"While nominally occa

it, and is therefore worse than wasted." sional and temporary, it becomes in a large proportion of cases continuous and permanent. One application is often followed by another as certainly as new moons are to come. To some, though not to an equal extent, it has the same demoralizing effect as life in an almshouse." The secretary estimates that at least three fifths of the total sum paid in out-door relief goes to permanent paupers.

The testimony of the local officials in Worcester is unequivocal that the system is wholly evil. They estimate that each new case they minister to breeds at once half a dozen more, and that to introduce a poor family to their books is, despite their best efforts, to make them practically permanent paupers, encountering all the evils of accepted pauperism relieved from the shame of it. Many recipients of the dole have been such "always; " not a few had parents who received aid; and at least one person is the grandchild in a line of unbroken pauper descent on the city records. Yet far the worst evil is the utter demoralization which the system works in the neighborhood and among the friends of the recipients of the dole. It rapidly turns industrious and self-respecting poor people into greedy beggars, who, as they see their neighbors receiving public aid, demand the same for themselves. They attack the poor office with the whining cant of the professional beggar and the bullying authority of the ward politician, an authority which even the best hired official finds it hard to withstand; and in proportion as they are aided they lose both their willingness to labor and their selfrespect. In all our cities the system of poor relief is an active school of pauperism and of vice.

What, then, does the New Charity demand that we do?

It demands, first of all, that our charity shall steadily aim at keeping the poor out of pauperism. Poverty can be borne, pauperism, which is poverty accepted without a struggle or a hope, is what degrades. The New Charity lifts into notice the individual case, and says, "Deal with this man by himself, and for his own sake. Recognize that, with him and with all his class, it is the heart, the soul, the mind, the will, that is famishing rather than the body, and seek to start a new life and power of effort from within."

It demands, second, that all who undertake to help their fellow men shall do it with something of personal attention and personal sacrifice. As has been said, "The New Charity is not so simple a thing as the old. To drop an alms into an outstretched palm

was very easy; to take the case of the poor upon one's heart and head, to think over it, to try this method and that, to go to the bottom of conditions which are as repulsive materially as they are morally, to lift, to lift again, undiscouraged by failure, to give one's self to the objects of charity, all this is difficult beyond expression." But it must be done if men are to be saved.

ness.

It must be recognized that to give indiscriminate alms, that is, to drop money into the hand of street beggars, and to pass along mendicants of one kind or another from office to office and from house to house, with no examination of the real merits of the case, and with the encouragement of ceaseless pittances, so far from being a benevolent, is an immoral act. It is purchasing one's own ease at the price of another's injury. It is generous selfishExcept the public dole, no one agency is doing so much to injure the poor to-day as this indiscriminate and incessant almsgiving. It promotes hypocrisy and lying. It cuts the sinew of all worthy ambition. It undermines character. It destroys natural affection among the poor; as the most pitiable member of the household, the cripple, the invalid, the aged, or the little child appeals most powerfully to public sympathy, the able-bodied can most easily live on its earnings. It dries up the springs of mutual helpfulness among the poor, and it hardens the hearts and paralyzes the efforts of the givers themselves as they find themselves again and again the victims of incessant deceit and imposture.

Individuals must be willing to deal with such cases as they touch thoroughly, must lay firm hold of them, study them carefully, and not soon give them up. Much, also, may be done by organization, much by wise legislation, and still more by a general recognition of the moral power of work. A fraction of what is squandered in every city in alms would provide opportunities of work that would sift out a large proportion of all applicants for aid, and would give employment to all the rest.

As to the public dole the testimony now is well-nigh unanimous. Six years ago Brooklyn, N. Y., was distributing $100,000 yearly in this way. It was then cut off in the middle of winter without warning, and without any substitute being provided, "and the result was nothing." Thereafter fewer people were found in the almshouse than at any time for ten years.

Previous to 1880 Philadelphia spent annually $50,000 to $80,000 on the dole. The dole was then abolished, and although the population of the city has increased, the number of in-door poor, for whom provision is still made, has diminished.

The town of Castleton, N. Y., with a population of 12,679, has not given one cent of public out-door relief since 1879. In former years it distributed from $1,500 to $3,000 per annum, with from one hundred to three hundred persons on its list. It now reports that the poor have not suffered, but there is less idleness, and the proportion of the poor from Castleton who are in the poor-house is smaller than that from the other towns of the county where public out-door relief is still distributed.

The State Board of Charities of New York, in its report of last winter, declares that "it has been proved that out-door relief is not only useless as a means of relieving actual suffering, but is an active means of increasing present and future want and vice. It has been abolished already in several cities and towns, not only without causing suffering among special and worthy cases, but with the most beneficial effects on the character and condition of the people who formerly depended upon it."

