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But when this difficulty is overcome, a greater one arises -- the difficulty of deciding what is the principal cause of dependence in particular cases. A man is drunk and breaks his leg; is the cause of his helplessness accident or drink? When this question was submitted to a group of charity organization workers, it was promptly answered by two of them; but their answers were different. A man is out of work because he is lazy and inefficient; one has to know him quite well before one can be sure that laziness is the cause. An experienced charity agent asked in conference how far back it was necessary to go to determine the principal cause in the following instances: --

"I have a widow and six children; her husband fell off a wagon when drunk and was killed; should I put down drunkenness as the cause? I have a case of a boy who received no proper training because his father was a drunkard; shall I put that poverty to drunkenness? I have a case of a family where four girls, one after the other, died of consumption, and I believe the cause to be that they had a drunken father who did not feed them, and who left them to live in improper conditions, but who died ten years ago. Shall I say that the cause in that case is drunkenness or sickness?" (30)

Among thousands of dependants it has been found that there are very few whose destitution resulted from a single cause. In order to represent the variety and relative proportions of the factors leading to pauperism, several ways of combining principal and subsidiary causes have been devised. Charles Booth, in his study of the pauperism of Stepney and St. Pancras, tabulated the contributory with the principal causes; and as indicating the results to be got from this method, his table is given on the opposite page.

In this table sickness, which operated as a principal cause in 26 per cent of all cases, was a contributory cause in 13 per cent more; drink, which accounted in the first place for the dependence of 12.6 per cent, aggravated the situation of 13 per cent more. In short, after a survey of the table, it can readily be believed that some, as Mr. Booth says, have been the football of all the causes in the list.

Professor Mayo-Smith tabulated 884 applicants of the New York Charity Organization Society for the year 1897 in a similar way, but with less striking results. At the suggestion of Professor Warner a quantitative method was adopted by Mrs. Coolidge in Table II. (31) The sum of the causes in each case was assumed to be 10. The principal cause might count for 5 or more units, while the contribu-tory causes might be 5 or less; as, for instance, case 48, principal cause sickness 5, contributory causes neglect by relatives 3, old age 2.

TABLE I.
PRINCIPAL CAUSES OF PAUPERISM AT STEPNEY.
(Adapted from Booth's "Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age," p. 10)

TABLE II.
Causes of pauperism of 228 almshouse women by nativity. (32)