expenditure upon free shelters for the poor, labour homes and farms, free or exceedingly cheap meals, and other widely advertised and highly centralised forms of material relief. It may be mentioned in passing that General Booth was not the first in the field. At the beginning of the century there was a predecessor of his who undertook for a million pounds to cure poverty and to beat the French. Then came Mr Charles Booth with his great and valuable book upon the poor of London. The outcome of his book is a proposal for universal pensions, a proposal which has "caught on," and which is seriously entertained in many quarters. Besides all this, there is an enormous amount of free meals for children and adults—robin dinners, soup kitchens, etc. Free medical relief at hospitals and dispensaries is ever growing in amount. Can we say after all these years that any impression has been made upon the volume of poverty, or that the way has been found out of "Darkest England?" According to Mr Rowntree's book, there is a large percentage of the poor who do not earn sufficient to provide for the barest necessities of themselves and their families. It is a significant fact that a large proportion of the most distressing cases cited by Mr Rowntree are in receipt of relief.
There are still some who believe that much of this, at least, is a beginning at the wrong end, and that poverty will never be cured by great schemes of centralised relief, amongst which State relief must of necessity take the first place; who believe, with the older economists, that the real and only true line of progress is to be found in the adequate payment of labour, and in the self-restraint and self-respect of the poorer classes themselves, and that such schemes, instead of acting as the cure for poverty, serve to render it inveterate, because on the one hand they condone the under-payment of
