CHAPTER II

The “charities directories” of New York[6]and Philadelphia[7]offer the most inclusive available lists of the various types of social work. For present purposes it will be sufficient to review them by groups. Duplications, omissions, and extraneous inclusions (all legitimate for the purposes of the directories) make the figures of agencies of each type inaccurate but they serve to show the multiplicity as well as the range of social work undertakings.

In cross section no obvious, no easily discernible bond appears among these diverse agencies. An eleemosynary purpose, the first suggestion of most laymen, is indignantly repudiated by the modern social worker and can be, in many cases, categorically disproved. All are benevolent, but so also are educational, religious, artistic and other undertakings not commonly considered social work.

It is a standing rule of science that if you can see nothing crosswise you must try squinting lengthwise. If a present form will not answer your questions look back along its history and consider its origin—study its evolution and genetics. Such a policy with respect to social work brings us promptly to a strong clue.

The interests of social work have wandered far from those of old-fashioned charity and “mere charity” has now a bad name, but we of this generation knew social work before it came of age and when we hear it repudiating charity we recognize the act of a thankless child denying an unfashionable parent. The oldest of the schools was called until 1919 the “New York School ofPhilanthropy” and the same word appeared in the names of the Chicago school and others. The “Survey,” the accepted general organ of the profession (if it is a profession), was until 1905 published as “Charities” and for three years more as “Charities and the Commons.” What is now the “National Conference of Social Work” was organized as the “Conference of Charities and Corrections” and kept that title right down to 1917.

We may therefore push our investigation back a step farther and for the question “what is social work?” substitute the less difficult inquiries “what was charity and by what modifications did social work develop from it?” However far apart these two may at present seem it is a patent fact that social work developed from charity and along the route of that development there is hope of enlightenment as to the essential nature of social work.

Charity in one sense is the name of a human quality—that which “suffereth long and is kind.” With this sense of the word the present inquiry is not concerned but with a more completely objective meaning. The dictionaries give it as “benevolence, liberality in relieving the wants of others, philanthropy,”[8]or “liberality to the poor, to benevolent institutions or worthy causes.”[9]The wording varies little. Philanthropy where it is described any differently from charity is merely a broader term not confined to the succor of the especially unfortunate, as “love of mankind especially as evinced in deeds of practical beneficence.”[10]

If we look at this “charity” in action we find its performance to be directed to the same ends even though we follow it back through two millenniums of Christianity and Paganism.[11]Motive and policy vary, but the tasks of charity are recrudescent and impose themselves on each successive generation in terms of the contemporary conscience. We seem, for example, to have forgotten the question which haunted sixteenth century motivation—whether faith without works avails for salvation, but we might still subscribe to a contemporaneous plan of action which demanded “the suppression of vagrant beggars, the punishment of impostors” and “a rational organization of benefits under thecontrol of the municipal authorities.”[12]Thetaskis still with us.

This so adaptable and so perdurable “charity,” while constantly changing its terms remains always in essence a free will offering made to those who are in some fashion especially in need. It may consist of material benefits or of services. An authoritative historian of English philanthropy says in his nearest approach to a definition that “Philanthropy, in common with other terms in general use, is difficult, or more probably incapable of strict definition. We may perhaps safely say that it proceeds from the free will of the agent, and not in response to any claim of legal right on the part of the recipient.” “The greater part of philanthropy may be said to consist in contributions of money, service or thought, such as the recipient has no strict claim to demand and the donor is not compelled to render.”[13]

