on one side but often not on the other. (The dilemma is one that is pressed, though not satisfactorily, in Cicero and Seneca.) The reason for this will be found, Aristotle suggests, in the feeling of satisfaction which men experience in action. We realize ourselves in our deeds—throw ourselves into them, as people say; and this is happiness. What we make we like: it is part of us. On the other hand, in the person benefited there may be no corresponding action, and in so far as there is not, there is no exchange of service or the contentment that arises from it. The “self” of the recipient is not drawn out. On the contrary, he may be made worse, and feel the uneasiness and discontent that result from this. In truth, to complete Aristotle’s argument, the good deed on one side, as it represents the best self of the benefactor, should on the other side draw out the best self of the person benefited. And where there is not ultimately this result, there is not effective friendship or charity, and consequently there is no personal or social satisfaction. The point may be pushed somewhat further. In recent developments of charitable work the term “friendly visitor” is applied to persons who endeavour to help families in distress on the lines of associated charity. It represents the work of charity in one definite light. So far as the relation is mutual, it cannot at the outset be said to exist. The charitable friend wishes to befriend another; but at first there may be no reciprocal feeling of friendship on the other’s part—indeed, such a feeling may never be created. The effort to reciprocate kindness by becoming what the friend desires may be too painful to make. Or the two may be on different planes, one not really befriending, but giving without intelligence, the other not really endeavouring to change his nature, but receiving help solely with a view to immediate advantage. The would-be befriender may begin “despairing of no man,” expecting nothing in return; but if, in fact, there is never any kind of return, the friendship actually fails of its purpose, and the “friend’s” satisfaction is lost, except in that he may “have loved much.” In any case, according to this theory friendship, love and charity represent the mood from which spring social acts, the value of which will depend on the knowledge, deliberation and purpose with which they are done, and accordingly as they acquire value on this account will they give lasting satisfaction to both parties.

St Paul’s position is different. He seems at first sight to ignore the state and social life. He lays stress on motive force rather than on purpose. He speaks as an outsider to the state, though technically a citizen. His mind assumes towards it the external Judaic position, as though he belonged to a society of settlers (πάροικοι). Also, as he expects the millennium, social life and its needs are not uppermost in his thoughts. He considers charity in relation to a community of fellow-believers—drawn together in congregations. His theory springs from this social base, though it over-arches life itself. He is intent on creating a spiritual association. He conceives of the spirit (πνεῦμα) as “an immaterial personality.” It transcends the soul (ψυχή), and is the Christ life, the ideal and spiritual life. Christians participate in it, and they thus become part of “the body of Christ,” which exists by virtue of love—love akin to the ideal life, ἀγάπη. The word represents the love that is instinct with reverence, and not love φιλία which may have in it some quality of passion. This love is the life of “the body of Christ.” Therefore no act done without it is a living act—but, on the contrary, must be dead—an act in which no part of the ideal life is blended. On the individual act or the purpose no stress is laid. It is assumed that love, because it is of this intense and exalted type, will find the true purpose in the particular act. And, when the expectation of the millennium passed away, the theory of this ideal charity remained as a motive force available for whatever new conditions, spiritual or social, might arise. Nevertheless, no sooner does this charity touch social conditions, than the necessity asserts itself of submitting to the limitations which knowledge, deliberation and purpose impose. This view had been depreciated or ignored by Christians, who have been content to rely upon the strength of their motives, or perhaps have not realized what the Greeks understood, that society was a natural organism (Arist. Pol. 1253A), which develops, fails or prospers in accordance with definite laws. Hence endless failure in spite of some success. For love, whether we idealize it as ἀγάπη or consider it a social instinct as φιλία, cannot be love at all unless it quickens the intelligence as much as it animates the will. It cannot, except by some confusion of thought, be held to justify the indulgence of emotion irrespective of moral and social results. Yet, though this fatal error may have dominated thought for a long time, it is hardly possible to attribute it to St Paul’s theory of charity when the very practical nature of Judaism and early Christianity is considered. In his view the misunderstanding could not arise. And to create a world or “body” of men and women linked together by love, even though it be outside the normal life of the community, was to create a new form of religious organization, and to achieve for it (so far as it was achieved) what, mutatis mutandis, Aristotle held to be the indispensable condition of social life, friendship (φιλία), “the greatest good of states,” for “Socrates and all the world declare,” he wrote, that “the unity of the state” is “created by friendship” (Arist. Pol. ii. 1262 b).

The sub-apostolic church was a congregation, like a synagogue, the centre of a system of voluntary and personal relief, connected with the congregational meals (or ἀγάπαι) and the Eucharist, The organization of the parish and endowed charities. and under the supervision of no single officer or bishop. Out of this was developed a system of relief controlled by a bishop, who was assisted chiefly by deacons or presbyters, while the ἀγάπαι, consisting of offerings laid before the altar, still remained. Subsequently the meal was separated from the sacrament, and became a dole of food, or poor people’s meal—e.g. in St Augustine’s time in western Africa—and it was not allowed to be served in churches (A.D. 391). As religious asceticism became dominant, the sacrament was taken fasting; it appeared unseemly that men and women should meet together for such purposes, and the ἀγάπαι fell out of repute. Simultaneously it would seem that the parish παροικία became from a congregational settlement a geographical area.

The organization of relief at Rome illustrates both a type of administration and a transition. St Gregory’s reforms (A.D. 590) largely developed it. The first factor in the transition was the church fund of the second period of Christianity, about A.D. 150 to after 208 (Tertullian, Apol. 39). It served as a friendly fund, was supported by voluntary gifts, and was used to succour and to bury the poor, to help destitute and orphaned children, old household slaves and those who suffered for the faith. This fund is quite different from the collegia tenuiorum or funeratica of the Romans, which were societies to which the members paid stipulated sums at stated periods, for funeral benefits or for common meals (J.P. Waltzing, Corporations professionnelles chez les Romains, i. 313). It represents the charitable centre round which the parochial system developed. That system was adopted probably about the middle of the 3rd century, but in Rome the diaconate probably remained centralized. At the end of the 4th century Pope Anastasius had founded deaconries in Rome, and endowed them largely “to meet the frequent demands of the diaconate.” Gregory two hundred years later reorganized the system. He divided the fourteen old “regions” into seven ecclesiastical districts and thirty “titles” (or parishes). The parishes were under the charge of sixty-six priests; the districts were eleemosynary divisions. Each was placed under the charge of a deacon, not (Greg. Ep. xi. and xxviii.) under the priests (presbyteri titularii). Over the deacons was an archdeacon. It was the duty of the deacons to care for the poor, widows, orphans, wards, and old people of their several districts. They inquired in regard to those who were relieved, and drew up under the guidance of the bishop the register of poor (matricula). Only these received regular relief. In each district was an hospital or office for alms, of which the deacon had charge, assisted by a steward (or oeconomus). Here food was given and meals were taken, the sick and poor were maintained, and orphan or foundling children lodged. The churches of Rome and of other large towns possessed considerable estates, “the patrimony of the patron saints,” and to Rome belonged estates in Sicily which had not been ravaged by the invaders, and they continued to pay to it their tenth of corn, as they had done since Sicily was conquered. Four times a year (Milman, Lat. Christ, ii. 117) the shares of the (1) clergy and papal officers, (2) churches and monasteries, and (3) “hospitals, deaconries and ecclesiastical wards for the poor,” were calculated in money and distributed; and the first day in every month St Gregory distributed to the poor in kind corn, wine, cheese, vegetables, bacon, meal, fish and oil. The sick and infirm were superintended by persons appointed to inspect every street. Before the pope sat down to his own meal a portion was separated and sent out to the hungry at his door. The Roman plebs had thus become the poor of Christ (pauperes Christi), and under that title were being fed by civica annona and sportula as their ancestors had been; and the deaconries had superseded the “regions” and the “steps” from which the corn had been distributed. The hospitium was now part of a common organization of relief, and the sick were visited according to Jewish and early Christian precedent. How far kindly Romans visited the sick of their day we do not know. Alms and the annona were now, it would seem, administered concurrently; and there was a system of poor relief independent of the churches and their alms (unless these, organized, as in Scottish towns, on the ancient ecclesiastical lines, were paid wholly or in part to a central diaconate fund). Much had changed, but in much Roman thought still prevailed.

On lines similar to these the organization of poor relief in the middle ages was developed. In the provinces in the later empire the senate or ordo decurionum were responsible for the public provisioning of the towns (Fustel de Coulanges, La Gaule romaine, p. 251), and no doubt the care of the poor would thus in some measure devolve on them in times of scarcity or distress. On the religious side, on the other hand, the churches would probably be constant centres of almsgiving and relief; and then, further, when the Roman municipal system had decayed, each citizen (as in Charlemagne’s time, 742-814) was required to support his own dependants—a step suggestive of much after-history.

In Constantinople the pauperism seems to have been extreme. The corn supplies of Africa were diverted there in great part when it became the capital of the empire. This must have left to Rome a larger scope for the development of the civic-religious administration of relief. St Chrysostom’s sermons give no impression of the rise of any new administrative force, alike sagacious and dominant. The appeal to give alms is constant, but the positive counsel on charitable work is nil. The people had the annona civica, and imperial gifts, corn, allowances (salaria) from the treasury granted for the poor and needy, and an annual gift of 50 gold pounds (rather more than £1400) for funerals. Besides these there were many institutions, and the begging and the almsgiving at the church doors. “The land could not support the lazy and valiant beggars.” There were public works provided for them; if they refused to work on them they were to be driven away. The sick might visit the capital, but must be registered and sent back (A.D. 382); the sturdy beggar was condemned to slavery. So little did alms effect. And in the East monasticism seems to have produced no firmness of purpose such as led to the organization of the church and of charitable relief under St Gregory.

