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III. Relief. -- In the field of relief we daily touch the border-line which divides philanthropy from the labor movement. Here is need to apply with utmost caution and rigor our test of social welfare. Charity workers and administrators of public funds and pensions are under solemn obligations to study the effect of their modes of relief on the aggressive, independent, self-reliant multitude of wage-earners. There is at this point such conflict of supposed interests, such partisan passion, such failure to make due distinctions, that there is a serious danger of impeding and hurting the labor movement, the hope of the majority of modern urban populations.

I must be content with a few illustrations. The studies of Charles Booth in East and South London have given the world a masterly analysis of the stratification of a city population according to their economic ability. Some such analysis must be the basis for advance in relief work. To the superficial and careless citizen the "poor" are all very much alike. One common character is ascribed to them. This superficiality of analysis is fatal to precision and wisdom in treatment. The vast majority of our modern populations have at last been caught up in the current of progress. They have an increasing money income, a longer average life, fewer days of sickness, better morals, and a higher education than the industrial populations of any previous century. For most men the inventions of machinery, and the improved organization of industry, trade, and education, have opened a new and higher world. Their very unrest, ambition, and clamorous demands are hopeful. Their higher standards of life fill them with an invincible determination to erect a dyke against the floods which threaten that standard. The universal possession of suffrage practically makes united industrial masters of the government.

But economically, physically, intellectually, and morally beneath the self-supporting industrial class is a struggling multitude who cannot share in the dearly bought advantages of the strong. These, in general, not counting exceptions, are the people who are the habitual care of the agents of public and private relief. Let us call this multitude the "Dependants." But this word "Dependants" is too vague and large for accurate use. Coming closer to the clinging, beseeching thing, we discover one line of cleavage which at least helps us a little way, -- the dividing line between the employable and the unemployable, to borrow a graphic phrase of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

The only point which the limits of my theme and time permit me even to suggest for reflection and discussion is this: How can we apply the principles of selection and education to this motley multitude of the unemployable, and what will be the effect of our policy on the employable? A mere hint must suffice.

It is becoming apparent, is it not, that vast numbers of the dependants are unemployable because they have no skill. That is what we are told by the superintendents of reformatories and visitors of associated charities. There are men who are strong and willing, but awkward. They have from childhood up had no organization of nervous and muscular system in correlation with eye and ear and brain. They have never learned the alphabet of the language of the mechanic crafts. The ancient apprenticeship system furnished a school for technical training. Our system of division of labor and specialized machine and factory industry has made it impossible to give a broad discipline of the whole man in a shop. If a boy goes early to a machine, it lames and distorts him to its own ends.

Thus our cities have, with every change of age and method, thrown upon them a considerable number of dwarfed and helpless men who know not what to do and none can tell them. To offer these a free bureau of employment is a mockery. Their need lies deeper and goes back further. The world is waking to the fact that many of the unemployable might, by a suitable early education, have been made employable.

But still our educational process is sternly critical. The motley crowd of the unemployable separates even in the school into two companies, with a ragged fringe of shreds half crossing the gap. In our urban population we find only too many who cannot be trained for competitive industry, -- that kind of industry which lifts the strong and well-endowed, but mercilessly rejects the incapable. It is quite certain that many of these incapables might at an earlier stage have been raised to the plane of contest. But now it is too late; and in the best case some will not be able to take the degree of training which will enable them to cope with the advanced demands of an age which runs by steam and talks by lightning.

An earlier or a coarser age knew well what to do with this residuum, -- they were food for powder or were left to perish. Natural selection killed them, and religion buried them, knowing not what else to do. Modern peoples are making slight and uncertain experiments with various kinds of agricultural colonies. But agricultural colonies are only another form of social selection of the unfit for humane treatment and painless death. They continue the process of training and classification; but in the last analysis they have proved asylums for the futile residuum, for those who cannot find a place in the whirling world of competition. The next step seems to be the final segregation of the incapable in an environment suitable to their condition.