ts of humanity lead to gifts outside the range of
personal affection and personal interest, to the beggar on the street,
to institutions devoted to charity. In New York state alone a sum of
more than $20,000,000 a year is expended by institutional charities.
About $512,000,000 in public benefactions were given in the United
States by private donors in the year 1915, and in this respect that
year was not exceptional. An enormous and increasing body of property
is thus being year by year socialized, largely through bequests
from persons without direct heirs. Great public subscriptions to
the sufferers from great disasters, such as the Irish and the Indian
famines, the Chicago fire, the Galveston flood, the San Francisco
earthquake, the great European war, bespeak a widening generosity.
Religion impels to the building of churches, to the support of
priests, missions, and manifold religious undertakings. Charity in
this connection is the expression of a sentiment that varies from
the most intense personal, affection to the broadest and most general
humanitarian sentiment.

Sec. 11. #Competition modified by authoritative distribution.# Authority
is, after force, the oldest and was the earliest widely operative
method of distribution. It shades into force, status, and charity in
manifold ways, but it is essentially the assignment of a common, or
social, income to individuals by some person or persons chosen, or
accepted, by the society to perform this function. Thus it may be
distinguished from force, which takes for itself what belongs to
another; and from charity, which gives to another what belongs to
one's self; and from status, which transmits claims to income from one
generation to another by a fixed impersonal rule, not by a personal
judgment in the particular case.

Authoritative distribution is the dominant method in patriarchal
tribes, in communal societies, and in monastic and other religious
orders. Each person works at what he is commanded to do, and some one
in authority (patriarch, head of the community, father of the monastic
order) portions out the tasks and the rewards. In the family this rule
largely prevails, and even after the children have come to years of
discretion they not infrequently accept, from habit or affection, the
will of the parents, and give up their entire wages to receive back
a portion. The method of charitable distribution while the child is
young gradually changes to authoritative dis