appoint an especially intelligent and sympathetic man or woman to take the moral oversight; and he should at once go to the district committee meeting nearest to his own house, lay the facts before the committee, and ask their advice and help. If physical relief were required, the best source from which to obtain it would be pointed out; and, in any event, the visitor would at least have the advantage of talking over the possible ways of helping, and would get encouragement from the experience of persons who were constantly considering the needs of just such families.

In regard to physical relief to able-bodied men and women the experience of 1893-94 would seem to show that, while relief-work as a regular annual means of giving relief would probably be very bad for the community as a whole by encouraging the less efficient and energetic workers to depend on it, yet its influence on the character of the individual may be good, and, if very carefully guarded, it may be the best means of giving such relief as is absolutely necessary and inevitable.

But I do not wish to be supposed to be presenting an ideal relief system. There is no ideal system of relief. For relief-giving by system is an evil; and even though a necessary evil, as at the present stage of our social development it seems to be, yet the only ideal in connection with it is that it may in time render itself or be rendered unnecessary. I think no one yet knows how this can be done; but the means by which we shall reach the knowledge of how to do it I believe to be evident, and that is by the patient and careful study, by educated men and women who go to live as neighbors of the poor workers in the crowded parts of the city, of the actual people who must be helped and of the conditions that must be changed.

The fact that such educated neighbors can do a great deal to make those around them happier and better is self-evident; for, however wonderfully the overruling and omnipotent "Power that makes for Righteousness" may turn what seem to us fatal surroundings into a means of grace to the human soul, yet there are many ways in which those who have had larger opportunities can bring pleasure and beauty to the toilers in swarming tenement houses. In the daily intercourse with the children, with the boys and girls, and with the young men and women, much can be done to awaken nobler ambitions and create higher ideals. But, impor

tant as this personal work is, I do not think it the most important work to be done. The chief value, to my mind, of the colonizing of the more highly educated and, from a worldly standpoint, more favored individuals among those who live in densely crowded neighborhoods, and work hard for a good part of every twentyfour hours, is that they come to know them, to know their lives and to know their needs, and can report them to the people who have the power to supply what is needed.

Experts are required now in every field. Most people have not time to attend to more than their own immediate surroundings and business. So many things press for attention that much which is of the greatest importance is pushed aside, and therefore it is necessary that each part of the public weal should be especially studied by those who devote themselves to personal observation and the collection of facts; and such students and collectors of facts in sociology are, or ought to be, the men and women who take up their residence among the "plain people," as Lincoln called them, and observe their daily life near at hand and all day long and every day.

The reason "charity" (so called, although it is sad to degrade a beautiful word) is so often discredited, and more often so discreditable, is that it has usually worked without any knowledge of this daily life.

It has kept out of the way of it, and has tried in a feeble and ineffectual manner to deal with the broken fragments, the failures, thrown out by it. When men and women have broken down because of long hours of overwork and horribly bad surroundings to work in, "charity" has put them into hospitals, and has either never thought or said anything about the causes of the break-down, or it has complacently remarked that "it was a pity that such conditions were necessary for business reasons."

When "charity" has found men and women drunken and shiftless and unable to care for their children, "charity" has taken their children away from them, and has said, "That's the way poor people are"; but it has not asked why they were so or tried to prevent their being so.

When girls have gone wrong and boys have stolen, "charity" has provided Refuges for the girls and has put the boys into prison, and has talked as if such ruin of lives, and what looks like ruin of souls, were inevitable, never even wondering what other outlet for the

natural love of pleasure and adventure, so carefully provided for in the case of other boys and girls, there was for these boys and girls.

Now, that is all changed or is changing, and it is, I believe, because men and women are learning the actual life of the mass of workers who do not break down, but who only die; who are not drunken and shiftless, but who lead lives of such heroic self-sacrifice and devation as we cannot lead because the demand is not made on us; and of the lives of the boys and girls, who grow up brave and pure through and in the midst of circumstances which, as I have said, seem to us fatal.

But, notwithstanding all the virtues and all the heroism of the mass of the people, they do need and ought to have a great many things they do not have, and the whole community ought to help them to get them; but the first step toward helping them to get them is to know exactly what they need, and this knowledge the "residents” in college settlements and the individual residents in tenement houses must get for us. They must report the neglect of the city government to do its duty, whether as street-cleaners, as police, or as educator. They must report the oppression of employers, whether the oppression be the result of individual carelessness or, as is often the case, the result of trade conditions. They must cry aloud for more air, more space, for a larger and better life in every way for the great masses of men and women in our cities.

