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"It is obvious to inquiring persons that society, as a result of its industries, its tenements, its policy of almost unrestricted immigration, and its system of education, ill-adapted in so many ways to the needs of the people, causes a large part of the poverty which exists among us. For instance, the aged, after years of honest and exacting toil, may find themselves at last thrown out of work, propertyless, and sometimes penniless. Dangerous trades cripple the bodies and undermine the health of large numbers of workmen, and almost unrestricted immigration helps to increase an already too intense competition for wages in the underpaid, unskilled trades, with the result that the whole mass is more or less in poverty all the time, and a certain percentage finds it necessary actually to apply periodically for charitable relief. The greed for profits on the part of the owners of tenement-house property has so interfered with the enactment and enforcement of laws establishing certain minimum sanitary standards that a considerable number of working people have their labor power diminished or destroyed by tuberculosis and other diseases. It would be impossible to question the responsibility of society for such common and widespread causes of poverty. After the economic independence has been destroyed, so-called charity undermines the character of the poor either by private alms or by public outdoor relief." (29)

Each of these types of observers has, indeed, seized upon a portion of the truth; the questions of character are very far from insignificant, but so long as it is impossible to measure accurately all the forces within and without the individual which tend to push him above or below the line of economic independence, it will be necessary to study the combined operation of character, circumstance, and environment in accounting for his failure.

The third and latest method of studying the causes of poverty is also statistical, but on a much broader basis than the classification of dependents. Beginning with the comprehensive work of Charles Booth in London, it has been applied to the city of York, England, by Rowntree; more recently to the anthracite coal regions of Pennsylvania by Peter Roberts, and to a district of New York City by Mrs. Louise Boland More. Its essential feature is the comparative study of a whole section of population in order to ascertain the proportion of the poor and the conditions of their life which tend to drive them into a position of dependence. To this class of studies belongs the report of 1903 of the United States Bureau of Labor on the Cost of Living and many other labor reports, the investigations of occupational morbidity and mortality, and nearly all the first-hand descriptions of the industrial strata of society.

It is evident that such a method has a breadth and perspective which give it superior value; but it, too, has its pitfalls and limitations. If pursued on a scale large enough to give a true picture of a representative section of the population, it is liable to lack the intimate personal knowledge of individuals without which all statistics may become misleading. If pursued on a small scale, intensively, by workers familiar with the people themselves, it may be distorted by local peculiarities and by the bias of the investigator. Returning once more to the analogy of medical practice: in the first case, the physician is in the position of a health officer gathering information for the determination of birth and death rates and for the prevention of epidemic diseases; in the second, he is a specialist in danger of diagnosing all ailments as partaking of the characteristics of his specialty.

As the case-counting method tends to emphasize unduly the subjective and immediate causes, so the pictorial method is apt to bring out the industrial and environmental causes; but all these methods, beginning with the inductive, have had a natural historical sequence. The early social philosophers sketched from afar some conspicuous feature of the field; the relief workers fixed their attention upon the miserable in need and their obvious characteristics; the latest comers are trying to present a complete picture of the whole territory. With the contribution of each observer, the details of the picture are becoming more accurate as well as complete; with the result that, on the one hand, the treatment of dependents is becoming more adequate and sympathetic, while, on the other, all philanthropists alike are uniting in a concerted attack upon those conditions of society which make dependence inevitable.

Turning from the discussion of the various methods of ascertaining the causes of poverty, we take up the consideration of the investigations conducted on the case-counting principle. The conclusions from these will vary widely according to the particular class of destitute persons under observation. Professor Henderson, after enumerating four general classes of dependents, -- dependent children, those receiving partial relief in their homes, those receiving institutional relief, and the abnormal and defective classes, -- remarks that a general average of the grand totals of the causes of poverty of these classes would not only be of no value, but would be positively misleading, as among these different classes a principal cause of poverty would vary widely, and in particular instances might not exist at all. The first precaution, therefore, in drawing conclusions from charity cases, as in every other kind of statistics, is to make sure that the classes compared are fairly comparable.