and economics, present-day charity organization, problems, and methods, and finally a chapter on the famous Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law. While the author's review of pre-Reformation times covers Europe generally, his discussion of subsequent conditions is confined almost entirely to England.

The author's conception of charity is broad and elevated. It means "a disciplined and habitual mood in which the mind is considerate of the welfare of others individually and generally, and devises what is for their real good, and in which the intelligence and the will strive to fulfil the mind's purpose. If the world were so poor that no one could make a gift, or so wealthy that no one needed it, charity—the charity of life and of deeds-would remain" (p. 4). No less sound and fundamental is his view of the place of the family in the history of charity: "The test of progress or decadence appears to be the condition of the family" (p. 7). Excellent also is his general principle regarding the aim of charitable relief: "To prevent distress, charity has for its further object to preserve and develop the manhood and womanhood of individuals and their self-maintenance in and through the family; and any form of state intervention is approved or disapproved by the same standard" (p. 352). No exception can be taken to this statement of correct method: "The method of treatment requires that cases of distress-applications for assistance-should be dealt with individually and thoroughly" (p. 444). In the historical part his enumeration of the various types, forms, and theories of charity is fairly complete, and his judgments of pre-Christian charity and of the English Poor Law seem to be accurate and discriminating.

Nevertheless, the two main and distinctive conclusions of the book are antiquated and unconvincing. They may be formulated thus: first, the greater part of the charitable relief provided by the Christian church down to the end of the Middle Ages was misdirected and socially harmful, owing to wrong motives and bad methods; second, since by far the larger part of distress is due to individual rather than social causes, state relief of any entire class, whether by old-age pensions, the feeding of school children, or minimum-wage laws, is individually and socially injurious. The considerations, influences, and prepossessions which have produced these two conclusions are to a great extent the same, namely, inadequate knowledge of some facts, and a one-sided view of others; and excessive emphasis upon the evil of liberal schemes of relief, and upon the value of individual treatment.

With regard to the historical conclusion, the author seems to arrive

at it mainly from his consideration of the supernatural motive that was so prominently placed before Christians. He seems to think that the average Christian regarded the act of giving as morally good, independently of its effect upon the recipient. "Hence endless failure in spite of some success" (p. 203; cf. pp. 202-9, 216, and passim). Both the premise and the conclusion involve questions of fact, yet the author adduces no adequate basis of fact, nor cites any authority either contemporary with or subsequent to the times that he is discussing. Now, the facts of the situation are: first, no Christian authority ever taught that the heavenly reward promised by Christ to those who assisted the neighbor (Matt. 25:34-40) could be obtained through almsgiving which was harmful to the person receiving the gift, or which took no thought of results; second, from the beginning the Christian teachers and pastors insisted upon the duty of investigation in charitable giving, as may be seen in the Didache, which was written at the end of the first century; in the writings of Basil, Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom; and in the decrees of numerous church councils. In the words of Professor Ashley, "it is not difficult to adduce a long catena of passages from the Fathers and from the canons of councils, which declare in the most explicit fashion the duty of investigation. . . . . It must be allowed that so far as the theory of almsgiving is concerned, the mediaeval church was free from the fault that has been attributed to it" (English Economic History, II, 315, 316). In the third place, the proportion of unwise giving varied widely during the different periods of pre-Reformation history. For the first six centuries of the Christian era the relief of the poor was probably attended by fewer abuses and misuses than during any subsequent period down to the present. In the seventh and the eighth centuries there was a considerable decline, which was checked by the reorganization of charitable activity under Charlemagne; at the end of the ninth century there began another period of disorganization which continued for about two hundred years; from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, inclusive, the poor were as a rule very well cared for, but there was a considerable amount of indiscriminate giving, and unwise charity generally. Neither in this nor in any preceding period, however, were the shortcomings in this respect so great as to deserve the sweeping condemnation which Mr. Loch passes upon the entire sixteen centuries: "endless failure in spite of some success." Possibly he has, like so many others, been misled by the unsupported generalizations of Emminghaus. Had he been more fully acquainted with the works of Ratzinger, Ehrle, Lallemand, and Uhlhorn, he would have found it impossible to write this amazing sentence.

If he had been satisfied with the statement that the duty of investigating cases that seemed to call for relief was less strongly emphasized before the Reformation than in these days of organized charity, he would have been on safe and easily established ground. Almost all the preachers of and writers on charity of the former period were more intent upon inducing men to give generously than upon warning them against unwise giving. On the whole their policy was, comparatively speaking, justified by the results. During the mediaeval period, the amount of unrelieved want was, relatively to the resources and standards of living then prevailing, less than it has been at any time since. Ample proof of this assertion may be found in the pages of any first-class economic historian. Nor is there anything in Mr. Loch's volume to show that the proportionally greater amount of existing poverty is a smaller social evil than the proportionally greater amount of indiscriminate charity in the Middle Ages.

