s.
All children of the poor were sent to school or taught a trade.

Though there were sporadic examples of municipal poor-relief in Germany
prior to the Reformation, it was the religious movement that there
first gave the cause its decisive impulse. In his _Address to the
German Nobility_ Luther had recommended that each city should take care
of its own poor and suppress "the rascally trade of begging." During
his absence at the Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps
to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A common fund was
started by the application of ecclesiastical endowments, from which
orphans were to be housed, students at school and university to be
helped, poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money at four per
cent. A severe law against begging was passed. Augsburg and Nuremberg
followed the {561} example of Wittenberg almost at once [Sidenote:
1522] and other German cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one
joined the procession.

For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of pauperism, though it
did not originate in the Reformation, was much more rapidly and
thoroughly developed in Protestant lands. In these the power of the
state and the economic revolution attained their maximum development,
whereas the Roman church was inclined, or obligated, to stand by the
medieval position. "Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract.
Thus Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published _A Plea for
the Right of the Poor to Beg_. [Sidenote: 1530] The Spanish monk,
Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his _Sacred Economy of caring for the
Poor_, [Sidenote: 1564] condemned the whole plan of state regulation
and subvention as heretical. The Council of Trent, also, put itself on
the medieval side, and demanded the restoration to the church of the
direction of charity.

[Sidenote: 1531]

But even in Catholic lands the new system made headway. As the
University of Paris approved the ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in
Catholic Germany, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but
informed by the modern spirit, grew up.

In England the problem of pauperism became more acute than elsewhere.
The drastic measures taken to force men to work failed to supply all
needs. After municipal relief of various sorts had been tried, and
after the government had in vain tried to stimulate private munificence
to co-operate with the church [Sidenote: 1572] to meet the growing
ne