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From what has been said regarding the failure of the church as an almoner, it must not be inferred that its influence was wholly perverse and mischievous. On the contrary, even Lecky, whose opinion as to the good effects of the secularization of the monastic properties in England has been already noticed, says that the value of Catholic services in alleviating pain and sickness and the more exceptional forms of suffering can never be overrated; and even in the field of charity he says: "We must not forget the benefits resulting, if not to the sufferer, at least to the donor. Charitable habits, even when formed in the first instance from selfish motives, even when so misdirected as to be positively injurious to the recipient, rarely fail to exercise a softening and purifying influence on character. All through the darkest period of the Middle Ages, amid ferocity and fanaticism and brutality, we may trace the subduing influence of Catholic charity, blending strangely with every excess of violence and every outburst of persecution." (7) In fact, the church educated the community up to a point where it insisted that a large amount of relief work must be done, and only in attempting to administer large funds did the ecclesiastical machinery work badly and break down. It was inevitable that the state should undertake relief work, but that relief work, and the great access of sympathy for our fellow-men which compelled it, would never have existed except for the influence of the church. But the change from ecclesiastical administration of relief to administration by the state hardly seemed for a time to be an improvement at all. In various parts of Europe public charities were at times as inadequate to meet the necessities of the poor or to improve their industrial condition as those under the church had been. In England at the beginning of the nineteenth century as much was heard of the failure of the poor law as of the monastic system of poor-relief. This administrative weakness had already drawn attention to the economic aspects of poor-relief. Defoe, for example, in his paper on "Giving Alms No Charity," said that the reason why so many pretended to want to work was that they could live so well with the pretence of wanting work. Ricci, in a book on the reform of the institutions of charity in Modena, (8) traced the gigantic development of mendicancy in Italy to the excessive charity of the people. He seemed to regard as an evil "all charity which sprang from religious motives, and was greater than. would spring from the unaided instincts of man." (9)

(8) Published In 1787.

(9) Cited by Lecky, vol. ii., p. 98.

This appeal to a natural man back of the actual man influenced by religion and law, marks Ricci as one moved by the spirit of the times which immediately preceded the French Revolution. This time-spirit influenced the relief of the poor in two ways: one through politics, and one through economics or political economy. Liberty and equality were the two words which represented the regnant ideas of the times. The religious dogma of the brotherhood of man was paralleled by the political dogma of the equality of man, and the result was a tendency to relieve distress with greater promptness and completeness. The revolutionary governments of France guaranteed to all not only opportunities to work, but security against starvation, and the facile manner in "which the state in that country still assumes the care of abandoned infants perhaps shows the influence of such philosophers as Rousseau, who believed that children should be raised by the state, and who gladly turned over his own children to be brought up by that agency. Indirectly it is probable that the belief in the political dogma of the equality of men also influenced the administration of the English poor-law, until it culminated in the great abuses which compelled the reforms of 1834. But liberty, not equality, was the first word in the sociological creed of the revolutionary period from 1789 to 1848. And while this word was constantly used by the politicians, the group of men who stood most consistently for it in industrial affairs were the students of the new-born science of political economy.

The earlier economists had little to say regarding the relief of the poor, though the subject was mentioned by Sir James Steuart and Adam Smith, and others took tip the subject of the English poor-laws. It received very full consideration, however, in Malthus's work on the "Principle of Population," where he gave two chapters to the English poor-law and two other excellent ones to the consideration of certain proposals for improving the condition of the poor. Many of the extracts from chapter nine of the second edition of his work might serve as mottoes for modern charity organization societies; though it would not be expedient to use them, since people have insisted on connecting with the name of this English clergyman so much that is brutal and materialistic and hopeless. As a matter of fact, he does not deprecate the exercise of charity, and would even give to it a much broader field than that recently accorded to it by Herbert Spencer; but he calls attention to the fact that there is no direction in which human ingenuity has been more exerted than in the endeavor to ameliorate the condition of the poor, and that there is certainly none in which it has so completely failed. "There is no subject," he adds, "to which general principles have been so seldom applied; and yet, in the whole compass of human knowledge, I doubt if there be one in which it is so dangerous to lose sight of them, because the partial and immediate effects of a particular mode of giving assistance are so often directly opposite to the general and permanent effects." (10)