Passing over this almost complete failure to understand the monastic attitude toward life and charity (pp. 230-33), his equally remarkable misunderstanding of the mediaeval view of the family, his ostensibly fundamental but really superficial generalizations in the chapter entitled "Mediaeval Revision of the Theory of Charity," we take note of one other pronouncement of the author in the domain of history. It will help to show how his historical and his theoretical judgments spring in part from a common source. By far the most distinctive and most fruitful social doctrine of Christianity is that which declares that the owner of property holds his goods in trust for God and his fellows, and is morally bound to devote all that is "superfluous" (all that is not required to meet his own reasonable wants) to the needs of his neighbor. More than any other influence this doctrine has diminished selfishness, and promoted the conception of wealth as a social possession and a social responsibility. Yet Mr. Loch merely mentions it, and then only to condemn it. "The distribution of all 'superfluous' income in the the form of alms would have the effect of a huge endowment, and would stereotype 'the poor' as a permanent and unprogressive class" (p. 261). Now the doctrine in question never restricted the giving of superfluous goods to the form of alms; it comprehended every kind of distribution that might be beneficial to one's fellows. Hence it included educational, religious, and civic disbursements, as well as those for immediate material relief. If the present possessors of superfluous goods could all be induced to dispose of them intelligently in all these ways, the problem of poverty would be much nearer to a solution than it is likely to be for some time

to come. In the presence of the gain in social and brotherly feeling and intelligence which such action on the part of the propertied classes would imply, we could regard with entire complacency the results of that "huge endowmnent" which is so greatly feared by the author. He is so impressed by his knowledge of the evils often attendant upon large schemes of beneficent work that he underestimates the evil of existing poverty, and overestimates the sufficiency of individual remedies.

This brings us to the second of the two antiquated and unconvincing conclusions noted above, namely, that state relief of any entire class is bad, and consequently that the English old-age pensions and minimumwage laws are to be condemned. By way of attempting to prove these propositions he points out the demoralizing effects of the Annona civica of Greece and Rome, and of the English Poor Law previous to 1834 (pp. 308, 315, 350, 364-66, 392, 408, 414, 415, and passim). Moreover, the intervention of the state is unnecessary. In common with the other leaders of the London Charity Organization Society, he assumes "that the conditions of our social and industrial system are satisfactory enough, and that when failure occurs the fault is to be found not in the circumstances but in the character of the person who fails" (Philanthropy and the State, by B. Kirkman Bray, p. 115). That this quotation from another high English authority on charity correctly represents the position of Mr. Loch is abundantly shown from the pages of the volume before us. Hence he maintains that if the individual character be properly strengthened wages are in almost all cases sufficient to provide adequately for present needs, and to make payments for insurance against sickness, unemployment, and old age (pp. 354, 386, 387, 468-73, and elsewhere). The minority who fail to accomplish this must apparently be allowed to "pass down along the road to destitution"; for "destitution cannot disappear" (p. 393).

Without attempting to characterize the view or the viewpoint suggested in the last sentence, let us examine the author's contentions concerning individual responsibility for distress, and individual capacity for self-help. The former is well called by Mr. Gray, "the fundamental error of the Charity Organization Society" (loc. cit.). It not only leads him to overestimate the power of recuperation in the average individual, but apparently makes him hopelessly blind to the plainest facts of industrial and social life. According to the estimate of Professor Bowley, 32 per cent of the men employed in regular occupations in the United Kingdom receive less than twenty-five shillings a week; yet Mr. Rowntree declares that twenty-three shillings and eight pence is the

absolute minimum upon which a family of five "can be maintained in a state of physical efficiency" (Contemporary Review, October, 1911, pp. 453-55). The figures of Professor Bowley do not include the hundreds of thousands of irregularly employed workers, whose rates of wages are much lower. Here, then, we see 32 per cent of the regularly employed laborers getting wages which leave them almost nothing "for sick clubs or trade unions, or beer or tobacco, or amusements or newspapers, or trams or traveling, or writing materials or stamps; and if an evening paper is bought, or the children have coppers given them to go and see the moving pictures, physical efficiency suffers." It is physically impossible for them to contribute those payments for insurance which Mr. Loch so blithely declares that the majority of both skilled and unskilled laborers are able to meet (p. 468). How does he deal with such statistics of wages as those we are now discussing? Apparently by the simple method of evasion. Not the amount of means, but the use of them relatively to station in life, is the important thing, he informs us (p. 386). "Everywhere one may see people of similar means living under similar conditions, some successfully and usefully, some with failure and social inutility" (p. 387). Because some persons are in distress through misuse of resources, and because others are able to keep out of distress through individual effort despite their lack of adequate resources, it follows that all who are in poverty are there by their own fault, and remain there for the same reason. To apply the words of that keen observer and analyst, John A. Hobson, who is speaking of the Charity Organization Society leader generally: "He does not reason to this judgment, but, with infantile simplicity, assumes it" (The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 205. The entire chapter from which this sentence is quoted is a severe but just criticism of Mr. Loch and his collaborators). The author admits, by implication at least, that some distress is due wholly or chiefly to economic causes, but, instead of dealing with this point in any systematic way, he places such emphasis upon the individual causes as to suggest that the latter only are deserving of practical consideration (pp. 474, 475, and elsewhere).

American authorities on organized charity have long since discarded, if they ever held, this preposterous individualist theory. While they insist quite as strongly as their English brethren upon the study of facts, they are much more thorough and scientific in their conception of facts that are pertinent. They take into account not only the facts of the individual "case," but also those "larger social and economic facts" which, in the words of Hobson, "do not come within the ken of