Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/349

Rh civil, and then gradually to a completely civil, poor-relief. In keeping with this development, the ecclesiastical poor-relief in the Teutonic countries remains still in a mere modest, supplementary position, closely confined within the limits of those bound together by a common creed. The opposite is the case in the Latin countries. Here charity, which is administered through churches, monasteries, religious orders, and charitable endowments, is supplemented by state and parish measures. The traces of this historical development are to be found in numerous half-way forms. For example, even in the England of today the public poor-relief is administered by unions which correspond to the several church parishes. In the French bureaux de bienfaisence and in the Italian congregazione di carità, the interest of the community at large finds 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 pursue 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 mediæval 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 rationalism which set in about the middle of the eighteenth century transformed the Christian idea of love of one's neighbor into that of pure humanity. And still today impulses to relieve suffering are produced by motives of the most various kinds. The means to this end are pouring in today as they have never done before. The applied methods of relief, especially where sickness and infirmity are concerned, have