Another movement of the Byzantine period was the establishment of the endowed charity. The Jewish synagogue long served as a place for the reception of strangers—a religious ξενοδοχεῖον. Probably the strangers referred to in “the Teaching” were so entertained. The table of the bishop and a room in his house served as the guest-chamber, for which afterwards a separate building was instituted. In the East the Jewish charitable inn first appears, and there took place the earliest extension of institutions. There was probably a demand for an elaboration of institutions as social changes made themselves felt in the churches. We have seen this in the case of the ἀγάπη. Similar changes would affect other branches of charitable work. The hospital (hospitalium, ξενοδοχεῖον) is defined as a “house of God in which strangers who lack hospitality are received” (Suicerus, Thesaur.), a home separated from the church; and round the church, out of the primitive ξενοδοχεῖον of early Christian times and the entertainment of strangers at the houses of members of the community, would grow up other similar charities. In A.D. 321 licence was given by Constantine to leave property to the Church. The churches were thus placed in the same position as pagan temples, and though subsequently Valentinian (A.D. 379) withdrew the permission on account of the shameless legacy-hunting of the clergy, in that period much must have been done to endow church and charitable institutions. In the same period grew to its height the passion for monasticism. This affected the parish and the endowed charity alike. Under its influence the deacon as an almoner tends to disappear, except where, as in Rome, there is an elaborate system of relief. Nor does it seem that deaconesses, widows, and virgins continued to occupy their old position as church workers and alms-receivers. Naturally when marriage was considered “in itself an evil, perhaps to be tolerated, but still degrading to human nature,” and (A.D. 385) the marriage of the clergy was prohibited, men, except those in charge of parishes, and women would join regular monastic bodies; the deacon, as almoner, would disappear, and the “widows” and virgins would become nuns. Thus there would grow up a large body of men and women living segregated in institutions, and forming a leisured class able to superintend institutional charities. And now two new officers appear, the eleemosynarius or almoner and the oeconomus or steward (already an assistant treasurer to the bishop), who superintend and distribute the alms and manage the property of the institution. (In the first six books of the Apost. Constit., A.D. 300, these officers are not mentioned.) In these circumstances the hospitium or hospital (ξενών, καταγώγιον) assumes a new character. It becomes in St Basil’s hands (A.D. 330-379) a resort not only for those who “visit it from time to time as they pass by, but also for those who need some treatment in illness.” And round St Basil at Caesarea there springs up a colony of institutions. Four kinds principally are mentioned in the Theodosian code: (i) the guest-houses (ξενοδοχεῖα); (2) the poor-houses (πτωχεῖα), where the poor (mendici) were housed and maintained (the πτωχεῖον was a general term also applied to all houses for the poor, the aged, orphans and sick); (3) there were orphanages (ὀρφανοτροφεῖα) for orphans and wards; and (4) there were houses for infant children (βρεφοτροφεῖα). Thus a large number of endowed charities had grown up. This new movement it is necessary to consider in connexion with the law relating to religious property and bequests, in its bearing on the rule of the monasteries, and in its effect on the family.

Thus grew up the system of endowed charities, which with certain modifications continued throughout the middle ages, and, though it assumed different forms in connexion with gilds and municipalities, in England it still retains, partially at least, its relation to the church. It remained the system of institutional relief parallel to the more personal almsgiving of the parish.

Monasticism, in acting on men of strong character, endowed them with a double strength of will, and to men like St Gregory it seemed to give back with administrative power the relentless firmness of the Roman. In the East it produced the turbulent soldiery of the church, in the West its missionaries; and each mission-monastery was a centre of relief. But whatever the services monasticism rendered, it can hardly be said to have furthered true charity from the social standpoint, though out of regard to some of its institutional work we may to a certain degree qualify this judgment. The movement was almost of necessity in large measure anti-parochial, and thus out of sympathy with the charities of the parish, where personal relations with the poor at their homes count for most.

We may ask, then, What were the results of charity at the close of the period which ends with St Gregory and the founding of the medieval church?—for if the charity is reflected in the social good the results should be manifest. Economic and social conditions were adverse. With lessened trade the middle class was decaying (Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 204) and a selfish aristocracy rising up. Municipal responsibility had been taxed to extinction. The public service was corrupt. The rich evaded taxation, the poor were oppressed by it. There were laws upon laws, endeavours to underpin the framework of a decaying society. Society was bankrupt of skill—and the skill of a generation has a close bearing on its charitable administration. While hospitals increased, medicine was unprogressive. There were miserable years of famine and pestilence, and constant wars. The care of the poorer classes, and ultimately of the people, was the charge of the church. The church strengthened the feeling of kindness for those in want, widows, orphans and the sick. It lessened the degradation of the “actresses,” and, co-operating with Stoic opinion, abolished the slaughter of the gladiatorial shows. It created a popular “dogmatic system and moral discipline,” which paganism failed to do; but it produced no prophet of charity, such as enlarged the moral imagination of the Jews. It ransomed slaves, as did paganism also, but it did not abolish slavery. Large economic causes produced that great reform. The serf attached to the soil took the place of the slave. The almsgiving of the church by degrees took the place of annona and sportula, and it may have created pauperism. But dependence on almsgiving was at least an advance on dependence founded on a civic and hereditary right to relief. As the colonus stood higher than the slave, so did the pauper, socially at any rate, free to support himself, exceed the colonus. Bad economic conditions and traditions, and a bad system of almsgiving, might enthral him. But the way, at least, was open; and thus it became possible that charity, working in alliance with good economic traditions, should in the end accomplish the self-support of society, the independence of the whole people.

Part V.—Medieval Charity and its Development

It remains to trace the history of thought and administration in relation to (1) the development of charitable responsibility in the parish, and the use of tithe and church property for poor relief; and (2) the revision of the theory of charity, with which are associated the names of St Augustine (354-430), St Benedict (480-542), St Bernard (1091-1153), St Francis (1182-1226), and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). (3) There follows, in reference chiefly to England, a sketch of the dependence of the poor under feudalism, the charities of the parish, the monastery and the hospital—the medieval system of endowed charity; the rise of gild and municipal charities; the decadence at the close of the 15th century, and the statutory endeavours to cope with economic difficulties which, in the 16th century, led to the establishment of statutory serfdom and the poor-laws. New elements affect the problem of charity in the 17th and 18th centuries; but it is not too much to say that almost all these headings represent phases of thought or institutions which in later forms are interwoven with the charitable thought and endeavours of the present day.

Naturally, two methods of relief have usually been prominent: relief administered locally, chiefly to residents in their own homes, and relief administered in an institution. At the time of Charlemagne (742-814) the system of The parish and charitable relief. relief was parochial, consisting principally of assistance at the home. After that time, except probably in England, the institutional method appears to have predominated, and the monastery or hospital in one form or another gradually encroached on the parish.

To understand medieval charity it is necessary to return to St Augustine. According to him, the motive of man in his legitimate effort to assert himself in life was love or desire (amor or cupido). “All impulses were only Medieval revision of the theory of charity. evolutions of this typical characteristic” (Harnack, History of Dogma (trans.), v. iii.); and this was so alike in the spiritual and the sensuous life. Happiness thus depended on desire; and desire in turn depended on the regulation of the will; but the will was regulated only by grace. God was the spiritualis substantia; and freedom was the identity of the will with the omnipotent unchanging nature. This highest Being was “holiness working on the will in the form of omnipotent love.” This love was grace—“grace imparting itself in love.” Love (caritas—charity) is identified with justice; and the will, the goodwill, is love. The identity of the will with the will of God was attained by communion with Him. The after-life consummated by sight this communion, which was here reached only by faith. Such a method of thought was entirely introspective, and it turned the mind “wholly to hope, asceticism and the contemplation of God in worship.” “Where St Augustine indulges in the exposition of practical piety he has no theory at all of Christ’s work.” To charity on that side he added nothing. In the 11th century there was a revival of piety, which had amongst its objects the restoration of discipline in the monasteries and a monastic training for the secular clergy. To this Augustinian thought led the way. “Christianity was asceticism and the city of God” (Harnack vi. 6). A new religious feeling took possession of the general mind, a regard and adoration of the actual, the historic Christ. Of this St Bernard was the expositor. “Beside the sacramental Christ the image of the historical took its place,—majesty in humility, innocence in penal suffering, life in death.” The spiritual and the sensuous were intermingled. Dogmatic formulae fell into the background. The picture of the historic Christ led to the realization of the Christ according to the spirit (κατὰ πνεῦμα). Thus St Bernard carried forward Augustinian thought; and the historic Christ became the “sinless man, approved by suffering, to whom the divine grace, by which He lives, has lent such power that His image takes shape in other men and incites them to corresponding humility and love.”

Humility and poverty represented the conditions under which alone this spirit could be realized; and the poverty must be spiritual, and therefore self-imposed (“wilful,” as it was afterwards called). This led to practical results. Poverty was not a social state, but a spiritual; and consequently the poor generally were not the pauperes Christi, but those who, like the monks, had taken vows of poverty. From these premisses followed later the doctrine that gifts to the church were not gifts to the poor, as once they had been, but to the religious bodies. The church was not the church of the poor, but of the poor in spirit. But the immediate effect was the belief for a time, apparently almost universal, that the salvation of society would come from the monastic orders. By their aid, backed by the general opinion, the secular clergy were brought back to celibacy and the monasteries newly disciplined. But charity could not thus regain its touch of life and become the means of raising the standard of social duty.

Next, one amongst many who were stirred by a kindred inspiration, St Francis turned back to actual life and gave a new reality to religious idealism. For him the poor were once again the pauperes Christi. To follow Christ was to adopt the life of “evangelical poverty,” and this was to live among the poor the life of a poor man. The follower was to work with his hands (as the poor clergy of the early church had done and the clergy of the early English church were exhorted to do); he was to receive no money; he was to earn the actual necessaries of life, though what he could not earn he might beg. To ask for this was a right, so long as he was bringing a better life into the world. All in excess of this he gave to the poor. He would possess no property, buildings or endowments, nor was his order to do so. The fulness of his life was in the complete realization of it now, without the cares of property and without any fear of the future. Having a definite aim and mission, he was ready to accept the want that might come upon him, and his life was a discipline to enable him to suffer it if it came. To him humility was the soul making itself fit to love; and poverty was humility expanded from a mood to a life, a life not guarded by seclusion, but spent amongst those who were actually poor. The object of life was to console the poor—those outside all monasteries and institutions—the poor as they lived and worked. The movement was practically a lay movement, and its force consisted in its simplicity and directness. Book learning was disparaged: life was to be the teacher. The brothers thus became observant and practical, and afterwards indeed learned, and their learning had the same characteristics. Their power lay in their practical sagacity, in their treatment of life, outside the cloister and the hospital, at first hand. They knew the people because they settled amongst them, living just as they did. This was their method of charity.

The inspiration that drew St Francis to this method was the contemplation of the life of Christ. But it was more than this. The Christ was to him, as to St Bernard, an ideal, whose nature passed into that of the contemplating and adoring beholder, so that, as he said, “having lost its individuality, of itself the creature could no longer act.” He had no impulse but the Christ impulse. He was changed. His identity was merged in that of Christ. And with this came the conception of a gracious and finely ordered charity, moving like the natural world in a constant harmonious development towards a definite end. The mysticism was intense, but it was practical because it was intense. In that lay the strength of the movement of the true Franciscans, and in those orders that, whether called heretical or not, followed them—Lollards and others. Religion thus became a personal and original possession. It became individual. It was inspired by a social endeavour, and for the world at large it made of charity a new thing.

St Thomas Aquinas took up St Bernard’s position. Renunciation of property, voluntary poverty, was in his view also a necessary means of reaching the perfect life; and the feeling that was akin to this renunciation and prompted it was charity. “All perfection of the Christian life was to be attained according to charity,” and charity united us to God.

