The chief aim of poor-relief is to give help in cases of poverty arising from individual causes, to deal with poverty regarded as an individual concern. Poor-relief makes no attempt whatever to do away with the social causes of poverty--nor, indeed, could the methods of poor-relief effect this, even if the attempt were made. In a certain sense, socialism and poor-relief have a common character, inasmuch as both are opposed to free competition. It is the aim of poor-relief to relieve the disastrous consequences of free competition; the aim of socialism is to do away with class distinctions and existing contrasts between wealth and poverty--that is, to equalise and to democratise. But socialism does not favour the relief of destitution, and rather regards the need for such relief as a proof of the unrighteousness of the capitalist system. Socialism regards poor-relief as nothing more than a way of treating symptoms of social disorder, and as a method necessary only during the age of capitalism. Socialism is hostile to any social institution which serves to safeguard capitalism. _Socialism_ versus _Child-Protection_.--The considerations put forward regarding poor-relief bear to some extent on the relationships of child-protection to capitalism. Many departments of child-protection--foundling hospitals, for instance--are merely departments of poor-relief. Child-protection is chiefly concerned with the children of the poor, since these are far more in need of protection than the children of the rich. Child-protection and socialism both existed, in a sense, prior to the development of capitalism. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, child-protection has received much more attention than in former times. This extensive development of child-protection is one phase of that general development whose other phase is the development of capitalism. Modern child-protection and modern socialism are necessary consequences of capitalism, and the existence of the last in the absence of child-protection and of socialism is altogether unthinkable. Capitalism gives rise to numerous diseases in the social organism, and then endeavours to cure them, for the most part, by the methods of child-protection. The causal relationship between capitalism and child-protection is not direct or primary. Certain applications of child-protection are not the direct consequences of capitalism itself, but only consequences of the causes by which capitalism has been created and evolved. When we come to examine concrete conditions, such as those of some particular country, we invariably find that child-protection and capitalism are intimately connected with the general development of the country with which we are concerned. This fact may interpose modifying conditions in the causal chain connecting capitalism and child-protection.