Mr. Seth Low, of New York, in a paper recently read before the Conference of Charities in Chicago, thus sums up the situation:

1. Out-door relief by the authorities in a large city is certain to become a political thing.

2. Aid so given goes almost entirely to those who can get along without.

(Both statements are proved true in Worcester.)

3. Private benevolence is equal to the demands of the really needy.

4. Value should never be given (except in great emergencies, and then only while the emergency lasts) without securing some labor or service in return.

5. The condition of the poor can be improved only by helping them to help themselves.

It is very apparent that the dole is a curse both to the poor and to the community, the more heinous, that it injures while it purports to bless. It is also manifest that it is so deeply entrenched in our traditions and habits that only with great difficulty can it be stopped. That many other influences, notably unchecked immigration and intemperance, are at work to increase pauperism, only renders it more important that this great obstacle to a healthier relation between class and class be removed. The State will then be left to do its part in caring for the needy in such ways as will not set a premium upon pauperism, and the fountains of both. private charity and of parental and filial duty will not be dried

up by the knowledge of the ever-flowing and ever-alluring dole. The almshouse will then be left as the single provision the State makes for the care of the able-bodied poor, and the disgrace of accepting that aid will be the strongest incentive to both the lazy and the unfortunate to use every effort to earn their own independent support. Cases of exceptional hardship will arise, but for these private charity will readily care, and, in any case, the State will cease to be the great breeder of permanent and shameless pauperism.

The New Charity is eminently the child of the Christian church. It looks to the church for its development, and it finds the church confronted by responsibilities as urgent as they are grave. Hatch, the learned professor, closes the Bampton Lectures for 1880 with these significant words :

"And now, at the close of the nineteenth century, the Christian societies find themselves surrounded by new conditions. The contingency that has to be faced is, that the social forces which are drawing men into combination may draw them into combinations in which Christianity has no part. Whatever be the form in which they are destined to be shaped, the work which the Christian societies, as societies, have to do, in the days that are to come, is not inferior to any work which has lain before them at any epoch of their history. For the air is charged with thunder, and the times that are coming may be times of storm. There are phenomena beneath the surface of society of which it would be hardly possible to overrate the significance. There is a widening separation of class from class; there is a growing social strain; there is a disturbance of the political equilibrium; there is the rise of an educated proletariat. To the problems which these phenomena suggest Christianity has the key. Its unaccomplished mission is to reconstruct society on the basis of brotherhood. To you and me, and men like ourselves, is committed, in these anxious days, that which is at once an awful responsibility and a splendid destiny-to transform this modern world into a Christian society, to change the socialism which is based on the assumption of clashing interests into the socialism which is based on the sense of spiritual union, into a communion wide as human life and deep as human need.”

For ourselves it is well to remember that when Herr Most and Dennis Kearney come to address men long without work and already gaunt with hunger their incendiary doctrines will get a different hearing from that with which they were received by the well-fed audiences to whom they spoke. In these days when danger seems to many comfortably remote it will be well to recognize the source whence it will surely come, thoroughly to revise our system of dealing with pauperism, and, as far as may be, to

awaken in the breast of every well-to-do citizen a sense of his personal responsibility for the condition of his poorer neighbor. The Christian church will have power in proportion as it takes the lead in this movement.

WORCESTER, MASS.

Henry A. Stimson.

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY.1

THE department of psychology is in some sense new in this country as a university specialty. On one side it represents, in part, that oldest and most unsettled of collegiate branches, philosophy. Thrice in its academic history the latter has been the dominant intellectual passion of the ablest and most ingenuous young men, and has spread itself over a large part of the entire field of knowledge. First it degenerated with the Greek mind; in the Middle Ages theology, and later science, absorbed much of its domain and led it into dishonorable captivity. We look in vain to the practice of its professed teachers in Europe or in this country, past or present, for any such agreement concerning its methods, problems, or scope as marks off work for other chairs, while sections of its acknowledged area are covered by a rank growth of popular idols and presuppositions long since eradicated elsewhere. On this university foundation philosophy is likely to find little of the academic ease and leisure which some of its ablest representatives in the past have thought its needful soil, and none of the factitious dignity which sometimes invests it, in curricula where little science is learned, as a finishing or culminating study taught only to seniors, and by the president alone. In this high normal school for special professional teachers where so many fashions in higher education are now set, with a virgin field free from all traditions so apt to narrow this work, and just as we are entering an age when original minds in all fields are giving increased attention to its problems, and perhaps, as is now said from several high and impartial standpoints, to be known in the future as the psychological period of intellectual interest and achievement, if philosophy is to strike root in such soil and season and thrive in an air so bracing, it should, I strongly believe, take on some new features, may attempt some scientific 1 An introductory lecture, delivered October 6.