On this foundation was built up the classification of acts of charity, which in one shape or another has a long social tradition, and which St Thomas quotes in an elaborated form—the seven spiritual acts (consule, carpe, doce, solare, remitte, fer, ora), counsel, sustain, teach, console, save, pardon, pray; and the seven corporal (vestio, poto, cibo, redimo, tego, colligo, condo) I clothe, I give drink to, I feed, I free from prison, I shelter, I assist in sickness, I bury (II. II.ae xxxii. 2). These in subsequent thought became “good works,” and availed for the after-life, bringing with them definite boons. Thus charity was linked to the system of indulgences. The bias of the act of charity is made to favour the actor. Primarily the benefit reverts to him. He becomes conscious of an ultimate reward accruing to himself. The simplicity of the deed, the spontaneity from which, as in a well-practised art, its freshness springs and its good effects result, is falsified at the outset. The thought that should be wholly concerned in the fulfilment of a definite purpose is diverted from it. The deed itself, apart from the outcome of the deed, is highly considered. An extreme inducement is placed on giving, counselling, and the like, but none on the personal or social utility of the gift or counsel. Yet the value of these lies in their end. No policy or science of charity can grow out of such a system. It can produce innumerable isolated acts, which may or may not be beneficent, but it cannot enkindle the “ordered charity.” This charity is, strictly speaking, by its very nature alike intellectual and emotional. Otherwise it would inevitably fail of its purpose, for though emotion might stimulate it, intelligence would not guide it.

There are, then, these three lines of thought. That of St Bernard, who invigorated the monastic movement, and helped to make the monastery or hospital the centre of charitable relief. That of St Francis, who, passing by regular and secular clergy alike, revived and reinvigorated the conception of charity and gave it once more the reality of a social force, knowing that it would find a freer scope and larger usefulness in the life of the people than in the religious aristocracy of monasteries. And that of St Thomas Aquinas, who, analysing the problem of charity and almsgiving, and associating it with definite groups of works, led to its taking, in the common thought, certain stereotyped forms, so that its social aim and purpose were ignored and its power for good was neutralized.

We have now to turn to the conditions of social life in which these thoughts fermented and took practical shape. The population of England from the Conquest to the 14th century is estimated at between 1½ and 2½ Charity and social conditions in England. millions. London, it is believed, had a population of about 40,000. Other towns were small. Two or three of the larger had 4000 or 5000 inhabitants. The only substantial building in a village, apart perhaps from the manor-house, was the church, used for many secular as well as religious purposes. In the towns the mud or wood-paved huts sheltered a people who, accepting a common poverty, traded in little more than the necessaries of life (Green, Town Life in the 15th Century, i. 13). The population was stationary. Famine and pestilence were of frequent occurrence (Creighton, Epidemics in Britain, p. 19), and for the careless there was waste at harvest-time and want in winter. Hunger was the drill-sergeant of society. Owing to the hardship and penury of life infant mortality was probably very great (Blashill, Sutton in Holdernesse, p. 123). The 15th century was, however, “the golden age of the labourer.” Our problem is to ascertain what was the service of charity to this people till the end of that century. In order to estimate this we have to apply tests similar to those we applied before to Greece and Rome and the pre-medieval church.

As in the pre-medieval church, the system of relief is that of charitable endowments—a marked contrast to Medieval endowed charities. the modern method of voluntary associations or rate-supported institutions.

In the 15th century the towns grew in importance. First the wool trade and then the cloth trade flourished, and the English developed a large shipping trade. The towns grew up like “little principalities”; and for the advancement Gild and municipal charities. of trade, gilds, consisting alike of masters and workmen, were formed, which endeavoured to regulate and then to monopolize the market. By degrees the corporations of the towns were worked in their interests, and the whole commercial system became restrictive and inadaptable. Meanwhile the towns attracted newcomers; freedom from feudal obligations was gained with comparative ease; and a new plebs was congregating, a population of inhabitants not qualified as burghers or gild members, women, sons living with their fathers, menial servants and apprentices. There was thus an increasing restriction imposed on trade, coupled with a growing plebs. Naturally, then, lay charities sprang up for members of gilds, and for burghers and for the commonalty. Men left estates to their gilds to maintain decayed members in hospitals, almshouses or otherwise, to educate their children, portion their daughters, and to assist their widows. The middle-class trader was thus in great measure insured against the risks of life. The gilds were one sign of the new temper and wants of burghers freed from feudalism. Another sign was a new standard of manners. Rules and saws, Hesiodic in their tone, became popular—in regard, for instance, to such a question as “how to enable a man to live on his means, and to keep himself and those belonging to him.” The boroughs established other charities also, hospitals and almshouses for the people, a movement which, like that of the gilds, began very early—in Italy as early as the 9th century. They sometimes gave outdoor relief also to registered poor (Green i. 41), and they had in large towns courts of orphans presided over by the mayor and aldermen, thus taking over a duty that previously had been one of conspicuous importance in the church. As early as 1257 in Westphalian towns there was a rough-and-ready system of Easter relief of the poor; and in Frankfort in 1437 there was a town council of almoners with a systematic programme of relief (Ratzinger, p. 352). Thus at the close of the middle ages the towns were gradually assuming what had been charitable functions of the church.

While a new freedom was being attained by the labourer in the country and the burgher in the town, the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient supply of labour for agriculture must have been constant, especially at every visitation of Statutory wage control. plague and famine. In accordance with a general policy of state regulation which was to control and supervise industry, agriculture and poor relief and to repress vagrancy by gaols and houses of correction, the state stepped in as arbiter and organizer. By Statutes of Labourers beginning in 1351 (25 Edw. III. 135), it aimed at enforcing a settled wage and restraining migration. From 1351 it endeavoured to suppress mendicity, and in part to systematize it in the interest of infirm and aged mendicants. Each series of enactments is the natural complement of the other. In the main their signification, from the point of view of charity, lies in the fact that they represent a persistent endeavour to prevent social unsettlement and in part the distress which unsettlement causes, and which vagrancy in some measure indicates, by keeping the people within the ranks of recognized dependence, the settled industry of the crafts and of agriculture, or forcing them back into it by fear of the gaol or the stocks. The extreme point of this policy was reached when by the laws of Edward VI. and Elizabeth the “rogue, vagabond or sturdy beggar” was branded with an R on the shoulder and handed over as a bondman for a period to any one who would take him. On the other hand, it was desired that relief should be a means of preventing migration. In any time of general pressure there is a desire to organize mendicity, to prevent the wandering of beggars, to create a kind of settled poor, distinguished from the rest as infirm and not able-bodied, and to keep these at least at home sufficiently supported by local and parochial relief; and this, in its simpler form all the world over, has in the past been by response to public begging. The argument may be summed up thus: We cannot have begging, which implies that the beggar is cared for by no one, belongs to no one, and therefore throws himself on the world at large. Therefore, if he is able-bodied he must be punished as unsocial, for it is his fault that he belongs to no one; or we must make him some one’s dependant, and so keep him; or if he is infirm, and therefore of no service to any one—if no one will keep him—we must organize his mendicity, for such mendicity is justified. If he cannot dig for the man to whom he does or should belong, he must beg. Then out of the failure to organize mendicity—for relief of itself is no remedy, least of all casual relief—a poor-law springs up, which, afterwards associated with the provision of employment, will, it is hoped, make relief in some measure remedial by increasing its quantity by means of compulsory levies. This argument, which combined statutory wage control and statutory poor relief, seems to have been firmly bedded in the English legislative mind for more than two centuries, from 1351 till after 1600; and until 1834 these two series of laws effectually reduced the English labourer to a new industrial dependence. To people imbued with ideas of feudalism the way of escape from villenage seemed to be not independence, but a new reversion to it.

Many elements produced the social and economic catastrophe of the 16th century, for the condition into which the country fell can hardly be considered less than a catastrophe. With the growing independence of the people there was The decadence. created after the 13th century an unsettled “masterless” class, a residue of failure resulting from social changes, which was large and important enough to call for legislation. In the 15th century, “the golden age of the English labourer,” the towns increased and flourished. Both town and country did well. At the end of the century came the decadence. The measure of the strain, when perhaps it had reached its lowest level, is indicated by the following comparison: “The cost of a peasant’s family of four in the early part of the 14th century was £3:4:9; after 1540 it was £8” (Rogers, Hist, of Agric. and Prices, iv. 756).

The poverty of the country was very great in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth. Adversity then taught the people new manners, and households became more simple and thrifty. In the reign of James I., with enforced economy and thrift, a “slow but substantial improvement in agriculture” took place, and a new growth of commercial enterprise. The vigour of the municipalities had abated, so that in Henry VIII.’s time they had become the very humble servants of the government; and the government, on the other hand, had become strongly centralized—in itself a sign of the general withdrawal of self-sustaining activity in all administration, in the administration of charitable relief no less than in other departments. A system of endowed charities had been built up, supported chiefly by rents from landed property. These now had disappeared, and thus the means of relief, which Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth might have utilized at a time of general distress, had been dissipated by the acts of their predecessors. The civil independence of the monasteries and religious houses might have been justified, possibly, when they were engaged in missionary work and were instilling into the people the precepts of a higher moral law than that which was in force around them. But afterwards, as the ability and intelligence of the community increased, their privileges became more and more antagonistic to charity, and tended to create a non-social and even anti-social ecclesiastical democracy actuated by aims and interests in which the general good of the people had little or no place. There was a growing alienation between religious tradition and secular opinion, as Lollardism slowly permeated the thought of the people and led the way to the Reformation. While this alienation existed no national system of charity, civic and yet religious, could be created. But worse than all, the ideal of charity had been degraded. A self-regarding system of relief had superseded charity, and it was productive of nothing but alms, large or small, isolated and unmethodic, given with a wrong bias, and thus almost inevitably with evil results. Out of this could spring no vigorous co-operative charity. Charity—not relief—indeed seemed to have left the world. The larger issues were overlooked. Then the property of the hospitals and the gilds was wantonly confiscated, though the poor had already lost that share in the revenues of the church to which at one time they were admitted to have a just claim. A new beginning had to be made. The obligations of charity had to be revived. A new organization of charitable relief had to be created, and that with an empty exchequer and after a vast waste of charitable resources. There were signs of a new congregational and parochial energy, yet the task could not be entrusted to the religious bodies, divided and disunited as they were. In their stead it could be imposed only on some authority which represented the general community, such as municipalities; and in spite of the centralization of the government there seemed some hope of creating a system of relief in connexion with them. They were tried, and, very naturally, failed. In the poverty of the time it seemed that the poor could be relieved only by a compulsory rate, and the administration of statutory relief naturally devolved on the central government—the only vigorous administrative body left in the country. The government might indeed have adopted the alternative of letting the industrial difficulties of the country work themselves out, but they had inherited a policy of minute legislative control, and they continued it. Revising previous statutes, they enacted the Poor Law, which still remains on the statute book. It could be no remedy for social offences against charity and the community. But in part at least it was successful. It helped to conceal the failure to find a remedy.

