Excerpt from Logic of Modern Charity: An Address Delivered Before the Federation of Jewish Charities, at Philadelphia, May 13, 1915If I were an expert in any department of charitable work, I might make an effort to give you advice or instruction. As there is no department, however, in which I have the slightest right to make the claim of being expert, I do not intend to attempt more this evening than to discuss with you some of the problems which we all have to meet, and to call attention to some phases of the work which it seems to me ought to be emphasized. You are too familiar with the history of charity and charitable work, as we understand it today, to justify my doing more than simply advert to that history as a preliminary to what I want to say afterward. We all know that the instinct and the practice of barbarous peoples in former ages was to get rid of the dependent, the old, the weak, or the half-witted - todrive them out of communities and let them either ekemt a precarious existence or else starve or drown. Even when the development of civilization and the growth of humanitarian sentiments had awakened the feel ing that it was the duty of a community to care for its dependents, that care was largely left to indi viduals, or if performed by public authorities, was done in a perfunctory and often brutal way. Sick, poor, epileptics, dependent children, and criminals were huddled together, and the results were demoral izing and shocking. It is one of the many evidencesof the progress which the human race has made through the ages that such conditions would not be tolerated in any civilized community today. De pendents and criminals are now segregated, and this segregation is further carried into a separation of adults from children, of sick from well, and of the sane from the insane. In our own country the state has assumed the burden of caring for some, the cities for others, and some are still left to the ministrations of private charities, as distinguished from public or official care. I use this word care advisedly, because it ought to be recognized that what the com munity as a whole does for certain persons incapable of taking care of themselves is done as a matter of justice and not as a matter of charity. This dis tinction should not be forgotten. If an individual is entitled to care, - if he can claim it as a matter of right and not of charity, - his claim is upon the com munity as a whole. This sentiment is very well expressed in the preamble of the Old Age Pension Act passed by the New Zealand Parliament in 1898, which reads: It is appropriate that deservmg per sons who, during the prime of life, have helped to bear the public burdens of the colony by the payment of taxes, and to open up its resources by their labor and skill, should receive from the colony a pension in their old age.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.