Though there were sporadic examples of municipal poor-relief in Germany prior to the Reformation, it was the religious movement that there first gave the cause its decisive impulse. In his Address to the German Nobility Luther had recommended that each city should take care of its own poor and suppress "the rascally trade of begging." During his absence at the Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A common fund was started by the application of ecclesiastical endowments, from which orphans were to be housed, students at school and university to be helped, poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money at four per cent. A severe law against begging was passed. Augsburg and Nuremberg followed the {561} example of Wittenberg almost at once [Sidenote: 1522] and other German cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one joined the procession.
For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of pauperism, though it did not originate in the Reformation, was much more rapidly and thoroughly developed in Protestant lands. In these the power of the state and the economic revolution attained their maximum development, whereas the Roman church was inclined, or obligated, to stand by the medieval position. "Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract. Thus Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published A Plea for the Right of the Poor to Beg. [Sidenote: 1530] The Spanish monk, Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his Sacred Economy of caring for the Poor, [Sidenote: 1564] condemned the whole plan of state regulation and subvention as heretical. The Council of Trent, also, put itself on the medieval side, and demanded the restoration to the church of the direction of charity.
[Sidenote: 1531]
But even in Catholic lands the new system made headway. As the
University of Paris approved the ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in
Catholic Germany, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but
informed by the modern spirit, grew up.
In England the problem of pauperism became more acute than elsewhere. The drastic measures taken to force men to work failed to supply all needs. After municipal relief of various sorts had been tried, and after the government had in vain tried to stimulate private munificence to co-operate with the church [Sidenote: 1572] to meet the growing need, the first compulsory Poor Rates were laid. Three or four years later came an act for setting the poor to labor in workhouses. These measures failed of the success that met the continental method. Even compared to Scotland, England developed a disproportionate amount of pauperism. Some {562} authorities have asserted that by giving the poor a legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. [Sidenote: 1572] Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme example of the commercialism that made money but did not make men.
{563}
CHAPTER XII
MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT
Were we reading the biography of a wayward genius, we should find the significance of the book neither in the account of his quarrels and of his sins nor in the calculation of his financial difficulties and successes, but in the estimate of his contributions to the beauty and wisdom of the world. Something the same is true about the history of a race or of a period; the political and economic events are but the outward framework; the intellectual achievement is both the most attractive and the most repaying object of our study. In this respect the sixteenth century was one of the most brilliant; it produced works of science that outstripped all its predecessors; it poured forth masterpieces of art and literature that are all but matchless.