Does this characterization hold good in our own country and time? First, must the gift be free? Where a service is exacted by law do we ever consider it charity? Free education while supported by voluntary contribution was considered a form of charity but when it came to be supported by taxes its connection with charity lapsed and was forgotten.[14]The upkeep of highways and bridges has been an object of charitable bequest—a benefit which the fortunate might out of his abundance bestow upon his neighbors.[15]The establishment of public responsibility for the highways has lifted this sort of benevolence from the category of charity. Prisoners whose support was not provided for by their own means or the concern of friends were for long dependent upon charity.[16]A nicer sense of corporate responsibility now requiring them to be fed at the public charge we see no charity in their support but when private interest carries into the prisons influences presumably improvingand meets friendless prisoners at the jail gate we recognize the unforced ministrations of charity removed to another field. We still stand near the turn of the road in the matter of caring for workmen injured during their work. A little while ago any provision by the employer for the injured man or his family was regarded as an act of charity. Latterly we have come to consider it no more than right that an industrial establishment should share the burden, as it does the fault, of such accidents, and state after state has enacted laws compelling “compensation.” And as relief of the injured man and his family has thus been made compulsory on the establishment in which he works it has ceased to be charitable. The act remains the same but with the loss of spontaneity its charitable quality has disappeared.[17]

It is true that we have a very considerable development of so-called “public charities.” But are not the services they render offered through the body politic merely to secure a certainty and inclusiveness of relief for which we dare not rely on private benevolence? And do we not continue to call them “charity” precisely because we still regard them as a free gift rather than as a routine purveyance which the state is essentially committed to provide? Some of them are plainly in process of transition and here and there we find the almshouse becoming the “county hospital,” or the department of public charities the “welfare department,” the nomenclature following a change in the conception of function.

If, furthermore, we examine the public attitude toward those undertakings which we have cited as having graduated from charity into public purveyance, we will recognize that these are considered public responsibilities in a different sense from any which so far attaches to what we still call public charities. Public education is held to be a naturalprerequisite of democracy; the making of roads a thing contributing impartially to the universal convenience; the feeding of prisoners the inescapable responsibility of those who have cut them off from the means of making a livelihood.

Moreover we make certain doles which we explicitly insist are not to be counted “charity”—pensions given after military or government service or to widows rearing children for the commonwealth—and in disassociating them from charity it is the custom to point out that they are not concessions but just deserts, something that can be claimed as a right.

Charity then is a free gift. It need not be given in love, as its etymology would assume, indeed it may be given in a mood of revulsion, in the hope of expiating a sin or in mere fear of the indignation of the deprived. The recording angel probably keeps a record of the motive and the spirit, but charity, in its simple objective meaning on men’s lips, inheres in the act of relief.

The brief characterization of philanthropy which we are testing was two-fold. It declared philanthropy to be a free gift and a gift to need. Just as the one qualification of the act was that it must be in no way exacted so the one qualification of the recipient was that his candidacy must consist only in need. Does this also hold true in our own country and our own time? Surely it is plain beyond any call for proof that only that is charity which is bestowed where need appoints the recipient. Free gifts are made to the prosperous, there is mutual helpfulness among equals, there are services prompted by loyalty and personal affection, but these, though unforced, are not called charity. But it will not do to dwell too much on the negative implications of “need,” on deprivation or suffering. We might almost avoid that rather misleading word and say that a gift is charity only when the outstanding circumstance is occasion for it. But it is a familiar observation that ardors or privations whichare accepted as the order of life while we see no prospect of remedy become conscious hardships at the mere rumor of succor and so it necessarily happens that the very act of service or relief prompted only by its own fitness is the creator of an ex-post-facto need even where the situation previously scarcely merited so strong a name.

Charity is not, however, preoccupied with material need only or with physical suffering or any other one phase of life. Moral redemption, intellectual opportunity, artistic realization—these also have come within its purview. It may follow mortal man into his every predicament and minister to his hungers of whatever sort. Only if we keep this well in mind will we be justified in associating it with so negative a term as need. It is the unconscious champion of the perfectibility of man. “The normal life,” “our common inheritance,” “humanity in whatever form,” “the rights of the humblest individual”—these are its commonplaces that have lost significance from frequent and often perfunctory repetition. But the fact that they are the commonplaces of the subject is in itself significant. The commonplaces of all subjects are not of that sort.

