his laborious and valuable study of the condition of the poor in York.

"That family is in poverty," says Mr. Rowntree, "whose total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency; or whose total earnings would have been sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency, were it not that some portion of it was absorbed by other expenditure, either useful or otherwise."

But what, after all, has science to do with poverty, or poverty with science? The suggested relation of the two is not accepted by every one without surprise. The question still needs to be answered. Why, then, is it necessary or desirable that Science and Poverty should be brought into relation with one another; and what benefit will result from such relation? What is the treatment that has been applied to poverty hitherto; and what the success that has followed such treatment? What has been the attitude of Religion, of Ethics, of Law; and what has been the reward of the continuous efforts of the Church, of Philanthropy and of Statesmanship?

With regard to those religions with which we are most familiar, it may be said that since early times the Jew and Christian alike have believed themselves bound to practise charity, but have generally conceived their duty to be fulfilled when they have given alms, or at the most when they have visited the poor and needy in their affliction. The poor were a permanent institution; but hardly an evil, since they afforded an opportunity of doing good works. "The poor," said the ancient Jewish lawgiver, "shall never cease out of the land. Therefore I command thee, saying, 'Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy in thy land." . . . "The poor," said Jesus of Nazareth, "ye have always with you." "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor." The Great Teacher did indeed look beyond mere charity and alms-giving, and even elevated poverty into a desirable thing in itself. The Kingdom of Heaven was for the poor and needy: the last were to be first, and beggars were to rule the earth. But almsgiving was too deeply ingrained in the Eastern nature to allow of its being accorded a merely secondary place in the religious observances of Eastern peoples. The early Christian Church, on the whole, did endeavour to carry out the teaching of its Founder in relation to the poor. But after it had allied itself with the great Roman power almsgiving once more took a prominent place in its tenets. The receiving and dispensing of alms became one of the recognised functions of the Roman Church.

In England, charity is more often left to private enterprise, either

under the auspices of religious associations or apart from them. But of late years we have come to see that almsgiving alone merely aggravates the very evil it is intended to cure. It degrades the recipient, and tends to foster a permanent class who subsist wholly or partially on the gifts of the charitable. Efforts are now made to preserve the independence of the poor, and in place of mere doles we have institutions such as the Salvation Army labour colonies, and the labour farms of private individuals. Philanthropy has become organised, and endeavours are made to discriminate between deserving and undeserving cases. Associations which have various forms of charitable enterprise for their object are now numbered by thousands. But with all the combined efforts of charity organisation societies, mendicity societies and other similar bodies, we have merely touched the fringe of the great problem, and it cannot be said that either religion or private philanthropy has yet made much progress towards the discovery of the key to its solution.

And how has the State dealt with poverty? Laws for the relief or for the suppression of the poor have been common and numerous both in continental countries (with the possible exception of Italy), and in England. In England, commencing in the middle ages by treating paupers as criminals, punishing those who assisted them, whipping beggars for a first offence, cropping their ears for a second, and putting them to death as enemies to the commonwealth for a third; a little later, branding them and selling them into slavery; we quite suddenly, in the great humanitarian wave that swept over us at the end of the eighteenth century, entirely reversed our policy, and for over thirty years pursued a system, the results of which were so disastrous that we have not even yet entirely

recovered from the economic difficulties which it created. This was the system of giving relief in aid of wages. The evils of this plan were so great that the Commission appointed to inquire into it reported that it was destructive of the welfare of the community. The evidence showed that the relief given to the labourers simply reduced the rate of wages paid by the farmers and other employers, who, with the assistance of the magistrates, themselves framed the sliding scales of aid. Men were often turned out of employment and then taken back from the parish at reduced wages. In parish after parish it was found that all the able-bodied labourers received allowances. Thrifty men were refused work until their savings were exhausted and they had become paupers. Of course such a method of dealing with poverty bore the germs of its own decay.

As a result of the Commissioners' Report, it was abolished, and was superseded by the present Union system. The leading principle of this is that the standard of comfort of the pauper ought to be lower than that of the poorest labourer, on the ground that to

make pauperism comfortable is to encourage indolence and vice. The system is at present carried out by 658 Boards of Guardians; and no less than 15,592 bodies are actively engaged in the administration of the poor law. Yet the statistics show that it cannot by any means be said that even absolute pauperism is decreasing as we have a right to expect. In 1879 England possessed 817,890 paupers, of whom 104,817 were able-bodied adults, costing £8,232,472. In January 1903, 847,480 were in receipt of relief, of whom 112,616 were able-bodied, costing for 1902, £12,261,192. Thus in these twenty-four years there has been a considerable net increase. In fact the total number of poor returned on January 1 of last year was higher than it had been on the same day in any year since 1873. It is true that in relation to the population the numbers show a decreasing tendency, and the proportion in 1903, though higher per thousand of the population than in 1902, 1901, and 1900, was with those exceptions the lowest since 1863. The cost however was in 1902 higher than it has ever been. The Guardians do not of course profess in any sense to prevent destitution, and our poor-law system has done nothing whatever, notwithstanding its enormous expense, for the permanent removal of poverty, unless it be that by inspiring a wholesome dread of "going into the house" it has to some extent preserved the independent spirit of the poor. But of what use is independence to those who can have no scope for its exercise; who are hedged in with a host of barriers in the way of their escape from indigence; and who, deep though their horror of the last stage be, can hope for no other end to their life of toil than the shelter of its friendly but unwelcome walls?