Part VI.—After the Reformation

During the Reformation, which extended, it should be understood, from the middle of the 14th century to the reign of James I., the groundwork of the theory of charity was being recast. The old system and the narrow theory on which The Reformation theory of charity. it had come to depend were discredited. The recoil is startling. To a very large extent charitable administration had been in the hands of men and women who, as an indispensable condition to their participation in it, took the vows of obedience, chastity and “wilful” poverty. Now this was all entirely set aside. It was felt (see Homilies on Faith and Good Works, &c., A.D. 1547) that socially and morally the method had been a failure. The vow of obedience, it was argued, led to a general disregard of the duties of civic and family life. Those who bound themselves by it were outside the state and did not serve it. In regard to chastity the Homily states the common opinion: “How the profession of chastity was kept, it is more honesty to pass over in silence and let the world judge of what is well known.” As to wilful poverty, the regulars, it is urged, were not poor, but rich, for they were in possession of much wealth. Their property, it is true, was held in communi, and not personally, but nevertheless it was practically theirs, and they used it for their personal enjoyment; and “for all their riches they might never help father nor mother, nor others that were indeed very needy and poor, without the license of their father abbot” or other head. This was the negative position. The positive was found in the doctrine of justification—the central point in the discussions of the time, a plant from the garden of St Augustine. Justification was the personal conviction of a lively (or living) faith, and was defined as “a true trust and confidence of the mercy of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and a stedfast hope of all good things to be received at His hands.” Without this justification there could be no good works. They were the signs of a lively faith and grew out of it. Apart from it, what seemed to be “good works” were of the nature of sin, phantom acts productive of nothing, “birds that were lost, unreal.” So were the works of pagans and heretics. The relation of almsgiving to religion was thus entirely altered. The personal reward here or hereafter to the actor was eliminated. The deed was good only in the same sense in which the doer was good; it had in itself no merit. This was a great gain, quite apart from any question as to the sufficiency or insufficiency of the Protestant scheme of salvation. The deed, it was realized, was only the outcome of the doer, the expression of himself, what he was as a whole, neither better nor worse. Logically this led to the discipline of the intelligence and the emotions, and undoubtedly “justification” to very many was only consistent with such discipline and implied it. Thus under a new guise the old position of charity reasserted itself. But there were other differences.

The religious life was to be democratic—not in religious bodies, but in the whole people; and in a new sense—in relation to family and social life—it was to be moral. That was the significance of the Reformation for charity.

Consistently with this movement of religious activity towards a complete fulfilment of the duties of civic life, the older classical social theory, fostered by the Renaissance, assumed a new influence—the great conception of the state as a The organization of municipal relief. community bound together by charity and friendship, “We be not born to ourselves,” it was said, “but partly to the use of our country, of our parents, of our kinsfolk, and partly of our friends and neighbours; and therefore all good virtues are grafted on us naturally, whose effects be to do good to others, when it showeth forth the image of God in man, whose property is ever to do good to others” (Lamond, p. 14). Economic theory also changed. Instead of the medieval opinion of the “theologian or social preacher,” that “trade could only be defended on the ground that honestly conducted it made no profit” (Green, ii. 71), we have a recognition of the advantages resulting from exchange, and individual interests, it is argued, are not necessarily inconsistent with those of the state, but are, on the contrary, a source of solid good to the whole community.

A phrase of Robert Cecil’s (1st earl of Salisbury) indicates the minute domestic character of the Elizabethan legislation (D’Ewes, 674). The question (1601) was the repeal of a statute of tillage. Cecil says: “If in Edward I.’s time a Poor Relief Acts and statutory serfdom. law was made for the maintenance of the fry of fish, and in Henry VII.’s for the preservation of the eggs of wild fowl, shall we now throw away a law of more consequence and import? If we debar tillage, we give scope to the depopulating. And then, if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the statute of inmates; if they wander abroad, they are within the danger of the statute of the poor to be whipt. So by this undo this statute, and you endanger many thousands.” A strong central government, a local authority appointed directly by the government, and a network of legislation controlled the whole movement of economic life. On this reliance was placed to meet economic difficulties. The local authorities were the justices of the peace; and they had to carry out the statutes for this purpose, to assess the wages of artisans and labourers, and to enforce the payment of the wages they had fixed; to ensure that suitable provision was made for the relief of the poor at the expense of rates which they also fixed; and to suppress vagabondage. Since 23 Edw. III. there had been labour statutes, and in 1563 a new statute was passed, an “Act containing divers orders for Artificers, Labourers, Servants of Husbandry and Apprentices” (5 Eliz. c. 4). It recognized and upheld a social classification. On the one hand there was the gentleman or owner of property to which the act was not to apply; and on the other the artisan and labouring class. This class in turn was subdivided, and the justices were to assess their wages annually according to “the plenty and scarcity of the time and other circumstances.” Persons between the ages of twelve and sixty, who were not apprentices or engaged in certain specified employments, were compelled to serve in husbandry by the year “with any person that keepeth husbandry.” The length of the day’s work and the conditions of apprenticeship were fixed. The assessed rate of wages was enforceable by fine and imprisonment, and refusal to be apprenticed by imprisonment. Thus there was created a life control over labour with an industrial settlement and a wage fixed by the justices annually. There are differences of opinion in regard to the extent to which this act was enforced; and the evidence on the point is comparatively scanty. It was enforced throughout the century in which it was passed, and it probably continued in force generally until the Restoration, while subsequently it was put in operation to meet special emergencies, such as times of distress when some settlement of wages seemed desirable (cf. Rogers, v. 611; Hewins, English Trade and Finance, p. 82; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce: Modern Times, i. 168). It was not repealed till 1814.

From 1585 to 1622 there was, it is said, a slight increase in labourers’ wages, which fluctuated from 5s. 3⁄8d. to 5s. 8 ¼d. a week, with a declining standard of comfort and at times great distress. Then there was a marked increase of wage till 1662 and “a very marked improvement; the rate of increase being very nearly double that of the earlier periods,” and reaching 9s., “as the highest weekly rate for the whole period.” Then from 1662 to 1702 there was “a slight improvement” (Hewins, p. 89). It would seem indeed that the stir of the times between 1622 and 1662 may have caused a great demand for labour. But with the Restoration, when the assessment system was falling into desuetude, came the Poor Relief Act of 1662 (13 & 14 Car. II. cap. 62), which brought in the law of settlement, and a settlement for relief of a very strict nature was added to the industrial settlement of the Artificers and Labourers Act. Thus, if the influence of that act, which had so long controlled labour, was waning, its place was now taken by an act which, though it had nothing to do with the assessment of wage, yet so settled the labourer within the bounds of his parish that he had practically to rely, if not upon a wage fixed by the justices, yet upon a customary wage limited and restricted as a result of the law of settlement. And the assessment by the justices, in so far as it may have continued, would therefore be of little or no consequence. Settlement also, like the Artificers and Labourers Act, would prevent the country labourer from passing to the towns, or the townsmen passing to other towns. At least they would do so at the risk of forfeiting their right to relief if they lost their settlement without acquiring a new one. Hence the industrial control, though under another name and other conditions, remained in force to a large extent in practice.

By the Artificers and Labourers Act then, in conjunction with other measures, the labouring classes were finally committed to a new bondage, when they had freed themselves from the serfdom of feudalism, and when the control exercised over them by the gild and municipality was relaxed. The statute was so enforced that to earn a year’s livelihood would have taken a labourer not 52 weeks, but sometimes two years, or 58 weeks, or 80 weeks, or 72 weeks; sometimes, however, less—48 or 35. It followed that on such a system the country could only with the utmost good fortune free itself from the economic difficulties of the century, and that the need of a poor-law was felt the more as these difficulties persisted. A voluntary or a municipal system could not suffice, even as a palliative, while such statutes as these were in force to render labour immobile and unprogressive. Also, while wages were fixed by statute or order, whether chiefly in the interest of the employers or not, obviously any shortage on the wages had to be made good by the community. The community, by fixing the wages to be earned in a livelihood, made itself responsible for their sufficiency. And it is suggestive to find that in the year in which the Artificers and Labourers Act (1563) was passed, the act for the enforcement of assessments of poor-rate (5 Eliz. cap. 3) was also enacted. The Law of Settlement, to which we have referred, passed in the reign of Charles II., was due, it is said, to a migration of labourers southward from counties where less favourable statutory wages prevailed; but it was, in fact, only a corollary of the Artificers and Labourers Act of 1563 and the Poor Relief Act of 1601. These laws, it may be said, were the means of making the English labourer, until the poor-law reform of 1834, a settled but landless serf, supported by a fixed wage and a state bounty. By the poor-law it was possible to continue this state of things till, in consequence of an absolute economic breakdown, there was no alternative but reform.

The philanthropic nature of the poor-law is indicated by its antecedents: once enacted, its bounties became a right; its philanthropy disappeared in a quasi-legal claim. Its object was to relieve the poor by home industries, apprentice children, and provide necessary relief to the poor unable to work. The act was commonly interpreted so as to include the whole of that indefinite class, the “poor”; by a better and more rigid interpretation it was, at least in the 19th century, held to apply only to the “destitute,” that is, to those who required “necessary relief”—according to the actual wording of the statute. The economic fallacy of home industries founded on rate-supplied capital early declared itself, and the method could only have continued as long as it did because it formed part of a general system of industrial control. When in the 18th century workhouses were established, the same industrial fallacy, as records show, repeated itself under new conditions. Within the parish it resulted in the farmer paying the labourer as small a wage as possible, and leaving the parish to provide whatever he might require in addition during his working life and in his old age. Thus, indeed, a gigantic experiment in civic employment was made for at least two centuries on a vast scale throughout the country—and failed. As was natural, the lack of economic independence reacted on the morals of the people. With pauperism came want of energy, idleness and a disregard for chastity and the obligations of marriage. The law, it is true, recognized the mutual obligations of parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren; but in the general poverty which it was itself a means of perpetuating such obligations became practically obsolete, while at all times they are difficult to enforce. Still, the fact that they were recognized implies a great advance in charitable thought. The act, passed at first from year to year, was very slowly put in force. Even before it was passed the poor-rate first assessed under the act of 1563 was felt to be “a greater tax than some subsidies,” and in the time of Charles II. it amounted to a third of the revenue of England and Wales (Rogers, v. 81).

