ABSTRACT
We are not directly concerned with the history of poverty during our era or with the measures taken by a vigilant society to effect its relief and cure. We are rather concerned with the rapidly changing structure of philanthropic aspirations during this period of almost two centuries; with documenting a momentous shift of these aspirations towards an all but complete secularism which almost incidentally brought the age-old problem of poverty under careful examination and which created amazingly effective provisions for its amelioration. Yet it must also be said that the question of poverty, its causes and its cure, was a central preoccupation of the social conscience of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that a very considerable proportion of the huge aggregate of charitable wealth provided was dedicated in one way or another to laying this ancient spectre.