According to Mr. Booth's well-known estimate, not less than thirty per cent. of the people of London are below the poverty line; and it is remarkable that Mr. Rowntree, working independently, by different methods, in a different town, arrived very nearly at the same result, placing his estimate of poverty in York at about twenty-eight per cent. If it be admitted that London and York are typical towns in this respect, and there seems no reason to doubt it, the dreadful significance of these figures to social reformers is appalling. For in the census of 1901, no less than 77 per cent. of the population of the United Kingdom was returned as Urban. So that even assuming no poverty in village life we have 21 per cent. or 22 per cent. of the entire population without the means of keeping themselves in merely physical efficiency. And what does the allowance for merely physical efficiency mean? To illustrate what it means to individual families I cannot do better than quote a short passage from Rowntree himself:

"A family living upon the scale allowed for in this estimate must never spend a penny on railway-fare or omnibus. They must never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular

concert. They must write no letters to absent children, for they cannot afford to pay the postage. They must never contribute anything to their church or chapel, or give any help to a neighbour which costs them money. They cannot save, nor can they join sick club or trade union, because they cannot pay the necessary subscriptions. The children must have no pocket-money for dolls, marbles, or sweets. The father must smoke no tobacco and must drink no beer. The mother must never buy any pretty clothes for herself or for her children. Should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the parish doctor; should it die, it must be buried by the parish. If any of these conditions are broken the extra expenditure involved is met, and can only be met, by limiting the diet; or, in other words, by sacrificing physical efficiency."

And it is at a lower stage even than this that nearly a quarter of our population are living, in this land of abounding wealth, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Can we then rest satisfied with the old methods of procedure? Can we contemplate with equanimity the fact that after many centuries of the well-meant efforts of religious bodies, philanthropists and statesmen, the physical efficiency of our people is in grave jeopardy, and we are face to face with a race question of the first importance? The old methods have failed because the problem was not approached in a scientific spirit. Scientific attempts have scarcely yet been seriously made to probe beneath the surface of this gaping wound in the social organism. No great organised effort has yet been made to shed upon it the light derivable from all branches of all knowledge. Not even yet, with all our boasted progress, with all our boasted biological method, do we seriously grasp the first principle in dealing with poverty and other social maladies; that is, the recognition that they are diseases, in the strictest sense, of the national organisation, and as such must be scientifically diagnosed before being treated. It is true that we admit it as a pleasing and useful analogy for purposes of abstract reasoning; but we hesitate to accept it as a positive and practical truth. We do not see that just as it is foolish to temporarily relieve the local symptoms of bodily disease without attempting to remove the causes of the trouble, so it is folly of the rankest kind to go on spending twelve millions a year on poor-law relief, and many more millions in public and private charities, without making the most strenuous efforts to discover the laws underlying the economic conditions that make poverty possible. Society is an organism, just as much as our bodies are organisms. Of course there are points of difference; but they are far outnumbered by points of resemblance. If Society is diseased, its members necessarily suffer; the strength and stability of the whole community is weakened; and fulness of life in the individual becomes limited.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance to the future welfare of the race of removing all hindrances to the organism's healthy

action and development. It is sometimes said that scientific sociology is materialistic. But those who make the objection do not realise how the material requisites of well-being are intimately bound up with the formation not merely of a vigorous body, but of character, and the highest development of the intellectual and spiritual nature. Man's character is moulded by his every-day environment, and by the material resources which fall to his lot, just as much as it is by his religious ideals. Religious ideals, indeed, largely depend upon physical conditions. The Salvation Army discovered long ago that a man cannot pray properly upon an empty stomach, and a man's spiritual nature depends far more than some of us realise upon the amount of his income. It may make little difference to his opportunities of developing his faculties whether he earns £5 a week or £50; but the difference between a family income of £1 a week and one of £3 is vast, for whereas with £3 the material necessities may be supplied, with £1 they may not. And while the poor may often, and do often, find some scope for the exercise of their higher moral faculties, those faculties are necessarily impoverished and warped by the sordid conditions by which extreme poverty is hedged about.

"The study of the causes of poverty," as Prof. Marshall well puts it, "is the study of the causes of the degradation of a large part of mankind." If this be admitted-and who can doubt its truth ?surely the removal of poverty should engross the attention of the master minds of our generation, and Science should be encouraged to grapple with the problem (that all the efforts of religion, philanthropy and legislation have failed to touch); whether the poor must be always with us, and whether there need be any so-called "lower classes" at all.

The question of the method of procedure is a far more difficult one. For sociology is yet in its infancy. We are still in the student stage. It is still our task to co-ordinate our facts, to collect information. All the discovered truths of biology, of chemistry, of mechanics, of economics, of ethics, of religion, must be carefully and patiently collected and accurately investigated. Their relation one to another must be sought for from the point of view of the particular problem we are studying. That is what we mean by Science in its relation to poverty. The first thing to do is to se; the second to record; and the third to bring into relation. The great difficulty is to discover people who can see; so many ardent reformers are partially blind. They can only take within the limited range of their vision a small portion of their problem at one time. Accuracy of observation is not, or has not until recently been, deemed of sufficient importance to take an important place in Your educational curricula. It is this lack of the observant faculty that leads one party of reformers to discover that the main cause of