846 THE DEPENDENT GROUP 



relief does not exclude the state or the community from appropriating 

 means for single objects. Thus in France the care for children and 

 the insane devolves upon the departements, and the care for the sick, 

 on the local communities, to which, however, the state grants con- 

 siderable assistance. On the whole, the participation of the state 

 and its greater associations in the burden of poor-relief forms a 

 prominent feature of the modern development of public relief. The 

 whole body of modern legislation on poor-relief in Germany, Switzer- 

 land, and Austria provides for considerable state and provincial aid 

 for poor-relief, and lays on the state or the province direct responsi- 

 bility for the care of certain classes of poor, for example, especially 

 the insane, the infirm, and idiots. Moreover, a marked tendency to 

 introduce, or at least to extend the sphere of public relief makes 

 itself evident in the Latin countries, as in the French law of 1895 

 concerning the care of the sick, in the Italian law of 1890 on public 

 charity, and in the proposed legislation in Belgium and the Nether- 

 lands which has not yet been discarded. 



These efforts to increase the sphere of public relief are at first 

 surprising, and appear to stand in contradiction to the distinctive 

 characteristics of the age in which we live - - to counteract poverty 

 rather by methods of prevention and by measures calculated to 

 increase prosperity in general. Yet here there is no contradiction, 

 but, on the contrary, a proof of the fact that poor-relief on its side 

 has imbued itself with a knowledge of the importance of all such 

 measures of prevention, and is directing its efforts to become what 

 we to-day are accustomed to call " social relief." The legislation 

 on the education of abandoned children, the oldest of which dates 

 back scarcely twenty years, rests on the principle of this knowledge. 

 It administers poor-relief to the children with the aim of preventing 

 the young who grow up under the direction of this law from falling 

 in future years into a condition of poverty. A like tendency is 

 displayed by the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, 

 the juvenile courts, the promotion of immigration to Canada, the 

 equipment of school-ships, etc. The care for disease has a far wider 

 aim than the mere care of the patient. It searches out the lurking- 

 places of disease in order to tear it out by the roots. It is no wonder 

 that new problems have everywhere sprung up, where the light of 

 new sanitary and social knowledge has lit up the corners and holes 

 of poverty, and where the young science of sociology has taught us to 

 understand economic and social phenomena. One need here only 

 call to mind the very recent movement for attacking tuberculosis and 

 the abuse of alcohol. At the same time, this movement against 

 tuberculosis beyond all others makes very manifest how far we are 

 still removed from a healthy condition of affairs, and how to-day, in 

 spite of every effort, millions of our fellow beings still live in such 



