VI. OLD AGE PENSIONS.
This generation has occupied itself much with the question of old age pensions. Probably most people feel that this is the first time in the world's history that such arrangements have been made. The movement is supposed to represent a recent development of humanitarian purpose, and to be a feature of recent philanthropic evolution. It is rather interesting, in the light of that idea, to see how well they accomplish this same purpose in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. In our time it has been a government affair, with all the possibilities of abuse that there are in a huge pension system, and surely no country knows it better than we do here in America. The old countries, Germany and France, have established a contributing [{439}] system of pension. This was the model of their system of caring for the old and the disabled in the Middle Ages. Toulmin Smith cites a rule of one of the gilds which gives us exactly the status of the old age disability pension question. After a workman had been seven years a member, the gild assured him a livelihood in case of disability from any cause.
When we recall that employer as well as employee as a rule belonged to the gild and this was a real mutual organization in which there was a sharing of the various risks of life, we see how eminently well adapted to avoid abuses this old system was. Where the pensioners appeal to a government pension system, abuses are almost inevitable. There is the constant temptation to exploit the system on the part of the pensioners, because they have the feeling that if they do not, others will. Then the investigation of each particular case is difficult, and favoritism and graft of various kinds inevitably finds its way in. Where the pension is paid by a small body of fellow workmen, the investigation is easy, the temptation to exploit does not readily find place, and while abuses are to some extent inevitable, these are small in amount, and not likely to be frequent. Friends and neighbors know conditions, and men are not pauperized by the system, and if, after an injury that seemed at first so disabling as to be permanent, the pensioner should improve enough to be able to get back to work, or, at least, to do something to support himself, the system is elastic enough so that he is not likely to be tempted to continue to live on others rather than on his own efforts.