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 natural prerequisite 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.