Not only does self-interest require that we help to lift our fellowmen, to make them useful citizens, law-abiding, and industrious, but no one can escape the responsibility for the intellectual and moral development of the race. As Drummond says, "the directing of part of the course of evolution" has passed into the hands of man. "A spectator of the drama for ages, too ignorant to know that it was a drama, and too impotent to do more than play his little part, Nature meant him to become a partner in her task,

It is not given him

and share the responsibility of the closing acts. as yet to bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or to unloose the bands of Orion. In part only can he make the winds and the waves obey him or control the falling rain. . . . But in a far grander sphere and in an infinitely profounder sense has the sovereignty passed to him. For he finds himself the guardian and the arbiter of his personal destiny and of that of his fellow-men. The moulding of his life and of that of his children's children in measure lies

with him. . . . He shapes the path of progress for his country and his time. The evils of the world are combated by his remedies, its passions are stayed, its wrongs redressed, its energies for good or evil directed by his hand. For unnumbered millions he opens or shuts the gates of happiness, and paves the way for misery or social health. Never before was it known and felt with the same solemn certainty that man . . . must be his own maker and the maker of the world."

THE BEST METHOD OF RELIEF IN SMALL

CITIES.

BY REV. JOHN C. BROOKS, SPRINGFIELD, MASS.

The question assigned me to consider to-night assumes that there is need of relief in small cities, and yet that the method of giving it, either from the character of the relief required or from the means at hand to administer it, is likely to be different from that found best to be pursued in larger cities.

Our study, then, shall be first of the field, and next of the instruments available for the work to be done; and then, if we can come to see the most harmonious and effective bringing together of these two, we may hope to arrive somewhere near the best method of relief thus far found.

What, then, are generally the nature and condition of the persons who need relief in our small cities? They are about equally divided between the native American and the foreign born.

Those belonging to the former class are either natives of the neighboring country towns, where absence of any means of steady employment has prevented the acquirement of one settled trade early in life, and induced habits of shiftlessness, and at last driven them to the cities, or they are those who have lived so long, even from their childhood, in the same city that they are discouraged amid their old surroundings, and have lost their own confidence and that of their old acquaintances of more prosperous condition.

The foreign element is in many cases more promising than these, only those who are capable and of industrious disposition generally

having the energy or desire to settle in one of our smaller cities. And among all classes in such intimately associated and thrifty communities we do not find abject poverty and squalor nor degraded ignorance, except in sporadic cases. What might be called slums find little cause to exist in such cities, where there is room enough yet for growth and healthy expansion, and where the poor can find enough of fresh air and sunlight. The only serious reminder of hopeless poverty is to be found in the constant presence of the tramp, by far the most serious and subtle evil influence with which such cities have to deal, introducing into every community physical and moral contamination, the effects of which we can never fully know, and then, as quickly and mysteriously as he comes, passing out of all reach of locally organized charitable work.

To linger no longer in study of the field, I would impress upon you, if I may, the hopeful and high character of the work to be done there. Not in most cases is the struggle to keep body and soul together that which calls for our aid, as in so many of the larger cities, but the further elevation and development of minds and souls which are waiting to be developed in the ways of good citizenship and healthy home life.

What, now, are the instrumentalities at our command for this work? We have in one of our small cities a community with a comparatively short experience in the official administration of municipal charities, very probably with traditional ideas left over from its village and town stage of existence still clinging to it. We are likely, also, to find a large proportion of the citizens with limited means to bestow in charities, and many of those able to give with a deep-rooted prejudice against any systematic investigation of the causes of want in individual cases from a very natural attachment to the habits of open-handed neighborly sharing of a simpler time, when every one knew and trusted every one else. Add to this the strong feeling apt to exist in the various local churches and associations in regard to their own province and methods, and we have some at least of the drawbacks to be found.

Yet from the very same causes from which these disadvantages spring come corresponding advantages of great value. The comparative simplicity of life and freedom from absorption in many things; the pureness of the administration of the city's affairs; the more general and personal acquaintance of citizens one with.