REMEDIES PROPOSED

To provide this special treatment requires elaborate equipment and expert service, which cost a great deal of money, more than most counties or towns feel that they can afford.  Communities must come to realize that they cannot afford to neglect their unfortunate members, no matter what it costs to care for them.  But the cost need not be so great as it seems.  A great deal of money is now wasted on almshouses without adequate results.  This can largely be remedied by insisting upon more expert supervision in such institutions, and by a system of regular inspection by expert state officers.  Greater care should be exercised with respect to those who are admitted to the institutions.  Only the deserving should be allowed to live on the public funds.  It is not uncommon for some classes of shiftless people to make a practice of seeking shelter in the almshouse during the winter, where they live in comparative comfort and idleness at the public expense, only to leave in the spring for a life of aimless indolence, imposing as beggars upon kind-hearted people.

PURPOSE OF STATE INSTITUTIONS

Moreover, the county almshouse should be only a temporary place of detention for many of the people who now are kept there permanently.  Those who need special treatment or training should be passed on as quickly as possible to special institutions that are equipped to care for them.  Since most local communities could not well afford to maintain such special institutions for the comparatively few who would need them, the state should maintain enough of them at central points to provide for the needs of all local communities.

The states do maintain such institutions—­hospitals and sanitariums for various types of mental disease, homes for orphans and for the aged, and for persons with incurable diseases, asylums and schools for the blind and the deaf-and-dumb, industrial schools for boys and girls.  The problem of the state is, first, to develop such institutions to the highest possible degree of efficiency for the rehabilitation of their patients or inmates, and, second, to secure effective cooperation on the part of local authorities and institutions in transferring those, and only those, who are entitled to state assistance.

COOPERATION FOR “OUTDOOR” RELIEF

When dependents are cared for in institutions, it is called indoor relief; when they are cared for outside of institutions, in their homes, it is called outdoor relief.  Outdoor relief requires community organization and cooperation and expert leadership quite as much as indoor relief.  The lack of these has often resulted in great harm both to the community and to the needy person.  Promiscuous giving of charity by well-intentioned persons