"2. Can anything be done to make the existing income go farther than it goes now? e.g.
"(a) Is too much money paid away in rent? Could as good accommodations be obtained in the district elsewhere for less? Or could the family do with less accommodation.
"(b) Is money wasted? e.g. on medicine, or in habitual pawning, or in purchasing from tallymen, or in buying things not wanted? Do husband and children keep back an undue share of their earnings?
"(c) Is too much money spent in travelling {157} backwards and forwards to place of employment? If so, could the family move nearer to their work without increasing their rent?
"These are but a few of the questions which the almoner must put if he wishes to be thorough. In every case he must think about the problem with which he is dealing, and he must try to make those who are applying for help think also."
The best arguments for giving relief upon a definite plan are the results of haphazard benevolence that are all around us—feeble-minded women with illegitimate offspring, children crippled by drunken fathers, juvenile offenders who began as child-beggars, aged parents neglected by their children. Every form of human weakness and depravity is intensified by the charity that asks no questions.
The third relief principle is that relief should look not only to the alleviation of present suffering, but to promoting the future welfare of the recipient.
IV. It follows from the foregoing that when we relieve at all we should relieve adequately.
"Can any one really approve of inadequate {158} relief? Can any one really approve of giving 50 cents to a man who must have $5.00, trusting that some one else will give the $4.50, and knowing that, to get it, the person in distress must spend not only precious strength and time, but more precious independence and self-respect? . . .
"There are many families in every city who get relief (only a little to be sure, but enough to do harm) who ought never to have one cent,—families where the man can work, but will not work. The little given out of pity for his poor wife and children really intensifies and prolongs their suffering, and only prevents the man from doing his duty by making him believe that, if he does not take care of them, some one else will. On the other hand, there are many families who ought to have their whole support given to them for a few years,—widows, for instance, who cannot both take care of and support their children, and yet who ought not to have to give them up into the blighting care of an institution; and these families get nothing, or get so little that it does them no good at all, only serving to {159} keep them also in misery and to raise false hopes, or else to teach them to beg to make up what they must have.