Excerpt from The Principles of Relief The class of social debtors is not recruited from any one occupation, or from any one economic or social group. The learned professions, the mercantile and clerical voca tions, artisans skilled and unskilled, contribute each their fair quota of those who for a longer or shorter period are dependent upon public or private relief. Religion, race, nationality, and color require in the recoids of charitable societies as many subdivisions as in the census. By no means all of those who have small and irregular Incomes become dependent. Meagre or irregular income is, of course, a usual precedent condition of dependence, but there is an uncounted multitude whose earnings are irreg ular or meagre who, nevertheless, do not become social debtors, and who maintain a standard of living which conserves their physical vitality, and enables their chil dren to attain a better position than that which they have themselves occupied. The relief problem is not directly concerned with attempts to elevate the general standard of living, or to influence the general distribution of wealth. It deals rather with social accidents - with individual families, whatever their previous station, who, through sickness, death of breadwinner, or exceptional misfortune of some kind, lose their position and are either temporarily or permanently unable to regain it, or to adjust themselves to any other position of normal self-support. The aggregate number of those who are thus submerged in the onward movement of commerce and industry may be great, but it affords a relief problem only in those communities which are so far advanced in civilization as to recognize social obligations and in which there are at least some resources available for relief. Whether a particular family is dependent is to be judged not by an absolute standard, but with reference to the pre vailing conditions. Where there is general prosperity and a considerable social surplus, it is possible to find families temporarily dependent and fairly entitled, in the interests of the community, to a helping hand from their fellows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.