era. It is, however, rather remarkable that a considerable section of the Anglican Church at the present time appears inclined to look to bureaucracy and compulsion as a solution of the problem of poverty. We may judge from the words of St Chrysostom, how great a departure this is from the tenets of the Early Church. "You cannot," he says, "like St Peter, cure the cripple: give at least your gold. I do not force you to do it if you do not wish to. I use no compulsion but I conjure you to give at least a part to the poor. God might have constrained us to almsgiving: He has preferred to obtain it from our free will so that there may be room for reward" (Chrys., Horn. 90). St Irenseus, comparing the almsgiving of the Jews with that of the Christian Church, says that the "one is the offering of slaves, the other that of free men." (Iren., de Hares, iv. 34).
We have also the records over many centuries of attempts repeated again and again, to make work for the unemployed. In ancient times they degenerated into a system of slavery (Chastel 314, Wallon Hist., t. iv., p. 3, c. 4 and 5). In more recent times we have had some 230 years' experience of the old poor law which was intended to "set the poor on work," and we have had the experience of the national workshops in Paris in 1793 and 1848. Finally we have had seven years' experience of the Unemployed Workmen Act, which was passed as a measure of social reform in the teeth of the warnings of those who had studied these questions most closely. And what is the result? The Act has recently been condemned in the most unqualified terms by the Reports of the Commission, which are unanimous at least in this. Yet, in spite of this condemnation, already some three years old, it still goes on. So difficult is it in these matters to retrace a false step.
