Definitions of Poverty and Pauperism.--Poverty is a relative term, difficult to define, but as generally employed in sociological writings at the present it means that economic and social state in which persons have not sufficient income to maintain health and physical efficiency. All who do not receive a sufficient income to maintain the minimum standard of living necessary for efficiency are known as the "poor," or are said to live below the poverty line. Pauperism, on the other hand, is the state of legal dependence in which a person who is unable or unwilling to support himself receives relief from public sources. This is, however, legal pauperism. The word as popularly used has come to mean a degraded state of willing dependence. A pauper in this popular sense is a person unwilling to support himself and who becomes a social parasite. Poverty is closely related to dependence or pauperism, because it is frequently the anteroom, so to speak, to pauperism, although only a small proportion of those who live in poverty actually become dependent in any one year. The Extent of Poverty and Pauperism in the United States.--The census reports showed that in the year 1904 there were about 500,000 dependents in institutions in the United States. While the number who received relief outside of institutions from public and private sources is not known, it is certain that it is many times the total of those in institutions. It is generally estimated that about five per cent of our population are recipients of some sort of charitable relief in a single year. In our large cities the number who receive relief from public and private sources, even in average years, is very much higher. In New York apparently the number who receive relief in an average year reaches fourteen per cent, while in Boston the number who receive relief has reached as high as twenty per cent in a single year. It seems probable, therefore, that taking the country as a whole nearly five per cent of our population have to have some sort of help every year. That would make the number who received relief in 1904 about 4,000,000, and probably this is not an excessive estimate. Upon the basis of these and other known facts Mr. Robert Hunter has estimated that the number of people in the United States living below the poverty line is about 10,000,000 in years of average prosperity. If negroes are included in this estimate of those below the poverty line, it is certainly not excessive. Probably 10,000,000, or fourteen per cent of our population, understates rather than overstates the number of persons in the United States who live upon such a low standard that they fail to maintain physical and mental efficiency.