The service of villein and cottar was, as we have now seen, in part superseded by what we have called a statutory wage-control, founded on a basis of wage supplemented by relief, provided by a rate-supported poor-law. But it follows that with the decay of this system the poor-law itself should have disappeared, or should have taken some new and very limited form. Unfortunately, as in Roman times, state relief proved to be a popular and vigorous parasite that outlived the tree on which it was rooted: assessments of wage under the Statute of Labourers fell into disuse after the Restoration, it is said, and the statute was finally repealed in 1814, and sixty years later the act against illegal combinations of working men; but the serfdom of the poor-law, the eleemosyna civica, remained, to work the gravest evil to the labouring classes, and even after the reform of 1834 greatly impeded the recovery of their independence. Nevertheless, by a new law of state alms for the aged, or by statutory outdoor relief with, as some would wish, a regulated wage, it is now proposed to bring them once again under a thraldom similar to that from which they have so slowly emancipated themselves.

The policy adopted by Queen Elizabeth for the relief of the poor (1601) included a scheme for the reorganization of voluntary charity as well as plans for the extension of rate-aided relief. During the century, as we have seen, endeavours The endowed charities. had been made to create a system of voluntary charity. This it was proposed to safeguard and promote concurrently with the extension of the poor-rate. Accordingly, in the poor-law it was arranged that the overseers, the new civic authority, and the churchwardens, the old parochial and charitable authority, should act in conjunction, and, subject to magisterial approval, together “raise weekly or otherwise” the necessary means “by taxation of every inhabitant.” The old charitable organization was based on endowment, and the churchwarden was responsible for the administration of many such endowments. What was not available from these and other sources was to be raised “by taxation.” The object of the new act was to encourage charitable gifts.

Towards the end of the 18th century, when the administration of poor relief fell into confusion, many charities were lost, or were in danger of being lost, and many were mismanaged. In 1786 and 1788 a committee of the House of Commons reported on the subject. In 1818, chiefly through the instrumentality of Lord Brougham, a commission of inquiry on educational charities was appointed, and in 1819 another commission to investigate (with some exceptions) all the charities for the poor in England and Wales. These and subsequent commissions continued their inquiries till 1835, when a select committee of the House of Commons made a strong report, advocating the establishment of a permanent and independent board, to inquire, to compel the production of accounts, to secure the safe custody of charity property, to adapt it to new uses on cy-près lines, &c. A commission followed in 1849, and eventually in 1853 the first Charitable Trusts Act was passed, under which “The Charity Commissioners of England and Wales” were appointed.

After the Poor-Law Act of 1601 the history of the voluntary parochial charities in a town parish is marked by their decreasing amount and utility, as poor-law relief and pauperism increased. The act, it would seem, was not adopted Charity in the parish after 1601. with much alacrity by the local authorities. From 1625 to 1646 there were many years of plague and sickness, but in St Giles’s, London, as late as 1649, the amount raised by the “collectors” (or overseers) was only £176. They disbursed this to “the visited poor” as “pensions.” In 1665 an extra levy of £600 is mentioned. In the accounts of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, where, as in St Giles’s, gifts were received, the change wrought by another half-century (1714) is apparent. The sources of charitable relief are similar to those in all the Protestant churches—English, Scottish or continental: church collections and offertories; correctional fines, such as composition for bastards and conviction money for swearers; and besides these, income from annuities and legacies, the parish estate, the royal bounty, and “petitions to persons of quality.” In all £2041 was collected, but, so far as relief was concerned, the parish relied not on it, but on the poor-rate, which produced £3765. All this was collected and disbursed on their own authority by collectors, to orphans, “pensioners” or the “known or standing” poor, or to casual poor (£1818), including nurse children and bastards. The begging poor were numerous and the infant death-rate enormous, and each year three-fourths of those christened were “inhumanly suffered to die by the barbarity of nurses.” The whole administration was uncharitable, injurious to the community and the family, and inhuman to the child. If one may judge from later accounts of other parishes even up to 1834, usually it remained the same, purposeless and unintelligent; and it can hardly be denied that, generally speaking, only since the middle of the 19th century has any serious attention been paid to the charitable side of parochial work. Parallel to the parochial movement of the poor-law in England, in France (about 1617) were established the bureaux de bienfaisance, at first entirely voluntary institutions, then recognized by the state, and during the Revolution made the central administration for relief in the communes.

In the 17th century in England, as in France, opinion favoured the establishment of large hospitals or maisons Dieu for the reception of the poor of different classes. In France throughout the century there was a continuous struggle Charitable movements after 1601. with mendicancy, and the hospitals were used as places into which offenders were summarily driven. A new humanity was, however, beginning its protest. The pitiful condition of abandoned children attracted sympathy in both countries. St Vincent de Paul established homes for the enfants trouvés, followed in England by the establishment of the Foundling hospital (1739). In both countries the method was applied inconsiderately and pushed to excess, and it affected family life most injuriously. Grants from parliament supported the foundling movement in England, and homes were opened in many parts of the country. The demand soon became overwhelming; the mortality was enormous, and the cost so large that it outstripped all financial expedients. The lesson of the experiment is the same as that of the poor-law catastrophe before 1834; only, instead of the able-bodied poor of another age, infants were made the object of a compassionate but undiscerning philanthropy. With widespread relief there came widespread abandonment of duty and economic bankruptcy. Had the poor-rates instead of charitable relief been used in the same way, the moral injury would have been as great, but the annual draft from the rates would have concealed the moral and postponed the economic disaster. To amend the evil, changes were made by which the relation between child and mother was kept alive, and a personal application on her part was required; the character of the mother and her circumstances were investigated, and assistance was only given when it would be “the means of replacing the mother in the course of virtue and the way of an honest livelihood.” General reforms were also made, especially through the instrumentality of Jonas Hanway, to check infant mortality, and metropolitan parishes were required to provide for their children outside London. A kindred movement led to the establishment of penitentiaries (1758), of lock hospitals and lying-in hospitals (1749-1752).

In Queen Anne’s reign there was a new educational movement, “the charity school”—“to teach poor children the alphabet and the principles of religion,” followed by the Sunday-school movement (1780), and about the same time (1788) by “the school of industry”—to employ children and teach them to be industrious. In 1844 the Ragged School Union was established, and until the Education Act of 1870 continued its voluntary educational work. As an outcome of these movements, through the efforts of Miss Mary Carpenter and many others, in 1854-1855 industrial and reformatory schools were established, to prevent crime and reform child criminals. The orphanage movement, beginning in 1758, when the Orphan Working Home was established, has been continued to the present day on a vastly extended scale. In 1772 a society for the discharge of persons imprisoned for small debts was established, and in 1773 Howard began his prison reforms. This raised the standard of work in institutional charities generally. After the civil wars the old hospital foundations of St Bartholomew and St Thomas, municipalized by Edward VI., became endowed charities partly supported by voluntary contributions. The same fate befell Christ’s Hospital, in connexion with which the voting system, the admission of candidates by the vote of the whole body of subscribers—that peculiarly English invention—first makes its appearance.

A new interest in hospitals sprang up at the end of the 17th century. St Thomas’s was rebuilt (1693) and St Bartholomew’s (1739); Guy’s was founded in 1724, and on the system of free “letters” obtainable in exchange for donations, voluntary hospitals and infirmaries were established in London (1733 and later) and in most of the large towns. Towards the end of the 18th century the dispensary movement was developed—a system of local dispensaries with fairly definite districts and home visiting, a substitute for attendance at a hospital, where “hospital fever” was dreaded, and an alternative to what was then a very ill-administered system of poor-law medical relief. After 1840 the provident dispensary was introduced, in order that the patients by small contributions in the time of health might provide for illness without having to meet large doctors’ bills, and the doctor might receive some sufficient remuneration for his attendance on poor patients. This movement was largely extended after 1860. Three hospital funds for collecting contributions for hospitals and making them grants, a movement that originated in Birmingham in 1859, were established in London in 1873 and 1897.

Each religious movement has brought with it its several charities. The Society of Friends, the Wesleyans, the Baptists have large charities. With the extension of the High Church movement there have been established many sisterhoods which support penitentiaries, convalescent homes and hospitals, schools, missions, &c.

The magnitude of this accumulating provision of charitable relief is evident, though it cannot be summed up in any single total.

At the beginning of the 19th century anti-mendicity societies were established; and later, about 1869, in England and Scotland a movement began for the organization of charitable relief, in connexion with which there are now societies and committees in most of the larger towns in Great Britain, in the colonies, and in the United States of America. More recently the movement for the establishment of settlements in poor districts, initiated by Canon Barnett at Toynbee Hall—“to educate citizens in the knowledge of one another, and to provide them with teaching and recreation”—has spread to many towns in England and America.

These notes of charitable movements suggest an altogether new development of thought. On behalf of the charity school of Queen Anne’s time were preached very formal sermons, which showed but little sympathy with child Progress of thought in 18th and 19th centuries. life. After the first half of the century a new humanism with which we connect the name of Rousseau, slowly superseded this formal beneficence. Rousseau made the world open its eyes and see nature in the child, the family and the community. He analysed social life, intent on explaining it and discovering on what its well-being depended; and he stimulated that desire to meet definite social needs which is apparent in the charities of the century. Little as it may appear to be so at first sight, it was a period of charitable reformation. Law revised the religious conception of charity, though he was himself so strangely devoid of social instinct that, like some of his successors, he linked the utmost earnestness in belief to that form of almsgiving which most effectually fosters beggardom. Howard introduced the era of inspection, the ardent apostle of a new social sagacity; and Bentham, no less sagacious, propounded opinions, plans and suggestions which, perhaps it may be said, in due course moulded the principles and methods of the poor-law of 1834. In the broader sense the turn of thought is religious, for while usually stress is laid on the religious scepticism of the century, the deeper, fervent, conscientious and evangelical charity in which Nonconformists, and especially “the Friends,” took so large a part, is often forgotten. Sometimes, indeed, as often happens now, the feeling of charity passed into the merest sentimentality. This is evident, for instance, from so ill-considered a measure as Pitt’s Bill for the relief of the poor. On the other hand, during the 18th century the poor-law was the object of constant criticism, though so long as the labour statutes and the old law of settlement were in force, and the relief of the labouring population as state “poor” prevailed, it was impossible to reform it. Indeed, the criticism itself was generally vitiated by a tacit acceptance of “the poor” as a class, a permanent and irrevocable charge on the funds of the community; and at the end of the 18th century, when the labour statutes were abrogated, but the conditions under which poor relief was administered remained the same, serfdom in its later stage, the serfdom of the poor-law, asserted itself in its extremest form in times of dearth and difficulty during the Napoleonic War. In 1802-1803 it was calculated (Marshall’s Digest) that 28% of the population were in receipt of permanent or occasional relief. Those in receipt of the former numbered 734,817, including children—so real had this serfdom of the poor become.