These then are the essentials of charity “a free gift and a gift to need.” May we go on to inquire what additions or alterations have developed these into social work, or is social work a thing so far transmuted from charity that it no longer shows the very elements of its original? A reperusal of our digest of the charities directories shows the many forms of social work all of them still to include the qualities of charity. In the first place the services of social work are still a gift. Sometimes they are provided by the state in close association with the obligatory work of some routine state department, but in such cases the tasks of social workers will be found to differ from those of the other employees in the department in being not only highly extensible and almost infinitely variable but in some degreesupererogatory—as in the case of the follow-up work of the workmen’s compensation office.

In the second place the presence of a need, though less evident among the forms of social work than in the case of primitive charity, is always discernible. Social work often seems to aspire to knowledge rather than accomplishment, as when making investigations or surveys or when any form of ministration is accompanied by so much solicitation of information as to raise the question of which is product and which by-product. But its activities will always on inspection be found to claim connection with the discovery and removal of some form of human ill. Social work itself naturally points to immediate purposes, small definitive tasks like the formulation of a standard distribution of expenses in the budget of a family at subsistence level. To conclude that these are its ultimate objects would be as serious a mistake as to imagine that the medical profession would rest satisfied with a set of dependable prognoses. And these investigations do not exploit the fields of prosperity. They consistently maintain a preoccupation with untoward conditions and a sense of stewardship. Before all social work, as surely as before charity, a Samaritan purpose floats like a will-o-the-wisp, an inconstant and shifting but ever discernible guide, sometimes at several removes from the work in hand but always its ultimate sanction.

Social work then, incorporates, while it modifies, charity, and we find ourselves ready to discuss the second part of our question—what is the nature of these modifications which have produced social work?

FOOTNOTES:[6]New York Charities Directory, A Reference Book of Social Service, published by the Charity Organization Society of New York, 28th edition, 1919.[7]Social Service Directory of Philadelphia, 1919, corrected for 1920. Pub. by Municipal Court.[8]New Century Dictionary.[9]Webster’s New International.[10]New Century Dictionary.[11]See Lallemand, Léon Histoire de la Charité. 4 Vols. Alphonse Picard et Fils, Paris. Vol. I, 1902; Vol. II. 1903; Vol. III, 1906; Vol. IV, 1910, and Queen, Stuart Alfred; Social Work in the Light of History, J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia and London.[12]Lallemand, Vol. IV, p. 21.[13]B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy. Preface, pp. 8 and 9.[14]Ibid., p. 103 e. s., and Philanthropy and the State, p. 222.[15]History of English Philanthropy, p. 20.[16]Ibid., p. 70.[17]See also Charities for Feb., 1898. Report of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, housing inspection, vacation schools, public baths and vacant lot farming begun by the Association and continued by the city.

[6]New York Charities Directory, A Reference Book of Social Service, published by the Charity Organization Society of New York, 28th edition, 1919.

[7]Social Service Directory of Philadelphia, 1919, corrected for 1920. Pub. by Municipal Court.

[8]New Century Dictionary.

[9]Webster’s New International.

[10]New Century Dictionary.

[11]See Lallemand, Léon Histoire de la Charité. 4 Vols. Alphonse Picard et Fils, Paris. Vol. I, 1902; Vol. II. 1903; Vol. III, 1906; Vol. IV, 1910, and Queen, Stuart Alfred; Social Work in the Light of History, J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia and London.

[12]Lallemand, Vol. IV, p. 21.

[13]B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy. Preface, pp. 8 and 9.

[14]Ibid., p. 103 e. s., and Philanthropy and the State, p. 222.

[15]History of English Philanthropy, p. 20.

[16]Ibid., p. 70.

[17]See also Charities for Feb., 1898. Report of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, housing inspection, vacation schools, public baths and vacant lot farming begun by the Association and continued by the city.

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