may be so little that social sympathy seeks to better the results; hence poor relief, public and private.  Society as a whole has an interest in the outcome of the individual’s economic struggle.  It cannot see men starving or driven into crime.  Moreover, when competition is the rule of valuation, it, like all valuations, partakes of the quality of those choosing—­wise or foolish, good or evil.[13] And tho competition is the rule of democracy in economics, yet democracy cannot permit the economic vote of a vicious or of a foolish group to stand, where the goods, services, and prices resulting offend the prevailing public judgment and social conscience.

Sec. 10. #Competition modified by charitable distribution.# In practice the competitive method of distribution always has been modified or supplemented in varying degrees by the other methods.  Important among these is charitable distribution.  Charitable is here used in its original sense, as synonymous with benevolence and affection.  First is parental love, the root and type of all the forms of charity.  There is a complete lack of economic equivalence in the relation of parent and child in early years.  The helpless infant does nothing for the parent, the parent gives all and does all for the child.  Gradually, however, the balance is regained; as the years go on, not only do children repay in affection but in many cases they repay in material ways.  Especially in the factory districts and on the farm the child sooner or later begins to reestablish the balance, becomes a worker, and contributes to the family income as much as the cost of his support, and finally more.  A student of modern English town life has traced the curve of poverty traversed by the average poor family as the children are first an economic burden, and later an aid to their parents.  In the middle, or propertied, classes the children do not for many years cease to be a financial burden to their parents, and in most eases the economic balance is never reestablished.  It is not to the parents, but to the succeeding generation, that the debt is tardily paid.

Friendship widens the range of generosity and multiplies the mass of gifts.  Broad sentiments of humanity lead to gifts outside the range of personal affection and personal interest, to the beggar on the street, to institutions devoted to charity.  In New York state alone a sum of more than $20,000,000 a year is expended by institutional charities.  About $512,000,000 in public benefactions were given in the United States by private donors in the year 1915, and in this respect that year was not exceptional.  An enormous and increasing body of property is thus being year by year socialized, largely through bequests from persons without direct heirs.  Great public subscriptions to the sufferers from great disasters, such as the Irish and the Indian famines, the Chicago fire, the Galveston flood, the San Francisco earthquake, the great European war, bespeak a widening generosity.  Religion impels to the building of churches, to the support of priests, missions, and manifold religious undertakings.  Charity in this connection is the expression of a sentiment that varies from the most intense personal, affection to the broadest and most general humanitarian sentiment.