In cases where institutional care is not practicable, and relief will be needed for a long period, it is best to organize a private pension, letting all the natural sources of relief combine and give through one medium an adequate amount.
The sixth relief principle is that we must find that form of relief which will best fit the particular need.
Though the foregoing six relief principles could easily be extended to twenty, yet a {163} bookful of such generalizations would be of no value to the almoner without a detailed knowledge of the neighborhood into which relief is to go, and an intimate acquaintance with the lives of the poor. It is evident, therefore, that a beginner in charity should not decide relief questions except in consultation with an experienced worker. For instance, a new visitor going to the house of a widow supporting her aged mother and two children, may find the woman sick, and receiving only a small pittance in sick benefits from the society to which she belongs. There is no apparent suffering, but the visitor at once concludes that the income is insufficient, and applies to the nearest relief agency, asking that coal be sent. As a matter of fact, the family income is as large as the average income of the neighborhood, and the woman has never thought of asking relief; if fuel is sent, the neighbors all know it, and, immediately, there is a certain expectancy aroused, a certain spirit of speculation takes the place of the habit of thrift. There seem, to the simple imaginations of these people, to be exhaustless stores of relief, which {164} are somehow at the command of visiting ladies. Take another instance of a more difficult kind. A family has long passed the stage of receiving relief for the first time; the man is a heavy drinker, the household filthy, the children neglected. They appeal at once for assistance. The children need shoes to go to Sunday-school, the rent is overdue, the coal is out. Confronted with such misery, the beginner is very likely to give, and to compound with his conscience by giving "a little." This is the very treatment that has brought them to their present pass, and only an experienced and intelligent almoner can tell how far it is wise to let the forces of nature work a cure, and how far it is wise to prevent extreme suffering by interference.
One trouble in the past has been that the agents employed by relief societies have not always been intelligent, but there have been great advances made in this regard, and now, in many communities, the agents of charitable societies are active, intelligent men and women, who have received special training for the work. These agents are often in communication with {165} many sources of relief, and can save us from duplicating relief to the same persons—from sending it, that is, where others are meeting the same need already. There are many reasons, therefore, for doing our charitable work in consultation with an experienced almoner, and friendly visiting, where it has failed, has usually failed through the visitor's unwarranted assumption that the giving of material relief was a simple and easy matter, about which charity workers made an unnecessary lot of trouble.
Collateral Readings: "The English Poor Law," Rev. T. Fowle. "The Beggars of Paris," translated from the French of M. Paulian by Lady Herschell. "Outdoor Relief," see Warner's "American Charities," pp. 162 sq. "Economic and Moral Effect of Outdoor Relief," Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell in Proceedings of Seventeenth National Conference of Charities, pp. 81 sq. "Outdoor Relief: Arguments for and against," in Proceedings of Eighteenth National Conference of Charities, pp. 28 sq. "Relief in Work," P. W. Ayres in Proceedings of Nineteenth National Conference of Charities, pp. 436 sq. "Is Emergency Relief by Work Wise?" the same in Proceedings of Twenty-second National Conference of Charities, pp. 96 sq.
[1] Miss Z. D. Smith in Report of Union Relief Association of Springfield, Mass., 1887, p. 12.
[2] Fifth Report of Boston Associated Charities, pp. 31 sq.
[3] Eighth Report of Boston Associated Charities, p. 25.
[4] Vol. II, New Series, p. 224.
[5] Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell in Proceedings of Twenty-third National Conference of Charities, New Haven, 1895, p. 49.