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Swartbmore Xecture.

beginning to prevail by the end of the seventeenthcentury, the latter since the end of the eighteenth.The war against destitution was waged not onlyby charitable relief of individual cases of distress,but also—and above all—by means of trainingthe young for work and organising work foradults. The root idea of all Quaker philanthropywas, and still is : " help them to help themselves "—a democratic principle and opposed to themediaeval form of charity which entertained thepoor and preserved poverty. By appealing toself-reliance, the Society of Friends , whosemembers in George Fox 's days belonged to thepoorer sections of the community, actualfysucceeded in doing away with destitution withinits own borders.

Thus Sir Frederic Morton Eden, in his bookThe State of the Poor, London, 1797, called theQuakers the one people on earth who know nopoverty and have no beggars within their ranks.He advises the legislator to investigate themeasures by which the Quakers achieved thisunique result. The Quakers also were the firstto see the great problem of bringing the unem-ployed poor back to the land, as William Allenadvocated it in his booklet, Colonies at Home,Lindfield, 1832.

For details I would refer to a book of one of mypupils in the Economic Department of theUniversity of Freiburg, Frl. Dr. Auguste Jorns, entitled Studies in the Social Politics of the Quakers(Karlsruhe , 1912)—up to the present day the beston the subject.