Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/288

 276 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

It is this personal element which has generally given value to the great public institutions of rescue and relief which have marked the nineteenth century, and which, unfortunately, is today less present among people of superior culture than among the more modest members of society who remain faithful to the sentiments of the family, of brotherly friendship, and of patriotic unity. The rise of the day-nursery in 1844 marked a stage in the development of this beneficence of per- sonal effort. Our schools today have taken a larger task than the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic ; they offer an apprenticeship in moral and economic living, in which the school savings bank aids not a little in rearing for the France of tomorrow a race of independent and honest citizens.

The scholars' mutual aid society, by which some misguided politicians would supplant the school savings bank, requires the payment of a fixed sum weekly or monthly in return for which aid in time of sickness is secured. But while the savings bank is a constant source of training in foresight and independence, the mutual benefit organization provides only the one act of foresight involved in making the contract, and furthermore is open to the serious objection that there is ever present the temptation to fall back on charity or the state under pretense of being unable to continue the payments. Thus dependence on charity, rather than independence and foresight, is the result.

There is a perfectly simple way in which the school may affiliate the scholar with the mutual aid societies, and that is by presenting him, upon his departure from the school, with a certificate book of the mutual aid society. The trouble with our mutual benefit societies, however, is that for some time they have been becoming mere industries and nothing more ; all fraternity, all personal touch, has been removed from their workings. And this tendency in France is largely due to an opinion, current in certain quarters, that these institutions of individual foresight are mere palliatives, calculated to make the people believe that they can by their own efforts procure the amelioration of their lot, whereas, it is maintained, this result can be achieved only by a social revolution, that is to say, by the state absorbing all individual forces.

Society has often thought it could best perform its duty when it had created an asylum for the aged who are without family or resources. But such institu- tional treatment has proved on trial decidedly less attractive and successful than the system whereby pensioners are made members of families, who for the slight remuneration which they receive are glad to make a real place in the home for the old and helpless.

The recent savings-bank crisis in France, which after eighteen months has only in the early days of the present year been calmed, is attributed by many to the report spread abroad among the people that the funds held on deposit were to be laid hands on for philanthropic purposes, or, in other words, that individual thrift among the working classes was to be exploited for purposes of public benevolence. The savings bank must be based on absolute confidence on the part of depositors. The principles professed and practiced for almost a century in England, where this institution is regarded as the most powerful agency of the moral life of the people, should be rigidly adhered to in the administration of similar funds in France. A. DE MALARCE, " Les valeurs morales dans la vie de 1'ouvrier," in Journal des fcconomistes, April, 1904. E. B. W.

The Poor Man's Banker. With the increasing need for the temporary use of money in the later Middle Ages, the practice of making loans gratuitously or on moderate terms came to possess the virtue of a charitable action. Hence sprang up throughout Christendom, from Italy to England, the prototypes of those Monts de Pittt which still constitute the chief mechanism of credit for the poorer strata of society in the Latin countries. The system rests upon the principle that the business of lending on articles pledged as security should be vested in public bodies, upon terms as to rate of interest and period of repayment fixed by the state, and that the element of private profit should be eliminated.

The extent of the business done by the forty-six Monts de Piett of France and Algiers, each of which is established by the decree of the president of the republic and the consent of the communal authorities, may be seen from the total of