THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY 835 



expression in the fact that the mayor is the chairman of these 

 associations. 



To these public and semi-public forms of poor-relief there is 

 added an immense number of private charities, which either pur- 

 sue precisely the same object as the former, or else supplement 

 them in some way or other. Their promoters are either single 

 individuals or societies and associations. Above all things, the 

 standpoint of humanity is predominant among them, although 

 this takes different forms of expression at different periods. The 

 simple command to love one's neighbor, which makes it a duty to 

 help one's suffering fellow beings, expresses itself in almsgiving 

 and penitential offerings in the medieval church, where the spiritual 

 welfare of the giver is the idea in the foreground, rather than the 

 need of the receiver. The charitable foundations of the cities that 

 grew up after the Reformation are the expression of a powerful sense 

 of citizenship, which feels itself able to do more for its impoverished 

 members than afford them mere sustenance. The period of rational- 

 ism which set in about the middle of the eighteenth century trans- 

 formed the Christian idea of love of one's neighbor into that of pure 

 humanity. And still to-day impulses to relieve suffering are pro- 

 duced by motives of the most various kinds. The means to this end 

 are pouring in to-day as they have never done before. The applied 

 methods of relief, especially where sickness and infirmity are con- 

 cerned, have reached a degree of excellence all out of comparison 

 with that of any previous period. How much also poor-relief has 

 extended its scope, increased its means, and improved its methods! 

 The method of poor-relief in itself, however, can boast of no progress. 

 It was and continues to be an indispensable, but always crude, 

 means of contending against poverty. So far as we can speak here 

 of progress at all, it is not to be found within, but rather without 

 the proper compass of poor-relief. It begins at the moment when 

 poverty is no longer reckoned with as a condition established by 

 the will of God, or as a necessary fact of human existence; and the 

 question is thus raised whether poor-relief itself cannot be abso- 

 lutely banished from the world by the absolute abolition of poverty 

 itself, and, without prejudice to the physical and mental inequal- 

 ities in natural gifts which divide men, by the removal of that 

 monstrous inequality which exists in the things of this life. From 

 this point of view the problem of poverty is a problem of economics 

 and sociology which investigates the whole relationship of man to 

 man and to nature about him, and whose final aim must be to render 

 to all an equitable share in the treasures that are to be wrung 

 from nature through work, and also, by the creation of universal 

 prosperity, to banish poverty from the world as the very contra- 

 diction of such prosperity. 



