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82 veloped monasticism. Monastic charity was institutional rather than social, as pointed out by Loch, who also shows that it was, in spite of its limitations, a step in advance of the older caste system. The first halting attempts of the civil powers to deal with poverty date from the ninth century. These attempts were quickened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the suppression of monasteries, after the Protestant revolts in Germany, England, and Switzerland, threw upon the civil arm the burden of relief which had been previously carried by the monastic orders.

England created Overseers of the Poor in 1572. The hospital directors in Paris shared the laicizing tendency by appointing paid secular ward nurses in 1692. The relation of poverty to disease was long obscured by the profound general ignorance of sanitary laws. The Black Death (1349) carried off, it is said, one quarter of the population of Europe. The first English Sanitary Act was passed by Parliament in 1388, but the connection between filth and illness continued to be popularly ignored, though Erasmus, the celebrated humanist and scholar (born in 1465) pointed it out in his writings. In general, the policy of secular authorities of the later Middle Ages in dealing with poverty was to treat it as a crime, and those apply-