690 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
and carefully spent. Should the dependent prove injudicious and careless in his use of the money, the allowance is of course withdrawn, or its revocation at least threatened. Least anxiety and suspicion is necessary in the case of widows, aged people, and children, whose physical condition, or whose inability to earn a living (Enverbsverhaltnisse] leave no question as to the necessity of help. Care must nevertheless be taken, in these cases, to search out relatives, and especially adult children who may be able to provide for their aged parents. Such search, conducted in the main by the business management (Geschafts- verwaltung), besides making a large number of allowances super- fluous, has the general social effect of reminding the people that the first duty of a child is to care for its parents, a duty of which the people of Hamburg, for instance, previous to the reorganization, had become most shamefully oblivious. The rules pertaining to able-bodied persons are very strict ; likewise those pertaining to women and children whose husbands and fathers are living, but are reported as having deserted their families. Even in these cases help cannot be denied when actual distress has been proven ; but the allowance is always for a very brief period only, and its necessity thoroughly investi- gated upon each renewal of the application. Under no circum- stances must the faithless father be permitted to feel that now he has deserted the family they are better off than if he himself still cared for them. And yet just such cases are the bane of nearly all relief organizations ; for, while women and children, who are sometimes guiltless in the matter, cannot be left in the depth of misery and distress, it often turns out that husband and wife play into one another's hand, the wife pretending to be forsaken, only to draw an allowance.
The amount of the allowance depends upon the circumstances of the family : the number of children, the age of the father, etc. The fixing of the amount in a particular case is left to the judg- ment of the district, except where a definite amount per head is fixed by the regulations. Very serious objections might, how- ever, be urged against this latter plan, which is in use in Elberfeld,
