Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/363

Rh out of the means of the rate-payer, may be contested; while private relief is voluntary, and is administered out of voluntary contributions. Nevertheless, the difference between public and voluntary relief is not so prominent in practical administration as theoretical considerations would lead one to think. Moreover, in countries of which voluntary poor-relief is characteristic the civic authorities place very considerable public means at the disposal of those who manage this voluntary relief; while, on the other hand, in the poorer communities of Germany or England the public relief falls far short of the demands made upon it. Moreover, the prevalence of voluntary relief does not exclude the state or the community from appropriating means for single objects. Thus in France the care for children and the insane devolves upon the départements, and the care for the sick, on the local communities, to which, however, the state grants considerable assistance. On the whole, the participation of the state and its greater associations in the burden of poor-relief forms a prominent feature of the modern development of public relief. The whole body of modern legislation on poor-relief in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria provides for considerable state and provincial aid for poor-relief, and lays on the state or the province direct responsibility for the care of certain classes of poor, for example, especially the insane, the infirm, and idiots. Moreover, a marked tendency to introduce, or at least to extend the sphere of, public relief makes itself evident in the Latin countries, as in the French law of 1895 concerning the care of the sick, in the Italian law of 1890 on public charity, and in the proposed legislation in Belgium and the Netherlands which has not yet been discarded.

These efforts to increase the sphere of public relief are at first surprising, and appear to stand in contradiction to the distinctive characteristics of the age in which we live—to counteract poverty rather by methods of prevention and by measures calculated to increase prosperity in general. Yet here there is no contradiction, but, on the contrary, a proof of the fact that poor-relief on its side has imbued itself with a knowledge of the importance of all such measures of prevention, and is directing its efforts to become what we today are accustomed to call "social relief." The legislation