roper 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