Does this characterization hold good in our own country and time? First, must the gift be free? Where a service is exacted by law do we ever consider it charity? Free education while supported by voluntary contribution was considered a form of charity but when it came to be supported by taxes its connection with charity lapsed and was forgotten.[14] The upkeep of highways and bridges has been an object of charitable bequest—a benefit which the fortunate might out of his abundance bestow upon his neighbors.[15] The establishment of public responsibility for the highways has lifted this sort of benevolence from the category of charity. Prisoners whose support was not provided for by their own means or the concern of friends were for long dependent upon charity.[16] A nicer sense of corporate responsibility now requiring them to be fed at the public charge we see no charity in their support but when private interest carries into the prisons influences presumably improving and meets friendless prisoners at the jail gate we recognize the unforced ministrations of charity removed to another field. We still stand near the turn of the road in the matter of caring for workmen injured during their work. A little while ago any provision by the employer for the injured man or his family was regarded as an act of charity. Latterly we have come to consider it no more than right that an industrial establishment should share the burden, as it does the fault, of such accidents, and state after state has enacted laws compelling “compensation.” And as relief of the injured man and his family has thus been made compulsory on the establishment in which he works it has ceased to be charitable. The act remains the same but with the loss of spontaneity its charitable quality has disappeared.[17]
It is true that we have a very considerable development of so-called “public charities.” But are not the services they render offered through the body politic merely to secure a certainty and inclusiveness of relief for which we dare not rely on private benevolence? And do we not continue to call them “charity” precisely because we still regard them as a free gift rather than as a routine purveyance which the state is essentially committed to provide? Some of them are plainly in process of transition and here and there we find the almshouse becoming the “county hospital,” or the department of public charities the “welfare department,” the nomenclature following a change in the conception of function.
If, furthermore, we examine the public attitude toward those undertakings which we have cited as having graduated from charity into public purveyance, we will recognize that these are considered public responsibilities in a different sense from any which so far attaches to what we still call public charities. Public education is held to be a natural prerequisite of democracy; the making of roads a thing contributing impartially to the universal convenience; the feeding of prisoners the inescapable responsibility of those who have cut them off from the means of making a livelihood.
Moreover we make certain doles which we explicitly insist are not to be counted “charity”—pensions given after military or government service or to widows rearing children for the commonwealth—and in disassociating them from charity it is the custom to point out that they are not concessions but just deserts, something that can be claimed as a right.
Charity then is a free gift. It need not be given in love, as its etymology would assume, indeed it may be given in a mood of revulsion, in the hope of expiating a sin or in mere fear of the indignation of the deprived. The recording angel probably keeps a record of the motive and the spirit, but charity, in its simple objective meaning on men’s lips, inheres in the act of relief.
The brief characterization of philanthropy which we are testing was two-fold. It declared philanthropy to be a free gift and a gift to need. Just as the one qualification of the act was that it must be in no way exacted so the one qualification of the recipient was that his candidacy must consist only in need. Does this also hold true in our own country and our own time? Surely it is plain beyond any call for proof that only that is charity which is bestowed where need appoints the recipient. Free gifts are made to the prosperous, there is mutual helpfulness among equals, there are services prompted by loyalty and personal affection, but these, though unforced, are not called charity. But it will not do to dwell too much on the negative implications of “need,” on deprivation or suffering. We might almost avoid that rather misleading word and say that a gift is charity only when the outstanding circumstance is occasion for it. But it is a familiar observation that ardors or privations which are accepted as the order of life while we see no prospect of remedy become conscious hardships at the mere rumor of succor and so it necessarily happens that the very act of service or relief prompted only by its own fitness is the creator of an ex-post-facto need even where the situation previously scarcely merited so strong a name.
Charity is not, however, preoccupied with material need only or with physical suffering or any other one phase of life. Moral redemption, intellectual opportunity, artistic realization—these also have come within its purview. It may follow mortal man into his every predicament and minister to his hungers of whatever sort. Only if we keep this well in mind will we be justified in associating it with so negative a term as need. It is the unconscious champion of the perfectibility of man. “The normal life,” “our common inheritance,” “humanity in whatever form,” “the rights of the humblest individual”—these are its commonplaces that have lost significance from frequent and often perfunctory repetition. But the fact that they are the commonplaces of the subject is in itself significant. The commonplaces of all subjects are not of that sort.
These then are the essentials of charity “a free gift and a gift to need.” May we go on to inquire what additions or alterations have developed these into social work, or is social work a thing so far transmuted from charity that it no longer shows the very elements of its original? A reperusal of our digest of the charities directories shows the many forms of social work all of them still to include the qualities of charity. In the first place the services of social work are still a gift. Sometimes they are provided by the state in close association with the obligatory work of some routine state department, but in such cases the tasks of social workers will be found to differ from those of the other employees in the department in being not only highly extensible and almost infinitely variable but in some degree supererogatory—as in the case of the follow-up work of the workmen’s compensation office.
In the second place the presence of a need, though less evident among the forms of social work than in the case of primitive charity, is always discernible. Social work often seems to aspire to knowledge rather than accomplishment, as when making investigations or surveys or when any form of ministration is accompanied by so much solicitation of information as to raise the question of which is product and which by-product. But its activities will always on inspection be found to claim connection with the discovery and removal of some form of human ill. Social work itself naturally points to immediate purposes, small definitive tasks like the formulation of a standard distribution of expenses in the budget of a family at subsistence level. To conclude that these are its ultimate objects would be as serious a mistake as to imagine that the medical profession would rest satisfied with a set of dependable prognoses. And these investigations do not exploit the fields of prosperity. They consistently maintain a preoccupation with untoward conditions and a sense of stewardship. Before all social work, as surely as before charity, a Samaritan purpose floats like a will-o-the-wisp, an inconstant and shifting but ever discernible guide, sometimes at several removes from the work in hand but always its ultimate sanction.
Social work then, incorporates, while it modifies, charity, and we find ourselves ready to discuss the second part of our question—what is the nature of these modifications which have produced social work?