In 1832 the expenditure on pauperism in England and Wales was £7,036,968. In the early years of the 19th century the mendicity societies, established in some of the larger towns, were a sign of the general discontent with existing methods of administration. The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor—representing a group of men such as Patrick Colquhoun, Sir I. Bernard, Dr Lettsom, Dr Haygarth, James Neald, Count Rumford and others—took a more positive line and issued many useful publications (1796). After 1833 the very atmosphere of thought seems changed. There was a general desire to be quit of the serfdom of pauperism. The Poor-law Amendment Act was passed in 1834, and since then male able-bodied pauperism has dwindled to a minimum. The bad years of 1860-1870 revived the problem in England and Scotland, and the old spirit of reform for a time prevailed. Improved administration working with economic progress effected still further reductions of pauperism, till on the 1st of January 1905 (exclusive of lunatics in county asylums and casual paupers) the mean number of paupers stood at 764,589, or 22.6 per thousand of the population, instead of 41.8 per thousand as in 1859 (see Poor-law).

Charity organization societies were formed after 1869, with the object of “improving the condition of the poor,” or, in other words, to promote independence by an ordered and co-operative charity; and the Association for Befriending Young Servants, and workhouse aid committees, in order to prevent relapse into pauperism on the part of those who as children or young women received relief from the poor-law. The Local Government Board adopted a restricted out-door relief policy, and a new interest was felt in all the chief problems of local administration. The movement was general. The results of the Elberfeld system of municipal relief administered by unpaid almoners, each dealing with but one or two cases, influenced thought both in England and America. The experience gained by Mr Joseph Tuckerman of Boston of the utility of registering applications for relief, and the teaching of Miss Octavia Hill, led to the foundation of the system of friendly visiting and associated charity at Boston (1880) and elsewhere. Since that time the influence of Arnold Toynbee and the investigations of Charles Booth have led to a better appreciation of the conditions of labour; and to some extent, in London and elsewhere, the spirit of charity has assumed the form of a new devotion to the duties of citizenship. But perhaps, in regard to charity in Great Britain, the most important change has been the revival of the teaching of Dr Chalmers (1780-1847), who (1819) introduced a system of parochial charity at St John’s, Glasgow, on independent lines, consistent with the best traditions of the Scottish church. In the development of the theory of charitable relief on the economic side this has been a main factor. His view, which he tested by experience, may be summed up as follows: Society is a growing, self-supporting organism. It has within it, as between family and family, neighbour and neighbour, master and employee, endless links of sympathy and self-support. Poverty is not an absolute, but a relative term. Naturally the members of one class help one another; the poor help the poor. There is thus a large invisible fund available and constantly used by those who, by their proximity to one another, know best how to help. The philanthropist is an alien to this life around him. Moved by a sense of contrast between his own lot, as he understands it, and the lot of those about him, whom he but little understands, he concludes that he should relieve them. But his gift, unless it be given in such a way as to promote this self-support, instead of weakening it, is really injurious. In the first place, by his interference he puts a check on the charitable resources of another class and lessens their social energy. What he gives they do not give, though they might do so. But next, he does more harm than this. He stimulates expectation, so that by a false arithmetic his gift of a few shillings seems to those who receive it and to those who hear of it a possible source of help in any difficulty. To them it represents a large command of means; and where one has received what, though it be little, is yet, relative to wage, a large sum to be acquired without labour, many will seek more, and with that object will waste their time and be put off their work, or even be tempted to lie and cheat. So social energy is diverted from its proper use. Alms thus given weakens social ties, diminishes the natural relief funds of mutual help, and beggars a neighbour instead of benefiting him. By this argument a clear and well-defined purpose is placed before charity. Charity becomes a science based on social principles and observation. Not to give alms, but to keep alive the saving health of the family, becomes its problem: relief becomes altogether subordinate to this, and institutions or societies are serviceable or the reverse according as they serve or fail to serve this purpose. Not poverty, but distress is the plea for help; not almsgiving, but charity the means. To charity is given a definite social aim, and a desire to use consistently with this aim every method that increasing knowledge and trained ability can devise.

Under such influences as these, joined with better economic conditions, a great reform has been made. The poor-law, however, remains—the modern eleemosyna civica. It now, indeed, absorbs a proportionately lesser amount of the largely increased national income, but, excluding the maintenance of lunatics, it costs Great Britain more than twelve millions a year; and among the lower classes of the poor, directly or indirectly, it serves as a bounty on dependence and is a permanent obstacle to thrift and self-reliance. The number of those who are within the circle of its more immediate attraction is now perhaps, in different parts of the country or different districts in a town, not more than, say, 20% of the population. Upon that population the statistics of a day census would show a pauperism not of 2.63, the percentage of the mean day pauperism on the population in 1908, but of 13.15%; and the percentage would be much greater—twice as large, perhaps—if the total number of those who in some way received poor relief in the course of a year were taken into account. The English poor-law is thus among the lower classes, those most tempted to dependence—say some six or seven millions of the people—a very potent influence definitely antagonistic to the good development of family life, unless it be limited to very narrow proportions; as, for instance, to restricted indoor or institutional relief for the sick, for the aged and infirm, who in extreme old age require special care and nursing, and for the afflicted, for whom no sufficient charitable provision is procurable. As ample experience shows, only on these conditions can poor-law relief be justified from the point of view of charity and the common good. In marked contrast to this opinion is the English movement for Old Age pensions, which came to its first fruition in 1908—a huge charity started on the credit of the state, the extension of which might ultimately involve a cost comparable with that of the army or the navy. Schemes of the kind have been adopted in the Australasian colonies with limitations and safeguards; and they seem likely to develop into a new type of poor-relief organization for the aged and infirm (Report: Royal Commission on Old Age Pensions, Commonwealth of Australia, 1906). In England, partly to meet the demand for better state provision for the aged, the Local Government Board in 1900 urged the boards of guardians to give more adequate outdoor relief to aged deserving people, and laid no stress on the test of destitution, or, in other words, the limitation of relief to what was actually “necessary,” the neglect of which has led to new difficulties. History has proved that demoralization results from the wholesale relief whether of the mass of the citizens, or of the able-bodied, or of the children, and the proposal to limit the endowment to the aged makes no substantial difference. The social results must be similar; but social forces work slowly, and usually only the unanswerable argument of financial bankruptcy suffices to convert a people habituated to dependence, though the inward decay of vitality and character may long before be manifest. Ultimately the distribution of pensions by way of out-door relief, corrupting a far more independent people, is calculated to work a far greater injury than the annona civica. Such an endowment of old age might indeed be justified as part of a system of regulated labour, which, as in earlier times, could not be enforced without some such extraneous help, but it could not be justified otherwise. It is naturally associated, therefore, with socialistic proposals for the regulation of wage.

In the light of the principles of charity, which we have considered historically, we have now to turn to two questions: charity and economics, and charity and socialism.

The object of charity is to render to our neighbour the services and duties of goodwill, friendship and love. To prevent distress charity has for its further object to preserve and develop the manhood and womanhood of individuals and their self-maintenance The economics of charity. in and through the family; and any form of state intervention is approved or disapproved by the same standard. By self-maintenance is meant self-support throughout life in its ordinary contingencies—sickness, widowhood, old age, &c. Political economy we would define as the science of exchange and exchange value. Here it has to be considered in relation to the purposes of charity. By way of illustration we take, accordingly, three points: distribution and use, supplementation of wage, and the standard of well-being or comfort in relation to wage.

The theory of charity separates it entirely from socialism, as that word is commonly used. Strictly socialism means, in questions affecting the community, a dominant regard for the common or social good in so far as it is contrary to private or Charity and socialism. individual advantage. But even so the antithesis is misleading, for the two need not be inconsistent. On the contrary, the common good is really and ultimately only individual good (not advantage) harmonized to a common end. The issue, indeed, is that of old Greek days, and the conditions of a settlement of it are not substantially different. Using modern terms one may say that charity is “interventionist.” It has sought to transform the world by the transformation of the will and the inward life in the individual and in society. It would intensify the spirit and feeling of membership in society and would aim at improving social conditions, as science makes clear what the lines of reform should be. So it has constantly intervened in all kinds of ways, and, in the 19th century for instance, it has initiated many movements afterwards taken up by public authorities—such as prison reform, industrial schools, child protection, housing, food reform, &c., and it has been a friendly ally in many reforms that affect industry very closely, as, for instance, in the introduction of the factory acts. But it has never aimed at recasting society itself on a new economic plan, as does socialism. Socialism indeed offers the people a new state of social security. It recognizes that the annona civica and the old poor-law may have been bad, but it would meet the objection made against them by insisting on the gradual creation of a new industrial society in which wage would be regulated and all would be supported, some by wage in adult life, some by allowance in old age, and others by maintenance in childhood. Accordingly for it all schemes for the state maintenance of school children, old age pensions, or state provision for the unemployed are, like municipal trading, steps towards a final stage, in which none shall want because all shall be supported by society or be dependent on it industrially. To charity this position seems to exclude the ethical element in life and to treat the people primarily or chiefly as human animals. It seems also to exclude the motives for energy and endeavour that come from self-maintenance. Against it, on the other hand, socialism would urge, that only by close regulation and penalty will the lowest classes be improved, and that only the society that maintains them can control them. Charity from its experience doubts the possibility of such control without a fatal loss of initiative on the part of those controlled, and it believes both that there is constant improvement on the present conditions of society and that there will be constantly more as science grows and its conclusions are put in force. Thus charity and socialism, in the usual meaning of the word, imply ultimately two quite different theories of social life. The one would re-found society industrially, the other would develop it and allow it to develop.

The springs of charity lie in sympathy and religion, and, one would now add, in science. To organize it is to give to it the “ordered nature” of an organic whole, to give it a definite social purpose, and to associate the members The organization of charity. of the community for the fulfilment of that purpose. This in turn depends on the recognition of common principles, the adoption of a common method, self-discipline and training, and co-operation. In a mass of people there may be a large variation in motives coincident with much unity in action. Thus there may be acceptance of a common social purpose in charity, while in one the impulse is similar to that which moved St Francis or George Herbert, in another to that which moved Howard or Dr Chalmers, or a modern poor-law reformer like Sir G. Nicholls or E. Denison. Accepting, then, the principles of charity, we pass to the method in relation to assistance and relief. Details may vary, but on the following points there is general agreement among students and workers:—

Where there is accord between charity and the poor-law pauperism may be largely reduced. The poor-law in most countries has at its disposal certain institutional relief and out-door allowances, but it has no means of devising plans of The poor law. help which may prevent application to the rates or “take” people “off the rates.” Thus a widow in the first days of widowhood applies and receives an allowance according to the number of her children. Helped at the outset by charity on some definite plan, she may become self-supporting; and if her family be large one or two of her children may be placed in schools by the guardians, while she maintains the remaining children and herself. As far as possible there should be a division of labour between the poor-law and charity. Except where some plan such as that just mentioned is adopted, one or the other should take whole charge of the case relieved. There should be no supplementation of poor-law relief by charity. This will weaken the strength and dissipate the resources of charity without adding to the efficiency of the poor-law. Unless the guardians adopt a restrictive out-door relief policy, there is no scope for any useful division of labour between them and charity; for the many cases which, taken in time, charity might save from pauperism, they will draw into chronic dependence by their allowances a very much larger number. But if there is a restrictive out-door policy, so far as relief is necessary, charity may undertake to meet on its own lines distress which the poor-law would otherwise have met by allowances, and, subject to the assistance of urgent cases, poor-law relief may thus by degrees become institutional only. Then, in the main, natural social forces would come into play, and dependence on any form of annona civica would cease.

