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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