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Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Expand Meaning of Public Welfare Says E.C. Branson, Sept. 3, 1919

From The University of North Carolina News-Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., Sept. 3, 1919

Public Welfare

By E.C. Branson, From his address before the N.C. Social Service Conference

The meaning of public welfare needs an immense enlargement in the public mind.

The stupidest man among us must be brought to see that it concerns the curse of illiteracy and near-illiteracy, commercial amusements and wholesome community recreation, preventable disease and postponable death, feeble-mindedness and its causes, insanity, poverty and its manifest relationships, orphan children in poor homes whose fathers are dead and orphan children in unsafe homes whose fathers and mothers are alive, the placing-out of children and their guardianship, wayward children, children maimed and lame in body and brain, the families of convicts in prison, returned convicts, prisoners on parole, men wanting jobs and jobs wanting men; that it concerns jail and chain-gang conditions, poor house and pauper conditions, juvenile courts and the oversight of juvenile probationers, fallen men and fallen women alike, and the whole subject of social hygiene; that it concerns the conditions, causes, consequences, and cure of social ills of every sort; that it sweeps the whole immense field of social science, theoretic and applied.

To build a meaning of this adequate and needful fort in the public mind, to stir the consciences and wills of men and women into activity, and to erect suitable institutions in North Carolina, county by county, is an exceedingly difficult but an exceedingly necessary task.

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