Open-handed hospitality always creates mendicants. This is what the hospitals offer in the out-patient and casualty departments, and they have created a class of hospital mendicants. The cases are quickly dealt with, without Hospitals. inquiry and without regard to home conditions. The medical man in the hospital does not co-operate with any fellow-workers outside the hospital. Where his physic or advice ceases to operate his usefulness ceases. He regards no conditions of morality. In a large number of cases drink or vice is the cause of application, and the cure of the patient is dependent on moral conditions; but he returns home, drinks and may beat his wife, and then on another visit to the hospital he will again be physicked and so on. The man is not even referred to the poor-law infirmary for relief. Nor are conditions of home sanitation regarded. One cause of constant sickness is thus entirely overlooked, while drugs, otherwise unnecessary, are constantly given at the hospital. The hospitals are thus large isolated relief stations which are creating a new kind of pauperism. So far as the patients can pay—and many can do so—the general practitioners, to whom they would otherwise go, are deprived of their gains. Still worse is it when the hospital itself charges a fee in its out-patient department. The relief is then claimed even more absolutely as a right, and the general practitioners are still further injured. The doctors, as a medical staff, are not only medical men, but whether they recognize the fact or not, they are also almsgivers or almoners; what they give is relief. Yet few or none of them have ever been trained for that work, and consequently they do not realize how very advantageous, even for the cure of their own patients, would be a thorough treatment of each case both at the hospital and outside it. Nor can they understand how their methods at present protract sickness and promote habitual dependence. Were this side of their work studied by them in any way they would be the first, probably, to press upon the governors of their hospitals the necessity for a change. Unfortunately, at present the governors are themselves untrained, and to finance the hospital and to make it a good institution is their sole object. Hospitals, however, are, after all, only a part of the general administration of charity, though as they are now managed they have seldom any systematic connexion with that administration. Nor is there any co-ordination between the several hospitals and dispensaries. If one rightly refuses further treatment to certain applicants, they have only to wander to some other hospital, there to be admitted with little or no scrutiny. For usually out-patients and casualty patients are not even registered, nor can they be identified if they apply again. Practically they come and go at will. The definite limitation of cases, according to some standard of effectual work, association with general charity, trained almonership and inquiry, and a just regard for the interests of general practitioners, are stepping-stones to reform. In towns where medical charities are numerous a representative board would promote mutual help and organization.

Like the poor-law, endowed charities may be permanent institutions established to meet what should be passing and decreasing needs (cf. the arguments in The State and Charity, by T. Mackay). Administered as they usually Endowed charities. are in isolation—apart from the living voluntary charities of the generation, and consisting often of small trusts difficult to utilize satisfactorily, they tend to create a permanent demand which they meet by fixed quantities of relief. Also, as a rule, they make no systematic inquiries with a view to the verification of the statements of the applicants, for they have no staff for these purposes; nor have they the assistance of almoners or friendly visitors. Nor does the relief which they give form part of any plan of help in conjunction with other aid from without; nor is the administration subject to frequent inspection, as in the case of the poor-law. All these conditions have led to a want of progress in the actual administration of endowed charities, in regard to which it is often very difficult to prevent the exercise of an undue patronage. But there is no reason why these charities should not become a responsible part of the country’s administration, aiding it to reduce outdoor pauperism. It was never intended that the poor-law should extinguish the endowed charities, still less, as statistics now prove, that where endowments abound the rate of pauperism should be considerably above the average of the rest of the country. This shows that these charities often foster pauperism instead of preventing it. As a step to reform, the publication of an annual register of endowed charities in England and Wales is greatly needed. The consolidating schemes of the charity commissioners have done much good; still more may be done in some counties by extending to the county the benefits of the charities of well-endowed towns, as has been accomplished by the extension of the eleemosynary endowments of the city of London to the metropolitan police area. Nor, again, until quite lately, and that as yet only in a few schemes, has the principle been adopted that pensions or other relief should be given only in supplementation of the relief of relations, former employers and friends, and not in substitution of it. This, coupled with good methods of inquiry and supervision, has proved very beneficial. Hitherto, however, to a large extent, endowed charities, it must be admitted, have tended to weaken the family and to pauperize.

In many places funds are raised for the relief of school children by the supply of meals during the winter and spring; and an act has now been passed in England (1906) enabling the cost to be put upon the rates. Usually a very large number of children Relief to children at school. are said to be underfed, but inquiry shows that such statements may be taken as altogether excessive. They are sometimes based on information drawn from the children at school; or sometimes on general deductions; they are seldom founded on any systematic and competent inquiry at the homes. When this has been made, the numbers dwindle to very small proportions. Teachers of experience have noted the effect of the meals in weakening the independence of the family. While they are forthcoming women sometimes give up cooking meals at home, use their money for other things, and tell the child he can get his meal at school. Great temptations are put before a parent to neglect her family, and very much distress is due to this. The meals—just at a time when, owing to the age of her children, the mother’s care is most needed, and just in those families where the temptation is greatest, and where the family instinct should be strengthened—stimulate this neglect. Considered from the point of view of meeting by eleemosynary provision a normal economic demand for food, intervention can only have one result. The demand must continue to outstrip the supply, so long as there are resources available on the one side, and until on the other side the desire of the social class that is chiefly exposed to the temptations of dependence in relation to such relief has been satisfied. If the provision be made from the resources of local or general taxation the largeness of the fund available will allow practically of an unlimited expansion of the supply of food. If the provision be made from voluntary sources, in some measure limited therefore and less certain, this very fact will tend to circumscribe demand and limit the offer of relief. It is indeed the problem of poor-law relief in 1832 over again. The relief provided by local taxation practically unlimited will create a mass of constant claimants, with a kind of assumed right to aid based on the payment of rates; while voluntary relief, whatever its short-comings, will be less injurious because it is less amply endowed. In Paris the municipal subvention for meals rose from 545,900 francs in 1892 to 1,000,000 in 1904. Between 1894 and 1904 there was an increase of 9% in the school population; and an increase of 28% in the municipal grant. In that period the contributions from the local school funds (caisses des écoles) decreased 36%; while the voluntary contributions otherwise received were insignificant; and the payments for meals increased 2%.

The subject has been lately considered from a somewhat different standpoint (cf. the reports of the Scottish Royal Commission on Physical Education, 1903; of the Inter-departmental committees on Physical Deterioration, 1905, and on Medical Inspection and the Feeding of School Children, 1905; also the report of the special committee of the Charity Organization Society on “the assistance of school children,” 1893). After careful investigations medical officers especially have drawn attention to the low physical condition of children in schools in the poorer parts of large English towns, their low stature, their physical defects, the improper food supplied to them at home, their uncleanliness, and their want of decent bringing-up, and sometimes their want of food. Other inquiries have shown that, as women more usually become breadwinners their children receive less attention, and the home and its duties are neglected, while in the lowest sections of the poorer classes social irresponsibility reaches its maximum. Cheap but often quite improper food is provided, and infant mortality, which is largely preventable, remains as high as ever, though adult life is longer. This with a marked decrease in the birth-rate in recent years, has, it may be said, opened out a new field for charitable effort and social work. Science is at each revision of the problem making its task more definite. Actually the mere demand for meals stands for less; the reform of home conditions for more. So it was hoped that instead of making school meals a charge on taxation, as parliament has done, it would be content to leave it a voluntary charge, while the medical inspection of elementary Schools will be made universal; representative relief committees formed for schools or groups of schools; the cases of want or distress among the school children dealt with individually in connexion with their families, and, where necessary, day schools established on the lines of day industrial schools.

At a time of exceptional distress the following suggestions founded on much English experience may be of service (cf. Report of special committee of the Charity Organization Society on the best means of dealing with exceptional Exceptional distress. distress, 1886). Usually at such a time proposals are made to establish special funds, and to provide employment to men and women out of work. But it is best, if possible and as long as possible, to rely on existing agencies, and to strengthen them. Round them there are usually workers more or less trained. A new fund usually draws to it new people, many of whom may not have had any special experience at all. If a new fund is inevitable, it is best that it should make its grants to existing agencies after consultation with them. In any case, a clear policy should be adopted, and people should keep their heads. The exaggeration of feeling at a time of apprehended or actual distress is sometimes extraordinary, and the unwise action which it prompts is often a cause of continuing pauperism afterwards. Where there is public or poor-law relief the following plan may be adopted:—In any large town there are usually different recognized poor-law, charitable or other areas. The local people already at work in these areas should be formed into local committees. In each case a quick inquiry should be made, and the relieving officer communicated with, some central facts verified, and the home visited. Roughly, cases may be divided into three classes: the irresponsible casual labouring class, a middle class of men with decent homes, who have made no provision for the future, and are not members of either friendly society or trades union; and a third class, who have made some provision. These usually are affected last of all; at all hazards they should be kept from receiving public relief, and should be helped, as far as possible, privately and personally. If there are public works, the second class might be referred to them; if there are not, probably some should be left to the poor-law, some assisted in the same way as members of class three. Much would turn upon the family and the home. The first class should be left to the poor-law. If there is no poor-law system at work they should be put on public works. Working men of independent position, not the creatures of any political club, but such as are respected members of a friendly society, or are otherwise well qualified for the task, should be called into consultation. The relief should be settled according to the requirements of each case, but if the pressure is great, at first at least it may be necessary to make grants according to some generally sufficient scale. There should be as constant a revision of cases as time permits. Great care should be taken to stop the relief as soon as possible, and to do nothing to make it the stepping-stone to permanent dependence.

