Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/337

 SOCIAL POLICY TOWARD DEPENDENTS 325

reduce the wages of self-supporting work-people below the level of the minimum. In the sewing industries very serious evil is thus introduced.

2. A social policy relating to the Dependent Group must iso- late the Criminal Group. One of the plagues of public and pri- vate charity is the anti-social criminal, the sturdy rogue and vagrant, the debased drunkard, the cunning thief, who mix in the throng of the merely dependent and appropriate by impudence or craft the fund intended for the helpless and incapable. At the door and desk of the municipal lodging-house may be seen daily the sifting and judging process one of the most delicate and difficult tasks which ever test the judicial faculties of man. The same problem often confronts the friendly visitor in. the homes of the poor; as when one is called to help the wife and infant chil- dren of a lazy or absconding husband and father.

Recent experiments and discussions at this dividing line have shown that the rough and ready, but overworked, "work test," even as a " workhouse test," is but one factor in the best method. One difficulty is that the motley multitude called the "unem- ployed " is composed of unlike elements the vagrant, the inebri- ate, the petty unsuccessful thief, the burglar " down in his luck," the physical degenerate, the enfeebled convalescent just staggering back from a hospital, the stranded country youth, the unskilled laborer seeking a job without trade-union card, and others; some with hard palms and thick muscles, some with deft but delicate fingers, some accustomed to cold and heat, some with prophetic cough ready to perish with slight exposure to sun or storm.

In order to treat with fairness, discrimination, wisdom, and humanity all these " Unemployed," and to transfer to the machin- ery of the criminal law those with whom charity cannot deal, several tests are necessary, and a merely automatic, mechanical method is totally irrational, (a) First of all a judicious, firm, courageous, and humane agent is necessary. The evil of depend- ing entirely on a single coarse test, as the stone pile, the bath, the workhouse, is that it seems to make the man unnecessary. It has long been observed that in an asylum for the insane where all the patients are kept within steel cages, one or two brutal attendants