Once more, as happens in crises of history, rich and poor have met. ‘Scientific charity,’ or the system which aims at creating respectability by methods of relief, has come to the judgment, and has been found wanting. Societies which helped the poor by gifts made paupers, churches which would have saved them by preaching made hypocrites, and the outcome of scientific charity is the working man too thrifty to pet his children and too respectable to be happy. Those who have tried hardest at planning relief and at bringing to a focus the forces of charity, those who have sacrificed themselves to stop the demoralising out-relief and restore to the people the spirit of self-reliance, will be the first to confess dissatisfaction if they are told that the earthly paradise of the majority of the people must be to belong to a club, to pay for a doctor through a provident dispensary, and to keep themselves unspotted from charity or pauperism. There is not enough in such hope to call out efforts of sacrifice, and a steady look into such an earthly paradise discloses that the life of the thrifty is a sad life, limited both by the pressure of continuous toil and by the fear lest this pressure should cease and starvation ensue. The poor need more than food: they need also the knowledge, the character, the happiness which are the gift of God to this age. The age has received His best gifts, but hitherto they have fallen mostly to the rich. It is a moment of Peace. To-day there are no battles, but the returns of the dead and wounded from accidents with machinery and from diseases resulting from injurious trades show that there are countless homes in which there must still be daily uncertainty as to the father’s return, and many children and wives who become orphans and widows for their country’s good. It is an age of Knowledge. But if returns were made either of the increased health due to the skill of doctors and sanitarians, or of the increased pleasures due to the greater knowledge of the thoughts and acts of other men in other times and countries, it would be shown that neither length of days nor pleasure falls to the lot of the poor. Few are the poor families where the mother will not say, ‘I have buried many of mine.’ Few are the homes where the talk has any subject beyond the day’s doings and the morrow’s fears. It is an age of Travel, but the mass of the poor know little beyond the radius of their own homes. It is no unusual thing to find people within ten miles of a famous sight which they have never seen, and it is the usual thing to find complete ignorance of other modes of life, a thorough contempt for the foreigner and all his ways. The improved means of communication which is the boast of the age, and which has done so much to widen thought, tends to the enjoyment of the rich more than of the poor.