Since the adoption of the centralized system in Wisconsin, there have been no complaints against institution management which have made formal investigations necessary.

Close legislative scrutiny and inspections voluntarily made by able men of college faculties and other students of social science have resulted in nearly uniform approval of the methods pursued. The record is one of which every intelligent citizen of the State is proud. I have no time to go into the matter of comparative statistics of cost and efficiency of institutions in different States, but will say that, so far as I have been able to study reports, I have found no other institutions operating at lower cost or wherein the inmates were better fed and cared for than in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin and Kansas are the only populous States having consolidated executive boards. It has been said that in States having much greater population the idea is impracticable. I do not share this opinion. In my judgment all that is necessary in such States is a board having a greater number of members. If in Wisconsin over 1,000 inspections could have been made in 1894 by the members of a board of six, whose travel aggregated over 150,000 miles, as were the facts, a larger board proportioned to greater labors would have done equally well.

As I understand the matter, the ordinary board of charities is more distinguished for investigations of bad conditions as they have developed than in the work of guarding against the occurrence of evils. Its preventive work is the strength of the Wisconsin Board. It does not simply lock the stable door after the horse is stolen, but makes every effort to keep the steed out of reach of the horse thief.

I am not making a set argument for the executive board idea. What I have said is intended to be merely suggestive. If it lead those having an interest in the subject to investigate for themselves what is being done in the Badger State, not by theorists and doctrinaires and retired capitalists with a dilettante taste for philanthropy, but by men of average endowments, starting early in life as students of social questions and workers in official charities, I shall be satisfied. I am sure that, when they become familiar with our achievements, they will not see changes in legislation in their several States without striving to have incorporated in new legislation some of the points of a centralized system.

I must not take leave of the subject without frankly admitting what my friend Wines has long maintained,— that systems are less important, after all, than men. I would disparage no great result reached in the older States due to the high character and great ability of the workers there. Their contributions to the science of institution management have placed us all under a debt of gratitude. They would make an abundant success of any, the poorest possible, system; but I cannot help thinking they would have been less handicapped in grappling with the many difficulties they have surmounted, had they been officially related to a system like that which has been so satisfactorily worked out in Wisconsin.

Public and Private Kelief.

POVERTY AND ITS RELIEF: THE METHODS
POSSIBLE IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK.

BY MRS. C. R. LOWELL.

were

Wherever any body of Americans interested in the question of poverty and its relief meet together this spring, the first thing they should do is to rejoice. During the winter of 1893-94 we forced by the emergency to do many things which seemed to us dangerous, and we dreaded to meet in the winter of 1894-95 the evil consequences of our actions; but from all the cities comes the same report, the evil consequences have not ensued. This means that we did the good we meant to do and did not do the harm we feared we were doing. the souls of those in need, while we helped their bodies, was so It means that our earnest desire not to hurt strong and so genuine that our influence upon them was good; and it may well give us renewed faith both in human nature and in the spirit in which we have tried to do our work. was that we did care more for the souls and characters of the people I believe the secret we tried to help than for their bodies, and that we did therefore treat each one as an individual person; and, even though we had to deal with hundreds, we never lumped them and treated them wholesale as a class.

It has been most remarkable that the people, hard pressed as they have been again this winter, have not succumbed to the temptation to turn for help where they got it so freely last year. The secretary of the University Settlement in New York, who himself gave out hundreds of relief-work tickets in 1893 and 1894, and who watched carefully the special relief-work given from the Settlement to the striking cloak-makers this winter, said he found only six of last

year's applicants among the five hundred who came this year. At the Charity Organization Society District Offices, where relief-work tickets were also distributed in 1893 and 1894, there has been this year the same remarkable absence of applications from those who were helped then.

And, as I have said, the account is the same from other sources. To take only three of the largest societies in New York: —

The number of “cases treated" by the United Hebrew Charities during the first three months of the years 1894 and 1895 were as follows: —

The number of applicants to the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor during the same period were:

and the number of applicants to the Charity Organization Society:

Thus, as I have said, we do well to rejoice; for a great danger has been escaped and a great lesson has been learned.

But let me make now a practical application of the lesson learned, and try to sketch the rough outlines of a plan by which, in ordinary times, people in distress may be helped physically without being hurt morally.

To turn to the special field assigned me, New York City, the problem of relief in New York is the same as in other large cities,—— how to provide such help as is needed for the people who belong in

the city without attracting to it persons from outside, and how t help effectively such of these last as do come.

The problem would be simple enough if there were only a give number of people in the city suffering from poverty and want, which number could not be increased, and could be decreased by every individual lifted out of misery; but the truth is the exact opposite to this. While the conditions continue which bring people to dis tress, while the great city attracts from all quarters and corrupts those who come, the suffering and misery will continue, no matter how many are "relieved."

It is not only or chiefly selfishness which should lead every large city to dread an influx of the "homeless and unemployed"; for, in the nature of things, little can be done for them which will not finally be more of an injury than a benefit both to them and to others. The natural attraction of the city is felt not only by the most intelligent and energetic of country men and women, who rightly believe that their chances of rising are infinitely greater in the metropolis than at home, but by the happy-go-lucky, who hope that something will turn up every time they make a change, and by the purely lazy or vicious.

Every "charity," notwithstanding the best efforts of those who conduct them, adds to this attraction; and the result is sad beyond expression.

As Edward Denison said thirty years ago:

A prominent characteristic of our social economy, and a main cause of its unsatisfactory condition, is the ignorant rush of population from the villages and smaller towns toward the great industrial centres. . . . It will be objected that, if the people flock to the towns, it is because they find themselves better off there than in the country. But do they? My complaint is that the rush is an ignorant rush, which carries its dupes over the precipice into the gulf of pauperism, of crime, of disease, of starvation, of despair. ...

The problem is to drain a poisonous marsh into which run streams of pure water to be polluted in its depths. Shall pumps be applied to suck out the poisonous stuff and suck in still larger floods of fresh water to absorb the deadly miasm, and so create an unending task of pumping, or shall the streams be cut off?

Practically, what solution of the problem do I propose?