If employment be provided it should be work within the skill of all; it should be fairly remunerated, so that at least the scantiness of the pay may not be an excuse for neglect; and it should be paid for according to measured or piece work. The discipline should be strict, though due regard should be paid at first to those unaccustomed to digging or earthwork. In England and Wales the guardians have power to open labour yards. These, like charities which provide work, tend to attract and keep in employment a low class of labourer or workman, who finds it pays him to use the institution as a convenience. It is best, therefore, to avoid the opening of a labour yard if possible. If it is opened, the discipline should be very strict, and when there is laziness or insubordination, relief in the workhouse should at once be offered. The relief furnished to men employed in a labour yard, of which in England at least half has to be given ih kind, should, it has been said, be dealt out from day to day. This leads to the men giving up the work sooner than they otherwise would. They have less to spend.

In Great Britain a great change has taken place in regard to the provision of employment in connexion with the state. Since about 1890 there has been a feeling that men in distress from want of employment should not be dealt Unemployment. with by the poor-law. A circular letter issued by the Local Government Board in 1886, and subsequently in 1895, coincided with this feeling. It was addressed to town councils and other local authorities, asking them to provide work (1) which will not involve the stigma of pauperism, (2) which all can perform whatever may have been their previous avocations, and (3) which does not compete with that of other labourers at present in employment. This circular led to the vestries and subsequently the borough councils in many districts becoming partially recognized relief authorities for the unemployed, concurrently with the poor-law. Much confusion resulted. The local authorities had seldom any suitable organization for the investigation of applications. It was difficult to supply work on the terms required; and the work was often ill-done and costly. Also it was found that the same set of people would apply year after year, unskilled labourers usually out of work part of the winter, or men habitually “unemployed.” As on other occasions when public work was provided, very few of the applicants were found to be artisans, or members of trades unions or of friendly societies. In 1904 Mr Long, then president of the Local Government Board, proposed that local voluntary distress committees should be established in London consisting of poor-law guardians and town councillors and others, more or less supervised by a central committee and ultimately by the Local Government Board. This organization was set on foot and large sums were subscribed for its work. The report on the results of the movement was somewhat doubtful (Report, London Unemployed Fund, 1904-1905, p. 101, &c.), but in 1905 the Unemployed Workmen’s Act was passed, and in London and elsewhere distress committees like the voluntary committees of the previous year were established by statute. It was enacted that for establishment expenses, emigration and removal, labour exchanges, and the acquisition of land a halfpenny rate might be levied, but that the rate would not be available for the remuneration of men employed. For this purpose (1905-1906) a large charitable fund was raised. A training farm at Hollesley Bay was acquired, and it was hoped to train Londoners there to become fit for agricultural work. It is impossible to judge this experiment properly, on the evidence available up to 1908. But one or two points are important: (1) something very like the “right to labour” has been granted by the legislature; (2) this has been done apart from the conditions required by the poor-laws and orders of the Local Government Board on poor relief and without imposing disfranchisement on the men employed; (3) a labour rate has not been levied, but a rate has been levied in aid of the provision of employment; (4) if the line of development that the act suggests were to be followed (as the renewed Labour agitation in 1908-1909 made probable) it must tend to create a class of “unemployed,” unskilled labourers of varying grades of industry who may become the dependent and state-supported proletariat of modern urban life. Thus, unless the administration be extremely rigorous, once more will a kind of serfdom be established, to be, as some would say, taken over hereafter by the socialist state.

In some of the English colonies Homeric hospitality still prevails, but by degrees the station-house or some refuge is established in the towns as they grow more populous. Finally, some system of labour in exchange for relief Vagrancy. is evolved. At first this is voluntary, afterwards it is officially recognized, and finally it may become part of the system of public relief. As bad years come, these changes are made step by step. In England the vagrant or wayfarer is tolerated and discouraged, but not kept employed. He should be under greater pressure to maintain himself, it is thought. The provision made for him in different parts of the country is far from uniform, and now, usually, at least in the larger towns, after he has had a bath and food, he is admitted to a separate room or cell in a casual ward. Before he leaves he has to do a task of work, and, subject to the discretion of the master, he is detained two nights. This plan has reduced vagrancy, and if it were universally adopted clean accommodation would everywhere be provided for the vagrant without the attractions of a common or “associated” ward; and probably vagrancy would diminish still further. It seems almost needless to say that, in these circumstances at any rate, casual alms should not be given to vagrants. They know much better how to provide for themselves than the almsgiver imagines, for vagrancy is in the main a mode of life not the result of any casual difficulty. Vagrancy and criminality are also nearly allied. The magistrate, therefore, rather than the almsgiver, should usually interfere; and, as a rule, where the magistrates are strict, vagrancy in a county diminishes. An inter-departmental committee (1906) taking generally this line, reported in favour of vagrants being placed entirely under police control, and it recommended a system of wayfarers’ tickets for men on the roads who are not habitual vagrants, and the committal of men likely to become habitual vagrants to certified labour colonies for not less than six months. Still undoubtedly vagrancy has its economic side. In a bad year the number of tramps is increased by the addition of unskilled and irresponsible labourers, who are soonest discharged when work is slack. As a part-voluntary system under official recognition the German Arbeiter-colonien are of interest. This in a measure has led to the introduction of labour homes in England, the justification of which should be that they recruit the energy of the men who find their way to them, and enable them to earn a living which they could not do otherwise. In a small percentage of cases their result may be achieved. Charitable refuges or philanthropic common lodging-houses, usually established in districts where this class already congregate, only aggravate the difficulty. They give additional attractions to a vagrant and casual life, and make it more endurable. They also make a comfortable avoidance of the responsibilities of family life comparatively easy, and in so far as they do this they are clearly injurious to the community.

The English colonists of the New England states and Pennsylvania introduced the disciplinary religious and relief system of Protestantism and the Elizabethan poor-law. To the former reference has already been made. With an American conditions and methods. appreciation of the fact that the cause of distress is not usually poverty, but weakness of character and want of judgment, and that relief is in itself no remedy, those who have inherited the old Puritan traditions have, in the light of toleration and a larger social experience, organized the method of friendly visiting, the object of which is illustrated by the motto, “Not alms, but a friend.” To the friendship of charity is thus given a disciplinary force, capable of immense expansion and usefulness, if the friendship on the side of those who would help is sincere and guided by practical knowledge and sagacity, and if on the side of those in distress there is awakened a reciprocal regard and a willingness to change their way of life by degrees. Visiting by “districts” is set aside, for “friendliness” is not a quality easily diffused over a wide area. To be real it must be limited as time and ability allow. Consequently, a friendly visitor usually befriends but one or two, or in any case only a few, families. The friendly visitor is the outcome of the movement for “associated charities,” but in America charity organization societies have also adopted the term, and to a certain extent the method. Between the two movements there is the closest affinity. The registration of applicants for relief is much more complete in American cities than in England, where the plan meets with comparatively little support. At the office of the associated charities in Boston there is a central and practically a complete register of all the applications made to the public authority for poor relief, to the associated charities, and to many other voluntary bodies.

The Elizabethan poor-law system, with the machinery of overseers, poor-houses and out-door relief, is still maintained in New England, New York state and Pennsylvania, but with many modifications, especially in New York. A chief factor in these changes has been immigration. While the County or town remained the administrative area for local poor relief, the large number of immigrant and “unsettled” poor, and the business connected with their removal from the state, entailed the establishment of a secondary or state system of administration and aid, with special classes of institutions to which the counties or towns could send their poor, as, for instance, state reform schools, farms, almshouses, &c. For the oversight of these institutions, and often of prisons also and lunatic asylums, in many states there have been established state boards of “charity or corrections and charity.” The members of these boards are selected by the state for a term of years, and give their services honorarily. There are state boards in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina and elsewhere. There is also a district board of charities in the district of Columbia. These boards publish most useful and detailed reports. Besides the state board there is sometimes also, as in New York, a State Charities Aid Association, whose members, in the counties in which they reside, have a legal right of entry to visit and inspect any public or charitable institution owned by the state, and any county and other poor-house. A large association of visitors accustomed to inspect and report on institutions has thus been created. Further, the counties and towns in New York state, for instance, and Massachusetts, and the almshouse districts in Pennsylvania, are under boards of supervision. Usually the overseers give out-door relief, and the pauperism of some areas is as high as that in some English unions, 3, 4 and 5%. On the whole population of the United States, however, and of individual states, consisting to a great extent of comparatively young and energetic immigrants, the pauperism is insignificant. In Massachusetts “it has been the general policy of the state to order the removal to the state almshouse of unsettled residents of the several cities and towns in need of temporary aid, thus avoiding some of the abuses incident to out-door relief.” In New York state, in the city of New York, including Brooklyn, the distribution of out-door relief by the department of charities is forbidden, except for purposes of transportation and for the adult blind. Most counties in the state have an almshouse, and the county superintendents and overseers of the poor “furnish necessary relief to such of the county poor as may require only temporary assistance, or are so disabled that they cannot be safely removed to the almshouse.” Public attention is in many cases being drawn to the inutility and injury of out-door relief.

In some states and cities the system of subsidizing voluntary institutions is in full force, and it is in force also in many English colonies. At first sight it has the advantage of providing relief for public purposes without the creation of a new staff or establishment. There is thus an apparent economy. But the evils are many. Political partisanship and favour may influence the amount and disposition of the grants. The grants act as a bounty on the establishment and continuance of charitable institutions, homes for children, hospitals, &c., but not on the expansion of the voluntary charitable funds and efforts that should maintain them; and thus charitable homes exist in which charity in its truer sense may have little part, but in which the chief motive of the administration may be to support sectarian interests by public subsidies. Claimants for relief have little scruple in turning such institutions to their own account; and the institutions, being financially irresponsible, are not in these circumstances scrupulous on their side to prevent a misdirection of their bounties. “Parents unload their children upon the community more recklessly when they know that such children will be provided for in private orphan asylums and protectories, where the religious training that the parents prefer will be given them” (Amos G. Warner, in International Congress: Charities and Correction, 1893). Past history in New York city illustrates the same evil. The admission was entirely in the hands of the managers. They admitted; the city paid. In New York city the population between 1870 and 1890 increased about 80%; the subsidies for prisoners and public paupers increased by 43%, but those for paupers in private institutions increased from $334,828 to $1,845,872, or about 461%. The total was at that time $3,794,972; in 1898 it was rather less, $3,132,786. The alternative to this system is either the establishment of state or municipal institutions, and possibly in special cases payments to voluntary homes for the maintenance of inmates admitted at the request of a state authority, as at certified and other homes in England, with grants made conditional on the work being conducted on specified lines, and subject to a certain increasing amount of voluntary financial support; or a close general and financial inspection of charitable institutions—the method of reform adopted in New York; or payment for only those inmates who are sent by public authorities and admitted on their request.

The enormous extent to which children’s aid societies have been increased in the United States, sometimes with the help of considerable public grants, suggests the greatest need for caution from the point of the preservation of the family as the central element of social strength in the community. The problem of charity in relation to medical relief in the large towns of the United States is similar to that of England; its difficulties are alike.

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