SOCIAL DEBTORS - THE PROBLEM The industrial and social progress of the nineteenth century has led to an enormous increase of wealth and to a higher average standard of both efficiency and comfort. This progress has not at all points proceeded with that equitable distribution which would accord with our sense of justice and the problem remains of dealing with such forms of social injustice and remediable hardship as have survived or have arisen as an incident to progress. The relief problem, which is to occupy our attention, is only a part — although a clearly defined and manageable part— of this undertaking. The normal family in the commu nity is self-supporting. There are some who, because of inefficiency or misfortune, are dependent in part or in whole upon others ; or who, if not relieved by others, live at a standard below that at which their physical vitality and moral character can be maintained. It is our present task to consider comprehensively the elementary principles upon which the community should afford relief to those who are thus dependent. The entire range of public and private relief, organized and unorganized, institutional and personal, must be passed in review — leaving necessarily many by-paths unexplored, but making clear at least the nature of the general relief problem, and enabling the student, it may be, to understand the various parts of our existing relief system, and those upon whoha rests the responsibility for leadership to forecast the directions in which the relief policy should be developed.
The very existence of the need for relief, as a phenome non of general social interest, is often overlooked, and is nearly always recognized but tardily. _There are, indeed, some advantages in concealing it, or at least in discharg 3 ing whatever obligations it involves in as private and per sonal a manner as possible. So long as all the charitable relief required can be supplied by relatives, by neighbors, or by those who act from a direct sense of religious obli gation or other similar personal motive, the community does not become conscious of it as a relief problem. How
ever desirable it might be to continue these primitive conditions, they inevitably disappear with the growth of towns and cities, and even in rural communities with the widening of economic and social relations. Whenever it becomes the rule that those who ask for aid find them selves either by preference or by force of circumstances turning to strangers or to those who are not bound to them by the strongest ties of family or religious kinship, it becomes a matter of concern for the community as a whole, and not merely for the two individuals in question. When the need is not merely to relieve the hunger of an individual who is without food, but to consider whether the individual is doing what he can to earn his own food, and whether he has an opportunity to earn it, or whether the circumstances which have incapacitated him from earning it may be so modified as to save others from reaching the same state — the matter is one of social concern.
As soon as the need of preventing disease becomes para mount to the duty of nursing an individual sick person ; as soon as the possibility is recognized that, by prevent able sickness, by unsanitary housing, by avoidable acci dents, by premature death, by industrial distress, or by any other cause, wholly or partly social in character, families may become dependent, it becomes of vital social concern to examine all such causes of dependence and to devise such systems of relief, of alleviation, and of cure as may be found practicable and desirable.
It is idle to deny that the problem of relief has thus become a vital social problem in American communities, as it has long been in older countries. This is by no means equivalent to saying that there are more dependent families, that poverty is on the increase, or that the distri bution of wealth in general is less equitable than in earlier or more primitive conditions. It is rather that society has become conscious of its responsibility for the relief of dis tress, and is awakening to its obligation to devise effective and remedial systems of relief for such dependents.