worth little if children may not be born well, grow in health, develop in stature; if mothers and wives in isolated or congested areas must toil in an unequal distribution of life and labor as between men and women, as between neighborhood and families. The great American boast that men may rise from simple beginnings to greater leadership amounts to little if communities may poison youth with vice or idleness or injustice in the courts. Freedom to go to school, or compulsory laws to enforce attendance are pitifully weak in comparison with an effective family welfare service which instructs and leads into the knowledge of what education means and into the desire to attain it. Labor proclamations about participation in the government of industry are worth little compared to the coöperative enactment of an industrial welfare which prevents child labor, unsanitary conditions and the other inequalities which may arise because of the lack of understanding and coöperation on the part of all concerned. In all these aspects of human endeavor public welfare may be expected to make great contributions to progress; and it may be affirmed equally that without an effective public welfare service of this sort, there can be no maximum achievement toward the attainment of human development and human freedom.

The most outstanding example of the new philosophy and technique of public welfare will be

found in the organization of state departments. City departments are important, but as yet they represent only special cases and special situations. County organizations are important as a part of the organic system underlying state organization and administration. It would seem most important, therefore, that larger efforts be undertaken to see that the state systems of public welfare in the United States be put upon some such substantial basis as are the state departments of education, of which every state has its definite organization and its definite administrative head. To study more fully, therefore, as much as possible of the present situation and of present organizations in the United States becomes an important task to which social workers, students of politics and public policy will more and more devote themselves.

CHAPTER II

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF STATE SYSTEMS OF PUBLIC WELFARE

A

STUDY of the development of state public

welfare systems shows a chaotic variety of experiments. There are few points on which there is anything like universal agreement among the states except perhaps on the point that the field of service is one to be recognized as a branch of the state organization," and even on that point three states have not acquiesced and have not yet created a state agency for such service.1

The movement toward creation of a central or state agency for standardizing the care, custody, and treatment of persons in distress and recognized as appropriate subjects for public service was begun in Massachusetts in 1863 when the legislature created a Board of State Charities, with powers of supervision and recommendation in relation to the charitable and correctional institutions already established and with administrative powers in the matter of admittance, transfer, and discharge of pauper lunatics." Massachusetts

1 Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah. Utah has had for some time, however, a commission of inquiry on the subject.

* Massachusetts Acts of 1863, chap. 240. A more correct view would probably regard the creation in 1847 of the New York State Emigration Commission, followed in 1851 by the Massachusetts Board of Alien Passengers and State Paupers, as the initial step in the field (see E. Abbott, "Restrictive Immigration Legislation," Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 49th Annual Meeting, 1922).

was followed by Ohio and New York in 1867; Illinois, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island in 1869; Wisconsin and Michigan in 1871; and Kansas and Connecticut in 1873.

It is not profitable to list the authorities in the order of their creation. The United States Census Summary of Laws relating to Dependent Classes makes possible a statement with reference to the situation in 1913 sufficiently complete for present purposes. The names of the authority created vary from state to state and from time to time in the same state, and differences in name indicate a wider or a narrower scope of work entrusted to the newly created body as well as the nature of the power given. The Board of Public Welfare created in 1919 in Georgia* exercises powers that are "strictly visitorial and advisory." The Illinois" department is one of nine executive departments of the state. The Board of State Charities of Massachusetts, for example, created, in 1863, to deal with the state institutions and with the state "poor" who had no "settlement," became in 1879 the State Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity, when the correctional functions were assigned to the Board of Commissioners of Prisons (Laws of 1879, chap. 249), five in number, of

3 Nor is it implied that all these authorities have had continuous effective existence. In some states there have been intervals when the law was repealed; in others, failure to appropriate has for the time rendered the legislation nugatory.

4 Georgia Acts of 1919, No. 186, sec. 6.

5 Illinois Revised Statutes, chap. 242, sec. 3.

• Massachusetts Acts of 1879, chap. 291.

whom two were women, was revived in 1886 as the State Board of Lunacy and Charity,' relieved of certain tasks connected with lunatics and settled paupers in 1898,8 when it became the State Board of Charity, which it remained until erected, in 1919, into a Department of Public Welfare. As to structure, it may be noted that in 1913, when all the states except ten1o had created these authorities, thirty-five of the thirty-eight established11 were in the forms of boards varying in number from three to twelve. Of these thirty-five boards, twenty-one were state boards of charities or of charities and corrections, 12 seven were boards of control, 13 1,13 while in five states14 there had been adopted the plan of two boards, one salaried and executive known as the Board of Administration, the other unsalaried and supervisory known as a Charities Commission.

"Acts of 1886, chap. 101.

Acts of 1898, chap. 433.

Acts of 1919, chap. 350. Among the fifteen departments created there were Departments of Mental Diseases, Corrections, Public Health and Education.

10 Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas and Utah. Delaware had a Tuberculosis and a Blind Commission, and Texas had a State Bureau of Child and Animal Protection. 11 Oklahoma provided in its constitution for a commissioner of state charities; New Jersey had a commission of charities and correction; Alabama had an inspector of jails, almshouses and cotton mills; Kentucky had an inspector of institutions in addition to a state board and is not counted.

12 Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida (board of commissioners state institutions); Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland (state aid and charities); Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana (charities and reform); New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, Wyoming, See Census Summary State Laws relating to Dependent Classes, p. 316 fol.

13 Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Washington and West Virginia.

14 California, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio.