Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/507

Rh is large. In this country the most valuable contribution to the subject has been the Report of the Massachusetts Old Age Pension Commission, a report due in large measure to the energy and careful work of its chairman.

Pensions, as we discus them to-day, are characteristic of modern civilization. This is necessarily so. A pension system can not be valued unless it promises security, and it is only within recent history that institutions and governments have attained to any great degree of security. In the ancient world pensions are hardly met with except in the bounties paid to discharged soldiers. In the Middle Ages the church, the only stable institution, fixed no age limit for its servants, but relieved their old age by coadjutors and assistants rather than by retirement.

The modern pension systems appeared in the nineteenth century and have shown rapid growth. Their extension to all orders of society has been a feature of the opening decade of the twentieth century. This result is due to two facts: first, to our quickened sense of humanity; secondly, to the clearer appreciation that such humanity means more effective service and an improved condition of society. Minor factors have also helped to quicken the attention of the more thoughtful nations to the need of support for old age. The work of modern society is done under increased pressure and under more nervous conditions. At the same time that these changes have taken place improved public hygiene has lengthened our years beyond the average of the last century. Men's activity is exhausted at an earlier date in many callings, while at the same time improved conditions of health prolong their lives. The period in which men require help has, therefore, been extended.

The movement for a general system of pensions to aged poor, to be paid by the community, was first proposed in England in the eighteenth century. The first comprehensive plan, however, to be enacted into a national law was that adopted by the German legislation of 1891. This was followed by Danish legislation in the same year; and at the present time, in addition to these countries, Prance, all the Australian states, and New Zealand have old-age pension systems, while Belgium and several of the cantons of Switzerland maintain a voluntary insurance against old age. In 1898 England enacted in Parliament the most far-reaching of all old-age pension acts.

The United States government has hitherto lagged behind other nations in the investigation and study of the civil pension for its old servants. This is no doubt due in part to the prejudice against all pensions engendered by the history of the bounties bestowed by the government upon the survivors of the Civil War and their families. The payments on these pensions aggregated in 1910, forty-five years after the close of the Civil War, the enormous total of $160,000,000.