766 THE URBAN COMMUNITY 



surpasses, in many respects, even the countries with obligatory char- 

 ity; and where charity is voluntary, it is voluntary not only for the 

 individuals but also for the communities, the largest of which have 

 gone farthest in performing voluntary charitable duties. In the 

 United States of America, where there is no uniform system and 

 where all intermediate degrees from strictly voluntary to com- 

 pletely obligatory charity exist, the necessity of uniform administra- 

 tion appeared most urgent in the urban centres of population. As 

 London has set an example by its Charities Directory, so did 

 New York with the great idea of the local concentration of its chari- 

 table institutions. A constantly growing circle of private, of 

 familiar activity occupies itself with charity, by rising from the 

 idea of removing existing need to the higher idea of preventive 

 charity. Thus the administrations of charity either endeavor to 

 improve sanitary conditions as sources of pauperism, or they attempt 

 to diminish the lack of employment and occupation by caring for 

 finding work more easily, by erecting small houses at the right time 

 in order to prevent the ill effects of abnormal high rates of renting, 

 etc. With all these aspirations charity does not create any new 

 objects of its activity, but it selects certain activities from those of 

 the family which are appropriate for the wide circle of the com- 

 munity. Charity is the intermediate stage through which a number 

 of activities pass in order to be taken out of the hands of the family 

 and to be performed at first only under compulsion of necessity and 

 in a provisory manner, and later to become a problem of enormous 

 significance. 



For example: To procure a dwelling is the matter of the family. 

 A place of refuge for the homeless and the inducement to build little 

 cottages when no houses are available is a provisory assistance 

 through charity; the policy of land and of home is a great modern 

 communal problem. 



While school and charity demonstrate, especially by the example 

 of Germany, that the sphere of communal activity is determined by 

 the condition that the authority finds everywhere the family, yet a 

 number of other urban problems represent activity taken from the 

 family, as water-supply and canalization. Often it is said that the 

 modern technic has not done anything to facilitate housekeeping, 

 since the wife stands even to-day at the primitive hearth and must 

 work with the same primitive utensils which her great-grandmothers 

 and their ancestors had possessed. But in those days housekeeping 

 comprised also carrying water into the house and removing the 

 garbage. To-day it is difficult to imagine how in high apartment 

 houses the burdens of housekeeping could be overcome, if these two 

 functions had not been taken by the urban community from the 

 family. And this transition was accomplished so thoroughly that it 



