succeed now because of new conditions. At the same time no one has sufficiently defined what these new conditions are. No one has shown us that human nature has changed in these days in such a manner as to obviate old difficulties. What we need most, perhaps, is to realise that it does matter very much both to the poor and to the nation what we do, what line we adopt, and that it is therefore of supreme importance that we should each of us think the question out as clearly as possible for ourselves by the light both of the history of the past and of the experience of the present.
For the problem of poverty is no new one; neither are we, of this generation, the first who have tried to solve it. It is a question which has always become acute in ancient and highly complex civilisations in which classes have drifted apart from one another. There are plenty of object-lessons in history of attempts to mitigate poverty by large and sweeping systems of material relief, sometimes originated by the State, sometimes by great and powerful organisations.
In the Middle Ages the great abbeys supported vast hordes of poor, "dispensing," says Fuller, "mistaken charity, promiscuously entertaining some who did not need it and many who did not deserve it; yea, those abbeys did but support the poor whom they themselves had made." Later again we see the question in a different aspect. Defoe, in his celebrated petition to Parliament, entitled "Giving Alms no Charity," speaking at a time when there were all sorts of schemes on foot for the establishment of parish stocks, or as they would be called in these days " municipal workshops," holds up for imitation the example of Queen Elizabeth, who endeavoured to solve the difficulty by the encouragement of trade and not
